Eye to Eye Read online

  “Spoken by some deluded soul who clearly never dated on the Internet,” I say, looking at the hagged-out, forty-five-year-old, grinning, hairless, across the screen, who will only date women aged twenty-two to thirty-eight. Priceless.

  With Toni’s help, I’ve gone from an Internet dating virgin to veritable savant in a few short weeks. And let me tell you, ladies-over-a-certain-age (puberty), in case you don’t already know, the cyber-landscape isn’t always pretty. Given, I am probably overly sensitive about this issue because of Zach and Toni, and Antonius and Vera, but unless you’re practicing kabbalah, there’s not a whole lot of Harold and Maude out there. It never occurred to me that I, at thirty-two, might be considered too old for men my age.

  “That’s him,” I say, when we get to Andrew. We responded “yes” to each other on our speed-dating sheets, but Toni is still too caught up in Tino to want anything to do with him. I, on the other hand, am up for anything to get my mind off my own present situation.

  “I guess that’s him,” Toni says, squinting at the screen. “The problem with these profile pics is they’re like the hamburger advertisements on TV. They show you a big burger on TV, and it’s like, wow, great, get me one of those, then you see it in person and it’s like, yeah, I guess that’s lettuce, and I guess that’s the meat they told me about, but it sure doesn’t bear any resemblance to that thing you showed me to get me in the place.”

  I laugh, and Lotto lets out a catcall through the walls. Toni walks to the wall and bangs against it, shouting, “Shut up, you crazy white-trash bird. Shut up, shut up, shut up. God, Doris, you’re a saint for not calling the management on me. Have I thanked you again?”

  “Please,” I say, scrolling through Andrew’s information, “you forget what I lived with through the walls in Indiana for six solid years. Noisy undergraduate sex and accompanying pot-patchouli scent.”

  “Dear God,” she said. “Indiana.”

  “Okay. You have to read this. More material for your study.”

  Andrew’s profile pegs him as a thirty-five-year-old psych grad student who is looking for a toned woman aged twenty-two to thirty. His e-mail to me reads: “Doris, great to meet you. Hard to find smart women with a sense of humor. Would love to catch up. Here’s my cell number if you’d like to take coffee one of these afternoons.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.” Toni laughs. “Seriously. He sent me the exact same e-mail, word for word.”

  “And not even good words,” I say. “Who says ‘take coffee.’ I mean, coffee is fine, but it’s not like ‘taking heroin’ or ‘taking a vacation.’ It’s just another of those drinks that falls above water and below martinis in the great chain of being.”

  “Probably some pretentious turn of phrase he’ll attribute to a summer traipsing around Europe,” Toni speculates. “Probably Prague in the early nineties, where he was going to be a great writer, but ended up with the sad, rich, white boy’s version of a long ‘dear diary.’”

  Also, while I don’t know what he and Toni talked about, I know full well that I acted like an idiot, so it seems clear to me that Andrew is pulling that age-old trick of telling a woman he finds pretty that she is smart, in the way that he would no doubt have emphasized that he found me attractive had I sold myself as an academic. Or, he could have thought that I was smart and just be flirting. But I am in no mood to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.

  So with Toni’s approval, I write back: “I would be glad to take coffee with you, but alas, I’m out of your age range. But who knows, maybe I’ll serve you coffee one of these days if you fly the friendly skies.” Because it’s the Internet, and my chances of seeing Andrew again in a city as large as Atlanta are zero-to-none, I send said bitterness into the world.

  After almost a bottle of wine, Toni is ready to talk about Tino. She’s stretched across the floor of my apartment on the faux sheepskin throw that seemed retro-sexy at the time I bought it. I have since downgraded it to frightening, but comfortable.

  “So I still haven’t told him,” she says. “And it’s not like he’s said anything crazy, like ‘hang them coons,’ but it’s like I have this thought bubble written over his head, and I’m waiting for the crazy thing that he’s going to say that I’m going to have to write in it, then write him off.”

  “But maybe he won’t,” I hazard. “Maybe you should give him a chance.”

  “When I was a full-out white girl, I dated guys who would say things on occasion. You know, without even thinking about it, a ‘those people,’ or a ‘that kind of girl,’ or a ‘well, what do you expect,’ and I knew it was racial, even then. But it hits me differently now.”

