Chameleon in a Candy Store Read online

  “You’re not affectionate.”

  She had mentioned in an email that her stomach was acting up, so I summoned its power to my side.

  “It’s because your stomach is hurting. I didn’t want to—”

  “You’re distant.”

  It was a question of theft. There was no hard-on where a hard-on should be. Ordinarily it wouldn’t have been a problem. If anything, I was as surprised as she was. The long evening that followed was spent in silence, punctuated by the sighs of a martyr and the whipping back and forth of glossy magazine pages until at last she slipped wordlessly away to bed. I grabbed a pillow and a blanket and made for the couch.

  The next morning I was woken by the sound of the shower being turned on and then off until finally she appeared in the living room in her uptight formal law-firm attire looking pinch-faced, unfucked, and even uglier than the night before.

  Pausing at the door, she turned to look at me on the couch. “You can go back to bed now.”

  I was lying on a smoldering hard-on.

  • • • •

  Pedophilic clergy, punishment beatings, mental abuse, domestic violence, two near drownings, and a recurring nightmare of the little boy I saw mangled in a farm accident.

  “You had a brutal childhood.”

  Dr. Jessica looked directly into my eyes to make sure I heard her. There, it was official.

  But none of it felt like it had happened to me. I was detached from these events. Had she confused my case with someone else’s? Maybe she was exaggerating my trauma so I’d keep coming every week. And yet I began to enjoy our sessions mostly because it was becoming clear that I wouldn’t be expected to marry Yvette. That I wasn’t so much in love with her as too lazy to resist. But I wasn’t about to marry her out of politeness. Why do that to myself? Or to her? She had her own agenda and her own time frame. She was thirty-three, so her body clock was sounding the alarm. I told Dr. Jessica about an unusually calm stretch of water on the Niagara River called the Deadline. Once you’ve passed it, there is no way to avoid the pull of the falls three miles ahead. I think we both knew I had said something significant, but that I was the one who needed to take action. Inaction would result in a marriage I didn’t want to a girl I didn’t love. A life I didn’t want was already materializing around me. If I sat still, it would envelop me like a gas. And staying with Yvette after realizing this would be lying with my presence. I felt as though I had said all of this out loud, but I hadn’t. Without looking up from her lap Dr. Jessica asked a seemingly unrelated question.

  “Have you ever tried online dating?”

  • • • •

  Yvette’s recently becalmed hell-raising father was separated but not yet divorced from her bohemian-sculptor mother, who for some reason liked to argue in airports. Her ridiculously handsome father was a geologist and so, it could be said, was her privately educated sister, being as she was a professional gold digger. The grandfather on her mother’s side made a fortune producing perfume and lived on what was essentially a private island north west of Bordeaux. The other grandfather was a retired judge in the French judiciary. He owned a summer house in the French Alps, where they holidayed at the slightest provocation. Yvette had been abandoned in her fair share of airports, and when she wasn’t waiting in the lost and found, she was watching Papa chase Maman around their antique-laden home in Bordeaux with an ornate poker.

  Her therapist forbade her from telling me too much about her upbringing, presumably because she thought I‘d be shocked, but she couldn’t have known that having experienced certain childhood eccentricities of my own, such nursery tales had a certain soothing effect on me. Anyway, by the time I was formally introduced to Maman I was adequately prepared to face the mass of neuroses, complexes, impulses, and moods that now stood collectively before me.

  “Bonjour, I’m Veronique. It’s so nice to meet you.”

  With her lantern jaw, close-cropped fair hair, and weathered skin, she looked more like a Scandinavian farmer than the mother of a junior lawyer for Leclercq & Menard.

  I had already heard about the legendary debates with airport staff, the aborted attempts to liberate cute little penguins from zoo enclosures, and the commandeering of microphones from singers considered unworthy of the title. She bent almost in half to kiss me.

  Veronique was a sculptor. A pretty good one, actually. Her pieces, to my eye, seemed heavily influenced by Picasso, but I didn’t dare tell her that. I didn’t want my first words to her to be confused with an accusation of plagiarism. We were en route en famille to the Metropolitan ­Museum of Art to see an exhibition of paintings by Gauguin, because logically enough, he was one of Veronique’s favorite painters.

  Yvette, though nervous about this meeting, was pleased it was happening. She had wanted us to meet at Thanksgiving, but this idea had proved too much for me, loaded as it was with so much significance. I knew that meeting parents, or even one of them, at Thanksgiving was tantamount to a marriage proposal. Even if the celebrants were French and Irish, there was still an unspoken implication that I was agreeing to something other than just a plate of turkey. But a visit to the Met was okay because it had plenty of emergency exits.

  And Gauguin was a hero of mine too, since he’d given up his job as a bank clerk to shag French Polynesian girls. Confronted suddenly by a life-size sepia photo of the artist’s tight-faced wife and children, I felt like I had just arrived home late with two strange Frenchwomen, and what time did I call this and was I not ashamed of myself? “Can’t blame him for leaving,” I said, and immediately regretted it.

  It was exactly the wrong thing to say, touching as it did on Yvette’s sensitivity about being abandoned. I braced myself for the public humiliation that would surely follow.

