One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(18)

The first can hit me anywhere, though it’s most often when I am watching television or looking out the window of a train or subway, and it’s that there is a head resting on my shoulder that must have been there the whole time that I haven’t noticed until now, and in the fantasy, or because of the fantasy—it is hard to tell the difference—I suddenly feel this surge of something like the combination of safety and elation knowing that every sight I see, no matter how small, is now important, because it’s shared. I don’t need to look at the head on my shoulder, and I never do, because what’s so important to me is not what the person looks like, but that we are seeing the same thing.

The second fantasy is that a small child, about four years old, is crying because she has drawn all over the wall with her crayons and has just realized that what she has done is going to subject her to some unknown form of justice. I put on a serious face and explain to the child that her mother and I are going to discuss what her punishment should be. Then I close the door to another room, and with relief, I drop the serious face and laugh and kiss the young artist’s mother and ask her what in the world we should do about this creature we made who wanted to put colors on the walls and is scared what we’re going to say about it.

The third romantic fantasy is so close to me that I don’t even think I can share it.

Just so you know the kind of romantic I am.


But in the meantime: I work long hours. I’ve been successful, so far, in the early stages of a career that is highly competitive. And while I can be very charming after a drink or two—I am a good talker, and sometimes a great one—I am not particularly tall or handsome or (yet) rich or (yet) well known. So to get to that first and then second drink with a person of the caliber that can inspire and maintain the level of love and attention I intend to give once and forever—a woman true from every angle, beautiful and spontaneous and grounded and funny and wise, a person as worthy of my permanent admiration as a sunset or a song, a partner in crime at the beginning and a partner in punishment later, for the child with the crayons—I’ve always figured that I need to advance farther, first.

In the meantime—what has become a long meantime—I am also a living human person, and, to put a simple desire in simple terms, I want to have sex with attractive people from time to time. Is it a shallow road compared with the road for love? Yes. Of course. But it isn’t the road away from love, either; in my case, I think of it as one of those little parallel access roads that you have to travel on sometimes to get where you’re going, always in view of the main route.

But somehow—and if I could have traced exactly how, or when, then I wouldn’t have been lost—I had ended up on some other road, one that seemed to be moving smoothly but I sensed was taking me farther from love and was an inefficient route to anything else, when you added up the time and emotion wasted on all sides. What needed to stop was the succession of dates with these relatively impressive, relatively interesting people, when I could tell from the first minute that everyone here was going to end as a runner-up in a long race to nowhere in particular, broken-down, exhausted, no one wearing a medal.

People who knew me and sympathized with me were determined to set me up with the other people they sympathized with and were always surprised when I would turn down their offer of what they thought of as romantic charity. “What’s the harm?” they would ask me, truly surprised. The harm, besides those hours that actually do matter when you barely have one night off every couple of weeks, is the little mark you get on you every time you open up a door to a hope and then close it fast in disappointment. It leaves a nick, or a dent, and those nicks and dents are not invisible. I used to see them all the time.

So at a certain point I realized that none of this was working.

As a previous record holder for artificial intelligence would say: “Recalculating route.”


I didn’t want to be tempted to compromise any of my romantic or professional ambition, and that was what the thing that people call dating had become for me. So for the sake of my life during this long meantime, I spent a few weeks designing Sophia with a very talented designer named Derek at Practical Concepts.

(An aside: apart from all the opinions I have about Practical Concepts, which I am advised not to discuss at the present time for legal reasons, I have nothing but positive things to say about Derek, whose name has not been changed.)

Derek asked me to describe my type so we’d have somewhere to start.

“Whatever’s beautiful,” I said. I opened up a bit and explained that I have a type I’m drawn to naturally, but that I’ve found that the women I’ve ended up loving the most have never been what I’ve thought of as my type, maybe because part of love is being helpless, being out of control of your own emotions.

Derek said he understood what I was saying but assured me that this, quote, “wasn’t about that.” He said he needed some sort of starting point and asked me to describe what those exceptions had been a departure from.

Fine, I said, and the rest came very quickly. Dark straight hair, thin but a little curvy, white but with a touch of something, button nose, mischievous smile. As for eyes, I told Derek, I truly had no preference—“dealer’s choice.” All eyes are beautiful, I said, which is why it’s such an easy compliment. I’ve never had or heard a complaint about anyone’s eyes.