Magical Thinking (19 page)

“Yes, it does,” he said, with concern. He had leaned forward, as if to study me up close.

“But it was actually a lot of fun. Eccentric. Anyway,” I clapped my hands together exactly like a talk show host, “I’ve had a lot of therapy since then. To get over it.”

His face relaxed, slightly. But he remained quiet. He wanted evidence that I had, in fact, gotten over it with the help of a trained mental-health professional.

“I had a really intense stint of therapy in rehab, then for six months after I got out.” I regretted everything I was saying but was unable to stop. What would be next?
“I think it’d be cool to be a transsexual, except I’m too tall. And I wouldn’t want to be a woman, you know. But the drastic lifestyle change would be cool
.” Dennis was very easy to talk to. He’d have been a good therapist.

“Rehab?”

I explained how I drank my twenties away trying to forget my childhood. This seemed perfectly understandable to me, almost Hollywood.

Dennis seemed worried. But then, as if inspired by angels, his face suggested a change of emotion. It was the benefit of the doubt, flying into his ears and lodging in his brain behind his eyes. He suggested dinner. “Do you eat meat?”

The bells of destiny began to ring. It was like standing in the
spire of a church on Christmas morning. Do I eat meat? DO I EAT MEAT? This man—this handsome, silver-haired man with the wicked sense of humor and the excellent legs-—he could have no way of knowing that not only do I eat meat, I eat meat exclusively. That “meat” is my favorite word. That meat has been a part of my life since I worked on the “Beef: Real Food for Real People” advertising campaign when I was an eighteen-year-old vegetarian copywriter. It was as if God’s hand came out of the sky and slapped me on the ass.
Here’s your fella
, God said, throwing his head back in a fit of celestial laughter, smug with knowledge.

I said, “Did I mention my meatacious nature to you?”

“Huh?” he said, puzzled.

“I didn’t tell you all I eat is meat, did I?”

He started to laugh because it seemed to be the thing to do, but he got caught up on one of my words. “All you eat is meat? No vegetables?”

“I loathe and detest them,” I said, making my words wink as much as a word can.

“I see,” he said, playing along. “Well, you’ll love this place, then. They come over to your table with a huge chunk of meat, and they carve it onto your plate. Oh, and they give you these little plastic disks. One is red and one is green. And when you want more meat, you put the green one out, and when you’ve had enough, you put the red one out.”

Was this true? Was he serious?

We walked four blocks south to a Brazilian restaurant that I must have walked past a thousand times on my own and yet never noticed. This further proved my own belief that there is only so much any given person can see for themselves in Manhattan. It takes two people, looking in all directions at once, to see everything.

We got a good table for two, right near the front, where we could watch the other carnivores enter. A moment after we were seated, before we’d even placed our white cloth napkins in our
laps, the meat man arrived. He was carrying an entire leg of something in one hand and a hatchet in the other. Our plates were already there, were there before we were. And wordlessly, he began carving the meat onto them in thick, steaming slices.

Dennis glanced at my plate and then down at his. There were at least three pounds of meat between our two plates. He smiled in a way that suggested mischief and remarked, “We are at the top of the food chain.”

I said, “And we can eat anything we want.”

Unlike every other person I’ve ever shared a meat-based meal with, Dennis did not comment on how clogged his arteries were about to become or how many miles he would have to run to burn off the fat. He tucked into his plate with quiet bliss. This, I thought, was a very good sign.

“So are you close to your family?” I asked.

He stabbed a quarter-inch-thick slab of medium-rare beast. “Not incredibly close. But we all get along and everything.” He carefully sliced the beast into a bite-sized piece and steered it into a small pool of sauce at the edge of his plate. “We don’t really see each other very often. I don’t know, it’s weird,” he said. “Two of my brothers and my sister all live within like twenty minutes of each other in Pennsylvania. They all have kids around the same age. And yet,” he popped the beast into his mouth, causing the fork to clank against his front teeth. “And yet, they never see each other. Maybe once every couple years.”

His mother, he explained, died of cancer. It had been a particularly sadistic cancer, and it took a long time for her to die. She suffered, and he spoke gently, kindly, of her. “She raised five kids with no help from anybody. She did the cooking, the cleaning, took care of everything and everyone as best as she could.”

He told me that his father lived alone in an efficiency apartment near his siblings. When he spoke of his father, his eyes flashed with complexity. I didn’t want to pry, but I wanted to know more. “What’s your dad like?”

“He’s, oh I don’t even know how to describe him. Okay, he’s like this. He believes that he put a roof over our heads and made sure we had food on the table and that was enough. That was more than enough. That was his entire responsibility, and as far as he was concerned, he was a good father.”

“I think it’s a generational thing,” I said. “Because my father was pretty much the same way. But it seems like women have pretty much pussy-whipped all the straight men, so they’re a lot more expressive and participatory than they used to be.”

Dennis said quickly, “You mean, straight guys are the new gay guys.”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Straight guys are like fags used to be. And the fags
now
are more like straight guys
were
. Fags today are all about body building and pickup trucks, and straight guys are all about feelings and open-toe sandals.”

This got us onto the topic of guys and dating. Dennis told me about some of the lousy dates he’d had over the past few years, including the recent date in Central Park where he cried.

“I’ve never cried on a date,” I told him.

“It was more than cried. It was like a complete mental collapse.”

He explained how he had met a guy through a personal ad, the old-fashioned kind in the back of a newspaper. He answered an ad this guy had placed. So they spoke on the phone—for hours—over a period of a week. Their chemistry was intense.

