Romantically Challenged (4 page)

She rolled her eyes. “Finding your soul mate has nothing to do with parking and everything to do with your attitude.”

“What’s wrong with my attitude?”

“Why won’t you go out with the guy from the plane?”

“Because he’s annoying.”

“See.” (I didn’t.)  “You talked to him for a whole five minutes and you’ve already ruled him out.”

“What are you saying? Prince Charming is disguising himself as an annoying skinny guy with a receding hairline?”

“I’m saying give him half a chance before you blow him off.”

I was about to say no, when I realized maybe Kaitlyn was right. Maybe plane guy was Prince Charming wrapped in annoying paper and I just had to open the package to find out. And if, as I suspected, he really was a frog, then I could prove Kaitlyn wrong. It was a win-win scenario.

“Fine,” I said, “but if I have a terrible date it’ll be on your conscience.”

She took the spoon out of her mouth and gave me her widest self-satisfied grin. “I can live with that.”

Prince Charming

The new, open-minded me reluctantly agreed to go out with John on Friday night. He called me Thursday night to work out the details.

“So what do you want to do tomorrow?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “How about dinner?”

“Dinner? That’s so boring.”

“Then how about a movie?”

After a few seconds of silence he said, “Nah, I don’t feel like a movie.”

“Okay. Then what do
you
feel like?”

“I don’t know, I just moved here. You need to show me around.”

Prince Charming was trying my patience. “That’s fine, but you’ll need to give me a hint about what you’re looking for.”

“Forget it. I’ll come up with something and surprise you. I’ll pick you up at eight.”

* * *

I snuck out of work early Friday night so I would have time to shower, dress, and eat dinner before John arrived. I wasn’t going to spend the entire evening hungry just because he thought dinner was boring. When I buzzed him upstairs at ten minutes to eight, I intended to chide him for being early, until I opened my front door.

“What are you wearing?” I said, despite it being quite obvious that he was wearing sweatpants and a torn T-shirt under his raincoat.

“My workout clothes,” he said and held up his gym bag as an offer of proof.

“Why?” was all I could manage.

He walked into the living room, sat down on the couch, and put his sneakered feet up on my glass coffee table. “I joined a gym on Monday and they sent me a free guest pass. I thought we could go work out, then grab a coffee.”

Maybe I’d been out of circulation too long, but when did working out become an acceptable first date activity?

“It’s on Roberston,” John continued. “Just a few blocks from here.”

“I know the one,” I said. “I used to belong there.”

“Used to?” He took his feet off the coffee table and sat up. “What’s wrong with the place?”

“Nothing, I just got really busy at work and let my membership lapse.”

He relaxed back into the couch. “Good, then you can sign up again tonight with me as your referral. That way, I get the free gift. I think they told me it’s a voucher for a health food restaurant. We can go there afterwards for dinner.”

At this point, the close-minded Julie would’ve told him to get the hell out and never call again. But as the new open-minded Julie, I just said, “I wasn’t planning on renewing my membership.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve decided to join a new gym by my office.”

That wasn’t a total lie. I’d driven past the gym near my office a few weeks ago and had momentarily considered joining. I just hadn’t thought about it since. Not that I didn’t need to--I did. I’d gained six pounds since Scumbag left me, although I could only attribute three to the break up. The other three could be directly traced back to last Christmas’ cookie binge.

“Well we don’t need to go to dinner, you can still use my guest pass.”

Lucky me.

* * *

I left John in the living room while I went into my bedroom to change. It took me ten minutes just to locate my sneakers. I found them buried in the back of my closet under an old black leather purse I hadn’t used in years but couldn’t part with, and a jumble of dry cleaner’s hangers.

By the time I’d peeled myself out of my black jeans (the only pair I still owned that didn’t make me look fat) and pulled on my baggy sweatpants, I was starting to think maybe this hadn’t been such a bad idea after all. John was definitely a cheapskate, but if we were only going to the gym it would be a short evening, and at least now I was comfortable.

* * *

“Which way is your car?” I asked John as we stood under the awning of my building waiting for the rain to let up.

“That way,” he said, pointing towards the end of the street, “but I figured we’d walk.”

