More Than a Kewpie Doll at Stake

She wore a short denim skirt and white panties.  The skirt I noticed when she walked through the library security gates, the panties when she knelt to find her hold on the shelf–a bright triangle between shiny tanned knees.  She stood empty-handed.  I followed her legs to her face, reaching it as she turned to me at the circ desk.  I locked onto her eyes, smiled, and silently invited her to come talk to me.  Her smile accepted.  Her hold was not where she had looked for it because it was waiting at the window for her to driveup for it.  I recognized her name when I scanned her card and knew that she picked up all her holds there, though I’d never actually seen her at the window.  I got it for her.  The title was something like When Food Is Love.  As our engagement was mutual, at parting I gave her the test:  How long would she maintain eye contact as she left?  She dropped her eyes to her book and slid it off the counter to her other hand, and as she turned to the entrance her near eye swivelled to me and smiled.  If the same light hit my eyes, I suppose I returned the same.  I’m sure I felt the same.  I watched her out the security gates then turned back to her name, still on the monitor before me, and clicked on it.  Fifty-four years old!  You’re kidding me!  I was pegging her for five years my junior not three years my senior.  She suddenly became even more attractive.

Such an encounter as that is now my goal for my hour on the circ desk.  Accepting that that won’t always happen doesn’t tempt me to lower my standards but to practice as intensely as possible.  And that I don’t practice on every woman but the ones I find most attractive shaves my opportunities to the bone.  (I’m a picky guy.)  But I’ve stumbled onto something–speed dating at its quickest and least embarrassing.  Simply, it’s first-eye-contact.  In that moment is the most significant moment of the relationship–in fact, the moment that decides the possibility of that relationship even happening.  And if that moment tells me it’s not happening, where’s the rejection?  Brilliant!  It starts with self-accepting the initial attraction and then conveying it.  I saw this woman (whose name I will withhold for compromising her vanity) before she knelt in front of the holds shelf, but she did not look my way until she didn’t find her book.  I was already attracted to her; now I had to let her know by looking in her eyes.  That she returned my smile with her own did not necessarily mean she was attracted to me–I could have just been a friendly face willing to help her–but it did mean she was willing to accept my friendliness.  That’s all I can ask, isn’t it?  It’s easy to discreetly test the waters from that point, as we are now open to each other, relative to being strangers.  After the initial positive connection I do not fear tripping over my tongue or saying something inane or innappropriate and have little trouble maintaining eye contact; plus, I will do anything she asks and offer to do yet more.  But how can I be sure I’ll see her again?  I can’t be sure I’ll be on the desk the next time she comes in, or on the window when she picks up there.  That’s why I have to intensify my practice.

Matt invited me over for lunch Memorial Day.  Being a bachelor (or just being me), I accepted the free meal.  “Oh,” he added, “Chris invited us over for a cookout later.  Do you think you’d wanna come?”  “Yes!  To tell you the truth, I would hope to see Jackie there.”  I told him about seeing her at the yoga studio.  (He doesn’t read my blog.)  “I really could use the classes,” I told him, “but I haven’t done anything about it because it still feels like a pretense to see Jackie.”  Well, guess what?  It must have been.  My hopes were already in the way when we got to the cookout, so my tongue was tightly knotted.  When someone asked, “Jackie?  Where’s Brian?  Is he working?”  i knew my game was over, but I was as relieved as I was disappointed–and I no longer felt the nine-mile trip to the yoga studio was worth my Wednesday morning.  At least I hadn’t committed myself to the hope and inflated it beyond proportion.  I could easily have done that in the months since I’d seen her, but unlike the months it took me to ask Julie out, I wasn’t reminded of my hopes by seeing her every workday.  If I’d been paying attention when we first saw each other at the cookout, I’d have already seen in Jackie’s eyes that our interests were not correlative.  My day wasn’t ruined; it’s knee wasn’t so much as skinned; it didn’t so much as cut itself shaving.  There was no lament or woeful wail, but a shrug and “Oh, well.”

