Mr. Unavailable #137: Girls' Night Out, Part II

See Spring Fever and Girls’ Night Out, Part I for the background on this one.

Around 2 a.m., we arrived at #137’s place deep on the lower east side. His one-bedroom apartment was on the 13^th floor of a high rise. It appeared to be a proper apartment—with a living room and a kitchen and a bedroom with a door. Nora and Chiseled were already supine on the sofa in the living room when we arrived, so #137 made me a seltzer with his Soda Stream in his very tastefully decorated kitchen (of course) as I happily twisted back and forth on a green Lucite counter stool.

His attention to detail was more than metrosexual. He had an extra toothbrush (of course), and then, as I sat on the toilet seat and we brushed our teeth together, he offered me a contact case for my contact lenses. He even asked if I wanted to take off my makeup or anything—then saying, as if to cover himself, that he didn’t actually have any makeup remover. 

In his bedroom, he gave me some articles of clothing to put on—a T-shirt and shorts—because he was a tighty-whitey kind of guy—and we unceremoniously climbed into bed. It was an interesting overnight. Through my borrowed chastity shorts, I could tell that he was turned on, but because I was only really there to experience his apartment—and his rather large bedroom—I kept saying coy things like, “I’m not that kind of girl.”

“Oh, stop,” he’d say, sounding irritated. There was evidence of straightness, after all. His irritation, the fact that I was even there at all…little things like that.

But the evidence as to something otherwise kept piling up. For example, I noticed that he had absolutely zero chest hair. Did he shave it? Laser it? Was it natural?

I heard Nora slip out around 6 a.m., which woke us. #137 set the alarm for 9 a.m. so I could make my noon brunch. At 9 a.m., as we got out of bed, he took my number and, as I got dressed, texted me. I laughed when I saw what he’d written.

“Hi, nice to meet u,” it said. Funny, sure, but a bit less than what I would have otherwise hoped for. We kissed good-bye in his foyer—an actual foyer—and I made my way to the elevator.

When I was a few blocks away, I replied to his text: “Likewise, I’m sure.”

At brunch, Kevin asked if there was potential. “Yes, I think so, if I can get over his gayness.”

“Maybe that could work in your favor,” Kevin said.

“Yeah, maybe if I’m turned off by his gayness, I won’t be that gaga over him and I can actually get to know him and see what he’s like and see if I even like him before getting deeply involved with him.”

“Um, actually, I was thinking that could work in your favor because he probably has good taste and could buy you nice things.”

“Oh, that, too,” I said.

Later, I asked Nora if she got a gay vibe from him. “I didn’t speak to him all night,” she said, “but when I saw his apartment, I definitely thought he was gay.”

One day went by, then two, the three and then one week turned into two weeks and I hadn’t heard from him. Maybe he felt rejected because I refused his advances. Maybe he was worried about the whole I-know-the-people-he-works-with thing. Or, maybe, he really was gay.

Signs of Hope: He seemed interested.

Red Flags: He also seemed gay.

Turning Point: When I didn’t hear from him.

Diagnosis: For him: See the three “maybe’s” above.

For me: I was glad Nora got a gay reading, too. At any rate, his disappearance didn’t really matter. Because 1, well, you know. And 2, #113 and I had been back in text touch for a week before I’d even met #137. And he was talking about coming back into town...

Mr. Unavailable #137: Girls' Night Out, Part I

See Spring Fever for the background on this one.

As someone who doesn’t really drink, I don’t go out for drinks very often. But with a full-blown case of spring fever and a very open mind, I found myself—at 11 p.m. on one particular Saturday night—out for drinks with Nora at R Bar on the Bowery, watching groups of girls take their turns around a couple of stripper polls.

It was an educational evening. I learned that the new fashion is for women to wear the shortest dresses possible—no matter your size or shape. I also learned that a short dress is not a liability when dealing with a stripper poll, not if one of two things happens: the dress is appropriately tight or the woman in the dress clenches tightly with her legs.

