Confessions of a Dating Fool

CONFESSIONS of a

  DATING FOOL

  Thomas John Dunker

  This book and others by Thomas Dunker are also available in print

  Cover Photo: © frenta / Can Stock Photo, Inc.

  Copyright © 2008 by Thomas John Dunker

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  CHAPTER 1: The Whitney Museum in New York

  CHAPTER 2: The Doll in Vermont

  CHAPTER 3: An Online Date in Scottsdale

  CHAPTER 4: My Last Tango in Paris

  CHAPTER 5: Christmas in Milwaukee

  CHAPTER 6: The Girls from Omaha

  CHAPTER 7: L’Orange Café in Phoenix

  CHAPTER 8: A Sunset in Naples

  CHAPTER 9: A Starry Night in Wisconsin

  CHAPTER 10: Trekking in Nepal

  CHAPTER 11: A Party in Napa Valley

  CHAPTER 12: A Beach in Santorini

  About the Author

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  INTRODUCTION

  Dating is such a trip. It’s certainly one of the main topics in conversation when we’re single, and it often comes into play in discussions with married friends as well. And why not—we are social animals, and socializing is deeply woven into the fabric of our lives.

  The immense diversity in the human genome assures us that every date is an adventure into the limitless world of human emotions. Practice might make perfect, but not in dating, which is an adventure like no other. In part, that’s because it takes us into the world of human feelings, the last great frontier, on this planet anyway. It can make us so happy that we feel like we’re floating on a cloud of bliss, and yet be so heartbreaking we think we’ll never recover. In a way, marriage is the greatest rescue plan of our lives; it takes us out of the dating world. Of course, it creates another kind of adventure, but this book doesn’t go there. This book is simply twelve great stories spun out of my own experience in dating.

  Men and women are so different in their wiring, goals, and expectations as well as emotional and physical needs that anyone would be a fool to bet on the outcome of a date. Oh yes, you might win your bet, but you shouldn’t be surprised if something you never imagined happens. Sometimes the outcome is a good one and sometimes it isn’t, but we all have to deal with whatever happens. Since I’ve been surprised on so many dates, I’m actually more inclined to expect the unexpected. I hope my readers will enjoy my stories.

  Special thanks to my twin sister, Gina Lake, who has heard all of my stories, edited them, and loved me through all my adventures in life.

  T. J. D.

  December, 2008

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  CHAPTER 1

  The Whitney Museum in New York

  Her name was Susan.

  It was Saturday night, early one autumn evening. The city was just starting to come alive. Cabs were everywhere in anticipation of the rush to a million dinners, movies, shows on and off Broadway, parties, galas, fund raisers, and every kind of event that happens in New York City on a Saturday night.

  My friend Kaitlyn talked me into the blind date for a museum party just hours before I would be expected to call on the mystery woman. It was the eleventh hour, and she pleaded with me, “Please do it for me. I swear you’ll like her.” I didn’t do blind dates, which is what everyone says, but I really meant it because it was true. Nonetheless, I said yes after being reminded that I owed Kaitlyn a very big favor for getting me out of a jam I got in for a social faux pas I committed a few weeks ago. I did plenty of those, for sure, but not blind dates.

  Kaitlyn told me very little except that my date’s name was Susan, she was tall, and we’d get along fine. Kaitlyn repeated herself at least three times, without adding any new information. Ordinarily, that would have been a red flag. Information, as everyone knows, is vital in the decision to go or not to go. But I was in a bind. I owed her, and that’s the other thing she repeated at least three times. I caved. It didn’t make any difference to me really because I get along with just about everyone. It was a done deal anyway.

  I had to call Susan. It was the polite thing to do, of course. That, and hearing a person’s voice, can really make a difference for setting the tone and enhancing (or destroying?) the anticipation. I called her an hour or so after Kaitlyn cornered me. Susan sounded nice enough, with kind of a sweet sing-songy voice, maybe with a touch of Texas? Or maybe North Carolina? I get those two accents confused; both share an edge of the Deep South. But with no time to chat, we quickly fixed seven-thirty as the time I’d call her from her lobby, or her doorman would.

