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Mead was handsome, fit my age range, was the correct height, had a full head of hair. And, as added bonus, he was a heart surgeon. When I first spoke to Mead over the phone I took his hogging the conversation as nerves. Even when I tried to cut him off in the middle of his dissertation on the comparison between the valves of the heart and the underground piping system of the city of Boston from where he was conceived I found myself in the uncharacteristic position of having to raise my voice. Something, which I abhorred in other people. Briefly he stopped, perhaps from shock, to listen to me. “I myself was conceived in an elevator,” I said. It was not true, of course, but my past was so nebulous that I might as well have invented it. The word elevator lit up an idea in Mead’s sizzling brain. “Once,” he said, “I sat on a plane next to an elevator constructor.” For the next ten minutes, I was forced to listen to his insipid ramblings about the layout of cylinders, electrical connections, counterweights and guide rails none of which held the slightest interest for me. As Mead sunk deeper and deeper into his little theatrical world I disconnected. Logically, I should simply have told Mead that I didn’t think they we were a match but logic seemed to have slipped somewhere in the dark, unattainable folds of my brain and instead I concentrated on what the fortune teller had said at my mother’s funeral: You will marry a doctor. With the perception of the wisdom of a worm I foolishly agreed to meet Mead at a bookstore where, should he become chatty, I could roam around pretending to listen to him. Our first meeting was surprisingly pleasant enough for me to agree on another date with him. A second date led to a third and then a fourth until we were seeing each other on a regular basis. I no longer minded that he talked so much for, if we were driving, I could relax and admire the scenery passing by and not feel that I had to respond to his monologues except for the occasional hmm or how interesting… strategies which I had come to understand made men perceive me as a remarkable conversationalist. “He’s really not my type,” I told my best friend, Patty.“Your type,” Patty told me, “is a man who is self absorbed, dishonest, and boastful, uses you for sex and mistreats you.”As usual, I ignored her. Patty was always reading these articles on relationships and because of that felt she qualified as my private therapist, analyzing my behavior based on having read an article or two in Cosmopolitan. “What I mean is that I like men who are affectionate,” I said. I immediately regretted admitting this to Patty for she took this as her cue to remind me of the relationship between my neediness and the lack of affection I had received as a child. What I want,” I said, interrupting her pseudo therapy session, “is a man who puts his arm around my shoulder or tells me or kisses me with passion. I’ve been on six dates with Mead and the most I’ve got from him is three pecks on the cheek. Like the French he tells me. I don’t even know if his pecks are meant for my cheeks or in the air, I can’t say for sure.”But there were other red flags. He had this annoying habit of quoting prices of things he bought. His iPad and iPhone. Cheeses and bottles of olive oil. Cleaning products for the bathroom and kitchen. Vacuum cleaner bags, candles, coupons for car washes, shoes, blankets. Armani towels. Fifteen dollars. On sale. When he showed me his basement which was warehouse packed with so much stuff I didn’t dare comment on anything for fear that I might find myself having to listen to his rambling off on prices like an auctioneer. In his den, off his bedroom, he showed off his new Apple TV. Ninty nine dollars. No tax. Bought in New Hamphsire. He showed me what it could do and turned it on to A Curb Your Enthusiasm video. The title of the video must have inspired Mead for he began to remove his socks and then his pants until he was standing in front of me in only his underwear and a t-shirt and said, “It’s been long enough. I think we should have sex.”Of course it was weird. Even I know that. But I was in this vulnerable stage in my life and felt that the affection would do me good. He kissed me in a manner that made me think he might be afraid to contact a disease, his mouth sewn tight as if they’d been frozen with fear or horror. Sex was arduous. When Mead tried going inside me he became limp as a rag. “This has never happened before,” he told me. “I’m usually not like this at all.”If this was meant to console me, he had failed terrible. Then, to make matters worse he rambled off how he needed to bond with someone before he could feel comfortable.“Hello! Why didn’t you think of that before pressing me to have sex?” I asked.I didn’t hear from him for an entire week. When he finally did call, on a Sunday afternoon, he gave as excuse that he thought that I wanted to spend the weekend with my girlfriends. I don’t know what had given him that idea for, besides the women in the Dating Club, I had never mentioned to him any of my girlfriends. Not even Patty. He had this bad habit of assuming my behavior although I wondered if he didn’t use his assumptions as manipulations. “I was happy for you to be out and enjoying yourself,” he’d said. “I could have been out with a guy,” I said. “You would be happy then?”