Flotsam

My ex-boyfriend has a Website. On this Website is a guest book. And in this guest book are 52 messages from women he met on his recent tour of Eastern Europe.
“Please come back! Bulgaria misses you!” “Romania loves you!” “The Czech Republic fondles itself whilst pining for your return!”—These messages were amusing for several, even tens of seconds. They were amusing until I realized that while my ex-boyfriend was bringing Eastern Europe—perhaps quite literally—to its knees, I was mastering my single serving Osso Buco recipe and playing Canasta with the retired schoolteacher who lived down the hall.

My friends approach romance with a Horatio Alger-esque grit and determination I find baffling. None of them has been without a relationship for more than a few weeks, and were I to bemoan my lack of one, I would be told curtly “You’re not trying,” which is true, but as they co-opt the tone and diction of my third grade teacher, I wonder: why should I pursue love, “la belle amour,” with a steely Rosie the Riveter glint in my eye?
After dwelling for a few seconds more on the guestbook and my ex’s trip abroad (a tour which might appropriately be titled “Waitresses of the Eastern Bloc.”) I begin to wonder if both my friends and third grade teacher have been right all along. None of my report cards showed an “A” for effort—perhaps, once again, I am failing to live up to my potential.

This morning, in a box of books marked “25 cents,” I found How to Pick Up a Man, by Dian Hanson. It was published in 1982 and on the back is a full-page picture of the author, her hair voluminous and feathery, her eyes as distinctly lined and carefully demarcated as countries on a map. It’s a black and white photograph, but this eyeliner is obviously blue. I skim the panels of the dust jacket.
“Even the most handsome and successful men are desperately afraid of rejection. Thus, women who have the gumption, foresight, and adventurousness to remove this fear are often greeted with acceptance bordering on worship.”

It was only a quarter. And anyway, if I were serious about “picking up men,” I wouldn’t buy a book that is twenty years old, that speaks buoyantly of “women’s new freedoms” and New Wave clubs, that ends its first chapter with the sentence “The eighties is the age of sharing, but you must reach out to get your piece of this great new world.”

I do not remove the book from my purse until I am safely home, but even then, it might be a slim volume of toddler pornography, the way I read the introduction with one hand over the title, one eye fixed on my locked apartment door. Here is what I read:
“This lively and happy and mind-opening book shows you exactly how to introduce yourself to all those appealing men you see about you every day, on buses and planes, in supermarkets and hardware stores…”
Perhaps Ms. Hanson’s experience of public transportation has differed from my own. Perhaps the stores in her neighborhood are peopled rather more attractively than those I frequent. Still, it is not an opening that inspires confidence, and I decide that I am wasting my time, reading introductions—being the sort of girl who reads introductions is how I ended up clammily clutching a man-catching book in my studio apartment, like some Cathy-comics reader, in the first place. What I need is action. What I need is Horatio Alger. What I need is the section beginning on page thirteen, entitled “Ten Men Tell You How They Feel.”
This book, Ms. Hanson reminds me, is more than the whimsical suggestions of one woman. Her insights are based upon hundreds of interviews with real, live men—more importantly, upon the answers given by Ten Attractive Men (presumably found on buses and planes, in supermarkets and hardware stores) to a detailed and carefully composed questionnaire. In this section are their answers to such weighty questions as: “Does getting picked up undermine your masculine role?” and “Do you consider a woman cheap for introducing herself to you? If so, what can she do to dissuade you from thinking she is ‘that kind of girl?’”
In the face of such meticulous empirical research I read carefully, keeping a pencil nearby to mark significant passages. I make it through Robert, Alex, Hal, Ted, Michael, Joseph, and Gil. I do not flinch when Alex says “I find women I sleep with the night I meet them full of life and guts and danger!” or when Gil makes the dubious assertion that “Today we have three kids, just because she had the boldness to walk up and say ‘Hi’.” But the following, from a gentleman named Douglas, in answer to the question: “Have you ever been picked up by a woman and, if so, How?” proves too much for me.
“This took place in a bar. I walked in; she and I looked at each other; she said ‘You look like you could use a drink’; we talked, and within fifteen minutes she made it quite clear that I had no choice. I was hers for the evening. We’re still going out. I guess in a way I kind of like being dominated by a woman. My mother was a very commanding person.”