I play on.  I keep looking, keep looking into eyes, looking for…what?  A connection, then a deeper connection.  It’s there, somewhere, in someone’s eyes.  It’s not a game–I shouldn’t call it that–and it isn’t play or sport.  I might know what I’m after, but getting it doesn’t get me the broken tape and the top step on the tri-level dais.  No medal will be hung around my neck, but a millstone might be lifted from it.  This is serious work and might amount to a life’s-work in the end, but…but the thought is too complex for me to express adequately, and, despite my normal analytical bent, I get the feeling that I should accept it being so, that even an understanding, much less an explanation of what I’m doing is not only unnecessary but detrimental:  Codifying what I do is what makes this a sport, a game for its own sake.  I want to see beautiful women; I wnat to meet them and talk to them.  I want to fall in love; I want to love myself.  That I feel good doing what I’m doing only means I believe I’m doing the right thing.  Whatever comes of that must be what I deserve, and the only way to accept what I deserve is to know I’m doing right:  There’s my circle.  I have to trust it not to be a snake eating itself.

Better the Julie I Don’t Know

The library at which I work is open till nine the first four days of the week.  Each of us works two of the evenings, our day starting at twelve-thirty.  Friday and Saturday the library closes at six.  Half of us work alternating weekends.  Before Julie was on my radar, we worked the same schedule–Wednesday and Thursday nights, same weekend.  Before I asked her out, she switched her Wednesday evening to Tuesday.  A couple weeks ago, she switched weekends with Becky.  I now have two whole days and two half days with Julie.  This is Friday.  Julie was at a training class yesterday.  Monday is a full day together.  I may need more time to write this.  Without Julie I have much more room.  She fills the library when she’s there, like smoke.  I take small breaths so I don’t choke.  Emotional survival is my only goal.  Her absence does not stop me thinking of her but stretches and thins the emotional wall to an  opaque veil, until I can almost think of her irrelative to my desire for her.  I need to be in that state from now till I finish this.

What is Julie to me now?  Julie is not May.  May would, of course, would not exist but for Julie, but Julie is just the framework for the character.  The rest I make up from what I know, filling the gap of my ignorance with imagination, extrapolating the girl I want from the girl I know.  But May would not exist if I knew Julie.  I would not be projecting my hopes onto May, because they would have been realized in Julie.  What Julie is to me is a fascination, a toy I can’t put down, a puzzle half of which I don’t have–the half in the box with the picture on it.  She is a regret:  I chose ego preservation over compassion.  I had the chance to get to know all about her.  I attacked her, instead, already digging out my pound of flesh for the perceived wrong of rejecting me, never considering how hard it was for her.  What I heard as patronizing–”If I change my mind, you’ll be the first to know”–was a nervous attempt at appeasement, appeasement I was too proud to accept.  She had considered my feelings, something I hadn’t done for either of us.  At last, I’m grateful for that.

My fascination with Julie I’ve never been able to quite trace to its source.  Perhaps I simply wanted to be fascinated by her.  Perhaps I really had no choice.  It has continued unabated and grows with each offhanded, overheard snippet of information she proffers to coworkers who aren’t me.  Those snippets plus what she told me of herself while she still trusted me add up to the Julie I know:  The fourth of four, the others boys; the third died in his early twenties after a very long illnes; the oldest predated her by sixteen years.  She “grew up in” northern Virginia, though her parents lived in a few different places before settling there.  She worked for Borders for thirteen years and is bitter about being let go.  She has a horticulture degree but would rather have (in hindsight) studied voice and/or “design.”  Her father died six years ago, her mother a month ago.  Add a few like/dislikes and personal observations and it’s only just enough to madden my curiosity.

