The Dictionary of Failed Relationships Read online

  At last year’s party, Rose had met an attractive, muscular Jewish painter named Sam, and, convinced there was mutual chemistry, she’d dared him to kiss her. He obliged, seemingly delighted, and the embrace was so intimate, long, and lovely that Rose felt certain he was smitten. As she was contemplating which font to use on the save-the-date card, he said, “Will you excuse me? I have to go to the men’s room.”

  “Of course,” Rose said, understanding that nature’s call sometimes competed with love’s. She looked at him dotingly. He looked at her less dotingly, hesitated for a moment, and then picked up his beer bottle and took it with him.

  Given her track record, Rose was nervous about attending the party this year, but at the last minute she changed her mind. She had no other plans and decided the upside was that she would be unlikely to have a worse experience than she had the year before. She wore confident clothes, hoping they might bring good luck: a new pair of jeans called Sevens that made her derriere look round but not too big, a black rock-and-roll tank top with a print of a unicorn on it, and a belt with a buckle that said INDIAN.

  When Rose walked into the party, one of the promoters gave her a hundred dollars and said, “Have fun.” She slipped the money into her pocket and spotted Tom, the ex-roommate of her ex-best friend. He was talking to a skinny boy who had mussed black hair and a strange elfin look, as though he had been the runner-up for lead hobbit in The Lord of the Rings.

  “Hey, Rose,” said Tom. “This is my friend Matt. Matt, this is Rose Brody.”

  “Do you bike, Rose?” Matt asked.

  “What?” she said, thrown.

  “Indian motorcycles,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t even know what Indian meant. I bought this at a high-end women’s clothing store because the saleswoman pushed it on me.”

  “It’s good she pushed,” Matt said. “You got a lot going on there! I wouldn’t mind clinging to your waist.” He put his thumbs in his belt loops, jutted his chin out, and nodded slowly. His delivery was so over-the-top that Rose decided he wasn’t so much sleazy as sending up the notion of sleaziness. The half-kidding style made her so uneasy that she mumbled, “Nice meeting you,” and moved along.

  For the next few hours, Rose circulated and made small talk with others in the crowd, which was comprised mainly of actors and screenwriters. Rose was a freelance copy editor and was half-afraid of, half-entranced by the beautiful people.

  Around midnight, the music got loud and the group danced and sang along to the only black songs that white people know the lyrics to: “ABC” and “Dance to the Music.” Rose could see all the young folk beginning to dip into their funny money and dare each other to do strange things: A slender performance artist climbed up on a table and was mooning the crowd; a buttoned-up blond was giving a lascivious lap dance to a guy on a couch.

  As Rose was gaping at the lap dance, an overconfident, wan guy came up to her and said, “Would you kiss me on the lips for ten seconds?” She looked around to see who he had made the suggestion to, but everyone around her was shimmying to Sly.

  “All right,” she said.

  He used too much tongue, though, and rubbed his hands too vigorously against her back. He must not have been too big a fan of her kissing, either, because when he pulled away, he handed her the money, said, “Thank you,” and quickly left.

  Rose found herself thinking about the ironically sleazy hobbit boy and took a promenade around the room. She ran into Tom, who was getting his coat at the coat check. Since she had tossed back a few Stoli tonics by this point, she said a little tipsily, “You’re such a funny guy, Tom. I need to find someone funny.” She had realized this a few weeks ago, when a girlfriend of hers had told her, “Sometimes my boyfriend makes me laugh so hard that I’m crying and can’t even move.” Many of Rose’s ex-boyfriends had left her crying and unable to move, but it was never because they’d said something funny.

  “You don’t date funny men?” said Tom.

  “No, the nicest ones are bland and the interesting ones are mean, but none of them are funny.”

  “Matt’s funny,” he said. “You should talk to him.”

  Before she knew what she was doing, she had pulled a ten out of her pocket. “Give him this and tell him to come over here and make out with me.”

