Dating Without Novocaine

“Because dentists deserve punishment. They’re evil people.”

Louise put her hand on my knee and gave me her mock therapist look. “I’m sensing a deep childhood trauma, Hannah. You’re safe here. You can talk about it.”

“The memories, I only see flashes of them, a man in a white coat, the whine of a drill—no! No!”

Louise turned to Scott. “She’s repressed the memories. We’ll have to try hypnosis. This woman has been deeply scarred. Your presence obviously brings up painful feelings for her.”

Scott was about to respond when Cassie swept in, bringing a wave of patchouli and sandalwood with her that temporarily overwhelmed the chili pepper odors of the restaurant. “Sorry I’m late! Practice ran later than expected.” Cassie belonged to a semi-professional belly dance troupe, and her first public performance was coming up in a few weeks.

Louise waved her hand in a gesture to say it didn’t matter. “Our table isn’t ready yet anyway.”

The teenage hostess called Louise’s name just then, and we followed her swaying, tiered gathers of orange skirt with pink bric-a-brac into the dining area, Scott and me falling behind Cassie and Louise.

“Did I tell you about the Japanese exchange student I saw last week, the one who hadn’t been to a dentist in over ten years?” Scott asked. “One of his molars had cracked, and the nerve was exposed. I had to—”

“Stop it! Stop it!” I cried, putting my hands over my ears. Hearing about dental disasters was even worse to me than listening to stories about someone getting their eye poked out. This, however, was Scott’s usual revenge for my dentist jokes: his most revolting cases recounted in excruciating detail for my torture. I don’t think he knew how very real my fear of dentists was, under all the joking.

And it wasn’t that anything truly horrible had ever happened while I was under the gas and drill: no wrong tooth accidentally removed, no hygienist slipping with her little metal scraper and gouging my gums, no near-choking experience with those tooth trays of drool-producing fluoride I got as a kid.

It was instead a lifetime’s worth of anxious dread, of the taste of topical anaesthetic before the needleful of novocaine went in, of spitting out small chunks of tooth after the drilling was finished and the filling put in.

I hated going to the dentist, I hated dentists on general principle, and since I had no insurance I was enjoying the relatively guilt-free thought that I couldn’t afford to go to one for quite a long while.

We gave our orders and settled down to a fresh basket of chips, two types of salsa and kidney-straining quantities of diet soda. Except, that is, for Scott, who rode his bike about forty miles every other day and didn’t have to worry about the dimensions of his derriere. He eschewed diet soda for a Dos Equis.

“I can’t believe I’m going to have a normal life,” Louise said, her straw making loud suction sounds at the bottom of her ice-filled glass. Scott flagged down a passing busboy, who took away Louise’s empty glass for replacement. “My life will no longer revolve around sleep! I can go out in the evenings, I can see the sun on weekends. I’ve already taken the blankets down off my windows.”

“You’re like a plant, ready to grow,” Cassie said. “You’ve been in the dark too long, getting yellow.”

“Exactly!” Louise said. She held out her pale, freckled forearm for us all to see. “This is not the color of a healthy human being.”

“Now you won’t have an excuse not to start dating,” I said.

Louise made a duck face with her lips, her eyes narrowing. “I’m sure I could think of one.”

“How long has it been since you broke up with that guy who worked at Intel?” I asked.

“I wouldn’t call it ‘breaking up.’ We only went out a few times. That doesn’t constitute a relationship.”

“But how long ago was it?” I persisted.

“Three months, give or take, and I’m in no hurry to repeat the experience. I just don’t do well with technical men—I think it’s a basic personality conflict. They’re all Sensing-Thinking types, and I’m an Intuitive-Feeler, like Cass. But of course the only available guys work in computers. Why is that?”

“It’s a major industry in the region,” Scott said, “so of course there are lots of guys around who work in computers.” We all gave him dirty looks. Sometimes he failed to catch the true substance of a discussion.

“No, I think it’s because they’re the only ones left who are single,” Louise said. “And there’s a reason for that, in terms of their emotional development—or lack thereof. They’re all geeks, who’ve put all their efforts to learning about things instead of people.”