  My blind date lived about fourteen blocks from me on the Upper East Side. I walked down from my place on East Eighty-second Street and then east on East Seventy-second Street, bound for a very tall apartment building on the southwest corner at York Avenue. That’s where Susan lived. From there, we’d jump a cab to a friend’s pre-museum cocktail party, also on the Upper East Side, for a warm-up before leaving for the night’s big event: a fund raiser for the Whitney Museum, at the Whitney Museum on Madison at Seventy-fifth. Attire was formal, black tie, but with a color scheme of black and silver.

  I wore a tux and skipped the silver thing after rejecting the first idea that came to me as totally over the top: painting my face silver like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz. So gauche! The thought of looking like that totally nixed any other ideas for accessorizing with silver. Besides, I didn’t have any clothes that were silver, and I certainly didn’t have accessories, not even a silver watch. Let Susan do some silver thing, I told myself; I was taking a pass. Thinking about all the possibilities for the evening, I entered the lobby of her building, greeted indifferently by the doorman, which is standard doorman behavior.

  That breath-holding moment (we all know) before facing the unknown occurred a few minutes past seven-thirty. Susan told the doorman to send me up, and suddenly I was standing in front of her door on the twenty-second floor of her high-rise, feeling the suspense everyone feels in my position—and hers. I buzzed, heard her heels clicking on the hardwood floor as she approached the door, and said a little prayer for a good outcome. The door opened. I blinked and said the only thing that could be said, and I said it loudly, like a cry for help:

  “Wow!” I exclaimed.

  I was face to face with a life-size silver version of the Statue of Liberty. That was my first thought. “I’m going home now” was my second thought. But I stood there, absolutely still and totally speechless, looking at her while she waited for something more than “Wow,” maybe something like, “Hi, you must be Susan. I’m Tom.” She was indeed tall, at least as tall as me—every bit of six feet and probably more. All women over six feet seem taller than me, even though I’m six foot three. I was so used to lowering my gaze to converse with women rather than looking up. We were eye to eye, nose to nose, sharing the same altitude except that her Statue of Liberty crown of silver spikes put another nine inches on her, almost above my sight line and quite close to the door lintel. She was wearing a black gown with a religious collar, probably to minimize coverage of the silver paint, and short, puffy mid-upper arm sleeves. Her face was painted silver—every bit of it. So were her arms. A silver cape flowed over her shoulders, well down her long black dress, with a smaller tail that was almost down to her silver slippers. I did the elevator thing on her with my eyes, and all I could come up with was another, “Wow!” and stupidly, it was just as loud a
s the first one. The seconds ticked by, long, slow seconds. And I’m not someone who’s often at a loss for words.

  She broke the silence of our lost-in-space moment with, “Pretty wild, huh?”

  I had to agree, nodded, and found my voice by mimicking her: “Yeah, pretty wild.”

  I hadn’t made up my mind. Honestly, I didn’t know what to think. Other than the whole statue thing, I didn’t have a clue about what her face looked like, though her hair was chestnut, bobbed enough to expose a long thin silver neck. More silver. I couldn’t see anything that I might want to kiss later, which caused any amorous thoughts to disappear faster than the pop of a party balloon. My thoughts for the evening were heading south, and the best I could hope for was a dead cat bounce.

  She was clearly enthused about my whole look, although she might have been reacting to my height. Tall girls love tall guys. She was bold, that much I could say, and in a split second, I decided to go with it, so I proclaimed:

  “Why not—it’s a party!” I followed up with a friendly introduction. “I’m Tom and you’re Susan!”

  “Nice to meet you, Tom. Please, come in.”

  I stepped into the foyer to help her with her wrap while we worked our way through the initial chatter about Kaitlyn and the party, establishing in my mind a glimmer of hope that we could co-exist and maybe even have some fun along the way.

  I complimented her on her cornering of the silver market, maybe in those exact words, and asked about her “sweet and alluring” accent. I remember saying “sweet and alluring” because those words exactly described her voice, and her accent was exactly that. I was beginning to think she was that way too. I was still guessing Texas or North Carolina, but now leaning on the latter, maybe Georgia. She told me she moved to New York only a month ago from Charlotte (Ah ha, Charlotte!), where she had worked for an interior designer. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do in New York, so evidently she had some money to burn. She looked like she had some money. I confess, she was stylishly silver, in an avant-garde way. I could see some fine antique furniture in her place, although her undecorated apartment, with its stacks of unopened boxes, didn’t reveal much of anything else.

