So I road-tripped across the desert from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, fantasizing the whole way about the look on Sasha’s face when she saw me at this banquet, decked out in the tuxedo I had purchased on eBay just for the occasion. She would be overcome by the pageantry of my grand gesture, by the affection and loyalty and sacrifice it all signaled. I mean, who could resist a boyfriend who would do all that for you?
I wore my tuxedo on the drive to Las Vegas, all its parts with the exception of the final piece of the outfit: the bow tie. Let me back up and explain that I had decided to wear a real bow tie at this event, not the pre-tied, clip-on variety I wore when I took Evelyn to prom. Before departing for my drive, I had studied several bow tie tutorials online and planned to put it on once I arrived at the casino.
I walked into Planet Hollywood, the location of both the banquet and the pageant, on my crutches with my bow tie in my pocket. I was nervous; I could run into Sasha at any point now, I figured. And I really wanted our meeting to be perfect. I wanted to take her breath away. I wanted her to be so happy I had come to see her. I wanted her to say, Gee whiz, you came all this way to cheer for me at the pageant? Holy smokes! Can I be your girlfriend, please?
I ducked into a men’s room outside the ballroom where the banquet would be held. Standing in front of the mirror, I extracted the bow tie from my pocket and attempted to replicate the steps I had studied in those tutorials. But no luck. I quickly discovered that real bow ties, while they look very classy, very James Bond–like, are virtually impossible to tie. Or at least, to tie perfectly. With every attempt I made, it always ended up crooked or lopsided, or tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. I was getting frustrated. And sweaty. And worried. I was worried that this was taking too long and I was going to miss the whole banquet. I was going to miss Sasha. I was going to miss my chance with her. Or I would see her, but my bow tie would make me look like a clown, and she would be all like, Um, no, you aren’t quite classy enough for me, Mr. Lopsided Bow Tie.
The real bow tie had seemed like such a cool idea. I had expected it would make me look so suave and sophisticated. Now I saw that it was a mistake—a big, fat, carb-bloated mistake. It just wasn’t worth it. I had spent too much time trying to get it to look right and it had not even been close to worth it. Next time I wore a tuxedo, I decided, I would revert to prom-style clip-on bow ties. They were oh-so-much easier to put on.
About this time one of the other banquet attendees walked in. He was also clad in a tuxedo, but his bow tie was already tied. I was jealous of its symmetry.
I’m not sure what it is about having one leg that makes people want to comment on it. But for some reason my disability gives many individuals permission in their own minds to say whatever they want despite our being total strangers. And often what they say ends up being quite awkward. Especially the questions they ask.
I’ll give you an example. One time I was wearing my artificial leg, and I was talking to this girl about what it was made out of, how it worked, all that. She looked down at the prosthesis, and she was like, “Is the foot fake, too?”
I informed her about the amazing medical technology that had allowed doctors to attach my real foot to the end of my artificial leg.
“Really?” she said.
Let me clarify: This wasn’t a child. This girl was in high school.
So anyway, I was standing in the men’s room getting very frustrated about how the real bow tie had not been worth all the trouble, and this gentleman walked in, and he said to me, “It looks like you do pretty well with that.”
Now, reader, I was currently so caught up in my bow-tying experience that I assumed he was talking about my ability to tie a real bow tie, though he was in fact talking about my ability to navigate life with one leg. So I was like, “Well, thanks. I appreciate that.”
A few seconds later this gentleman and I were both standing in front of the urinals. I want to remind you that I was thinking about my bow tie, about how the real bow tie just wasn’t worth the trouble. And he was thinking about my life as an amputee.
I said, staring at the wall above the urinal, “I tell you though, it’s actually pretty difficult.”
I could see him nodding out of the corner of my eye. “Yeah, it looks like it would be… pretty difficult.”
There was a pause. “To be honest,” I confessed, “tonight I’ve been feeling like it’s just not even worth it anymore.”
He blatantly broke the number one rule of social interaction at urinals, making direct eye contact with me, and exclaimed, “Son, it’s always worth it! No matter what happens—it’s always worth it!”
This guy is intense, I thought. I must look really good in a real bow tie after all.11 Maybe even good enough to impress Sasha?
At the banquet, I was seated at a circular table with a bunch of people I didn’t know. This wasn’t particularly surprising, of course, since I didn’t really know anyone at the event. I made small talk with my table-neighbors, however, all the while waiting and watching for the pageant contestants to arrive.
And arrive they did. As dessert was being served, the lights went down in the small ballroom. Conversation among the crowd quieted down. A tuxedoed guy with well-coiffed gray hair took the podium. He looked like a boxing promoter—like the “Let’s get ready to rumble” guy. In fact, he probably was the “Let’s get ready to rumble” guy. This was Vegas, after all. He asked us to please put our hands together for this year’s Miss Aaaaaaaaaamerica contestaaaants, and we did as instructed. Spotlights came on as the fifty-two girls12 marched into the room wearing evening gowns and sashes embroidered with the names of their home states. As it happened, Miss North Dakota walked right by my table. We made brief eye contact, and then her head snapped back when she recognized me. She stepped out of the line and let the other girls keep walking as she approached my table.
