In Search of …With Lost Loves In Mind
By Bart Webber
In search of… that sure as hell fit Dan
Hawkins’ fix, his inevitable lost love fix that had this time taken him by
surprise, taken him for a spin as well. That terrible fix had a name, Moira
Kiley, whom Dan had had a long, long for him at thirty, relationship with for
three years, three and one half years if you included the six months he had
been in shellshock since she had left. It hadn’t been like he couldn’t have
seen it coming, if he had had his eyes wide open for there were signs and word
fights that came ever closer a few times. And then there was that time about a
year before after they had gotten back from Paris, a freaking week after they
both agreed that they had had a great time there and he had thought they had
turned a corner, had thought about moving on from living together to marriage
and such (that “and such” the question of children which he was ambiguous about
and she was as well although less so).
That week after Paris one night, one
Friday night, a night they called their “wine date” night which they were using
as a way to touch base with each other, time to enjoy each other and be silly
if they liked, silliness not a strong suit between them Moira first lowered the
boom. She had told him that she was dissatisfied with their relationship in no
uncertain terms, that the great time in Paris only made it clear to her that
the episodic good times they had could not make up for all the times in
between. Could not make up for his ill-humored fits of anger at her for no
earthly reason making her afraid to mention anything in the slightest bit
negative for fear of that rage. Could not make up for his usual indifference to
her when he was hopped up on one of his work projects, one of his damn cases,
one of his lawyer things.
That time Moira coolly suggested to him that they go
to couples counselling, something like that or she was leaving, way “going to
find herself,” going find out what she was meant to do in this wicked old world
(Dan’s term not hers) before it was too late (she was about to turn thirty, a
critical age for such decisions as Dan had to acknowledge in his own turning
thirty). Dan, who had grown up in a strongly working-class neighborhood, the
Acre, in Riverdale about thirty miles west of Boston had been no partisan of
what he called, what the guys whom he hung around with there, in college, and
in law school called “New Age touchy-feely stuff” and at first had balked but
after several hours of discussion over that weekend as Moira literarily was
packing her bags he agreed. The funny thing was that once they found a suitable
counsellor, a New Age-type no question, in Cambridge but who was very much into
letting the couples have the floor, work out between themselves what ailed
them, he could see the wisdom of Moira’s suggestion. Could see that his
off-the-wall behaviors and her reactions were the source of their problems.
Naturally he had to “kick and scream” a
bit about this therapy business but after a few sessions he was, using his
term, “all in.” And so it had gone for the better part of a year before the
crash, the lowering of Moira’s boom. Some sessions were good, the ones where
they had to deal with each other’s hurt, hurts started in childhood with Dan
having to prove he was not-bum-of-the-month which his father constantly called him
and she with a father who would shut her up anytime she uttered anything,
anytime. No question not a happy mixture. Some sessions, and this would part of
Moira’s final indictment of him, seemed like a match between two professional
talkers, the counselor and the lawyer, with her on the outside looking in.
Still he, they had held on until their summer vacation for a week up in Maine.
That Maine trip was another great time, a time when they not know for goofiness
had beside the usual beach and dinner out routine gone and played miniature
golf, gone to an old-fashioned drive-in theater and to a bowling alley. Then, a
week after that great time, this week after a great time for Moira to spring
something bad which Dan had thought a lot about the six months she had been
gone, Moira lowered that final boom. After a short indictment of Dan’s
short-comings, after again expressing her desire to find herself, to see what
she was on earth to do she packed her bags that night and told him she was
going to her sister’s house where she would stay until she found a place of her
own. That was the last he had seen or heard from her except a few impersonal
e-mails about forwarding her mail and forwarding her cellphone number to any
friends who might call expecting that she would be found there.
For that six months since Moira had
gone Dan had had time to think things through, think about what made Moira tick
the way she did and how what seemed like a union of soulmates (both had used
that designation when they gave each other holiday and birthday cards and the
like) had turned to ashes with nothing in the end left behind. So he had been
sad, been in a funk, and had worked like seven banshees to try to get her out
of his mind, to move on. Then one day he realized that working twelve hour days
and moping around was not going to either bring her back or allow him to move
on. That six months had been in any case the longest he had been without a
woman, been without some girlfriend, serious or not. Dan was now aching to get
back into “the game” even if he had been sobered up about his own short-comings
and was slightly apprehensive about getting back into a relationship, serious
or not.