  She flips over onto her belly and pushes herself up into a seated position.

  “Here’s a crazy and true story,” she says. “I thought I was white for, like, sixteen solid years. My mom, she never knew she was biracial, because her mother was white. And her dad died when she was really young. So she just up and moved, and told me that my father had had no family to speak of, married my stepfather, and had two more full-out white babies.”

  She pauses and lets out a long sigh.

  “On my sixteenth birthday it turns out my great-aunt, my father’s sister, has been trying to track me down for years. And she’s black for sure. So black I am. I took off and didn’t speak to my mother the entire summer. Then when I went away to school, I guess I got sensitized to it, but it felt like race was everywhere. All the places people think it isn’t, with who gets carded for ID at the video store, or whose house gets rebuilt, or all those other light-skinned women like me, who chose to pass or not pass as white, and me, passing without even knowing it for most of my life. So I feel, being with Tino, like I’m sliding into this bad, awful, sick, diseased habit, and part of me just hates myself for it. And then I consider whether if I’m not punishing myself for sliding by for so long, and I don’t even want to tell Tino the truth because even if he thinks it’s okay, I’m going to think it’s because I still look white, and he can make it exotic and a little trashy, and maybe a little more sexual like some old-school massah before the wind done gone.”

  All the joy had gone out of her voice by the end of her story.

  “I have to tell him,” she said, resigned. “And then I have to break up with him. That’s all there is to it. Any man who will only date white girls is never going to date this girl.”

  And though the anger and bitterness all but seep through her voice when she says, “white girls,” I don’t take it personally.

  After Toni leaves, I turn my music down lower so as not to disturb the neighbors (nor agitate the parrot), and return my attention to my laptop, to which I have developed a sort of Internet-fantasy addiction. A fantasy that is shattered each time I really read what folks have to say about themselves.

  Part of the problem with Internet dating profiles is that they all sound alike. Everyone loves the outdoors, wants a woman who “looks as good in jeans and a baseball cap as out on the town.” Everyone’s last favorite book read is The DaVinci Code. Everyone has a good sense of humor and is looking for someone who makes them smile. Everyone is “living life to the fullest and looking for that special someone to make me complete.” And grammar? Spelling? Forget about it. If I decided to be snobbish about English usage, I would never leave my house again.

  Then there are those who dare to be different. The handsome, six-foot-four African-American man whose profile stated that he is LOOKING FOR A SOCCER MOM, SOMEONE WHO LIKES DOING CRAFTS OR SOMETHING OUT OF THE HOUSE. ALSO I’M A TWO TIME A DAY GUY SO IF YOU’RE NOT PASSIONATE…. I was surprised his tagline didn’t read: “Stud seeks local concubine with eye for macramé.” There’s also the gentleman who likes WOMEN WHO WEAR PANTYHOSE AND LINGERE (Together? Please, God, NO!), and the one who advertised himself as GOOD HUSBAND MATERIAL. (Yikes! As scary in men as GOOD WIFE MATERIAL would indubitably be in women.) Furthermore, having surveyed the sheer volume of men who list brainiacs as a turn off, I have now concluded that when a man s
ays he wants a “smart woman” what he means is “smart enough to unzip my pants.” It was sort of like taking a trip to the Designer Shoe Warehouse where there’s lots of material, the promise of a great find, but lawdie, lawdie, the junk you had to sift through to find one decent sole (or soul, as the case may be).

  I also had a “yes” from Maxwell-the-speed-dater, and I’m anxious to look him up and see if he’s sent me an e-mail. I shied away from doing this around Toni, as I’m not yet sure whether or not she’d approve of my own cross-race dating, white girl that I am.

  Maxwell has a nice tagline: “Where are all the brainy beauties?” His self-description is written in a recognizable version of the Queen’s English, and nothing stands out as terribly different, nor does anything strike me as terrifying. The veganism is a little troubling, only because it’s one of those lifestyles that cannot help but make the nonvegan feel like a worse person. I read an interview with Billy Bob Thornton saying that being with Angelina Jolie made him feel bad because she was off saving the world while he just wanted to stay home on the couch and watch Green Acres. To paraphrase Melville, call me Billy. That, and the slightly kooky sandals (no matter how humanitarian, I cannot call plastic masquerading as cow a step forward), are the only strikes against Maxwell. Puny little strikes. Ostensibly, he’s what’s known in urban parlance as a catch. I mentally calculate ways of getting him into my bedroom without seeing that non-PETA friendly chamber of horrors—my shoe rack. I could give up eating meat in a New York minute, but a beautiful pair of leather pumps, of python (God forgive me) high-heel sandals? I’m sorry, but vegans haven’t mastered the stiletto to my satisfaction. Pleather with a three-inch heel is like a piece of nonfat chocolate cake, or your favorite song set to elevator music.