  Surely Veronique would put me in my place. I myself was about to become an exhibit.

  “Ahh, she is so afraid of being abandoned, no?” said Veronique, bending even deeper now to kiss her daughter. Yvette’s cheeks beamed embarrassment outward into the exhibition space, and I suddenly realized Maman was Papa too.

  She had to be, because Papa had fucked off. I’d heard all about his affairs with girls half his age and how Yvette was forced to compete with them for his affection. Papa was talked about with regret. But Gauguin had fucked off and they called him a genius. He can’t have been the most considerate of men to dump his wife and kids and take off with Van Gogh, that other famous family man. Gauguin’s abandoned wife took the children to live with her wealthy parents, so therefore they were well cared for. And to be fair, they looked pretty fucking boring compared to the Technicolor windows into paradise on the walls ahead.

  I refused to believe that he wasn’t fucking every little Polynesian trollop he could get his hands on. Painting all day between orgasms and shagging all night between paintings. Should we think less of him because he didn’t have a family? An emotional life? Or was he able to achieve what he did because he was free of such constraints? Art historians count him among the most notable post-impressionists, but to me, his most significant achievement was that he lived in an aftershave commercial before aftershave existed.

  “You have found she can be difficult, no?”

  We were on the roof patio of the Met, and Veronique was talking about her daughter as if she wasn’t standing next to her. I mimicked a man testing the ground with his foot and then leaned back in mock horror as an imaginary explosion leaped from the tiled surface of the roof garden. Veronique’s smiling eyes met mine and we turned to enjoy Yvette’s confusion. The moment felt good and strangely just.

  This was my cue to produce the glossy book of Gauguin prints from my shoulder bag and hand it to Veronique. And let’s be clear here. She was the mother of the best sex I’d ever had. Approval from mother meant more sex from the daughter. I was willing for the gift to be misconstrued as willingness to commit as long as it remained unspoken.

  “Pour toi Maman.”

  I had been forewarned that she loathed people who tried to speak French, but I had spent $175 on the book and I wanted my money’s worth. Inhaling loudly and ooh-la-la-la’ing, she bowed to kiss both my cheeks again. Real full-on wet kisses, not makeup-saving facsimiles. She wiped my face like I was a rascal and stepped back to regard me.

  Later, back in her apartment, Yvette put away her phone after a long muffled conversation in high-speed French.

  The verdict was in.

  “Maman says she thought you loved me passionately and that it was clear to her we would be married. She also said that she herself liked you very much and that you were obviously of superior intelligence.”

  The deafening roar of the waterfall grew louder.

  I was numb as she went on to say that her mother’s boyfriend was using the fact that she was too old to have children as an excuse to end their relationship. He was thirty-nine (same age as me) and she was forty-nine. Mother and daughter now shared the same fear of abandonment. Yvette was worried that Maman was on the prowl . . . with me in mind. It was true she flirted with me, but I just ­assumed that this was what French mothers did.

  The sexual possibilities of being the filling in a mother-and-daughter sandwich were not lost on me, but such a scenario refused to ignite if you were flanked by your mother-in-law and wife.

  • • • •

  “Dare to be average,” said Dr. Jessica.

  Dare to give me a fucking break.

  If I succeeded in being any more average, the likelihood of her getting $250 an hour would be somewhat diminished. We had agreed that I would write down my dreams, so when she asked me if I had anything for her, I took out my notebook and read her the following scenario.

  “I’m setting out chairs in the gym for my Sunday-night AA meeting when I become suddenly conscious of making too much noise. I look around, and there between the stacks of chairs are at least seven or eight young boys arranged in sleeping bags on the floor. It’s a strange sight, but I assume for some reason that they are a junior basketball team who made bad travel arrangements and need somewhere to sleep. As I continue putting out the chairs, they begin to wake up, and without speaking, they stand up and bunch together by the wall, waiting for me to finish. This is when I notice they have no arms. I wonder how their vests can possibly remain in place on those smooth rounded shoulders. And because they are well behaved and respectful, it somehow feels okay to introduce them to some of the AA members who by this time are starting to arrive. I feel proud of these boys even though I have no idea who they are.”

  “That’s so beautiful,” said Dr. Jessica. “Can you see what it is?

  I stared at her.

  “It’s your subconscious telling you it’s okay now to bring your younger self into the AA meetings. They have no arms because that’s how you felt when that guy was touching you.”

  The boy was contacting the man.

  I was astonished the she could get all this from a dream. It was true I had compartmentalized the whole Brother Ollie thing. Quarantined it. But maybe now it had lost its potential to contaminate.

  Later that night, Yvette called me an asshole with such conviction I almost felt grateful to hear such an honest utterance. Advertising had all but gutted me of any genuine emotion. We had been talking about us. Or rather, she had been talking about us while I stewed.

  “Do you want to be that guy who has to keep changing his girlfriend every three years?”

  Silence.

  “Because they’ll all want the same thing.”

  Silence.

  Every three years didn’t sound so bad to me. If anything, it was a little optimistic.