Nora and I settled onto a banquette with drinks and scanned the room. A group of pretty boys stood across from us at the bar.

“I like all of them, especially that one,” Nora said, noting a particularly chiseled, bearded man. “I usually don’t like guys with facial hair, but he’s cute.”

“Oh, he knows he’s cute,” I said, meaning that that was his problem.

I picked out another one from the group that I liked, too. Dark hair, clearly fit—the kind of guy who wears aftershave and irons his shirts.

I turned to take a sip of my drink and when I turned back, the chiseled one had bolted across the room to sit at Nora’s side. They started talking and, within minutes, were making out.

I looked around, knocked at the ice cubes in my glass with my straw, went to the bathroom, came back, sat down, looked around some more. And then I saw the dark-haired, fit one approach. He said something to Chiseled and Chiseled leaned over Nora and introduced us.

“Tara, this is [#137],” Chiseled said.

“Hi, nice to meet you,” #137 said.

I hadn’t noticed from a distance, but, up close, he just seemed gay—maybe it was the lilt at the end of his introduction, or his product-laden hair, or the slight bounce in his step, or his symmetrical features. Whatever it was, it was palpable.

Oh, the chiseled guy's nice gay friend has come over to keep me company, I thought. Too bad he’s gay.

We started talking. It turned out that he worked at a mutual fund company that I did freelance work for—and, on a daily basis, he worked with the people I dealt with. We did a full department name check: “Do you know Angela? Greg? Carrie?” Check. Check. Check.

“That’s crazy,” I said, grabbing the arm of my new gay friend.

“Wow, what a small world,” he said, “Now I can’t say anything about how it really is there.”

“Yes, you can,” I said, smiling big and jumping up and down. There was no need to hide my spastic personality, after all. He was gay.

“Do you want a drink?” he said.

That was nice. Chiseled’s gay friend wanted to buy me a drink.

We stood by the bar with our fresh drinks.

“Well…now that we know the same people in a business context, I can’t say what I was going to say, “ he said.

“What can’t you say? Just tell me,” I pleaded.

“Well, you’re practically a colleague so now it’s kind of out of line…” he said, brushing his hand across mine.

“No, it’s not,” I said.

“Well, I was going to say, it’s too bad you’re practically a colleague because you’re really cute. Did you see me checking you out before?”

Aw, Chiseled’s gay friend was hitting on me. Wait. Oh my god. Chiseled’s gay friend wasn’t gay.

#137. Was. Not. Gay.

“No, I didn’t see you checking me out,” I said, trying to wrap my head around his newfound heterosexuality.

“Good. That means I was being slick,” he said. Taking my hands, he started to dance with me. And, no surprise, he could dance. As if his straight cred weren’t already flimsy enough, that just served to crack away at it some more.

Later, we compared war stories. He was an adrenaline junky, active in things like skydiving, motorcycle racing and bike racing (running from some kind of buried truth, perhaps?) while I confessed that I was afraid to ride my bike in New York City.

“It’s dangerous,” he said sweetly. Too sweetly?

Chiseled and #137 wanted to go somewhere else and Nora, despite her wobbly state, wanted to dance, so they took us to Hotel-something on the Lower East Side, where we headed to the basement and started dancing to 80s tunes. #137 danced close, holding me to him as he swung me around. He had that look in his eyes. It was a look of…well, the only words that come to mind are “gay delight.” Yes, he had a look of gay delight.

I could also tell that he wanted to kiss me. When he’d lean in, I’d smile and dodge. Smile and dodge.

“You’re really not going to kiss me?” he said.

“OK, fine,” I said as if I’d been dared. And then we kissed. And it was really good. The last time a kiss was that good it was 1999 and I was on the dance floor of Red Dog in Chicago when MY GAY FRIEND Preston said he really wanted to kiss me, and, when we kissed, I nearly fell over. This time, #137 nearly fell over.

#137 leaned back, stunned. “Wow,” he said.

