Around the World in 80 Dates (12 page)

I spotted Olivier as soon as I walked into the park, but skirted around a statue so I could check him out before he saw me. First impression: tall, slim without being skinny, but glasses and hair—as in the photos—the dominant features. Was an evening with Olivier going to be hard work? I took a deep breath and stepped out from behind the statue to introduce myself.

As he turned to greet me, I was shocked by something I had not prepared myself for.

He was cute.

Under that mop of dark-brown curly hair and the severe glasses, Olivier had gorgeous green eyes, clear, freckled skin, and a fine nose. I smiled instinctively. I'd been prepared for an interesting, possibly argumentative date; I was quick to revise my opinion and put my “flirt face” on.

“Hi, I'm Jennifer,” I said unnecessarily (we'd both seen each other's photos), holding my hand out to shake his. Olivier's hand was warm and firm in mine.

A middle-aged man a few feet away waited patiently for his dog to finish adding yet more crap to the park. He whiled away the time watching us with a neutral expression. We were clearly on a blind date; maybe he was glad he was beyond all that. Maybe he was sad that on such a beautiful evening his only companion was a crapping dog.

I tended not to get too nervous about the dates (apart from Anders, of course), as I knew it was actually harder on the Dates than it was on me. Up until they met me, the Dates treated the occasion as a sort of community challenge, as they, their Date Wranglers, and gradually most of their friends became involved in designing the Perfect Date. My date-a-thon was like a street carnival where each Date and his group wanted to make and show off the best float.

My date-a-thon also revealed the competitiveness of men: They were so concerned with imagining what the other seventy-nine might have arranged and whether they could do better, they quite forgot that when the time came they'd be on their own dating a real live woman (me). As a result, during the first thirty minutes of the date, the guys tended to suffer from DRI (Dating Reality Impact) and all my energies were focused on getting them safely through the transition period until they felt normal enough to
be
normal.

However, because I hadn't expected Olivier to be good-looking—plus he was French, so he didn't care what I thought anyway—I was caught off guard and went straight into full-blown DRI myself. I launched into a manic account of how my mother and sister used to live in Paris and wasn't the weather great and wasn't Paris better than London because it was so much smaller and oh, I love the Marais, there are so many cute shops…I listened with horror as the anecdotes and opinions poured uncontrollably out of me at top speed. Olivier studied me with an amused expression, which was all he could do as my jabbering made it impossible for him to get a word in.

But suddenly, just as I'd launched into an excruciatingly superfluous story about bees, the wise words of the Love Professor floated—Obi-Wan Kenobi–esque—into my head: “
Jennifer…Jennifer…just let it happen. Use all your senses…take in whatever comes….
”

And I stopped talking.

Olivier waited to see if I would start again. I didn't. So he smiled and asked, “Would you like a drink?”

I nodded gratefully, and we left the park and began our date.

 

It was a wonderful evening. Olivier and I wandered along the banks of the Seine, stopping for glasses of wine, dinner in a little bistro, coffee in a café by now lit by moonlight, whiskey in a crowded after-hours bar…. We walked and talked through the romantic streets of the Marais; crossed the Seine to the touristy twists and turns of the Latin Quarter and back again through the crowded club-land of rue de Lappe and Bastille.

Olivier was every bit as challenging as I'd imagined and ten times as interesting. He had lived and studied all over Europe and was passionate about art and films. His personality was like a medieval city of switchback streets opening up into beautiful courtyards: impenetrable and magical by turns. And as he opened up, he became more tactile, touching my hand to make a point or standing close behind me and reaching over my shoulder to show me something fascinating and obscure about a building.

I had decided after Denmark that I was only going to stay out late or agree to see the Date again if I felt he was a genuine prospect. It was now after 3 a.m. and I still felt intrigued and utterly entertained by Olivier. I was also attracted to him and felt comfortable enough with the pace at which things were progressing to anticipate with pleasure the French Kiss that I was confident would come at the end of the date.

By 3:30 a.m., we were both completely talked out and I was glad when Olivier offered to walk me back to my hotel. I'd had a wonderful evening and felt really good about seeing him the next day if he asked. It was the perfect time to end the date.

Thirty minutes later, we stood together outside my hotel, our faces gently lit by the fading streetlights and the approaching dawn that now warmed the sky.

Olivier admitted, “I really did not know what to expect from this evening, Jennifer, but it has been extremely enjoyable. It is unlike me to talk of myself so much; you are charming and very good company.” Studying me through his glasses, his eyes were dark and intent. He was about four inches taller than me, so when I told him how much I had enjoyed the evening, too, I had to tilt my face up toward his to answer, smiling warmly into his eyes.

I watched his mouth as he talked; I was going to get kissed and I was feeling really good about it.

“If you have time, I would very much like to see you again tomorrow,” Olivier said.

“I would like that too,” I replied simply.

Olivier smiled. “It is agreed then.”

I relaxed. He smiled at me, I smiled at him. I waited happily; I was in no rush.

“Umm, okay, then I shall see you tomorrow,” Olivier suddenly blurted, and with an awkward half-shrug he turned and walked off down the street.

Huh?

I watched in astonishment as my cheeky-guy fun vanished around the corner. What had just happened? Why hadn't he kissed me? I shook my head vigorously, as if trying to shake some sense into it. I didn't understand: Why hadn't he kissed me? We'd liked each other. He'd asked me out again. Why didn't he want to kiss me? Why?

I suddenly felt furious with him: How could he do this? I'd stayed out most of the night with him and would now undoubtedly spend the rest of the night wide awake, agonizing over why he hadn't wanted to kiss me. I mean, I knew he didn't have to, but I was really sure he'd wanted to. What terrible thing had I said or done that had made him change his mind? Could I isolate the thing which had made me an Unkissable?

