chapter 14: a date

a date

I don’t want to think about the night with Jack Roberts the third, and the three women. I wake up and realize I don’t have any beer in my fridge. I feed my cats and sit down and turn the tv on. I remember I have a bottle of red wine in one of my cabinets, so I go and find that. I pour it into a coffee mug. The coffee mug says “Best Cat Dad Ever.” I can't remember who bought it for me. The wine makes my body feel warm and tingly. It’s like magic. Before long the night with Jack doesn’t seem so bad. It feels like a perfectly natural thing to have done. I can’t stop thinking about the red-haired girl. Something about her is just perfect. I really want to do something to let her know that I think she is special. The problem is that when you’re an adult there are no rules in place for what to do when you start to like someone. It was so much easier when you were a kid and you handed a girl a note that said to circle “yes” or “no” to show if they wanted to be your girlfriend. Now you never truly know where you are in a relationship, and discussing where you are in a relationship is the one sure thing that will ruin it.

After a few more mugs of wine, I decide to invite her out to eat dinner at a fancy restaurant. It is the most cliche thing you can do, but I want my motives to be clear. It’s this place called Vito’s. I went with another girl once. I didn’t really care about her. One night at a bar she came up to me and asked me what my name was. We slept together that night. She was a lot younger than me, which is a bad thing. She saw me as wiser or something which was not the case at all. Most people younger than me are far wiser than I am. I could tell she really liked me, and I should have done the respectful thing and just ignored her, but I didn’t. We kept hooking up, though. Sometimes she would just come over and watch tv and play with my cats. That usually means that things are serious. Once again, I should have done the right thing, but like most people I did the easy thing instead. The comfortable thing. She kept coming over and it was nice, but I always felt guilty. I was just postponing the inevitable.

One time when we were hooking up I just couldn’t get it up. I laid there embarrassed. I had been drinking whiskey and taking painkillers one of my friends gave me after surgery. She kept telling me it was fine, that it was a perfectly natural thing, that sometimes people just couldn’t get hard. It happened to everyone from time to time. I didn’t know what to say so I asked her if she wanted to be my girlfriend. She got so excited and started kissing me and hugging me. I don’t even really think I knew what I had said until after I said it. You can’t take it back, so I just went along with it. I knew I would have to wait at least a month to break up with her, so I waited. I gave her all the signs. I ignored her when she was speaking. I never asked her to hang out, she was always the one doing the inviting. She was so excited to be in a relationship that she didn’t pay attention to the signs. One night she asked me to go out to Vito’s and I went because I didn’t have anything else to do. When we got there I knew something was wrong. She was serious, and she wasn’t her normal smiling, upbeat self. After the waiter brought us water, she told me she had been talking to her friend and she needed to know if I was serious about her. I told her I didn’t know. “That’s what my friend said you would say.” She started crying in the middle of the restaurant. It made me upset, angry almost. I know that is not a good response, but I can never understand when people can’t wait to go into a private place to display strong emotions. If she could have just waited another 10 minutes to begin crying everyone in the restaurant would have been a lot more comfortable. Everyone was staring at us. I started to feel hot all over I didn’t know what to do so I just got up and left. I handed her three twenty dollar bills and just walked away. Later that night I texted her “hey really sorry about everything.” She never responded to me, and I never saw her again, which made things easier for everyone.

Anyway, Vito’s is a really nice place. I text the red-haired girl and ask her if she wants to go to Vito’s, and wait to see what she says. While I wait I take a break from the red wine and make a pot of coffee. I might need to be charming and funny and sexy and professional and aloof and open and sensitive and kind and a little bit dangerous. All of the things you have to be on a formal date. If you do a good enough job, then in a few months when you start actually dating you don’t have to be any of those things, and you can be lazy and silent and watch tv in sweatpants and fart during commercials. That is the prize for pulling off the hard part. A comfortable life with a girl you like where you don’t need to fill every moment with some sort of opinion or interesting story. Life gets truly beautiful when you find enough people that can be silent around you. It’s comforting to be around people, but it’s exhausting to speak.

I’m watching a dating show on tv. It’s terrible, but I can’t find the remote and I don’t feel like sticking my hands deep down inside of the couch. I think the show is The Bachelor but I’m too nervous to pay attention. One of the girls on the show reminds me of another girl I accidentally dated. I think her name was Stephanie. Anyway, this was several years back. I forgot how we met. I think one of her friends knew one of my friends. It’s not really important. After a while her friends stopped going out to the bars on weeknights and my friends stopped going out to the bars on weeknights. One weeknight I went to a bar alone and she was there, and we exchanged numbers and then we started meeting up. I loved having her around. She was so much fun and I genuinely looked forward to going out with her, but I couldn’t picture her romantically. We even started hanging out during the day, and once again I got in way over my head. For my birthday she bought me a guitar. A Fender Telecaster. It was $550. It was way too much. It made me love her. But once again, I just couldn’t bring myself to love her romantically. I tried really hard. We had been sleeping together. One day she texted me that she had “bad news.” I started freaking out. That had to mean that she was pregnant. I spent the whole day running through all the solutions in my mind. I was young and a child was a death sentence. I would rather be dead. That was my thinking on that day. She called me right after she was off of work and told me “So next weekend we can’t use my parent’s lake house. I was looking forward to it so much. They ended up closing on it. It’s been sold.” She started crying on the phone. I didn’t even remember agreeing to go to the lake house. I must admit I was angry. I had been thinking about taking my life or raising a child and she was upset that we couldn’t have a “romantic weekend getaway.” I also was relieved because I was not a father, and I didn’t have to go to some lake-house. I realized the next day I had to end it. When she invited me to the bar that weekend I texted her “Sorry. I can’t make it.” After doing this routine for several weekends she realized it was over. To this day she probably thinks if we had gone to that lake house we would be married and have kids, and that breaks my heart. I still miss her, and wish I hadn’t been so cruel.

