A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl (5 page)

Once school had ended last spring, but before my summer as a reporter on Long Island began, I immediately immersed myself in the cathode hot tub of American culture. On any evening in early June I hunkered down in front of Colonial Club’s TV, deliciously slack-jawed while advertisements played the summer hard sell, showering this winter shut-in with scenes of beach frolic, the open road and heavy, heavy socializing.

The message fit nicely with the brochures sent to the
Newsday
interns. TV said
what
to do, while the booklets and maps told me
where
to do it. (With
whom
was the problem.) Equipped with my first car, the Newsday social calendar and, of course, lots of gasoline, I was bound and determined to enjoy myself, even if I nearly killed myself in the process.

My main outlet for this urge was the Long Island singles scene. Various groups ran notices in
Newsday
, and, as a total stranger to such activities, I decided to investigate some of them. Beneath my thoughts then was an image of the mythical summer romance, a way of celebrating and sharing the first season of being truly independent.

As things transpired, Murphy’s Law—if something can go wrong, it will—became the organizing principle of my adventures, as the bubble of expectations shrank rapidly after continual prickings. Like a surfer who paddles farther and farther out to sea in search of the perfect wave, I wasted a lot of time looking for something that wasn’t there, while missing the lesser but more accessible possibilities for diversion. Once I shed the Mr. Goodbar mentality, things improved. There’s nothing wrong with watching the Yankees with neighbors.

So there were lessons to be learned, or relearned in some cases, over the summer. Mainly, I realized that in life, unlike sports, you don’t have to score to win. To make a deliberate search for the love of your life—whether at singles’ bars or their collegiate equivalent, club parties—is an exercise in futility. Friends are made, not captured.

Freshmen should keep that in mind as they pass through the swirl of introductions and forgotten names this week. More than high grades or a superficial social visibility, the friends you make and the experiences you share will give Princeton a meaning and fullness that will remain with you long after academic matters have slipped into the past. [Incredibly enough, this pathetic attempt to rationalize socio-sexual failure turned out to be true.]

Different adventures yielded different lessons.
For freshmen and others who prefer to experience such things vicariously, the following vignettes should suffice.

You’re your own best transportation.
You invite disaster when you must rely upon the good will of other people to meet your transportation needs. Nobody ever wants to leave when you do. Once, to get to a church singles dance, I left my car at the Hicksville train station and patriotically rode the fabled Long Island Rail Road to Carle Place and saved a few precious ounces of gas. Nobody at the dance knew when I could get a train back to Hicksville. A young woman had offered to drive me back, so I didn’t worry. My easy state of mind lasted about as long as the dance did. Gee-whiz, the would-be driver said, as she primly wrung her hands, she couldn’t give me a ride after all, because I was a strange man and her parents wouldn’t want her to give potential weirdos rides at one in the morning. She was adamant, and even an offer to let her examine my press card was to no avail. Finally, after considerable waiting and cursing on a chilly train platform, a member of the clean-up crew took me to my car.

Quality does not assure compatibility.
This is just a rephrasing of the King Midas Dilemma. Why else would I have gotten intensely bored as the only male in a singles group’s post-movie trip to that noted eatery, the Syosset Restaurant? The women—two fairly young, two others better described as “matronly”—were nice enough, but the conversation moved into areas we never explored in Philosophy 200, or even during Freshman Week’s beery confessions. Husbands, ex-husbands, baby-sitters, startling propositions and the ultimate truths contained in the movie
Manhattan
made me very, very sleepy. My rather obvious foot-tapping was both a signal for somebody to take me to the parking lot where the group had gathered and a means of combating waves of grogginess.

When opportunity knocks, don’t close the door.
If you do, try not to catch your fingers in it. This became apparent one Saturday evening at the Lone Star Café, a Fifth Avenue hangout for visiting oilmen, Gucci cowboys and people who crave Pearl Beer and guacamole dip. While waiting at the bar for two other journalists, a young woman—a teacher—began talking to me. Like a light in the control booth at Three Mile Island the word “contact!” began flashing in my mind. We chatted, but when one of the friends I was expecting arrived, I turned my attention to her and felt no allegiance to the teacher whose acquaintance I had just made. After a while the teacher left. This didn’t really bother me, because two others had replaced her, and social Nirvana, I was sure, was dawning. As it was, I saw neither of these two again, a state of affairs that made me ruefully appreciate the teacher even as memories of the brief encounter faded. [I can still picture the woman sitting with me at the bar. She might have been a lexicographer. Not for the last time did I miss an opportunity. Where is she now?]

Look for a catharsis.
The most effective way of dealing with the feelings of frustration and listlessness that strike everybody at one time or another is to lay them on the table, confront them and then move ahead. Talking with my landlady always helped me. [My landlady in Old Bethpage was a
Newsday
librarian, and I have fond memories of our summer. As I was leaving for a post-internship trip home to Texas, I surprised her with a going away gift, the just-published
Sophie’s Choice
.] Once you realize that the great cosmic forces are not thumbing their noses in your direction, the malaise becomes less intense. One Saturday, in a particularly superfluous mood, I walked past a movie line near Greenwich Village. The crowd had just started moving in, and the marquee bore the names of films by Ingmar Bergman, whose work I had never seen.