“Not happy for myself but for you yes.”What kind of idiot would be happy for his girlfriend to be dating another guy? “Anyway,” Mead said in his defense, “You could have called. We’re not in the middle ages.”“We are,” I said. “Both you and I are middle aged. I just like the man to make the moves. It makes me feel special.”After that, things kind of dragged on between us and so I didn’t mind when he didn’t ask me to accompany him to Boston on a medical conference he was attending. “I’ll call you next Saturday when I get back from the conference.”In his fourth day away I received an e-mail from him. Sunshine and warm. Beautiful flowers. He then signed it M. I was insulted. It was nothing but a bloody weather report. “Maybe he’s seeing someone else,” Patty said. “Or maybe he just wants to have sex with no strings attached.” We were on our weekly bike run along the canal. “Whatever it is he wants,” I said, “I am no longer willing to hand it to him without there being something for me. There was a short period where I thought that I could fall in love with him. But I got tired and frustrated and discouraged from reaching out to empty arms.” “You know what they say? People?we attract reflect what's inside us.” There was Patty again carelessly quoting frivolous slogans from self help books. “I prefer to believe that I was attracted to his qualities - a reflection of my own,” I retorted. “He’s just self-centered. So what if he’s a doctor? All he is is a heart surgeon without a heart,” Patty said. The following day was Saturday. I was expecting a call from Mead, for hadn’t he told me he’d call me when he retuned from his conference? As the day wore on and my phone had not rung once I began to be losing patience with Mead. Not only patience but also attraction. At first I was giving him all sorts of excuses: He needed to unpack. He was tired from his flight. But I knew that I was only fooling myself. Had the situation been reversed I would have given Mead a call as soon as I got in, bags still packed. Hell, I would have called while still in the plane getting ready to disembark. By eight o’clock on Sunday Mead still hadn’t called. By now whatever leftover desire I had for Mead had disintegrated and for my own sense of respect I had no intention of taking up where we had left off – which I wasn’t even certain where that was. “I’m not that desperate,” I told Patty over the phone. “I just think that people should be made accountable for their actions or absence of them.”After I hung up with Patty I punched in Mead’s number. “Are you alright?” I asked, my voice tingling with artificial panic. It must have disoriented him for he said in a wobbly voice, “Yes, why?”“I wondered if maybe something had happened to you. You told me you’d call me on Saturday and when I didn’t hear from you I started to get worried. Maybe you’d been in an accident.”“I didn’t think you wanted to hear from me.”“Whatever gave you that idea?”“You never answered the e-mail I sent you.”“The weather report e-mail? Honestly Mead did you really expect an answer from such a cold, impersonal e-mail?”“What was wrong with it?”“There was no heart in it,” I was pleased to have thought of the heart reference. “It was absent of any warmth. As if you were writing out of obligation. It made me angry and so I chose not to respond in a state of anger. It’s always better to do that, don’t you think?”I waited for his answer and when he didn’t say anything I went on informing him how I’d been sick for three days with a very sore throat, tired, exhausted really and a terrible, terrible headache. “But I have good news,” I said full of exaggerated excitement. “I’ve got one of my stories accepted.”I paused for dramatic effect. He’d shown as much interest in my work or my life, for that matter, as he would in a bowl of dog food. I was wise enough to know that it was hopeless to expect him to change. Men set in their self serving swaggering ways seldom do. But that wasn’t my objective. My goal was to not give him space to ramble on with his incessant and exceedingly boring monologues. I’d had it being his private audience. It was always possible to accept the faults of a man if he treated you with tenderness and showed you affection; very impossible when he gave you the feeling he didn’t care for you.“Did you miss me, Mead?” I asked him and imagined him squirming in his Ralph Lauren pajamas. Thirty-eight dollars. No tax. I was aware that the answer to such a blatant question might hurt me. But I had already got over him the weekend he had assumed I’d wanted to be with my girlfriends and hadn’t called me. My grief over him was all packed and done and ready to go.He said something about how he missed me not being in Florida to go to the restaurants with him. “Eating meals alone is pretty depressing.” There were dozens of responses I could have given to his adding- insult- to- injury answer but none that measured up to his lack of insight. