“She’s no looker but I don’t have to worry about her running off with anyone. No one else will have her.” He panics appearing to realize he’s verbalized his secret thoughts. Len quickly reminds me of our signed agreement not to use his name and to disguise his identity.
I tell him his secrets are safe with me. “Would you die for the woman you love?”
“If I ever loved? No.”
When I exit, I avoid shaking his hand. Cooties.
CHAPTER FORTY
“You meet too many women who want you to fill a hole in their life. And it turns out the hole is like 95% of their life.”
~ Skip, 39, single
Case 485 / Skip
Referral to referral, guys love my visiting psycho-service. I just listen and they feel better. Me? I’m falling apart. Did you ever pig out on one food... chocolate, potato chips, ice cream? You swear you’ll never eat that food again. This was similar but worse. The sound of a man’s voice made my teeth rattle.
I find myself in a house in the Los Feliz section of Los Angeles. From the outside the Spanish contemporary house looks normal enough. Inside it’s a colorful cottage of whimsy.
Skip is a writer friend of lawyer Chris. He’s a lone wolf given to a small circle of friends. He’s never been married, and is quite factual about his needs and desires.
“My friends and I were talking the other night about people coming to a certain age where they feel almost obligated to get married.”
He pops a Coke can and hands it to me as he continues his tale, “Take men who are in that trench from thirty-three to thirty-nine, and especially if they’re stage performers or working in some kind of fringe specialty, childhood-extending occupation. They feel an obligation to that normal life. They become disappointed because they’re not getting it.”
I don’t follow this line of thought. “Do you mean they feel guilty because they’re enjoying life?”
He leans against the refrigerator, an expensive retro-looking appliance – bright turquoise with chrome restraints. I’d like to lean on it for a minute, but I figure he’d think I was freaky. I wonder how many people secretly share my love for refrigerator-leaning?
Skip’s kitchen is a vision. I find it a little tough to concentrate on the interview. Damn . . I wish I had a kitchen like this. What isn’t a white or that marvelous shade of blue, is red. Red tumblers and a red tea-pot. Cool. Oh yeah ... back to Skip.
“I think what those guys are looking for is the kind of stability they had with their parents, whether they had good relationships with them or not. Like home is the place you go, where they have to take you in.”
I laugh at his humor.
“I’m almost forty and I’ve never been married. Marriage is no longer the threat I once perceived it to be. I could marry the woman I’m with now and it would not be a problem. Children, however, would be a problem because I am incredibly selfish about what I want to do.”
I try to feel what Skip is saying.
“You make it sound so either/or.” I scribble a few notes to myself without looking into his intense green eyes.
“Well, it can be. My older brother was a very inspired and talented individual, who never lived up to his talent. When he turned twenty-one he got married, immediately had two children, and had to drop out of college.” Skip forces his hands into the pockets of his oh-so-tight black slacks.
“I see my brother as a guy whose dreams sort of got shot in the head before he was twenty-five.”
“So so you see marriage as the end of dreams? And where does love fit in?”
He wears a worried expression. “A lot of people are brought up to see marriage as a goal. It’s like when you complete your basic course work, you get a diploma and a spouse.”
“What about love?” I persist.
He smiles. “For most women, love isn’t the goal, marriage is. ‘If I can just marry somebody’ which translates in a lot of cases into if I can just fool someone into marrying me, then I’ll be a complete person.”
I think of Christa and her pursuit of Chet’s identity.
Skip continues. “It’s too much like that whole concept you see in those 50’s movies, ‘how to trap a man’. Since there’s no legitimate way for a man to say ‘yes’ I’d like to hang around with you for the rest of my life. No, no. They must be tricked.”
How many men harbor that unacknowledged resentment? That trapped feeling? I wonder again if Mark found someone and if he speaks of her that way. I think not. I hope not.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
“Making love to the unattractive ones is a lesson you learn early on. You go somewhere else while you’re having sex. You have a sort of out-of-body experience.”
~ Mike, 25, single
Case 486 / Mike
Mike meets me at Sal’s apartment. My friend steps out for the afternoon and leaves us to explore what turns out to be one of the most surprising and downer of the almost five hundred interviews. He shows up early, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and white slacks. His hair is platinum and his skin is tanned to a light George Hamilton #3. We have been talking for an hour, and he has revealed himself to me. It is more than I could have expected.
We’re sitting on Sal’s tiny rear porch. The freeway traffic makes it a little hard to communicate. Mike can’t seem to get his slender frame comfortable in the metal patio chair. He begins, “The first time I got paid for sex, it was arranged by a friend. After that it became word of mouth.”
Okay... I’ve heard of this. I keep the surprise from registering on my face.
Despite looking less than his twenty-five years, Mike’s voice is raspy, tired. “The women who were my clients all seemed terribly depressed and lonely. As much as the sex, these ladies needed to talk to another man about what bastards their husbands were.” He checks my expression. Satisfied, he continues.
“Where did you do this? At hotels?”
