The Awesome Girl's Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men (2 page)

Risa’s accusation and Sharita’s approval felt insulting to me. I was Thursday, as bohemian as my name. As staunch a feminist as a struggling comedian with a low-paying day job could be. I had never needed contracts or vows or commitments before.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Tammy said. She pulled two books out of her white Gucci crocodile leather bag and handed them to Sharita and me. “I brought along copies of my sister-in-law’s new book.”

I glanced at the title:
The Awesome Girl’s Guide to Dating Extraordinary Men.
“Is this a dating book? I thought your sister-in-law was a career coach.”

“She is, but she says she has to give a lot of relationship advice, so she decided to write it all down. Isn’t that a fun idea for a book?”

Sharita flipped through it. “Is there anything in here about how she managed to land your fine brother? Because that’s the kind of advice I need.”

In Sharita’s opinion, Tammy’s sister-in-law, Davie Farrell, was exceptional not because of her mega-success as a life and career coach to the rich and famous, but because she had managed to date and keep a good black man. And the only thing that Sharita wanted more than making partner at her accounting firm was to date and keep a good black man. “Heck, at this point I’ll settle for decent,” she’d told me after her last breakup. “A decent guy with a regular job who takes me out every once in a while.”

Sharita, I knew, would do anything to figure out how Davie Farrell ended up with a black dreamboat like Tammy’s brother, James Farrell.

“No,” Tammy said with an apologetic frown. “It’s more like a general relationship advice book. What to look for in a man. How to be your best self. That kind of thing.”

“Oh,” Sharita said, setting the book aside. “Well, if I’m going to make partner by Christmas 2011, I won’t have a lot of free time to read.”

I also set the book aside, not because I didn’t have time to read it, but because I couldn’t see me, the queen of dating, reading a dating book just so I could land a husband.

“You didn’t bring me a copy?” Risa asked, all snarky half smile. Risa was, in her own words, “too cool to date men.”

“Like you’d actually stop pining over The One long enough to read a dating book anyway,” I said. “When was it you two broke up, anyway? Eight years ago?”

“I think it’s been nine,” Sharita said.

“Wow, you’ve been mooning over someone who dumped you at the beginning of the decade. A woman who’s never even met your best friends.”

Risa, having become used to us giving her a hard time about The One, took another sip of her coffee, which she drank in lieu of actually eating food whenever we all met for brunch. “If you knew her, you’d think she was worth it, too.”

Tammy started looking all distressed, like she did whenever any of us Smithies teased another one too hard. She hadn’t gone to Smith College with us and couldn’t really be called an honorary Smithie, either, since nothing about her old-money, Texas-accented, debutante background read “modern black Smithie” in any way. But she and Risa had become friends before Sharita and I had moved to Los Angeles, and though Risa, Sharita, and I were officially the Smith College best-friend trio, somehow Tammy, a former USC cheerleader, multi-millionaire heiress, and the current spokesmodel for Farrell Cosmetics, had been absorbed into our little clique. From what we could figure, the only reason she continued to hang out with us was because we were maybe the only group of black girlfriends in the entire Los Angeles metro area willing to fully embrace a way-too-blessed spokesmodel who could double in looks and temperament for a Disney princess.

Still, Tammy was a sweet girl. And with a trio as opinionated and loud-mouthed as Sharita, Risa, and me, it didn’t hurt to have a natural mediator in our fold.

“C’mon guys, stop picking on Risa,” she said, in that good-girl way of hers. “Let’s just enjoy our lunch together.”

This, of course, only made Sharita and me turn on Tammy and start grilling her about her own love life. “So you’re recommending your sister-in-law’s book,” I said. “Does that mean … ”

“… you’re going to start dating again?” Sharita finished.

Other than being exceedingly rich and beautiful, plus unfailingly polite and kind, here was the most interesting thing about Tammy: she used to date Mike Barker. Yeah,
that
Mike Barker. Before he became a huge movie star, he was actually engaged to Tammy, until he dumped her for some random cocktail waitress he met in Vegas. Tammy was destroyed and hadn’t dated since. So though Risa and she were as different as night and day, they had this one thing in common—a crippling inability to get over the assholes who had broken their hearts.