“Geeks have their advantages,” I said. “They usually have good jobs, and they treat you well, they’re so glad to have you.”

“Have you ever dated one?” Scott asked.

“Well, no.”

“I didn’t think so. They don’t seem to be your type,” he said.

“What is my type?”

“I don’t know. Someone edgier.” He widened his eyes. “Dangerous.”

I snickered. “Yeah, right. The muscle-bound sort, with long hair and tattoos. Motorcyclists who ride without helmets. Bad boys, the type who group together to rent a house in northeast Portland and wouldn’t know a lawn mower if it ran over their foot. Probably don’t vote, either. That’s the type for me!”

“Hannah, dear,” Louise said, “I don’t know a single woman who finds a man who avoids yardwork attractive.”

“And long hair is only nice in fantasies,” I said. “In real life, it’s the sign of a guy who has to sell his motorcycle to find money for this month’s rent.”

“I like guys with long hair,” Cassie said. “They don’t have to be losers—I know several emotionally aware ones in my yoga class, one of whom teaches English at Portland State. I think long hair’s sexy.”

I looked at Scott, trying to imagine him with long hair, the heavy mass of it pulled back in a ponytail while he walked around his office in blue-green scrubs. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant picture, but it was pretty funny.

He caught me looking at him, and saw the smirk on my face. “What?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

Our food came, platters of fajita fillings sizzling and steaming in dramatic fashion. For a few minutes all thoughts were turned to tortillas and sour cream, as we filled and rolled. With my first bite I felt fajita juice drip out the bottom and run over my hand.

“I don’t know why I should be the only one pestered to start dating,” Louise said after we’d all downed the first crucial mouthfuls. “Not a one of you is doing so yourself. You’re projecting onto me.”

“I’m trying to date,” I said. “God knows I’m trying. I just can’t seem to find anyone suitable.”

“Her sex chakra is blocked up,” Cassie said.

“What?” Scott asked, his pristine, undripping fajita halted halfway to his mouth.

“My sex chakra,” I said, and leaning back pointed to the area just below my navel. “Cass was trying to help me free my sexual energy by taking me to a belly dance class.”

“Men can sense when the Divine Feminine has been awakened in a woman,” Cassie said.

“They can?” Scott asked.

“Maybe that’s what I need to do,” Louise said, to no one in particular.

“If you’re not seeing anyone,” Cassie said to Scott, “your own sex chakra might have a blockage.”

“I’m not going to try belly dancing,” he said.

“I don’t know the proper moves for men, anyway,” Cassie said. “The energies are different. Drinking a lot of fluids is supposed to help, though, for both men and women. It flushes you out.”

Apparently water was not only good for conventional constipation, but emotional, as well. I refrained from making note of it out loud, considering we were eating. I saw Scott’s lips twitch. Our eyes met briefly, and I knew he was thinking the same thing.

“Where are we supposed to meet people these days, anyway?” Louise asked. “I don’t want to go to a bar, much less date someone who hangs out in one looking for women. Going through parents or friends is supposed to be what all the ‘experts’ advise, but my parents don’t know anyone of the right age—I’ve asked. All they can come up with is someone’s twenty-five-year-old, ultra-Christian son. And you all are no help. If you did find a single guy, you’d go for him yourselves.”

“I wouldn’t,” Scott said.

“You were supposed to find me a nice dentist. Where is he?” Louise asked.

“They’re all married,” he said. “And besides, they’re not your type. You need someone who’d be willing to talk all night about Jungian dream analysis, not some guy who’d rather be out boating on the river, cruising by Sauvie’s Island to spy on the nude sunbathers.”

“Is that what dentists do on their days off?” I asked.

“Only when they’re not polishing their Porsches or hanging out at The Sharper Image.”

We were quiet for a moment, each of us stewing over the perpetual adolescence of men, while Scott wrapped up another fajita.

“This really can’t be as hopeless as it all seems,” I finally said. “Even if there is only one man in a million who would be right for each of us, there’s what, two million people in the greater Portland area? So one million men, which means one guy who would be perfect. For each of us. And one woman for you, Scott. They’re out there—we just have to find them.”

