The Adventures of a Love Investigator, 527 Naked Men & One Woman (19 page)

I nod, while keeping my professional corner-of-the-bed sitting demeanor.

“I would call her a few times a week, just to let her know I was thinking about her. I didn’t know what to do. I want to call her right now and ask if I did anything wrong. Or should I just let it go? I can’t figure out what to do. It’s weird.”

I’m fascinated with his cluelessness. I watch as he struggles, a victim of his own desperation.

“She lives in Hartford,” he tells me. “I found a reason to return there.”

“And?” I begin to recognize the situation for what it was ... stalking.

“Well, I knew where her house was, so I drove by.”

“And ... ?” I’m sitting, perched for the coming action. He lives in Minnesota but finds himself cruising the streets in Connecticut.

“And ... well she got very upset. Somehow I had misread her cues.”

“Restraining order?”

“Yeah. How’d you know that?” He looks amazed.

“Just a lucky guess,” I respond while remembering an over-enthusiastic admirer of my own. Jim the Stalker was an IBM executive who took an unreturned interest in me. That was twenty years ago and I still hesitate when going to my car in parking garages. No matter where I went when I returned to my car it would be festooned with flowers and handwritten love notes. Then Jim would appear out of nowhere and pledge his undying love. He made my skin crawl.

“I don’t think I’ll ever have a long-term relationship with a woman. My job is my passion.” Robert extends his arms to illustrate his love for his work and then brings them in to a self-hug, as he stands in the middle of the dinky little hotel room extolling the joys of his life. “Sometimes when I’m sitting at my house or going down the road in my car I get this feeling. Why am I still going out looking for love? I just turned forty-two. I get turned down every time I ask a woman out. I wonder why?”

Aching to get up and stretch instead I remain on the corner of his bed. I’m looking at vanilla pudding with no vanilla. I can tell him what’s wrong, but that’s not my job. I could stretch but then he would think I was bored. Ever conscious of my obligation to be nice, I sit motionless, my elbows sinking deeper into the pillow. I imagine myself at Smith and Wollensky’s slicing into a sirloin, medium rare. I remember I didn’t have breakfast this morning.

Suddenly Robert seems to realize how much of himself he has exposed to me. He regroups. “I think I’m too positive for women.”

I gag and it makes me cough. He caught me unaware.

“Want some tap water?” He unwraps a sink cup.

“What’s in your mini-bar?”

“They charge for that.”

Yeeks. Geeks.

He goes on, “Sometimes when I meet a girl who’s very attractive, I get tongued-tied and my mouth gets dry.”

I nod in pseudo sympathy.

“With this girl recently, I know I screwed it up. It was a business dinner, but I talked and talked and talked.”

“Why?” I ask as I shake myself awake.

“She was staring at me the whole time.”

“Really?” I speak with an edge of sarcasm.
I need some food.

“I called her the next day. I think I called her too much. It’s either that or I talked too much or ...”

It’s hard to keep a cool head when you’re drowning. I feel like I should wade in and help him. But the idea of a medium rare steak and a baked potato with everything on it and maybe a scotch, neat, had taken seed in my brain. I could think of nothing else.

Our time is up. I leave the bed-corner, which Robert eyes in such a peculiar way I’m left with a creepy feeling.

I thank him for his time and wish him well.

Months later, Robert drops me a note to tell me he has remarried. I remain unsure of my own judgment. What did I fail to see in Robert that some other woman found desirable? Or did I see nothing in this man because I had seen so much in other men? Had I become
the woman who knew too much?

“The woman I’ve been living with for two years, she thinks we’re involved in a serious relationship. I think we’ve been having convenient, casual sex.”

~ Terry, 49, single

Case 502 / Terry

I taxi over to Tribeca to meet with a producer of children’s television shows. Terry contacted me to schedule an interview after hearing from one of his creative type friends. I remain amazed at how guys are looking me up in order to unload their stories. I’m Lucy Van Pelt from
Charlie Brown–
the 5¢ psychotherapist in a box.

