The One - No one said it would be easy (19 page)

Which was not what he smelled like – that was the first thing I noticed during our first, last and only date.  He smelled just awful. Sickly, woody, heavy and gooey, reminiscent of an old dandy. Musty, like I imagined the smell in the sleeping compartments of the old Orient Express. I suppose this was the absolute latest in hip luxury scent as worn by hip luxury-label managers, and my nose really had no idea. But whatever the reason, my nose wrinkled its nose. And that was that – the guy could have looked like Adonis personified, it wouldn’t have mattered. He was finished. Another one bites the dust, I thought. And how do I get out of this one? I rolled my inner eyes in irritation but greeted him overly charmingly and flirtily so that he wouldn’t notice that my inner walls had long come up. Aside from the fact that he wafted about in this cloud of creepy perfume, he’d kept me waiting for two hours and didn’t look remotely as good as in his photos. He was smartly dressed, I’ll give him that – his scrawny body was dressed in the finest cloth money can buy, and there you have the problem: he was scrawny, brittle and pale.

No wicked little smile in his eyes. No joy in his face. Just these compulsive efforts to appear super respectable. Maybe he needed that for his job, but not when he was after a woman! My God, it’s so easy to win the heart of a woman: boyish charm, a wicked sense of humor and the playfulness of a child, that’s pretty much all it takes! See exhibit A: Robbie Williams. Number Eighteen, however, was a stick-up-his-butt merchant, as stiff and brittle as a Neanderthalian bone from the museum. It was a miracle he didn’t leave a trail of dusty bone crumbs behind. He didn’t even utilize his cool macho-asshole I-wanna-fuck-you-now number. He seemed totally insecure, tense and the diametrical opposite of sexy and confident. If only he’d run with the hard-boiled macho act. But as it was, he seemed as innocuous as a pig in a blanket.

However, I somehow had to get through this date. Sadly, I still hadn’t mastered the I-am-leaving-right-now number. We went to a dim little bar and I ordered a high-voltage cocktail in the hopes of being better able to cope with the evening. He ordered a Virgin Colada, a cocktail with zero alcohol. Most commendable, since he was going to drive – but what it meant for me was that he would stay like this all night, so dour and stiff and boring. Wow, how wonderful! For the first time ever I was grateful that the place was so full of cigarette smoke that your lungs were thinking of emigrating – it was better than constantly having your nose assaulted by his dreadful stinky perfume. We chatted about this and that, but the conversation never really got going. Where the hell was the cool “Want to fuck?” guy? I guess he had chosen a strategy that was out of his league and now he was tripping over his missing courage. There’s marketing guys for you! They promise you the earth with their cunning, expensive marketing-advertising-slang, but when it comes right down to it, you’re left bitterly disappointed because the promised unforgettable consumer experience doesn’t materialize. Even a luxury-label T-shirt with a price tag of 230 euros is really just a piece of cotton, the 110-euros-for-20-ml miracle cream can’t magically nuke all those wobbly pockets of orange-peel skin, and a guy who is looking for a woman on the Internet is just another poor sod who can’t get one in real life. That’s how it is. Yes, Sir.

Since I had no interest in the guy at all, I had some fun messing him about. I adopted the role of the fuck-crazy hussy and tormented him mercilessly. I was the man-eater who had no interest in being faithful, lasciviously smoked although he was a confirmed non-smoker, and flaunted my not unattractive figure for him to see by going to the ladies’ room a lot, sauntering across the room in an exaggeratedly slow and hip swaying fashion. I could feel his eyes on my butt. And I grinned at the thought of how he was getting his hopes up, which I would be pleased to dash in due course. The smug bastard. Some not very entertaining while later I asked if he would drive me home and, seeing his chance for a satisfactory culmination of the evening, he agreed. When we arrived at my house, I thanked him politely for the nice evening and for driving me home, and got out. Number Eighteen was entirely bewildered – apparently he hadn’t envisaged the end of the evening quite like that. He got out of the car, too, and mumbled: “But I thought, well, how about, well, what about me coming in for a nightcap?” He didn’t even have the balls to look at me. I laughed, shook my head, went through the obligatory kiss-left-kiss-right routine, waved at him and disappeared behind my front door. He didn’t contact me, I didn’t contact him. The deed was done and it hadn’t been fun. What an idiot. As was I, that’s for sure. Still, at least I couldn’t blame myself for not trying all possible avenues. But even so, it was astonishingly naïve to assume that Prince Charming was waiting for me out there in cyberspace. I think I’d watched “You’ve Got Mail” once too often!