I just smiled as if I knew it would be stunning all along. By the time we decided to go, he’d already given the keys to his apartment to Chiseled so he could take a now-very-drunk Nora there. We got our coats at the third floor coat check, stopping at every floor to make out, and then stepped outside onto whatever Lower East Side street we were on.

“I really like kissing you,” he said. “You’re a really good kisser.”

“So are you,” I said, really just basking in my own apparent kissing skills.

It was the turning point. Would I go home to my home or to his home? I have to be honest, I was having a hard time overcoming his gayness. It was more than just a metrosexual thing. A gay glow shined just under the surface—like a blue vein under thin skin—in his voice, in his laugh, in his dancing. Deep down, I just wanted to go home, but Nora was at his place and she was drunk and maybe I should really check on her and…

Well, I did say yes, but the real reason I said yes? Real estate. I wanted to see his place. Living in New York, due to the small apartment sizes and consequent lack of parties, one rarely gets to see where people live. And he told me he had a one bedroom in an elevator building on the Lower East Side. It had to be nice.  

Signs of Hope: He wanted me to come home with him. And the kissing was good.

Red Flags: He just seemed so gay.

Turning Point: The moment when, driven by real-estate mania, I decided to go home with him.

Diagnosis: For him: He seems so nice and stable and available—and gay.

For me: Maybe I’m the only one who’s getting a gay reading; maybe that’s just my own unavailability talking.

Mr. Unavailable #137 (Intro): Spring Fever

See The Phoenix Rises, Paper Perfect, More Nouveau, Please, Visions of Sundance, Fantasyland and The Gongs of Doom for the background on this. 

OK, I know I’m fast-forwarding by quite a bit. It was February and then there was one date in March (#134, who, thankfully, never called for that second date) and now it’s April. Let's recap: Last we left off, I had finished “Calling in the One” with a solid idea of what I was looking for (a long-term, committed relationship) and had therefore taken myself off of my self-imposed guyatus. I’d also, due to a severe lack of contact, written off #113. Clearly, someone who lived in Arizona and only texted me on major romantic holidays (i.e., Valentine’s Day) was not what I was looking for.

After all that, I came flying out of the single gate with a serious case of misdirected spring fever. Misdirected as in Mr. Unavailable #s 135 and 136:

1         #135: I developed a serious crush on a guy who turned out to be gay despite my flirtatious attempts to prove him straight. Case in point: At a party, after getting over my crush-borne muteness, I found myself in conversation with him. We were talking about nicknames.

“It’s funny, in my phone, since I don’t have people’s last names, I have descriptions of them,” he said, “like ‘Johnny No-Thumb’ and ‘Katie Long Legs.’”

I’m not the quickest knife in the drawer when it comes to seizing flirty moments, but I seized this one.

“If I were in your phone, what would I be?”

It was perfect. If he was interested, he’d say something like, “Tara the Tantalizer” and then ask for my phone number.

“Um, I don’t know,” he said. “Probably ‘Tara Blonde.’”

Needless to say, he didn’t ask for my phone number.

2.     #136: I developed a crush on a guy friend of mine who’d recently broken up with his girlfriend of two years. I’d misinterpreted his Valentine’s Day text and various other flirty texts as real interest instead of what they were: Just a guy who’d recently broken up with his girlfriend of two years who was casting his net far and wide. In other words, he was probably just as misdirected as I was. There were two defining end moments.

     #1: When he said he’d meet me at The Bean where I was doing some writing and never showed up.

     #2: When he said he’d meet me at the café that I was at—again—and actually did show up but then started talking about his various sexual forays and ended with a critique of a recent liaise: “It might sound weird, but her lips are too small. I need someone with a big, full set of lips. I mean, look at my lips, these suckers are like fish lips. They need some massive kissers to be compatible.” I sat back in my seat mentally pursing my own meager pucker. Well, that was that.

