Little White Liar

Going down punching

Friday night it's raining cats and dogs and I miss my bus stop because I'm watching the water slicks like pavement mirrors revealing my city upside down. It's cold and I'm missing the eight inches I cut off my head the night before. All my hair now fits under a thin hoodie and a collapsible umbrella. The jeans over my shins get wetter each time I take a step; my saturated flipflops give the sensation of wearing flippers through the streets. I see a bright spot ahead, a cute/geeky boy surrounded by his cute/geeky friends, and I make eye contact through a gauze veil of rain. As I pass him, smiling, one flipflop loses grip in a puddle and I wipe out in a heap of neither-cute-nor-geeky human squalor. While flailing downward, I manage to punch my intended in the thigh. As he peels me off the street he asks, "Are you okay? and I ask, "Are you okay?" and his weird/dorky friends wince as he rubs his thigh and I rub my thigh. Then we all walk back into the deep, thick night.

All the things I hate about you

Lee and I had tried to get together unsuccessfully all Saturday night. That same evening nine days ago had ended in my best friend crying openly in a massive club whose bass line pounded pancakes of my already-thin patience levels. So I was happy when Lee took me up on the offer of crashing at my city pad rather than driving back to his outer-suburban house. Even when it meant that I was woken at 2am to trot to the front door in pajamas that seemed warm enough when packed in New York but never quite cut it when worn in Sydney.

By this point, sleepovers with Lee were fairly regular events. I slipped back into the warm place I had left in my bed and watched as he dropped his clothes onto my floor. When he slid under the covers beside me, dressed only in silky boxers, I counted the hours it had been since he had last vacated the same position. Possibly no more than 12. Lee kissed my mouth for the second time that evening (the first was frigid, at the entrance, between the bars as I fumbled with a key) and said gently, "I don't have any condoms."

To be honest, I was confused as to why my booty call would come without booty protection, and I said so. Just making a "call" is so 19th century, and his hours were all wrong. He said that he had missed me. That he just wanted to see me at the end of a bad night out. That it wasn't about the sex. Everything that every girl wants to hear. Except for this girl.

I sulked until sleep crept back up and blacked out everything. Seconds later Lee startled me awake by speaking. His voice sounded very loud and heavily accented in my foreign bedroom. For once, this was not a turn-on. "What?" my own voice, by contrast, sounded heavy and slurred. I might have still be drunk, I realized.

"I reckon you like me quite a bit," he repeated smugly, and hugged me closer.

"You're alright." Better when you bring condoms, really.

"I'm better than alright." Lee was practically purring with self-contentment. He wound his long lean limbs around me and held his body close. He knew that I would try to jump back from the next question. "How do I rate against the rugby guy?"

I had made the mistake of telling Lee that I had briefly been seeing someone else in Australia after my arrival. Being both the competitive type and the complete opposite of a brutish rugby player, this has been an unending source of questions ever since.

"I'm not having this conversation right now."

"Aw, come on, I just want to know more about you," he whined against my ear, rubbing it with his nose. Whenever somebody says that to me, I want to start telling them lies. It serves them right. The way of knowing more about someone is not by demanding, 'tell me more about you.'

"I don't want to have these deep relationship conversations now or ever. You're not my boyfriend. Stop the jealous deal." The night before he had given me the silent treatment for ten minutes after I had kissed my favorite bartender goodbye (on the cheek).

"I don't want to be your boyfriend," he said thoughtfully, "I just want to know I could be if I wanted to."

Which is the rudest thing that a man has ever said to me in my bed.

"You would never be my boyfriend."

"Why not?!"

"Because you're moving in December. And even if you weren't, I'm foreign, and I have to go home eventually," is what I said. But what I wanted to say is this:

You'll never be my boyfriend because for all of the masculine moans and disinterested grunts that I crave, I get devoted coos and soft murmurs. Because I could never date a guy who, for all I know, only owns three shirts and one pair of jeans and who has to pick bars on the basis of who allows white sneakers past the doorman.

Your car is a filthy mess, and I don't mean on the outside bits that you care about -- the peeling tint and dented chassis. I mean the inside, where trash collects in the foot wells and isn't cleared before you invite my new shoes to lay their unscuffed soles in garbage. I can't stand how you throw your clothes around my room, never once bothering to fold an article, and how you always rip my undergarments from me without a care as to how expensive they are and how far away I bought them (still not understanding the Aussie system of measuring a bra). When you told me that you dropped a used condom on my clean bedsheets I almost threw up, but even that is better than letting you come unrubbered, spraying this way and that and laughing when my hair sticks together.