“In the rain?” It was obvious John was new to Los Angeles. Los Angelenos don’t walk. Anywhere. Ever. Especially not in the rain.

He pulled his car keys out of his pocket and said, “C’mon, I have an umbrella in the trunk.”

“Do you have two?” I asked.

“It’s a big one,” he said. “We can both fit. It’ll be romantic.”

I could imagine strolling through an unexpected tropical rain shower, hand in hand with a gorgeous guy. My hair would be mussed, but my makeup would still be perfect, and my floral sun dress would be clinging to me in all the right places. The guy would only be wearing Bermuda shorts. His muscular upper body would be glistening with a mixture of sweat and raindrops. He would be holding his soaking wet T-shirt over our heads in an ineffectual yet gentlemanly attempt to keep us dry. That would be romantic. Walking six blocks to the gym in a cold downpour with John the Annoying Cheapskate was not going to be romantic.

* * *

John held the umbrella at an angle in his left hand. This succeeded in keeping the wind from blowing the rain directly into our faces, but also meant that he was the only one actually under the umbrella. By the time we reached the gym my fingers were numb and the right side of my body was completely soaked. Except for a few wet spots at the bottom of his sweatpants, John was completely dry.

Luckily, the woman at the reception desk remembered me from the years when I had been a regular. She let me borrow shorts and a T-shirt from the lost and found box while she ran my clothes through the towel dryer.

I found John upstairs on a treadmill. He’d already started a slow jog.

I stepped onto the treadmill next to him. “I’ve never seen it this empty before. When I used to come here there were always at least five people ahead of me on the waiting list and tonight there’s not even a line.”

“Isn’t it great?” he said. “I love to work out on Friday nights.”

I just nodded. On the rare occasions when I’d even considered working out on a Friday night, Scumbag had always talked me out of it. He told me only losers without friends went to the gym on Friday nights. I decided to be nice and keep this opinion to myself. Instead, I asked John how his week had been and he started telling me about his job in marketing for a petrochemical company. I asked questions and nodded dutifully on the off chance that my initial impression of him had been wrong and that he was actually a good catch. We were forty-five minutes into the date and so far he hadn’t said or done anything to change my mind.

Abruptly, John asked, “Are you going to walk the whole time?”

I looked down at the timer on my treadmill. I’d only been trotting for three and a half minutes. “I’m warming up,” I said. “I haven’t worked out in a while.”

“There’s no point in working out if you’re not going to raise your heart rate. If you’re just going to walk at that pace, you might as well not even bother.”

I increased the speed on my treadmill from 3.3 to 3.6 and immediately started to sweat. John seemed satisfied and went back to talking about himself. A few minutes later John pronounced that we’d warmed up enough and it was time to run.

“John, I haven’t worked out in almost a year. I’m not running.”

“Coward.”

I should’ve bailed on him right then, but I took the bait. “I’m not a coward. I just don’t want to hurt myself.”

“You won’t hurt yourself with a slow jog. It’s the same as walking fast, only you burn more calories.”

I was about to ask if he was implying that I looked like I needed to burn more calories, but stopped myself. I was afraid he might answer truthfully.

“C’mon,” John said. “We’ll only run for ten minutes, then we’ll take a break and move on to the free weights.”

Free weights? “I’ll run for ten minutes John, but then I’m done. You can finish your workout while I shower and change.”

“Okay. I’m sure it takes you longer to get dressed anyway, so this way I won’t have to wait.”

John increased the speed on his treadmill to 6.5 and I increased mine to 4.2. I was breathing heavily, but I was still breathing. Six minutes into it I didn’t think I could go on any longer, so I switched the display to countdown and started counting along with it. I only had a minute and thirty seconds to go when I noticed my shoelace had untied, but I didn’t want to stop when I was so close to finishing.

The last time I looked at the clock I was down to fifty-three seconds. Then I was face down on the treadmill.

“Julie, are you all right?” It was the woman from the reception desk. She was kneeling next to me. I read her name tag: TRACY. Then I looked up and saw John standing behind her. He didn’t look nearly as concerned as Tracy did, but at least he’d stopped jogging.