Dan was not sure how to go about
finding somebody since he felt that he was too old to go to the bar-hopping
“meat-market” and he did not meet many available, or desirable, women in his
profession so he left his feeling stir for a while. One afternoon he heard a
fellow male lawyer on his cellphone talking to somebody in such a way that it
was a female and that he did not know the woman well. Once the fellow lawyer
saw that Dan had overheard the conversation and knowing of his alone status
mentioned that he had found Susan, the woman that he was talking to in the
phone with whom he had just set up their first date, on a well-known on-line
dating service. Asked Dan why didn’t he try it since they had vaguely talked
about how hard it was to meet interesting women who were in the same profession
as they were. Dan laughed and said no way that he was going to “meet” somebody,
who knows some monster or serial killer, through the Internet. He had always
found a girlfriend the old-fashioned way-meet them and then get their phones
numbers if he was interested and go from there. But that conversation put a bug
in Dan’s ear.
The long and short of it was that a
couple of weeks later he decided to try “just for kicks” this new form of
dating and signed up for the same service he fellow lawyer said he used. At
first he was put off by the idea of paying for a dating service which despite
the “come-on” of a free membership entailed payment if you wanted to get
anywhere (and before he succumbed to payment he was badgered endlessly by the
service about the benefits of membership). What floored him though was the
questions he was supposed to answer to fill out his on-line “profile” (complete
with on-line moniker-he used zackjames12 after his old friend from high school
as a name he would remember easily when he logged into the site. He filled out
some of the formation, left some of it blank, told little white lies about some
stuff (what he was looking for in a woman which really amounted to getting
somebody under the sheets, somebody to have sex with and see what happened after
that but he pull some bullshit about a “meeting of the minds”). And he was
off.
Or Dan thought he was off but as it
turned out he was having trouble connecting with most of the women on-line,
probably because they were not Moira. One night when he was his father’s house
in Riverdale he mentioned that since Moira had left him he had not had a
girlfriend and then told the story about how he joined an on-line dating
service but was not having much success except a few “chats” and a couple of
cellphone calls that turned out to be not worth pursuing. He was down in the
dumps about the situation. Dan’s father, Jethro, had to laugh. Women troubles
would always plague the Hawkins men it seemed. Dan and his father had been
estranged for several years after his father had divorced his mother to run
after some other woman which had not worked out either. Dan had taken his late
mother’s side and that had led to the years of estrangement (and had that
constant belittling of him by Jethro). They had reconciled at his mother’s
funeral and would periodically meet for supper and the elder Hawkins’
house.
Beyond the seemingly endless women
troubles of the Hawkins’ men the reason that Jethro had laughed at Dan was that
he had a few years before joined the very site Dan had joined, or the senior
version of that same site, Seniors Please.
Jethro had always been a lady’s man of sorts, had had several girlfriends after
he had left his wife and his girlfriend he was abandoning her for left him. He
told Dan that over the past few years it was getting harder to meet women in
the flesh. Those he came in contact with now that he was retired were concerned
more about their grandchildren than dating men or else they were too young and
didn’t have a clue about what he was talking about when he mentioned the hell
he had raised in the 1960s. One had threatened to call the cops when he
mentioned that he still like to smoke grass and was glad that a number of
states were allowing recreational purchases. Wished Massachusetts would get on
the stick about it and stop keeping it as some goddam crime. So he was reduced
to going on-line, or that was the way he put it to his son that night.
Jethro told Dan that he had had the
same troubles at first in reconciling the old-fashioned way he had always
previously met women just as Dan had in the days before cellphones, on-line
credit card payments and the Internet. But eventually he got the hang of it.
Realized that all he had to do was write a couple of cogent paragraphs and the women
would jump at the chance to meet him. Well not quite that easy but it seemed
from what the women told him when they “chatted,” on-line, on the phone or the
few he met for a date that most of the guys, older guys remember, who trolled
these sites were loons, guys who thought they were twenty-something and talked
boyish sex talk or about how nice some mature woman would look in a black dress
and high heels. He had learned to avoid the on-line grandmothers whose idea of
being appealing to a man, an older man, was to fill their profile pages with
photographs of each and every grandchild. Had learned to avoid sixty-something
women who had never been married since what the hell would they know about
life. Was lukewarm about women who had children at home but overall he had
taken the position that the rest were worth checking out-and not be too choosey
looking over the on-line “meat market, senior version.” They talked some more
about the do’s and don’t like don’t give a woman your real e-mail address since
one woman still sends him messages about getting together and that was months
before and don’t respond to anybody, woman or man, who asks for money. That
dough will be long gone.
That night Dan when he went back to his
Cambridge apartment he turned on his computer and worked for a few hours
“hitting” on every good-looking woman who did not look like a mass murderer and
who could write a couple of complete paragraphs. But mostly that they did not
look like Moira. Yeah, in search …
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