How could I take you seriously when you don't care about your education? When, at 25, you skip postgraduate seminars to meet a girl at a bar, laughing off professors' warnings? Me, the nerdiest of the nerds, the most serious of the students, who sacrificed untold social nights for a 4.0 and never regretted it, with you, the eternal slacker who once admitted that he majored in a philanthropic study for the money that's in it.

Your taste in music is outdated, and you laugh embarrassingly loud at the movie theater. You never caught on to the fact that I'm not the type of girl who enjoys having her ass grabbed at every intersection like some kind of purebred dog put out on the show. Your only interest in New York is hiphop, which kind of died in my city a decade ago. Know what's a little more recent? Any other kind of art. Not that you'd know.

I've always run a little bit late, but since I met you my 15-minute buffer has increased to an hour-long tardiness that is unforgivable by almost anyone's standards. You refuse to get out of bed, and what was initially a toe-stretching luxury on a random Saturday morning has become a toe-curling beast of burden in my bed every Sunday afternoon. You are the reason for missed calls, for irritated friends, for plans fallen by the wayside.

Even after not-so-subtle hinting, you continue to wear jewelry, and not the acceptable kind for a man. Instead of a watch you wear a bracelet and a chain, so by the time we're naked I get the mental image of boning a Guido in the dark. I can't believe you ruin your beautiful red hair by running gel through it and turning it brown. While I like your cologne I hate how common it is. That every couple of blocks I'll be reminded of being naked next to you because some 20-year-old got the same bottle for Christmas. And the visual high-five you give to my male roommate when you walk out of my bedroom in the morning makes me feel like a hooker in my own home.

I hate how you pressure me into scratching your back and then complain about the burning nail marks. I hate that you don't know how to ease into sex and the first two minutes are always a knee-clenching teeth-grinding rite of passage into the good stuff. While we're being honest, I'm really not too fond of the taste of your come.

You're so much fun to hang around casually with, but the worst sin of all is that you don't realize your casual status. That you press for something deeper, something more meaningful, even when we're laying in bed after a night of flirting with other people. That, for all the tricks you'd picked up to make me moan, for all the 'tell me more' questions you ask, you really don't know me at all.

Random thoughts before flying

While I'm sitting endlessly in the airport with nothing but my laptop keeping me from assaulting a screaming child, let's talk. What do you want to talk about? I don't really know, either.

Let's start with how I fall in love at all the wrong times. My mother's half-proud half-drunken bragging has made me a bit of hometown celebrity. This weekend I reaped many benefits in the attention department, fielding compliments and handshakes like a politician on the campaign trail. I might have kissed a baby at one point, who knows. The point is that on Saturday night, feeling a little vulnerable and a lot inebriated, I met the man who would later (by a few hours) become my favorite bartender of all time. Ken greeted me with an Australian accent and kept in character for our first few minutes together. When he finally flipped over into his native Irish brogue, I asked if he was changing character to fit the decor or whether his colors were showing. He's really Irish. Hands-down the most delightful accent in the world, according to me. Ken is good-looking, but not in a way so intimidating that it seems it would be wrong to think about being able to go home with him at the end of a shift. He's engaging and kind-eyed in a way that makes you want to talk to him endlessly, especially when you get drunk. Having nothing to lose, I laid it on thick.

Then, last night, I met a living legend. My mother has been trying to set up a friend of hers with a local named Phil. A few days earlier, I had even played a part in trying to convince this (recently divorced) friend to give men another chance. Had I met him beforehand, I would have kept him to myself. When we walked into the bar, I sat myself down next to the best-looking guy in the room and started a conversation. I was trying to avoid my own conversations, which would have been increasingly teary-eyed last-night proclamations on the part of my mother, and embarrassing getting-to-know-you type questions from a newly discovered aunt (only two years my senior). Hot guy wins that round, right? Phil is tall, preppy in a blue collar way, and so gorgeously tan that you want to spend your life rubbing lotion over the splash of pink across his long straight nose and ruddy cheeks. His brown skin sets off his blue eyes, and his blonde hair has gone duckling colored in the sun. Over the next few hours, Phil tells me how his girlfriend kicked him out, and how he now lives on his boat. Both of these had seemed like red flags when my mother warned her friend about them, but coming from Phil's own mouth they seemed like minor heartbreaks forgiven for the romance of it. He's working the next two years in contracting while rebuilding his boat - making the structure and himself ready for a sail around the world, landing in Australia. He let me use words like "transient," and smiled. He said that "debauchery" was his favorite word. I was smitten. I think maybe he was smitten too. Around seven o'clock he told me he had to leave.

"Are you leaving me for a date?" seemed like a reasonable question.

"No, nothing like that. Just meeting a friend."