“You can’t force these things,” Cassie said. “The universe—”

“I don’t want to wait for the universe to take care of it. I’m going to be thirty years old on September sixth—that’s four months away. I want to be engaged by then,” I said, resolved on the issue, all my angst of the other night suddenly crystallizing on this one point. It was as if making a declaration would take away all the uncertainty, all the worry about what my future would be. Nothing had changed, but it gave me a sense of control, however spurious. “I don’t want to turn thirty and still not know who I’m going to marry.”

“Hannah,” Louise said in a concerned, counselor tone, “getting married just because you think you’re the age that you should is setting yourself up for disaster.”

“Well, I’m not going to just grab some poor fool off the street. If I was willing to marry anyone there wouldn’t be a problem. No, I’m going to find Mr. Right—the one-in-a-million Mr. Right who is within a twenty-mile radius of us as we speak. Then it won’t be a mistake at all.”

“Why the big concern about turning thirty?” Scott asked.

We all looked at him. Again, his maleness was showing.

“I mean, I had a big bash when I turned thirty. It was great—you know, you were there. Yeah, I felt a little old, but I certainly wasn’t worried about getting married.”

“Tick, tick, tick,” I said.

He looked blank.

“The biological clock,” I said. “It’s ticking. You can have kids until the Viagra gives out, but we’ve got deadlines to meet.”

“Women are having children well into their forties—”

“I don’t think any of us wants to be eligible for social security when our kids graduate from high school,” I said. “I don’t want to worry that my husband is going to die of a heart attack while playing basketball with my son. I don’t want people to assume I’m my daughter’s grandmother. I’ve got an independent career, I make my own hours and my own money, now I want a husband and to start a family. It’s time, whether the universe thinks so or not, and I’m going to do something about it.”

“Jeez, Hannah, you sound like you’re about to start a military campaign,” Scott said.

“That’s no way to find love,” Cassie said.

“She’s right,” Louise said. “I don’t know about the universe knowing when the time is right, but guys can sense it when you’re desperate, and they run. Right, Scott?”

“You might as well have a trio of redneck brothers standing behind you with shotguns.”

“I’m not desperate,” I said. “I’m organizing. The universe helps those who help themselves. I can’t expect the guy to just turn up on my doorstep one day, can I? Don’t you all want to find your soul mates?”

A silence descended around the table, a pocket of quiet amid the voices and dish-clattering of the restaurant.

“Well, yeah, I want to find him,” Louise finally said. “But how?”

“That’s what I’m going to figure out.”

Three

Gypsy Scarf

“Y ou keeping busy?” Robert asked, handing me the armload of pants and jackets that needed hemming. Robert was a salesclerk at Butler & Sons, an expensive sportswear shop where I got a lot of alterations work. He was six years older than me, tall and slightly overweight, with a fresh face that lit up whenever I came in. I suspected he had a crush on me, but I couldn’t quite come to grips with the idea of dating a guy in his mid-thirties who still worked retail. Ambition and confidence were attractive, and Robert had neither.

Or maybe he didn’t have a crush, and was just happy to see someone fairly near his own age. The clothes Butler & Sons sold looked as if they were meant for golfers and the country club set, or whatever passed for the country club set in Portland. The customers who came in for the taupe pants and boxy argyle sweaters were not likely to be young single women.

“Pretty busy,” I said, taking the clothes. “I’ve got three appointments lined up for this afternoon.”

“Have you had a chance to eat?” he asked.

I avoided his eyes. Any mention of food was a danger sign. It seemed to go back to some primitive time when Man bring Woman meat, good, eat, eat. Which was fine, if Woman want Man, Man kill many mammoth, make good fire. Not fine, if Man kill one old pigeon and have wet wood. I wanted a good provider.

“Joanne usually feeds me,” I said, which was pretty much the truth. She was my next appointment, and she usually did have muffins or coffee cake she encouraged me to eat. It wasn’t a meal in the traditional sense, but I’d been counting on it as lunch.

“Oh.” His face fell, and then he struggled to put the cheer back into his expression. “Maybe next week we can grab something to eat together. The food court has some pretty good stuff.”

I smiled, rather painfully. “We’ll see.”

