Sleeping With Dogs and Other Lovers Read online

  “Yeah, well, he probably left already,” said Walter, reassembling his suit and tie.

  “Oh god, Walter!, I’m so sorry about that,” said Cynthia, poised to close the door. She hesitated, realizing that even though the poor guy wasn’t a totally innocent bystander, he was mostly a surrogate target for her anger with Max. Because she was breaking it off with Walter anyway, she had no real beef with him. “I’m sorry, Walter. I don’t know what got into me. You didn’t deserve that. You deserve someone so much better than me. This was a mistake and I promise to make it up to you. I know there’s a great woman out there and I will help you find her because that’s what I do best. Please let me do that for you.”

  Walter didn’t say anything, so Cynthia whispered, “Okay, well, I’ll call you,” and shut the door gently. Ahhh. Breathe. What is wrong with me? I really went off on him. But at least it’s over. She smiled, remembering the mixture of joy and terror on his face as the whole thing unfolded. She had never seen human eyes that big.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  Oh, no.

  Knock, knock, knock. “Cynthia?”

  “Walter?”

  Pause. She stared at the closed door.

  “I don’t want you to find me somebody else,” he said. “I want you.”

  Oh my god. Isn’t that the way it always goes? Lopsided love? I remember my first boyfriend in junior high, Donnie McGraine. I adored Donnie. I thought about him day and night. I loved everything about him——his longhair, his sense of humor, the freckles on his nose. Donnie, Donnie, Donnie. I wrote his name in loopy cursive about a million times in my notebooks and almost that many times on my arms and hands like bad tattoos, with hearts dotting the i’s, obviously. I would have gone all the way for that boy——while jumping off a cliff if he asked me to. But Donnie loved Bonita Burns, who, unfortunately for him, was mad about Mikey Jimson, who didn’t give a damn about her, because he was all goofy over me. Meanwhile, Mikey was a total dolt. It was like the domino theory of unrequited love. So unfair. In retrospect, it’s obvious that good old-fashioned matchmaking was the secret ingredient missing from that recipe for disaster.

  “Okay, Walter,” she replied, not really knowing what to say. “Well, anyway, let’s talk soon.” She waited and listened, making sure he did actually move away from the door and down the hallway.

  She padded back to the bedroom, throwing on shorts and a t-shirt. She thought about making lunch, but she’d gotten a little sidetracked today, so it was time to focus. She grabbed the laptop and went to the couch. Tonight was huge——the first major date night. She checked the site, her email, and the phones. She had gotten confirmation from all couples. It was a go project. She felt good about it.

  But Cynthia was incredibly tired all of a sudden. She’d gotten almost no sleep and the day so far had been exhausting. She felt guilty about what she’d done to Walter, even if it did turn out that he actually liked being treated that way. It was no excuse. She certainly hadn’t known he would, so her intent was far from honorable. What had come over her? Rage. Pain. MAX! Her head was swirling with regret and self-reflection.

  Chapter 14

  What was it about me that would lead to a phenomenon like Walter? Or Max for that matter? I’ve had meaningful relationships. Lots of them. Maybe too many. But why didn’t they last? I’ve sometimes been married to my work, but almost everyone is. When I think about matching up other people, I’m able to identify their problems and attack and defeat them. How am I so blind to my own? What is that?

  I’ve seen my share of therapists. They all say I expect too much, that my standards are too high, that I never give guys a chance. Is that true? Think back. Is there a pattern, some recurring behavior? Start at the very beginning——it’s a very good place to start.

  Pre-school

  Okay, this is ridiculous. Who has a “relationship” in pre-school? But in the interest of full disclosure. Tommy somebody pulled down his pants and peed on my finger painting. Was that a relationship? Now that I think of it, maybe it explains a lot. But this is the kind of thing that I’d need a couple of other advanced degrees to decipher. I also remember a boy who lived next door who was older. Maybe five. Damn cradle robber. He and I ran around naked all the time. We lounged in his blow-up pool like west-valley newlyweds in a hot tub. His sister, probably the ripe-old age of seven, played doctor with both of us.

