The Year of Yes

  He got significant mileage out of the event, spending the next several years reminding me and everyone else of the trauma he’d endured when the mother of his first love had informed him that he was a reincarnated dachshund. Whenever Ira did something bad, out the story would come, as an excuse. He’d roll his sad eyes, and moan: “I can’t help it. I’m a dachshund. A destitute dachshund. I’m supposed to be a lapdog, and instead, I’m a scavenger. You should feel sorry for me.”

  A year after I met him, Ira came to pick me up for the junior prom. By this point, my dad had decided that a pothead dachshund was better than nothing, and he’d pulled Ira aside and informed him that he had his blessing to marry me. Not that marriage was on the table at all. We were talking about desperation: two people who were enough at odds (largely due to me repeatedly refusing to kiss Ira) that Ira had vindictively given me a giant sausage instead of a corsage, and told me to use it to conquer my frigidity. My dad had informed Ira that he should marry me because “no one else will want her.” Obviously, my dad had been mistaken. Plenty of people seemed to want me, or, at least, want part of me. It was just that I was having a hard time wanting them. I was bummed about Baler. He’d been so appealing until he’d brought up his fetish.

  My list of nos was growing. No masochists. No addicts. No one who moaned over NPR. It would have been nice to know what, exactly, I wanted, but at least I knew more every day about what I didn’t. I’d thought things couldn’t get worse after the strip club debacle. Ha! Still more proof that there were more things in heaven and earth, or, in this case, hell, than had hitherto been dreamt of in my philosophy.

  A FEW DAYS LATER, I found myself in the Astor Place Barnes & Noble checkout line, eyeballing the selections of the short, balding guy standing in front of me. I was unimpressed. He had a stack of self-help books, and several generic CDs of Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Bach, played by television network orchestras.

  “What ees the things that you are purchasing?” he asked, reaching uninvited into my arms and plucking out my Patti Smith CD. “Hmmmph,” he commented, in his French accent. “I am not interested in zis thing.”

  I picked up one of his books, a guide to losing weight through Feng Shui. Stop judging him, I thought to myself. Stop it. This was not as easy as it sounded. I had to physically hit myself upside the head, not the most discreet thing to do. He looked at me oddly.

  “That’s fine,” I said politely, having shaken myself into submission. “I’m not interested in your things, either.”

  “I am Jarzhe,” he declared.

  “George?”

  “Yes, Jarzhe.” He grandly pounced forward and kissed me on both cheeks. I’d never gotten used to the European method of greeting. It still seemed to me as though it was more a way to get a cheap feel than to say hello. Maybe it was his fingers fluttering at hip level. He seemed seconds away from a grab.

  Suspicious as I was, as long as a guy didn’t introduce himself by groping me against my will, the yes policy remained in effect, and so I agreed to go to Starbucks with him.

  WHEN JARZHE ASKED me to marry him, an hour or so later, he was on his third 105-degree, nonfat-half-shot of caramel, foam-free latte, and shaking like a leaf. Something bad seemed to happen to foreigners living in America. They’d become poster children for all the worst parts of our society. Jarzhe had loudly and piteously rejected two attempts at his drink of choice, as “scalding to my mouth.” He had also, to my horror, clandestinely nibbled a biscotti and then put it back, saying, “Pffft. That is not biscotti.”

  “I will take you to France to meet my family tomorrow,” Jarzhe said casually. “You will meet my mother tonight. You like escargot, yes?”

  Something went wrong in my brain, and Jarzhe’s question provoked a frightening image of a chic Frenchwoman living as a snail. I could see Jarzhe proffering a silver spoon, in which was the butter-sopped matriarch of his family. Unfortunately, I had no idea how to extract Jarzhe’s mother from her exoskeleton, and this was aside from the fact that I didn’t want to eat her anyway.

  “Oui! S’il vous plaît!” she shouted furiously from her place on my spoon. “Crème brûlée! Kir royale! Louvre! Merde! Madeleines! Café! Merci! Oui! Oui!”

  It was not as though I spoke French. I knew only the names of desserts, drinks, and shit. In the mouth of Jarzhe’s bitch mother, though, these words were plenty. I did not like her, particularly when she used the silk scarf tied around her neck as an impromptu noose to strangle my fingertip.

