Love by the Book (34 page)

Truer words were never spoken.

I turned my focus to next Saturday. Surely
one
of the ten candidates would be decent? At least I hoped that would be the case: I was starting to lose faith in the project again, and I needed something to bolster my belief.

Adrian left three messages on my mobile today, one asking if I'd seen his sock, one asking if he could come around to mine to watch football next week as his mom wouldn't let him, and one to see if I wanted to get a drink after work. I deleted all three.

It was also Thanksgiving. Obviously I was only home a short time ago, but it's my favorite holiday (as it's about eating ridiculous amounts of food and falling asleep in front of the television) so I was pretty bummed to miss out.

I called Meghan at
3:30
her time, as I figured it would be after the big meal but before the Patriots' kick-off. She sounded sleepy and a little drunk when she picked up: classic turkey coma symptoms. I was so jealous.

“Is everyone playing nicely?” I asked. “Any tears over the mashed potatoes?”

“Harold made a grab for the turkey—which is Cajun-style this year, by the way—but Dad managed to wrangle him away and we only lost a drumstick.”

“No one likes those anyway. How's the Cajun turkey going down?”

“Pretty much as well as you'd expect.”

“Any other excitement?”

“Mom and Sue got into a long, protracted debate about the merits of second-wave versus third-wave feminism and ended it by arguing who would win in a fight: Betty Friedan or Naomi Wolf.”

“Oh, Friedan all the way. She's not fucking around.”

“That's what I said! So what's new?”

“Adrian's history.”

“Thank fuck that's over—that guy sounded like a jerk. Never forget the wise words of
TLC
. You definitely don't want any scrubs.”

“Amen, sister.”

Today I met a random sample of the world's male population and I've got to be honest: the results were not encouraging for the species. I might be doing my best to follow
TLC
's advice, but it was proving very difficult to avoid scrubs. It seems they're everywhere.

I had scheduled my ten dates with military precision. Every hour, on the hour, I had to move on to a new location and a new man: there was a brunch, a lunch, three coffees, two dinners and three drinks. It was a Herculean task and, by the end of it, I was a drunk, caffeine-rattled maniac, stuffed to the gills with food and despair.

I can't bear to go into details about each date, because each was more tedious and bizarre than the rest, so I'll just tell you the moment I knew that each one wasn't going to work out.

Brunch with a middle-aged toxicologist: “It's amazing how easy it is to poison someone undetected. I'm surprised more people don't top their spouses with a bit of strychnine in the old morning cuppa.”

Lunch with a systems analyst: “When I first saw you, I thought you were my mum. It was a lovely surprise.”

Coffee with a cameraman: “Call me old-fashioned, but I think a lady should always be told she's beautiful. Saying ‘Show us your tits,' is just another way of saying that.”

Coffee with a sweaty man in a too-tight Dungeons and Dragons T-shirt: “My tongue is stuck.”

Coffee with a tidy-looking computer software engineer (before taking my outstretched hand on meeting me): “When did you last wash your hands?”

Dinner with an extremely well-dressed businessman: “What I'm always telling the Jewish guy I work with is, say what you like about the Holocaust, it
did
get them to the promised land one way or another, eh?”

Second dinner with an electrical engineer: “Right, so an engineer and a mathematician were locked in their rooms for a day with a can of food but without an opener. At the end of the day, the engineer is sitting on the floor of his room and eating from the open can—he threw it against the walls until it cracked open. In the mathematician's room, the can is still closed but the mathematician has disappeared. There are strange noises coming from inside the can . . . When it's opened, the mathematician crawls out saying, ‘Damn! I got a sign wrong . . .'” Several beats pass. “Get it?”

Drink with an underfed milk-float driver (setting a bag down on the table when he arrives and gesturing toward it as he sits down): “Sorry, it's just a few frozen rats for my snake.”

