The Undateable

by Sarah Title

  “So you went to art school?” Bernie asked.

  “Yeah, but I gave that up. Now my palette is teeth.” Colin gave Bernie credit for not rolling her eyes.

  Their scintillating conversation was interrupted by the opening of the doors to the theater. Phil paid for their tickets, though Colin saw Bernie protest, as usual. Colin followed them in and took a seat toward the back of the theater, which wasn’t that far from where they sat toward the front. There were probably a hundred seats—folding chairs, he was not surprised to discover—and by the time the lights went down, the house was about half full. So much for sneaking around. If Phil so much as stretched, he’d see Colin. Maybe he’d be so riveted by the performance he wouldn’t notice, Colin thought. And hoped. Then the stage lights went up and Colin sat back to watch the show.

  * * *

  Bernie wished that Marcie had told her that the show would be so . . . graphic. Not that there was anything wrong with Marcie’s naked body, but this was a lot, even for her. Even Bernie knew that wasn’t the kind of thing you sprang on a guy on the first date. Poor Phil. He looked a little shell-shocked.

  “Do you want to grab a drink or something?” she asked him. She really didn’t want to send him home like this. She doubted he’d be able to find the BART station in his condition. Marcie’s performance art was one of the rare instances when drinking made your judgment better.

  Phil nodded, and she started to guide him into the crappy dive bar next to the performance space. But then she spotted Colin, blinking heavily in the street lights, and he shook his head vehemently and inclined his head up the street. Fine. She took Phil’s arm and pointed him in the direction of the very nice-looking wine bar on the next corner. Before they made it in the door, though, Phil stopped her.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and she had a sinking feeling the date was over. “I can’t do this. You’re really nice, but I think I need to go home and just . . . process.”

  “Okay,” she reassured him. “Sure. Um.” She wasn’t going to go out with him again. Even if she wanted to, she had a feeling Phil was going to lose her number.

  “That was your friend?” he asked in a small voice.

  Bernie nodded. “She’s very creative.”

  “And . . . flexible.” He shuddered.

  “Do you want me to walk you to the station?”

  He shook his head and turned to walk away. Before he got too far, he turned back and kissed her on the cheek. “Thank you for a nice night. It was . . .” He trailed off. Poor guy.

  And then she was standing outside of a pretty nice wine bar all by herself. She wasn’t ready to go home. She, like Phil, needed to process the evening. And she needed to find Colin to make sure he wasn’t too terrible to Marcie in his next article. The performance wasn’t awful. Incomprehensible and bawdy, but not awful.

  And now she knew Marcie played the clarinet. So that was exciting.

  She looked around for Colin, since he wasn’t where she’d last seen him on the sidewalk, and then there he was, right in front of her. How did he keep doing that? Showing up exactly when she needed to find him?

  “Don’t tell me you’re traumatized, too,” she said when he was close enough to hear.

  “No, I was going to ask you for Marcie’s number. I’ve never seen the clarinet played like that before.”

  She smacked his arm a little harder than she meant to.

  “I’m just kidding!” he protested. “What happened to Phil? Couldn’t handle a little menstrual poetry?”

  Bernie sighed. “You’re never going to let me live this down, are you?”

  He just shrugged. “I’m definitely never going to let you plan a date again. Although it wasn’t just going out to dinner, I’ll give you that. In fact, I might never eat again.”

  “That’s too bad. I was going to see if you wanted a drink.”

  “Drinking, yes. Definitely.”

  He held the door for her and they walked into the dimly lit bar together. They found two stools at the far corner of the bar, away from the door, away from the noise of the other customers. And away from the bartender.

  She was about to ask Colin if he wanted to go somewhere else when the bartender appeared before them, holding two glasses of wine.

  “Hi,” she said, starting to order her own drink.

  “From the table up front,” the bartender said, indicating a couple at a shadowy table beneath the window. She squinted, but she couldn’t see who it was. Then the couple moved and caught the light, and she groaned.

  “You know them?” Colin asked, indicating the two of them waving frantically and way less subtly than they probably imagined they were.

  “My friends.” She started to get up to talk to them, but Dave and Marcie waved her back to the table, mouthing “no!” and “date!” and “hot!” Bernie rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Not my date,” she mouthed.

  “What?” they mouthed.

  She started to get up again, but they put hands up to stop her. Marcie grabbed her giant shoulder bag and the two of them made their way through the narrow bar to Bernie and Colin’s corner.

  “How’d you get out of the theater so fast?” Bernie asked Marcie when they were close.

  “Dave texted me.”

  “Since when do you come running when Dave calls?”

  “Since you are finally doing something exciting and I didn’t want Dave to be the only one to witness the hot gossip.”

  “Great.” Why were these people her friends again?

  “Well, we’ll let you go,” Dave said, looking Colin up and down.

  “No, stay,” Bernie said. “This isn’t my date.”

  “It should be,” Dave said.

  “This is Colin, the writer.”

  “Ooohh . . . hello, Colin the Writer.”

  “He’s straight.”

  “Oh.” Dave actually pouted. Great, as if Colin’s ego wasn’t big enough already.