"A lady friend or a guy friend?"

He was smiling again. "A lady friend. She and I go way back. When we were both in relationships we used to go see movies together. You know, after college. She recently found out she has MS. Last time I saw her she was in a wheelchair, really just crippled at this point. It's moving quickly. Sometimes I take her for little drives. She said that she wanted to see some fireworks, so we're going to do that. I'll be back later, though, if you're still here..."

"I'll be here." Because my heart was slung over the draught handles. I wasn't there, though. We stayed until 9:30 or so, and by that time I was so drunk that I realized packing was going to be a great difficulty. With a large amount of regret, I left him behind and returned home to my mother's raves about how good he would be for her friend. I can't decide if she thinks I'm too young or too much her daughter, because she never hooks me up. And it turns out she knows lots of available bachelors. Boat hobbyists, world sailors, carers for the handicapped, lovers of the word debauchery. Sigh.

---

I got glasses for the first time in my life. I think they're cute. I'll show you when I'm sure.

---

Let's also talk about how the whole travel climate has turned this country very...Orwell. "If you see something, say something" booms a disembodied loudspeaker voice every five minutes on the train track. Turning away from black bags brings a hundred eyes in their directions. I'm going to stop typing this before I'm arrested. It is the airport after all.

The one with the internet date that didn't end up murdering me

I don't know how to meet men anymore. Long Island is populated, generally, with millions of photocopies of the same person - and I find that person repulsive. Up until a few months ago, I spent all of my time in the office (with a measly 10 full-time employees, only two of which were male), in the library (with too-young coeds jostling each other to reserve computers for MySpace harassment), or at home watching trashy made-for-TV movies (with my very-charming but also very-female foreign roommate). Hooking up with my male friends in moments of drunken horny weakness brought me through my mid-20s in roaring style, but I still wanted something more. Someone I could hook up with regularly. Maybe even while sober. So, this April I turned to the internet.

I responded to a few ads on Craig's List, and began the traditional internet dating dance. First came the picture exchange, where 75% of would-be dates died at the unfeeling hands of physical revulsion on the part of one or both parties. If, by some miracle, both myself and the Craig's Lister were pleased with the photo exchange, we began e-mailing or instant messaging to screen for major personality incompatibilities. If you have been with me longer than five minutes, you know that I am a hateful bitch. If you have been on the internet longer than five minutes, you know that most men who use internet dating services are trying to bypass the usual wait period for kinky sex. I found 95% of the remaining physically attractive men to be either too sexually eager, too geographically distant, too incomprehensibly dull, or too careless about general illiteracy to hold my attention. That left me with one guy. I responded to his ad, we chatted on the phone for 20 minutes that night, and we met up the next day. I didn't allow myself any time to hate him, because I'm weak and slutty and I really just wanted some action.  Hey, it was springtime.

On paper, my date looked amazing. Tall, good-looking, well-traveled. Jewish, which isn't necessary by a longshot, but does seem to provide for a certain baseline of sarcasm and dark intelligence. In his final year of med school and about to enter his rounds at a local hospital, which I thought would balance out my hypochondria nicely. He agreed to meet me at a mall so that skinning or raping me would be more difficult if that was on the agenda for the evening. I'm not that easy, after all.

Okay, so in person he was still tall, good-looking, well-traveled. I learned that his Judaism was manifested less in a biting sense of humor and more in the fact that he had moved home to live with his mother during his rounds. The same mother who he proposed that I meet after he discovered that I had been to Israel. "Oh, you're Jewish? My mom's going to love you!" were a few sample sentences that sent my neck disappearing between my collarbones in a cringe so deep it's surprising aftershocks didn't register on the Richter Scale. While we waited for dinner seats I flirted with the bartender, which he didn't call me out on (or really even notice) and sipped on a glass of white wine (which he did notice and call me out on for being "too slow"). Having not pounded my drink, I was unprepared once seated intimately across from a stranger for any sort of conversation. Especially since he spent half of dinner staring at himself in the mirror behind my head. "I'm nervous I'll catch something in my teeth," he confessed. "I would tell you by laughing hysterically if you did," I volleyed. No laugh. No change in the behavior.

Over dinner I learned that he had gone to medical school in Guadalajara. Not so very glamorous. He learned that I push my food around my plate a fair amount, and he made comments about this regularly. As regularly as, say, I selected a bite to put into my mouth. I tried to find equal footing by discussing traveling, and it soon came out that I would be moving to Australia in a matter of months. My date was disappointed that we weren't destined for marriage. Chillingly, he asked me if I would be blogging from abroad (no mention was ever made of blogs). He warned me about traveler's diarrhea. Malaria. The variety of poisonous animals where I was going.

