Toddler

Lots of people meet each other on the Internet, but I had sworn off the whole business. I went on about four dates after signing up for an online dating community, and none of these dates materialized into anything other than a basic interview. The women I met were all eerily similar, simultaneously desperate and condescending. I met one Egyptian grad student who presented a frigid and cynical aura toward men in general. She talked about her last boyfriend, both handsome and successful, but “too much of a player.” For about ten minutes I listened to her describe his suave, manly qualities and sly ways with women. On another date, I met a Puerto Rican, age twenty-nine, who had just arrived here in the Midwest, which she found profoundly dull and monotonous. She hated the cornfields, she said. She had been recruited by a big insurance company to work in their marketing department. The description of her title, Lead Marketing Coordinator, was obviously intended to impress me. We met at a bookstore because I told her I liked to read. I said it was my passion. Before we even sat down, she appointed me to the task of picking out a book out for her. She said she needed something to distract her if she was going to have to live in this town. I could see with her self-important airs that she took pleasure in giving me the task, and that she just assumed that I would wag my tail, and run off in the direction of the bookshelves. In spite of myself, I did just that. I scanned the titles of popular novels by female authors until I ferreted out, “The History of Love.”

After these fruitless encounters, I gave up the search for a romantic partner via the Internet. How could two people come together through an electronic contrivance? None of these people had any basis for talking to each other. The whole practice seemed rootless and inane and I decided to end the search right there. I was done. And then, the greatest thing happened to me, I stopped checking my online messages, I stopped changing words on my cheesy Internet profile, and eventually I forgot all about my nagging desires for a female companion. I forgot about wanting a mate; I forgot about not having one. It was a blissful interlude of peace, not caring one way or the other if love came my way.

Around Thanksgiving, I received an email from a young woman, a couple years younger than me, a professional, living in Springfield. She had found my profile on the dating site I renounced to my satisfaction. Cleverly, the dating people leave your information up in cyber space, and you’re never truly free from this advertising scheme. Her name was Tara and she tried to send me a message, but the website required that I renew my membership if I wanted to talk to her. By this point in the whole online dating saga, I had erotic fatigue without the erotic part. I had no desire to reincarnate my online identity. Whoever this woman was who wanted to talk to me I would have to meet her in another life. Tara, however, being especially persistent, used my screen name to look me up on another social networking site, which is free. I got her message saying “Don’t think I’m a stalker but I read your profile and you sound really cool”. She also happened to check out my website and said she liked my poetry.

All of this was very flattering. I remember having Thanksgiving dinner at my Aunt’s house in Downer’s Grove. After dinner I went upstairs to use the computer in my cousin’s room. I looked at the pictures of the woman who had tracked me down, and she looked like a tomboy with short, cropped hair and a slender, lanky build. One picture made her look sexy, the others you couldn’t tell. I looked at the pictures of her “friends”: one blond-haired, buff computer programmer who ran marathons, one Latino underwear model, and a handful of attractive women. I still hadn’t replied to her, though, and her random messages sent to me through the ether of cyber space conjured up the distant voice of a person yelling into a deep, dark, vertiginous tunnel, and then waiting for a reply. Echo, echo, echo . . .

At last, I answered her messages. I answered them because, one, I wanted companionship even though I had formerly sworn off Internet dating, and two, there was something pseudo-mystical about a woman looking for me rather than the other way around. Maybe I believed it was a sign. After all, when you give up searching and then something just miraculously appears, you have to wonder. My friends will tell you that my only weakness is that I’m credulous and a bit fantastical. I won’t discredit this criticism, all I will say is that there are coincidences in life, and without some sort of narrative logic our lives wouldn’t make any sense at all. I am willingly to believe almost anything that adds coherent meaning to the predictably irrational world we live in.

She sent me one of her short stories. She didn’t write as often as I did, but she had been writing on and off throughout her life. Most of her time was consumed by her career; she worked four days a week, nine hours a day. She worked with sexual deviants in a locked down facility. She was their therapist. The story she sent to me over a MySpace message had nothing to do with rapists or pedophiles. Instead it was about a folksy second hand clothing store where she must have worked before college, and it was about her eccentric boss and a couple of the high school kids who also worked there. I praised the short story for its quirky expressions, like “the lusted object of my affection.” Oh, and the story was about a bisexual crush.

When I checked her profile information to confirm that she was indeed a bisexual, I was pleasantly surprised. Knowing this little fact stoked the fires of my curiosity. I was intrigued by her sexual identity, perhaps titillated. Admittedly, I have had very little contact with the bisexual community. But, waxing philosophical, I imagined that a bisexual would inherently possess a wider spectrum of experience than, say, a heterosexual. Bisexuals, by the very nature of their desire, seem to be allotted more freedom, more agency in the universe. The figure of the mythological hermaphrodite immediately came to mind, that omniscient being which sees with one eye female and one eye male. Did I go too far in describing her this way? She accepted my outrageous remarks with a wise taciturnity.

Evidently I didn’t offend her too much because she called me on the phone a couple nights later. She had the voice of a confident woman who is obsessed with her career. We sort of explained to each other what our lives are like. She said she used to live in Boulder, Colorado, where she shopped at an organic food store, greeted the mountains every morning, and went hiking in the woods on the weekends. Central Illinois was somewhat of a let-down to her, but she expected that, she said, coming from a place like Boulder. “I was offered a much better job in Central Illinois with higher pay,” she said. I told her that I worked at a community college and tutored fifth graders privately in the evenings. “My life is pretty simple,” I declared. “I have two cats and a small library that I’m building for my reading pleasure.” At the end of the conversation, I asked if she would want to meet sometime. We tentatively planned for the next Saturday, and she agreed to drive to Bloomington, nearly an hour away from where she lived.

On Saturday morning I woke up early and cleaned my house. I am a compulsive house cleaner. Cleaning is one of the few activities that I engage in which effectively calms my mind. I just get myself into a meditative state and move from the bathroom to the kitchen to the living room. Sometimes I even forget that I’m cleaning. The vacuum cleaner hums loudly as the cats jolt out of their slumbers, leaping from the couches in a frenzy, and rushing into the empty room upstairs. But this Saturday I was using my cleaning routine to calm my nervousness. I hadn’t been this nervous in a while, longer than I could remember. Even when I met my Internet dates, I wasn’t this nervous. Tara was expected to be here in the late afternoon and I had about three hours to collect myself and pretend like a normal human being. During this time I failed to even look out the window, I was so consumed with my cleaning. When she called around twelve o’clock and said there was a massive storm outside, I turned to open the curtains. “Oh yeah,” I said. “The roads are probably pretty bad. You should stay home.”

“Maybe tomorrow or next weekend,” she answered. After the date was broken, I lost the wind in my sails. And because of my

early failures at Internet dating, I expected she wouldn’t come to visit me at all. The phone rang early, however, the next morning. She had a bright, cheerful voice and said she was coming to see me. The roads were cleared and the sun was shining.