I stood up and reached out for a hug that never quite materialized.
All she said was, “I didn’t know you were going to be here.”
There was no excitement in her voice, no gratitude, no happiness. She wasn’t even smiling.
This was not how I had imagined it. Not what I had planned. Not at all. I felt like I was falling, like I had lost my balance and was dropping in slow motion to land hard on the grass beside a golf tee.
“I—I wanted it to be a surprise,” I said eventually.
She blinked a few times like a flashbulb had gone off unexpectedly in front of her. She looked surprised, all right, but not in a good way.
“Oh, okay, well—I have to go sit at my table.”
And then her tiara rose several inches as she returned to perfect posture and fell back into the procession of beauty queens, left hand planted on her hip, right hand sashaying with each step.
I didn’t see her again that night. I hoped she would at least text me, but she never did. I got a cheap room at a Motel 6 off the main Strip that had a single lonely slot machine in the lobby. At the pageant the next day, I sat by myself and cheered extra loud for Sasha. Out of the fifty-two contestants, she was one of only two who wore a one-piece bathing suit instead of a bikini. Sasha was a homeschooler, I remembered, and though she did listen to gangsta rap, I supposed at heart she was still a good Christian girl. So she stuck to her guns and kept things modest onstage. I had to respect her principled stand, though a part of me wished she would’ve sold out a little, showed off a little more skin. Not for me. For the judges. For the win.
Because she didn’t win. In fact, she didn’t even make the top fifteen, so I never got to hear her sing opera. Oh well. I wouldn’t have understood the words anyway.
After the pageant ended, I walked around Vegas for a couple of hours, hoping she would text or call to see if we could hang out, or at least to thank me for coming. I walked up and down the entire length of the Strip. I stepped inside a few of the casinos and watched retirees blowing their savings one slot machine pull at a time. I waved away hobo-looking dudes offering glossy postcards with scantily clad
women. I stared silently for a really long time at the fountain in front of the Bellagio. But I never heard from Sasha. Not once. Nothing. So I drove back through the desert to Los Angeles feeling angry, hurt, confused.
How could I have been so inaccurate in my assessment of our relationship? I mean, I wasn’t in high school anymore. I felt like my instincts had matured enough that I could usually tell when a girl liked me. And Sasha had always seemed interested. Really interested. She had come to see me at the airport when it was still dark outside. We’d talked on the phone constantly ever since. We’d hung out in North Dakota whenever I came to town and always, it had seemed, had a great time. Granted, we had never kissed, but our hugs had been lingering and, honestly, I thought we were practically boyfriend and girlfriend. Yet, when I came to surprise and support her on the most important day of her life, she hardly even noticed I was there. Not before the pageant, not after.
I gave it a few more days. Maybe she was busy. Maybe she was bummed about her loss. Maybe she had a bunch of formal gowns to pack up and ship home. Maybe she’d call me when she got back to North Dakota.
Nope. I never heard anything from her. So I didn’t call her, either. I didn’t text. But as the days turned into weeks and my final semester at USC finished up, I kept wondering: What happened? Where had I gone wrong? How had I misjudged our relationship so drastically?
HYPOTHESIS
Subject behavior at Miss America pageant suggests I misjudged her interest in me. But if she did not have interest in dating me, why did she spend so much time on the phone with me?
Face-to-face interview is required to investigate.
INVESTIGATION
Chapter 34
A few months after the Christmas when I tracked down the girls of my failed middle school and high school relationships, I happened to be in Sasha’s home state of North Dakota for a speech. In fact, I was in her city. Her number was still in my phone, so I broke radio silence by sending her a text to ask if she wanted to have dinner while I was in town.
And that’s how I found myself at a booth with Sasha in a sushi place that had a little fountain in the middle of it. I was nervous. Our conversation was basically an act of verbal procrastination.
Eventually, she asked, “So, you have a girlfriend?”
“No. Do you have a boyfriend?”
She shook her head, smiling like that was a funny question. “No. No boyfriend.”
“Speaking of which…”
She raised her eyebrows.
I continued, “Remember when we were—I mean, remember when we used to be—remember…” This was not going well so far. “When I came to Las Vegas? To the Miss America pageant?”
“Of course.”
“That was a big deal for me.”
“I bet. That banquet was two thousand dollars a plate.”
I smiled. “Oh yeah. I got a free ticket.”
“How?”
“This whole time you thought I paid two grand for it?”
“How’d you get it?”
“Doesn’t matter now. Look, what I want to know is, how come you blew me off that night?”
“What?”
“You blew me off. You barely said a word to me.”
“Josh, I was about to compete in Miss America.”
“And I had just paid two thousand dollars to see you do it.”
“I thought your ticket was free.”
“It was. But you didn’t know that.”
“The pageant was the biggest day of my life. It was a whirlwind. I barely even talked to my parents.”
Our waitress arrived with my seaweed salad.
“So how come you never called me afterward?”
