A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (21 page)

The memorial service called for Jews to rededicate themselves to study and service, and I can connect my own insights there with other Jewish moments. These instances raise religious expression from an abstract ritual observance to an immediate, directly experienced reality.

For example, sometimes I’ll imagine the Prophet Elijah—beloved invisible guest at Passover seders—riding the commuter train with me, a faithful, accepting companion. One of my favorite parts of the Passover seder (speaking of Elijah) comes with this statement, “In every single generation one is obligated to look upon himself as if he personally had gone forth out of Egypt.”

Those words always connect with me. The seder vibrates with meaning at that moment, placing me at the Exodus, escaping bondage in Egypt for a new life. I can even interpret the story as my own spiritual wanderings, from beliefs imposed on me to a faith I freely accepted. I stand with my fellow Jews at that moment, part of a family that transcends time and place. Judaism then becomes our own “Snow White” machine.

When I needed dating advice, I have a few sources of wisdom. In college and beyond, my mother provided basic values, boiled down to her favorite aphorism: “Don’t get anybody pregnant.” My father urged me to date beautiful, wealthy older women, which is easier said than done. My younger brother Cooper was always available to listen and lend me his hard-boiled Texas spin. When a relationship soured, I would console myself with the wisdom of a line in
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace:
“There’s always a bigger fish.”

My friend Steve, whom I worked with right out of college, gave me a great piece of wisdom after listening to my string of deluded rationalizations about staying in a bad relationship: “Van, you don’t want thimbles of affection, you want BUCKETS of affection!”

Another friend, Larry From Brooklyn, specialized in advising women about me. He told one, “Don’t try to pressure Van into doing something he doesn’t want to do. It’ll never work.”

But for the detailed discussion, the late-night line-by-line close textual reading of what’s going right (or more typically, horribly wrong), I always turned to women. They would listen and comment and give me their well-informed feminine perspectives. They could tell me when I was kidding myself, or when another woman was treating me poorly.

For example, the Lark and I swapped scores of emails about our romantic woes. I once wrote her, “I have a half-dozen or more women I can do things with. Quantity isn’t the problem, nor, on some level, quality. One woman I’ve known for close to three years is eager for me to visit her abroad. I always feel I’m one woman behind in the trips I take; I go see somebody and then feel, you know, I should have gone to see X instead of Y.”

After I updated the Lark on a turbulent relationship, she wrote, “Wow, it is hard to say goodbye. She clearly has you on her mind. How are you feeling about this?”

The process goes both ways. The women would also turn to me for help in penetrating the labyrinth of the male mind. I once advised the Lark, “So the Ragin’ Cajun is back and horny? What a classy guy. He sure knows how to make a gal feel special. Your response was right—you’re not his toy (unless that fills a gap in your life and that’s what you want). He sounds arrogant and presumptuous.”

One woman told me about her frustrations with repeated visits to a randy Orthodox man, who kept her out of sight of his family.

“
So,” I said with what is for me surprising directness, “you’re good enough to fuck but not good enough to meet his parents?”

I had bilingual consultations with Simonetta, a teacher at a Jewish school in Mexico City. She wrote to me soon after I joined a now-defunct Jewish dating site, and we hit it off. After a week she informed me that she had found somebody else online so the romance angle died fast, but we stayed in touch. Our chats often dealt with languages—Spanish was her native language, English was mine, and confusion arose when we became involved with men or women who weren’t fluent in our respective native tongues. I had several contacts with women in Latin America—they found me approachable and responsive, and I had grown up on the U.S.-Mexican border and had visited Mexico and El Salvador—so having a handy translator was welcome.

In fact, Simonetta and I often accessed each other’s language skills in real time. A woman might lapse into Spanish in an instant-message session; I would IM Simonetta at the same time and relay phrases I couldn’t understand to her, and she would give me a quick English translation. I did the same for Simonetta when she couldn’t understand the full meaning of what a man wrote in English. While I couldn’t translate into Spanish, I could give her my snap analysis of what the guy was getting at. The guidance must have worked; Simonetta married a man she met online and he moved to Latin America to be with her.

Simonetta also introduced me to a friend of hers, one of the few times I met a woman through the old-fangled personal connection route. After I met her friend, JJ, I sent this after-action report:

The greatest oracle of them all, the one who has been listening for thirty years and has encountered almost all the contestants in my dating game, is my friend Chloe. We met in 1981 when we both lived in the same brownstone apartment building in Amity Street in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. While we never “dated,” we became close friends and confidants and frequently attended the open high holiday services at Hebrew Union College. Chloe and I intersected at key points in each other’s lives, even after she moved to Florida and then Virginia. We attended each other’s weddings, celebrated the births of children, supported each other during divorces, attended bar mitzvahs of our sons, mourned the deaths of our mothers, and swapped buckets of romantic advice. If my brother and I had a sister, she would be Chloe.

Chloe and I each have the ability to coolly dissect romantic situations and their potential and pitfalls—except for our own. I used to compare us to two winos clutching each other, each waving a bottle of cheap wine around while begging the other, “Don’t drink that poison! It’ll make you sick!” even as we swill our own rotgut of romance. In the early years of our friendship, I had my doubts about her beau, the ne’er-do-well communist bicycle messenger, while she warned me about my involvement with an Ecstasy-popping Joan Rivers-sound-alike.