At the community college, I work in a tutoring center. There are about twenty-five tutors in total. Of course, we don’t all work at the same time. We have been hired to tutor the students in any number of subjects. I can tutor English, Spanish, Religion and Philosophy, anything except Math and Science. But mostly the tutors just sit around the center and wait for someone to walk in asking for help. In the case of English tutors, this seldom happens, maybe once a day. As a result, you will find a large group of tutors congregated at the front of the center, chatting fervently. These are people I see all the time, my coworkers. We smile and exchange a few words that hardly skim the surface of our actual lives, mostly pleasantries. I know they would like to get to know me better. They would like to chat with me longer. But as soon as I come in to the center, I find an open computer room and shut the door. Occasionally a coworker of mine will

intrude and begin a conversation with me. I don’t want to appear self-obsessed, so I turn from what I’m doing and abandon myself to a moment of idle chatter.

After Tara and I had been dating for a couple weeks, my coworker Debbie knocked on the door while I was in front of the computer. “Hi Debbie,” I said cheerfully. “How are you today?”

“I just wanted you to know,” she said in a loud whisper, “that I had a dream about your toddler last night.”

“My toddler?” I replied, quizzically. “Yes, but I have to go to class now. We can talk about this later . . .”There was really nothing to talk about. My toddler appeared in her dream.

A toddler is something between a child and an infant, right? I pictured a toddler with a pumpkin grin. He was crawling gleefully in my direction.

I forgot about the dream until later that night. Lying up in bed, I got to thinking about my toddler, and it irked me that one of my coworkers had this strange, prophetic dream about me. Now I began to worry. The more I considered the toddler scenario, the more I grappled for my faculties of reason.

The next day at the community college, I said with mild sarcasm to my coworker Debbie, “Thanks for telling me about your dream.” I was only joking with her, of course. How could she help it, having that dream? But I was also not joking.

“You believe in that stuff?” She replied.“No, not really,” I said. But I’d been single for over six months. Why didn’t

she tell me about her dream during all that time? Why did she have to dream this dream right when I was beginning to see Tara?

I didn’t have a child yet—thank God. I had to remind myself of that. Thus far the story was only in my imagination, a tale I brewed in my obsessive mind. Dreams are not real, I told myself, although they sometimes seem that way.

After I fretted long enough about the possibility of being a father, there was only one thing left to do. I had to write down the facts.

To be continued . . .

****************The streets of Springfield were covered in thick, slushy pools of ice. The storefronts off of the main avenue looked drab and ghostly in the snow storm. A couple street lamps shed a thin, phosphorescent light through the whirlwinds of flurries. Once I got onto the main avenue, I called my girlfriend. She gave me directions, telling me what side streets to turn on. I had to drive around the block a couple times to find exactly what she was talking about. She lived in a two story rented house on a residential street. It was a quiet neighborhood with older trees. I parked my car along the sidewalk while she stood in her pajamas in the doorway. “Get inside,” I shouted. “You’ll catch cold out here.”

Once I stepped inside her house I was assaulted by the most rancid smell, some mixture of decaying matter and sourness. We kissed in the entryway and I imagined it was coming off her breath. Had we entered her apartment yet? I

couldn’t be sure; it seemed like common area where we were standing and holding each other. But she said that were inside her apartment. She led me into the front room, which had a couple pieces of furniture, and a coffee table. The smell in this room was even more repugnant. I wanted to say something about it, but we had just started dating and I didn’t want to be rude. She seemed oblivious to the fetid odor hovering about her apartment. Maybe she was just pretending. As we sat in the main room by the front window and watched the snow gather, her two cats slipped furtively along the sides of the wall and circled around us. The long hair made a slow, languorous strut in Tara’s direction. The short hair seemed afraid of me. I still wore my coat and my knees were shaking from the frigidness of old house.

After sitting in the main room and chatting for a couple minutes, we went into the kitchen and she said that she apologized for the mess. When she heard I was coming tonight she had to hurry up to clean the place and she did the best she could in such a short amount of time. I could see that she wanted to please me. There was something gratifying about a woman who wants to please you, but it was sadly ironic that despite the tidiness of the rooms, an egregious smell permeated everything. We brushed our teeth and jumped on her bed and she took out her parent’s college literary magazine. The nostalgia of a golden age, when her parents were young and in love, overcame her. And we turned the pages, reading the short poems he parents had written. “They were both so creative,” she said. “My father was brilliant, very artistic.”

I could see how my presence had evoked her memories of her father. I was a creative writer, I wrote poems and short stories and so I reminded her of him. Then she showed me a bunch of her pictures, again in the same sentiments and finally she turned off the lights.

In the dark, I was aware that the bed was on wheels and with my slightest movement, it budged forward or back. I was also aware that despite the heated blanket on us my limbs were freezing. It didn’t appear however as though we were going to go to bed. She had severe urges, incredible urges to have sex with me. And being a man, I also had urges to have sex with her. The only difference was that certain things about her stained my attraction to her. It was that smell in the bedroom, and the elusive smell on her breath that I could never tell if it was a result of her stomach problems or if she just had poor hygine. She made fun of me, of course, because I was obsessive about my hygience. She liked to talk about how I was an obsessive compulsive and I admitted my nerouses to her. We dissected our types of personalities after a heated session of love-making. We talked about how I need control and that was why I retreated to the bathroom so many times to brush my teeth. She, I argued, didn’t take care of herself enough. Later this would become an issue. Not at the beginning of the relationship when I’m consciously not saying anything about these things that bother me, but later when the feelings that get stirred up inside me are on the verge of disgust.

She was not a disgusting girl. She just didn’t clean her litter box very often. There were little balls of cat hair on the towels and I promised myself that next time I came here I would bring my own towel. That night I tried to quell my

distaste with the situation, the freezing room, the ubiquitous cat hair and just go to sleep. After we had sex however it was never easy to fall asleep and she couldn’t sleep if I couldn’t sleep. We were like giddy children having a sleep and without thinking about the importance of sleep we chattered and chattered into the night. I knew, after a point, that Tara stimulated me, mentally, which made it difficult to turn off my brain. This uncomfortable feeling of anxiety I blamed entirely on her. It was something in the way she related to me, in how excited and full of anxious, unchecked and fearful energy. She told me several times that she was afraid I would break up with her. That night before we closed our eyes, she said it. My sleep that night was intermittent and not good.

The next morning we work up early and it felt just as if I hadn’t gotten enough sleep. The dream world was still on top of me in a hazy blanket thought I pricked myself again and again to wake up. We sat in Panera bread shop, having our coffee and our bagels. We seemed to forget about our exaustion.

“What are we going to do today?” She said.“I don’t know. Go to the mall.”We went to the mall, heavy-lidded and tired. We walked arm in arm like a

couple and I felt again the heavy, slothful movement of my legs. By two o’clock I had to go back to her apartment.

We could never get back in bed for a short nap without having sex first. We always had to have sex. And it wasn’t me who was the one asking for it either. I wouldn’t say no, not that weekend at least. In bed with Tara both of us were always able to have orgasms. I think this was due to her unusually comfortable relation to her body. She never blocked any of the energy. She was open and free in bed. This gratified despite my slight aversion to her hygine issues.

That night we were going to go out to dinner, but first she wanted me to come upstairs and meet her friends. Her friends were roommates and both were single mothers. One of them had a toddler.