  I start to write Maxwell an e-mail.

  My subject line reads: “Are you an actual crackhead?” Not flattering, but one must hope that he can take a joke. And, in fact, crackheaded is the word that came to mind when I finally got a hold of a picture of Maggie Mae Mischner’s mother—Misty Lee Mischner—who is about two surgical procedures from looking as if she should be a fixture at Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. I even made Ronnie look up Misty Lee Mischner on the Internet, and Ronnie concurred that while there was something in the nose, the deadened Stepford-esque glaze to the eyes and over-toxed forehead canceled out any true resemblance.

  “Read your profile,” I begin, “not sure I’m gorgeous, but am fairly certain that your lenient definition of fox leaves some room for discussion. At the very least, not a hag.”

  Hmm. Not in love with how that reads. Clunky. I know Maxwell has met me before, but I worry that he’ll mentally substitute “hag” for “not quite beautiful.” Modesty, not hagdom, is the desired effect. I call Ronnie to get some advice, but Ronnie is unavailable. I knock on the wall, and Toni materializes five minutes later, wearing her pajamas and thick Buddy Holly glasses.

  “Oh no,” I say. “You’re doing work.”

  “True. You have five minutes.”

  “Okay. I’m sending an e-mail to a man that I saw on the Internet, one that I actually like, and I don’t want to screw it up.”

  “Fine,” she says, pushing her glasses farther up the bridge of her nose. “Do you want feminist, sensible Toni’s advice or the advice of Toni the professional dater who knows how to get you laid?”

  “Please. I’m recently broken up. Do you even have to ask?”

  “All right. But you may never judge me for what you are about to hear.”

  I love it. Un-PC advice is about to be divulged!

  “Okay,” I say. “I want to sort of sound modest and acknowledge the fact that I’m not a model, but I also don’t want him to think that I think I’m a hag. How about ‘not beautiful, but not haggy.’”

  “Are you completely stoned?” Un-PC Toni asks. “Saying ‘not a hag,’ that’s like saying ‘don’t think of elephants.’ Men are visual. Mentally visual. Only emphasize the positive. Men are also highly, highly suggestible.”

  “So I should suggest dinner and potential nakedness?”

  “God, no!” Toni blurts. “You should suggest that you are far too busy for dinner let alone nakedness. Men want what they can’t have.”

  “Oooh, that’s such a cliché!”

  “But like most clichés, it’s also true. I went to college, too, remember? I know what you like to think in the little liberal bubble of academia, but in the real world? Men? Women? Different. You must stroke their egos and bat your eyes. Get used to it—you might even find a boyfriend with a job who treats you like an actual woman.”

  “Zach had a job,” I say. “The same job I had for near on a decade. And you know as well as I do that gender is largely a social construction. That we are what we’re socialized to be. If there are differences between men and women, they’re far more cultural than biological.”

  “And what is your beloved Zach doing now?”

  “Dating a twelve-year-old.”

  Toni gives me an I-rest-my-case smile.

  “Doris, as your un-PC advisor, whom you will never acknowledge that you even met after this evening, let me give you a piece of advice. Do not under ANY CIRCUMSTANCE say that gender is a performance or whatever crap you’re selling at work to a man you’re dating. I’ll bet that twelve-year-old of Zach’s is a major ego-stroker. Repeat this to yourself—I am in the REAL WORLD.”

  Possibly the most frightening part of this conversation is that Toni now sounds far more like a Langsdale local, or Paige Prentiss, than the Atlanta-based woman-of-the-world I know and love.

  “You’re kind of scary like this, Toni.”

  “You have no idea.” Toni smiles. “I didn’t say it was pretty or true, I’m just trying to get your overly analytical little academic arse in the nude condition as quickly as possible. It’s called friendship.”

  I give her a hug, and she leaves to work on her writing. That she used the word friendship makes me happier than just about anything that’s happened to me since I arrived in Atlanta.