I’m as eager to please as the next girl, but if Dian Hanson thinks I am going to date someone over whom I am obliged to brandish a whip whilst wearing a flowered housecoat, she is much mistaken. Something tells me Douglas will end by stabbing his eyes out with a brooch, and I want no part of it, potential “acceptance bordering on worship” notwithstanding. I met my last two boyfriends while buying produce and knitting, respectively. Both times I was minding my own business, neither fondling the melons in a suggestive fashion nor knitting anything more titillating than a scarf.

I keep my behavior with suitors firmly in neutral, friendly territory until I am kissed. Sometimes I give small clues—an extra coat of lipgloss, a non-committally soft smile. Occasionally I forget myself with a fond glance. Still, after the other party has made their move, I generally find that my capitulation was unexpected. That their kiss was a heroic last stand in a battle they were sure had been lost a dinner and a movie ago.
I have always regarded flirting as a dangerous and ultimately foolhardy endeavor, like bungee jumping or renting an apartment on a fault line. Trouble will find you, all on it’s own. It knows where you live. If you’re bored, read something. I read a lot.

As I put How to Pick Up a Man in a drawer, I tell myself it is better that strangers stay what they are—strange—until chance throws us forcibly together in some amusingly madcap fashion. Perhaps my own true love will knock me into a river as he bicycles along the pier. Perhaps we will meet at the circus, or the Zoo, or at the scene of a grisly automobile accident. Perhaps he will catch me as I leap, despondent, from the roof of my apartment building.
I remind myself that this uncertainty is thrilling, much more so than the Machiavellian pursuit of someone to love.
I tell myself I like the frisson of possibility that drapes each hour when one adopts a “Que Sera Sera” attitude towards relationships. I ignore the fact that “frisson” is a word I would never, ever use in my daily life; that its presence in the previous sentence is an obvious attempt to add a sibilant, French glamour to my loneliness.
“You can’t hurry love,” I tell myself queasily, “No, you just have to wait.”

From “How to Pick Up a Man,” page 34:
“There are so many men in the world, approximately two billion, that there really is no man you have to have.”
In college I became, for a time, resigned to living out my days in solitude. This was near the end of what I referred to as my pointillist period, peopled largely with men who, while seemingly rational from a distance, made less and less sense the closer I came to them. Sitting at my dressing table, hiccoughing and gazing tearfully at my reflection, I imagined I would devote the bulk of my future years to watching soap operas, completing crossword puzzles, and ogling the mailman. For dinner I would prepare a “Microwaveable Chicken Kiev For One” frozen entrée, which wouldn’t cook all the way through, and I would spend the evening gumming at my chicken Kiev Popsicle and squinting myopically at “Wheel of Fortune.” When I died—crushed under a heavy appliance I had been trying to move in an effort to add variety to my life by rearranging my furniture—it would be weeks before they found me, my eloquently orthopedic shoes jutting from beneath the refrigerator, too many cats circling my ankles and yowling piteously.

From page 147:
“When you’ve met an artist or craftsman, have visited his shop, seen his show and still can’t think of a way to get his attention, think of found objects. A beautiful shard of glass, a twisted old light fixture, a doll’s leg, or a bundle of dowels glimpsed in the trash might be just what an artist would love.”
Tomorrow, as I sit plushly in the booth of a tony drinking establishment, I will see a man standing near the door. I have seen him here before, talked to him even, once, while I waited at the bar for a drink. His name is Tim or Tom or Todd, one of those, and he is telling a story, now, making rapid hand circles in the air to indicate speed. He is laughing attractively. He holds an unidentified beverage, and I am swiftly jealous of the cupped glass under his fingers. I smile at him vaguely, hoping that if he finds me repellent he will assume I am merely drunk and smiling at everybody.
He smiles back.
Mutely, motionless, I try to lure him to my table with a combination of telepathy and eye contact, explaining silently that I would invite him over with words if I were more certain that yes, I am exactly what he is looking for, his doll’s leg, his shard of glass, his bundle of dowels. My hand flutters over my napkin like an injured bird as I quietly fail to wave in his direction. And as I look down at my feet in their shining spiky shoes, shoes that cost me an entire paycheck, I seem to see their cunning, tiny straps become sensible beige laces, and instead of a delicate heel there hovers into view a pale, rubbery, eloquently orthopedic sole.

2001. All Rights Reserved.