To this day, Chloe appreciates advice based on my hard-won romantic experience. She says, “You told me, ‘Chloe, don’t have more than two dates in one day. If have more than two, then you get confused and you can’t keep your stories straight and you repeat yourself.’”

Once we dove into the online dating scene, I became her profile photographer. Whenever we met I’d take some photos of her, edit them and send them to her to upload at the sites she used. I like to think the photos work, because Chloe enjoys a busy dating dance card. She always looked fetching—she has that Hungarian-Jewish bone structure that guarantees she will age well. And the photos do her justice in a medium where eye candy always gets sampled.

We’re still talking, although thanks to a stable relationship the drama level in my life has ratcheted down several notches. I get Chloe’s reports from the dating wars, and I mostly encourage her to get out there and stir things up. After thirty years of mutual coaching, I know she can do it.

Relationships are often like revolving doors. One lover’s coming in while another’s moving out. Sometimes the two competitors wind up in the same revolving door, going around in circles. When the door spins fast enough, you can actually bump into the competition—the other man.

I’m not talking about the gay best buddy, or protective brother, or stolid co-worker. No, I’m talking about glinty-eyed male competitors, their testosterone surging in the eternal quest to slay the mastodon, steal the fire, present the polished-bead necklace, swing the virgins onto their snorting stallions and shove their DNA into the next generation.

In my dating career, encounters with other men of a romantic persuasion typically happened at the start or end of a relationship. One’s the happy new guy, the other is the rejected suitor kicked into the recycling bin. I’ve had both experiences and much prefer being the guy on the front end.

In one relationship I played both roles. This is the story of Van and Calypso, a bewitching woman with high-octane sensuality and a high-drama expressive style, nicknamed after a passage in the late Robert Fagles’ translation of
The Odyssey,
where he describes Calypso as “the dangerous nymph with glossy braids.”

The Dangerous Nymph Calypso and I met in New York through an elderly common friend who thought we would be nice friends and nothing more. I well remember my first meeting with Calypso at her apartment. She wore a tight turquoise jumpsuit (keep that attire in mind). The Judaic-hormonal connection kicked in over lingering, starry-eyed Chinese food dinners; thus began a madcap Manhattan romance. Despite being the same age as me, she carried more hard emotional baggage than I and was an expert at wrapping men (like me) around her pinky. In comparison, I still felt like the country rube who fell off the turnip truck from Princeton and landed in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn. She liked to talk about those generous but horrid men from her past in order to pressure me subtly into behaving the way she wanted. Calypso excelled at this. She could have been the sexy but conniving “bad girl” on a Mexican soap opera.

When we met, she had another man wrapped around her pinky. Let’s call him Fredo. Moving in the brisk and bloodless manner of all femme fatales, Calypso dumped Fredo to be with me. This succession happened so abruptly that when Calypso took me to a party a day later, everybody expected her to show up with Fredo. And, in fact, Fredo did appear—he had been invited, too, after all.

Calypso, with her unerring sense of soap-operatic drama, introduced us.

“
Hi, I’m Van,” I said, manfully extending my hand.

“
I know who you are,” said Fredo, who was sporting enough to shake my hand rather than punch my jaw. We sat on opposite sides of the crowded living room, ignoring yet eyeballing each other.

“
Just remember, you’re the one I’m going home with tonight,” Calypso cooed.

Navigating the peaks and valleys of this intense physical and emotional relationship was new and difficult for me. Differences of opinion led to explosive arguments when I wouldn’t follow the relationship roadmap she carried in her head (this is the woman who told me, “Van, you’re ONLY twenty-five but I’m ALREADY twenty-five.”). And I had other pressures in life. My mother was dying of cancer, and my employer, a magazine publisher, had relocated out of New York to the Midwest. Rather than move and remain an editor with a trade magazine covering the frozen food industry, I had opted to stay in New York and start a career as a freelance writer operating out of a tin-ceilinged studio apartment in Brooklyn that I rented for $300 per month. I could find no stability—family, work and relationship all felt terribly fluid.

So, how can I describe my romance with Calypso? On the plus side, she was a sex goddess. She had great curves, superb skills in the feminine arts of clothes and cosmetics, and a verbal style rarely found outside
Letters to Penthouse
. A picture of us shows her draped around me with her head on my shoulder, Betty Boop lips glowing, a manicured hand resting on my chest, and a silken blouse perfectly in place. One Passover we made love in her girlhood bedroom in the suburbs while her mother puttered around with the seder table and welcomed guests. She looked good and smelled good and knew just what to say to drive a guy crazy. Calypso set the erotic bar very high.

But ... she was a gal in a hurry. She expected the relationship to move at warp speed, to where no Van had gone before. She had no sense of patience or boundaries and even dragged my ailing mother into the act. When I met Calypso, Mom was dying from bone cancer and living with her sister in Tyler, Texas. I visited Mom for what turned out to be the last time on Mother’s Day, 1983. When I returned, Calypso declared that I didn’t spend enough time with Mom. “I personalized it,” she said. “If this is the way he treats his mother, I thought, how is he going to treat me?”