  I began to use my CD case to pry at her shell.

  “Non! Non! Non! NON!” she said, and I muffled her in my napkin.

  Obviously, this date was not going well.

  We’d been discussing marriage. I’d told him that I wasn’t sure I wanted to get married, ever. He’d poohpoohed this. According to Jarzhe, every woman wanted to get married. Particularly once they hit the old maid age of twenty-one.

  I’d speedily become convinced that Jarzhe was a pathological liar. He’d shown me an Apple ID card, claiming to have worked in high-level management for fifteen years and recently retired, at the age of thirty-five. He was dressed in a costume of “office-casual” clothing: a windbreaker over a sports jacket, a polo shirt, and khakis. There were Mont-blanc pens arranged in his pocket and a Rolex displayed on his furry wrist. I suspected that all this was smoke and mirrors.

  I had ideas about Jarzhe, and they did not include self-made corporate millions. They included filthy rich parents and Jarzhe being raised from birth by a disturbed nanny. Meeting Jarzhe felt similar to the way it might have felt to meet Howard Hughes. It was a disaster waiting to happen, but it was a fascinating disaster.

  “Do you know the film Pretty Woman?” Jarzhe asked. “That film is my existence. Women in this country offer me only beauty. And that is not enough for a person like I am. They offer me beauty and want me to support them financially. They rent me a space beside them! It offends me deeply, to be wanted only for my money. I want a wife who looks up to me! That is what I deserve for myself.”

  I pulled out a notebook. “Would you repeat that?” I asked. Maybe I could use his character for a playwriting assignment.

  He was happy to.

  “We will be married in less than one year, with our first child on the way,” he continued.

  “I can’t marry you, Jarzhe.” I felt that this was an important point.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t know you. Because I don’t love you.”

  “Pfffft. Let me tell you something about yourself: You will. I saw it in my dreams last night. It ees the truth. I have a talent for these things. Let me tell you something about yourself. You are born in April? No? October? No? I am a Libra on the cusp of Scorpio. Scorpios are known for their passion, yes? I have a talent for guessing the names of people. Sometimes I walk into rooms, and I am not giving you the joke, I know the names without asking. I will call you Maaaaawhrie.”

  People often tried to use Marie instead of my name, saying that it was “more elegant” and that I shouldn’t mind being addressed that way. Also Maya. Marian. Mhari. Mary. The occasional telemarketer calling me Murray. Murray? I was relatively resigned, but that didn’t mean it made me happy.

  “That’s not my name,” I said.

  “It was written in my soul.” Jarzhe’s eyes flickered sideways, possibly guiltily, possibly due to excess caffeine.

  I looked down at my notebook. My name was on the cover. About half of everyone I met attempted to sing I just met a girl named Maria when I introduced myself, and the other half made me suffer through “They Call the Wind Mariah.” Who exactly called the wind Mariah? No one I wanted to know. I’d been forced to befriend a bedraggled hippie child named Mariah when I was a kid, and our names were always being mixed together. I’d never really gotten over my egomaniacal fury at being confused with someone else. Particularly someone who believed that dried fruit and carob were “just like candy.”

  “I will fall in love with you now. But first,
I must introduce you to God,” Jarzhe said, banging his empty cup down on the table. His eyes were frighteningly earnest. I’d envisioned my punishment for my teenage attempts to tempt Mormon missionaries as something more along the lines of being forced to hand out pamphlets outside the Pearly Gates for a few millennia. Apparently, I was getting my just reward while still on earth. Month four of my Year of Yes, and I was on a date with a horny zealot.

  Jarzhe opened a small box of chocolate-covered cherries and began eating them swiftly, one after another. Pinkish syrup dribbled from the corner of his mouth. He stood up and flagged a taxi.

  Was he really religious? I couldn’t tell. I’d seen a St. Christopher medal tangled in his chest hair. He’d prayed briefly prior to each cherry. He’d told me he was Catholic, but I was unused to encountering religious people in New York City.

  “We will go uptown to get the blessing of my mother.”

  “Where does your mother live?”