Just as I began to feel dinner rising back up in my esophagus, he leaned toward me confidentially and asked, "Do you do drugs?" I should have asked him to write a prescription for antidepressants to pop after the date was over.

Instead I said, "I smoke pot now and then, but I've never done anything that makes me want to pick imaginary bugs off my skin."

"So you don't do intravenous drugs?"

Stunned silence from my side.

"I only ask because that's my only deal breaker."

That was pretty much my deal breaker, too. I dropped all facade of taking the date seriously after that. I let him pay for dinner and declined a second drink. I took a ride in his car to the movie theater because I was pretty sure I could physically overpower him and I was dying to see 300. When we got there, I told him to put his wallet away and I paid for both of our tickets. Any man would realize that this is the kiss of death. Beyond the friend zone. I was paying the guy to be my cover in the theater - to make me look as though I weren't going in there alone. Furthermore, I was repaying him for dinner in a way that was nonsexual. Instead of wincing, insisting otherwise, or even doing the fake reach, my date smiled and shrugged. He was Jewish in all the wrong places.

As we sat through a movie made up entirely of rippling sixpacks and people getting gored, my internet date repeatedly brushed his long bony knuckles against the outside of my thigh. I ignored it the best I could as my skin tried to invert inside my jeans. Halfway through, he offered me gum. I declined. I might as well have waved a flag that said "Stay the fuck away from me," or so I thought. Because two minutes before the movie ended, in the only emotional part of the entire film, he tapped his foot lightly but insistently on the outside of my shoe. I turned slowly and carefully toward him, cautious about getting a faceful of accidental tongue, and I said, "This is a sad part. STOP THAT." He stopped.

Walking outside, I ignored the gentle trickle of his overly cautious fingertips on the small of my back. Just like I ignored his small talk in the car, and his casual lean-in as I hopped out in the parking lot. "Keep in touch!" I said sarcastically as I slammed the door in his puckered-lip face.

He did keep in touch. At dinner I had told him that the following night I had Yankees tickets. That didn't stop him from calling me. Twice. And leaving two voicemails. I ignored both, which just earned me two e-mails the day after that. And an IM the day after that. I text-messaged him on the weekend from the dentist's office (getting everything painful out of the way at once) to say that I was busy with school and would be in touch when my schedule died down. Meaning never. He kept e-mailing. The last message I received, mystifyingly, said "I think I know what went wrong." Which part was it? The mention of IV drugs? The list of diseases I would contract in Australia? The suggestion that I meet his mother as soon as possible? The questionable mention of a blog that is in no way tied to anything he knew about me? The shoddy medical pedigree? The mirror-gazing? The cheapness in the movie theater combined with complete lack of flirtatious finesse? What could he have pinpointed as going wrong?

Finally I told him, succinctly but firmly, that we didn't have the connection I was looking for. And this, my friends, is why I'm ruined for internet dating.

My examination, and who I wished had examined me instead

I was just at the gynecologist. Hopefully that sentence will be enough of a disclaimer for anyone who doesn't want to read my personal vagina monologues. Anyway.

The doctor's office goes like this: one half is the OB/GYN, the other half is a family doctor. (Hos left, babies right.) While I'm sure this is very convenient one-stop shopping for moms who can't stop squirting them out, it makes for a very uncomfortable Single Gal Gyno environment. Why? I guess I'm just repressed. I expect gynecologists' offices to be modern red tents; one big group hug, bras optional. Having men strutting around wondering what I'm in for sort of messes up my Zen.

For awhile I could tune the Y chromes out by justifying that these were fathers. Fathers taking their children to the family doctor, or fathers-to-be escorting their pregnant wives to the neighborhood obstetrician. Then he walked in. A heart-stoppingly good-looking specimen. At least six and a half feet, bright red hair, LRG shorts that sprouted these calves like tan boulders cut away at the bottom by river. I watched him as he checked himself in, and in a moment I realized that I was not only surrounded by sexually active specimens, their offspring, and their impregnators, but also...the random adorable inappropriately grown man who still goes to his pediatrician.

I listened to his cell phone conversation with his own father, and it was very professional. This was no simpering "Gimme a lolly" post-checkup patient. I built up an elaborate fantasy about him as I checked him out and he checked me back, as he chose the seat next to me. I screamed inside when he butted into the waiting room conversation that I had butted into, and his voice was the perfect mixture of deep and excitable. We did that thing where we looked just beyond each other to sneak a sidewards glance now and then. It gave me warm tingles in a place that was about to be inspected naked under fluorescence by a strange woman. Nightmarish.