The Julie I extrapolate from what I know and have observed was not born in northern Virginia but likely moved there before school age.  Her father I’ve narrowed to two professions–college teacher or military, leaning toward military, based on something else I know:  Julie was not on the academic track in high school but distributive education.  That is, she was preparing herself, it seems, for a commercial career, not a liberal arts education, which I can’t imagine would sit well with a teacher-parent.  Northern Virginia tells me “government job”  for retired/decommed dad.  It also tells me “very white upringing in a vast surburbia,” evidenced also by the fact that she had to ask who did “Ball of Confusion.”  Julie isn’t two years younger than I am.  If she didn’t hear that song on the radio, then she was a in a demographic that wouldn’t have been exposed to it that way.  Her brothers, I surmise, were not so much her protectors as whom she needed protection from (oldest brother excepted).  This I make out from her being so tough (outwardly), self-protective, and emotionally guarded.  As the youngest and a girl, she was likely daddy’s little girl and not real close to her mother.  I doubt she’s ever had many true, lasting friendships–plenty of acquaintances but no confidants.  She aches to be more outgoing.

Julie’s darkness attracts me perhaps more even than her beauty.  I want to know that darkness (though maybe I do already; my own might not be dissimilar), be with her in it, walk out of it with her–but I am not a knight, or a prince;  and if that isn’t what she needs, it’s at least what she wants, I would bet.  A bigger man than I would be happy to see her happy with the right man.  I want her to be happy, but I want the right man to be me.  When that man comes along–and I really do want him to–I don’t want to see it.  I don’t want to experience it in any way.  I would be happy for her, but I woud be devastated for me.  There is heartbreak in her darkness, and shame and regret.  I recognize it.

I accept all the attractants that tie me to Julie–her beauty, her darkness, all the common interests, her sexuality.  The pedestal on which I’d placed Julie has never been more than a shabby simulacrum of rotten wood and mis-hit nails.  She’s always been a whole woman to me:  It hasn’t been just her lips and neck I’ve wanted to press my lips against, not just the contours of her face I’ve wanted to trace, not just the hair I could see that I’ve wanted to comb my fingers through.  Why am I only now able to admit this?  (The more I consider the answer, the more rhetorical seems the question.)

This is Monday now, long after work, close to bedtime.  Julie has made no effort toward reconciliation; I have not made another.  I suppose for Julie it is just not worth the effort, or she just can’t make it; or she doesn’t trust me–or herself.  I want to get along, and I can’t believe she doesn’t at least want that, too.  This isn’t going to get better for either of us until she wants it to.  I may be asking her to be assertive beyond her usual capacity, but isn’t that what growth is?  We’re both stunted, rooted firmly in a barren clay of stubbornness, but I’m not content to wither in this rotten excuse for soil.  There’s better to be had.  Doesn’t knowing that obligate one to pursue it?

Holding My Breath Waiting for Satan to Slip on His Ice Skates

Julie’s mother died last week, about a year after her stroke.  Still, I managed not to talk to Julie.  At best, I’m horrible at offering comfort in such a situation.  It was not a lack of compassion.  It hurt and hurts still to think of Julie alone in her mother’s house, her brothers eventually leaving town again to get back to their homes and families; Julie surrounded by her mother in the shape of what she left behind, sifting through the memories of intrinsically valueless things in a practical, necessary effort to distill sentiment into a portable burden, the burden anyone with such a loss carries.  And I’m jealous.  Her mother’s funeral was Saturday.  I was working.  So were others, but some still took the time to go.  Mike went, and I couldn’t have been greener, though I’ve always known he’s not attracted to Julie.  I was jealous of the attention Julie got without me, but if I’d been there, I’d have wanted her attention.  I told myself she wouldn’t want me there, as if my presence could possibly have dampened the surprise I’m told she felt upon seeing coworkers there.  Only for my sake was it best I wasn’t there.  Even now, when I consider how it would have been at least a nice gesture to be there, I wonder what kind of points it would have scored me.  How could I ever have thought I was worthy of her love or capable 0f giving her mine?

Julie took off today, the first workday after the funeral, and I spent the entire time thinking about her.  I will tomorrow, too, no doubt, as I avoid her, stare at her furtively, and try now and then to make eye contact.  I wish I knew what love was.  I want to know if that’s what I’m feeling for her.  I think I love her yet am not in love with her.  I think that’s possible.  I think it would help if it were.  But if I loved Julie I would be kinder to her, not expect and hope for so much from her.  I’m not going to say I’m a horrible person.  I’m not.  It hurts to be the way I am toward her, but I don’t know how to stop.