  Kindergarten

  Everything I don’t know I learned in Kindergarten. All I remember boy-wise is Timmy Brink hitting me with a block. And a book. Foreplay? Who knows.

  Grade school

  Danny Harding taught me to write my first dirty word: “shit.” So I wrote it on his leg. This did not go over well. He wrote “poop” on my face. I think that meant we were going steady.

  My father died when I was in the fourth grade. Besides crying for a year and a half, I don’t know for sure how this affected me, but it obviously did. I remember being at the funeral and looking at my friends with their parents and thinking that they would never know pain like I did. They seemed so much younger all of a sudden, like I had shot ahead twenty years in ten minutes. I remember seeing my mother sad … crying all the time. I tried to cheer her up. Sometimes it worked. She became kind of over-protective, understandably, and eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and rebelled (see Junior and Senior High). I remember wanting her to get remarried——I was mad at her for not just doing it——but, then again, I didn’t approve of anyone she dated. I spent a lot of time thinking about matching her up myself. I tried to hook her up with the principal, not knowing that he was already happily married to one of my mom’s bridge partners.

  Junior High

  Donnie McGraine. First big crush. Wild hair, sarcastic, a smart bad boy. Possibly a Max precursor, now that I think of it. Why didn’t he love me back? Where did he go? He moved before we got to high school. He looked nothing like my dad, so I thought I was rebelling against type. I thought I was more enlightened than my mother in that regard … not locked into finding a carbon-copy replacement for him. But in retrospect, maybe Donnie was more like my dad than I thought——tall, dark, smart, funny, and handsome. Maybe that was why it felt so earth shattering, like I was being rejected by my dad? Don’t know if I totally buy it. A little psychobabble-ish.

  High School

  Dan Stenger. The first penis I ever touched. It wasn’t on purpose. It was really more of a wardrobe malfunction between acts of Kiss Me Kate. We were all helping each other on and off with our costumes. It should have been a simple quick-change. It involved yanking off his too-tight Shakespearean tights and his tighty-whiteys coming along with them. I slammed against the brick wall behind me, fell forward, held my hands out to brace myself, landed on top of him, and——bingo——close encounter of the male kind. I had to run back on stage, so I only ogled him for a moment——just long enough to notice the freckle on his penis (wait, a connection I’d never made … Dan and Max both have birthmarks in private places, birthmarks of destiny, what are the odds?)——but it forever changed our dynamic. We never became a couple, mostly because I wasn’t particularly interested in him. At the time, he was kind of a skinny nerd——smart as hell, pimply, Star-Trekky. But we shared a bond from that day forward. I couldn’t look at him, talk to him, or even——four years later——listen to him delivering the valedictorian address, without thinking of his wiener. It was etched in my memory. I found myself daydreaming about it over the years—wondering how much it had grown and if the freckle had too——as he passed through adolescence into manhood. Couldn’t he have sent me annual updates, like photos in Christmas cards or something? I also wondered later, when he got a girlfriend, whether she had touched it yet and, if not, what she would think if she knew I’d beat her to it. He came up to me in a party once when I was home from college, his skin all cleared up, young adulthood suiting him very, very well. We met in line at the bathroom, packed in like sardines in the cramped hallway of the tiny apartment. We ran quickly through the r
equisite small talk and then he came out with it. He said that by all rights, he should be able to touch me back, like it was a slow-motion game of tag or something. He said he’d accept reciprocal contact with privates or, because he was a generous guy, breasts——both, not just one——would also work. Such a gentleman. We laughed, like he was obviously just kidding, but we both knew he wasn’t. I wasn’t insulted or angry, though. In fact, I might have gone for it, but I was there with someone——Jack Winsom, who turned out to be a one-date wonder. Oh, well.

  Wait, I’m getting off topic. Actually, no, I’m probably right on topic. But what does it all mean? I did tell one therapist about that incident and she laughed. So what does that mean?

  Wilson Grubne. Tall, dark and weird. He had a Jeep. That is the only reason I let him feel me up. Well, the main reason.