  She was charming, and we conversed as if we had known each other for a while. She was borderline loquacious, which was okay, as I wasn’t really feeling chatty. I could tell she was pleased with her whole look and her ability to have an effect on me. As she talked, the sweetness of the South was pouring out of her, though clearly not out of her pores, not the painted ones anyway. I wondered about that. I think I’d read somewhere that a body can suffocate if entirely coated in paint. Surely her whole body wasn’t painted, though every inch I could see was, indeed, silver. It was captivating, actually, although what she really looked like was a mystery, and I imagined would remain one every minute of the evening ahead of us.

  It didn’t take long before I bought into her whole look as kind of cool. I quickly got over not knowing what she looked like under all that face paint; that would have to wait until another time, IF there was another time. “Bold,” “show-stopping,” and “almost overwhelming,” were all words that described her. That she was at least six feet tall without heels and minus a headdress made for an imposing human being, all accoutrements aside, but with them… I was betting she’d stop every conversation at the pre-party when she walked in. I wasn’t able to guess what would follow, but surely we’d come face to face with pin-drop silence. New York could be a pretty tough place, and mob rule was second nature. I feared that Susan would be a target.

  We waved goodnight to the doorman and his open mouth, and ten minutes later we arrived at the threshold of my friend’s apartment for the warm-up to the gala at the Whitney. We took our first step into his living room, which was standing room only. I spotted Kaitlyn a few people away, to my right, and our eyes locked for a second in anticipation. We both looked at each other instinctively on pause, waiting to see what happened next.

  I won my bet.

  Susan’s entrance created a tsunami of jaw-dropping faces, and with the ensuing silence, the single second of suspense over her reception was palpable. I held my breath for the second time that night. Then, like a Hudson River breeze on a sultry summer night, I heard the same “Wow” I exclaimed at Susan’s door fifteen minutes ago echoing throughout the room, and then a round of spontaneous applause erupted.

  After a flurry of introductions, Susan’s Southern personality got her over all the speed bumps with ease. A cocktail or two later, everyone cabbed to the Whitney to begin mingling with a thousand other people well into the night. I danced with Susan only once, the only time she would, since she was fearful that overheating might cause a run on the silver market. I got it. The one time we danced was a slow one, and she was a very good dancer. The rhythm was right, and we swayed to Michael Carney’s band like two skyscrapers in sync.

  It was a fun evening of black and silver, more fun than I possibly expected, but one that would end, as Susan was ready to go home, passing on the after party that was forming up among my friends. She wanted to get the silver off and call it a night. I hailed a cab, climbed in the back seat with her, and we took off for her building. At her door, I made the usual promise to call tomorrow. I kissed her briefly on the lips, which was the only part of her face that wasn’t silver, thanked her for a fun evening, and said, “Goodnight.” Two minutes later, I caught a cab at the building’s entrance and told the driver to go to Swell’s, the “it” place. He knew where it was.

  It was nearly two in the morning when I walked into Swell’s with an eye out for Kaitlyn, the great organizer, the woman I was no longer indebted to. She was in a big black leather banquette in the back—way back—with her date Chappie, my friend Chase, his girlfriend Dudley, and another couple, Doug and Julia, who shared my Midwestern roots—and not just by having normal names. I walked up, slid into the booth, and we commenced the assessment of the Whitney gala over serious cocktails, much of it about Susan. She did remarkably well and passed with flying colors, at least a silver medal, which seemed like a very funny thing to say at the time. The verdict was in: I should go out with her again, they said, whether I wanted to or not. Of course, I said I wanted to go out with her. I had to go out with her. After all, I wanted to know who was under all that paint!

  Several timeless hours later, I hiked the twenty blocks home with dawn creeping into Manhattan from Queens. I was saturated by the gala evening, the camaraderie of my friends, and too many Kettle One martinis, dirty and up. The walk did me good.

  I’m just thankful the year was the two-hundredth anniversary of the United States. All of New York celebrated the nation’s bicentennial year. The Statue of Liberty—the real one—was the focal point that year. I think that helped the evening turn out as it did. Any other year, Susan would have been toast!

  By the way, I had two dates with her after our blind date. She was good looking under all that silver, but it didn’t go anywhere.

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