  “Our apartment is on Eighty-fifth Street.”

  Our apartment? He lived with his mother? This was a new one.

  “I’m not sure I want to go with you…”

  “Pffft. You are just young and do not know what is the right thing for you. Let me to lead you.” Jarzhe put his hand on the small of my back, and ushered me into the cab.

  I got in. I couldn’t help myself. The yes was done, I thought, I’d already had coffee with him, but I was too curious to depart. I figured that if things got weird, I could always open the door and jump out at an intersection. Jarzhe turned to me.

  “I have been with two women on three separate occasions, and on one occasion with two women and one man. This is a most interesting story of how this occurred, which I will tell you soon. You look as though you could deep throat ten inches cock. True? Let me tell you something about yourself. You like it most doggie style, and you trim your bush with the scissors. True? Your breasts are average sized with small nipples. You like to have your head massaged when you are sucking the cock.”

  This qualified as weird. I heard the driver snort from the front seat. I moved back as Jarzhe’s tongue approached, pink and wet as a puppy’s. My eyes were, alas, open as he licked my eyeball. I blinked frantically, contact lens displaced, and put my hand on the door.

  “I am French. I need no condiments. I lick the salt from your eyeball,” Jarzhe said, by way of explanation. “You did not like that?”

  I settled uneasily back into my seat. I couldn’t help myself. I wanted to see if the apartment actually existed. A typical problem. Even when I disliked a book before I’d finished the first chapter, I felt compelled to keep reading all the way through. I always thought it would get better. The price wasn’t so high: a little corneal lick now and then. However.

  “I’m not going to sleep with you,” I informed him. “I don’t sleep with strangers.” A lie, unfortunately, but a reasonably plausible one.

  He looked offended.

  “Pffffffffffft!!! I am not wanting the sex. My mother is at home, I told you. We will make love for the first time on the wedding night. I am a Catholic!”

  The cab pulled up in front of a very fancy building on Eighty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue. I imagined Jarzhe’s mother, again, oozing her snail self up to peer nearsightedly out the windows. I imagined the kind of havoc an enormous escargot would wreak on Persian carpets. However, it also occurred to me that it would be kind of nice to carry your bedroom on your back. Instead of my hut, I could curl up into my shell and be spared the noise of New York. During this imagining, Jarzhe somehow got me into the elevator. I vaguely registered the fact that the doorman greeted him by name.

  “Which apartment is yours?”

  “Pfffftt! Zee penthouse, of course, but I own the building,” said Jarzhe, rapid-fire. “I have a house in Provence. It is in the middle of a lavender field. You like that, yes? You are one of the American…how do you say? The Francophiles. Pffft. You know nothing about France. Marcel Proust, yes? Pfffftt-ha! Let me tell you something about yourself. We will have four sons. I will sail around the world in my little boat. You will tend to our children. I will return home from time to time.”

  He paused to swallow his last chocolate-covered cherry whole. Before he could open his mouth again, I interrupted.

  “I don’t think we get along well enough to get married.”

  He pulled a photograph out of his wallet and pointed at it nervously.

  “Steve Jobs has had me to his home as a participant in social events! I am a friend to persons well-known in the world!”

  The photo showed Jarzhe with his arm around someone who looked very much like Apple’s CEO. They were both grinning, and giving the thumbs-up sign in front of a melting ice sculpture. It had the look of a souvenir photo taken in, say, Colonial Williamsburg. Steve Jobs looked like a cardboard cutout, which was, in my opinion, very plausibly what he was. Jarzhe looked rapturous.

  “Now I will introduce you to God,” Jarzhe said.

  SOMEWHERE, THERE WAS a phantom drumroll, as Jarzhe unzipped his fly. I backed myself into the corner, but really, there was no need. If this was God, it was more like one of the lesser gods. Why would a man cede higher power to his penis, anyway? Penises had terrible judgment. They were known for betraying their owners. Wouldn’t Judas be a more appropriate name?

  Jarzhe said, “You will suck on my cock a little bit?”

