Circus

H
ENRY
B
OTTLESWORTH HAS GIVEN HIMSELF
thirty-one days to find love on the Internet. For the past ten years, his friends and relations have been setting him up with their co-workers, friends of friends, sisters’ friends, former schoolmates, and second cousins. Henry has dutifully attended every date and allowed himself a carefully measured dose of optimism each time. He always takes note of buffed fingernails, a well-loved purse, or a hand-knit scarf and saves these details for later, just in case. Too polite to refuse his friends’ matchmaking efforts, he has sat through more silences punctuated by bouts of awkward eating than he cares to count.

Henry has, with time and experience, learned a thing or two about the culinary ins and outs of first dates. Sushi, for instance, invites a rice explosion. Ordering a saucy noodle dish or a dressing-laden salad is asking for a spill, and Chinese broccoli is impossible to eat all in one bite without losing one’s dignity. In his own way, Henry has become an expert in the etiquette of courtship:

Never wear a white shirt.

Never arrive early.

Never arrive late.

Never ask about previous relationships.

Never forget to bring your wallet.

Always keep mints or gum in your pocket.

These are common-sense rules, and most people seem to emerge from the womb knowing them. Henry, however, has educated himself solely through trial and error, with a heavy emphasis on error. Sometimes, though, he learned more than one lesson on a single date. Sushi, therefore, is forever associated with the memory of spending an entire evening attempting to conceal a soy sauce stain on the breast pocket of his white button-down by crossing his arms in an uncomfortably lofty position over his chest, followed by the shame of reaching into his back pocket to find it empty of both wallet and gum. Not that minty-fresh breath would have really been necessary at that point. The Age of Matchmaking, he’s decided, has now come to an end.

On one particularly embarrassing occasion Henry’s younger brother Charles was careless in his role as Cupid, and forgot to tell both Henry and Bachelorette #1 – Penelope, who had just moved to London from Minneapolis to begin her degree in anthropology – that they had been invited to his flat in order to be set up. Henry spent most of the evening in the kitchen, occupying himself by sipping gin from a plastic cup, nibbling on cheese-and-onion-flavoured crisps, and pouring drinks for first-year students who assumed he was a hired bartender, rather than dancing in sock feet in his brother’s living room with a rabble of sweaty eighteen-year-old strangers. Penelope, on the other hand, had literally let her hair down, and was bouncing up and down in the middle of the crowd of
bodies, whipping her long, messy curls about to the rhythm of “Common People” as if she were in an advert for volumizing shampoo. Charles would not give up on the idea of pairing them, however, and kept physically pushing the two together until Penelope and Henry finally bumped foreheads in the kitchen doorway, leaving him with an unsightly goose egg above his left eyebrow and her with a mild concussion. Accidental head-butts do not often lead to intimacy, but in the decade since that party, Penelope and Henry have become the kind of friends whose hearts leap for each other, so that they just have to sit close together, Penny’s head resting on Henry’s shoulder, to be perfectly content.

That first night, he had fetched some ice and wrapped it up in a tea towel to apply to her forehead, and they’d sat on the stairs leading out of Charles’s flat. Penelope leaned on his shoulder and twirled her index finger around a strand of her hair, and told him over and over again that she would probably leave soon, but made no motions to go until he stood up himself. Henry had liked her from the start, and for whatever reason she was fond of him, too, even if it was somehow clear to both of them from their first meeting that romance was not a possibility.

Since blind dates failed to lead to actual amorousness, Henry finally swore off them. For a time, he had given up on love altogether in pursuit of other fine things in life. He homebrewed beer in his bathtub, obsessively cultivated a small lemon tree that he impulse-purchased at a street market, took
daytrips to stately homes operated by the National Trust on weekends, and pondered the minor everyday concerns of his job – a reasonably respectable position in the Foreign Office. It’s not that he’s discontented being on his own – the hobbies are certainly fulfilling – it’s simply that he has now decided to try his hand at Internet dating, within sensible limits.