The Dictionary of Failed Relationships Read online

  “Do you have somewhere I can change at least?” I said. “I have a date.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me but did not smile, “The lobby bathroom is around the corner.”

  I crammed myself and my rolling carry-on into a faux-marble stall after having considered and rejected using the larger, handicapped area. I tried the jeans, then came out to look in the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. I tried the skirt.

  “Which do you think?” I asked a Korean attendant, who was making perfect little pyramids out of seashell-shaped soaps.

  She waved her hand at what I had on. “The skirt.”

  I said, “Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.” I left my roll-a-bag behind the counter in the lobby and went out to catch a cab.

  The driver had deep-black skin and was wearing an Oakland Raiders cap pulled down over his eyebrows. “You’re a long way from Raider country,” I said.

  He grinned. “We’re everywhere,” he said. “Where to?”

  “Blue,” I answered, “the restaurant.”

  He whistled through his teeth. “Fannnnnncy,” he said, “I heard they stack the food there real high, like edible skyscrapers.”

  “It’s an assignment,” I said.

  “I can dig that,” he said and grinned again. It was the second time in ten minutes that someone had taken me for a whore, not counting the Korean woman. Being in Chicago was starting to seem like a very bad idea.

  “No,” I said, “I’m a writer.”

  The explanation that never worked. It came out as more of a sigh than language. I remember the very first time, ten years ago, the publication of my first book imminent, when on another plane, between two other cities, I’d been brave enough to say those words for the very first time. The woman next to me, with her cotton candy hair, had looked at me, blinked twice, and said to her husband, “Howard, this young lady over here says she’s an underwriter. Imagine, at her age!”

  “A writer,” the driver said, “Really, and what do you write?”

  “Fiction,” I said. Mostly. I remember another time when I had told a long-limbed, fantastically beautiful and equally androgynous checkout guy at Whole Foods market that I was working on a screenplay for Danny DeVito. The checkout guy had taken one look at my sweatpanted, unshowered self and said, “Right, and my daddy is Richard Nixon.”

  “Fiction,” the driver said, “No shit. What kind?”

  “Just fiction,” I said. It was another difficult question. “Not mysteries or westerns or true crime or fantasy, just fiction. Some people call it mainstream,” I said, conscious of the tone in my voice, hating myself a little for it.

  “Mainstream,” he said, like he was trying out the word, “and by using that word, you might be referring to, oh . . .” he scratched his head through the Raiders cap, “maybe John Updike, or Tim O’Brien, or Jayne Anne Phillips, or Annie Proulx?”

  His eyes were suddenly wicked in the rearview mirror. I wanted to stay in that cab for the rest of the night. For the rest of my life.

  “Yes, that’s it exactly.” I paused, then confessed, “I have a date with Cupid.”

  “Come on, girl,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

  When I told him, he said, “Well, I thought I knew a lot about writers, but I never guessed they’d make y’all do shit like this. You think Annie Proulx would do shit like this?”

  Back in Denver, I had recently had dinner with Annie. I said, “Never in a hundred million years.”

  “We’re here,” he said.

  I looked at the dark street, empty of people or signage. “It’s subtle,” I said.

  “Of course,” he said. “Good luck.” When I had paid him, he asked “You sure you don’t want me to wait?”

  I walked into Blue twenty minutes late. I went to the desk and asked for Cupid by his real name. The hostess looked at me pityingly and bent her head sideways to indicate a man standing behind her and to her left.

  I walked over to him and stuck out my hand. “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said.

  “I am, too,” he said, then turned his back to me and strode over to the bar.

  He was short, balding, and smoking a cigar.

  Like a stubborn dog, I followed him. “I did come all the way from Denver,” I said.

  He ignored me. He appeared to be internally combusting.

  I looked around the room, which was golden and glassy, some kind of warehouse out near the ballpark, entirely remade to resemble some designer’s idea of utopia; it was both elegant and warm. The bartender put a napkin down in front of me. There were cosmopolitans on all sides of me. Cupid was drinking something brown. “Club soda,” I said, getting my bearings. “And cranberry, with a lime.” Cupid still had his face turned away.

  “The plane got in late . . .” I said.

  He looked at me with more fury than perhaps I have ever deserved.

