On the Rocks (9 page)

“What guy?” I asked.

“The guy who offered to buy you a drink when we were at the bar. You not so subtly told him to go kill himself.”

“Oh please, he wasn’t hitting on me. He was just drunk and being stupid, and I might add, he was entirely too forward considering he didn’t know me.”

“Are you seriously so dating-impaired that you don’t even recognize the act of being hit on?” Bobby turned to Grace with a bemused expression I wanted to smack off his face with my tennis racket. “Grace, is she kidding me?”

“No. She’s that clueless,” Grace said as she stared at her Scrabble letters.

“Thanks, Grace,” I said.

“Hey, it’s not a bad thing. You’re just out of practice is all,” she replied.

“He was most certainly hitting on you. When was the last time you went on a date?” Bobby asked. Suddenly, no one was interested in the Scrabble board, which was a shame, because I had a monster word to play.

“She hasn’t been on a date with anyone in like, twelve years,” Grace so nicely offered up. The guys gawked and stared at me like I was some kind of circus freak.

“Really?” Wolf asked. “I’ve been on more than that, and I’m still learning English.”

“Yes, well, I was in a long-term relationship, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been on a real date. And that’s my point!” I said, getting excited about sharing the details of the plan I’d concocted in my head somewhere around mile two before I started to see spots.

“That you need help in the dating department?” Bobby said as he clapped his hands together to get the Tostito dust off his fingers.

“Yes. I hate to say it, but I do,” I said.

“Okay,” Grace said, finally devoting her full attention to me and not to the letters in front of her. “What kind of help?”

“I was thinking that maybe I should move. I mean, I can teach anywhere. Maybe a fresh start outside of Boston would force me to come out of my self-imprisonment.”

“Oh, this is fantastic,” Bobby said. “You think you’ll be better at dating in other cities, huh? Okay, hotshot, let’s play this game. Where would you go?”

I hadn’t really thought about it much. But now that everyone was wondering, I guess I had a few ideas. “How about New York?”

“No way,” Grace said. “It’s crazy expensive. Aside from that, it’s too high-maintenance. In order to survive in New York, you need to have a session with your personal trainer, a resurfacing facial, a full body wax, a manicure, a pedicure, $500 highlights, and a designer wardrobe just for most people to deem you acceptable to walk on the sidewalk. Too much pressure. Bobby and I both lived there, and we are both back. You’d never last.”

I wasn’t sure if that was an insult. I decided not to find out.

“DC?” I offered.

“Nope,” Bobby said. “Everyone there is in politics, i.e., they’re game players, they know how to play them, and most importantly, they actually recognize them when they see them. Besides, half the guys in that city think emailing naked pictures of themselves to people they meet on MySpace is a normal way of getting to know someone. Are you up for that?” he asked. I sensed sarcasm.

“What do you think?” I answered. “What about Chicago?”

“Too windy,” he said. “Boston may be just as cold, but the wind in Chicago will kill you. Plus, then you’d have to be a Cubs fan.”

“Funny.”

“You need to do some research if you want to move. You need to go somewhere where there are a lot of guys and not a lot of good-looking girls,” Bobby offered.

“I can’t believe I’m going to ask you this, but why is that?” I asked.

“Because guys who live in those cities don’t know what really pretty girls look like. Their scale is all screwed up, so a seven on the East Coast is like a nine in some places. You’d definitely be a nine in some cities.”

“Really? You couldn’t just give me a ten?” I asked. I was oddly insulted . . . again.

“No, this is like Zagat’s. No one gets a perfect score,” he said flatly, as if his explanation somehow justified his insult.

“I see.”

“This exercise is pointless,” Grace said as she scooped salsa out of the dip bowl with a chip and then walked into the kitchen to add a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips to the Scrabble picnic. “You and I both know you aren’t going anywhere, and besides, moving won’t solve anything. You’ll have the same problems in any city anywhere in the world, so let’s take geography out of the equation and figure out what you can do to change your situation
here.
”

“Okay, how do I go about changing my situation here? How do I go about being proactive?” I asked, thinking that in this case maybe four heads were better than one malfunctioning one.

“Would you go online?” Wolf asked. “The Europeans love Internet dating. I bet you’d be popular with them.”

