A Jane Austen Education(54)

But one thing was still missing. One big, huge thing. I hadn’t found anyone to be with. Not just sleep with, but be with. Not just a hookup, or a short-lived affair, or a summer fling, but a real, stable, satisfying relationship. Coming out of youth movement and college and the first few years of graduate school—sheltered spaces, all of them, that made it relatively easy to find a girlfriend—I was unprepared for the full horror of the New York dating scene. It was like entering an endless maze of stupid conversations, as confusing as the subway and equally bleak. Instead of meeting people through friends, like I always had, I was expected to endear myself to complete strangers—who knew exactly what I was trying to do—in the time it took to walk into a party or order a drink.

And this being New York, it wasn’t enough to be charming (not that I had a clue any longer about how to be charming). You had to be impressive, you had to look successful, you had to sound like a winner, especially as a man. What did you do? Who did you know? Where had you gone to school? I learned to drop the salient points of my résumé into the first five minutes of a conversation. It got so that talking to single women felt like having a job interview. Just be yourself, people would say. Be myself? Wasn’t that the whole problem?

I was spared no indignity. Blind dates. Setups. A dinner invitation from a woman who turned out to have a boyfriend and “didn’t realize this was a date.” A parade of women who liked me, but “not in that way.” “At least you’ve made a new friend!” my friends would say. “I don’t want any more goddamn friends!” I would shoot back.

One day, I struck up a conversation with a woman on the way out of exercise class—one of those miraculous situations where you’re already in the middle before you have a chance to feel nervous. She was smart, nice, interesting, pretty. When we got to the corner and seemed about to go our separate ways, we turned to each other at the same time and said, “So what’s your name?”

Her name was Pam. Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam, Pam. I thought about seeing her again all week. But the next week came, and she didn’t show up. I started to get a little desperate. Surely she would come back the following week. But she wasn’t there the following week, either. Finally, I got so distraught that I put one of those “missed connections” ads in the Village Voice: “Desperately Seeking Pam,” with the place and date and my phone number.

Here’s a tip: don’t put your number in a personal ad. First I got a call from a woman pretending to be Pam (“Of course I’m Pam”—“Okay, so what do you do for a living?”—“Oh, c’mon”). Then I got a call from a woman who admitted that she wasn’t Pam but was hoping we could get together anyway. Then I got a call from a guy in New Jersey who wanted to commiserate about how hard it was to meet women. (“Maybe you should stop going to those singles events with your richer, better-looking friend,” I suggested.) Then I got a call from a guy pretending to be Pam. (“You can call me Pam if you want to.”) And finally, late at night, I got one last call from a guy with a voice like sandpaper, who let me know that, for the right price, he’d be happy to introduce me to “Pam.”





I did have one serious relationship during those years. It all started very romantically. I met her at the wedding of an old friend. Actually, as I discovered later, it had been a setup. She had chosen me out of a whole lineup of eligible guys that my friend had laid out—literally, with pictures—upon her request. Well, a short lineup. Okay, me and another guy. But still. It made it all seem even more romantic, when she told me—like the whole thing was meant to be.

My friend arranged to have her pick me up at the airport bus, and as I climbed into the car, we felt the chemistry right away—not just sexual sparks, but an immediate feeling of ease and familiarity and kinship, as if we already knew each other and were merely resuming a conversation that had gotten briefly interrupted. We were inseparable the entire weekend, didn’t stop laughing, couldn’t believe our luck. The wedding was in Michigan (she and my friend had just finished a graduate program together at the U of M), and when she set out for Boston right after the ceremony to start a new job, a new life, she invited me along for the ride—a spur-of-the-moment dash that seemed to have all the glamour and daring of Bonnie and Clyde making a getaway.

We traded stories the whole way, spent the night at a motel in Niagara Falls, of all places (we hadn’t even realized that it was a honeymoon spot), and as I tore myself away from her a couple of days later, swore that we were committed to making the relationship succeed, even though it was going to have to be conducted long-distance. We even mentioned the M-word—as in, “Yes, I think I would be ready to get married if things work out.” That sentence actually came out of my mouth. I couldn’t believe how grown up I was being. It felt like all that Austen was paying off, and that now I was ready for a mature, adult romance.

Well, it didn’t take long for things to go south. Fights in Boston, fights in Brooklyn, fights over e-mail (which had just come in). Fights about my feelings, fights about her feelings, fights about the fights we’d just had. Fights that spun off little subsidiary fights that had to be resolved before we could get back to the main fight. Endless phone calls where we’d talk for a few minutes until we stumbled over something to fight about, then spend the rest of the evening fighting about it.