  He said, “I saw your face when you came in here . . .”

  “Yes?” I said.

  “You . . .” he stretched out each word, “have . . . no . . . idea . . . who . . . I . . . am!”

  I tried to think quickly. “Well,” I said, “that’s . . . true. I mean, I know you have this new TV show, and I know you’ve been in movies, but I’m not a TV watcher really, at all, except sports sometimes, and I tend not to go to the more violent movies, which if I understand correctly are the ones . . .”

  He let out a breath that was slow and hot.

  “I know your publicist said she was going to FedEx me a copy of the movie and the pilot of the show, but I waited at home as long as I possibly could before I had to go to the airport, and it just didn’t come. This whole thing happened so quickly at the last minute. I’m actually supposed to be in Laramie right now.”

  “Where?” He squinted at me through a cloud of cigar smoke.

  “Laramie.”

  He looked at me blankly.

  “Wyoming. At a bookstore.”

  He waved for silence. “Just tell me one thing,” he said, his face screwing up around the cigar like the face of a much older man, “how on earth are you supposed to do an interview with me if you don’t know my work?”

  Again, each word seemed to have its own internal punctuation.

  “Well . . . it’s not an interview,” I said, a little like a conductor who knows the train is nearly at the place where the bridge has washed out and still can’t find a way to reach for the brakes.

  “Then what is it?” he said.

  I took a deep breath and felt iron give in to gravity. “It’s a date,” I said. Though I had wanted it to be strong, it came out as a whisper.

  “A date?” he shouted, loudly enough to interfere with everyone at the bar as well as several tables’ utopian experience. “Why would I want to go on a date with you?”

  I made myself not look away.

  It had been nearly a month since David, my fiancé of a year, had waited until I returned home from therapy to tell me that he didn’t want to see me ever again. He had made up his mind without me, he said, while I was out on tour. When I begged him to reconsider, to see a therapist with me, to give us a chance to repair things when I got back from the rest of my tour, he yanked on his much-too-long hair and talked with so much vehemence that little flecks of spittle showered my face.

  I spent the next and final month of the tour on autopilot, doing my job, making people laugh, and feeling increasingly worse about myself, about my looks, about my life. I can say, with some objectivity, that I am a reasonably attractive woman, though clearly not the kind of woman a star of television and movies would ordinarily find himself out on a date with. I don’t wear makeup, for one thing, and I rarely do much of anything to my hair. And although it’s likely that I was at my thinnest for that tour, I’ll bet I weighed a full twenty pounds more than anyone Cupid has dated since he got his first leading role in junior high. Though at this point too much time has passed for me to say this with any certainty, I may have been a shade taller than Cupid, had we both gotten down to our socks.r />
  Had I to do it all over again, I would have thrown my club soda in his face and stormed out of the restaurant, teaching him no lesson at all, but preserving some shred of dignity. What I tried instead was reason.

  “It’s not a real date,” I said, reminding myself of the tone I had misused on the literary cabdriver. “It’s a publicity date. I write books about failed relationships; you are going to be Cupid. Somebody at a magazine thought it would be funny. Didn’t you have a photo shoot for this today? What did you think you were doing, out there on the sidewalk with flowers in your hand?”

  “The photo shoot was fine,” he said, “I knocked on doors, I held the flowers behind my back, they took my picture.”

  “A-ha,” I said, “you see, not an interview. A date.”

  He thought about this for a minute, and some vestige of the person he might have once been nearly came to the surface—the part of him that understood that I wasn’t out to get him, the part of him that wanted to laugh . . . but just as quickly as the understanding crossed his face, it was gone, and the movie star returned.

  “Are you suggesting . . . ?” he asked, his face twisted again, “that you and I would be in-ti-mate, and then you would write about it?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t believe intimacy ever crossed anybody’s mind.”

  “I swear to God,” he said, “on all sides of me . . . everywhere I turn . . . I’m surrounded by idiots.”

  “I hope you don’t mean me,” I said.

  He eyed me for another moment before he went on.

  “If that’s true,” he said, “then why would you agree to do this?”

