GIRL 46 ~ CAREER CHANGE GIRL

GIRL 46

CAREER CHANGE GIRL

 

 

In the days before Christmas, I was more focused on the New Year. I told myself that it would the year I'd find true love. I made the conscious decision, after having won a confrontation with my traitorous penis, Tyrannosaurus Rex, that I would begin my New Year's resolutions early, and try to get an A-Girl in my life.

Since Girl 42, Shop Girl, I had been back in the B-Girl and C-Girl league, but I thought I was ready. It was time for a first date with a woman who would count.

I arranged a narrow search for a blonde nurse, slender, on the young side. I'd spent too much time on the forty-somethings, I thought, and they were all burned up running kids around. I figured "The Girl" wouldn't have kids. While I was at it, I thought, I may as well unclick the "divorced" button. The divorcees had been bitter. Perhaps a woman who had never been married would fit the bill. It was a bit daunting staring at the checkmarks all snug in their database boxes. What the hell would happen if I pressed the SEARCH button with these settings? I admit to a tingle of fear, just for a moment. I fully understood this could result in someone whom I would be with for more than a couple of dates. She would be more than a single Tuesday afternoon blowjob. She would be for life.

I bit my lip and decided to consult with Rex. I couldn't remember pausing like this before I hit the button. Always I'd just plowed ahead. It wasn't like the woman who flashed on the screen would fall into my lap. Odds were, such an eligible female wouldn't be so easily coaxed to go out with me. But if this turned up someone significant, it would be better to get Rex's input now rather than his annoyance later.

I could feel him looking over my shoulder. People insist that penises are brainless, but I owed a lot of my best grades in mechanical engineering to Rex. The guy was fearless and angry and relentless. As an energy source, he'd kept me driven for night after night of studying back at the Academy, and he had an instinctive understanding of physics and spatial geometry. Geometry and curves, I thought. He loved a slender woman with a Hooters waitress chest.

"What do think, Rex? Do I press the button?"

Even Rex, formerly fearless, was nervous. He hesitated, but finally spoke.

"Go for it." His voice was deep and strong as steel, but I knew he was acting.

I hit the button, and there was only one result, a spectacularly stunning thirty-eight year old blonde nurse who obviously knew how pretty she was by the sheer number of photographs she'd taken of herself, including ones in lingerie.

"You like her?"

Rex nodded. "Um, yeah. I like her."

She was hot, and her writeup was articulate. She'd been an advertising mogul on Madison Avenue, and cashed it all in to go back to college for a nursing degree. Career Change Girl, I thought, would be the girlfriend.

"Maybe you should do the typing," I said to Rex, getting up from the command chair. God knows Rex knew how to hit on the slutty girls. They always responded eagerly when he took over the keyboard. All I would do was fog things up with intellect. This called for a macho dinosaur.

"Career Change Girl," he typed, "if you're working on a new career, you should furnish your new life with a new guy, a guy different from the ones you've dated before." I don't know what else he typed. Sometimes he went for the macho angle, but with a girl like this, certainly the cops and firefighters were all over her. He might even play the sweet, sensitive, caring writer-artist card. You never knew with Rex.

He hit the send button, and we both settled down to wait. The wait seemed like years, but she wrote back the same night: "Dear Michael, I have to say, I haven't gotten an email like that in all the time I've been on Match. I'm intrigued. Tell me more. Love, Audrey."

Rex leaped into the air and threw a punch at the same time. "Yeah!" he roared.

I reread her email. It seemed neutral. I wasn't so sure what Rex was so psyched about.

"Look, you idiot," he said. "She starts off with 'dear' and then says your name. Not 'Mike.' That gay 'Michael' crap you use for a name."

"Hey, I like that name."

"Gay. Anyway, look at her first sentence, she says our email was unique. She sounds faint." He imitated a female voice reading the first line, all southern and smitten. "Then she used the word 'intrigued.' That always means pussy, always. Then she begs for more." He chuckled. "I'll give ya more, baby. Then she signs off with the word 'love.' Dude, it don't get no better than that."

