W
hen a process server finally caught me in the deli section of my neighborhood QFC and served me with divorce papers, I felt both despair and exhilaration: despair because although my marriage was a nightmare, it was still better than being abandoned by yet another woman, and exhilaration because I was now free to go out and live the dissolute and debauched life of a roué. My wife was divorcing me for an ugly German man she met in a coffee shop. He spoke Mandarin, her native language, and she was delighted. She decided he was her soul mate and now she wanted a divorce. I was glad to grant it, but why a Chinese-speaking German? I believe that French, not Chinese, is the language of love.
Et je parle Français. Prenez garde femmes du monde! Je suis libre et je suis fou! Look out women of the world; I'm free and I'm crazy.
But Exhilaration quickly abandoned me and Despair settled in for a long stay. I could barely get out of bed in the morning, much less ask for a date. The women of the world had nothing to fear from me. “Not pleasure but freedom from pain is what the wise man will aim at,” Aristotle said, but I ignored him and now I was “getting what was coming to me”, or as my mother would put it in her broken Filipino English: “Now you get what you looking for.”
When I was a child, my mom would scold me whenever I failed to take precautions against misfortune: “I told you not to climb that tree,” she would say when I fell and hit my head. “Now you get what you looking for.” I should have listened to my mom and Aristotle.
For the next couple of months I went to the actuarial firm where I work and did almost nothing but stare catatonically at the computer screen. After work I would come home and watch episodes of the British sci-fi sitcom
Red Dwarf over and over again until I had memorized the dialog. I felt lonelier than the main character, a soup vending machine repairman on a derelict spaceship. He was the last human left alive in the universe but even he had companions: a dead shipmate reincarnated as a hologram and a creature that evolved from his cat. I thought of getting a cat, but I’m allergic.
I might have continued this pathetic routine forever were it not for a flyer I found posted to a telephone pole near Green Lake. It read:
Sad and Lonely No More!
One-On-One Matchmaker at Your Disposal!!
Speed Dating!!!
Cuddle Parties!!!
Literally Blind Dates
and
A Practice Date with Me,
Your Personal Love Coach – Hannah Rabinowitz!!!!!!
I go to the website listed on the flyer. A beautiful woman in her late 30s, posing in a bikini with her hands clasped behind her head, welcomes me with a seductive smile. Hannah Rabinowitz, I presume. Her lovely brunette hair cascades down about her D-cup breasts and only a slight asymmetry of her nose mars her beauty. But those eyes, that hair, that smile—witchcraft!
Once again I ignore the wisdom of Aristotle and seek out pleasure instead of avoiding pain. The allure of a practice date with this woman is irresistible and to hell with the consequences! This may be a front for something shady, but illicit or not, I will be in for an adventure. I call the number listed on the website. A woman answers.
“Who is this?” she says warily, as if she’s having problems with stalkers. “Is this John? I’ve got a restraining order, John. Get lost, jerk!”
“No, no, it’s not John,” I say. “Sorry. I saw your ad…on a telephone pole…near Green Lake.”
"Oh, sorry. What can I do for you? What’s your name?” she coos.
“My name?”
“Yes, your name. Is that a problem?”
“Umm, my name is Victor,” I say.
“Victor, what?”
“Victor…Victor Shakapopulis.”
“That sounds fake,” she says. “Isn’t that a character from a Woody Allen film? You have some problem giving your real name? I’m gonna hang up now.”
“Wait, wait. Don’t hang up. Sorry. My first name really is Victor, but my last name is Badilla. Victor Shakapopulis was how Woody Allen introduced himself to Heather MacRae as he was about to do battle with a giant disembodied breast in
Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex."
"I'm hanging up now," she says.
"No, no, please, wait. I'm sorry I lied about my name. I have a thing about privacy.”
“Well, you better get over that,” she says. “I’m going to be all up in your thing if I choose to work with you ‘ Victor Badilla,’ if that really is your name. What kind of name is ‘Badilla’ anyway? What's your nationality?"
"I'm Filipino," I say.
"Oh, that explains everything,” she says. “What do you want from me?”
“There’s a lacuna in my life,” I say.
“A what?”
“A gap, an emptiness, a black hole of nothingness that only the companionship of a woman can fill.”
“You’re kidding, right? You know you have more personality than my other Asian clients. You're kind of like a Jew, Victor, a Filipino Jew. So what are you looking for? A long-term relationship or something more casual? Are you looking for love or just sex?"
Love or just sex. Love or just sex? I say to myself sotto voce. Does she ask this question of women or is it only men who are faced with this choice? Why not sex and love? As Isaac Bashevis Singer said of genuine literature, I combine the passions of the flesh with the yearnings of the soul. Maybe the real choice is not between love and sex but between woman and mathematics. To find a woman or not to find a woman and devote myself solely to mathematics, that is the question.