  I decide to take Toni’s advice, but instead of writing Maxwell back immediately, I decide to do a reverse search of sorts, and check to see what other women my age—my competition as it were—are looking for in a man. Could it be that my brain has been seriously warped by years of gender theory and dating of the über-politically correct? I know from my conversations with Paige that it’s entirely possible for young women to reject feminism, and not just the name, but the actual ends. If scads of women view marriage as the chance to sit on one’s ass and be cared for, who’s to say that women aren’t devolving, putting Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, not to mention Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi, to shame. It hurts my head to think about it, since women disidentifying with feminism seems to me the equivalent of African-Americans looking at the civil rights movement and deciding that it really didn’t do that much.

  Here is what I learned about single women and Internet dating in general.

  These ladies have gone to Glamour Shots. Seriously. I will be changing my cute and candid picture in the very near future.

  Toni has clearly done her research. Passivity in the female subject is alive and well. It’s not so much the occasional girl who says she “wants a prince,” as the sheer volume of girls who describe themselves as “down to earth,” who want a “nice” man who likes “to treat a woman right.” There are ladies aplenty who announce up front that they’d like to settle down, or they like to party, but very little that reveals a sentient being with unique and independent thoughts. And women, too, love that DaVinci Code, though there’s a healthy smattering of Oprah book-club picks for variety’s sake.

  Overall, the women are pretty much EXACTLY like the men in most respects. Generic and slightly depressing. Testament to the self-Stepfordization of America. I will no doubt be haunted and horrified well past this moment by the woman who “loves the news, but only FOX News.” It’s like thousands of versions of the exact same person looking for the exact same things. Scary. V
ery, very scary.

  And perhaps this goes without saying: it will be a miracle if I meet anyone through this venue.

  Mid-September in Atlanta is still summer. If I ever deigned to visit the gym near my apartment, I have a sneaking suspicion this is how the steam room might feel. In the short time it takes for me to cross the two blocks from the parking garage to my office, I can feel the back of my once-crisp white blouse (button-down with a Peter Pan collar—thank you, Anthropologie sale rack!) plastered against my back, sweat dripping beneath my cropped brown pants. The outfit would be women’s-club conservative, but I’m wearing a no doubt inappropriate pair of red shoes, a half inch too high to be strictly professional, but not so high as to be overtly trampy. At home, I thought the outfit screamed sex and money. Now it simply screams for antiperspirant.

  On the way to teach world literature, I pass Asa in the hall, who is wearing a similarly conservative outfit, but with well-worn, beige leather sandals that scream professional and practical. She gives me the once-over, but withholds comment. This is the single tangible advantage to being the resident poet, from those Byronic blouses to the always-in-season Dickensian white: no one has ever expected those skilled in verse to dress like normal people. I vow to stop by her office later and make a second pass at making friends.

  Making the transition from graduate student to professor is similar to moving from engaged to married. Everything about you is technically the same, but somehow the formalization makes everything different. It’s not that I know more than I did a scant four months before, but my students treat me with respect. No more of that “where’s our real teacher” nonsense that so riddled my experience at Langsdale. In Atlanta, it’s all polite smiles and “okie-dokie, Miss-I-mean-Dr. Weatherall.” I take that back. Aside from Paige Prentiss, it’s all okie-dokie.

  Paige is now in all three of the classes that I’m teaching this semester: advanced poetry writing, American lit and world literature. Initially, she was only in two, but I think she’s become the Lex Luthor-ette to my Super-prof—she hates me, but it’s clearly a fascinated kind of hatred. In poetry writing, she’s a regular shark and on her way to becoming the real deal. She’s what teachers call “gifted.” In possession of a turn of phrase that seems almost beyond her control. Her metaphors are consistently surprising, her critical eye astute, and yet she refuses to write about anything more troubling than an unweeded garden and a slightly untrainable boyfriend. In world lit, she plays dumb. This is almost entirely due to the presence of Jack Moynihan, a generically handsome, deeply mediocre but good-hearted student whom Paige seems desperate to impress. Jack reminds me of the young version of every half-datable man with a profile on the Internet. He all but cries for a women who loves her dog, country, God and man, but not necessarily in that order. And Paige is far more interested in impressing him with her awe-gee-shucks stupidity than she is in stunning me with her smarts.