I thought I was okay until I tried to move my left leg. My shoelace was still caught in the treadmill. Tracy removed my sneaker and untangled it from the machine. She’d had to cut the lace, but otherwise it was fine. It looked a lot better than I did. I had a bump on my forehead the size of a plum and, according to John, similarly colored, and my left ankle was swollen to twice its normal size.

“I don’t think it’s broken,” Tracy said, “but you really should get it x-rayed.”

“Do you know where the hospital is?” Tracy asked John.

“No,” he said. “I just moved here.”

“I know where it is,” I told her, “but we need to call a cab. We walked over from my place.”

“That’s okay,” John said. “I’ll run back and get the car.”

That was the first acceptable thing he’d said all night.

Tracy helped me down the stairs and into the locker room. She brought me my dry clothes and waited for me while I changed. Then she helped me back to the lobby to wait for John.

“What kind of car does your boyfriend drive?” Tracy asked as she wiped a circle onto the fogged-up glass entrance.

“I don’t know,” I said. “This is our first date.”

“He took you to the gym on a first date?”    

“Thank you,” I said, grateful for her incredulous stare, “it’s nice to know I’m not the only one who thinks that’s weird.”

“Is he at least taking you to dinner afterwards?”

“Only if I renew my membership and he gets the free gift certificate to the health food restaurant.”

Tracy tried to stifle a laugh. “You can really pick ‘em.”

I gave her a half smile. “He picked me.” But I won’t make that mistake again. Even proving Kaitlyn wrong wasn’t worth this.

We heard a horn honking and Tracy helped me out to John’s car. John waited behind the wheel while Tracy maneuvered me into the passenger’s seat. I made a mental note to myself to send Tracy a thank-you gift. I didn’t need to make a mental note to lose John’s phone number.

I directed him the four blocks to the Cedars-Sinai Hospital Emergency Room, where I was quickly becoming a regular.

“If I knew it was this close, I wouldn’t have bothered with the car.”

He’d just negated his one good deed.

* * *

Kaitlyn arrived at my house the next morning with a
grande
-sized Starbucks House Blend for her (she never went anywhere before noon without one) and a giant blueberry muffin for me. After taking off her shoes and promising me that this time she wouldn’t spill her coffee, and if she did, she’d pay to have the furniture cleaned, she settled herself on my white sofa.

“So how did you leave it?” she asked.

“You mean after he abandoned me in the emergency room because, unlike the gym, hospitals are packed on Friday nights, and he needed to get his beauty rest before his seven a.m. tee-time?”

Kaitlyn smiled sheepishly. “I guess he wasn’t Prince Charming after all.”

“No,” I said. “He wasn’t. And I’m finished with this open-minded stuff. I’m going back to my mental checklist. That way I can eliminate the losers before I waste an entire evening with them and end up on crutches.”

“It wasn’t a total waste. You got to see the Jewish doctor again.”

Leave it to Kaitlyn to find the silver lining. “For five seconds in the hallway, with my hair in a pony tail, and no make-up.”

“Yes, but he remembered you.”

“As the girl who almost puked on him.”

She leaned over to where I was sprawled on the carpet with an ice-pack on my ankle and patted the top of my head. “No, Jules, as the cute lawyer with the great smile whose phone number he wanted, but stupidly forgot to get.”

Only Kaitlyn would think that, and I loved her for it.

Elmo Never Lies

It was an uneventful Friday night. But after my previous Friday night with Plane Guy, I was happy with uneventful. The swelling on my ankle had gone down so I was off the crutches, and the plum on my forehead had shrunk and faded to a green grape. I’d met Kaitlyn for dinner at Cheesecake Factory earlier in the evening and she swore that with makeup on and my hair combed forward, the bruise wasn’t even noticeable.

By nine o’clock I was lying on the couch in my boxer shorts and T-shirt, searching for something good on TV. After I confirmed that there was nothing worth watching on all two-hundred-fifty-six channels, I started flipping through magazines. Satin jeans were out, six-inch heels were in, and men really didn’t want to date women over thirty-five, at least according to
Modern Woman
.