I didn't pursue his number, and here's why. I don't know the protocol for OB/GYN pick-ups. Did he think my presence in the office meant that my basements levels were finished, furnished, and ready for slumber parties - totally cared for and immaculate? Or did he wonder what I was about to be sentenced to - what variety of structural damage awaited any potential bidders? I couldn't handle the thought. When my name was called, we smiled goodbye and I walked off to pee in a cup and clothe my bottom half in paper and rubber invasion.

Pray for us sinners

This weekend we had an outdoor event at work. The skies were blue, the day was glorious, the sexy seasonal workers were wearing shorts. (I don't know why, but I think the hottest part on a guy is the ankle. The transitional parts of the body - the ankles, the wrists, that little dip where the collarbones feed into the neck, those kill me.) I was harnessed into my digital SLR, snapping promotional pictures of the goings-on, feeling wonderful about being in the sun and also great that this was my last promo event with the company, ever. Picture all of the appropriate calm-before-storming. Children laughter and running ahead of pigtails that waved like streamers. Parents smiling and eating ice pops in the shade. Music sparkling through the clouds, birds calling from the outskirts.

Let me just say that I do have a serious father fetish. Not in that I want someone to be my daddy, because ew. But in that I love guys who are really good fathers to their really little kids. I think that this is the only evidence of the lovable existence of my ovaries, whose general platforms are No Kids Not Ever, Puppies Are Ugly, I Hate My Life So I'm Going To Make My Neighbors Bleed, and If It Wasn't Going To Turn Us Into A Man I'd Be Totally Cool With Being Removed Altogether.

So don't hate me when I say that I was checking out this one dad from the back. He was so working cute young dad style. Flip flops, khaki cargo shorts, a polo with a long-sleeve t-shirt underneath shoved up to the elbows to show off forearms that were both tan and muscular without being overly veiny. Round athletic butt, perfect ankles, flecks of gray in his brown hair that caught that afternoon sun like jewelry. I lost track of him briefly while, you know, doing my job.

When I saw him again it was because someone was yelling somewhere near his general direction. Upon closer inspection, I saw that it was him who was yelling. At children. Upon even closer inspection, I realized I knew him. Intimately. I was wearing my new aviator glasses (thank you Jesus and Michael Kors), so when he noticed me back, my eyes were neat designer mirrors instead of pools of absolute mortification and self-disgust. Regardless, I trotted over to the hottest and nearest seasonal staff member that I knew, and threw my arms around his shoulders. He kissed my forehead and hugged me into a half-dip. I'm not sure why I did this. It could have been laying the groundwork for later, if the dad approached me and I could have been all, "Did you see that hot hugging guy? That's my new man. He has a way bigger 'dik' than you." Or maybe I just wanted to rub it in his face, that he wasn't the only one with other things going on.

Anyway, he was there. With his (ex?) wife, who looks nothing like me. And his children, who apparently exist. Have you ever felt so deeply ashamed of yourself that you're actually distracted from thinking about anything else? That was this. People would be small-talking with me and all I could think was, "I hooked up with a guy who has kids, and who probably tucks those kids in at night without underwear on. I gave a beej to a bad dad." I brushed the gums right off my teeth after the event was over. So consider this, I guess, my Hail Marys. I repent.

Books, covers, dirt, and Washington

While last night was supposed to be a library night, my study buddy rescheduled and a friend had a sudden cause to celebrate. I went to the bar straight from work and got home around 9pm. So obviously nothing wild. Everyone left with their hair in place and their own underwear on. However, my mascara was a little messed up from laughing-until-crying on more than one occasion.

So there are bars for picking up guys, and for being picked up by guys. There are bars for live music and for dancing around- or on top of tables. There are bars where bras hang on the ceiling and the parking lot is full of sparkling motorcycles that look dangerous despite how easy they are to accidentally knock over. Then there are bars with no gimmick except for lots of beer on tap and lots of people who know at least one embarrassing detail about you.  This last kind is the sort we choose to celebrate quietly in.

I was sitting there talking to my friend, making some stupid toasts, bobbing to the music oh-so-whitely, eyeing up the fellas, the usual. The thing about tiny neighborhood bars like this one is that every entrance is a huge production. Everyone who's not busy pretending to be too cool turns to look when the door swings open. Each bang of the handle on the wall means one more person to try and hit on or make fun of, right? Welcome to the party.

One of these entrances was guy I've never seen before, but whom my friend knew. We got introduced, I shook his hand, he sat down at the bar beside me. He and my friend started having a conversation that I pretty much tuned out because it was about landscaping and really: who gives a fuck? I don't have pets or kids, so as long as my front yard doesn't have a sinkhole or an open cesspool in it, I could care less what's going on there. While they were talking, I was busy checking the new guy out.

