Love by the Book (13 page)

“What's it this time? Asking about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?”

“Nah, I'm going to ask a very guy-friendly pop culture question. Should be easy.”

Cathryn picked her book up off the table. “
Bonne chance
,” she said. I don't think she meant it.

I walked up to the group of wine drinkers and picked out the best-looking of the bunch: rangy, dark-haired and green-eyed. “Hi!” I said brightly. “I need your help with something.”

He looked up at me with an air of mild impatience while the rest of his friends continued their conversation, oblivious. “How can I help?”

“My friend and I were talking about eighties
TV
, and we were trying to remember the full cast of the
A-Team
. We can remember Mr. T as B. A. Baracus and Dirk Benedict as Face, but we're totally stuck on the other two.”

His expression changed from impatient to bemused tolerance. He gestured at the other guys sitting around the table. “We all work in
TV
, so I'm sure we can help. Hey, lads, we've got a question here that needs answering.”

The rest of the group fell silent and looked up at me in surprise, as though I had suddenly materialized out of a genie bottle.

“This woman was wondering about the cast of the
A-Team
.”

A shortish man with glasses called out from the end of the table. “Film or television?”

The green-eyed man looked mildly disgusted. “Television, of course. She and her friend can remember Mr. T”—there was a snicker of derision from the sandy-haired man to his left—“and Dirk Benedict.”

“So we're talking the series, not the pilot,” the bespectacled man said. “Because obviously Tim Dunigan was the original Faceman.”

The green-eyed man nodded. “Yes, that's right. So there's James Coburn as Hannibal, and—”

The bespectacled man looked like he was going to punch through the nearest window. “What are you on about, mate? Coburn wasn't in the
A-Team
! He was in the
Magnificent Seven
! Peppard was Hannibal!”

The green-eyed man looked calmly smug. “No, Brian, he was not. It was definitely Coburn.”

The sandy-haired man sat back in his seat. “You're both wrong. It was Robert Vaughn.”

The bespectacled man looked like he was going to spit nails. “Fuck off, the pair of you! It was Peppard!”

The sandy-haired man and the green-eyed man looked at each other and shrugged.

“Seriously, lads, I should know. I wrote a whole fucking thesis on the postmodernization of Peppard for my media studies course.”

The green-eyed man nodded imperceptibly. “Fine, Peppard. So that's one.”

“Thank you,” I said, very quietly.

“So the real question is, who played Murdock?”

The table descended into chaos once again. I stood there awkwardly for a moment, occasionally trying to offer my own thoughts on the matter, but it quickly became apparent that I was effectively invisible; they were too immersed in shouting eighties
TV
star names. I was beginning to realize that guy-talk was a very different beast, in that it involved a lot more outward aggression (as opposed to the passive aggression often found in girl-talk).

I mumbled my thanks and they barely glanced up as I made my way back to Cathryn.

“That looked lively,” she said as she folded down the page of her book.

“Apparently the
A-Team
is actually more controversial than the Egyptian slavery issue.”

“Men will find any excuse for a debate. It's how they express affection to their friends—by berating them for their opinions.”

I heard a loud noise erupt from across the room and glanced over to see the bespectacled man shaking the sandy-haired man by the shoulders. “Apparently so.”

“Can we go now? I'm starving.” Cathryn was in a perpetual state of self-proclaimed starvation, and yet she could pack away more food than anyone else I knew—and never seemed to gain a pound. I assumed it was something to do with genetics, like the whole flawless ponytail thing.

“Soon, I promise. I've got to approach one more table, and then we can go.”

“Are you quite sure you want to risk another go?”

“A scientist's work is never done,” I said.

I decided to try a scenario straight from the book (with slight tweaks to make it gender appropriate). It was called something like the “curious girlfriend” opener. Here's how it works: the guy approaches a group of women and asks for their opinion on a situation his buddy is currently going through. He and his girlfriend have been together for six months and everything's going great, but there's one snag: she just loooooooves making out with girls. Can't get enough of it. She doesn't see it as cheating, but her boyfriend does. The guy making the opener is then meant to canvas the opinions of the women in the group: is hot pseudo-lesbian action cheating or not?

