“I met a boy!”
“That’s wonderful”, said my shrink, careful not to roll his eyes. “This’ll be good for at least eight to ten sessions worth of billing!
“He’s so pretty!”
“Twelve sessions worth of billing!”
“We’re getting married and adopting babies from multiple third world countries!”
“Early retirement in Ibiza with cabana boys and peeled grapes seemed so far away only five minutes ago! I knew I took that licensing exam three times for a reason. What’s his name?”
Magnificock was one hot son of a lust-filled dream. He had eyes that could melt permafrost and a smile that made me want his dentist. When he spoke, I watched his perfect lips move in slow motion and wondered – maybe out loud - when I’d get to touch them with my own. When he looked at me, I stopped checking out the other guys in the room.
“That powerful, huh?”
My shrink shrank when I gave him the look my mother used to give me right before she unleashed her inner ninja. He knew this look well, since I’d described it in vivid detail during our mommy-n-me issues sessions.
“Please continue”, he said, reaching for his popcorn.
Magnificock wrote to me on Connexion nearly a full year after I initially contacted him with a coy wink of an email. It was the end of June, I was freshly 32, and I’d gone through dozens of profiles while listening to an episode of “The Hills” that had my roommate’s rapt attention in the next room. Just about the time I decided that, sight unseen, Spencer and Heidi should be tied together and catapulted into a burning building but only after being dipped in gasoline and force fed cyanide and recordings of their own conversations, I got the fateful email that would change my life for a whole six weeks.
The boy with the perfect lips had written to me. In clipped language so effortlessly poetic that the untrained eye could never have recognized it as such, he said I was cute and wondered in plain text why it had taken him so long to email me. You see, my beloved had bookmarked me too, but the sneaky monkey kept that part hidden lest I know he harbored a lustful interest that would have occupied my waking hours and driven me to distraction. My thoughtful future husband, I thought, working hard to win my affections and we hadn’t even met yet. If he kept this up I was gonna be a summer bride after all. After debating whether I’d have us registered at Target or Crate and Barrel, I went to work composing my reply, careful not to overwhelm him with my biting wit yet peppering him with just enough bons mots to pique his doubtlessly superior intellect.
“Dude, sup?” I quipped. “You’re cute too. How’s your summer going?”
“Looks like you just had a birthday lol”.
LOL?! OMFG, he’d used “lol” at the end of a sentence without proper punctuation in a way that made absolutely no sense. Laughing out loud because I turned a year older? Really? Dude, WTF?!!
I should have cut the expedient bastard out of my life then and there, but I took a deep breath and decided to overlook this, the first of a long line of transgressions to follow, because he was cute and he was paying attention to me.
We met for coffee a week later - you know, 'cause I love to play hard to get – and, despite everything I knew and three solid years of therapy I could barely afford, I promptly turned to jelly as soon as he walked through the café door. Lord help me, he was even more beautiful in person than he was on a reproduced computer screen image, AND he knew how to dress himself. He smelled so good I was convinced he bathed just to come see me, and judging from the complex scent wafting from his recently washed man-body, this was no mere Irish Spring floozy. This was a man who splurged on body wash yet wisely avoided the pedestrian Axe products that were perpetually on sale and had, on more than one tragically pungent occasion, claimed me as hapless value-starved victim.
“Give me a ring now”, I pleaded with my eyes. “Give me a ring here and now and I’m yours til you’re old and fat! Marry me, goddamn it, unless your breath stinks or you’re a serial killer or you’re bad in bed.”
This last thought gave me pause. What if he was indeed bad in bed. I took a step back. He was approaching fast, too fast. Why was he so eager to meet me? Why was he on time? That wasn’t body wash I smelled from ten feet away, it was recently drawn espresso and desperation. He was a lousy lay and he was overcompensating for it through the miracle of evolution by being cute. Bitch wasn’t all that and I’d seen right through his feeble ruse, but I’d humor him with a half hour of my precious time.
And then he smiled, and I was fucked. Surely, sex with this, my betrothed, would be the most electrifying I’ll have ever had in this life or the next. Hell, if he looked at me like that while we made the beast with two backs I was certain that I’d get a glimpse into the inner workings of the cosmos.
He loved mint tea and pastries, and we had lots of both. We lamented our mutual love/hate relationship with butter, delved into our love/love preoccupation with all things Harry Potter, and our hate/homicidal disgust for bad city planning. We talked about movies and dating and didn’t get within twelve miles of discussing our exes. He was smart, and fun, and available, and he was easy to talk to. Our half hour coffee date turned into three hours, complete with a walk and the holy-mother-fuckin-grail-of-a-date-with-moi, a trip to a non-chain bookstore. Not once did I have to resort to my standby escape hatch text from a mystery friend who needed an emergency pickup from the airport because his or her mother had just been injured in a tragic motorcycle accident. And not once did I catch him eyeing his phone for a similar phantom text. Clearly, he was enjoying my company as much as I was enjoying his.
