Instant Love: Fiction

by Jami Attenberg

  Gareth was wearing just a suit jacket and pants this time, but I could tell they had been tailor-made. I had mustered up a black sweater (the better to hide stains) and a long, loose cotton skirt, the edges of which were crumpled like a failed love letter in the trash. Gareth touched me hesitantly on the shoulder, then told me I looked beautiful.

  “Black is your color,” he said.

  “Black is everyone’s color,” I said.

  The host—a short, dark man with cigarette-stained teeth—greeted Gareth by name, then escorted us through the restaurant to a small patio lined with ivy. Several torches filled with citronella candles blazed as posts to the patio. There were only two other tables. Ours was clearly the best. It made me feel proud, and then my stomach lurched, as if I had stopped short in a speeding car, just moments away from an accident, but somehow, through the grace of God, had saved myself.

  After Gareth ordered what I presumed was an expensive bottle of wine (the flourish of his hand, the way his voice ended on a high note, the generous nod of the waiter in response all made me feel like something important was happening), I turned to him and said, “So, Gareth, tell me about you. I don’t know much except what I’ve read on the Internet.”

  “First tell me what you’re going to have,” he said urgently.

  “I’m going to have the…” I glanced at the menu. “The veal, I think.”

  “Oh, no,” he said. He inhaled, stretched his lips in pain, and shook his head. “You really don’t want the veal.”

  “No?”

  “Anything but the veal.”

  “Well, what do you recommend?”

  “Really, anything else.”

  “Shrimp scamp—” I looked at him. He shook his head slowly. I closed the menu and placed it on the table. “What are you having?”

  “I was thinking about having steak. We could get it for two? Any way you like, though medium rare is how I like it.”

  “That sounds lovely. Whatever you say. I’m easy.” And then I laughed. I raised my eyebrows at him. I don’t know why I did that. I didn’t want to flirt with him, that much I knew.

  He looked down, flushed. “Oh, I’m sure you’re not easy. I’m sure you’re quite the lady.”

  “I am, I am. I’m sorry I even said that. Anyway, tell me about you.” I smiled my sweetest, most gentle smile, the one I give to small children, the elderly, and uneasy suitors. “You write children’s books. That must be so rewarding.”

  “Oh, yes, I love children. I want to have at least three of them. Do you want to have children?”

  “I’m undecided.” This was true, though I knew it would discourage him. On the one hand, I would love to have children. On the other hand, then I would have children. That part I wasn’t so sure about.

  “You look like you’d be a great mother. You’ve got the perfect figure for childbirth, too.”

  I was certain this was a compliment, though it didn’t feel like one.

  “God, I’m such an ass,” he said. “I didn’t say that right at all.” He flushed, then coughed. Slapped a hand to his face, then ducked down.

  I wanted to reach out to him, pull his hand away from his face and pat it, calm him down. There’s too much agitation over words in our lives. It seems ridiculous at times. I know my own words tumble out sometimes like ill-behaved children rolling down a hill after church while wearing their Sunday finery. Messy, messy words.

  But then he added, “I do think you should at least consider it. Children.”

  This must be the comedy-writer part of him coming out, I thought. This must be a big joke. I laughed to test my theory. He looked disappointed. Oh, dear. He really wasn’t kidding.

  “Listen, Gare, I don’t know if you should—”

  His head snapped up. “My name is not Gare.”

  His voice got loud, as if he were trying to be heard above the din, only there wasn’t any din, just he and I outside under the one star faintly blinking through the lights of the city. Or was it a plane?

  “It’s easy to skip that last syllable, I understand, but I hate it. My name is Gareth. It’s a bit odd, sure, but it’s a family name, and I like it. I’m big on tradition.”

  “Fine,” I said. I wanted him to calm down. I hadn’t anticipated any dramatic moments, and I didn’t like it.