I thought about her on the way in to work, too, and by the time I got there I was angry, having yet again revisited her betrayal of A Bright, Ironic Hell to all the managers in the building and how a week later I get an “apology” passed through one coworker and another admitting she “overreacted.”  And I just can’t let it go.  When will I ever?  How far am I from love when I feel that way?

Risking Life In Limbo

I followed through on my two vows.

I talked to Julie.  It was nearly as difficult as the time I asked her out, but I finally spit out, “Julie, how is your mom doing?”  “Not very well,” she answered, turning to me.  “She’s in hospice care.  All we can do is keep her comfortable.”  “How are you holding up?”  A patron interrupted before she answered.  I let it go, but when the patron left, Julie said, “I’m hanging in there.”  No more was said by either of us to the other while we were out on the desk.

I was right about how I would feel–relieved, a bit righteous, humble, hopeful.  I wanted this to be the end of things, the beginning of better things.  I had put the ball at her feet and wanted her to play.  Four days later, I still don’t know if anything has changed.  Until yesterday she still wouldn’t meet my gaze and when she finally did today it was with that defiant glare I’ve come to know all too well–chin tipped upward, jaw clenched square.  Yet yesterday she had opened and held a door for me and my cart of juvenile non-fiction.  I looked at her, thanked her.  She smile and replied, and I stared at her.  Still she smiled.  I’d missed that smile more than I realized.  I devoured it.  I missed the doorway and banged the frame.  But now?…

I wrote Melissa on Facebook two nights ago.  I have not heard back, and the worst assumptions grow in my mind:  My message didn’t go through; or she knows that Sandra doesn’t care for me and doesn’t know how to tell me.   I can’t imagine a best-case scenario, and it’s difficult to even consider the realistic, neutral possibilities.  The longer it takes to hear back from Melissa the less worthy I feel to be in a relationship.  I’m steeling myself for bad news.  But as I imagine, with apprehension, waking up with morning breath beside someone, I also think of those things I said I want–someone to talk to and be and do things with–and there’s that hope that the positives, if they become real, will melt the negatives.

I hope they would also melt my feelings for Julie.  Listening to Belle and Sebastian last week, I nearly convinced myself I was still in love with her.  I can’t quite trace the mental path that brought me so close to that conviction, but I think it began with the character May of my novel, who is modelled after Julie.  I’ve begun to feel very close to the character empathetically, and I think I began to wonder if I could feel that way without being in love with Julie.  Then came that defiant glare of hers yesterday, and I just became angry.  Whatever my feelings for Julie, I would expect a meaningful relationship with another woman to extinguish the most passionate of them and leave me with, at least, indifference.

I am out of vows for now; until these two are reacted upon I don’t know what to do.  There are no contingencies.  I hope my life means more than waiting for women to talk to me.

John Gray Is From Uranus

Stacey didn’t take my advice.  Eric called her, she didn’t call him back.  She’d met Alex at church soon after she’d met Eric.  Alex was better.  When she told me about him, she didn’t call him The One–not for not wanting to but for knowing the scepticism of her audience.  I took news of Magic Alex with a mine of salt.  A couple of guys over the past year have been The One.  Now Alex is over.  He broke it off–too many red flags he couldn’t get past.  Before Eric, another guy had broken up with her–same thing.  The guy before that she just started to ignore.

See the trend?  When the guys break it off, they’re straightforward, honest.  Stacey breaks it off–sort of–by hoping it will go away if she ignores it.  The guys were not cruel–they didn’t want to hurt Stacey’s feelings–but they knew that it was best to be honest.  Stacey knew all that, too, so why couldn’t she be honest?  Now she’s embarassed to go back to that church or that store and the places the other guys worked.  There’s little sympathy coming from me.  I didn’t know any of those guys.  Stacey is a friend.  I don’t like to see her in pain, but the embarassment is the bed she made.  The one time I compared my difficulty with Julie to her difficulty in frequenting the places where she met these guys, she said, “But you didn’t sleep with her.”  “No,” I didn’t say, “but I was humiliated by her.  You didn’t have to sleep with those guys.”  Stacey knows I can’t side with her, that I feel she did Eric wrong, and that she’s got to lie in that bed.  I don’t speak Julie’s name to Stacey, and Stacey does her best not to whine about the places she can no longer go, and no one’s the better off.  Julie is not redeemed.