The mother, Margo, was in the kitchen making chicken cakes and the grease hovered thick in the kitchen. Tara had told me again and again what a wonderful cook Margo was. Her son, about eight months, sat on his butt on the ground and played with toys. Tara immediately went down on her knees to play with him. She babysat “Little E” for that was his name, quite often. Tara had a strong maternal urge in her but she always said how she didn’t want a child until she was ready. Now she played with little E on the floor and he managed to slip off her shiny bracelet and was sucking on it. She let him have it and even told Margo, before we were leaving, that he could keep it for the night. We didn’t stay in her friend’s apartment for long. I was relieved for that. I looked around and there was box of cheap wine on the table and cigarettes in the ash trays. Margo was smoking in the kitchen. I criticized her in my mind for having the child in the first place and in the second place living a dumb with intoxicants and poisons lying around.

The cuteness of the toddler only occurred after the fact and even when I stared at him I felt a pang of regret, even slight animosity to the innocent creature. His head, like most toddlers, was abnormally large and he had the look

of one who couldn’t say just how happy he was. His smile had a goofy appeal and my girlfriend stroked his limp, blond hair.

Is someone like you, little man, growing up inside my girlfriend’s tummy? I thought in one of those weird flashes of irrational voice.

Then I was reminded of Debby and the way she said Toddler echoed again in my mind.

Even if my girlfriend was pregnant I reasoned, then it wouldn’t be so bad. I compared my situation to my last situation. At least in the new situation, I knew that my girlfriend was mentally stable and she had a carrer and a future. But on the other side, a terrible fear reminded me of how unlucky I would be to father a son at my age, at any age. I had no plans to raise a family, and I was articulate on this subject with my girlfriends. That didn’t change my stupidity, that in the beginning of my last two relationships, I didn’t use condoms.

After seeing little E, I told my gilfriend that night that I didn’t want to sleep with her anymore without a condom. She agreed with me, and thought it was an intelligent decision. She wouldn’t have to put up with my paranoid fears either. Using a condom would give both of us peace of mind and I could put out of my head this crazy obsessive fantasy that my girlfriend was pregnant.

A week later she got her period; I was safe. Although we continued to talk on the phone, my feelings for Tara did not become stronger but more obscure. I was fixating on her lack of hygine. On weekend before Christmas break I picked her up from the airport and we were stuck in traffic for over three hours. Our conversation was absent of strong emotion. There was a smell in the car that was absolutely putrid. I became really mad now that I was finding all these instances of my girlfriends lack of hygine.

“About the relationship,” I broke in awkwardly, “I have only cosmetic concerns.”

“What do you mean, ‘cosmetic,’” she said.“What I mean is that they’re on the surface. Their easily repairable.” I

relized when I said this that I was starting to sound like her old boyfriend who refused to be her boyfriend but who abused her emotionally and was highly critical of her. Maybe there was something about her personality that made a man critical of her, perhaps her father, no, I thought, these are dreadful rationalizations, I being a jerk. But even as I was aware that I was being a jerk I continued to say what I had on my mind. The smell was obvious, and it needed to be brought to her attention. But first I started off soft, “How often do you clean your litter boxes.”

“I know my apartment smelled bad when you came over that night. I didn’t have a chance to clean the litter box. I’m sorry, okay, I’m sorry.” She exaggerated her syllables.

“I clean my litter box every two to three days.”“You’re an obsessive compulsive”“But that smell—”“I know okay, I know. Tell me your other cosmetic concerns.”“When was the last time you took a shower, Tara?”

Now I had hurt her. She covered her hands with her face and looked deeply offended.

“I’m sorry,” I quickly replied, “But there’s a smell in this car.”She looked ashamed, almost in a childish way she vented, “I’ve been in

the bus for the last twelve hours. Give me a break okay. I’m sorry I’m not scrubbed clean and smelling like roses for you1”

I had been cruel. The release I got from being cruel partly satisfied me. But there was still the open fact that my girlfriend smelled. Her breath smelled and her body did too.

For the next three hours we argued and I got to thinking how mean I had been to her. Couldn’t I keep my cosmetic concerns to myself? She had idolized me the first three weeks of our relationship and now was the first time I punctured her dreamy bubble and showed her that I could be just as a jerk as the next guy.

Later that night we were buying soup in a grocery store. The two of us stood by the soup stand and she screamed, “That’s it! I know what it is.” She seemed ecstatic about something.

“What honey?”“It’s my jacket. That’s what you smelled. I wear it at the hospital and it

smells like them, the criminals.”I too was happy that the smell wasn’t intrinsic to her body. Both of us

thought about how foolishly emotional we had been. I could see that she didn’t forget my barbed remarks, but at least it wasn’t anyting about her. She wasn’t a dirty person.

From that night on Tara bought new make up and fancy creams and every time I saw her she was bathed in the smell of perfume. It gratified me that she wanted to please me. She said she was also eating healthier and working out now. All because of me.

Sadly however that wasn’t what I wanted. I was a nice consolation that she did these things. But secretly I thought more and more about how I wasn’t attracted to her. I talked to my friends about how she didn’t fit my ideals. They said that one had to be happy and not too picky. And while these things were true, she didn’t embody for me the beauteous woman I imagined. Maybe I could go on a little longer, though. After all I was foolish of me to want a woman who was perfect. I reminded myself that there are no perfect women out there. But I am a severe, unwavering idealist and after the fireworks of the intial connection, fireworks that were more anxious electric currents than the calming effect of true love, I nourished discontent and preferred to have nobody than a girl who didn’t match my ideal of psychical beauty.

How selfishish and shallow I am, I’m sure you are saying. And perhaps you are right. But I as a man needed a woman who inspired me with her looks, not one who secretly repulsed me and in outburst of cruel emotion I stabbed her with critical comments. I did not want to repeat the pattern of her old boyfriends, who used her, most likely for sex.

Having the company of a romantic partner is always refreshing, reaffirming, even if you’re not in love with them. She came to visit me once and the weekend went more or less successfully. My nagging doubts about her,

about whether I wanted to be with her continued. One morning we woke up and it was usually in the morning when I was plagued by these doubts. She wanted to have sex, but I gave her a sign that I didn’t. We ate breakfast and afterwards I told her I wanted to meditate. Was there anything else she could do? She picked out a book in my library, and began reading it. I set my timer for forty minutes and proceeded to quiet my mind. If you know anything about meditation, it is a practice that requires one to sit in a single place, usually crossleged or on a bench, and not move the entire time. The goal is simply to be open, attentive, and non-judgemental. That is the goal. What happens in actuality is something very different. You begin to hear the ongoing commentary much more obviously than if you were going about your daily routine. You hear the inner voice, bitter, critical, angry, depressed, whatever it may be, ranting on and on. Luckily I’ve trained myself to not be bothered by the inner voice that doesn’t shut up. I’ve been meditating for four years. That does not mean, for me at least, that I’ve achieved total silence when I sit down to meditate. On the contrary, my inner voice can harp just as long and hard as it always has. Today that’s what I was experiencing. The voice, the daemon some would call it, was telling me how wrong Tara was for me, how I was repelled by her. The voice reminded me again and again how far from my ideal Tara was. I listened to the voice for nearly the entire time. I suppose I had a few minutes of reprieve, a gap of silence perhaps, but mostly it was this dominant, critical voice telling me to get rid of her.

There was a great deal of anger and frustration inside me while I was meditating but I observed those feelings and those toxic thoughts and by the end, when the bell rang, I felt as though I had transcended my negative attitude toward my girlfriend.