  Tom grinned, took the money, and disappeared. Rose sat in a banquette to wait. Fifteen minutes later, she spotted Matt across the room. He looked at her sideways but didn’t approach. She beckoned him in an exaggerated, cartoonish style, and soon he was sitting next to her.

  “What took you so long?” she said. “Didn’t you get my offer?”

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I thought ten was a little low.”

  Matt’s drink was sitting on a cocktail napkin in front of them, and there was a red cherry in it. She plucked it out, ate the cherry, and asked, “Want to see me tie the stem in a knot with my tongue?”

  “You can’t do that,” he said. She stuck the stem in her mouth and pulled it out in a perfect knot a few seconds later.

  “How’d you learn to do it?”

  “My cousin taught me at a wedding, when I was five,” she said, “and I’ve been screwed up about men ever since.”

  He raised his hand to her face and ran the back of his fingers up and down her cheek. “Your cheek is so smooth,” he said. She decided he wasn’t so strange looking.

  “Let’s make out,” she said, curling her arm around his as if they were walking, even though they were sitting.

  “Have you kissed anyone else tonight?”

  “Just one guy. He was bad.”

  “Then I can’t kiss you.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m germ-phobic. I’ve been afraid of germs ever since I went to India.”

  “When was that?”

  “Twelve years ago.” She looked at him uneasily. He paused a second, then said, “Just kidding.” He leaned in and smooched her, soft and just a little wet.

  “Let’s go somewhere,” she said.

  “I really shouldn’t,” he said. “I wanted to get some sleep tonight.”

  “Then let’s get in a cab, drive around, and make out. We can drop me off first and then you.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “Brooklyn.”

  “That’s too far,” he said.

  “Are you kidding?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. She sighed, weary from the effort, and it must have had an impact on him, because immediately he said, “OK. Let’s go back to my place for a drink, but only one.”

  “One is fine,” she said.

  His apartment was a tiny one-bedroom without a separate kitchen. Rose beelined to the bathroom. In front of the toilet, where everyone posts their most prized achievements, was a framed poster for a film called Party Line, about a telephone operator who eavesdrops on people’s calls. Rose hadn’t seen it, but she had seen the trailer. Someone named Matt Bell had written it, and Rose assumed it was this Matt.

  She flushed and came out of the bathroom. “Did you write Party Line?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said, from the kitchen, where he was mixing a drink. “Did you see it?”

  “No, but that was a big-deal movie. I’m very impressed.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “How come you have such a small apartment if you wrote a big-budget movie?”

  “Don’t ask me that,” he moaned. She realized she had done the one thing a woman should never do to a guy on the first date: criticize his size.

  His desk was by the bathroom door, and Rose sat down at it, picked up the fax phone, and said, “Hello, Matt Bell’s office. No, this is his secretary. Who’s calling? Mr. Lingus? All right, Mr. Lingus, I’ll give him the message.” She wrote Mr. Lingus on his blotter, on February 14. Matt came over and handed her a drink.

  “What is this?” she said.

  “Gatorade and vodka,” he said. “It’s all I have.”

  He disappeared into the bedroom. A
few seconds later, Rose heard “The Girl from Ipanema,” playing with just music and no lyrics. She had never had a guy play “The Girl from Ipanema” as a precoital warm-up before. She felt romantic and light-headed, as if she were living in an old-time movie.

  She went into the bedroom, where Matt was adjusting the volume of the music, and he turned to her with his arms extended and a decidedly unfunny look on his face. They danced well together, and because he was short, they fit. She became so taken with his small, strong body that pretty soon she toppled him down onto the bed.

  “I’d like to be naked with you,” he said after a while.

  “That sounds like a good idea,” she said. “We could do it like in The Heartbreak Kid.” He was a screenwriter; she felt sure he’d get the reference.

  “I don’t know that movie,” he said.

  “How can you not?” she said. “Cybill Shepherd and Charles Grodin stand in front of a fire and take off all their clothes, item by item. After each piece is removed, they take one step closer to each other, but she says they can’t touch.”