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I missed you?”How frightening it was to know that someone whose emotions were so closed had the authority to work on your heart. “You know what I miss?” I said before he had a chance to answer. “I miss the romance with a man. I miss getting an e-mail from a man when he’s away on business or at some conference and he tells me how much he misses me, how he wishes I were there with him. I miss being cherished by a man and having a man come back from a week away from me and call me as soon as he gets in because he’s so eager to talk to me and can hardly wait to see me. That’s what I miss. That’s the only kind of relationship I’m willing to settle on. And I’ll tell you what I don’t miss. I don’t miss your lack of affection and your coldness towards me. I don’t miss how the way you are with me makes me feel undesired, unattractive and diminished. Nor do I miss your horrendous, unfeeling weather report e-mails.”I was about to ask him if he was always like this with other women but preferred to believe that he was simply incapable of affection. “Each time I date a new man,” I said “I always hope he won’t end up as another neurotic case study. I’m always hoping that finally I’ll meet the man that will treat me the way I want to be treated. A man who is kind and gentle with me and has enough integrity to accept his responsibilities and not dump his shortcomings on me.”“I didn’t do that?” he said. “Of course you did. If you have issues with affection then don’t try to make me responsible for them.” You’re not the kind of man I’m looking for,” I told him. “We’re not on the same page. I know this may sound pompous of me and surely you are intimately familiar with pompousness but I find that I’m more evolved than you are, if you may allow me to say so.” “What do you mean by that?“Oh, just that I don’t try to dump my shit on someone else’s backyard. I guess I expect certain etiquette in dating and sleeping with a man. One of them is that the man will call or leave me a message on my e-mail telling me something sweet. Anyway, I don’t call up men who make me feel bad about myself. Remember what I put on my profile. That integrity was the most important quality I’m looking for in another person. That without it everything else doesn’t matter?”He didn’t remember. His own lack of integrity had likely prevented him from registering this in his mind filled with so much ego. You only see what you want to see. Or maybe he believed himself to be a man of integrity. I had met plenty of men who didn’t really know themselves but thought they did. Two weeks passed and I hadn’t heard from Mead. Not that I expected to. I still missed him sometimes and wondered if perhaps I’d reacted too harshly, throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Maybe we could try again. Was it loneliness that made me want to call him? An inner voice commanded me not to, telling me that was a horrible reason to be with someone. If anything, at least I was getting better at discerning which inner voice to listen to. I went about my morning and afternoon trying not to think of Mead. I felt like an anorexic that kept longing for food all day long and knew that my appetite was for something much deeper. Love was what I was seeking, to give and to take. I wondered what made him change his mind. There was a time when he wrote me long e-mails and although they were far from being Byronique they had hints, tiny pockets of affection in them. And there was a time also when he would want to know when we’d see each other again. He would call and say, you fancy getting together tonight? But all that changed so quickly. So I called him and asked to see him. I wanted to know the answer to that impossible question. We walked along the lake that was beginning to thaw and the anticipation of spring around the corner filled me with hope and courage. I’d always hated the lame excuse of being too busy. It took no more than two minutes to pick up the phone, dial the person’s number, tell the person that you’re really busy but will get back to them later. Less time if you left a message on their voice mail or texted them. As we approached the parking lot the wind had picked up and I tightened the scarf around my neck. “I guess I can’t put the entire blame on you. I myself ignored some of the red flags telling myself that nobody’s perfect. But there were, weren’t there? Just the fact that you never showed any affection towards me. Only pecks on the cheek. Like the French, you said.”He said, “Your youthful body didn’t correspond to your face.”How does a woman respond to someone telling her that she’d too old? For days after, I began to think of what I should have said. It is often like that, isn’t it? That as human beings, except for the quick witted ones, we find ourselves regressing when faced with some unpleasantness about our person. At least it is for me. And it is only after I churned over it that I came up with an adequate response. What I should have said was that he’d had plenty of time to look at my face before getting involved with me. It was then that the notion that my heart opened to myself that I finally understood that it belonged to me. Up until now, I’d been giving it away. I went into my bathroom and took a long look at myself in the mirror. What had Mead seen? Was it the slight sag in my chin that might have warned him of more serious sags down the line? Or the lines under my eyes that had increased in number and depth since the last time I’d examined them. He was no Adonis. In fact, when I first saw his naked body the Humpty Dumpty imaged poured into my mind. The truth was that Mead wanted a younger woman and there was nothing I could do about that. There were no artificial treatments, no surgeries, no magic creams for that kind of relationship. ................
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