Coming down the stairs, I saw that Tara was reading one of K.Jameson’s books on Manic Depression and Genius called Touched by Fire. There was a time when the doctor told me that I was manic depression, but it turned out to be a faulty diagnosis. I still believed I was touched by fire. Nonetheless, I came over to the couch and sat down, feeling calm and relieved. Tara always said that she wanted me to meditate, that she could see the effects of the meditation after I finished. Both of us were together, side by side and she looked at me with big, moon-shaped eyes. She still was projecting all of these desires on to me. Despite the cruelty I was before, she appeared to go right back to admiring me unconditionally.

Despite my nagging obsession, my latent or not so latent repulsion of Tara, I frequently attempted to become closer to her. I did this by opening up and telling her my most intimate secrets. Today I told her what I was thinking on the meditation mat.

“Did you notice how I was a little distanced from you this morning?”“Yeah, we were sitting up in bed and it almost seemed like you were mad

at me.”“Notice how I’m not the same way now.”“I’ve always said that meditation is so good for you.”

“Do you know what was going on in my head while I was upstairs meditating?”

“No, what?”I wanted to be honest but not brutally honest, so I said. “I was thinking

about how I don’t think this relationship is going to work. I was doubting us the entire time. But you see, I’ve had these feelings before. They are obsessive thoughts and their almost always negative. But I watched them, I sat with them. And you know how I feel now?”

“How’s that?”“I feel like I’ve transcended them.”“Really? So is that stuff true. That you don’t want to be in a relationship.”“I have conflicting emotions, there’s no doubt about that. And I want you

to know what’s going on inside my head.”“I’m glad you told me.”It was the way I told her however that made it seem not so serious. I

couched these feelings between an attitude of mature acceptance and my honesty came across. I made it sound like this was a common experience for men, that all I had to do was get over myself.

That afternoon we went into town. Whenever we were together, as a couple, we projected the semblance of love. Despite my confessions, even when I submitted to her, I was aware that it was not love which surrounded us but a neutral cammraderie. We walked into a bookstore, she talked gaily to the book store owner. He was a skinny man with a fu man chu mustache. The books were lying on the floor in piles. My eyes roved the titles as my girlfriend in a buoyant spirit carried on a conversation with the skinny man. You could tell that Tara was secretly ecstatic about having me as her boyfriend. I don’t know if that sounds arrogant. But what I got from her, about her past, was that she never had a boyfriend who was deep and understanding as myself. You could tell that when we were together she was joyful.

She picked out a book and said it looked interesting. She wanted me to take a look at it, which I did, though not finding anything spectacular about it I put it down. I had been into the bookstore many times, often I traded my books here. I ran through the shelves, searching for a classic book because I only read classical literature. And then I discovered, quite as a surprise, Trisdam Shandy. Tara had found another book now, except this one was a classic. Her mother read a great deal of literature, which was another reason why I evoked her nostaligia. In both parents then, neither of whom she really knew anymore, I was her beckon reminder of the golden past. Her mother was still an obsessive reader, although she had a degenerative disease and her body had atrophied and become like a lump of clay. My mother had also had a degenerative disease, her body also atrophied. This connection was one of the first that brought Tara and I together, or rather that aroused her sympathy and interest in me. But the literary connection, the mutual interest between myself and her mother, was equally strong. When Tara saw me hunting for classical literature, I believe she also began looking for something more everlasting. What she found was the book that her mother had named her after: Tara of the Umbervilles.

I brought my book to the check out counter and she brought hers. The owner with the fu man chu mustache had two girls working for him, one of these girls was working the register, a homely college student with a dry smile. I gave her my book and opened my wallet, I had no money left. Tara offered to buy my book, and this small gesture was meaningful to me.

We carried our books across the street to the coffee shop. This was different than the coffee shop where we had originally met and Tara found it much more appealing. The other coffee shop was more of a gourmet sandwich shop, while this one had all college students working and they sold only vegetarian food. The cook was usually visible through a rectangular window. Typically the cooks had dread locks and greasy smiles. I didn’t eat the food very often. But the environment of the coffeehouse was open and the walls usually had student artwork, colorful canvases, there were vinal booths and large couches to sit on. In general, a very homey atmosphere. So we sat together in one of the booth, her with a Latte and me with a tea. I read the introduction to Trisdam Shandy, she looked around the room and ate her bagel with cream cheese.

That day gave me a certain amount of hope in the relationship. Though I was not head over heels for Tara, I often contemplated the nature of my reality. At times I was overcome by fits of dislike and even aversion for her. But at other times I was able to appreciate her intelligence, her kindness, her admiration for me. On this afternoon, without fireworks bursting, I still felt a sort of intimacy with her. We returned to my house and had sex on the floor of my library. It was a passionate love-making session as sex usually was for us. I couldn’t complain about the sex with Tara. I even went so far to tell her that she had sexual intelligence, an opening of the channels, that whereas most women were repressed and restricted. Tara had an uncanny ability to achieve orgasm and beyond that she felt comfortable naked and with a man.

We had only been dating about a month when I discovered that my father was going away on vacation. On the night before he left, I asked him if I could visit his condo in the city. He would be gone for a whole month. He acquiesced and though he preferred that I didn’t bring my girlfriend he said he would leave that up to me to decide. My father has a beautiful condo overlooking Millenium Park and lake Michigan in the Chicago loop. A weekend in his apartment was a vacation in itself no matter who I brought with me. I told Tara about it and the very Friday my father got on the plane, we were driving to Chicago.

It took two hours and in the care, Tara and I, did what we usually did together, which was talk about ourselves in a highly analytical, sometimes philosophical, way. Our conversations were abstract and mental and they induced a sort of vertiginous non-stop flow of concepts and ideas. I enjoyed having a partner who had been trained in psychology and understood various intellecuatal discourses, but on the other hand, I never felt as though I was at ease when we were conversing. The anxiety was ever present in our speech. And the lack of an emotional connection was apparent to me. Because I didn’t swoon over her, let alone feel strongly about her prescence in my life, it was hard to convey anything other than mental constructs to each other.

Both of us were excited to be in the city, however. When we arrived, we parked my car in the garage and asked the doorman to send someone to open the door for us. I didn’t have a key to my father’s apartment, but my father told me that he had made me a key. It was sitting on the marble counter of his kitchen, once we could get inside. I explained all of this to the door man. I was a bit apprehensive about whether they would let me in or not. I didn’t think that my dad told them I was coming, and perhaps it seemed strange that the very day my father left, I was there with a girlfriend. But my father had put me on a list long ago that said I could be let into his apartment. Without any trouble one of the building maintence guys opened the door for us.

Both Tara and I were exhausted. She got up a six in the morning and drove an hour and a half to work, then worked for nine hours, then drove an two hours to where I lived and then got in my car, and I drove two hours to Chicago. You would think that they only thing either of us were capable of doing was falling asleep. But our intellectual chatter in the car had aroused and we were overstimulated as usual. We prepared for bed. I worried that I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep. We began making out and like clockwork we had sex. But the sex usually stimulated me even more. After sex, I lay in bed next to her tossing and turning. For an hour, I wait up in bed aware of my buzzing thoughts. She couldn’t fall asleep until I did. I got up to go into the kitchen, where I made myself a sandwich. Food was the only thing that put me to sleep in situations like this one. I mused on how I had never been able to sleep a full night in bed with Tara. There was too much anxiety between us. I returned to the bed. She mumbled something to me about not being able to fall asleep. I knew how much she needed to sleep and felt bad that I was getting up and tossing around. But why could she never sleep when I couldn’t sleep? Finally I rose from the bed and went into my father’s room.