Drink with a junior advertising executive wearing a bowler hat: “I mean, culture should just be, like,
META
, you know? Like, we should just be taking existing archetypes and smashing them up! Like,
BAM
! You know? . . . Fuck, what were we talking about again?”

Drink with a ponytailed aromatherapist (as he pushed an iPhone filled with photos of Japanese bondage across the table toward me): “I think I could really help you explore your sensual boundaries.”

Good Lord. What a ragtag bunch of weirdos and creeps. What did people think of me, sending them my way? Did they really think I was that desperate? Or did they lump me in with the rest of the weirdos and creeps? Fuck: was I a weirdo or a creep? If I had to choose, I guess I'd go for weirdo, but neither category particularly appealed. I'd rather take option three: a nice quiet night in with a vibrator.

To make matters worse, my phone was still ringing constantly and my voicemail was reaching its full capacity, overflowing with messages from mouthbreathers describing increasingly disturbing sexual fantasies. It turns out that I'm only two degrees of separation away from a bunch of very perverted souls. Thankfully, I hadn't had any more callers at work, but it seemed like only a matter of time. I was starting to think I might have to change my number.

I climbed into bed with a glass of whisky as soon as I got through the door, determined to sleep off the memory of the day.

Thank the Lord above, November is finally over. I spent much of the day nursing my trauma-and-whisky-induced hangover and only started to feel human again after a long run and a hot shower. Oof.

This whole book really fucking depressed me: it's all about lowering your standards, swallowing your pride and rearranging your entire life in the hope that it might snag you a man. The whole thing felt forced and decidedly un-fun. Sure, there was no shortage of prospective partners, but only weirdos and creeps respond to this level of desperation. If this is what it takes to find a partner after a certain age, well—give me spinsterhood any day.

Works best on . . .

Weirdos and creeps. Seriously, if you want to maintain any dignity, avoid this book. If you want to put yourself at serious risk of finding a stalker, be my guest.

To be used by . . .

I wouldn't wish this on anyone, but I guess if you're looking for quantity over quality (and don't mind sacrificing your dignity in the process) this book could be for you.

 • • • 

I closed my notebook and lit a cigarette. I felt jaded. Deeply jaded. What exactly was I doing to myself? What was I trying to accomplish by offering my sex life up like a sacrifice on the altar of gurus, misogynists and lunatics?

The whole point of the project had been to find new, interesting, non-psychopathic people to have sex with on the regular, but the results didn't add up. Sure, I managed to meet a few decent guys in the process, but I didn't feel like I was any closer to unlocking the mystery of the male mind, and I definitely wasn't getting laid very often.

I couldn't stomach one more ridiculous piece of advice, one more awkward dinner or one more moment of deflation at the end of an evening. I couldn't stomach the emotional ride anymore: the anticipation on the way up, the hope and excitement during, and then the inevitable plummet back to earth. If going on all these dates and following all this crazy advice wasn't fun anymore, what was the point?

I started the project because I thought I was terrible at dating. Eight months on, I didn't know that I was any wiser about men, but I knew I was fed up trying to mold myself into something or someone I thought they might like. I was a free agent now—and it was time I started living in my own reality, even if the idea of it was still scary as all hell. I didn't need a crutch: it was time to stand on my own two feet.

I stubbed out my cigarette. I'd made a decision.

As of tomorrow, no more dating guides. In fact, no more dating. Instead, I'd do all the things I'd been wanting to do—should have been doing—during the time I spent going on terrible dates. I'd go for long runs, make myself decent dinners, read books I actually wanted to read, focus on building my career, spend evenings in the bath with a bottle of wine and a pack of Marlboro Lights—anything I wanted to do, I'd do.

Fuck this shit: I was going to date myself for a while.

I woke up this morning full of determination. Time to clear house.

Before I left for work, I got together all of my dating guides and stuck them outside on the curb, where hopefully they'd be used as toilet paper by a tramp.

