Olga Dies Dreaming(16)
Later, when he would confide in Charmaine, his assistant who had been his father’s assistant before Dick inherited her and in whom Dick entrusted all of his secrets and fears, that his offer had been rebuffed, he found himself nearly whining with disbelief. “Isn’t this what every woman wants? To be the person that the rich guy actually leaves his wife for? Don’t all women want that, Charmaine?” But that was later. In the moment, when Olga rejected his offer to cohabitate, before he could become pouty or offended, she had come over from her side of the little dining table where they were eating and straddled his lap, opening her robe as she did so, reminding him of how much more fun everything is when it’s spontaneous, and didn’t he agree with that? And he had said, enthusiastically, yes.
Charmaine reminded him that the city was full of women who would want to be that girl, that he didn’t need to chase after Olga. The problem was that he wanted to chase after Olga. He didn’t simply want to catch her, he wanted to pin her down, and make her love him as much as he loved her. (The irony of this did not escape him. The challenge throughout his entire marriage had been his deep-seated resentment of having himself felt caught by the former Mrs. Eikenborn.) The unevenness of their relationship both vexed him and moored him, rendering him unable to fix his mind on anyone else. In an effort to open his eyes to another woman, any other woman, he signed up for one of those dating apps, anonymously, of course. He wasn’t famous, but his face and name were in the financial papers—and his divorce on Page Six—enough that he knew better than to show his recognizable self. So instead he showed the parts of him that were less frequently seen, carefully cropping out his head. He wrote his self-description cautiously: his aim to be truthful, but not too revealing. “Five-foot-ten Caucasian businessman and entrepreneur, athletic build, passionate about travel, cycling, flying planes, and wine collecting. Enjoys a good joke and live concerts.” He could be anyone, he thought to himself.
The “likes” started immediately. He was overwhelmed and flattered. He never responded to the messages with anything more than, maybe, a wink. He never gave out his number. Yet, rather than take his mind off Olga, these other women only made him more resolved to wrestle commitment, of some sort, from her. To make her see what even strangers on the internet saw: Richard Eikenborn III was a catch.
“Why don’t you like my photos?” he asked her one evening in bed.
“The Dick dick pics?” she asked.
“All of them. The body shots, the dick pics. Yes. Why don’t you like them?”
“No women like photos like that. We’re just told that we’re supposed to by a lazy patriarchal culture that assumes that women must like the inverse of what men like. Men like topless boob pics, ergo, women must love bare chest shots … it’s just lazy.”
He felt himself getting defensive. “If I were to post these photos on a dating app, Cherry, women would love them, I bet you anything.”
She laughed.
“Are you on a dating app, Dick?”
“Of course not! Why would I be on an app when I have you here with me?” He pressed himself closer to her back as he spooned her in bed.
She giggled again and rolled away from his embrace.
“If you posted pics like that on a dating app, I have a feeling that the ‘women’”—and here she put her fingers in the air to emphasize the point with air quotes—“who like them might not turn out to be women at all. Or at least not the kind who don’t expect a monetary exchange at the end of the evening.”
Dick was both grazed and perplexed.
“What are you trying to say? That people on these apps aren’t real people? Why would someone do that?”
“I’m not saying that they aren’t real people, I’m just saying that they might not be the people they are presenting themselves as. Grifters. Married guys too afraid to download Grindr. Online hookers. A whole assortment of explanations. My cousin Mabel went on a date with a guy and when he showed up, he was only five feet tall. In one of his photos he was towering over Jon Hamm—she showed me!”
“Did she bring it up?”
“Hell yeah! She showed him the photo and he admitted he was standing on something.”
“But why would he do that?” Dick had said, genuinely confused.
“Richard,” she said—she always used his full name when she was being serious—“I know that no one has given you any reason to worry that you are anything less than perfect, but some people don’t like themselves the way they are.”
“This doesn’t make any sense to me,” he said sincerely.
She turned to him and smiled, her face right near his face. “Your inability to see people’s dark sides never fails to awe me.”
He didn’t, in fact, agree with that assessment; he sometimes felt Olga underestimated him. When it came to business at least, Dick always saw the dark sides of things, but his gift, he felt, was for sensing the opportunities that often lie in wait. Certainly, this had saved him—and their national chain of hardware stores—when his father, still CEO at the time, had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Business had already been contracting and Dick knew their investors would pressure them to sell as soon as word got out. So, he got ahead of it, calling an emergency meeting of their board of directors, in which he laid out a plan for expansion into Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Canada that would triple business valuation within two years, making everyone in the room far richer than unloading the business would. A decade later, when the housing market crumbled, people around him panicked; construction and contractors were a huge part of their customer base. But Dick sensed opportunity: if people couldn’t afford new homes, they would likely fix up their old ones. He invented Eikenborn DIY Reno Schools. He cut out the middleman, invested in developing their own line of paints, tools, and toolboxes. He licensed their name to a DIY show on HGTV. By the time the recession was over, Dick had grown Eikenborn and Sons into one of the most profitable retail operations in America. Similarly, while his friends and colleagues lamented the seemingly endless environmental rules and regulations of the Obama era, Dick saw a burgeoning market. He was the first hardware retailer in the country to carry LEED lighting fixtures. They began retailing home solar systems, then launched their own solar panel production operation. From Dick’s point of view, climate change—be it efforts made to mitigate it, or efforts to repair the havoc it caused—would be his greatest boon. Eikenborn Green Solutions would keep the business thriving into its sixth generation, when he imagined, and hoped, that Richard or Sam, or maybe even Victoria, might take the reins from him one day.