In my father’s room, it was an entirely different situation. First of all, my father’s king size bed gave me all the room I wanted to roll around and stretch out my legs. Second, the softness of his comforter had almost a surreal quality as I lie there after having battled to fall asleep in another room. It felt like I was lying on a bed of clouds. My anxiety abated and slowly my active mind dimmed. I entered the realm of dreams.

I may have entered the realm of dreams that night, but in the morning I woke up from a nightmare. All I can recall from that wretched experience was that I had unwittingly impregnated my girlfriend. We used condoms and still I impregnated her. In the nightmare I saw the hump of my girlfriend’s belly assuming gigantic proportions. It just kept getting bigger and bigger until it filled my range of view. And then it popped like a balloon and I woke up.

That morning I was groggy from not getting enough sleep. It wasn’t her fault of course, but she helped create the conditions which made it impossible for me to sleep. Nevertheless, we kissed and dressed and went downstairs along Michigan Avenue for breakfast. There is an Italian breakfast place on Michigan by my father’s building. The food is served buffet style and you wait while a smiling Mexican makes your omlet. Tara and I watched the omlets being made and then I began looking around at the staff and the city people who came there

by themselves or with others. I grew self conscious around Tara. It was obvious that we were a couple, but I was contantly aware of a lack of emotion for her. In the Italian breakfast place, another one of my attacks of nagging self-consciousness came on. She must have been able to tell. When she was eating, I looked at her face, which now appeared dreadfully plain to me. And her lips, which the thought “fish lips” came into my head again and again. This sort of torture I couldn’t stand, though I didn’t know how to stop it. I wanted to love her, but I couldn’t. Instead I felt the sharp pangs of revulsion. She could tell, I’m sure she could tell. We sat at a table in a little alcove surrounded by windows. Outside it was cold but bright and a chill sunlight fell over Michigan Avenue.

After breakfast, we went out into the cold. I wanted to first take her to Milenium Park. Although it was freezing, I wanted to walk around the park for a bit and then my plan was to go to the Art Institute.

Though it was early in the morning, the ice skating rink was filled with whirring skaters. Couples nestled arm in arm and meandered across the granite park. The object of attraction in Mileniumum Park is the giant silver bean. It sits on a plateau and people approach it slowly and apprehensively. It has a science-fiction feel to it. Once you get close, you see the reflection of the skyscrapers and the sky above. You can even walk under the bean and see your own reflection inside.

We stood over the railing looking down on the ice-skaters. A woman in her seventies was zooming around in circles, adept skaters and children went around in merry loops. The cold was sharp and frosty but everyone on the rink seemed warm and filled with energy and joy. I looked around again at the couples holding hands and holding each other near. Tara and I weren’t holding hands. I didn’t have an urge to touch her, to hold her. Instead I took out my camera and told her to smile.

We headed toward the museum. The Art Institute summons up all sorts of emotions for me. My mother was an artist before she died and she graduated from the art institute. Besides that I have a spiritual love for art and I deeply identify with museums just as I deeply identify with libraries.

The museum seemed unusually empty that morning. She wanted to walk through the early Egyptian artwork and I followed her. The historical stuff is not my cup of tea but I followed her lead, she seemed delighted to be in a museum. We looked at the mummies and slowly made our way to Greek sculptures and then renaissance jewelry. We were separated from each other and then we were together. For one of the moments that we were separated I saw two high schoolers at the end of the hall. They were the only other people in this section of the museum with the exception of the security guard. While Tara was engrossed in reading about the various artworks, I studied the two high schools. It almost looked like they were playing hooky. They had come to the museum but they weren’t that interested in looking at artwork. The female was young and attractive, I barely glanced at her. Her boyfriend had the hardness of a rebel. He wore a black leather jacket with lots of silver knobs. She had a sexy look and tight jeans. This group of young lovers evoked some sort of envy in me, as I

stared at them I felt more and more alone, more and more separated from what I wanted. And Tara, of course, was far behind.

After the teenagers passed me, I returned to Tara and suggested we look at another part of the museum. I asked the security guard what was showing. She said in a Chicago accent that there weren’t any special exhibits running right now. “De Kooning just left,” she said. The security guards in the museum have a neutral, objective presence, as if their not interested in art. They stand there without any strong emotions for the artwork, as if they don’t care about it. That’s how this security guard was, very indifferent.

Downstairs Tara and I looked at the various galleries. I was surprised to find neo-classical sculptures. AT the time I was writing a short story about a sculptor and I wanted to study the sculptures. Tara went into the Native American paintings and early American art section. The neo-classical sculptures were set up in a an open pavilion, in the center of the room where the stairs led to. A middle-aged woman was sketching in a book one of the sculptures. I stood before the sculpture entitled, “Liberty.” The woman was perfectly shaped and her stance was symbolic, heavily symbolic. Another group of sculptures caught my eye. They were a bunch of lovers standing together, the woman hanging her arms over the back of a man. I walked around the sculpture with heightened interest, even though the woman next to me was trying to sketch it.

Then I found Tara and suggested that we find the modern art section upstairs. That’s what I really liked, impressionism and the sort. We walked through a second-floor gallery with more people in it. Couples walked near to each other. Tara and I were still separated and I was conscious of our lack of intimacy the whole time. She walked along one wall and I walked along the other. Ocassional we would met and discuss whether we like a painting or not, but for the most part I was in my own little world. The artwork did not impress me at first. I tried to sound knowledgable to Tara and spoke about how the best pictures of these artists were in different parts of the world, Europe mainly. I had visited some of these European museuams, like the Salvador Dali museaum in Spain. Tara had not been exposed to as much artwork in her life, this was her first time in a museuam. She looked at the pictures with the vague appreciation of an uneducated person. My eye on the other hand was trained.

Throughout the walking through the galleries the nagging obsession of dislike toward her continued to bother me. These were obsessive compulsive thoughts that I was usued to. I made myself miserable but I didn’t know how to turn them off. Tara could always tell that I was distant. But we reached one of the galleries where both of us seemed to come together in appreciation for a couple paintings. Both of us admired Much’s bedroom girl and a number of paintings by Gaugain. We stood before the bluish dreamlike painting of Munche’s and together we were uplifted by the spirit of art. I felt a connection to her, a unity, through the painting that we both appreciated.

It was becoming noontime and the galleries were filling up with people. There was a steady stream of people looking at the modern artwork and you could hear curators giving lectures to small crowds. One curator was hunchbacked and he stared at the floor as he talked about the large futurist

painting behind him. The crowd was absorbed in his anecdote and the ease with which he told it, like a man with a secret. He told the story of the painting. It was about a preacher and a dancer in a club. The artist had seen the preacher on a train and followed him to the club, where the object of his affection, his amorous obsession, danced. The futurist painting conveyed nothing of this to me. Instead the huge canvas had floating blocks and cubes and a black background. But the story served as the inspiration, I suppose for the art work. The curator gave a reason for why the painting was the way it was, why for example, you couldn’t exactly point out the dancer and preacher. In cubist paintings, he said the object is moving. In futurist painting, both subject and object are moving.