“After what?”
“The pageant.”
She frowned. “You mean after I lost?”
“After you competed in Miss America.”
“I was eliminated in the first round.”
“So? You were one of the top fifty-two girls in the country. In America!”
“Josh, what did you place in the Paralympics?”
“Thirty-fourth.”
“And were you proud of that finish?”
I was silent.
“Were you?”
“I see your point.”
“Answer the question, please.”
“No, I thought it was a pretty bad finish.”
“But Josh! You were at the Paralympics! You were one of the top ski racers… in the world!”
“All right, all right, I understand.”
“Do you? I don’t think you do. Because that’s why I didn’t call you, if you must know. You had paid all that money and traveled all that way to see me compete. I wanted you to see me win and wanted you to be my boyfriend. But I lost. And I was ashamed about that. I was embarrassed.”
It was a lot to process. But above everything she had just said, blinking like a neon sign in Vegas, was a single word: “boyfriend.”
“You liked me?” I asked.
“Of course I liked you.”
“So why didn’t you call me?”
“I could ask you the same question.”
“I didn’t call you because you blew me off. I thought you had started dating someone else or something.”
“Well, you were wrong.”
But then it occurred to me: We could make things right. Now that it was all out in the open, now that we were both single and sitting there together in this sushi restaurant…
“Maybe it’s not too late,” I said.
“No, it is.”
“But why? Just because we live far apart?”
“Josh—”
“We could come visit each other.”
“Josh—”
“Sasha, we could make this work!”
“Josh!”
“What?”
She looked down at the table silently.
“What?” I said again.
She kept her gaze fixed. I followed it down to her hand, where I noticed for the first time a sparkling diamond ring. I blinked a few times.
“I thought you said you don’t have a boyfriend,” I said softly.
“I don’t. I have a fiancé.”
“Oh. Well. Congratulations,” I said unconvincingly. “When did you meet?”
“Three months ago. We got engaged six weeks later.”
I didn’t say anything, but I guess my surprise was written all over my face.
“When you know, you know,” she said. “You just have to find the right person.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
RESULTS OF INVESTIGATION
Chapter 35
I went back to my hotel room and lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. Sasha was the final girl on my list, so the scientific investigation was now complete. Complete, but not insightful. I had no answer, no single unifying explanation as to why I could never find a girlfriend. I had found no fatal flaw in my personality or appearance like I had expected to. The investigation, I concluded, had been a complete failure.
Some months went by. One night I went to see a movie by myself. Near the end, one of the characters lost a limb. Which happens in movies all the time, right? No big deal. The lights came up and I walked out to my car and sat down in the driver’s seat. Then I started to breathe all weird. Oxygen came in short gasps. I thought about the character in that movie, and then I was thinking about the little boy I had once been, the boy who had lost a limb of his own, and I felt incredibly sorry for him. I wished I could reach back through time and hold his hand, comfort him in some way. I felt such grief over his life. Over my life.
A little gasp came out of my mouth, and then I was crying.
I thought, why am I crying? This doesn’t make sense. My amputation was so long ago. I am over it. I have accepted it and moved on with my life. Right?
And that’s when I realized the real reason, the actual reason, I had set out on my scientific investigation in the first place: I wanted to find an explanation, any explanation at all
, other than the obvious one. I had always been the guy who had overcome his amputation. I mean, I went to the Paralympics. I had been an elite athlete, a world-ranked ski racer. I had never used my disability as an excuse for anything. That just wasn’t the kind of person I was. So I had not wanted to blame it for my lack of success with girls, either.
And if I was honest with myself, this was why I had really begun the investigation. I had hoped the girls I interviewed would tell me that I had been too nerdy, or too serious, or too silly, or too anything, really. In fact, I would have even considered my investigation successful if one or two of the girls had told me they didn’t want to date me because I was an amputee. At least that would allow me to say to myself: See, there is a problem, and the problem is with these girls being too shallow to date a guy with a disability. In other words, the problem is with them and their psychological shortcomings, not with me and mine.
But of course, no girls had told me that. The truth was, I was the one who had a problem with my disability. Sitting there in the parking lot crying, I finally admitted to myself that I was deeply and painfully insecure about it. That was why I never tried to talk to Liza Taylor after the pumpkin shoe–relay incident. That was why I was too scared to kiss Francesca at the waterfall. That was why I had never told Evelyn my true feelings about her. And that was why I had lost my nerve with Sasha and stopped calling her after the pageant. Because I was insecure about having one leg. It made me doubt myself. It made me feel inferior. I had always known this, deep down, but I had not wanted to admit that there was an element of my disability I had yet to overcome, so I concocted this investigation to find some other explanation on which to place blame.
And for this reason, my hypotheses had all been flawed from the beginning. The problem had not been with the girls, and the problem had not been with some characteristic of mine; the problem had been with my believing there was a problem. It had been with my believing that the way my body was shaped disqualified me from having a romantic relationship. It was not the shape of my body, as it turned out, but my insecurities about that shape that had kept me single.
We Should Hang Out Sometime Page 15