But Tammy shook her head at our nosy questions. “No, I enjoyed the book and I want to support Davie by spreading the word, but I think I’m going to stick with being single for now.”

“Yeah,” Risa said, smirking at me. “Not everybody’s dying to get married like you.”

“It was just a dream,” I said again, nearly shouting the words this time.

But at that point it was already too late. The movie
Inception
had been the sleeper hit of summer 2010 and Risa’s words had planted an idea, so to speak.

The next night, I went to an L.A. Derby Dolls game with an “aspiring director” (in L.A. terms this meant that he hadn’t actually gone to film school or made anything, but he had dreams and a day job as an assistant at a production company). I’d been one-month standing this guy for twenty-eight days, so we’d gotten to the point where we were just cozy enough to attend multiple events within the same date night. After the game we hit an after-party for a small play one of his friends had starred in for a three-week run. Then we went back to his Echo Park one-bedroom, all smoothed out on Tecate and free wine, for a Woody Allen movie viewing that got interrupted by a sudden, but not unexpected, bout of couch sex.

“That was great,” he said, when we both fell back against opposite arms of the couch, spent and out of breath. He ran a hand through his now very tousled black hair and smiled at me in that moony way that guys smile at women like me after almost a month of dating, even though I had said at the Fourth of July party where we’d met that he didn’t want to date me, because I was fucked up and emotionally unavailable.

Normally, I would have let this play out. Stopped returning his phone calls until the inevitable confrontation where I’d have to flat out tell him that I had no interest in seeing him again. I used to try to let guys down easier than this, but I had learned the hard way that saying things like “I’m not in a place to date anyone seriously right now” or “It’s not you, it’s me” or “I think we should pull back” only led to the last one-month stand calling me over
and over again, leaving voicemails begging for “closure,” while I was trying to hook up with the next one-month stand, until I was forced to have an even harsher, “I don’t want to see you anymore” conversation to get him to stop.

This, I had found during my many years of one-month standing, was the main problem with dating white boys exclusively. They were totally up for dating the girl that wore her emotional ineptitude on her sleeve, but they didn’t tolerate lighthearted breakups, and when they start to like that girl, in a way that’s about more than lust and wicked smiles and having fun, they don’t have the good sense to hide it.

So yeah, when the aspiring director smiled at me all goofy and happy, I knew it was time to implement the first phase of the one-month stand breakup and not answer the phone the next few times he called. But at that moment, looking into the eyes of yet another guy who liked me but wasn’t right for me, a powerful need to, for once, not have the complete emotionally disconnected upper hand in a relationship came over me. I wanted to have a guy like me and like him back—not like him back well enough, but really like him back in a way that made me smile at him the way the aspiring director was smiling at me.

It occurred to me that as much fun as being me had been up to this point, I had become sick of being me. I was tired of having so much fun. I wanted to take someone seriously.

I scrambled off the aspiring director’s IKEA couch and pulled back on my bra, my soft and faded Sweet Janes T-shirt, and the prairie skirt I’d tossed aside less than thirty minutes ago.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Listen,” I said, tugging on my panties. “I feel really bad about this, because technically, you should have gotten two or three more days before I dumped you. But I’m just going to stop this now. I don’t want to see you anymore.”

The aspiring director looked from side to side. “Was it something I did in bed?”

“No,” I said. “The truth is I don’t like you enough to want to see you anymore, and I think it’s time for me to start going out with guys I can see myself spending more than a month with.” I thought about that statement as it came out of my mouth and agreed with myself. “Yeah, it’s definitely time. You’re basically witnessing a big epiphany here.”

He blinked like I had just slapped him. “Wow, this conversation is really harsh.”

“Yeah, I know. It totally is, right? Really sorry about that,” I said, fighting the persistent, feminine urge to over-explain myself.

I opened up a can of Tecate from the six-pack we had purchased before coming back to his place. “Here, drink this,” I said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

This last line seemed like a good compromise between my suburban upbringing, which taught me to never say what was on my mind, and my undergrad education, which had insisted I speak my truth always, even if it made others uncomfortable. Then I hightailed it out of there.