I walked into the next gallery, having completely forgotten about Tara. This was the gallery with the Van Goghs. The Master’s paintings have become such a cliché in our society. You see them every where, on thank you cards, on an infinite amount of prints. Despite the gross reproduction of his works, it does not minimize the experience of seeing the originals. Gazing at Van Gogh’s bedroom painting and then his self-portrait, I was in a sort of trance. My girlfriend appeared in the corner of my vision, over my shoulder. I must have said something exclamatory about the paintings. Yes, now I remember, gazing at the Self-portrait, I said to Tara what amazed me was the sheer incompleteness of it, how the strokes were rough and uneven and it seemed the painting had been completed just two minutes before, as if the colors were still wet. This gave the painting the intrinsic presence of the artist himself, as if the artist were hovering somewhere close too. If his painting was so unfinished, or just recently finished, then the artist must be near. Tara was astonished by the painting as well but she moved on. I stood there for about ten minutes, staring.

Shortly after seeing the Van Gogh Self-Portrait we returned home. We changed our clothes and got into bed for a nap. We usually took naps in the afternoon together because we hardly got any sleep at night. What preceeded our afternoon naps however was sex. Neither of us had the restraint to not have sex.

After sex, we lie up in bed. Neither of us could sleep. We were still over-stimulated. And then, it began to occur to me . . . suddenly a conviction formed inside of me, inside of my heart. It was different than those nagging obsessions I had about Tara and her hygine and her plainness. No, what I felt now was sincere, I didn’t love her and I had to tell her.

“Tara,” I said. “I can’t do this anymore.”Both of us were silent, and then I resumed, “I don’t have the same feelings

for you that you have for me. You know, everything happened so fast. We connected immediately the first day we met, you slept over the first night, we had sex on the first date. I feel like I’ve been carried along on a wave of stimulated activity. As if I let you drive and I was along for the ride. You were so infatuated with me that it was hard to tell how I felt. I wanted to be in a relationship with you and I gave it a chance, I really gave this a good chance. But now I realize my feelings just aren’t there. I can’t do this anymore.”

She shrank from me, and covered herself with a blanket. Her eyes looked small and narrow.

“I knew this was going to happen,” she said. But her voice didn’t seem angry at all, it was almost as if she accepted my feelings or lack of feelings. Nevertheless there was hurt inside of her, I could see it crushing across her face.

She didn’t say much after that. I got up from the bed and seeing now that I wouldn’t be able to sleep I went into the kitchen to make myself something to eat. I could hear her breaking into sobs while I made myself a sandwich. Had I been clear about how I felt? After eating my sandwich I went back into the room

My voice was stern and unforgiving when I said, “you know what I realize now?”

“What?” she said.“I realize that you were projecting your desire for love onto me. From the

beginning, you wanted us to fall in love. But you didn’t even fall in love. You couldn’t. Our frenzied relationship made it difficult for me to see what was going on. That it wasn’t love, but just the hope, the lingering wish, not the real thing.

She hung her head and didn’t object to anything that I said. She seemed to completely agree with it too. She was like a pile of arms and legs on the bed. Her back was hunched forward and she had her face to the mattress. I talked on and on about how I gave the relationship a chance and how I let her lead, but now I couldn’t do this anymore I said.

And then, I wanted to go home. It was a Friday night in the city and we were expected to stay until Sunday. I had even hinted that maybe we’d stay until Monday. This was to be a vacation for us. My sudden discovery however ruined all of that. It dawned on me with such force and I told it to her just as it was for me, without falsity or pretension. I told her my feelings. I was honest and that seemed to balance the hurt that she was feeling. She knew it was true. She accepted my version of reality.

But when I told her I wanted to go home, she recoiled in horror. That struck her deeply, that now that I’ve discovered my true emotions, we should just end it right here. What about our relationship? Weren’t we friends as well? Couldn’t we continue to be friends at least for one night?

It was a juvenile emotional reaction to want to go home that night. She persuaded me to be mature about the weekend and even though my feelings toward her had changed then at least we should go out to dinner like I said we would and I had even promised her a movie. We picked the movie out and the theatre. We called the restaurant. So I agreed with her and said, “Of course, we’ll stay here tonight and leave in the morning.”

But there was a wall up between us. Her grief was barbed and she was distant to me. As I took a shower she talked to her sister on the phone. Her sister was well acquainted with this sort of outcome because it had been happening to Tara over and over again. Her life with men repeated a single pattern. She rushed into relationships, gave them her heart, slept with them and then was treated badly or dumped. Most of the men she met refused to make a commitment to her, but they would agree to be friends with her and have sex with her. This arrangement, this pattern that she continued to allow to happen, caused her enormous regret but she continued to give her heart to men because

she feared that was the best she could get. That was the answer she gave me later when I asked her why she slept with me on the first date.

After my shower, I had to force her to take a shower. She was lingering in the guest room of my father’s apartment. Now she was finishing up an email to her ex-boyfriend, Alex, but he really wasn’t her boyfriend because he refused to acknowledge her as a girlfriend. She feed the hope for two years that Alex loved her, even though he openly refused to acknowledge her as a girlfriend. They had childlike carpe diem friendship, as two friends revel in college, do crazy things, have fun but it’s all about the moment and there is no lasting loyalty. I had a friend like that in college. Tara talked about Alex quite frequently. She had very deeply mixed emotions about him. Because they had spent so long together, she needed to convince herself that there was something worthwhile to their relationship, that he did love her. She would send him an email or call him on the phone every once in awhile. Tonight, while I was in the shower, she sent him email telling him that I broke up with her and basically the same thing happened to her again. Alex was very cold and unemotional to Tara despite her repeated attempts to get him to acknowledge their friendship, love, whatever. She started the email out, “If you love me or have ever loved me, you will reply to this email.” In the email she told him that at last she understood what her problem was. Despite her declaration of this, she still seemed to want his approval. He replied to her the next day, “If you know what you’re doing wrong, if you know you’re problem, then there’s nothing more to be said. Just learn from your mistakes and move on.”

When I got out of the shower she told me that she had written Alex an email. I knew that she still after a year of not even seeing him (he had a girlfriend now) she clung to him mercilessly. She could not let go of him. During the relationship I had tried to talk to her about letting go of him. But he became such a predominant thread in our conversations that I felt almost as if I knew him. My impression of him was this. Alex was a jerk and he had emotionally abused Tara, took advantage of her. But still from hearing all of his stories I also sympathized with this stranger. Who was Alex? Oftentimes during our conversations, she compared the two of us and I stood out as a much more mature man beside this manipulative prick. She talked on and on about him, with remorse and I tried to help her to see that she was still attached to him. He even had a girlfriend now and he had never reciprocated any genuine feelings to her anyways. Why was she still emailing him? She couldn’t cut the umbilical cord, her haunted her. To let go of him would be tantamount to accepting that he never loved her, even as a friend.

I told her to take a shower. The email was sent. She admitted that she had reacted emotionally and that’s why she sent it to him. Men, especially Tara’s old boyfriends, were like her drugs, to talk to them, to make contact with them, no matter how minimal gave her a small burst of gratification like a hit of cocaine.