“I don’t think that’s for me. I thought about it at one point, but then I chickened out.”

“Oh, you got wet feet,” Wolf said, nodding sympathetically. “I understand.”

We shook our heads in unison. “The expression is ‘cold feet,’ Wolf,” I said.

“Why would cold feet keep you from doing something? Wet feet are way more annoying than cold feet. I’d change my plans if my feet were wet, not if they were cold,” Wolf said in a no-nonsense tone.

He had an interesting point.

“Anyway, I don’t want to go online. I want to meet someone live and in person. I know that’s a crazy concept in this day and age, but I guess I’m just old-fashioned that way.” I sighed. My reluctance to let go of the concept of fate and being in the right place at the right time was probably going to be the end of me.

“Times have changed,” Bobby said. “If you don’t want to change with them, then you need to get aggressive, and since that’s clearly not something you’re comfortable with, you’re going to have to think outside the box.”

“What does it mean to think inside the box?” Wolf asked.

“No one says ‘Think inside the box’!” Grace said.

“If you don’t know what’s inside the box, then how do you know when you’re outside of it?” Wolf asked, confused.

It was quickly becoming clear that idioms in the English language didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

“I don’t know. I’ll get back to you on that,” I answered him as Grace and Bobby laughed.

Wolf appeared bemused as he continued. “When I first came here, I didn’t know anyone. I had to force myself to go out and meet people! I didn’t want to, it was scary, Americans talk way too fast. It’s hard to understand you. Girls especially, because you squeak a lot when you talk. You sound like birds chirping.”

Bobby laughed as Grace and I stared at him. “We don’t squeak!” Grace, well, squeaked.

“German isn’t the easiest language to understand either,” I added.

“It is for me,” Wolf answered. “Anyway, I pretended it was my job, and I had to go. It helped me make my new friends. Maybe it will help for you too.”

“So what are you saying? That the only way I’m going to get my head back in the game is if I treat dating like it’s a job?” I asked.

“It worked for me. I have a lot of friends now,” he pointed out.

“Wolf is right,” Bobby said as he finished his beer. “Dating is not fun. First dates by and large suck, but they’re a necessary evil if you want to get a boyfriend, right?”

“Yeah, that sounds about right,” I admitted.

“This is genius. Why hasn’t anyone ever thought of this before?” Bobby asked as he scratched his head, frustrated that Wolf had come up with this idea and he hadn’t.

“I don’t know. Most people don’t listen to me, I guess,” Wolf said with a shrug.

“I mean, it’s just so obvious! Relationships are hard, exhausting, soul-sucking work. Everyone knows that,” Grace mused.

“It’s a job, basically, yeah,” I said, becoming more and more intrigued by this idea.

“I really need one of those,” Bobby said.

“A relationship?” I asked.

“No. A job. Law is also exhausting, soul-sucking work. You just made me remember that I’m unemployed.”

“I’m liking where you’re going with this, Wolf,” Grace said. “How would Abby go about dating like it’s a job? I’m not entirely sure I get it.”

“You know how some days you wake up and you really don’t want to go to work?” he asked.

“That’s
every
day,” Grace answered.

“Right. But you still make yourself go, yes?”

“Yeah,” I said hesitantly.

“Well, sometimes you have to go on dates you don’t want to go on, but you still have to go. Pretend you don’t have a choice, and you don’t have the option to call in sick.”

Bobby stood and addressed us with authority. He really did need to get a job, because he was about to turn our living room into a courtroom. “You need to make yourself available, ask people to set you up, talk to the guys at the bar who offer to buy you drinks, and maybe even give them your phone number.”

“I think I could do that,” I said, even though I wasn’t sure I believed myself.

“That’s the complete opposite of what you did yesterday. You know that, right?” he asked.

“Yes. And I recognize that that was stupid.”

“Wow, what a difference a day makes.”

“So while you’re out here this summer, make it your goal to go on at least two dates a week, minimum,” Bobby suggested as he continued to pace around the living room.

“You totally need to do this,” Grace agreed.

“That’s great practice, plus no doubt there will be some major catastrophes in there and that will give us something to laugh about. Just make sure you don’t end up on the Walk of Shame website. While I’d personally love it, I don’t think you’d ever recover.”