  He leaned in closer. “Once, I went out with this girl and when she was trying to get me to do stuff she would call me Gare Bear, like that would win me over. And the only thing worse than ‘Gare’ is some sort of insinuation that I’m an animal, especially a large, scary, hairy animal.”

  “I understand,” I said.

  “Just—you know what? No nicknames at all. That’s what works best for me.”

  “No nicknames. Gotcha.” I picked up the menu again and stared hard at it. He tapped his fingers on the table. He tapped them sharply. “I’ve reconsidered,” I said. “I don’t want steak. I think I’ll have the veal after all.”

  “No steak?” he said. He hadn’t calmed down yet, but I think he could see where this was going. He was zooming in for a crash landing any minute.

  “No steak. I just have a taste for veal tonight, and when I set my mind to something there’s really no changing it.” I sucked my bottom lip in under my top teeth, squinted my eyes, and tried to look tough.

  Just then, the man with the yellow teeth walked up to our table with our bottle and began the wine service. “The steak is particularly good tonight,” he murmured to Gareth.

  And you know what? So was the veal.

  I DIDN’T SEE him for a few months. He e-mailed me a couple of times, once with a link to a study reporting a higher incidence of breast cancer in women who don’t give birth. Oh, I thought, so that’s the way it’s going to be? I responded with a link to an article proclaiming obesity a national epidemic, and then stopped replying to his e-mails after that. You can never know who is crueler, men or women. It depends on how strong your back is when it is pushed up against that wall.

  I went back to my old ways, and put my profile up on yet another Internet dating site. Usually I would return to the fold with great relish, spending hours poring through the other ads, e-mailing clever questions to attractive, employed men between the ages of thirty-two and forty, and constantly updating my ad with new pictures and hilarious stories about myself in order to maintain a fresh and intriguing profile. This was always the best part: getting attention without putting too much effort into it. I mean, yes, I spent hours a night at my computer, but I never had to actually leave my home.

  But eventually you had to meet them in person, and that was always disappointing. They always seemed exhausted, and not nearly as clever as in their e-mails. I’m sure I disappointed them, too. When they see “scientist” under occupation they think “sexy librarian” for some reason, but it’s not the same thing at all. Maybe it’s because I have glasses on in my picture, but I need those glasses to function. I’m not striving for a look—I’m practically blind.

  Occasionally I would sleep with one, just to prove that I still could do it. There is a particular kind of rage I can conjure up in my eyes when I choose, and when I fuel it with alcohol, I don’t need to say a word, they know they can have me for a night, for an hour, on their bed, in the bathroom at the back of the bar, on the couch in my living room. It’s only awkward right at the very beginning, when they’re a little surprised that it’s really going to be this easy, and then again at the end, when we’re saying good-bye. Because if I could just walk out silently when I’m done, that would be the best thing of all, but it is always important to them that they pretend they care, that their intentions seem good, that they take back control by offering some pretense of hope that we will somehow see each other again.

  If I had wanted to see them again, I wouldn’t have fucked them in the first place.

  But mostly I tried to be the relatively nice girl my mother raised me to be (My father was too busy fucking his grad-student groupies to worry about how I turned out); I would g
o out on dates, I was dating. Yes, I will go out on a date with you, stranger who thinks referencing Voltaire and Yo La Tengo in a personal ad will make you attractive to women with good jobs, who own their own apartments within spitting distance of the park and regularly attend yoga classes. Here we are, on a date at a wine bar located equidistant from our apartments. Sure, I’ll have another chardonnay; let’s try something from California this time. No, I’ve never been engaged, never even close. I’m not that type. You are that type? Right. I’m sorry that didn’t work out for you. It was for the best, obviously. It is always for the best. And I’ll bet the medication is helping. It is helping, isn’t it? Do you have any extra?

  We were all just walking around this city with our hearts sadly swimming in our chests, like dying fish on the surface of a still pond. It’s enough to make you give up entirely.

  Still, when Gareth surfaced and e-mailed me, asking for a favor—would I meet him for a drink?—I said yes.