  “What a good plan,” he said.

  They lay side by side. She took off a sock. He took off his shirt. She took off another sock. He took off his pants. When she got down to her bra and underwear, she was embarrassed because she was wearing a cheap green-and-black leopard print thong. She decided to take it off first.

  “Uh-oh, I’m getting nervous,” he said. She slithered out of the thong, and he said, “That’s a very interesting shape you’ve got there.”

  “It’s an overgrown Brazilian,” she said. “So I’m two-toned. So sue me.”

  He took off his boxers. She took off her bra. They touched.

  The sex itself wasn’t so much bad as hesitant, on both of their parts. They were torn between wanting to go all the way, to make it a bona fide one-night stand, and not wanting to go all the way because neither of them was really comfortable with that sort of thing, generally speaking. He was the first to suggest they do it. Thinking he meant it and really wanted to, she agreed, and then he ran into the bathroom to get a condom and had trouble getting it on, and she said, “Maybe we shouldn’t,” and he said, “You’re right, let’s not.” They rolled around a little more, and he went upside down on her, and after he made her very, very happy, she said, “I think we should,” because she felt generous, and he said, “That’s a good idea,” and they did for a while, but the condom was thick and dry and after fifteen minutes she suggested that they stop, and he seemed more relieved than dissatisfied.

  In the morning, as Rose dressed next to Matt, she found her unspent funny money in her pocket. She put it down on the nightstand and said, “Thanks for last night.”

  “Good one,” he said.

  They went into the main room to leave, and he asked her for her phone number before she had even offered it. That, combined with her one-liner, made her feel elated and secure. She went to the desk and scribbled her number underneath the name Mr. Lingus.

  “You’d better not throw out February,” she said. “I’m unpublished.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t want the wrong people bothering me.”

  “I know what you mean,” he said. Then he walked her to the subway station and kissed her for a long time before she went down the stairs.

  That afternoon, as Rose was sitting at her desk, editing a revised, expanded, annotated edition of The Yellow Wallpaper, the phone rang.

  “Last night was really amazing,” Matt said. “You are really something else, Rose.”

  “Thanks, Matt.”

  “Do you not like it when I call you by your name?”

  “I don’t mind it, but I can’t tell if you’re being funny.”

  “I call people by their names. It’s a habit I have. I’m bad with names, and it helps me remember.”

  “So you were about to forget mine?”

  “Not at all! I won’t say your name anymore. I won’t say it.”

  “You can say it.”

  “All right, Rose.”

  They talked a little about their families, and Rose told him a joke she had heard recently about an old man who complains of pain to his doctor. The doctor asks for a stool sample, a urine sample, a mucus sample, and a semen sample, and the man says, “Why don’t I just give you my underwear?”

  Matt laughed appreciatively, and Rose felt relieved that he wasn’t grossed out. “So, Matt,” she said, “why don’t you tell me something about you that I don’t know?”

  “Like what?”

  “It could be about anything, not necessarily dramatic. About your favorite food, even.”

  “Food is OK?” he said. “All right. More than any other food, I eat boiled chicken. I like to boil it in a pot, take a shower while it’s boiling, and then dry myself off and eat it.” Rose didn’t know why she was charmed by this image, but she was.

  They talked awhile longer, and Matt seemed solicitous and very interested. He asked her a bunch of questions about copy-editing and kept calling her “lofty” and “smart.” At three different times, he said what a great night it had been, which Rose thought was odd given his lack of fruition. Maybe the world was becoming more egalitarian. Then he said, “I’m going to visit my uncle in Connecticut this weekend, but I’ll be back Sunday. We can go out early next week if you want.”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  “Actually,” he said, “I have birthday parties on Monday and Tuesday. But let’s talk in the beginning of the week and do something late in the week.” Rose didn’t understand why he didn’t invite her to the birthday parties along with him. “I’d invite you with me,” he said, “but my friends are really weird, and if you met them, you’d think I was weird, too. Besides, if you were there, I’d want to focus all my attention on you.” Rose liked the idea of his focusing all his attention on her but still thought it was strange that he wouldn’t invite her.