This scenario sounds more like something in the “Letters to the Editor” section of
Penthouse
than a way to approach women, but what did I know. I was about to find out how a bunch of men would react.

I picked two hipster-types who were monopolizing the jukebox. There was one in particular I had my eye on: sleepy-eyed and slim with a mop of curly chocolate-brown hair and wearing an excellent pair of thin-whale cords. Last chance of the evening: I needed to make it count.

I made my way over to them, avoiding the eye of the bespectacled man as he poked furiously at the sandy-haired man while staring at his iPhone.

I put a smile on my face and tapped the sleepy-eyed hipster on the shoulder. “Can I trouble you guys for a quick opinion poll?”

He looked up at me and grinned, revealing a row of small, even teeth. “Sure.”

It was going well already.

“Great, thanks. See my friend over there?” I gestured toward Cathryn, who had nearly finished her book and was gazing longingly at the door.

“The brunette? She's a fox,” said the man next to him, who was wearing a seventies aviator jacket and jeans so tight I worried for his testicles.

“Yep, that's her. So she has this problem. She and her boyfriend have been seeing each other for a while now—about six months—and everything's going well”—the aviator's attention demonstrably waned—“except for this one issue. You see, she's kind of into women. She doesn't want a relationship with one, but she does like to make out with them sometimes.”

The aviator perked up. “Man, that's some Girls Gone Wild shit.”

“I know, right? Anyway, her fiancé hates it. He gets really jealous and feels like she's cheating on him”—the aviator scoffed loudly—“but she doesn't think it's cheating and she doesn't want to stop doing it because it's a side of her that she doesn't want to give up.”

The sleepy-eyed guy nodded sagely.

“So what do you guys think? Is it cheating or not?”

The aviator rolled his eyes. “I have a more important question: why is she staying with a loser who doesn't appreciate how close he is to a threesome?”

“Yes, well, I guess that's a separate issue.”

Sleepy Eyes shrugged. “I dunno. Seems like cheating to me.”

The aviator slapped his forehead in disbelief. “Mate, what are you on about? His girlfriend is basically every man's fantasy, and he's acting like a wanker,” he said, rising from his chair. “I'm going to have a word with your friend myself. You two are talking bollocks and she needs someone to lean on in her time of need.”

I threw myself in front of him. “No! She'd be mortified. She's actually a very private person.”

The aviator tried to move past me. “She doesn't sound all that private to me.”

“Just leave it, mate,” Sleepy Eyes said. He was a man of few words, but so far I liked all of them.

The aviator sat back down and started to pick the label off his bottle of beer, grumbling under his breath.

“Well, I'll get out of your hair. Thanks for your help!”

“No problem,” Sleepy Eyes said. “Come back over here if you get bored.”

“Will do!”

“Bring your friend!” the aviator called as I scurried back to the table.

Cathryn gave me a long-suffering look. “How did it go?”

“Better.” I took a long sip from my drink. “Not great, but better.”

“What was the opener this time?”

“Oh, just a theoretical question about a friend.”

“Nothing controversial then?”

“Oh no,” I said. “I kept it as vanilla as possible.” I looked anxiously over at the aviator, who was openly leering at Cathryn. “Let's get out of here. Do you want to get dinner? We could go to the Turkish place around the corner?”

“Yes please—I'll eat anything at this point.”

We collected our things and made our way to the door. I felt the eyes of several of the men I'd spoken with give me a quick glance, but most of them were too engrossed in their own conversations to notice.

Except for Sleepy Eyes, who nodded at me as I passed by.

“You leaving?” he drawled.

“Yep, we're off. Thanks again for the advice.” I glanced nervously at Cathryn, who was just out of earshot. “I think it helped.”

“Anytime. Hey, my band is playing this gig at the Old Blue Last next Thursday. You should check it out.”

