Alyce Miller
        

            Hooper's friend and colleague Myrna who believed in such things actually wrote and placed the ad.  Hooper tried to envision himself as an "attractive prof. SWM, 37,  brn hair and eyes, with lit. and mus. interests" in search of ("ISO") " a woman of any race, ages 20-60  with same."

            "With same what?" he asked.  Myrna shot him a look.

            "Wouldn't it help if I put in more of a physical description?" 

 "No," Myrna snapped, "number one big mistake.  My relationship intercessor says you stick to articulating your interests.  No one is ever what they say they are anyway, so the less you say, the less chance of a letdown for each other when you meet in the flesh."
            Shouldn't I specify tall women?"  

"Absolutely not!" said Myrna, who barely cleared five feet herself.  "You might be excluding someone you really like over a meaningless matter of a few inches.  Keep the applicant pool wide.  Don't eliminate prematurely, especially on superficial bases!"

Hooper gave up protesting.  "You really think these things work?" he wanted to know, as Myrna phoned in the ad.  He still wasn't sure about the 20-60 years old part, since both ends of the age spectrum filled him with a queasy dread.  He didn't want to date his daughter nor did he want to date his mother.

"These things work," Myrna assured him in the evenly-stressed spondee he'd come to associate with her impatience.  "Don't analyze everything."

Hooper had known Myrna since law school, when they both clerked for the same judge.  He'd seen Myrna through two marriages and a long live-in, one pregnancy, and one abortion.  She was generally an even-keeled, no-nonsense sort of person, who ran her life like a business.  After her second divorce, Myrna discovered the personals and became an over-night convert.

"I'm telling you, I keep a log now," she'd crow on Mondays, after what she claimed to be a weekend of revel and romance, "I am meeting so many single guys.  It's like being a kid in a candy store."

"I thought there was a shortage of single, straight men in the Bay Area."  Hooper had put his foot in it now.

"What baloney!" cried Myrna.  "Male myth.  There are single men all over the place, if you know how to look. I'm heading toward my mid-life with a blast.  Dinner Friday night with Hank the plumber, symphony Saturday night with David the dentist, and bowling Sunday with Leon the computer analyst. Next weekend I'm booked up too with a Canadian and a Nigerian."

"But isn't there anyone you like well enough to see more than once?" asked Hooper.

"Sure," said Myrna, "but I'm playing it footloose and fancy-free for a little while until the mantel of despair I've been wearing falls off.  I need some time and space to get over Allen, work out my issues.  So much stuff has come up for me since the divorce." She lowered her voice.  "I've had such low self-esteem."

Of late, Myrna had adopted a whole new lingo, which Hooper found impenetrable at worst and at best too non-specific to be of value.  Myrna's oblique references to the mysterious changes occurring in "this season of her life" made Hooper as uneasy as he'd felt when his old girlfriend Charlotte had tried to explain the benefits of transcendental meditation.

 Myrna now divided the male world into binary opposites.  She had categories for men: "commitaphobics" and "commitaphiles," men with "dependency issues," men with "a fear of intimacy."  She often drew on literary analogies, referring to men as Peter Pan or Captain Hook or Winnie-the-Pooh.  In each of Myrna's vivid date descriptions, which she served up with relish, Hooper began to see himself: a self-pitying Eeyore, an insecure Piglet, the Wolf from Red Riding Hood, the Beast that Beauty loved in spite of everything.  Myrna's discourses, which were patchworks of what she learned at all the relationship seminars she was attending, smacked of thinly-veiled accusations, which Hooper suspected were directed at him as well.   She seemed to be accusing him of something dreadful, though she claimed she was referring to men she met through the newspaper.  Through Myrna's lens, Hooper imagined himself alternately as a frightened man, then a lonely man, a man who loved too much, or worse yet, a man who couldn't love at all, a man with no community, or, conversely, a man with too much community. 

Self-questionnaires began to appear not so mysteriously on his desk.  To appease Myrna, he put himself through a Cosmopolitan relationship test, the Myers-Briggs type indicator test, and a transactional-analysis primer.

"You're so parent," Myrna assessed Hooper.  "So Type A.  I guess it goes along with our profession, the need to control and take charge.  Lighten up a little.  Learn to let the child out. Be vulnerable. Be real."

Hooper started feeling edgy when Myrna would catch him at lunch or in his office alone.  What did she mean by real?

"You really need to try the personals," she insisted. "You've been alone too long, Hooper, it's not healthy.  It's time you found a woman. That is . . . . if you're interested in women. . . . " She gave him a long once-over.

***

A week after the ad was placed, Hooper received his first batch of correspondence, twenty-some letters in all.  Some were short and to the point, some more detailed, hinting at pleasures untold.  Some included snapshots: women on horseback, women waving tennis rackets, women posing seductively under trees, women perched coyly on steps in shorts and halter tops, women with their arms around small, grinning children.  With Myrna's help, Hooper sorted out the "failed chronic daters" from the "brand-new bumper crop."