  “Great show,” Colin told Marcie. “I almost didn’t recognize you with your clothes on.”

  Marcie laughed. Bernie made a face at her. That wasn’t funny. Why was she laughing?

  “So how’s our girl doing with all of these eligible bachelors?” Dave asked.

  “Yeah, I’m just beating them off with a stick.”

  “You’re not supposed to beat them off,” Dave said. Then he looked at Marcie and they burst out laughing. They ran out of the bar, hand in hand, giggling.

  “Sorry,” Bernie said. “They get a little punch-drunk after a show.”

  “Was Dave in it?”

  “No, he’s the director. He directs, she performs, they both produce and write and all the other stuff. When they’re doing a show together, they get this weird twin-language that’s a little nuts.”

  And you’re on the outside, Colin thought.

  “How do you guys know each other?”

  “College. They moved out here right after. I did after library school.”

  “They seem nice.”

  “Don’t make fun of my friends.”

  “I’m not! They seem like a lot of fun.”

  “Good. They are.”

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  “Are we arguing over whether your friends are fun or not?”

  Bernie just took a sip of her wine, because she was pretty sure they were.

  Colin shook his head. “So, tonight’s date was a bust, huh? You think it would have been any different at a different venue?”

  Bernie shrugged. “He doesn’t seem to have much of a backbone.”

  “You need a strong constitution to date the Undateable, Disapproving Librarian.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Seriously, what kind of guy do you like?”

  “None.”

  “I’m beginning to see that.”

  “No, I mean, I don’t have a ‘type.’ I either like them or I don’t. It’s not fair to reduce a person to one small aspect of their lives.”

  “But you won’
t date stockbrokers or corporate lawyers.”

  “Because the life choices that led to those fields represent a fundamentally different worldview from mine.”

  “A money worldview.”

  “Yes, valuing money over creating meaning.”

  “So you don’t like money?”

  She raised her eyebrow at him over the tip of her wineglass. “You know that’s not what I mean.”

  “So, okay. You want someone who’s poor.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Someone who’s not driven by money.”

  “Even if it would make your life more comfortable.”

  “No, because it wouldn’t be comfortable because I’d be with someone so fundamentally different from me that there’s no way I could be happy.”

  “You really think these things through, huh.”

  “What, I should just throw myself into things? I’ve done it. It only leads to getting hurt.”

  “You’re right. It’s much better to already decide that it’s not going to work out before you really get to know someone.”

  She laughed at him. And he called her argumentative.

  “So what about your type?” she asked.

  “No, uh-uh. We’re still talking about you. You’ve got to have some ideal guy.”

  “Not really. I’ll just know him when I see him.”

  “Like porn?”

  “Yes, exactly like porn.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just close them.” He put his hand over her eyes, so she didn’t even have a choice. “You’re coming home from a long day at the library, checking out books and stuff.”

  “I don’t check out books. That’s the circulation department.”

  “Shhhh . . . it’s been a long day of . . . librarianing. Don’t—you don’t have to give me a lecture on what a librarian does. Just pay attention.”

  She huffed out a breath.

  “You open your apartment door, and there he is. Your dream guy, waiting for you. What does he look like?”

  “I don’t know. He looks like a guy.”

  “Okay, what has he been doing all day?”

  She tilted her head a little, thinking. “He’s been working on something for the good of humanity.”

  “Very specific.”

  “Okay, he’s a teacher.”

  “Your teacher is tired from a long day of giving out bathroom passes. How does he greet you?”

  “Uh. He says hello?”

  Colin took his hand away. “Do you just have no imagination?”

  “Of course I do! I just haven’t envisioned my perfect ‘Lucy, I’m Home’ moment.” She took another sip of wine. “Okay, if you’re so creative, what’s it look like for you?”

  “The woman I come home to?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not gonna like it.”

  “I’m sure I won’t, but tell me anyway.”

  “She’s naked.”

  “Of course she is.”

  “And she’s made dinner.”

  “Of course she has.”

  “Not because she’s the woman, but because she loves to cook. See, I hate to cook, so my ideal partner loves it. And I do the dishes.”

  “Fair.”

  “It’s worked in the past. So she’s working on dinner—”

  “Naked.”

  “Okay, in an apron, but nothing else. High heels. Heels and an apron.”

  “Remember how I said I’d know porn when I saw it?”

  He wagged his eyebrows at her. She rolled her eyes.

  “Okay, fine, for real. Here it is: I don’t even come home from work alone. I go meet her at her office.”

  “What does she do?”

  “Um, something in an office. I don’t care what. She wears pencil skirts.”

  “Okay.”

  “I meet her at the office, and sometimes she’s waiting out front for me, or sometimes I have to go in and drag her away from her work, which is what she wants me to do, otherwise she’ll be in there all night. So I go in, kiss her on the neck—”

  “Porn.”

  “A gentle kiss hello, and she turns and her face lights up and she grabs her coat and I take her briefcase and we walk hand in hand to the MUNI together. We stop at the market on the way home and pick up something to make for dinner.”