The Included Crowbar Doubles as a Bookmark

When I broke up with a particular girlfriend, I began reading about love.  I was not heartbroken–I was relieved–but I still had that hole to fill.  Don’t ask for titles–I don’t remember them, but they all probably had the word “heart” in them somewhere.  Besides, I wouldn’t recommend them.  All they did was infuse me with the warm and fuzzy delusion that I deserved and was ready for love.  Right and wrong, but I swallowed it all, opened my starry eyes wide and got myself married.  Twenty years later–seven years post-divorce–I’m putting it down to a weakness akin to religious conversion.  Hallelujah! I’m married!

It was not a match made in heaven, a blessed union, or anything else remotely beatific.  There was no love.  A component of the delusion that got me married was the belief that with marriage came love.  She gave, I didn’t.  She didn’t give as much as I wanted, and I gave nothing.  She gave up.  (Don’t mistake the concision for glibness.  It’s still painful, and that is as much as I want to consider it right now.)

I have not since sought out those books, or any of the hundreds more written since then.  Divorce was an even bigger relief than the breakup that laid the groundwork for the divorce, and so a more lasting lesson was learned, or I was finally old enough to grasp its wisdom.  Bottom line:  I’m in no hurry to marry again.  A girlfriend would be nice, with love and all that.  Well, maybe not the “all that.”  We all have our “all that.”  I have mine and you have yours, and, frankly, most of mine I’d like to keep.  I live like a batchelor, with the poorly kept apartment and things where I like them.  I could use a cook and a housekeeper, and sex would be nice, but if I could afford the first two I’d go that way.  (I don’t pay for sex, thank you.)  Living with someone is out of the question.  I’m not moving, and no one’s moving in.  Let’s get together for love, dinner out, yard sales, movies from the sofa–but let’s leave “all that” at home.

Of course, that’s too conditional.  Love won’t stand for that.  If that means I’m not ready for it, then, well. …  No, I won’t read those books!  What I have is not enough, or too much of what I don’t need.  When I can no longer pretend that it’s an adequate substitute for what I need I’ll discard it and make room.  I’m the only book I need to open.

It’s Either Love or Another Kid Selling Magazines

Tell me:  Given that I deserve love, am I already receptive to it?  Has it come to me and, being unrecognized, been rejected?  How many himes has it come to me only to be rebuffed?  Just once, I think–with Ann.  She could have loved me if I could have loved her.  I wanted her to love me like I couldn’t love myself or anyone else.  It was too much to ask.  Is giving love receiving love?  If so, I can stop wasting my efforts at attaining it.  I don’t feel capable of giving love.  I have, perhaps, never given it.  I could say that the first gift should be to myself, but I’d rather believe in Stacey’s magic.  It’s easier, and it’s as closely aligned to my wishful non-intervention theory of love-reception as I’m likely to get with rationale.  What I want to believe is that despite how badly I might think of myself, there is still someone who can see through my self-hatred to the me I was meant to be and love that.  That’s some serious magic.  I can’t expect that to ever happen.  How could I expect anyone to come more than halfway?  or respect myself for letting them?  No, I have work to do.  And no clue where to start.

That’s a lie.  Pride is the starting point; the biggest, bitterest pill I have to swallow.  Pride is all a guy with low self-esteem has.  Well, that and vanity.  Their intrinsic values are equal–zero–so I have nothing.  I could be a bigger man.  I could give Julie the time of day, say “excuse me” when I nearly run her over.  I could let myself fade into her background.  That I can’t do those things makes me the kind of person that wants love to knock on his door.

Would the knock come?  Would I ignore it?  Would I let love in?  Would it come in?  I would not be a good host.  I’m a horrible housekeeper, I sleep in the middle of the bed, and I leave the toilet seat up.  I’m a selfish jerk.  And I deserve love.