  Tony Lagoona. Worked in his parents’ Italian restaurant. We would go there and eat eggplant parmigiana sandwiches after school. I got fat, he only got to second base. Lose-lose.

  Tod Harlan. We won the longest kiss at a spin-the bottle party and then he never talked to me again. Hello? WTF?

  Pete Blatt. An artist. Very sensitive. Not very talkative. Cute, but painfully shy. He was deeply in love with me. I’d see him riding past my house on his bicycle at all hours. One day I was doing my homework at the kitchen table and saw him lurking out front. I ran out and busted him. He made some excuse … said he was on his way to somewhere. I dragged him inside. Mom was still at work and we drank some of her liquor. Actually, it was a bottle of Pisco that had been there from before Dad died. He’d gotten it from a client. It was one of those ceramic specialty bottles that looks like an Incan warrior or god or something. I figured it was the one thing she wouldn’t miss, because I was positive she hadn’t touched it once in all those years. We drank every drop——there wasn’t all that much left——and ate a whole bag of Cheetos——in retrospect, way too many Cheetos, especially when you consider that any Cheetos are too many Cheetos. But once you’re halfway, you just keep eating to hide the evidence. We sat on the couch. He knew how to play the guitar and I had one that I’d never really even used. So he started playing and singing to me——I think it was the Springsteen song I’m on Fire——and suddenly we were both kind of on fire. It may have been the Pisco talking. We looked at the clock: Mom would be home in forty minutes or so. We got naked in my room and fooled around a bit. We got pretty silly. I distinctly remember twanging his erection and making a sound like a thumb piano. I think I may have “played” one entire verse of Oh, Suzannah. He had absolutely zero girl experience and, since I had a teeny, tiny bit more boy experience, I remember feeling like a real expert, moving his hands where I wanted them to go. Things were progressing nicely until he came and threw up at the same time. I don’t know what makes Cheetos orange, but it doesn’t come out of sheets. We rolled up the whole mess and took it out to the trash. Mom got back just as we were coming back in through the kitchen. The amazing thing was that somewhere along the line, Pete got hard again and was still hard while we were chatting with my mother. I was just relieved that she didn’t notice.

  Doug Warren. He was really my best guy friend in high school. We kissed once, but it didn’t take. Why not? Maybe a best friend would have been good.

  Stanford

  Frankie McLaughlin. My first live-in boyfriend. The boyfriend part was good——the living-in part sucked. I never really knew that tidiness was even an issue for me until Frankie “Pigpen” McLaughlin took up residency. He was studying creative writing, but his real talent was in creating squalor. He was a genius at that. This, I suppose, relates back to the therapists’ charges of perfectionism on my part——that I’m unrealistic in my expectations. But I don’t think it’s unrealistic to not expect cockroaches in bed. I’m talking about the real insect kind. And to not expect one’s roommate to leave an open box of Ritz Crackers and half of a salami sandwich under the covers.

  Graduate School

  No real boyfriends in here. Truly married to the grindstone. Might as well have had a wedding ceremony with my computer. You would think that Pepperdine would have been a good place to fall in love. Twenty-seven miles of gorgeous Malibu coastline should have been a siren song for young lovers. But aside from a few beer-soaked evenings with Christian surfers at the Malibu Inn, it was all work all the time.

  Workplace

  Paramount Studios, up the marketing food chain … climbing nearly to the top. Several short-term boyfriends in here: David, Bill, Tom, David, David. What’s with all the Davids? Analyze that. Some other short affairs while on the road. Hotel life is conducive to that.

  Bobby Gilbaud. My husband for one year. Why? What happened? He was a director. At that point he’d done one indie feature and a lot of TV. Since, he’s gone pretty major. I was absolutely sure it would last forever. I loved everything about him. He made me laugh, he inspired me, the sex was great, the conversation was great…what was it? Why, after only six months in, did he decide he liked getting blown regularly by his assistant under his desk more than waiting until he got home where he had me and a perfectly good desk? As well as a bed, chairs, couches, and all kinds of furniture to stoke one’s fantasies. She wasn’t even that pretty. Was it the fake boobs? What that it? Really? Those gravity-defying silicone torpedoes had to be hard as hell. Was that really it——that he wanted to be hammered in the face by a couple of ham-hock hooters while getting off?