Maybe I was simply curious about what Davie Farrell would have to say about finding lasting love or maybe I was looking for answers to why my one-month stands had, as of this particular night, made me start to dislike myself. But for whatever reason, I opened the book when I got home. I only meant to read the first page, but I stayed up all night, enthralled by the dating advice within. And when I finished the book in the wee hours of the morning, it seemed to me that the Universe was trying to tell me something.

I had started having this weird dream in June;
Inception,
a movie all about weird dreams, had come out in mid-July. On the last day of July, Risa had informed me that I had an itch to get married. And then on the first day of August, I had read a dating book that actually made sense.

That couldn’t all be coincidence. Could it?

I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew, I was back in the farmers market, chasing after my literal dream guy again …

“Okay, okay, I’ll marry you,” I said.

He stopped, turned around, and—

My alarm clock went off with a loud, dream-destroying electronic bleat. I hit the snooze button. I had been planning to wash my hair that day and possibly retwist my dreadlocks, a beauty task I’d been meaning to check off my mental list since the Friday before, but in the cold, harsh light of Monday morning, I decided that it would have to wait for ten more minutes. Then another ten minutes when I pushed the snooze button again. And when my alarm went off a third time, I decided to just wear a knit tam to work and pushed “snooze” again.

Almost as soon as I did, though, a fist pounded on my closed bedroom door, causing it to rattle inside its jamb. “Either get your lazy bag of bones out of bed or shut off the bleeding alarm clock,” a man’s voice yelled on the other side of my door.

At least that’s what I thought he said. Benny, my temporary roommate, was Scottish—and not Scottish in the clever, charming way depicted in romance novels set in the Highlands. No, he was some overly large grumpy troll version of Scotsman, who spoke a garbled plaid patois that I couldn’t even begin to understand.

This hadn’t been so much of a problem when he had just been dating my English roommate, Abigail, and I only saw him in passing. Back then I smiled and nodded sort of vacantly whenever he spoke to me, which kept our conversations short. But then Abigail got a production assistant gig on a World War II movie filming in Prague for three months, and she and Benny decided to move in together when she got back. And since his lease was up on his Koreatown one-bedroom, he figured it would be cheaper to sublet Abigail’s room in our North Hollywood apartment while she worked in Prague. He and Abigail wanted to save up first and last month’s rent on a bigger, better apartment in Los Feliz, which they would be renting as soon as Abigail came back from Europe.

At least, that’s how Abigail had explained it to me. But I didn’t really buy it. I was fairly sure that Benny was subletting for the street parking. Abigail had confessed in the earliest months of their relationship that the reason he always opted to sleep over at our apartment (even though he lived alone and maybe should have been hosting Abigail) was because most nights neither of them felt up to a “desperate parking-space search,” followed up by a possible one- to three-mile hike back to his apartment in Koreatown.

Still, I couldn’t complain too much. I got to put off searching for a new roommate until Abigail came back. And Benny had become the best alarm clock I’d ever had. Even if I couldn’t understand a word he said.

“I’m getting up,” I yelled back.

He said something else in Scottish, before clomping away from the door in the Doc Marten boots he wore to work as opposed to sneakers like every other production assistant in Los Angeles. I stretched once, twice, let out a big yawn, and finally got up, pulling on some black yoga pants to go underneath the gray-and-blue Smith College T-shirt that I wore to bed every night. I took my scarf off and ran my hands through my locks to give them some volume, still thinking about the dream, which had seemed especially vivid this time.

Why did the alarm clock always have to go off right before I got to the good part?
I wondered as I padded into the kitchen. I found Benny at the table, eating a bowl of Trader Joe’s cornflakes and reading the
Los Angeles Times
. This had become a somewhat familiar sight, since Abigail used to do the same thing every morning.

After four years of living in L.A., from what I could tell, the only people who ever read the paper version of the
Los Angeles Times
were either in the AARP set or from the U.K. They had this cultural thing about reading actual newspapers, and on Sunday mornings I would often find both Abigail and Benny with a pile of them scattered on the kitchen table, including the
LAT
, the
Guardian
, the
Wall Street Journal
, and a couple of gossipy trades from England, like the
Daily Mail
and the
Sun
.