“What are you saying?” I asked.
Both Aguilera and Quarterly ended therapeutic relations with me. Three months later I received an invitation to the after-ceremony wedding reception of Jool Lanscome and James Silver.
Kara moved back to Minnesota to her pseudo-Scandinavian roots.
When Bob Brandt cut my editing down to three online publications, I moved into a rooming house in Staten Island and started an online publication of my own, called Broken Hearts Monthly, which has been wildly successful. It started out as a blog telling my own stupid story. But I got so many responses that, with Bob’s help, I organized a virtual publication that presents confessionals, artwork, poems, short stories, and also a dating service.
I work so hard at the magazine that I have little time for any kind of social life. But I’ve been slowly thinking of getting back into therapy. Nowadays I’ve become so popular that I’m often invited as an expert on love and relationships. The anxiety this notoriety produces is sublime and, at the same time, almost unbearable.
Cut, Cut, Cut
1.
“There’s a marked difference between brain functions, knowledge, and mental potentials,” Martin Hull said to Marilee Frith-DeGeorgio at Mike’s Steaks on Forty-Seventh Street just east of Grand Central Station. The time was 6:46 p.m. on a clear and bright Tuesday in late May.
This was their first meeting—a blind date, inasmuch as they’d met through the online dating service People for People, provided by one of the few surviving alternative lifestyle magazines from California’s Bay Area, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
The questionnaire provided for subscribers to TRWNBT’s People for People allowed participants to enter gender identity and preference, intellectual endeavors, personal ambitions, and accomplishments in life. The survey did not ask for race, age, income bracket, religious orientation, or physical proportions. One could fudge a few of the banned subjects by surreptitiously including them in the essay-like answers to the questions provided.
Marilee, for instance, had typed in that her most profound political ambition was to one day computerize the voting process in America based on the positive concept of what people wanted and not what they did not want or were afraid of. She added (parenthetically) that she had no patience for people who harbored antidemocratic thoughts.
“In my ideal system,” she told Martin that evening, “people would be voting for what they had in common, not what they hated or feared about each other.”
Martin considered it his greatest personal accomplishment that he had run a half marathon every other week for one year, four years earlier. He did not, could not, mention that he was a dark brown man, descendant of a long line of slaves and sharecroppers from the Mississippi Delta. Marilee was surprised that a black man had filled out the People for People form she’d read. But she decided to go through with the date because of the caveat clause in the PFP e-contract.
PFP was the go-between for first dates and electronically queried the participants within a week of the rendezvous. If it was reported that either party had not shown up, or left before the date actually started, a mark was put in the offender’s file. If any member of PFP got three such marks, he or she was deleted from the service.
The week before, Marilee had been scheduled to meet a man named Joseph Exeter. Joe was a portly man, and Marilee quite small in comparison. Joe’s breathing was loud, and from time to time, a not very pleasant odor wafted from his side of the table at the Midtown sushi bar. When their second drink had not dimmed her olfactory awareness of Exeter, Marilee excused herself to go to the restroom and never returned.
So she would have to sit through this date, because PFP was the best dating service that she’d encountered since her divorce from Paris DeGeorgio, a latent conservative and an outright thief.
Martin Hull was the opposite of both Marilee’s last date and first husband. He was two inches shorter and maybe five pounds lighter than Marilee, who was five seven and 135 pounds. She worked out every day for an hour and a half, so her few extra pounds looked good in the step-class mirror.
“But I thought you were a plastic surgeon,” she said, in response to his pontificating on the contrasting qualities of the human brain.
“That’s my day job,” he said with a smile. His grin, Marilee thought, was both goofy and sincere. “But the neurological sciences are my passion.”
“Why didn’t you become a brain surgeon then?”
“That would be like an abstract artist becoming a house painter.”
“Really?” Marilee said. “I thought that that kind of surgery was the very top of the field.”
“Not really,” Martin said, crinkling his nose and exposing the gap between upper his teeth. “Surgeons all specialize. Cut, cut, cut—that’s their whole life. That’s the way they get so proficient. They do the same procedures day in and day out—thousands of them; might as well be working on a production line.”
“At five million dollars a year,” Marilee added.
“Yeah, I guess. But, you know, I’d need a lot more money than that if I had to do the same thing every day for the rest of my life.”
“Except for sex, food, and good music,” Marilee said. Martin’s size and goofy demeanor gave her the courage to say what was on her mind.
He smiled, half-nodded, and looked down, saying, “I meant one’s working life.”
Marilee felt a twitch in her chest and wondered what kind of sex partner a small, shy man like this might be.
“So you said that you’re divorced,” Martin prompted.
“Paris DeGeorgio,” she replied, nodding out every other syllable.
“Sounds like a good name for a clothes designer.”
“That wasn’t his birth name. He was born Anastazy Kozubal.”
“Polish, huh?”
“You knew that? Everyone else ends up asking me where the name comes from. The first guess is almost always Russia.”
“That’s because of Anastazy,” Martin said. “Makes it sound like a tsarina. I like to study those parts of language that make humanity a culture as well as a species. The brain, you know.”
“I had a business selling Mexican wheat to various South and Central American nations,” Marilee said.
“Mexican wheat?”
“There are some large farms in the southern highlands. I organized them over the Internet and made a two-percent profit. It was going pretty good, until one day I found out that Paris was skimming my profits and donating to this group called the New Redeemers . . .”
“California archconservatives, right?” Martin asked.