We'll see, I said. In what seemed like no time at all, I had a prime time date lined up with Career Change Girl. I was so excited I counted down the minutes. But it turned out to be a bad thing. I became too psyched, and soon I was nervous. Nerves gave way to pure pre-date fear.

 

As the hour for the date arrived, I was barely able to stand up to get into the shower. I had to throw down a Jack Daniels just to calm down enough to get ready for the date, and a second one at the door. What the hell was wrong with me, I wondered. Was it just me, or was Rex nervous too?

"You okay?" I asked him as I walked to the car.

"Oh man," Rex said. "Oh, Jesus."

Great, the most masculine part of me was going to pieces over this damned chick. That wasn't good.

She walked up to me in the Brew Pub, as lovely as her pictures. There is simply nothing more alluring than a tall, slender blonde with a good walk. No wonder she'd torn up Madison Ave., I thought.

"Hi, I'm Audrey," she said, smiling. My world seemed to tilt half sideways.

At the table, the waitress landed the steak in front of me. I smiled at Career Change Girl, the conversation up to then all about her advertising gig. I decided to get my first date questions in, the ones I was usually asking on the phone long before the first date. With Career Change Girl, I'd been careful. I didn't want to treat her like the sluts I'd been jamming of late. This was an A-Girl.

"So," I said casually, "how do you come to be thirty-eight and you've never been married and never had a child?"

It must have been the double Jack I'd had before I left. I knew women like her were sensitive, perhaps oversensitive, to questions like that. Women are so cruel to other women, always expediting them on getting married and pooping out kids. Like they need any help other than the biological clock. There I am, trying to be suave, asking calmly how she fended off all the lusting males, but I said it clumsily. Instead of sounding like she'd been successful at keeping the drooling males at bay, it came out sounding like I'd just told her she'd be an old maid.

Perhaps it was even worse than my memory of what I'd asked, because after ten seconds of stunned silence, she reacted in rage, coming out of her seat and leaning toward me, her face a mask of fury.

"Where the hell do you get off asking me that?" she said in a tight, furious voice.

I was 46 years old. Never in my life had a woman come across the table at me. Well, there were those punches from the first ex, but that was different.

At the Princeton Triumph Brew Pub, when they give you a steak, the steak knife that comes with it is a machete. It must be fourteen inches long, perfectly balanced, a veritable K-Bar knife of gleaming steel, ready to rip apart the cowflesh on the plate. I pushed my chair two feet away from table, the knife in my right hand, the blade pointed toward her throat, and I said in my best Clint Eastwood, "Now you just sit right back down, there, little missy!"

She sat dawn, still furious, her eyes glaring at me in red hot anger. The knife still in my hand, blade out, I used my left hand to signal the waitress.

"Check please!"

It was a damned shame. The steak looked and smelled wonderful. In confusion the waitress brought the tab.

"Is something wrong with your food?" she asked.

"It's fine, honey," I said, tipping her generously. "We have an emergency."

I stood, suddenly angry myself. This woman had just cost me a juicy steak because of her goddamned biological clock. I glared back at her, put on my coat and threw hers at her, thinking, take your coat and get lost, cunt.

So she walks up to me, so close I practically needed reading glasses to see what was going on in those mile-deep blue eyes. She puts one her hand on the back of my neck and pulls me close, and her full lips touch mine and I can feel her mouth open as her silky warm tongue goes into my mouth and invites me to chase it back into hers. For the next two minutes I kissed her there on the upper deck of the Brew Pub. When I pulled back, there was lipstick on my lips, and Career Change Girl was breathing like she'd just sprinted a quarter mile. I sensed ten pairs of eyes on us and I wondered if they'd seen the entire scene from her coming across the table and my knife threat.

"Let's get out of here."

I bought her an ice cream cone, kissed her neck and walked hand-in-hand through Princeton. I remember virtually nothing about the rest of the date.But I did follow through swiftly on arranging date two.