  But it couldn’t have been just the tits. After I found out, I analyzed the whole thing——asset by asset, piece by piece, quality by quality, body part by body part. Personality … check, brains … check, body … check, sense of humor … check, I beat her out by any measure. What was it? Even on the coarsest possible level, when you come down to the task in question, my lips were way, way, WAY better than hers. I swear I’m being totally objective here. For men is it just an Everest thing … because it’s there? Those thin, skanky lips were just there and had to be utilized? There are some women out that there who one could understand might be irresistible to almost any man. Women who just scream sex … who are simply cock magnets. You can see the effect they have on a roomful of people. It’s an awesome power. Lolita sort of has it. But the under-the-desk girl … I just don’t get it. I could understand if he was away for months on location or something. But the dipshit was working at the Radford lot, about fifteen minutes away. And in the first year of marriage. What does that say about him? What does it say about me?

  I had enough trouble imagining a lasting love after Dad dropped dead way too young. And since my marriage ended I just haven’t felt like it’s worth the risk. I haven’t been all that excited about signing up for something that involves constantly being on the lookout for huge, phony, freakish tits; thin, scuzzy, skanky lips; and a mountain of misery.

  That’s why Max is so appealing. He has never, ever, ever, ever pretended to want to be married and we both know he’s not capable of it. Of course, he did marry someone else and that was hard to watch, but finding out that it had fallen apart made me glad that at least I wasn’t the one who spent all that time and energy trying to convince him to go against his nature, to be something he wasn’t.

  But who was she to be matching people when she couldn’t even match herself? Her head was adrift in a sea of stats and win-loss columns of every boy-girl encounter she’d ever had. She fell asleep.

  However, slumber brought little comfort. She dreamed of hundreds of dissatisfied customers. They were streaming toward her like an angry living river. Fists emerged from the water and shook themselves at her in fury. Suddenly she was in a canoe, a tippy canoe, and she was paddling madly, trying to escape. But she was only paddling on one side, so the boat was going ‘round and ‘round in circles, waters raging over the gunwales, the river itself wailing and moaning about Cynthia Amas’s horrendous dating service.

  Chapter 15

  Cynthia awoke to the sound of screaming sirens. She rushed to the window only to see her normal picture-postcard v
iew of palm trees, tile roofs, the sun going down on paradise. The trouble was probably somewhere below Franklin, but it echoed loudly through the canyon. It was nothing, but it added a sense of urgency to Cynthia’s big night.

  5:47 P.M. Where did the time go? Actually, I know exactly where the time had gone. Oh my god, when I first brought out that feather and ever so gently traced the inside of poor Walter’s thigh——him standing there, trembling, unable to talk or move. It’s terrible, but this was the most fun I’d ever had with him. What does that say about me? Am I a bad person? I mean, who knows—are scrunchies a gateway drug to an entire closetful of full-fledged dominatrix paraphernalia? What the hell was I thinking?

  It was good she slept. She lined up the five multicolored phones on the coffee table. She opened the PDF she’d made with one page per couple——each had a colored dot to match its respective phone——so that she could have their faces and bios at her fingertips in case they called. She scrolled through the couples to refresh her memory:

  Dolores (Lonely in Brentwood) and Robert (rich, retired lawyer-surf-bum); Jade (singer-songwriter-sexbomb) and Dylan (novelist-drummer); Helena (nympho-heiress with horse obsession right out of Equus) and Johnny (underwear model, hung like a horse right out of Equus); Sadie (photographer, woman-in-progress) and Ishmael (internet guru with disdain for clothing); and finally, Lolita and Diego.

  Cynthia loved knowing that five couples—ten intelligent, creative, vibrant, and attractive people—were getting ready to meet each other and it was more or less all her doing. She may have had a bit of a god complex, but so what? The real god wasn’t doing much for these people, romance-wise anyway. She loved being a catalyst for love.