The red-haired girl texts me back “sure.”

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The date at Vito’s went well. We both had the fettuccine and a lot of red wine. We’re feeling pretty good. We both have a buzz and I think the red-haired girl had a good time. I had decided to talk about different movies that I liked when we were drinking wine and having salad at the beginning of the date. Then when our fettuccine came out I had asked her if she liked to travel. She had told me all about traveling to Europe during one summer when she was a Junior in college. She had studied art management. While she was talking about Europe I had decided that when the meal was over I would ask her what she thought was art since she was an art management major. She had gone into the description of how “almost anything can be considered art.” She said it depends on who is looking at it; which honestly makes no sense to me, but I let her talk. I was going to suggest going to the brewery after we ate dinner. At the brewery I was going to mention that I would like to hang out with her more in the future which would show my interest in her. But after I had paid the bill she had said, “There’s actually an art show on the east side of town if you want to go.” I didn’t particularly care about seeing the art show, but I wanted to spend more time with her so I had agreed.

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We pull up to an older building in the industrial section of town. The industrial area is like most industrial areas in modern cities. There are breweries, coffee shops, pop-up shops, art exhibits and all kinds of other hip things. On the way over the girl had told me that in one of her art classes a student had discussed how there was a 90 year old blind millionaire who kept buying expensive works of art. He owned a Van Gogh, a Rembrandt, and a bunch of modern artists whose names mean nothing to me. She said it was typical that the greatest works of art are usually owned by millionaires who only have them as some sort of investment or insurance. No one ever looks at them, and they are usually stored away in protective containers. I agreed that it didn’t seem right that a blind man had all of the greatest works of art. I had asked her if they had paintings in braille. She had told me that was a good question but she didn’t know if they did.

We go inside. The first room is a large open space with photographs covering every inch of wall space. We go through the room and look at the photographs. I see a guy selling beer in the middle of the room and get two Budweisers for us to drink. The red-haired girl tells me that the photographs are done by her friends. They are all in black and white and show them partying and doing drugs. She goes on to discuss how they are supposed to show how young people are disinterested with The American Dream. “It’s like taking a canister of spray paint to Norman Rockwell’s paintings,” she says. I don’t know if that is a good or a bad thing. I drink my beer fast and buy another one. As we are looking at all of the photographs I see her in one. She’s smoking a cigarette on a porch and smiling as a guy behind her is puking in a cowboy hat. “I took my mother here once,” the girl tells me, “It was to see an abstract painting show. All she talked about the whole time was how well done the signs in front of the paintings were. She talked about the font and the dimensions. It drove me crazy! She can’t appreciate anything that doesn’t have some practical meaning. I’ve never tried to take her to an art show again.”

After we finish looking at all of the photographs we head to the back room. It has a sign above it that says “enter at your own risk.” The room is dark and has flashing strobe lights. We walk inside. The first art “exhibit” is just a room with a pole in the middle of it. There is an actual woman, completely naked with her wrists tied to the pole. She is blindfolded and gagged. The sign above her says “The safe word is SPY.” We can tell she is trying to yell the word “spy” through her gagged mouth. I ask the red-haired girl if we should get someone to untie her, but she says “It’s part of the art show.”

We walk to the next exhibit. There is a man sitting at a piano with no keys. He is staring off into space and singing the intro to the Beach Boys’ song “Wouldn’t it be Nice.” Those are the only words he sings “wouldn’t it be nice” over and over and over again. There is a room with a man lying naked on the ground eating what appears to be raw steak. He’s grunting like a pig.

Another room has a man with one of those fraternity paddles and he yells at you. “Get on the ground pledge!” He gets right up in our faces and yells “You’re nothing! You’re fucking nothing, pledge. Take off your clothes,” he’s screaming about an inch away from my face and lifting the paddle up in the air, “Did you fucking hear me, retard! I said you’re nothing! You’re fucking worthless! You’re nothing!!!!” Painted on the walls in red, over and over is the phrase: “You can’t crush nothing.”

We get to the last room. The girl leans close to me and whispers in my ear “The last exhibit is always the best one.” We go into the room and there are about 50 art snobs standing around whispering to one another. The girl and I wait patiently. When we finally get up to the front there is a single pair of glasses sitting on one of the benches. The red-haired girl takes a notepad out of her coat and starts writing. Everyone is nodding their heads like they know what this means. I can’t help but think that I could do this. I know everyone says that, but I could literally put anything in this room and people would think it was art. I mean I could even put nothing in this room and then people would really lose their minds. “What is he trying to say? By putting nothing in the room is he saying that everything is art, or that nothing is art?” I can already hear them talking about it in my head. As we’re walking out an older man comes up to us. “Have you seen my glasses? I think I left them on one of the benches.” I tell him that yes I did see a pair of glasses on a bench, but that I think they were part of the exhibit. “Oh no, those are mine,” the man says laughing. He walks over to the bench, puts the glasses on and walks out.” I can’t believe it. I was right. There was nothing in that last exhibit, and just like I had predicted everyone projects their own opinions on the room and finds some way to dub literally anything as “art.” I get ready to tell the red-haired girl this, but she leans close to me again and says, “He was part of the exhibit.” I have my doubts, but I agree with her. She’s the one with the art degree after all.

We drive back home. We drink more red wine. She kisses me, I kiss her back. I tell her I have been thinking that I like her and want to spend more time with her. She says that is nice and that she would like that. I let the girl punch me five times in the stomach and then ten times on each shoulder. Then I go to my bed to sleep and she lies down on the couch.