  “WHY’D YOU bother going?” asks Maggie. I’m telling her the story of the third date, seated on the living room couch of her spacious suburban home, my legs folded under me, my head resting on my hand. Maggie speaks quietly—she has gotten quiet and careful the past few years—but with force. “I just don’t understand why you go on any dates at all. You don’t like anyone. Why don’t you just admit that you’re not interested in having a relationship? It’s OK to be single. Just do it. Just be single.” We’ve just eaten steak for dinner, filet mignon, naturally. Maggie had spent the whole afternoon shopping for the dinner, she told me. What a hard worker. Her commitment to spending her husband’s money was an inspiration to women everywhere.

  I look at her hands, at her enormous wedding ring. Three icy karats on a solid gold band. We weren’t raised to care about jewelry, but here she is, caring about jewelry. I’ve watched her clean it, her precious ring, swab it, shine it. Underneath the ring is a thin line of pale skin, with one brown freckle—like the ones on her lovely shoulders—in the center acting as a divider. It’s her real skin underneath.

  Robert is in the kitchen doing the dishes. My glass of wine is poised on a ceramic coaster they purchased on their honeymoon in Costa Rica. There was a blue chicken painted on it. They had twelve of these coasters, but they only ever used four at a time. The rest sat in a drawer. Eight blue Costa Rican chickens roosting in a drawer in Westchester.

  She continues, “I have never seen you happy with a man.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. “I loved Alan. I was devastated when it ended.”

  “You loved Alan because he lived in Chicago. The farther away the better, that’s what works for you. You know—just do these men who ask you out a favor: stop saying yes.”

  Maggie has tried to fix me up before, has sat me down in front of them, one after another, dinner after dinner in Westchester. A husband buffet. These single men of the suburbs were all in their forties and wealthy and really into their jobs, with one big hobby each, biking or sailing or their car. Men really do love their cars, I learned at those dinners, and if I could just love their cars, maybe I could love them, too, and they, in turn, could love me. If only.

  They trotted out their divorce stories, too, which had become so practiced it was as if they were pitching a movie in Hollywood, the most important details refined into quick sentences designed to sound off the cuff and funny and memorable. (“She didn’t think she had a drinking problem—she drank, no problem,” said one, but I could see in his eyes that it hadn’t been funny at all.) But they were back in the saddle, these men, they wanted you to know that, and being single was just a minor detail that they planned on changing as quickly as possible. If I liked what I saw. If I were interested. If I wanted to try.

  Finally I told Maggie: I couldn’t possibly take another bite.

  Of course they were all Robert’s friends, which might be part of the reason why I never liked any of them. My sister doesn’t have any of her own friends anymore. She gave them up when she moved to Westchester with Robert. She sucked in his life, inflated herself like a balloon with his job and his friends and his family. She filled herself up with him until there was no room for anything else. Except for me. I’ve got a permanent residence somewhere in her, in the ankle or the elbow. Maybe I’m a joint.

  GARETH AND I met again at the same Irish bar, this time on a Tuesday. I was a half hour late. I didn’t really care. He wore another suit, crisp and pressed as I remembered, but the rest of him had collapsed: his posture sagged; his arms, his shoulders, his head, and his neck were all slung forward and drooped down as if beneath the floor there were a giant vacuum slowly sucking in his enormous frame, bone by bone, pound by pound. He was sitting in a booth near the back by the kitchen, underneath a framed sepia-toned picture of a baseball player at bat. The frame was crooked. He did not rise when I joined him. I tried to straighten the frame as I sat, but it dipped down on the other side so the player and his bat were askew, aiming a shot at the sky.

  “Thanks for meeting me,” said Gareth.

  There were three empty pint glasses in front of him, and he gripped a full fourth one.

  “I will make this brief. I was sad when our relationship didn’t work out. I felt very close to you immediately, as I told you at the time. I thought you and I had a real future together, even though we didn’t agree on the whole children issue, but I think you would have come around. So I have to wonder why it didn’t work out.”