“Hey, are you still there?" she says interrupting my soliloquy.
“Sorry,” I say. “Well, I guess I'm looking for a long-term relationship but while I’m waiting for that ship to come in, I wouldn't mind a quick excursion or two. Can I choose both?"
"Of course. No problem. A lot of women are just looking for casual hook-ups, too."
"Really? " I say.
"What a schmo," she says. "Of course. So are you looking to just do speed dating or do you want personal coaching and my match making services, too?“
“I’m not sure. I have ambivalent feelings about all this,” I say, trying not to sound too eager. “But I’m kind of interested in the practice date."
“Ambivalence-shambivalence!” she says. “I have a feeling that you’re gonna need the whole enchilada. The practice date comes after I check you out to make sure you’re not some kind of psycho. Meet me at Northgate mall tomorrow. We’ll start with your wardrobe.”
“Wait. How will you know me?” I ask.
“Don't worry, Filipino boy, I’ll know you,” she says. “Bring money. I prefer cash, but I’ll take a check."
T
he next day at the mall I wait impatiently for her to appear. She’s 45 minutes late. Just as I'm about to leave, I feel a tap on my shoulder. I jump and let out a high-pitched scream.
My love coach laughs and says: "All right! You made it. Do you have my money? Does my face look red? I just had a laser peel and I think they turned the laser up too high."
She speaks with a nasal twang in a fading Brooklyn accent and her voice projects all the way to the end of the mall. I have to stand back a bit to protect my ears, but there is no escaping her. If I move away, she moves in so close I can feel the heat radiating from her body. She punctuates her talking points by frequently touching my arm or poking my chest with her beautifully manicured forefinger. If I talk to her too long, my chest starts to hurt, but not in a bad way.
She gives me a once over. I’m wearing a wrinkled pair of pants, a pair of running shoes full of holes and a dirty white T-shirt with Maxwell’s equations emblazoned on it.
Four equations that fit on the front of a dirty T-shirt are enough to completely describe all electromagnetic phenomena. Maxwell's equations are a wonderful testament to the power of mathematics and a great conversation starter.
“Oh, my God,” she says. “You look like a homeless nerd. You called me in the nick of time. We have to get you a whole new wardrobe now!”
“What do I do with the clothes I have?” I ask. “I already bought a whole new wardrobe about 15 years ago.”
“Oh, God,” my love coach says, “burn them. Burn them all. I gotta get you out of those schmattas.”
We go to the Gap where she orders the sales clerks to find different kinds of shirts, pants and sweaters. I’m surprised that my love coach knows so many qualifiers for clothes. She is like the Central Siberian Yupik Eskimos who can distinguish 40 different kinds of snow such as “matsaaruti” for wet snow and “pukak” for crystalline powder snow.
In the dressing room I feel like a model doing a change every 30 seconds as she orders me to try out various combinations of shirts and pants. The sales clerks are coming and going with all kinds of clothes probably wondering what this beautiful young woman is doing dressing a middle-aged man.
"Black, more black," she orders. "It's slimming."
As I’m putting on a sweater, she bends down to pick up a shirt, and just as my hand comes out of the sleeve, she straightens and I inadvertently get to cop a feel.
"Don't sample the merchandise, Victor. They’re real.”
“Sorry, but it’s cramped in here. I haven’t been in a dressing room with a woman since first grade. How about giving me some privacy when I change?”
“Privacy? What do you need privacy for? You don’t have anything worth looking at, do you? I promise I won't sneak a peek at your little thing.”
I try on one more set of clothes and finally she’s satisfied with her selections. She gives me another once over. “Wow, Victor. You look almost hot in your new clothes and is that a pencil in your pocket or are you just glad to see me? No, really, you look good. I have great taste.”
I look at myself in the dressing room mirror. I must admit I do look good, but I feel these slick clothes are superficial and false. “I don’t know,” I say. “This is not me. The dirty T-shirt with Maxwell's equations-that’s the real me. I don’t feel true to myself wearing such nice clothes. Have you read
The Scarlet Letter?”
“The one where the pilgrim chick gets knocked up by her priest?”
“She was a Puritan and he was her minister,” I say. “You know what the moral of that book is? Never mind, I’ll just tell you what the moral is: ‘Be true, be true, be true,’ Hawthorne declaims. ‘Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait by which the worst might be inferred.’ I feel these clothes hide the real me. I’m not showing freely to the world my worst traits.”
My love coach looks thoughtful as if she’s giving serious consideration to what I’m trying to tell her. Finally, she says: “You know what?”