There followed an evening of Liv Ullmann and rollicking Scandinavian angst. It was just what the doctor ordered. After three hours of
Autumn Sonata
and
Cries and Whispers
, I felt great and practically bounced up to Penn Station.

In the 1980s, I generated a social life from the time-tested ways (introductions, blind luck) and through the personals section of
New York
magazine, with an occasional dip into the
Village Voice
and New York’s
Jewish Week.

Every week, New York offered up columns of possibilities. From the view of twenty-five years later, the process was astoundingly pokey: Find an ad, write a letter, stick in a picture, apply a stamp, mail, and wait. And wait. If a woman responded, the lag time between mail and call could make it hard to remember who was who, so I typically clipped the ad from the magazine and wrote down the date I sent a letter. Occasionally, I noted the name of the woman and when she responded. Until about a decade ago, the technology of romance had changed little since Babylonian singles exchanged cuneiform calling cards at village wells. Introductions were personal, random encounters at parties or on subway platforms, or via cumbersome and thinly informed ads.

Between 1980 and 1987 my relationships resulted from old-fashioned introductions and responses to
New York
and
Village Voice
ads. All involved Jewish women, and all but one lived in Manhattan when we dated. I remember odd details about them. One
New York
ad, which led to an eighteen-month relationship spanning 1985-1986, read, “Witty, Jewish Female Exec—26, seeks Jewish professional, male 26-32, 5’7” or over, who loves NY and wants to share it.” One woman had an older father—so old he had fought in the Kaiser’s army in World War I. Another’s mother escaped on the last children’s transport out of Germany. Another tried to win my affections by exclaiming, “I’ve been fucked so many times I had to get a bigger diaphragm!” One was with me on a cold January night in 1984 when I learned my mother died of cancer in Tyler, Texas. These and other women moved on with their lives—marriage, children, divorces. One died, and two found me on the Internet.

While I was socially asleep during my dozen years of marriage, the Internet blasted apart the technology of the lovelorn.

Online dating has transformed the way people seek, meet, and, sometimes, meet again. It exploded opportunities for browsing and contact, driving curious hearts across multiple time zones in the search for what Chana, from Latin America, called the
media naranja
, a Spanish colloquialism for your “better half” or “significant other.” Some sites are general, such as match.com, while others like JDate.com serve a particular religious or ethnic slice. Rightstuffdating.com focuses on graduates of the Ivy League and similar schools. Having lived on my own since October 2002, I hadn’t dated since 1987, before technology turned dating into a form of interactive direct marketing. Back in the dating world, I found I liked the online channel’s choices and depth of information. Scanning a full profile reveals more facts—along with a surprisingly good sense of a woman’s personality—than a half-hour of tortured conversation. As a writer, contacting women online suited my style far better than jostling for attention as just another bald middle-aged guy at a bar or party.

The traditions of my youth, however, were still appealing. In early 2003, I responded to a personals ad in the
Forward
newspaper. Most of the personal ads were geriatric, but one woman in her early forties, Russian, sounded worth a letter. As a writer, I can do nothing if not crank out an attention-grabbing letter. I summoned up my rusty ad-response skills after a fifteen-year hiatus and sent a note to the woman.

A few days later, the phone rang. The Russian, let’s call her Nadezhda (the Russian word for hope, which she indeed represented at that time of my life) was calling. My letter worked! She had a very heavy accent, but the talk went well and I got her phone number. I asked her to meet and she agreed. We worked out the details to get together a few days later on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Ninth Street after work.

I remember my excitement at my first real date after the separation and how my teeth chattered. Actually, the dental clicking was a combination of nerves and the bone-snapping cold of the night we met. The temperature must have been in the mid-teens as I scurried out of my office at an accounting firm on Third Avenue around 6:30, dressed in a suit. Despite layers of clothing, the cold seeped into me as if I were in swim trunks. Nadezhda was probably used to just such weather, but my Texas roots still kept me acclimated to balmy Gulf Coast weather.

We had no plans for what to do, where to go. Nadezhda worked in a financial position with a state agency, so that gave us some occupational overlap. I waited on Fifth Avenue at the appointed meeting spot, bouncing from foot to foot to keep the frostbite surely affecting my extremities from spreading.

“
Van?” I heard, and turned. I had not seen a picture of Nadezhda, but she knew what I looked like. I saw a well-dressed women with Asiatic features. She reminded me of a Jewish version of the Icelandic singer Björk. As such, she varied greatly from the bred-from-the-
shtetl
variety of Eastern European Jewish women I typically ran with in my single days. For the very first date of my newly single life, I had made a good start. Nadezhda was breathtakingly attractive.