Finally she took a shower. She walked naked into the bedroom. She stood in the bathroom naked and I looked at her body which was stark naked and slender. Her whole aspect however was sad. I could see the sadness in her very limbs. She was like a wilting petal.

I told her that I didn’t have enough cash to take a taxi so we would have to walk in the cold. It was piercing cold out but Michigan avenue was still flooded with people and on a Friday night, a convivial spirit among the thronging masses. We walked all the way to where my sister lives on Huron street and then we walked further. I had something to return. Tara and I had been downtown a month ago, during Christmas time. I bought a pair of shoes which were handsome but exorbitant. With the shoes, the salesman sold me an insole that was supposed to fill up the shoe. At the time, the shoe with the regular soles felt big. Now I wanted to return the insoles because I didn’t need them. Luckily the same salesman was there, a short Latino boy with short hair and a pretty smile. He was more than willing to return the insoles for me. He remembered my girlfriend and said Hi. The last time we were in the shoe store Tara had said to me that the salesman thought I was cute. I couldn’t tell. We returned the insoles and with the sixty dollars I got back, I took Tara out to dinner. She said she wanted to go Middle Eastern Restaurant. There were two Middle Eastern restaurants I knew of, I took her to the more expensive one.

Barely anyone was inside the restaurant when we arrived. The Lebanese man who owned the place suggested a couple appetizers for us. After he left the table, I was aware of the bitterness that Tara couldn’t help but to convey. Since I had broken up with her, things were just not the same. She looked at times disdainful, at other times unhappy. Sometimes she seemed mad at me.

The dinner did not turn out to be as good as I expected. Toward the end of the meal, a huge spider climbed up the wall next to our table and Tara screamed. The chubby Lebanese man came rushing over to our table and he lifted up his leg in the air and stomped the wall. The restaurant was fairly crowded by this point and I hurriedly paid the bill and we left. Neither of us wanted to see the movie anymore so we took a cab back to my father’s apartment. The cab driver drove like a lunatic and I only had about nine dollars on me. He didn’t seem happy when I told him that because the trip would probably cost over twelve. But I had him drop us off near my sister’s building, which was quite a long walk on Michigan avenue to my father’s apartment.

When we returned to my father’s apartment we changed our clothes and got into bed. I flipped through the channels and looked for the free movies. There were a number of good free movies. I got excited to watch a movie with Tara for some reason. I wanted her to experience a couple of the movies I had seen. One of the movies was The Vanishing and the other was Hoffa. I couldn’t decide which I wanted to watch, both of them were good. I turned on Hoffa. She seemed interested in the story but midway through we both had sex. It was probably the most intense sexual experience I had with her. I remember in the whirlwind of repeated gyrations, a huge shock of her hair got into my mouth. After having sex, I got up and went into the bathroom. I opened my mouth and took out the hair.

Both of us were exhausted from the sex. And I was suddenly hungry for chocolate. I opened up a box of chocolate wafers, the kind that look like fingers and started eating them one after the other. I think I finished the entire box. She came out of the bedroom, naked, and sat down on my father’s plush stools. She

ate a couple of the tantalizing wafers. I poured a cup of milk to quench the sweetness in my mouth. We returned to the bedroom and now I told her that I wanted to watch The Vanishing. Now that we were broken up, I had a sort of attraction to her. The sex was incredible, but the sex was always good. Beyond the sex, then, there was something appealing about Tara. With childish excitement I told her I wanted her to watch the movie with me. She seemed very sleepy, but said it seemed good. It was good, an excellent movie. You’ll love it. Jeff Bridges plays a psychopath and she had first hand experience with working with psychopaths. In the first fifteen minutes of the movie she seemed intrigued. But then I looked over to her during the middle of the movie and her eyes were closed. I roused her awake and said that she had to watch the movie. I wanted her to see it. It was such a good movie. Don’t fall asleep I said, or you’ll miss out. This is really a fantastic movie. Before the last fifteen minutes of the movie, I had to rouse her awake again. I looked to see if she was watching, her lids were heavy but she was watching. Finally the movie ended and I told her she could go to sleep.

During the drive home the next day, I did most of the talking. Tara was still in shock from the break up, even though we had only been together for a couple months. She seemed confused and unable to think. I analyzed her problem, which, as I saw it was she projected the desire for love onto her relationships. She could not love authentically, however. Nor would she be able to receive love until she loved herself. She had always treated me as a sort of mentor. Perhaps that was another likeness of the relationship between me and her and her and her father who was dead. She listened to me and usually supported my intellectual conclusions. And when I commented on her behavior, she also listened to me. She knew that I was right about her men issue. She wouldn’t be able to find true love until she gave up these unhealthy habits. But it really dismayed her that she wouldn’t be able to continue having sex with me. And when she thought about that, she thought about not being able to have sex with other men. This frustrated her even further because in her vulnerable state she would want to feed her addiction which was sex. But I told her that if she was going to grow from this experience, then she probably shouldn’t sleep with anyone for awhile. At that point, I realized that I couldn’t have sex with her either and even if we continued to be friends we couldn’t have sex. That would destroy my integrity, I said. I don’t know how much of what I was saying to her in the car, she actually heard. She was violently upset and the prospect of being without a man and without sex drove her crazy. I kept phrasing things in terms of, “Okay, well now you have a chance to change. You can go on doing the same thing you’ve been doing. Or you can change.”

When we got to my house, she said she was tired and she wanted to lie down. But I didn’t think that was a good idea. Moreover, I had to go to work in an hour. So she took some of her things from my closet and left.

I was on the toilet when she knocked loudly on the front door. I screamed from the bathroom, “I’m on the freaking toilet.” This woman is never going to leave me now I thought. Not even two minutes and she’s back.

She had forgot her keys. They lay on the table next to the door. I gave them to her and she left.

There was about a week before I heard from her again. She called me one night and we talked. She started the conversation by saying she didn’t know why she called me. By the end of the conversation it was apparent that she wanted to know if I still cared about her. But it was more than that. She wanted to know if there was a chance for us to get back together.

She called me again after a couple days. I was beginning to feel lonely myself and it was nice to have someone to talk to. As the conversation progressed, I told her that I felt we would have a better, more honest relationship with each other now than when we were dating. Our conversations were still deep and probing. I was very articulate when I was speaking to her on the phone. I think that was because she respected me and listened to me. Perhaps our relationship was better now because we weren’t pretending. I told her how I felt and she told me how she felt. Although there was still a lot of mixed emotions and things weren’t any more straightforward than they had been during the relationship. When I talked to her, and had someone who still liked me, it gave me a boost of confidence. Even though I knew I wasn’t attracted to her and a relationship would never work again, I said stupid things that made her think otherwise.

She called me about once a week. I didn’t mind her calling, but sometimes I would give her the impression that maybe we would see each other again, or that maybe the relationship could renew itself Then I mistakenly told her that I masturbated to her still. All of this was confusing to the both of us.

I didn’t hear from her for about four days. She always called me. I never called her.

“You might want to sit down,” she said.“Why, what’s wrong?”“Nothing that you have to worry about. It doesn’t really effect you

anymore.”“What is it?”“A piece of flesh came out of my vagina when I got home from the doctor

today.”I knew that she had gone to the doctor to get precancerous cells checked

out.“I looked on the internet and well, the pictures I saw were exactly like what

this thing looked like.”“It’s like a clear bag the size of a fist.”Her voice was rather calm for the circumstances. I was in shock to hear

this. My coworker’s dream . . . I thought. I impregnated my girlfriend. How could it be?