  “Well,” she said. “Cawl me latuh.” Rose said this to emphasize the point that he should call her, but she said it with an accent so it would seem joking and off-the-cuff instead of insistent and controlling.

  “I will,” he said.

  Rose lived in a tiny studio apartment, so her desk was only ten feet from her bed, but her phone was on the nightstand. It was a white, cordless Radio Shack model, and although she had to replace the battery more often than she liked, she was pleased with the unit and the ring, which was friendly without being too loud. Her answering machine was a Panasonic digital messaging system that had twenty minutes of recording time. Rose’s friends all thought she was crazy for not having caller ID, but she was old-fashioned and felt the world was getting stale from lack of surprise.

  On Monday morning, she moved the phone to her desk, right next to where she was working on the manuscript. It was eerily quiet all morning, so quiet that she became convinced the phone was broken. On three different occasions, she pressed “Talk” on the receiver to make sure nothing had happened, and each time she was greeted by a kind, infuriatingly efficient dial tone.

  The only time the phone rang was at twelve-thirty. Rose felt her heart race and said, “Hello?” There was a long pause—Rose felt sure it was Matt, mustering up the courage to speak—then a woman’s voice came on, telling Rose that she wanted to offer her an unlimited calling plan from Verizon.

  On Tuesday morning, she decided to leave the phone in its cradle so she wouldn’t look at it or think about it. She was pretty sure that Matt would call, but she knew if she focused on it too much, he wouldn’t, since that was what always happened. It rang at three-thirty. She jerked around nervously. She was certain it would be Matt, since this was the middle of the middle day of the beginning of the week, so she answered in a low, breathy voice like Jessica Rabbit’s.

  “Hell-o,” sang her mother, who was calling to give Rose the date of the Passover seder, which was six weeks away.

  “What’s the big rush?” said Rose.

  “I’m just trying to be considerate,�
� said her mother.

  Wednesday was the longest of the three days because when Rose woke up, her first thought was, “This is the day he’ll call.” She was sure that if Matt had any doubts about when to call or any logistical problems on Monday or Tuesday, he would surely be over them by now. The phone rang twice that morning. Once it was Rose’s editor to check in on her progress, and the other time it was her gynecologist, reminding her of an upcoming appointment. Rose was rude to both and felt guilty that the cause was a boy.

  At noon, she went for a walk to clear her head, but she took her cell phone with her and called her home machine three times within twenty minutes. By three o’clock, she was wondering if maybe Matt were dead. She thought he might have gotten into a car wreck on his way back from Connecticut, and this thought made her happy. She knew it was bad to be happy he might be dead, but it soothed her. She imagined herself in black at his funeral, his whole family knowing she could have been the one he married if only he hadn’t been killed.

  But if Matt were not dead, it meant that he had consciously decided not to call her again for some other reason, so she began replaying every line and inflection of their conversation to determine what she had said that might have been misconstrued. She decided her dirty joke was too dirty. She decided she had seemed, in general, too eager and fond.

  At four-twenty-two, the phone rang. Rose let it ring three times before she picked up. Her heart was beating very fast, but she tried to sound calm. “Hello?”

  “Rose, it’s Steve. We’re all going to dinner tomorrow night, and I wanted you to come.” Steve was a married guy in his fifties whom she had met at a magazine party several months before. He and his friend Richard, another fifty-something married guy, liked to double-date with Rose and her friend Jane, a single girl in her twenties. They would gather at a SoHo restaurant to eat, drink bottles of red wine, and flirt. At the end of the night, the men would drive home to Westchester, and the girls would split a cab back to Brooklyn. It was a symbiotic relationship—the men got to leer without guilt, and the girls got free food and nonstop compliments.