All this is to say that I came flying into springtime with a: Very. Open. Mind. There were a few more revolving crushes in there, but you get the idea. I was up for anything. I even joined an “Over 40 Singles Club Meet-up” and I’m not even 40. Like I said, you get the idea. Nora and I started throwing social darts at all kinds of random city social targets: museum nights, meet-ups, tours. I was bound to hit the bull’s eye at least one time. And hit I did…with #137...

Mr. Unavailable #134: The Gongs of Doom

Vital Stats: 45, 5’8” (supposedly), dark-haired, goofy-smiled executive recruiter with near-sighted glasses.

First Date: Coffee at Via Della Pace on East 7^th Street.

What Happened: After finishing “Calling in the One” with Eva, I decided to dip my toe back into the dating pool and went back on OKCupid for the first time since the fiasco with #133 with a renewed sense of purpose: I put my real age down and made it clear that I was looking for something long term.

I’d intentionally overlooked #134 on OKCupid, thinking him to be nerdy, but then, out with Nora one night at the MOMA for a Cindy Sherman exhibit, I got out my phone to exhibit my online bachelors, including him. “Oh, he’s cute,” she said. “You should go out with him.”

I’d forgotten his profile said he was 5’8” because in his pictures he looked like he could have been 6’, so when I walked up to him, he was, of course, really 5’6” or 5’7” and I matched his height in my heels. I was not attracted, but he did seem nice—and harmless.

We got a table inside Via Della Pace and ordered coffee. He was a good talker, which immediately put me at ease because that meant I didn’t have to talk much. I discovered all kinds of interesting things about him. He grew up on a horse farm and was a competitive rider in his youth. He got his haircut by a gay guy in east midtown. He owned an industrial espresso machine and had combined two one-bedroom apartments to make his huge two-bedroom apartment.

As he talked, I began to notice that, behind him, the restaurant was filling with gorgeous Italian men—real Italian men, speaking Italian and everything. I tried to focus. #134 went on: All his brothers were lawyers, including one who was an award-winning documentary filmmaker by night and a confirmed bachelor. “As soon as I hear that one of his relationships is getting serious, I know it’s about to end,” he said. (Now, his brother I would probably be attracted to.) 

#134 also said he’d had a few long-term relationships and a previous marriage. Elaborating on the idea of long-term relationships, he said, “There’s something wrong with someone who’s in their late 30s or early 40s and has never been in a long-term relationship, don’t you think? People who haven’t had a long-term relationship don’t know how to give. They’re just selfish.”

Somewhere, the gongs of doom rang. My last long-term relationship was fifteen years ago. I gulped. Without knowing it, he’d just kicked me in the gut. But I just nodded as if I totally agreed: People who haven’t had long-term relationships—the lepers.

“I didn’t just insult you, did I?” he asked. I must not have had quite the poker face that I thought I had.

“Oh, no, of course not,” I said.

I didn’t really hear what he said after that. I had a lot of self-reflection to do. And now I was really distracted by the hot Italians. There was definitely something wrong with me. I excused myself to go to the bathroom and frowned at myself in the mirror. I've always thought of myself as being interested in long-term relationships but my dating history pointed to the contrary.

I took a deep breath and left the bathroom. He didn’t exactly insult me but, with that comment, he did manage to guilt me into agreeing to a second date. We finished our coffee, he paid and walked me to the corner and I gave him my phone number. After we parted ways, I stopped into a deli and bought a pack of cigarettes, a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a lottery ticket—the hallmarks of a disappointing date.

I called Eva, who’s financially struggling and trying to date a non-committal ex-con, and told her about how #134 was successful and into long-term relationships. “Would he like me, do you think? Could he support both you and me?” she asked.

And then I came home to my one true long-term relationship: Molly McButter, my 13-year-old cat, who rolled over so I could rub her big, fluffy belly.

Signs of Hope: He's clearly into long-term relationships. And he's successful. And he picks up the check. 

Red Flags: I’m just so not attracted to him.

Turning Point: When he nailed me—my supposed problem, I mean.

Diagnosis: For him: He seems pretty available.

For me: Am I just one of those selfish people who doesn’t know how to compromise?