It was as good as I could do, for a response. It was neither dashing nor encouraging his hopes, although dashing was what I knew I should do. “You have to be cruel to be kind,” and all that, which I think is almost harder on the dasher than on the dashee. But I got a lot of business at this store, and didn’t want to create bad feelings with an employee.

Maybe he’d get the hint when I was too busy next week, and the week after, and then we could both pretend he had never expressed anything but friendly interest.

Butler & Sons was in the lower level of Pioneer Place Two, the new addition to the upscale shopping center in the heart of downtown Portland. Pioneer Place Two was connected to its older twin by a sky bridge and an underground tunnel, and it was along this tunnel that I walked with my armload of sportswear, following the streamlike undulations of decorative blue glass under my feet. The stores on either side were mostly the same chains found in every other city: the Body Shop, Victoria’s Secret, the Gap, Banana Republic, Eddie Bauer. I much preferred to go to Saks to steal my ideas for clothes to make. Somehow everything looked just a little more beautiful there.

The tunnel came out in the lower level of the original Pioneer Place, in the atrium center where switchbacks of escalators rose up four floors to a skylight roof. Thirty-foot bamboo grew in enormous pots, and smooth oak benches curved around a fountain that bubbled from several spouts, the sound rebounding off the bare floors and the glass walls of the surrounding shops. For some inexplicable reason someone had thrown a bright red toothbrush into the fountain, to lie at the bottom amid the pennies and dimes.

I spotted a rack of Willamette Week, and lay the clothes over the back of a bench as I took a copy and sat to peruse the back pages. It’s a weekly paper, the main alternative to the more run-of-the-mill Oregonian. No one I knew actually read the articles: all we wanted was the entertainment section and the personal ads. What I wanted today was found in the last few pages: ads for singles’ activity clubs.

“Women Call Free! Meet Quality Singles Like Yourself!” This, written above a heart with a photo of a blond woman seductively talking into a phone.

What women are willing to call those numbers? And what men do they find on the line? It was hard to not think of the “slimers” Louise talked about, who called the crisis line: men who would call up and pretend to need counseling, but there was always a telltale hitch in their voices that said they were jacking off. Apparently all they needed was a woman’s voice to get them to blow weenie phlegm into their hankies.

“Summer Fun! Rafting! Hiking! All Singles!” another of the ads read, over a black-and-white photo of young, handsome people screaming in delight as they shot the rapids, water splashing up around their rubber raft, their paddles raised, their life jackets turning them into uniform human cubes of athletic enthusiasm.

This sounded much more like what I was looking for, but I had a feeling there was going to be a hefty membership fee. If I couldn’t afford health insurance, I couldn’t afford to fork over hundreds to go rafting with other desperate singles.

No, not “desperate,” I reminded myself. Organized.

But still, there was something I didn’t like about the idea of paying a membership fee. It seemed so…forced. I wanted to be organized, but I also wanted to preserve a bit of the illusion that I would meet Mr. One-in-a-Million by fortuitous chance.

I flipped back through the pages toward the Culture section, stopping briefly in the personals at Men Looking For Women, but then deciding to save that entertainment for later.

The Culture section had everything from music clubs to art gallery listings, and went on for pages and pages. I browsed through it and found a college production of Shakespeare’s “Cymbeline”, performed on the Reed College lawn; a jazz group scheduled for a night at Pioneer Courthouse Square; and myriad events that made me feel like I was getting old. They sounded so loud. And smoky. Ugh.

I bought an Oregonian for its Friday pull-out A&E section, and found a hike along a trail in the Columbia Gorge, organized by Portland Community College, to observe spring wildflowers and wildlife. Five dollars, bring your own lunch and water to the specified meeting point.

They all held possibilities for meeting a man, although you can’t talk during a play. I might be able to drag Louise or Cassie along with me to the jazz night at Pioneer Courthouse Square, but I didn’t really like jazz. But guys seemed to, so maybe. The hike—maybe, although my hunch was that guys would prefer to think of themselves as the type of outdoorsmen who didn’t need a guide.

On the other hand, wouldn’t it be nice to find someone who enjoyed nature for reasons other than shooting deer and drinking beer by the fire?