First thing you notice about a person is whether or not they are covered in shit. Well, to be fair, you're less likely to notice if they're not covered in crap than if they are. This guy happened to be pretty well-dusted, so I noticed immediately. There was a fine layer of soft brown powder freckling his bandanna, his worn-in t-shirt, his faded jeans, even the toes of his broken-in boots. No, I do not live in the sticks. No, this is not normal.

Beyond the dirt thing, the guy was pretty sexy. I spotted a few beautifully shaded tattoos crawling up his well-muscled arms, mixed in with scars that I imagined to be from something romantic like falling tree branches or wayward landscaping tools. (Imagine? Scarred by a gardening spade accident?) Since I'm psychotic, I started imagining the ways that I could fix him up if he were my boyfriend. Less dirt, new shirt, maybe the tiniest trim of facial hair.

Then my friend said, "I took a picture for you in Morristown when we were there a few weeks back. Do you have e-mail?"

"No, I'm still in the horse-and-buggy days," the guy shyly replied, spreading his calloused hands honestly out across the bar in front of him.

"Well next time I come here I'll bring a print and leave it with one of the bartenders. Make sure to ask them for it."

"For sure. So you stopped by the Park then?" The outside of my face was smiling lightly, because I'm generally polite to strangers and also generally smile in front of decent-looking men. But the inside of my face was all scowly.  I was sick of listening to talk of the outdoors. Let's talk about sex! Drugs! Politics!

"I did, but we didn't know enough of the history to fully appreciate the place," my friend admitted with a bit of offhanded regret.

"Washington was really fond of that place. He wintered there year after year. Something really drew him. I just finished another book about his middle years that described how he spent his seasons. The park in Morristown was in a valley, so he could be protected from all sides. He was always thinking like that. The guy's my hero." The landscaper went on for ten solid minutes about George Washington, as though old GW were a buddy of his that was set to walk into the bar any moment. He told intimate stories about the man, sparkling the whole time with a deep respect and admiration for someone he was hundreds of years too late to meet for dinner.

It was surreal, watching this guy who I had written off as a dirty laborer spout history and politics with careless ease. Instead of fantasizing about fixing him up, my mind traveled to his nightly ritual. Peeling off layers of muddy clothing, easing into bed with a book about our country's forefathers and the technical battles that won this country. Waking up again to walk into the sun and consider his knowledge under the meditation of physical labor.

A little bit of a crush was going by the time his history speech was over, I'm not going to lie. I had just begun leaning in and smiling wider, inviting further explanation on topics of warfare and strategy, when a woman walked in, over, and straight to his lips. She kissed him on the mouth and draped an arm over his strong shoulders, comfortable in her longstanding knowledge of his many facets. This should teach me not to judge books by their covers.

Next time a construction worker whistles at me, I'm going for it. Who knows, maybe he reads Proust in his free time.

Mental Album part 1

I remember how content I was, seeing James holding his own camera with my lens screwed on. How I held my breath as I watched his long, aristocratic fingers twist focus into the shot.  How I smiled to imagine what those fingers would later do to other…instruments…of my ownership.

This is not a love letter.  I have never confused my lust for love in the case of James.  This is a piece about photography.

I always thought that James was good-looking, in the way you think your friends are good-looking if only because you know that you’ll have to stare at them for a long time.  He has blonde hair that always looks as though it has been pulled straight from a restless bed.  His cold blue eyes come down from generations of noble in-breeding.  The full soft mouth, draped with sarcasm and dimples, has benefited from the good genes of very many trophy wives.  He is tall and thin, broad of shoulder, sharp of hip, prone to holding himself in poses of impertinence.  He is a natural model.

One afternoon when James was staying with me, we drove into town to pick up some lunch.  On the way, we saw a bunch of red and yellow balloons that had been lost, or let go, or blown off by wind.  Their strings were tangled around a power line that crossed the street above us.  The balloons tugged at their leashes, frantically trying to escape.  We were stuck at a stoplight just in front of the spectacle.  Both James and I stared.  “I can’t decide if that’s sad or beautiful,” I said to the boy in my passenger seat.  “I don’t know,” he responded, “But I can say that we would both take twenty pictures of it.”

One of the most beautiful photographs I have ever taken exists only in my head. I snapped it with my shutter-eyes and developed it with my brain and I am the only one who will ever look at it.  I’m looking at it now.

It’s maybe six in the morning, or some other time too ridiculous to be awake, because the sun is just rising in bars through the off-white blinds.  There is only one window in the white-walled room and it never shines directly onto the bed.  Because of astronomy or architecture, there never seem to be concentrated blocks of light cast in at all. Instead, every sunrise turns everything in that particular room a dreamy grey-blue. 