"No, you cannot date anyone who has white sectional furniture," she said throwing into the reject pile a photo of a leggy bottle blonde, lounging on her sofa.  Hooper lunged for the photo, but Myrna slapped his hand.

It was pointless to protest.

"Look, trust me, I know how to read the sub-texts. And now, another word to the wise: arrange to have coffee first, no dinners, no movies yet," said Myra.  "Set a time limit, half hour max, for the first meeting. Always pay for their coffee.  It's an easy way to look generous.  Stinginess is a major turn-off, even if the woman is making more than you.  You can work all that out later if you click." After Myrna's knowledgeable paring down, Hooper was left with four letters: Barbara,  a legal secretary ("don't assume she's a gold digger, she sounds smart and direct"); Nadia, a journalist and ex-classical violinist, originally from New York ("she's probably gorgeous, and if she writes, it means she can think"); Leslie, a professor of women's studies and Afro-American literature who enjoys world music ("we're talking brains and probably a good political consciousness"); and Maureen, a divorcee with a Master's degree in comparative literature, emphasis on French, and a love of jazz ("she's well-read, Hooper, you're not going to be bored").

Hooper guiltily set aside an hour that he should have devoted to his brief on the collapsing playpen suit in which a small child had been practically strangled by the playpen net, and composed a generic response on his PC.  He used the mail/merge feature to insert the four names in the same carefully worded text.  He had Myrna read over what he had written.  She made several minor changes ("don't say just a half hour, it sounds as if you're apologizing"; "don't say you're passionate about Bach, it sounds so stuffy–I thought you liked blues and jazz, too"; and "don't sign it with 'sincerely,' it's too stiff--just say 'yours,' or something friendly like 'looking forward to seeing you'").

With a combination of trepidation and excitement, Hooper enclosed his business card ("Michael J. Hooper, Personal Injury Attorney"), in each of the envelopes, and mailed the letters himself at a mailbox in Noe Valley. Then he went about his business without thinking too much about the letters.

The first response arrived by telephone three days later, followed by three more the following day.  Hooper followed Myrna's advice not to get involved on the phone. 

The four voices were all pleasant but generic, each of them articulate, polite, upbeat, definitely very female, maybe hopeful. He jotted them in on his calendar. Barbara on Thursday at 6, Leslie at 7:30 (to give a little leeway in case he really liked Barbara), Nadia for lunch on Friday, and Maureen Saturday afternoon at 3 for herb tea (she wasn't "doing caffeine or dairy"), after he'd finished at the gym. 

"So," said Myrna as Hooper packed up his briefcase at 5 on Thursday, "let me know how it goes."

And so it began.  Barbara was pretty and pleasant, but way too young and a little giddy, and Hooper figured quickly she was masking her own disappointment with him in overly-polite responses. She excused herself sweetly after twenty minutes or so, saying she'd forgotten she had an appointment, but thanks so much, it was a real pleasure talking.  That gave Hooper an edge in being on time to the cafe several blocks away to meet Leslie.

Leslie was about his own age, a brilliant brown-skinned black woman with soft eyes like a deer, and Hooper's hope rose immediately. But during the conversation she became overly- intense, which then turned into thinly-veiled depression the way cynical academics can be who spend a great deal of time thinking about how unfair the world is, and eventually she conceded of her own volition to a conflict about dating men of other races, because she'd just broken off from a long-term relationship with an Italian man from Santa Barbara because he "couldn't handle the social pressures."  A lot of her women friends had started dating white men, and things had worked out.  But she had to be honest, she said, it wouldn't be fair to Hooper if she put on a false front. They could never be anything but friends, she said, and then looked as if she might begin weeping. Nadia canceled at the last minute on Friday, without explanation, her tone frantic and abrupt.  And Maureen phoned shortly after to explain that she'd had a successful date with a personals the night before and it looked as if things might work out with someone named Jimmy, so if Hooper didn't mind, she would take a rain check, and if Jimmy  turned out to be a bust, she'd give Hooper a call soon.

On Monday, Hooper arrived at work with another briefcase full of letters.   Heidi, Monica, Ann, Maria, Nancy, Beverly, Veronica, Padma, Lisa, LaShawna, Marjorie, Patti Jean, two more Leslies, a Philippa, and a Louise.

"Treat it like a job," Myrna advised.  "Don't get personally involved. Me? Ditch the Heidi woman -- anyone named Heidi has got to be trouble."

***  

Go to part:  1,  2,  3,  4,  5

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Copyright 2002, Alyce Miller

nidus is an online publication supported by the Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh's English Department.