I arrived at my date’s swanky Upper East Side apartment building and announced myself. The doorman handed me the phone. Lizzy skipped the greeting, getting right to her grievance:
“You didn’t confirm, so I thought you weren’t gonna come.”
“Well,” I told her, “we did make a plan for me to pick you up here at one o’clock today. Sorry, I didn’t know that a confirmation was required.”
“But since you didn’t confirm, I assumed you’d canceled.”
What is she? United Airlines? When she came down 30 minutes later (she needed time to prepare since I had dropped in on her out of the blue) she explained to me that all guys in New York City confirm: “It’s the normal thing to do.” After discussing this in greater detail, she did concede that her 5 p.m. date of the same day also had failed to confirm. What is this with confirming? For me, making the date is the confirmation. But I was dealing with the Dr. Ruth of dating in New York City, who insisted that the man always confirm, the day before. And I foolishly thought a confirmation was only necessary when the plan is tentative. How two people of the same cultural and genetic stock could arrive at such a misunderstanding was beyond me.
The first thing she said when she set eyes on me was, “You look artsy.” So she was slumming it, I gathered. During lunch, she did warm up, a bit too much, telegraphing interest with risqué innuendo. Like, when we entered the restaurant out of the rain she said, “I’m all wet...get it?” My blank look led her to believe that I didn’t. Then she invited me back to her house with the caveat, “No funny business, okay?” But I had to decline because I too had double booked and had to be on my way. What chronically single New Yorker can afford to squander an entire Saturday on one measly date? When she urged me to stick around, I gently reminded her that she also had a 5 o’clock date. But she felt confident that he wouldn’t show since he hadn’t confirmed. “Right, just like me,” I said.
Lizzy was part of a series of dates that I had lined up with Jewish women in New York City in an effort to overcome my aversion to the type of female that reminds me too much of my sister to trigger romantic sensations. And in the typical way that fate enjoys mocking me, this is precisely the female demographic that likes me the most: thirty-something, zaftig, New York Jewish women who are determined to marry a Jewish man, screw and produce Jewish babies. As a rule it seems that the women who I am attracted to have little use for me, so I figured I stood a better chance where I was a club member. I really thought I was going to have a breakthrough with Lizzy, who looked irresistible in her profile’s photo; but in person, the spark just wasn’t there. Would you want to kiss a composite of your sibling?
At 4:30, I phoned my second Jewish endeavor of the day. I left a message, telling her that I was at an Astor Place café waiting. Meanwhile, the guy sitting next to me was spewing opinions in monologue mode loudly into my ear in a thick Queens accent. After an hour and a half of this, my 5 o’clock date got back to me to say that she was sorry, but couldn’t make it, completing a hat-trick by becoming the third woman to stand me up in a week. A tsunami of despair crashed down upon me like, uh, something really heavy that crashes down on you. The vast abyss of a solitary Saturday night loomed before me as profound questions emerged: Why can’t I meet a nice girl? And, more importantly, who can I blame for this problem? Though I came up as a prime candidate, I didn’t want to rule out potential scapegoats.
So I hit another café in the East Village, waiting for something titillating to cross my path. I was reading Maus, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel about his father’s experience during the Holocaust in which the Jews are portrayed as mice and the Germans as cats. At one point, speaking of a woman he had dated prior to marrying his French wife, Spiegelman says, “I just dated her to get over my prejudice against middle-class, New York, Jewish women. They remind me too much of my relatives to be erotic.” It was then that I had an epiphany that illuminated the key to my problem with women: I am a mouse and they are cats! That’s it! And unless I revise this deeply rooted metaphor through expensive Park Avenue therapy, I will be condemned to getting pounced on.
Bereft of direction and confidence, I wound up meekly standing on the corner of St. Mark’s on 3rd Avenue when a black guy walking past said, “Don’t look so sad. It’s not the end of the world. Unless you know somethin’ I don’t.” All I knew was that it was time to go home to figure out how to metamorphose from a mouse into a man.