The second date would be sealing the deal. I'd bring her to the Snake Ranch and show her Rex. That would hook a girl like her. She'd love both of us. I figured she already loved Rex's spirit, because it had been him holding that knife in the Brew Pub.

It was a Friday night. A mellow fire burned in the hearth of the Snake Ranch. The best Chinese food in a three state area was waiting for her, and a great bottle of cabernet was ready to be opened. Candles burned everywhere, including the bedroom. She arrived on time and looked lovely in tight jeans, boots and a tight turtleneck sweater. I smiled, thinking about her clothes lying on my bedroom floor later.

This time I'd been careful - no predate alcohol at all. I needed to avoid asking clumsy questions. In fact, I'd thought about how the conversation would go, and I'd come up with the perfect way to get her talking and avoid the thin ice of her single, childless status.

One bite into my sesame chicken I smiled at her and said, "So Career Change Girl, tell me about your life."

Her fork froze on the way to her mouth. "What?"

"You know, tell me about yourself."

She put her fork down and frowned. "I don't know what you mean," she said, her tone hostile.

"I don't know, start with how you were born a poor black child, and go from there." The worn humor was lost on her. Her eyes widened, her frown got more angry.

"I have no idea what the hell you're asking. Why do you want to know that?" She leaned toward me as if she were about to strike me.

Oh dear God, she was furious again.

I looked at this stunning, interesting blonde who looked like she was about to reach for the neck of the cabernet bottle and break it on the table to use as a weapon. I needed to make sure I wasn't imagining this.

"Is that too hard a question for you?"

"What the hell is it with you?" she practically shouted. "It's so many questions! It's like a goddamned interview!"

It was my turn for stunned silence. I looked at her, suddenly realizing what a mistake it had been to bring her to the Snake Ranch. I couldn't just slip out to the men's room, pay the check and leave. She was here, in my house, coming across the table at me.

"Career Change Girl," I said slowly, "I need to ask you to leave."

"What?" she said, her tone dangerous, like she'd just been insulted.

"You heard me. You need to leave right now." I stood and took my plate to the kitchen. This woman could be a diet. She picked fights on the first bite.

When I came back she was gone, but I'd heard her boots going the wrong direction. The bathroom door in the hall slammed. Shit, now the psycho was barricaded in my bathroom. I could hear her crying. For twenty minutes I waited, cleaning up the dinner plates and throwing out the food.

Finally she emerged and walked toward the door. Her mascara had completely melted down her cheeks from her tears. She shot me a look, as if to say, aren't you going to kiss me and stop me. But I looked at the door as if coaxing her out.

She slammed the front door behind her. I watched out the front window as she walked quickly to her sports car and roared off.

This time it was Rex who asked the usual post-date question. "What the hell was that about?"

I shook my head. "I have no idea, buddy. No idea at all."

Rex swallowed hard. "Maybe next time a divorced chick with a child."

"Yeah," I said, still looking out the window as if making sure she didn't come back. "Why don't you go to the computer and start the search?"

He didn't move. "Maybe we'll just leave Match alone tonight," he said.

I nodded. Bed early would be the only way to deal with this. Perhaps by the light of morning it would seem funny.

But when the sun came up, it still seemed freakish. My friends asked over and over for me to retell the story, loving how I showed them I'd handled the knife. No amount of laughter really made it any better to me.

Much later I ran the story by my female friend, Gal Pal. She was on the side of Career Change Girl. "You were a boor to ask her about the lack of a baby or marriage. Of course she reacted."

What about having to back her off with the knife? And the second incident?

"Oh, you just exaggerate, you drama queen. That's why you're a fiction writer."

So I made it all up, I said in annoyance.

"I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that, well, in your world, things are kind of…different."

I drove home from Gal Pal's house, incredulous that a female could hear that story and still assume that I was the psycho.

It made me think about what the female mind was really made of.

Asit turns out, it has nothing to do with sugar and spice and everything nice.

Tags: sex, love, romance, dating, women, girls, hundred girls