Number Nineteen: The old man in my bed

I was slowly coming to the conclusion that I wanted a proper man in my life now. A real man. Someone with success and experience under his belt. I started to define exactly what my dream man should be and have. I was sick to the teeth of wishy-washy guys who didn’t have a clue what they wanted or who they were or where they were headed. I wanted someone who’d grown out of these phases. I wanted someone who would lay the world at my feet. My mum’s words of wisdom reverberated in my ears: “Find a man who has more to offer you than some crummy student digs and prepackaged salami from the cut-price food store.” OK – I’m going to listen to my mum because she’s almost always right!  

When I was little and naïve, I was sure that you can’t help who you fall in love with. It just happens. And if he happens to be some destitute art student space cadet, then so be it – love is sacrosanct and can’t be reduced to mere material things. However, by now I clearly had good reason to revise my opinion. Naturally, I still didn’t believe some silicone-enhanced twenty-three-year-old blonde marrying a wizened seventy-eight-year-old multi-millionaire and whispering: “It’s true love – honest!” whilst fluttering their eyelashes at the cameras. But I am happy to announce I have extended my wish list for dream-man-material to include some important new attributes. My Mr. Right must be successful and well off, or if he isn’t yet, he must be well on his way. That’s how it is for me. And, let’s be honest: success is sexy. Some ratty misery-guts who constantly goes on about the horrors of capitalism, the evilness of money and the arrogance and greed of career-oriented people – is that supposed to be sexy? Certainly not! It’s extremely uncool. Who wants a whining garden gnome by her side? There’s a simple explanation why success makes sexy: a successful person does what he is good at, and he does it well. And that gives him satisfaction. Which is why he is happy and at peace with himself. And someone who is at peace is a superb partner. No relationship power games, no dramas, no feeling obligated to make the other person happy. Just simply enjoying each other’s company. That’s what it’s all about. And that’s damn difficult with a cynical, grouchy, poison-spitting loser. The correlation of success and increased access to financial means is a nice added value, making matters even sweeter.

Incidentally, the same goes for women. All those girlies who are too timid, too lazy and too lame to take charge of their own happiness are their own worst enemies. Don’t hook up with some guy and expect him to make you happy for life! You’ll need to provide your own happiness. And once you’re able to do that, your relationships will automatically be a lot less troublesome. I don’t mean to say you need to be single to find happiness – no, not at all. What I do mean to say is that, even when you’re in a relationship, you don’t hand over responsibility for yourself and your own life to your partner. What’s the opposite of vicious circle? Let’s call it a happy circle. I know it’s not a real term, I made it up, but who cares – it’s true: make yourself happy and you’ll automatically make your beloved happy. And when your beloved is happy, he will in turn make you happy. And so on and so forth, and they lived and loved happily ever after. That’s the theory.

Filled with these pearls of wisdom and a whole new thirst for action, I began to screen the guys around me based on my new criteria. While spending a summer Sunday in a beer garden with a girl friend, my eyes fell on exactly the kind of guy that fit my newly established preferences. My Number Nineteen. He was sitting nonchalantly on a wall and seemed to be waiting for someone. He had a lot of whitish-gray gelled back hair, a receding hairline, aviator sunglasses on his nose, wore an expensively labeled polo shirt and jeans with the legs rolled up, had flip-flops on his feet and all in all looked very striking and interesting. Age-wise I estimated him to be in his late thirties, early forties. Yes it’s really true – gray-haired men are utterly attractive, provided the whole package is fresh and sexy. He seemed totally cool, the way he sat there. He didn’t play at being cool like all those twenty-year-old posers, he didn’t have to. He simply was cool. I kept watching him and the more I did, the more I liked what I saw. A wild discussion was raging inside my head: he’s much too old! How do you propose a little chickie like you would even get anywhere near him? And I’ll bet he’s married!