Mr. Unavailable #113: Fantasyland

See The Phoenix Rises, Paper Perfect, More Nouveau, Please and Visions of Sundance for the background on this one. 

After generating a large amount of Christmas cheer with #113, the Jewish doctor, I had high hopes. In the days after Christmas, there were some texts, but things were on a downswing rather than an upswing. Where were the phone calls? Where were the plans to meet up at Sundance?

Taking a cue from "Calling in the One," instead of sitting around wondering if he was going to call and going crazy when he didn’t, I was direct about what I wanted.

I texted him: Happy Thursday, Mr. Piano Man. I would love it if you had some time to catch up via telefono sometime soon…”

After I sent it, I couldn't stop smiling. I'm not sure how to say it, but I was really proud of me. I made me laugh. I was tickled by my directness. It was so foreign. Not to get too cheesy, but I even caught myself thinking, "That was so great. I love me."

Two days later, having heard nothing, I was totally fine. His silence had become my answer. He was incapable of doing what I asked. It was New Year's Eve and I was on the M train crossing the Williamsburg Bridge headed to a party with Kevin when a text came in.

#113: Happy new year Tara, wish you were here, or I was there with you. Maybe a party in dumbo or nolita?

I looked at Kevin. “A text? Two days later? What about a phone call? I asked for a phone call.”

Kevin not only shared my aggravation, he surpassed it. “It’s like he only gets in touch with you when he wants to, like he’s acting as if he’s in a relationship without doing any of the stuff that makes it a relationship.”

I remained standoffish in my reply: You, too. Have a great new year’s!

#113: Just getting sushi.

We were baffled. “So?” Kevin said. I answered #113 with no response.

Maybe the standoffishness had an effect because he called the next night and left a message. And then I called him back the next night and left a message. And then two weeks went by with nothing until another text arrived.

#113: Small batches. 


Again, I didn’t respond.

One month later, on Valentine’s Day, with #113 having completely vanished from my mind, I was sitting on my sofa watching TV, enjoying my self-imposed singleness as I worked toward finishing "Calling in the One" when a text came in.

#113: Happy valentine’s day! Be mine

I laughed as I realized I hadn’t thought about him in over a month. Having failed to call me, he'd become an automatic write-off. I wasn’t sure what kind of fantasyland he was living in. Be mine? Seriously? 

I played nice.

Me: Aw, you are sweet. Happy Valentine’s Day.

#113: Miss you. Have your necklace and want to keep it til I see you. Piano coming this weekend.

I laughed again. He missed me? Why didn’t he call me then? It was 2012. There were so many communication options. He had an iPhone. I had an iPhone. We could call. We could Skype. We could Facetime.

I remained polite but standoffish.

Me: Aw, yes, you’ll have to return my necklace in person. Keep me posted on your travels. And I’m glad your piano is finally on its way.

But the more standoffish I was, the more he appeared to pursue.

#113: Like you. How we are it is nice surprise. Spontaneous.

I laughed even harder. "How we are?" We weren’t anything. And we weren't spontaneous, we were non-committal.

And then it got even better. He sent a photo. Of himself. In bed. In his boxers and a T-shirt. Clearly, he’d just taken it.

While he did look cute lying there in boxers and a T-shirt, I panicked at where things were headed. Was this sexting?

Help me out here. What is it called when you’ve had a romantic liaison with someone and you don’t hear from him in any real way for a month and a half and then he reappears expecting you to pick up via text from exactly where you left off when you saw him? Presumptuous? Flaky? Rude? I shut him down.

Me: Yes, we’ll have to see what happens next. Cute photo. It’s sleepytime here, too. On that note, I must get some shuteye. Have a good evening. Sleep well. Xx

He was no dummy.

#113: Sleep well T.

Signs of Hope: He did call once and leave a message.

Red Flags: After I called him back, he never called me back.

Turning Point: When he never called me back.

Diagnosis: For him: He appears perfectly happy to be living in fantasyland.

For me: I shut him down, but I didn't completely shut him down.