“What?”
“You’ve got a big, gross hair sticking out of your nose and it is disgusting.” She takes a small pair of scissors from her handbag and cuts off the offending hair near its base, deep up my nostril. She wipes the scissors on the sleeve of my new shirt and hands them to me. “Here,” she says. “Keep them. Use them. I’ll bill you later for one pair of scissors.”
T
he next week my love coach wants to meet me at a trendy bar to teach me how to pick up women. “I don’t like the women there,” I say. “They dress too nice and their hair is too well coiffed.”
“Well, where do you want to go?”
“I like smart women,” I say. “Let’s meet at a Barnes & Noble bookstore.”
I’m on time, but she’s late again. “OK, let’s go to sex and relationships. That’s where the action is,” my love coach says.
I insist on trying science and math first, but there are no women there. Just a fat guy in sweat pants. “OK, we’ll do it your way,” I say. “But first I have to get something.”
I go to the philosophy section and grab a copy of
The Sickness Unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard’s treatise on the manifold forms of despair. I run back to my love coach, clutching my Kierkegaard to my chest with the title face up for all to see that I am an intellectual, not a pervert whose only source of sexual gratification is browsing sex manuals at Barnes & Noble. My love coach pretends to be engrossed in a pop-up edition of the
Kama Sutra. As I approach she gives a quick nod toward a woman clerk shelving books and then resumes her
Kama Sutra.
The clerk’s clothes are wrinkled and none too clean. Her straw blonde hair looks self-cut and her cheeks are splotched with red, either from acne or rosacea. Still, she has an appealing air of vulnerability and intelligence and she is giving off a lot of pheromones. I go up to her and pretend to look for a book. My heart is racing and my knees are trembling.
“Can I help you find something?” she says. Her voice is surprisingly deep and gravelly, like Tom Waits’s.
“Yes, I’m looking for a book on how to give women multiple orgasms,” I say, “and can I buy you a cup of coffee?”
The clerk glances down at my Kierkegaard and then looks me in the eye. She seems to be giving serious consideration to my offer.
My eyes close in anticipation of her acceptance. She is going to say: "Yes, my poor Filipino boy, I'd love to have a cup of coffee with you, and you don’t need a book. Let me teach you how to sexually satisfy a woman.”
I feel a hand on my arm. When I open my eyes, the woman clerk is gone. The hand belongs to my love coach and she is rushing me toward the exit. “Oh, God, Victor,” she says. “I think she's going to get security. We gotta get out of here. Jesus H. Christ, you were coming on too strong and too weird. Putz! I told you to talk about the weather! I shouldn’t have let you solo. We should have done some role playing first.”
"What? I just asked her out to coffee. Has no one ever asked her out to coffee before? Has no man ever asked a woman out to coffee? Am I the first man in history to do so? Is that perverted? Just coffee is all I asked for.”
O
ver the next couple of weeks, my love coach would call and leave messages, but I wouldn’t return her calls. I was completely humiliated and demoralized. Schopenhauer was right: “Almost all of our sorrows spring out of our relations with other people.” I decided to eschew relations with other people, and take comfort and refuge in mathematics, the realm of Kant's reinen Vernunft - the realm of pure reason.
One night there is a loud knock at the door. It’s my love coach. I’m surprised to see her in a sweatshirt and sweatpants. Her hair is greasy and uncombed.
“What the hell?” she says. “Why did you take so long to answer the door? Why didn’t you answer my calls? I thought you had offed yourself and whew, what died in here?”
“I give up on women,” I say. “I think I should stay home and study math.”
“Are you studying math?”
“No.”
“Look, Victor, you’re not a putz and I’m sorry for that ‘pencil in your pocket’ crack. I’m sure your penis is very nice. You got nervous with the Barnes & Noble girl. So what? She seemed kind of slutty anyway. You dodged a bullet with that one.”
“She was a slut and yet she wouldn’t have coffee with me?”
“Her loss. Forget her, Victor. Like I told you before: you’re smart and funny like a Filipino-Jew. Women go for that. You’ll find someone. Trust me. To tell you the truth, you’re one of my few clients. I’m just starting out and I need a success story. Help me out, please. Will you stay with me?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
She holds out her arms as if inviting me in for a hug. “Will you have a cup of coffee with me, Filipino boy?” she says in a deep gravelly voice.
I do not want to laugh, but I do.
“OK, but this does not count as my practice date,” I say.
At an all-night diner we tell each other sad stories about our lives. When we run out of conversation we sit quietly staring into our coffees. Finally she looks up and glances at my T-shirt. She smiles and touches me lightly on the arm. “Tell me about Maxwell’s equations,” she says.
Ecstasy!