“Usually it took place at their homes, with some, they had more than one home, there or at hotels. The women didn’t have to worry about their husbands coming home because these women were pretty much alone. As far as people who might work in their homes, like maids and other domestics, they were so jaded by the whole thing they just did their job. I would stay the whole evening or as long as I wanted. No one questioned it. You have to realize with most of these women I was just someone else they were paying, just like a servant.”
He’s trying too hard to sound detached. “I did this type of work for a year and a half.”
“So you’re not a journalist?”
“No,” he shrugs. “It’s just a cover.”
I reach out to touch his hand. He jerks it away.
Okay. “Why do you need a cover?” I ask.
“My parents live on Maui. They think I’m a Los Angeles success. You’re not using my real name, right?”
“What about the women? Who were they?”
He shifts on his boney hips, seeking a better position. “Most of the women who used my services were in their forties and fifties and married to successful men. The men placed their work ahead of everything else.”
So that’s how the other side lives.
“These women were very bored by their lifestyle. They never really worked for anything in their lives.”
I gauge my words carefully. “Did you comfort these women?”
His smile is pained and slightly sheepish. “It was pretty much just telling them what they wanted to hear.”
I turn up the volume on the recorder.
“It was business, just work. You didn’t allow yourself to get attached.” His eyes plead with me to believe him.
“Maybe I gave them some sense of comfort in telling them what they wanted to hear. It was usually pretty obvious.”
“Did you ever feel anything?” I squirm in my skin.
“There were a couple of the women that I liked. I sound callous, don’t I?”
I notice for the first time, how really thin he is. I fight the urge to lean ove
r and hug him. This is a guy who needs a hug with some genuine affection behind it.
He gives in to a coughing fit. I wait with concern.
Mike begins again, his voice garbled. “Most of these women were so shallow. They cared more about themselves than anything else.”
I try to envision paying for sex.
“If it ever got to the point where it seemed like they were getting attached, I would just cut it off, because it wasn’t worth it.”
The total recklessness of Mike’s life style grabs me. Here’s a bright, maybe talented journalist, choosing to gamble his life for $5000 nights with shallow women, in a profession, that at best is good for quick retirement and at worst ... death. The equation doesn’t work. Mike was selling the illusion of intimacy, the women were buying it and everybody was losing.
Mike’s cough chokes off his words. I kill time by checking to see if the recorder is picking up our conversation over the drone of rush hour traffic. We could go inside, but I fear he might use the opportunity to run for the door.
Mike finds his voice. “Some of these women want to save you, too. It’s kind of hypocritical, but very common.” His hands are at rest. I notice the manicured nails. Gentle hands.
“Rarely did anyone ever tell me I was leading an evil lifestyle before the sex. They would tell me afterward. You know, they got what they came for and then they would try to find out why I was doing such a horrible thing.”
A truck rumbles by, Mike pauses to let it pass.
“So I learned how to play stupid. I got really good at playing dumb.”
Why did these women stay married? The question rolls around like a marble in my brain. I ask, “Did you ever feel any emotion?”
He deliberately deflects my point, aiming it back at his clients. “Some of them cried during and after. It was never fun. I would hold them while they cried.”
He looks down now, avoiding eye contact. “It usually didn’t last very long. You just try and get them to stop.”
“Oh my,” I whisper. I know what it’s like to feel helpless in the face of someone else’s pain.
“The ones who were real attractive when they were younger were very sad cases because they were trying to hold on to youth forever. Their looks were their only talent.”
I ache for Mike and the ladies he serviced. How sad, how truly, purely sad.
“What was your toughest date?” I ask in my softest voice.
He winces. “I was getting to the point, where I just couldn’t do it anymore. There was a time when I got very sick. I... I got sick. Word got out that I was... sick. Most of my regulars disappeared. I had to start dating men.”
He looks past me and at a painful memory. “I met a client at a fancy restaurant. He was a middle-aged man with lots of money and no manners. I excused myself from dinner and went into the men’s room, covered my mouth and quietly screamed.”
Something rips inside me – maybe it’s my heart. Why do some people make their lives so difficult?
Mike leaves after sharing his last secret. He only has a few weeks left to live. I collapse on Sal’s sofa, nursing brain bruises.
I suddenly feel like damaged goods. I can’t bring this me to Mark. I’ve lost myself.
“Don’t look at me,” I tell my friend upon his return home.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
“When do you tell your wife you love her...”
~ George 65, divorced
Case 490 / George
I leave Sal’s intending to hide out at a friend’s cabin on Mount Desert Island, just off the coast of Bangor, Maine. I need time to digest all the guy stories, a year or two will be just about right. I kid myself. During the flight and plane change I sleep fitfully. Men with chattering jaws chase me through fog-infested dreams. I arrive at the airport exhausted.
It’s fall and the weather is nippy during the day. It bites at night. I love it. I’ve rented this cabin before and I’m familiar with where things aren’t. There is no hot water, limited interior lighting and a tiny refrigerator not large enough to lean against or hug. I boil the water on a little propane stove and schlep it up the stairs to the bathtub. I don’t need anyone. Hurray for me. Solitude will cure what ails me.