Terry ‘s operation is located in a small third floor studio with ceiling to floor windows. In an adjacent office two of his assistants slam and bang about like human sliding doors. The noise is distracting.

Tall and thin, Terry’s skin is the color of milk chocolate. His hair is close cropped with one pencil thin braid trailing down his back. At forty-nine, Terry seems at first contact to be what I would call a sensitive male.

“I blame my career for messing up my search for true love,” he says. “My career allows my imagination to explode in all directions, including my love life. I’m attracted to playful women. I would love to be in love with a woman who was child-like. I think that has to do with losing a girl I really loved when I was in my teens.”

“You’re looking to replace someone from childhood?”

“Constantly. I keep writing child-like fantasy scripts for the ladies I meet. Then I fall in love with the stories I created and not the women. Very Pygmalion of me. I might look at a woman and assume she’s the woman of my dreams. Then I try to make her the woman of my dreams. I willfully ignore whatever doesn’t fit into the pattern and see only what does. I keep shooting myself in the foot over and over.”

“Are you in love, now?” I ask.

“I’m in the middle of a misunderstanding. The woman I’ve been living with for two years, she thinks we’re involved in a serious relationship. I think we’ve been having convenient, casual sex.” He excuses himself to speak to one of his assistants, a chubby twenty-something in sweats and running shoes.

I stare out the windows, losing myself in the view. I think how easy bricks and mortar have it. All they have to do is stand there.

Terry pops back in and settles into a long-legged director’s chair. “Where were we?” he says, bridging his fingers and stretching. “At this point, I’m holding myself in reserve. I’m not giving little pieces of me away. Not in my work and not in my personal life. Not anymore. I don’t trust my judgment.”

“You’re not alone.”

He looks stern. “I am not going to invest my emotion in the wrong place anymore. I’m going to save it for real love.”

“But how will you know when it’s real love?”
Give me an answer I can work with.

“Good question. As children, we seem to know. Somewhere, in the growing up process, we forget how to love with all our hearts, in the forever way.”

As I leave Terry’s studio and hit the subway back to Penn Station, I’m feeling lower than a garden slug and half as frisky. The idea of running off into the woods and never coming back is looking better and better.

Man after man talked of being disillusioned when the woman of his choice turned out to have no identity, except the one he imagined for her. Was everyday love merely a case of self-hypnosis?

“If you give a guy a piece of candy and then pull it away and make him look for it, he’ll want it that much more.”

~ Frankie, 46, single

Case/ 505 Frankie

The roads are congested and the air is gray. I find Frankie’s bungalow just outside Atlantic City. Frankie has been on disability for seven years. A former state employee, he now spends most of his time renovating his tiny home. I’m pleased to discover that his wit is sharp, despite his claims of cabin fever.

With his gnarly beard, flashing dark eyes, Barry White voice, and hickory cane, Frankie is a man at odds with the world. He presents a hard shell with what I guess to be a soft inside.

His bungalow home is a two room affair, with kitchen and living room taking up 12 × 14 feet. I don’t see the bedroom. The total effect is cozy and not unpleasant. We sit at the kitchen table to talk. A black cat the size of an SUV makes a determined leap into my lap, while a golden retriever gazes up lovingly at her master.

Frankie’s in the midst of describing his close call with commitment. “I wouldn’t call it smothering but it was getting too comfortable.” He moves to the stove, puts on a stainless steel kettle, and fiddles with two mugs each bearing a casino logo. “Lipton okay?”

“Perfect.” I smile.

He stands by the stove waiting for the kettle to boil, and then pours the water in both mugs.

As he settles into his chair, he speaks, “I had to think about everything I did, before I did it. I didn’t want her to feel that I was leading her on.” He brings the mug to his lips but doesn’t drink. “I fear women that way. They’re vengeful.”

I take that comment in as I blow on my tea. “Let’s say this same girl didn’t want to get involved, would she have been more appealing then?”

“Oh yes.” The words sound mellow as they leave his lips. “It would have lasted a long time. She made it almost too easy. The relationship would have lasted longer if she had made me chase her. Guys like something they can’t get.”

“Let’s pretend that you had gotten married,” I ask him. “How would she have kept you interested physically and emotionally?”