At the end of our marathon swim in one another’s souls, I drove us back to the street with the café where we’d tell the grandchildren with none of our DNA we had our first date. He’d say something about an albatross and pass gas, and I’d laugh heartily and wipe the drool from his chin while the youngest of our brood gasped in horror and asked her mommy why she hadn’t put us both in a home or had us euthanized yet. Magnificock looked lovingly into my eyes and then he did something more powerful than any spontaneous kiss and just short of an actual marriage proposal. He spoke these words:
“I wanna take you to Disneyland.”
“Be still my immigrant heart”, I thought, fighting back tears. When my parents sold me the bill of goods that included endless opportunity and unbounded happiness awaiting me in our new home in America, I only signed on because my sly mother let it slip that we’d be closer to the happiest place on earth and the Mickey Mouse might just sneak into my room and tuck me in every night.
“And he won’t need a visa?” I remember asking, through the wide, innocent eyes of a child.
“Of course not, silly, he’ll be right next door.”
“And Goofy and Pluto will be there too?”
“Yes, honey, there’ll be a veritable orgy of cartoon characters just lining up to touch you on a nightly basis. Now get on the fucking plane.”
But Mommy lied. We ended up in Georgia, so far away from the Magic Kingdom that fucking Tinkerbell herself wouldn’t make the trip to sprinkle my head with fairy dust even once in the fourteen years I lived there. That son-of-a-bitch, Mickey, charged admission, and if I wanted him to touch me I had to get my ass to fucking Florida, and even there I’d have to get through Epcot and wrestle a killer whale to get a glimpse of the objects of my childhood desire.
Magnificock would turn all of that around. He’d make me forget my mother’s treachery and all the sad, lonely moments between those steamy lust-filled ones that so far made up the days of my life like an endless unclean soap opera where the closest you ever got to an emotional payoff was blue balls.
I was dating, which meant that every waking moment was spent neglecting the things that made me interesting in the first place in lieu of crafting that perfect text message, which I’d strategically send to let my one and only know that I was thinking about him in a non-obsessive way. Would it be a “hi”, followed by a smiley face, or just a smiley face? Would I plant the seeds of commitment and inquire about his schedule, ready to harvest another rendezvous at his next anxiously awaited moment of availability? Was today the day he would wake up to a digital “good morning” from moi? Would I know he received my greeting when he smiled through perfect teeth and the clouds that darkened a cold world parted so that I bathed in a bright shaft of sunlight like the in “The Lion King”? There was so much to contemplate, and I had to be careful not to smother, not to frighten my beloved, lest he mistake my devotion for something psycho or needy or clingy or anything the authors of “Why Men Love Bitches” or “He’s Just Not That Into You” would disapprove of. I’d read my relationship bibles – or as much as I could stomach of either of them by page three before they went sailing on the wings of a breeze from my bedroom window. “I didn’t need relationship self help. Love would see me through.”
I stopped writing, but made sure that I kept working out so that Magnificock would never stop wanting me. I went to work because nobody wants no scrub, and it was too soon for us to move in together anyway. I needed to prove to myself that I could succeed in my own endeavors before I martyred my career to stay at home and raise our rainbow of foreign-born children of varying ages and psychological, and/or language needs.
“Get a hold of yourself!” I screamed in internal monologue. “You’re moving too fast. You can’t change your relationship status on Facebook yet, it’s too soon.”
My internal monologue was right. I had to get past our second date, find out if he was a decent kisser, and make sure he wasn’t a drunk, ex-con, or drug addict, that he was polite to servers and restaurant personnel and knew how to tip, didn’t talk or use his phone during movies, and could hold a conversation about modern geo-politics and macro-economics.
“Can I cancel my Connexion account?”, I sheepishly asked monologue.
“No. You must maintain this lifeline to your singlehood in case things don’t work out. Besides, if you delete your profile, you’ll have no way to stalk him.”
I bowed my head to the mighty wisdom of my own psychosis...
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPENS!!!????????? WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAPPPPPENS!!!???????????????? WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT HAPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPENS!!!!????? *passes out*
Posted by: Mandelwhore (Lick) | November 23, 2010 at 08:16 PM
Oh, Mandi, your enthusiasm is infectious, and just borderline enough that I keep 911 on speed dial. My love to thee, from a safe, warm distance.
Posted by: Moe | November 23, 2010 at 10:20 PM
All will be revealed in Part 3, coming soon...
Posted by: Moe | November 23, 2010 at 10:21 PM
Mo, you are, as ever, a total tease.
Posted by: Frank Miller | November 27, 2010 at 09:42 AM