  “Naked?”

  “We get home, and I let her in, and I give her a real kiss hello.”

  “And you get so caught up in it that you forget all about dinner?”

  “Something like that.”

  “You’re ridiculous,” she told him. “Sounds codependent.” But damn, that sounded kind of nice.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Dear Maria,

  I’ve made a terrible mistake. I met this guy, and he was nice enough, but when he asked me out, I turned him down. I just thought I could do so much better, you know? But we stayed friends, and hung out a little. The more I get to know him, the more I like him. And when we first met, I thought he was just okay-looking, but now I can’t stop looking at him. How did I not notice that he has the most perfect mouth?

  Except now he has a girlfriend. I think they’re getting serious, but I want another chance with him. What should I do?

  Sloppy Seconds in Russian Hill

  Dear Sloppy,

  Karma, am I right? I’m sorry to tell you that that ship has sailed. He’s got a girlfriend. Attempted home wrecking is not going to endear him to you, unless he is an asshole, in which case you should probably not throw away your reputation for him anyway.

  Maybe one day he’ll break up with his girlfriend and you can try again. But maybe by then you’ll be married, unhappily, to the first guy who asked. And it will be your own fault because you wouldn’t go out with him when you first met because he wasn’t cute enough.

  Kisses,

  Maria

  THE PALACE OF FINE ARTS was a very romantic place for a date. It was picturesque, it was public, and, even though it was a pain to get to on public transportation, Bernie appreciated that Colin had listened to her and scheduled a low-key date. It wasn’t like she didn’t enjoy big events that were crowded with people and made it impossible to hear a conversation (which, in some cases, she was actually grateful for), but it was exhausting. Besides, if she kept eating all that rich date-restaurant food, she wasn’t going to fit into her clothes.

  And now she was the kind of woman who worried about her waistline.

  If she didn’t have so many people in her life telling her this was a good idea, she would be worried. But Marcie and Dave had promised—promised!—to tell her if she turned into even a little bit of a Bernie-bot, and since she’d had brunch with Marcie that morning, and Marcie hadn’t said anything, Bernie figured she was still Bernie.

  Still, she was glad to be going on a non-eating date.

  Especially since she’d had a big brunch with Marcie this morning.

  But that was only because she knew she was going on a non-eating date this evening.

  She thought fondly back to a time when she had been certain of everything. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when that time was, but she was pretty sure it ended about the time she met Colin Rodriguez.

  Humph, she thought.

  “You okay?”

  And there he was, standing in front of her with a puzzled look on his face.

  “A lot of our conversations start with you asking if I’m okay. Have you noticed that?” she asked him.

  “It’s because you always have an inscrutable look on your face.”

  “Inscrutable how?”

  “I don’t know, like you’re in pain or something.”

  “Pain?”

  “Yeah, or some kind of mental anguish.”

  “I’m not in mental anguish,” she lied.

  “Your face tells me otherwise.”

  “Leave my face alone,” she told him. “It’s just my face.”

  He didn’t say anything else, just held the car
door open for her.

  “You look nice today,” he said, once they were safely buckled in.

  “Thank you,” she said, because she was good at taking compliments now. And she liked her outfit—score one thousand for Makeda. Her dress had a retro vibe, with bright buttons down the back and a hemline that went right below her knee. And it had thick straps so she wasn’t flashing her fancy new bra straps everywhere, and Makeda had paired it with a funky silk motorcycle jacket. She was so pleasantly surprised that she even wore the shoes that went with the outfit, cute navy Mary Janes with a two inch heel. She was wearing heels! Training wheel heels, but they were heels, dammit.

  She felt girly and good, and she did her best to ignore the part of her that said only a Bernie-bot would enjoy feeling girly and good.

  She turned and caught Colin looking at her legs. He must have sensed her laser glare, because he looked up at her and just shrugged.

  “Cute shoes,” he said.

  “Shut up,” she said, like the mature adult that she was.

  “Today you’re going out with Ben,” he told her. “He’s a hairdresser. And yes, he’s straight.”

  “I didn’t suggest that he wasn’t.”

  “Well, that’s how he introduced himself on his application, so I thought I’d just throw that out there.”

  “Sounds defensive.”

  “He’s a straight male hairdresser in San Francisco. Can you blame him?”

  “Fine. What else?”

  “He plays the viola in an art-punk band in Oakland.”

  “Hip.”

  “But I looked them up and the band just broke up last weekend. Apparently the lead singer stole a bunch of money and fled the country.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Yeah, so maybe don’t bring the band up.”

  “What if he brings the band up?”

  “Then you can talk about it.”

  “Thanks, boss.”

  As usual, Colin’s annoying debrief made the ride seem short, and they were pulling up in front of the entrance to the park before she felt like she had adequately purged her system of her daily requirement of male-induced snark.

  “Oh, good, there he is.”

  Ben was tall and slim and wearing a narrow black tie that dressed up his well-worn boots. His face was clean-shaven and his hair was slicked back and hip, but not oppressively so. She could see tattoos peeking out of the sleeves of his long-sleeved dress shirt.