James and I are both wearing a single sheet, and nothing else.  We are both lying on our sides, our heads propped on pillows, our faces turned toward each other. James, post-orgasmic, fights against his exhaustion.  He thinks that staying awake in bed after the fact is romantic. He has strange notions of romance.

(For instance, he thinks that masturbation is bad karma.  For a few days before big athletic or intellectual events, he refrains.  He once went five months without touching himself and then Cambridge rejected him.)

James manages a few soft, accented confessions before his eyes fall shut and his roaming fingers go still on my hip.  His hand is padding one cheek and the rest of him is flushed skin and mussed hair, courtesy of myself.  I stare for a minute or five from my pillow point of vantage—it’s hard to tell how long I admire him because time doesn’t come into this room.  James is one of those angelic sleepers, mouth hung just open.  The coming light flips on a fire all around the outermost edges of his blond hair, shakes glitter onto his eyelashes, makes pools of the shapes of his muscles.  As his sweat dries his satin-like shine becomes more matte, and he blends more comfortably into the cotton sheets.

I memorize him like that and then push myself into his arms before he stirs, catches me staring, and gets a turn to accuse me of being a weirdo.  It’s worth taking the risk of being caught, though.  I keep flipping back to that mental picture now.  It’s one of my mental photo album favorites.

Box it up

People keep saying that spring is coming. Each time it snows in April people swear this will be the last of a winter death rattle that's drawn out so long that someone must be waiting for inheritance.  For a week there I could go outside wearing only one set of sleeves and my lungs still functioned. Already the skies are filling with birds, the trees are fleshed with buds, and my blood is rushed with hormones. I didn't say this was going to be an innocent post.

I am anxious about the real arrival of spring. On one hand, the season kneels down only for autumn in a competition for my love. On the other hand, it is inexplicably the time of year that brings old, dusty, shelved memories of my ex-fiancé crashing down from their high places right into the soft spots on my head.

It's been long enough now that these thoughts don't make me want to hold my breath until my brain shuts down. In the years between me and him I have engineered new, playful ways to torture myself. Instead of wondering whether he is in love with someone else, I wonder whether someone ever found the ring I threw in a tantrum down the gutter. Instead of picturing him admiring another girl (as long-eye-lashed and achingly-green-eyed as ever), I imagine a NYC subway rat with a diamond cinched up around its thigh.

But heartsickness can't be fantasized (or reasoned or buried) away. Like recovering from any ailment, there is a possibility of sudden unexpected flare-ups.

Two years ago my mother's home renovation project brought her, hammers and claws, to the kitchen. I was there to help her peel back seven layers of floor and wall finishes that had been stacked one on top of the other over the house's 100-year history. I love demolition work, especially when I am demolishing alongside my mother. I get special pleasure from the gusto with which she punches her way into the guts of things. I live for the times when we laugh so hard at some folly that we have to rip off our dust masks and draw ragged breaths full of the history of the home.

We were working on the third layer of wall with little blades and big scrapers. The floral wallpaper was putting up a fight, and we were so involved in the battle that we worked wordlessly. As is often the result of good labor, my mind was blank. I remember the pleasure of slicing and then stripping an extra-long piece of wallpaper off the wall. I can picture it, because as my mind's eye turns back to the hole I had made, focusing for the first time on what was beneath it, I also remember a sudden nausea so intense that it shoved my elbows down to my knees.

Beneath the floral print we were slowly exposing another kind of wallpaper. This one had the West Point crest printed over and over. I told my mother that a piece of paper had flown into my eye. I jogged to the bathroom, slid onto the floor, and sobbed into my dusty t-shirt for five minutes. Then I went back to the kitchen and for three hours I hacked at the walls, revealing a symbol of my past in every six inches. My mother never made me talk about how a piece of paper in one eye could turn both of them a bruised red, or soak a patch of my shirt to the sticking point.

I was glad afterward to know that I had dug that cancer out of my family home.

These relapses happen less and less, but then again, I am more vigilant about avoiding proven triggers. There are hotels I do not visit, and towns I do not drive through. There are colognes I will never sniff in stores. There is a nickname that I will never allow a man to call me again. Suddenly, my world exists in negatives.

Since that ancient time when he and I were new to each other, I have lived in ten places. When a girl moves that often, she learns quickly what she can carry and what she can leave behind. Something I have carried through ten homes, even when I left my furniture on the street and gave my books away, is a box full of my ex-fiancé's things. Not things I kept out of spite, like his CDs or something. But things he gave me.