But when they met, the man was shaped like a pear, and he had a tiny head.

I said, “That’s the catch. That’s why his ad was in the newspaper and not online, with a picture.”

Dennis said, “Well, I tried to overlook that. I kept thinking,
We were really connecting on the phone; I can overlook his body
.”

“Yeah, but the tiny head,” I said.

“Well, yeah. I know. That was hard to overlook. So anyway, we met in the park, and I just was so wound up from our conversations, so let down, I guess, by the way he looked. And so tired of
dating and ten years of being single and having really terrible dates that it just hit me.”

Selfishly, I thought to myself what a good sign it was that he could cry. At the same time, I felt so bad for him. Like, I wanted to go back in time and hide in the bushes while he was on his date and then jump out and take him away.

The subject changed to work. Dennis told me about the graphic-design firm he owns, and I told him about my ad career, which was now freelance. I explained how advertising is what I do to make money, like waiting tables, to support my writing. And the best way to do it is freelance.
Sellevision
had just hit bookstores, and even though I was thrilled to have my first book published, I knew it wasn’t going to earn me enough money to quit advertising altogether.
Maybe
it would earn me enough money to buy some shirts. At the Gap.

“But that is so exciting about your book,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. I tried to sound casual, because it was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me, my small yellow paperback-original book. It was a novel that was fluffy and mean and funny, and I was extremely proud because writing a book was what I’d always felt I would do. And had never done. Had been a drunk instead.

“I can’t wait to read it,” he said. “Maybe I’ll be able to read it over the weekend.”

Here, Dennis was shouting. Other people glanced at our table, looking for the fight. He was speaking like a person who had been deaf for most of his life and then suddenly could hear but didn’t have all those years practicing voice modulation. I didn’t dare tell him to lower his voice. He was much too passionate and intense. I liked it. I would just ignore the curious glances from the other meat eaters.

“Aren’t you going to have another glass of wine?” I asked.

“No, I’m fine,” he said.

I didn’t believe him. “You’re just saying that because I don’t drink.”

He admitted this was true. “I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable.”

“I knew it. NO,” I said. “It doesn’t make me uncomfortable at all. Honestly.” The more I insisted, the more uncomfortable I probably looked. But it was true. I wanted him to be himself and not refrain from anything because of me. Also, I felt this was an incredibly thoughtful act on his part that could easily have gone unnoticed.

Except I noticed. I motioned for the waiter to come to the table, and when he did I looked at Dennis.

Dennis smiled at me and ordered another glass of merlot.

“I don’t know anything about wine,” I said. “I could easily drink seven bottles at any given moment, and used to sometimes. And I can’t tell you the brand or anything about it. I just know I paid thirty dollars a bottle and drank three bottles a night.”

“Thirty dollars? Must have been good wine.”

“I guess,” I said with an air of disinterest. “It’s all a blur.”

After dinner we stepped outside, and a man walked past us. He was a shortish man with a balding head and a trimmed red beard. He was wearing neon-blue Lycra. We looked at him, his butt. It was not a good butt. It was not a butt that should ever be in Lycra. Dennis said without prompting, “I should be the one who decides who gets to wear Lycra. You know? That should be my job, I should be the director of Lycra for the United States or the ambassador or whatever it would be called.”

Then he looked at my ass. It was a quick look, but I caught it. And from his face, I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or upset.

To be honest, I don’t have a great ass. It’s on the skinny side. It’s a skinny white-guy ass.

When it was time to part, I didn’t want to. And, it seemed, neither did he. I got the feeling he was slightly afraid of me, wary. But also interested. Also sort of glued to me.

“Well,” I said, in that tone of voice people use when they’re finishing something, wrapping things up for the evening.

He said the same thing, in exactly the same way, at the same time.

I had the sensation one experiences of making all the green lights. I knew at that moment that if I were to play slot machines or bet on a horse at the Derby, I would win. It wasn’t so much a feeling as it was certain knowledge. Like déjà vu, except instead of seen before, it was more certainty.

As I walked away, I looked back at him.

He was already looking back at me.

I smiled the whole way home. I was walking and smiling, and because of this, because of my Happy Face, I probably looked like a very simple person, unencumbered by complicated thoughts. Like somebody who was just happy because there was macaroni and cheese in the world. And socks! Maybe people looked at me and wished they were more simple and idiotic,
like that guy there
.

Normally when I come home from a date, I replay the entire evening in my head. I pulverize it and then examine the grains of dust. Sometimes I actually write it all out, capturing the dialogue while it’s still fresh. I then examine what was said from every angle, trying to peer into the nuance and subtle meaning between the words. I project into the near and distant future. I make a sort of mental flowchart of how the date could lead to either a relationship or a disaster.

“What did he mean when he said . . .” or “Was he smiling because he was happy or uncomfortable?”

I obsess so thoroughly that after twenty-four hours of imagining various scenarios, I am sick of the other person and can’t bear
the thought of a second date with them, let alone a committed relationship.

But tonight, this night after my first date with Dennis, it’s different. Something in the world feels supernaturally askew. As though something in space has shifted, creating a rare opening.

I come home and feel the distinct sensation of complete peace. I am exactly, absolutely, perfectly okay. At the same time, I know I could easily topple the feeling. It’s like I am balancing a china plate on my head. One abrupt move, the plate will fall and shatter. It is not something I have ever felt before, yet it feels more comfortable than anything I can name. Instead of pondering any of this further, I climb into bed and open a book.

I am not going to rush this. I am not going to write this. I am not going to force this.