He laughs. It’s a homey, textured sound. “She would be constantly coming up with new ideas. Not allowing us to get into a rut.”

I look around his little cabin. “Hmm.”

“She would always be setting some sort of goal. It would give us both something to shoot for. Goals keep a relationship stirring.”

The “G” word again. “What kind of goals are you talking about?”

Frankie leans over bringing his tea-breath within my range. “Not goals like adding a room or painting the house. Goals that make us both grow and stretch and become more than we were. That’s what life is all about.”

“So that’s what you would expect from a long term relationship?”

His phone rings, a jarring sound in the silence of the cabin. Frankie hobbles to the bedroom and speaks in a soft voice. “No, no. I can’t right now. I’ll call you back this afternoon.”

I sip my tea, enjoying the guy-ness of the setting.

He resettles in his chair, a strange look on his face. “That was her.”

“Her?” He lost me.

“My close call. She’s married now and has three children.”

I give him my extra special love investigator look.

“I don’t want to lead her on but I guarantee you, if I went out of my way, I could probably get her to come over here. She started calling me a few months ago.”

He looks sheepish. “I don’t mind talking to her, but when we get off the phone it is like ‘why did you call me?’ I haven’t seen you in twelve years, and you’re calling me to tell me you’re having your third kid. Why?”

I wonder myself.

“I told her, if her husband found out she was calling me, he’d go through the roof ... I would.”

Frankie studies my face. He knows I get it.

“You could say ‘what if ...’ to any girlfriend or relationship, but there are certain ones that are just there to haunt you.”

I think of Mark and wonder ... would he call me if he were married? A question bubble pops over my head. “If she left her husband for you, would you marry her?”

He looks at me, disappointedly. “Of course not, how could I ever trust her? I’ve only been involved in adultery once. It was great while it was going on. I went in with my eyes wide open but after it was over I felt like I was being stared at from above. I felt guilty because I knew that sure as hell I wouldn’t want that happening if I were the guy on the other side. That would send me over the edge. I think a lot of women go outside marriage to find relationships. But if the guy makes it too nice then suddenly his house is the house they’d rather be at.”

“Do you think you could have gotten involved with that woman on a permanent basis, knowing she’d already committed adultery with you?”

A worried look passes over his face. “That’s the thought that was just in my head. With the person I was with, yes. I understood her situation. She was getting mentally destroyed by her marriage. If she wasn’t married, I would have no problems dating her. I think she came to me because of what she was going through at home and mostly because I was someone she knew already. She would never go out and pick up a stranger.”

I force the SUV cat off my lap in order to get the circulation back in my legs. The cat returns a few minutes later, determinedly snuggling into my thighs.

“I believe in the seven year itch. At that point in a marriage they’ve had a least one kid and they’re headed down a different road and one of them is looking at what could have been. Most men screw up marriages. Once there are children, they feel permanently anchored. Men start feeling spiteful. Like, ‘I’m trapped.’ Now the attitude at home switches from ‘I’ve had a lousy day at work’ to ‘my life sucks.’ ‘I’d love to switch jobs, but now I have kids to support.’”

I’m feeling judgmental. I can’t control it. “Aren’t we talking about living up to commitments? The children didn’t ask to be born.”

“But remember, these guys are all my age now. They’ve slam-dunked themselves into a life and they’re stuck. They moved too quickly and didn’t plan. You don’t see me married yet. A good life comes from making careful decisions because you’re not the only one who pays the price if you screw up.”

I have to agree. The idea of spending extended time with anyone I know creeps me out. Is it because I haven’t met the right person or because I lost him long ago?

“So tell me about these couples who are your age.”

He smiles. “They can’t see their way out. So the marriage is screwing everything instead of helping them along. Then the woman starts looking up ex-boyfriends because her husband doesn’t want to listen to her anymore and there you go. The marriage is dead.”

“Tell me about breaking up with a woman,” I ask.

“I became harder toward her because I preferred that she broke up with me. It wasn’t actually me testing how much she would take. I was actually hoping she wouldn’t take anything.”