One thing was certain: I had no intention of ever seeing him again. I know that sounds harsh, but I have absolutely served my time dating men who are hard work and take tons of understanding. I was here on my Soul Mate Mission, and that did not include second dates with men who disturbed my self-confidence and peace of mind by treating me as an Unkissable.

 

I said all this over breakfast the next morning to my friends Jilly and Stevie, who were over from London for the weekend.

“Oh, Jen, that's not fair,” Jilly remonstrated as we divided up the last buttery flakes of croissant, trying to catch the eye of the waitress so we could order some more. “He sounds lovely, you must see him again.”

“Bugger that, why must I?” I protested indignantly. “The whole point of what I'm doing is to find someone who'll make me happy and not invest time in guys who
don't
anymore.”

“Maybe he's a slow starter?” Stevie observed reasonably, while attempting unsuccessfully to flag down the waitress.

They were being sweet and lovely. I knew they wanted the best for me, to see me happy and with a boyfriend again. But if I was going to ignore my instincts and make excuses for someone from the first date, I might as well have saved myself all this effort and settled for the first (“you've got”) male who came along. I knew from personal experience that to give him another chance was just courting trouble and disappointment.

“Stevie,” I said firmly, licking the delicious pear confiture from my fingers and pouring out more coffee, “I really appreciate you saying that and maybe you're right, but it's not like I'm upset because he didn't propose to me. It's a kiss we're talking about here. It was a date, we liked each other. It shouldn't have been that difficult.”

But none of us had had much sleep the night before and the task of getting the waitress to serve us turned into a major production. Soon the topic of whether I should see Olivier again or not was forgotten by everyone.

Except me. When my phone rang, I pushed it deeper into my handbag and nudged my bag under the table with my foot until the ringing stopped.

I would have dearly loved to have gone shopping that afternoon, or even to have popped back to the hotel for a quick nap, but I had a date in a few hours with Max, an old friend of Clare, one of my neighbors from home.

Max was a lecturer in art history at one of our neighborhood schools and Clare had been trying to orchestrate a meeting for months. He was spending the school break taking a school group around Paris, and when Clare heard I would be there the same week she nearly broke her fingers trying to dial his number and lock us into a date before I could come up with a reason why it wasn't possible.

It wasn't that I hated the thought of meeting Max; he just didn't particularly sound my type, a little too earnest and proper. But Clare was determined we should meet and I had run out of energy to keep persuading her otherwise.

Max had an afternoon off from the kids, so we had arranged to meet outside Varenne metro station at 2:30 p.m. He was easy to spot: around six feet five (“You can't say he's too short for you,” Clare boasted triumphantly) and extremely thin with a long, pale, but boyishly eager face, crowned with an explosion of curly red hair. There was a Cambridge University scarf wrapped tightly around Max's neck (even though the temperature must have been about seventy degrees) and he was sniffing vigorously.

He beamed as soon as he saw me and stalked straight over. “Ah, Jennifer, what a pleasure, what an absolute pleasure to meet you.” He smiled and sniffed, nervous and excited in equal measures. Towering over me like a huge praying mantis, he bent his upper body down to kiss me “hello.” I wasn't prepared, he misjudged my height, and at the last minute I overcompensated and stretched up to meet his kiss.

It was an awkward mess: I got a mouthful of shirt as I ended up kissing his collar; he missed my head altogether, his mouth sucking the air two inches right of my cheek. He sniffed and laughed in embarrassment, but as he pulled his head self-consciously away, he caught one of my big silver hoop earrings in his hair and ripped it clean out.

I let out a high-pitched yelp of pain and surprise. Max frowned in alarm; he had no idea why I was shrieking, and he also had no idea that one of my earrings was dangling incongruously from his tight red curls.

Following my astonished stare, he gingerly reached into his hair and found my earring. He beamed in confusion, now sniffing furiously, like a beagle at customs angling for a promotion. “Ah, well, yes,” he stammered, “I, ermm, well, but…this must be yours….” Max pulled the earring from his hair and plummeted from his great height back down toward me. I realized with horror he intended to try to put it back in.

“No,” I shrieked automatically, taking a sharp step backward, my hand clamped protectively over my throbbing ear. “I mean…please don't worry,” I managed to say, slightly less dramatically. “I'll take it, it's fine.” And I took the earring from between his long, outstretched fingers and dropped it out of sight into my handbag.

Words didn't exist to describe how much I was hating today. I mean really, really, really hating it. It wasn't really poor Max's fault, and it was important that I didn't make him feel it was. You can't blame someone for not being your type; it was myself I blamed for giving in to Clare—she had the married person's compulsion to match up singles, the way some tuck in a stranger's sticking-out shirt label on buses: The desire for neatness is greater than their sense of tact.

But this wasn't working. In fact, at that moment, it seemed the whole premise my Odyssey was based on wasn't working. Clearly, there were far more “wrongs” than Mr. Rights out there. And I was wrong about the ones I thought were “rights,” as they all turned out to have something wrong with them in the end. Was I wasting my time? Should I be back in London, either trying harder or accepting my single life? Did this mission have any chance of success at all?

At school when I was about five, I picked up someone else's sweater by accident. One of the teachers noticed and asked me to give it back. Perversely, I insisted it was mine, and before anyone could take it away I tried to put it on. It belonged to a girl half my size, though, and the sweater got stuck over my head. Embarrassed at being caught out, enraged at not having pulled off the bluff, and very, very agitated at having my head trapped in someone else's sweater, I had the kind of whirling-dervish, feet-stamping, screaming-my-head-off meltdown that on a slower day would have made it into every single textbook ever written on behavioral difficulties.