I didn’t mention any of these summertime fantasies to my girl friend. And, as coincidence would have it, the cool guy suddenly looked our way and started to wave, and my friend waved back. I was flabbergasted. Unbelievable – she knew him! There I was, my head awash with all kinds of convoluted how-to-get-to-know-him scenarios complete with potential success ratios, and then it turns out she knows him! She called him over and I could not believe my luck. Now, don’t start flapping like an overexcited moorhen, just put on your brightest, most dazzling smile, be charming and interesting and do your superwoman thing. I briefly checked (in my head) what I was wearing and thanked God that I hadn’t thrown on my usual sloppy-Sunday gear. I’d chosen Sunday-smart-but-casual style, a cool skirt with a tight top, you couldn’t really go wrong with that. Which meant that I didn’t have to sit there and berate myself for wearing the wrong outfit. The guy came over and sat with us, my friend introduced us. Number Nineteen looked quite passable even without his sunglasses on. To start with, the gentleman didn’t seem overly interested in me and conducted an animated conversation with my friend, without ever once including me. Damn! I was offended. Evidently, I had to resort to more forceful subterfuge. I went to get more drinks, entirely for strategic reasons. I was giving Number Nineteen the benefit of seeing me in all my glory. I was well aware of my luscious figure and was prepared to make best use of it in an important situation like this. It requires an astonishing degree of coordination to rise sylphlike from a beer table bench and stride catwalk-style along the pebbled path in your flip-flops. I must have managed quite well though, because later Number Nineteen told me how smitten he was with the way I moved and that he’d been quite unable to take his eyes off my butt. It worked! I’m such a hussy!

When I came back, our gray-haired golden boy suddenly seemed interested in me. We started to chitchat and I noticed that his ice-blue eyes went very well with his gray hair. We also found out – like there hadn’t been enough coincidence already – that we were job neighbors. He was the marketing manager of a large music company and worked literally a few meters away from my office. That sounded good. Being job neighbors gave me the perfect excuse for suggesting we should meet up sometime for a harmless, noncommittal business lunch. The power of networking and all that. Yeah, right! The suggestion found favor, Number Nineteen gave me his business card. Jubilation: I’d managed to acquire email address and phone number of the coolest guy in the entire beer garden! And it wasn’t exactly a small beer garden, either! When he left, Number Nineteen again made a point of asking me to get in touch. Yesyes I will, certainly I will, I said in my most honeyed voice. And then – women can be such bitches! – for no good reason at all, my girl friend threw a wrench in the gears of my freshly awakened hope for a new love. She had of course noticed what was going on, which would have been hard to miss, since my smile-and-charm offensive was radiating full-blast from here to Kandahar. The guy couldn’t help but be captivated, there was no escaping my flirt-attack. As soon as he’d gone, she hissed at me: “Forget it! That guy’s had enough of women. He just split up with his girlfriend of fifteen years.” Dressed up as good advice, it really just meant, hands off. Stupid ass-cow. Still – pleased to hear it, because it meant that he wasn’t attached anymore. Excellent. Watch out – here I come!
 

I did of course adhere to the unofficial rules of dating and waited a while before getting in touch with Number Nineteen. After some days, I wrote him a little email. It’s a wonderful achievement of modern technology to be able to make first contact by electronic mail. It may be a trifle cumbersome to spend an entire afternoon puzzling over three measly lines of text, followed by the every-second-on-the-second checking of incoming mail. But it’s still better than the previously required embarrassed mumblings on the phone. I wrote to remind him of our casually planned business lunch, and asked when would be a good time. Then I spent hours trying to arrange and rearrange those few words in ways that would make them sound harmless, witty and charming but not brash or even presumptuous. The delete-button had a busy time. In the end I just pressed “send” and off it went. Shit! What now? What if he didn’t reply? What if he only talked with me to be polite and had never had the faintest intention of meeting up with me? Panic was running riot in my head. It was too late anyway. Number Nineteen kept me waiting. For two days. But then he replied. His email left me with a big question mark stamped on my forehead, his style was so strange. Like Shakespeare on ecstasy, sending a telegram. Short hacked-off sentences trying to sound poetic. Hm – ominous. The man seemed to be somewhat deranged. But never mind – maybe his job required a degree of lunacy. The result of this dadaesque exchange of emails: a date. A real one. Not a business lunch, no, a real one with dinner and cinema and everything. That was good too – why waste time?