  From where I sat at that moment, he had a point. “Well,” I began, “first of all, I try to do whatever my publicist tells me to do. I feel like she knows better than I do about that end of the business. And secondly, I just got dumped, about a month ago. This date felt serendipitous . . . a date with Cupid . . . like I might get some information I needed, like you might have something to tell me that I could use.”

  He gathered up his patience from unimaginable depths. I felt it coming, the karmic payback. “Do you not understand,” he said, “that I’m an actor?”

  “That is one thing,” I said, “I definitely do understand.”

  For a minute there seemed like there was nothing more to say.

  “Well, then,” he said, at last, “do you want to at least get some dinner?”

  “Okay,” I said, just like a trained seal, just like a trained woman.

  The food did come, as the cabdriver said it would (I held on to his memory like a life preserver), in multicolor erections. Cupid had a hard time staying at the table, getting up to relight his cigar every couple of minutes and also to talk on his cell phone.

  He took a big bite of ahi tuna and looked me in the eye for the first time.

  “So, you promise you won’t do the assignment?” he stated more than asked.

  “I don’t think this is what the magazine had in mind,” I said.

  “That doesn’t sound like a promise.”

  “I’m not a secret agent. I owe the magazine nothing. If you don’t want the story to appear, I’m sure you can stop it. You are, after all, the famous one here.”

  “So, you’re saying you are going to write it, and make me responsible for killing it?”

  “That would be a ridiculous waste of my time.”

  “All right, then,” he said, “so should we just try to have a normal conversation?”

  “What would you like to talk about?” I asked.

  He put his head in his hands and shook the resulting sculpture back and forth.

  “Nothing,” he said, “I can’t talk about anything, because how am I supposed to trust you not to write down what I say?”

  Had I to do it all over again I would have hurled a dinner roll at his considerable forehead and walked out of the restaurant at that point. What I did instead was ask, “How about if I talk?” I put the roll back down onto my bread plate. “I’m planning a trip to Laos and Cambodia. Would you like to hear about that?”

  He would have just as soon not, as it turned out, but I told him anyway. He got up and stood in the corner of the golden-lit Utopia, which was not, come to think of it, Blue at all, and he made another call, this one with a bit more urgency. I wondered if he was asking some of the other idiots who surrounded him to come and deal with the one who was currently taking up his time. I checked out the other diners. I took great pleasure in knocking over my little skyscrapers of food.

  When he returned, I said, “What about you, is there anyplace where you would like to travel?”

  He drew a long, cleansing breath. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but I really think if we make it through dinner, we shouldn’t even think about extending this date any longer than we already have.”

  Had I to do it all over again, I would have upended my little towers of rare ahi into his lap and walked out of the restaurant.

  “I meant in the world,” I clarified. “I meant by yourself.”

  Seven years later, dinner ended. We both declined coffee and dessert. We shared a cab back in the direction of Michigan Avenue. I prayed for the Raiders fan, but he did not appear. Cupid and I rode silently through the wet streets until at his stop, which came first, he leaned over and kissed me very briefly on the cheek.

  I went back to the originally booked hotel, where I had changed in the bathroom. I rode the shuttle to the other hotel, where my room was right next to a conference center and in which an insurance company was holding their annual blowout. The band was scheduled to play until one. It was just after ten.

  Had I been in Laramie, it would have been just after nine, I would have just finished my reading, everyone would be applauding, and a few loyal fans would be lining up to have me sign their books.

  I walked back out to Michigan Avenue. It was 1998, and for reasons I couldn’t imagine at the time, someone had lined the streets with individually decorated life-size papier-mâché cows. The one in front of Neiman Marcus was wearing pink toenail polish and pearls; the one in front of the Rand McNally store had the world painted all over him; the one in front of the Tribune building was jumping over the moon.

  I’ve never liked Chicago much, but that night, its cows saved me. I went back to my room and watched an I Love Lucy marathon on Nickelodeon until it was time to get ready for the airport.

  ORGASM

  By Darcey Steinke

  or·gasm ’r-’ga-zm noun [New Latin orgasmus, from Greek orgasmos, from organ to grow ripe, be lustful; probably akin to Sanskrit rj sap, strength] (circa 1763): intense or paroxysmal excitement; especially: an explosive discharge of neuromuscular tensions at the height of sexual arousal that is usually accompanied by the ejaculation of semen in the male and by vaginal contractions in the female. See also: BED BUDDY, GRAFENBURG SPOT, BRAIN CHEMICALS RELEASED BY CHOCOLATE.