There were times when the box used to sit open, when my hands would touch something inside every day. It is full of photographs of a lanky boy growing up into a muscular man. It is noisy with dog tags and medals that show the progress of a young soldier, determined. It is filled out with a selection of letters on spartan Army stationery, whose subjects range from apologies for that fight to songs that must be played at the wedding, from things that reminded me of you today to cool names for babies. One box is all it takes to enclose an entire life, long abandoned.

I haven't touched the box in years. I duct-taped it shut at one point to remove the possibility that I might, like a sleepwalker, open it up and daydream about things that will never be. But I know exactly where it is in my house. I keep a corner of my eye on it, even as other men parade through my life and other knickknacks are cycled into the garbage.

In less than two months I will move abroad. At least three more houses await me there, and I am determined that none of them will be a home for this box. But what do you do when such a lovely piece of your emotional past has evolved to such a terrible solid shape, capable of being lost or found? I can't bear to store it away from me any more than I can stomach the thought of discarding it entirely. What if I become an 80-year-old woman with nothing to look back on but a boy who loved her ferociously through her late teens and early 20s? Maybe this box is my life's portion. This could be it for my stock of love letters, my share of medals, my store of baby pictures of the man to hold beside pictures of the babies I would later give him.

There's the saying, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. But how do you really know how many eggs you have? And, if you already had a basket, how do you find the nerve to stand over something hard and turn it upside down? To let the smell of stink out? To trust that there are eggs enough in this world that you won't be standing there, empty basket, forever?

Rules of Flirtation

I have a blind date tonight--from the internet. I'm nervous. Not because I'm afraid to say something embarrassing (I will), but because I'm one of those people who automatically assumes that any male who agrees to a blind date is just a rapist/murderer going through a dry patch.

If this is the last thing I ever write, here's my message from the grave: I've posted his full name and other information as a draft on my blog. If we get married someday, I can print a log of my archives and make a cute little wedding speech reference to how I thought I was going to be forcibly impregnated the first time we met. And if I do get killed, I know that my laptop is the first place my mother will tell investigators to look.

(Dear Investigators: none of that porn is mine.)

Since I know basically nothing about this guy other than that he is completely out of my league and is probably only buying me dinner so that he can harvest my skin, I've been thinking a lot about my dating method. Let's revise that to my flirting method, since my dating method is basically, "Date any guy who doesn't repulse you, for as long as that is true."

I have seen some examples of excellent flirtation. I can always tell when my ex-foreign-roommate is considering hooking up with a guy. Her method is tried, true, and predictable. You might be thinking, "What does this girl do? Stick happy face print-outs to her nipples with honey and shake it?" No, but close. She offers up a challenge. "If you can beat me in an arm wrestling match, I'll make out with you," she promises. She's a fucking genius, because this plays on all three things that guys like best: roughhousing, winning, and trying to get laid.

The other day I was trying to make a little "Year in Review" video on my laptop, because really, why else own a Mac? (Answer: sense of superiority.) I was cataloging all of the videos I've shot over the year, and watching the ones I was too drunk to remember having starred in.

There is a five-minute clip of me and a guy I slept with, shot by my ex-foreign-roommate. It was taken on the night that we hooked up for the first time, about four hours before the fact. Up until I watched this video, I have maintained that I had no pre-meditated plans of making out with him (and certainly not doing so after he threw up and until the sun came out). But there it was: proof that my subconscious had a crush. Evidence? Wallet pilfering.

The only way I know how to flirt with a guy is to go through his shit in front of him. I don't know what turns me on about this. It might have something to do with the sudden exposure of it all, or worse, the guy's shifting embarrassment. But there is a lot that can be said about what a person carries around with them all the time. What's the primary ID? Is the picture joke-worthy? (Always yes.) Are there old receipts from far-away places? Is there a condom stuffed in there? What's the middle initial listed on a license, and what does it stand for? Etc.

Since guys always respond to this flirtation (wallet-jacking) in turn, mine is kept pry-worthy. I'll even tell you guys what's in there right now.

• Photo ID: Driver's license, Student ID, International student identification card
• Gift cards: Barnes and Noble, Starbucks, GAP
• Emergency contact cards: Geico car insurance, US consulate numbers
• Store membership: Borders, American Eagle, Blockbuster
• Two black and white photo strips from a booth in the East Village
• An English pound
• Four bobby pins
• Ticket stubs from my last two trips
• Business cards from my neurologist, my dentist, and a guy who tried to pick me up in New Orleans
• One half a jagged "Best Friends" heart, hand-ripped from an MTA subway map

I wonder how this date will go tonight. Whether it will ever get to the wallet. Whether I will become a wallet. I'll keep you updated.

Until next time: how do you flirt?