My stomach flipped but I tried to look nonchalant. “Sure, cool. That would be cool. Maybe. I'll check what I've got on. Busy schedule. Busy.” I could feel my cheeks reddening.

His mouth curled into a slow, languorous grin. “Cool. See you around. Maybe.”

I turned to see Cathryn being harangued by the aviator.

“I
told
you that I'm engaged!” she said, pulling her hand away and brushing it down the side of her pristine linen dress.

“But he doesn't understand you!” The aviator looked desperate. “I'm telling you, love, he's stifling you! I'd let you be free!”

“C'mon,” I said, grabbing Cathryn's hand and pulling her toward the door. “Let's get out of here.”

“Lauren, what on earth was that man talking about?” she said as we tumbled out onto Kingsland Road.

“Fucked if I know. I think he was on drugs. Lots of people around here are on drugs. Lots of drugs.”

Cathryn looked at the group of steampunks across the street and recoiled slightly. “Mmm. Yes, that must have been it. What an odd place.”

“It's sad, really. Now let's get some food into you.”

After watching Cathryn suspiciously spear bits of kofte into her mouth (“Are you
sure
this is lamb?”), I went home and wrote up my notes from the night's experiment.

While it hadn't been a raging success, I had managed to make conversation with three groups of strangers. Sure, two of those groups descended quickly into argument, and I'd seriously tarnished Cathryn's gleaming reputation with the third, but it was progress nonetheless. I couldn't help thinking that what Cathryn said was true, though: men communicate with their friends in very different ways than women, and trying to apply the same rules to both doesn't always work out smoothly.

I decided to do a little bit of music research in advance of Sleepy Eyes's gig on Thursday.

I hadn't been to a gig in years (other than weird Max's, which obviously didn't count). The music scene in Portland had been, shall we say, niche; while I didn't object to the banjo, it wasn't necessarily enough to get me to change out of my pajamas on a Saturday night and hit the town.

I sat down with my laptop and put iTunes on shuffle as I made dinner, hoping that it would throw up some forgotten indie gem I could casually drop into conversation on Thursday night.

I'd been lulled into a false sense of security by an excellent run of early Justin Timberlake while chopping onions, so when the first strains of the song came on, it took me a second to register what it was. As soon as I realized, I threw the knife in the sink and leaped across the room to the laptop, mashing the keys with my damp fingers, but it was too late: Stevie Wonder's voice had been released into the air, and “Isn't She Lovely” was in my head. I sat down on the kitchen floor and put my head in my hands.

It had been our song. When we moved into our first apartment, the first thing we unpacked was our beat-up stereo. We'd put the volume up as loud as it would go and danced with each other in the kitchen, me in my dad's old overalls and him in faded jeans speckled with dried paint. He held me in his arms and sang the words softly into my ear, and I thought to myself, “This is what it means to be in love. This is what it means to be an adult.”

We moved out a few months later—the bathtub leaked and the upstairs neighbor had a passion for salt cod, the smell of which had permeated all of our clothes—but the song stuck around. Well, for as long as I had.

I gathered myself up off the floor and called Meghan. When an iTunes ambush strikes, only a sister can help.

I'd spent my lunch hour locked in the toilet, staring at myself in a compact mirror and reciting the book's mantra: “You are perfection. You deserve only the very best. People feel privileged to speak with you. You are magnetic. You are irresistible.”

When I emerged, Cathryn looked at me strangely.

“Were you talking to yourself in the toilet?” she asked.

“Just giving myself a little pep talk about tomorrow's meeting,” I said. In truth, the pep talk had been more focused on Sleepy Eyes's gig, but I was too embarrassed to admit that to Cathryn, and we did have a big meeting coming up tomorrow.

“How very . . . American of you,” she said, turning back to her spreadsheets.

With a little cajoling and the promise that I'd lead a group of six-year-olds on the museum tour tomorrow, Cathryn agreed to cover for me so I could slip out early in order to get ready for the gig tonight. I poured myself into my skinniest pair of black jeans, rimmed my eyes with an entire pot of kohl and, after a swift vodka or two, I was ready.