Lucy was moving in with Tristan in a month, so I had to sort out my living situation. I'd been planning on getting another roommate to replace her, but my newfound burst of independence made me think about finding a studio to rent instead; I'd never lived on my own and it felt like something I should do. I made a few calculations and, if I stopped buying lunch, cycled everywhere and never allowed myself to set foot in Zara again, I could just about afford a shoebox in South Tottenham. I sent a few emails to real estate agents on my lunch break and felt a swell of excitement at the prospect of having my own shitty little bolthole.

I worked late that night, trying to clear the backlog from the past few distracted weeks. When I told Cathryn that I was quitting the project, she looked at me with a mixture of pride and relief that almost alone justified my decision.

By the time I got to the bookstore, I found a drawn shade and a locked door. I checked my watch: three minutes after closing. “Ah, fuck,” I muttered to myself. It had begun to drizzle and I was digging around my bag for an umbrella when the shade flew up and the bookseller's face appeared in the window.

“Jesus!” I yelled, leaping back in surprise. He looked at me for a long moment and then held up a finger and started fumbling with the lock. The door opened and he ushered me inside.

I was confused—and a little scared—by this act of kindness, and immediately started apologizing profusely.

“Sorry! Sorry! I know, I always turn up at closing time and you're about to shut and it's really annoying—you don't have to tell me. I promise I'll be super fast!”

I turned to see the bookshop owner still standing by the door, staring at me as if seeing an apparition. “You've come back,” he said. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and what appeared to be a completely intact cardigan. I'd forgotten how handsome he was when he wasn't scowling.

“Yep!” I said, charging past him to the literature section.

“I didn't think you'd come back,” he muttered.

I couldn't tell if this had been a hope of his or a fear; after all, I was probably helping to keep him afloat with all my guide-buying, even if I did so obviously insult his delicate literary sensibilities and occasionally have emotional breakdowns in the middle of his shop.

“I bet you missed me something terrible, huh?” I said as I searched through the stacks. I glanced back to find he'd turned a slightly pink color. His hair had grown longer and was now curling wildly in pretty much every direction. He looked different, somehow. Happier, maybe.

“How was your trip home? Did you get everything sorted out?”

“Yep, all fine now, thanks. And thanks for . . . uh . . . looking after me. Sorry about that.”

“My pleasure,” he said. I searched his face for any hint of mockery or sarcasm, but couldn't find any. It was unsettling.

“I got your card,” he said with a grin. “Happy belated Thanksgiving to you, too. I would have replied, but my plumber is a big old bugger and I didn't think you'd fancy him.” Ah, there was the mockery!

I waved my hands in the air, hoping it would somehow dispel my mortification. “Oh God, that. Yeah, sorry about that. I was following this crazy Harvard business school guide and the author made me do it. Anyway, that's done now, so you can throw it out. Actually, the whole project is done.”

He raised his eyebrows. “But what about your devotion to science?”

“I decided that I'm more devoted to myself, so now I'm just doing whatever I want. Speaking of which, I've come with a list: can you help?”

I held out the piece of paper I'd torn from my notebook earlier.

“
Persuasion
,
Lady Chatterley's Lover
,
Moll Flanders
 . . .” A smile spread across his face as he read out the titles. “Excellent choices.” He started rocketing around the store, collecting books from various shelves and balancing them in his arms. When he'd finished, he placed the towering stack on the desk and nodded at it. “That's everything.”

I was stunned by his helpfulness, but knew better than to comment. Instead, I walked over to the glass case and pointed at
Black Beauty
. “Any chance you're willing to let this one go yet?” I figured I'd be saving a bundle on dinners, drinks and depilation now that I was dating myself exclusively, so might as well treat myself.

He glanced at the case and shook his head. “Afraid not.”

“Ah well,” I said, “a girl's got to try. I'll just pay for these and get out of your hair. I read your book, by the way.
The Age o
f
Innocence
.”