As ever, I was way too early, damn it I should really kick that habit. Be late, make them wait, that’s the way to go. Evidently he had decided on the diva routine. When he finally showed up, he was still fully stressed out, talking manically on the phone and not looking the slightest bit like someone with the time or the inclination to go on a romantic date with me. Oh super – either he’s on some weird trip to impress me, or he’s really that stressed out. Either way spelt crap for me because whatever the reason, I felt totally superfluous and very silly. Without even a proper “hello, how are you” he waved me into the restaurant and even ordered with his mobile clamped to his ear. Sweat dripped down his forehead. Wonderful – won’t this be a fun evening! And exactly how are you supposed to react? Go all prissy, roll your eyes and show your irritation? Or be all docile and submissive and giggle a sweet “oh it doesn’t matter”? And there you have it – that’s exactly why this kind of situation is so damn annoying. Not because the guy feels he has to conduct his business on your time, but because in your role of waiting date-partner, you’re going to come out looking crap, whatever you do. And frankly, someone who puts a lady in a position where her only choice is between pestilence and cholera definitely needs additional coaching in gentlemanly behavior!

Eventually, Mr. Super-Important had finished his business dealings, shut his mobile off and apologized for his atrocious conduct. At least he’d noticed! But even so the whole thing seemed off, he wasn’t really there, was edgy, hectic, tense. And if a guy can’t even be fully present at a first date, it would be safe to assume that his interest is probably not all-encompassing. Dinner with him was unspectacular, to put it mildly. I was quite excited to start with but there were no sparks of any kind. It was sobering. Making a choice based on your pre-listed preferences doesn’t really cut it. You may have caught the coolest guy in the known universe, but if there’s no spark – forget it! Number Nineteen no longer was the cool guy from the beer garden, he suddenly just seemed pale, gray, old. Apropos old – he was forty, I was in my mid-twenties. Some fifteen years stood between us. Young chickie that I was, I thought it funny to date a forty-year-old, even a bit weird. Forty was so very far away. And forty was definitely on a different planet to thirty.
Part two of the up to now rather dreary evening was the cinema. Number Nineteen let me choose the movie. Not an easy task. What do you pick for a first date? Some idiot action thing, in an attempt to select something he might like? Or a romantic comedy, which you’ll enjoy but which will bore the guy to tears? Some independent-cinema wobbly-framed art movie, to give you that highly intellectual air? This is no trivial matter. I decided on a roadmovie-independent-comedy that was hailed as critic’s favorite. The movie was bizarre, which kind of befitted the evening. But, no sparks. None. And not even a suggestion of a butterfly in my stomach. This really was a lesson in the difference between theory (“I’m going after the coolest guy around”) and practice: you can’t hurry love. Number Nineteen took me home like a good boy, I got out of his car like a good girl, and he said a courteous thank you for the nice evening. Neither of us felt like kissing. I walked up to my house and went in like a good girl. What a complete waste of time! I learned one thing though: even the most super-cool of all cool guys, complete with super-cool job and super-cool sunglasses, can turn out to be the super-king of boring old farts. Well, what that means is, don’t stress when you meet another one of those impressive looking guys – nothing to get excited about!

I was pretty sure that I’d seen the last of Number Nineteen after our disastrous date. But to my great surprise, he sent me a really sweet after-date text message. I hadn’t expected it at all. Well, maybe the date hadn’t been that bad after all. And there was another surprise the next day. Since it was summer and bombing hot, my gray-haired Mr. Boring invited me to an after-job outing to the nearest swimming lake. My first thought: clever boy, checking the goods before he buys, he’ll just want to see you in a bikini. But since I had nothing better to do – why not. Number Nineteen picked me up in a gold-colored classic-convertible-something-or-other, an awesome car, extremely cool. Even though I don’t really care about cars at all. There he was, Number Nineteen, smart polo shirt, aviator sunglasses, hey-babe smile on his lips. Finally! Mr. Cool was back again. Maybe he’d just had an off-day during our date. Well of course he’ll get a second chance, no question – and in one fell swoop I was sitting in his iconic vehicle. I felt very glamorous indeed, and the thought of maybe going on more outings like this with Number Nineteen wasn’t exactly unappetizing. Manipulated by motorized illusions, I decided to do my utmost to fall in love.