  When my sister was in high school, she’d gone out with a devout Mormon guy named John. He’d been wracked with guilt over their heavy petting and had confessed his sins to his church, going so far as to drag Molly in for a joint consultation with a panel of church elders on the wickedness of tempting young men. John had then been referred to God, for a serious talk. Upon emerging from his powwow with the Heavenly Father, Molly’s boyfriend had happily explained that, while he was not allowed to do anything that might give her any pleasure, God would look the other way if Molly wanted to give John a blow job. God was a guy himself, John had explained, and so he’d cut him a break.

  Apparently, Jarzhe had a similar deal.

  The elevator doors opened into a gilded foyer, just in time to save me from having to respond. Jarzhe zipped up.

  “We will meet in the powder room after dinner,” he said, patted my rump, and stepped out of the elevator. The apartment door was already swinging open. I glimpsed an unlucky young someone in a maid’s outfit, holding a tray of champagne glasses and smiling a frozen smile, as the elevator doors closed again, me still inside.

  The last thing I heard Jarzhe say, as the elevator descended, was, “I am a millionaiiiiiiiiiirrrrrre! Where are you gooooooooooooooing?”

  As I left Jarzhe’s building, the doorman asked if I’d been crying. I looked at my reflection in the glass door. Jarzhe’s lick had left mascara smeared from eyebrow to chin. I spit on my finger and tried in vain to scrub it off.

  “He makes a lot of women react that way,” the doorman said, handing me a tissue.

  “I wasn’t really going home with him,” I said quickly, embarrassed. I had gone home with him, after all. If he was a pathological liar, I was a pathological story stealer.

  “I’m not judging you,” said the doorman. “I’m just the guy who opens the door.”

  And with that, he opened it, and ushered me out.

  WHEN I GOT HOME, I looked Jarzhe up on the Internet. He was both too good, in terms of finances, and too bad, in terms of personality, to be true. If not family wealth, I expected maybe an escaped lunatic with delusions of grandeur and friendships with doormen in high places. I called Vic into the room.

  “I met an award-winning weirdo today,” I told her.

  “Shocker,” she said. “You always do.”

  I’d thought that I might find a laundry list of psychiatric records for Jarzhe, but instead, I found the unbelievable. A photo and bio of Jarzhe, documenting him as, indeed, an Apple man. And here was his name funding charitable activities for the Catholic Church. And here was a photo of him on a sailboat. He’d been
telling the truth.

  “He doesn’t look that weird,” said Vic.

  “Neither do I,” I said. “Looks can be deceiving.”

  “Actually, you do look weird,” said Vic. I was wearing a spangled gold cocktail dress and it was full daylight. “You need someone who’s a little strange, or it won’t work at all.”

  That hadn’t occurred to me. Maybe the reason weirdos wanted me was that even when I was trying to look normal, they recognized one of their own. There were clearly plenty of men in New York who’d be happy to take me as I was: gnashing my teeth, hitting myself upside the head, and wearing a cocktail dress. Given that I wasn’t sure I could change, this was yet another reason to love New York. I hadn’t found anything spectacular with either Baler or Jarzhe, but I’d learned something. I wanted a man with passion, but I also had some boundaries, no matter how open-minded I was. Greater knowledge, even if it was just greater knowledge of myself, was reason to celebrate.

  I put Tom Waits on the stereo, picked up Big White Cat, and tangoed him around the room. Vic rolled her eyes a little, but she joined us. Maybe she’d forgiven me for my men. At least she was willing to have a good time. It was a triumph to have her happy with me again. The three of us dipped and twirled a while, and then Vic and I went out and gorged on ice cream. We bought Big White some kalamata olives, his addiction. Maybe we were freaks, but we were having a good time anyway.

  Te Amo, Chupa Chupa

  In Which Our Heroine Confronts Her Dirty Laundry…

  A RICHARD GERE LOOK-ALIKE crawled across the floor of the downtown train. It was 11:00 p.m., and I’d been walking all over the boiling hot city for the entire day. My feet were black with grunge unknown, and there Pseudo-Gere was, down on his knees. Somehow, I didn’t think he was about to propose. He trailed his fingers over the arch of my flip-flop-wearing foot, and I looked down at him. He looked up at me. His eyes were green and intelligent. He really didn’t look like the kind of person I suspected he was.