After three days of quiet isolation and I feel the need to wander. Slipping down the rocky steps to my car, I head off along the coast road from Salisbury Cove. Lunch is at a roadside lobster stand. For less than ten dollars, I enjoy a succulent crustacean and corn on the cob. I thank the counter lady and ask an older gent if I can share his shaded picnic bench.
My companion’s name is George, and for forty years he has waited on tables in local eateries. We engage in conversation and by the time my lobster is eaten, I’m asking George about his experiences with love.
“Not much to tell ‘ya,” he says, folding up his wrappings, tucking the red orange shells into the cardboard box. He settles back down on his side of the table. “I like the ladies.” He chuckles.
A peace settles over me. I think that if there is a heaven, it must be like this: a picnic table on a dock, lobster, salt air and a view of the sea and the mountains.
George still has the sharp looks of his youth with his face unlined, his body agile and his movements graceful. His talent for bouncing one-liners is enchanting. What is it about the restaurant business that allows its people to keep their same high energy well into their old age?
He cocks his head, looking up at me from under dark lashes. “I was the manager of a restaurant here on Mount Desert.” He uses the tip of his boot to poke at a chunk of seaweed lodged in a crack in the dock. “I married my first love, Sarah,” he says.
Could this be one of the nice guys?
A tug boat chugs by. George stops speaking, waiting until the sound follows the boat out of the harbor and into the misty ocean. “I used to love surprising my wife. Everything was an adventure with us. One night I took two lobsters, some champagne, and candles home with me. Being really quiet, I set down a blanket and made a romantic candlelight picnic on our bedroom floor. And then I awakened Sarah.”
I sigh hungering for that kind of tenderness. I remember experiencing it in the past and then like sand on the beach it washed away with the next tide. It was an illusion, a moment in time, a scene in a play, something to recall at times like this. Something to fill the void.
“We fed each other lobster, finished off the champagne and made love in a way we were never able to duplicate. It was as if I was a part of her, I shared her soul. Every one of her emotions was there for me to taste. She moaned and arched under my touch. I could have gone on and on. At one time I think I even cried a little.”
George looks out to sea alone in his memories. “I was never able to feel that passionately again.”
“Why?” I touch his hand.
He flashes a sheepish look. “That experience frightened me, to think that I could get lost so far into someone else. It was like I took a shaky step in that direction and scared the shit out of myself.”
His story begs a question.
“What happened to Sarah? Are you still married?”
“There’s this old joke, ‘when do you tell your wife that you love her? ... Before someone else does.’ That’s what happened. I began to take it all for granted. A man should never take his woman for granted. She’ll slip through his hands like a spring breeze.”
I thank George for his conversation and head to Bar Harbor. There’s a small bookstore in town that needs my money. My purchase is a book of caustic quotations – delicious treats of sarcasm by Anais Nin, a clever author and sassy lady who lived in the last century.
That night as I sit in the cabin on the old plaid sofa watching night slip into place I bring out the little book and thumb through the pages. I read one and then another, chewing them over like toffee but better.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“Women have this incredible sixth sense about men cheating.
It’s a form of ESP.
A woman can tell in thre
e seconds what’s going on with you.”
~ Michael, 34, single
Case 493 / Michael
Back in Florida for three days, I have an uneasy feeling something is about to happen. The ring of the phone drags me from my writing. I answer wearing my Daffy Duck pajamas and cradling a glass of chardonnay. A voice I haven’t heard for a decade speaks, “Hi, what’s going on?” I jump at the sound, even as I think: what a dorky question. It’s Michael.
After a certain amount of time, a woman forgets most of the bad things a guy might have done to her. And if she’s really foolish, she remembers only the good.
I force myself to recall our last moments together: Michael and I standing, our arms tight around each other, sobbing in rhythm. Two hearts broken by one deed.
I discovered Michael’s cheating through my sixth sense, intuition, and a series of nightmares. In my dreams a strange woman came to me and told me not to worry, she was “taking care of Michael.” I couldn’t see her face in my dream but the letter “K” floated serenely in and out of each episode.
I spent the fourth day deciding what “K” stood for. On a yellow pad, I listed all the female “K” names I could think of I weeded out the Karens and Kristas and zeroed in on the most popular ... ‘Kathy.”
When Michael bopped in for dinner that night, I quietly accepted his neck kisses, as I stirred the stroganoff. And then I asked him, “Who’s Kathy?”
I will always remember his gasping reply. I thought he was having a stroke.
“You can tell me,” I persisted. “Just be honest. I can handle it.”
Silly man. He believed me.
As he scrambled to collect his belongings which had found their way into my house and now lay strewn on my front lawn, he cried out, “I thought you said you could handle it.”
Months went by before I stopped torturing myself with visions of Michael and Kathy spooning in bed, laughing at how they had tricked me. I played this scene over and over in my mind, like an infomercial in the dentist’s office ... “This is how we set about to hurt you – again and again.”
The Adventures of a Love Investigator, 527 Naked Men & One Woman Page 12