  I looked around me to see if anyone was listening. “We only went out on one date,” I said.

  “Twice,” he corrected.

  “I would hardly count meeting for a quick beer a date,” I said.

  “To me, it was a date,” he said. Something in his voice, a tenderness unfamiliar in my daily existence, convinced me to play along.

  “It was a date, sure,” I said soothingly. I inched toward the edge of the booth.

  “So after two dates and several phone calls and countless e-mails I have to wonder, why didn’t it work out?”

  I sat there and waited to hear a theory, and then I realized he was actually asking me a question. “Oh, you want me…? OK. I just wasn’t interested. It’s not a big deal, you’re simply not my type.”

  He looked down, and made an impatient noise. Then he drew himself up, pulled his shoulders back, looked at the ceiling, and then proclaimed, “It’s because I’m fat.”

  “You’re not fat,” I said.

  “Hey, I know I’m fat. My mother says I’m fat, my doctor says I’m fat. Don’t bother lying.”

  I struggled. There wasn’t a correct response. “I didn’t come here to discuss your weight,” I said.

  “But you think I’m fat, right?”

  I rested my head against the back of the booth, felt my back flatten against it. I shrugged my shoulders, swung my hands up in the air. “Do you want me to be the asshole here? Because I can be the asshole if that’s going to make you happy. Tell me what you’re looking for, because I’m more than willing to give it to you if it’s going to make you feel better.”

  “Be my girlfriend,” he pleaded.

  ROBERT COMES into the room, dish towel on his shoulder, shaking droplets of water off his hand.

  “So how did you leave it with him?” says Maggie.

  “Let’s just say…I was the asshole,” I say.

  Robert laughs, presumably at my use of a curse word. “Are you breaking hearts again?” he says. “Don’t worry, the right man is out there for you, just waiting for the right moment to sweep you off your feet.”

  Maggie takes a sip from her wineglass and looks away. I was sorry I had made her sad. Robert notices it, too, and reaches his hand down to her shoulder, but she swats it away, as if it were a fly circling endlessly around her. And then I see her do something familiar. I have done it so many times myself I know exactly what is going on in her head at this moment. I see her pull into herself. I see her recede. But I don’t think she has much room for herself in there. Me, I’m hollow inside. There is o
nly me, just me. I know that someday she’ll get sick of being full of Robert. I know she’ll puke him out of her system. But she’ll never get rid of me. I’m in her blood.

  GARETH CONTACTED me one last time. I didn’t tell Maggie that part. It somehow seemed better that she thought me only guilty of my usual callousness. He sent an e-mail a week after our last meeting. In it he apologized in a sincere and clean fashion. He had been having trouble finishing his latest book, he explained. He had been drinking too much, pints and pints of beer every night of the week, which was unlike him. “I’m not a drinker,” he wrote. “Not like that.”

  There was an anger and confusion inside of him, and he did not know where to direct it so he had turned it on me, he explained. Well, he had turned it on a half dozen women he had dated in the last year, but of all of the ones he had tried to contact then, I was the only one who had responded.

  “It is just hard in this city sometimes. Surely you know that.” (I did, of course.) “Sometimes you just need to get it out. And you were the one who agreed to see me. It wasn’t fair. There have been others who were much worse to me. You were, in fact, just fine.”

  “I would have treated you like gold,” he wrote. “I say that not to imply that you missed out on something great, but just so you know that I had only the best of intentions.”

  He asked for my forgiveness. He italicized the words for emphasis. If I could just give him that, he said he would feel better, he could move on toward attempting a life of clarity.

  Telling him he was fat—that was not the worst thing I could have done to him. He already knew that. Never replying to that e-mail, that was when I was the asshole. But I could not find one word inside of me, neither kind nor cruel, to give to him. I had nothing left inside.

  I TAKE THE Metro-North home from Westchester. I cannot get home fast enough. Commuter trains should have wings, I think. Wings on engines.