“What Walk of Shame site?” I asked, shocked that there was now a website dedicated to capturing embarrassing situations on film and broadcasting them on the Web for all the world to see. Once again I found myself dumbfounded at how technology had changed the way we all interacted. It used to be that people had to actually know you in order to humiliate you. Man, I missed the nineties.

“There’s some guy who drives around the island in the morning and takes pictures of people walking home in their clothes from the night before. It’s amazing. I’ve busted my friends on that thing more times than I can count,” Bobby said.

“That’s disgusting,” Grace said. “I’d never let that happen to me. I’d kill the guy first.”

“You’d have to find out who he is. No one knows who does it, but I have to say, whoever he is, the guy’s got talent.”

“Is no one listening to me anymore?” Wolf asked, hurt that he had lost our attention to an anonymous blogger.

“No, I’m listening to you. You’re saying she should have a dating project!” Grace squealed as she sat up on her knees. “I like this. I like this a lot.”

“I do too,” Bobby said.

“I think this is just a little bit ridiculous,” I replied, even though I knew that I was outnumbered and that no one cared what I thought.

“It’s kind of a ridiculous idea, but that doesn’t mean that it won’t work or that it won’t be good for you,” Grace said.

“I have a hard time accepting the fact that nothing seems to happen organically anymore, you know?” I said, pulling my hair into a messy bun on the top of my head. “Is this what a girl needs to do now to meet people?”

“Look, Abby,” Grace said, “I’m your best friend, and I love you, but you have to face the facts. You’re a smart girl and a great friend, but for whatever reason you have terrible—and I mean
terrible
—taste in guys. Your instincts are miswired for some reason, because there is no other explanation on earth to account for the fact that you won’t let go of this loser.”

“True, but I’m not the first girl on earth who’s had a hard time letting go of someone who deep down I know is toxic. I mean, you and Johnny aren’t exactly the model for highly functioning relationships.”

“Hey, I thought this wasn’t about me.”

“The rules have changed.”

“Look, I never liked Ben, and you know it. He was a jerk from day one, you just didn’t want to admit it. And let’s not forget the gem you dated in high school.”

She may have had a point. As bad as Ben was, he was nowhere near as big a loser as my high school boyfriend. I was pretty sure he might actually still be in high school unless he had found someone else’s papers to copy.

“I was sixteen! Every guy is an idiot at that age.”

“Most of us are still idiots in our thirties, to be fair,” Bobby added.

“I don’t think I’m an idiot. Maybe only sometimes,” Wolf said, looking hurt that he was lumped into the category of all men when it was very clear that he was a different breed of male.

“All I’m saying is that what you’ve been doing isn’t working. So let’s do the opposite of what you would normally do and see what happens! What’s the worst possible outcome? You go on ten bad dates, summer ends, you go back to the city, and you’ve had some practice.”

“No. The worst possible outcome is that I end up with a stalker or with mouth herpes or something. This plan comes with its fair share of risks.”

“It’s time you took some risks,” Grace scolded.

“I know. I guess desperate times call for desperate measures.”

“I’d totally leave the word ‘desperate’ out of this,” Bobby suggested. “It’s just not a good word for a guy to hear from a girl’s mouth.”

“I think the fact that this entire idea makes you uncomfortable is good. You need to get out of your comfort zone,” Grace said.

“My comfort zone is my couch. So I’ve already done that.”

“I think there was a
Seinfeld
episode on something like this once,” Bobby said. “Opposite George.”

“Seinfeld was a smart man, see?” Grace added.

“I don’t remember if it worked,” Bobby said as he stared at the ceiling as if trying to remember how the episode ended.

“Who’s Seinfeld?” Wolf asked.

We ignored him. It was simply too ridiculous to address.

“I think you should do it,” Bobby said. “I’ll be your consigliere. I’ll be here to offer advice and help you along the way.”

“That’s supposed to be a selling point?” I asked, not entirely sure how Bobby had gone from not knowing my name to wanting to serve as my mentor in the span of twenty-four hours.

“Yes. Don’t be so defensive and admit that you could use some guidance in the guy department.”