“The baby had been inside me for four weeks.”“But I thought you had your period all those months we were together.”“It was very light. I didn’t want to worry you. So I never said anything.”“I think you should go get a pregnancy test. How do you know you’re not

preganat?”

“I’m pretty sure I’m not, but I’ll get in the car and drive to Walgreens if you want.”

We got off the phone and she went to Walgreens. The weather was foggy and cold but she went to get the pregnancy test anyways. Then the phone rang, I answered, and she said, “I’m not pregnant.”

I found out about the pregnancy after it was void and therefore my feelings toward it were subdued. It shocked me what she said, if what she said was true, but it was all over now. I had the experience of one who manages to escape death by a sliver of chance. I looked back on the occurrence, not truly or deeply apprehending it, because it came and went so quickly that I had not had enough time to know what was happening. For the most part, I was relieved. I was relieved and thankful that God or anyone else didn’t make me a father. The toddler of my coworker’s dream never lived and the dream remained a dream and not a facet or manifestation of reality.

When Tara came into Bloomington, she called me and we met in the parking lot of a strip mall. It was raining ice water and she jumped into my car. Her slender back arched up to get into the seat and she put her butt up in the air and then dropped down into the bucket seat. After talking to her on the phone about her job, I was surprised she just jumped into the car with me. What if I was a dangerous human being? But she said she could tell within seconds that she had nothing to worry about. That was a quick assessment I thought. From the rain-slathered parking lot, we left her car and drove into the area of town where there is a college and some places to eat.

We stepped inside a place I sometimes like to go called the Garlic Press. The Garlic Press attracts a lot of the academics that work at the university and who can afford the expensive gourmet salads. Tara mentioned that she has a “bad diet” and that she ate a lot of greasy food which gave her stomach problems so I figured this was an appropriate place. Everything was cooked fresh and with organic ingredients. I’m kind of a health freak and I make no attempt to hide. I skirt between vegetarianism and pesco-vegetarianism, which you probably haven’t heard before, but it means fish and vegetarian. As we were standing in front of the glass displays deciding what to eat, I made a few suggestions to Tara. She looked a bit perplexed not having accustomed herself to such fare. But I was able to clear her worries by a few simple suggestions. First I suggested the dolma. Dolma are grape leaves stuffed with rice and herbs. Sometimes they are filled with bits of meat, but at the Garlic Press they are vegetarian. Another suggestion I made was the veggie muflata which Tara eventually ordered. I ordered a plate of chickpea salad and asparagus.

We sat in the semi-busy restaurant, our first real encounter. It seemed that she was more nervous that I was. At first, when I was driving to meet her, I felt my heart pumping and an awkward self-consciousness begin to affect me but once I met her and was seated in front of her in this restaurant my nervousness

seemed to go away. Or rather I could maintain a sense of calm. I’m guessing this sense of calm was because I felt that we were evenly matched, or that I was better than her in a physical sense. You may think that these things don’t matter, but they do. We size ourselves up to each other, I believe, and on a first date, the other person is thinking: Who is better looking? Neither one of us had the upper hand, only I didn’t have anything to be fearful about anymore. So I adopted a calm posture and listened to her talk about herself as she ate her Veggie Muflata. But I was not entirely calm and self consciousness did creep into my focus. What was it that was bothering me that day? Oh, yes, I went to the bathroom because I had that conventional fear that there was something on my face, perhaps, a bugger in my nose. You never know until you make sure. So Tara watched me get up from the table twice in the gourmet food shop.

After she finished her sandwich, she said it was good but you could tell that she would have rather had a cheeseburger and fries. Perhaps my tastes are too refined for this woman I said to myself, but really, I didn’t want to think this way. I did not want to think I was superior to her and though this gave me a sense of calm, I did not want to cultivate that attitude. But we were talking a great deal, mostly out of nervousness. And after we finished our food, I suggested we walk down the street to a coffee shop.

The icy rain let up and the clouds even pushed apart enough for some sunshine to pour through. We went into the Coffee Hound and I paid for the coffees. Then we sat down and talked more. My first impression of Tara and I was that clearly the date was going well because we were talking non-stop. She talked about her parents, her father who died and her mother who was sick. She really felt a connection with me she said, because my mother had been sick. The way she described her mother was that she “had the mind of a seven year old.” Which was not the case with my mother who had lost a lot of faculties but never her mind. We talked about our past relationships. We talked about our interests in life and our goals. The conversation went on and on and on. During which I got up to go to the bathroom a number of times. I wasn’t exactly calm anymore. Talking to Tara made me nervous. She was high-strung like myself and we were very cerebral people. She received her degree in psychology and so her language was spattered with psychological jargon, such as transference and counter transference. But I had a mind for psychological concepts and much of the way lovers relate to each other is from the fund of Segismund Freuds legacy. We analyzed ourselves and asked each other questions about identity. My trips to the bathroom became rather noticeable and she asked me about them but I explained that I can be obsessive. She seemed to accept this. She seemed to accept me. Her personality was very open and accepting of people. She was not a judgmental person.

Her face had nothing distinctive about it. She reminded me of a blander version of one of my ex girlfriends and it was horrible to think this way. But I give a high value to aesthetics. There is room, much room, for a person to be deceived in the beginning. Her body was rather my type, slender, and boyish frame. This may have deceived me into building an attraction to her. Both of us, however, had too much nervous energy for each other. We were excitable and

excessively cerebral. Nevertheless we both felt something, perhaps just an initial burst of serotonin, and when I offered to show her my house, she agreed.

Now when we were on the phone, talking, before we had met, she had told me how careful she was with men because of her job. But that did not seem to be the case at all. She went on an instinct with me, she felt I was safe, which I was. At my house, I took her upstairs into my library where I showed her a book that I mentioned while we were talking in the coffee shop. It was a psychology book called, “Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends.” I thought that maybe she would be interested in it and she was. I told her that she could borrow it. Downstairs she admired my house, its cleanliness and minimalist style. All of my furniture is white and the carpets are light beige and the walls are natural tones. She sat down on my couch and leaned her back against the arm rest. I sat at the other end and we continued our interminable conversation about our lives.

You wouldn’t think that on the first date you could divulge so much information, but you can. Together Tara and I reconstituted our entire past lives for each other. I was interested in the encyclopedia of relationships that she presented to me and how each one of these relationships was etched deeply in her mind. I told her she could read a story I wrote about my last relationship called “Sucker”, but I wouldn’t give it to her until right before she was going to leave. As we were lying side by side on the couch together she came over, on top of me, and started to kiss me. She had that active feminine energy that likes to make the first move and I relented to her and soon we were rubbing our legs together. That’s when I said, “Tara, I forgot that I have work in an hour.” Which I did. It was a Sunday night and I work in the tutoring center on Sunday night. She asked me how long I worked. “Three hours,” I said.

“Well, then, maybe I can stay here while your gone.”Frankly, I couldn’t believe how easy things were going for me. And

quickly. I enjoyed having a woman on my couch and willing to remain on my couch until I returned from work. And so I said, “Why not?”