  Mary heard her husband’s key in the lock. The dead bolt gave and she jumped up from the tub, wrapped a towel around her body, and tucked the corner in between her breasts. She’d been planning what to say to him, how to tell him that she was hurt that he had stayed out so late on Christmas Eve. But now, as usual, she was just glad he’d come home. Cold drops of water fell onto her bare shoulders as she stretched up on her tiptoes to kiss him.

  He grinned like a teen idol. “Missed me, huh?” he said, pulling her into the front room, plugging in the Christmas tree lights, and yanking a Macy’s bag from his backpack.

  “Go try them on,” he said.

  Mary went into the bathroom and opened the bag. She was hoping for a flannel nightgown in a pattern of rosebuds, maybe fluffy pink slippers, but instead she pulled out a white bustier, panties, and thigh highs. Was he trying to mock her? Her stomach muscles were like Jell-O, and she had ten more pounds to lose. But she wanted to be a good sport. Life w
as short—what was wrong with a little sexy underwear? She let the towel drop and secured the bodice backward, then twisted it around so that the harsh material pressed into her nipples. Wouldn’t he be disgusted? But he liked the look of white lingerie against pink skin.

  Mary walked out and threw herself down beside him on the couch. She was chilly in the outfit. In the raw, overhead light, her skin looked as powdery and loose as a latex hospital glove. She looked, even to her own eyes, like a washed-up hooker. But he didn’t seem to notice her body’s imperfections—the loose stomach, the heavy upper thighs—and this fact comforted her. His oversight, a connubial manifestation of her place in his heart. But then his eyes dilated out of focus, and she knew the lace was mesmerizing him, encouraging the curtain to rise on the private slideshow in his head. Who knew what items were on the play-bill? A sullen fourteen-year-old with puffy nipples and fuzzy blond hair, in platform shoes. A few Barbies. A couple hundred gin and tonics.

  Her husband unzipped his black jeans, let his cock flap out, and moved, looking flushed and boyish in his white T-shirt, till his head was in position between her spread thighs. He flattened his tongue against her, causing the stiff nylon to push against her pubic bone, and she felt the imprint of the synthetic rose outlined there. Sensations like sound waves moved into her pelvis and bloomed like one tiny wet flower after another. Her husband came back up and kissed her mouth as he pushed his cock inside her. Really, he was a sweet guy, a little misguided but nice, she thought, as she watched over his shoulder as the light illuminated the weave of the linen-covered lampshade.

  Mary turned into a baby-sitter with a thin teenage body, entwined with her boyfriend’s thin teenage body, as they fucked crazily on the couch. And for a while, that was OK, the scent of Coca-Cola and sweat emanating as their flat stomachs and sharp hips collided. But then it wasn’t enough, and it was time for the father of the house to walk over to the couch, lower his pants, and offer the baby-sitter his cock. This worked immediately. A sweet sting infused her flesh. But just as quickly, the water began to leak out of the drain. Mary tried frantically to inhabit each of them: father, baby-sitter, boyfriend. Each had characteristics as specific and mysterious as the Holy Trinity. She decided to kick the baby-sitter out, but it was too late. She was the baby-sitter, the unbabysitter, the ur-baby-sitter, the ghost in the baby-sitter, and so she paused a minute and concentrated on the cock within her, rotating around in a motion that made her think of the name Roto-Rooter. That in turn brought the picture of a toilet brush getting at the film in the hole of the toilet bowl, and that did give her a little charge. It was weird, the things that were sexy. Of the two sticks that sparked fire, each had their own philosophy, excruciatingly particular. Wanting to help her husband along, she reached down into the crack of his rear and ran her fingers over the webbed skin between his testicles and his anus. Jesus Christ. Even the words. Testicle. Anus. It was enough to make you put a gun to your head. He sped up the motion of his pelvis, and that was it, that was the point in the universe, the shiny one, the one one, the place where restlessness was transformed into ice cream, gravel into flowers, and dirt into love.