I’d always liked those naturalists on television, the men who talked with calm, knowledgeable assurance, and had the patience to wait for hours behind a bit of shrubbery for the chance of seeing an otter or black bear. Any guy who would go on a guided nature walk in the gorge had to be a nice guy.

Some instinct had me glance up from the paper, and there was Robert, not fifteen feet away, headed for the second tunnel that led to the food court. He turned his head and saw me, and I felt my cheeks heat. I smiled weakly at him, feeling like a dog caught eating the cat’s food, and he gave me an uncertain little wave and then kept going.

Damn. He probably thought I’d been lying about the appointments, to avoid eating with him. I folded up the Willamette Week and the A&E section, and picked up the clothes, feeling like a clod. I shouldn’t have dawdled here, when I knew there was the danger of his coming by and seeing me. Stupid, stupid.

Why did emotions have to create so many delicate webs of pain, so easy to blunder through? And how many would be destroyed, both my own and others, by the time I’d found my Mr. Right?

Maybe there was a reason love and war were so often mentioned together. In both cases, the casualties were legion.

“This is you, the Page of Wands,” Cassie said, pointing to the tarot card in the center of the layout. We were sitting on the floor of Louise’s eighth-floor apartment, later that same day. Louise had invited us over to dinner, and Scott would be coming by in time for dessert. The apartment was filled with the scent of baking lasagne, likely made with five or six exotic cheeses and half a dozen vegetables I’d never heard of. Louise liked to try recipes from trendy cookbooks.

Louise was already looking more healthy now that she was working days: the shadows were gone from beneath her eyes, and her skin had a touch of color beneath her darkening freckles.

Louise’s apartment is in a new-ish building in the heart of downtown, the rent partially subsidized by her well-off parents, who slept better at night knowing that their daughter was in a safe place, with security cameras in the halls and a man at the desk in the lobby. Counselors at crisis lines did not make much money, and Louise would be living somewhere like I did if not for her parents. I envied her modern bathroom and the balcony with a view, but I liked where I lived with Cassie and wasn’t sure I’d trade.

“Why the Page of Wands?” I asked Cassie.

“Pages are for young women with lots of creative energy. They tend to be action-oriented.”

“Okay.” I shuffled the deck, the oversize cards awkward in my hands, and then Cassie laid them out in what she called the “gypsy spread.” My question for the cards was what my love life would be like in the next four months.

“These cards on either side of you represent aspects of yourself,” she said. “Seven of Swords—you have plans, but don’t know how to put them into effect, or whether they will succeed or fail. The Emperor—you are taking action in the real world.”

“That fits well enough.”

Cassie looked up at me with a grin, henna-red hair loose and slightly tangled, that and her elflike eyes making her look very much the part of the fortune-teller. Louise sat to one side, arms crossed over her chest, observing with a half smile on her lips. She claimed to not believe in spirits or supernatural forces, and said that the only useful thing about tarot cards was that they served as a good projective test for people’s psyches. You saw in the pictures what your personality allowed you to see, and nothing more.

Me, I chose to believe the cards only when they told me what I wanted to hear.

Cassie went through the aspects of the past that had brought me to the present situation, and then the “forces beyond my control.” Among them was a card with an angel standing with one foot on the ground, one in the water.

“Temperance,” Cassie said. “Sometimes this means that your angel is near, helping to guide you.”

“She is?”

Cassie shrugged. “You would know better than I. The interpretation of the cards is more for you to figure out than me.”

“Do you believe in guardian angels?” I asked, curious. I didn’t, but why then did I always get teary-eyed when I watched Touched by an Angel on Sunday nights? That I liked that show was one of my most closely guarded secrets.

“Sometimes I can feel my grandmother watching over me,” Cassie said.

“Really?”

“Yes, really. She talks to me in my dreams, too.”

“Huh.” I didn’t know quite what to say to that. I turned to the psychological expert. “What do you think, Louise?”

She shrugged. “If it is comforting and does no harm, there’s no reason a person cannot believe what they wish.”

“I thought counselors referred to that type of thinking as delusional,” I said.

“In psychology, we say that no personality trait or behavior is a problem unless it causes problems for the client.”

I chewed that over for a minute. “I guess that makes sense.”

“Then again, some people are just plain nuts.”