  I prayed that I might be struck in love with her. It would make life so much easier. She was a ready-made life in waiting. French, highly cultured, great in bed (if not a little demanding), with an aristocratic artist mother so well connected in France I could already see the scenic summers in the Alps, the publishing deals in Paris, and the French-speaking children showing me the contents of their mouths. But as I tried to talk myself into it, I just couldn’t conjure the required flutter in my chest. Or if I did, it was more like a twitch. Yes, the sex was the best I’d ever had. No doubt about it. Guiltless soaring orgasms that felt like time travel. So what was wrong? Other girls I’d met were boring in comparison or older or uglier or worse—American. Was I was in denial? Would I only find out how deeply embedded I was when I tried to pull out?

  I thought more clearly when we hadn’t had sex.

  In the time we’d been together, the orgasms were so intense and so regular they’d had the same effect as medication. Once every two days after meals; and depending on the dosage level, I’d see Yvette as gentle, beautiful, and kind and myself as loving, caring, and truthful. But now that she was on sexual strike, I couldn’t find this girl or that guy. Maybe lust was all I’d ever felt for her. Had I mistaken the softening effects of postcoital afterglow for romantic love? I knew that there would be no sex if I couldn’t at least pretend there was some emotion attached to it. Had I begun to believe my own lies just so I could continue to get sex? But now I had to smoke myself out. There was no point in making us both miserable just because she wanted to have a child. I knew I’d find it impossible to love a creature whose first act on entering the world would be to demolish the one thing I really did have genuine feelings for. Yvette’s ass.

  Open on a classroom full of boys supervised by a Christian Brother. He walks between the desks craning his head to read the copybooks and pauses to point things out. He stops next to a ginger-haired boy and slides in beside him. The other boys exchange amused looks. Beneath the desk in a close-up shot we see the priest’s hand emerge from a pocket slit in the side of his gown and crab-creep toward the boy’s crotch. The forefinger and thumb pull at the fly fastener, but it doesn’t budge. He tries again. Nothing. After one more tug we notice the boy’s zipper is pierced by a safety pin. Cut to a close-up of the boy’s face as he allows himself a barely perceptible smile.

  Forty-Pack of Safety Pins, Extra-strong.

  Browsing menus of single willing women was intoxicating at first. Pornographic, even. Beautiful girls with cocked heads and laughing eyes competing for my attention in a modern-day harem. I toiled over half-written messages and deleted them in disgust only to start anew. Finally after agonizing over every comma, period, and apostrophe I’d send out a message like a dove into the night. Annette87 was absolutely gorgeous, but believe it or not, it was not her beauty that caught my attention. She listed Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare, in her last great book I read section and for the superpower you would most like to possess, she’d answered, “I’d like to read minds.” So yes, I wrote her a poem.

  Look ye to these blackened leaves,

  Deathly froze ’neath icy screen,

  Neglected thus by suns and moons,

  These worried words seek news of you,

  Thine eyes to them are planets bright,

  Whose orbit brings the gift of life,

  Sayest not thou art bereft of powers sublime,

  Thou canst read words and therefore minds.

  No reply. Maybe she never received it. Should I send it again? Maybe the Internet was down. In many ways a fleeting glimpse of a beautiful girl in the street was more merciful. You saw her and she was gone. Here you could ogle what you couldn’t have for days on end. Meanwhile, capitalizing on your disappointment, ads for cars, aftershave, and clothes promised to make you more attractive. But I wasn’t about to give up.

  Intelligence, wealth, wit, and height.

  These were the most commonly sought qualities on datemedotcom. I already had three of them, and I could mimic the fourth in the right shoes. I was never going to attract many replies on my looks alone, but I was confident that most girls were going to at least feign interest in a guy who made $250,000 a year as an advertising art director.

  And having worked with some of the best digital retouchers in the world I couldn’t help but notice that many of the photos had been modified. Skin lightened (I kid you not), blemishes blended, legs lengthened, weight reduced, stretch marks removed.

  After I had been on only a few dates, it quickly became clear that if a seemingly gorgeous twenty-five-year-old girl was willing to meet a guy nearing forty, it meant he was going to have to pull up an extra chair for her ass. Witnessing a girl rearrange the table in front of her as she waited for her anatomical entourage to catch up was not something I wanted to repeat. I felt like the victim of a crime but with no emergency number to call because legislation had yet to catch up with whatever this was.

  Scrutinizing the profile photos even more carefully, I realized to my horror I had been deceived by three very basic methods of in-camera trompe l’oeil.

  1. Lying facedown on a plush carpet absorbed all manner of immensity. 2. Holding the camera up high created a false perspective that funneled even the most amoebic madness into a neat vanishing point. 3. Posing between two friends converted a milk-churn silhouette into an hourglass figure. I was looking at this all wrong.

  Instead of being the customer, I needed to become the product. Instead of buying, I would sell.

  At first I didn’t catch the significance of profile names like Erin76, Shannon12, and Colleen111, but it soon arrived in me like a smile. As a walking, talking, realistically rendered, three-dimensional, life-size export of that mythical faraway land called Ireland, I had something to sell after all. These misinformed females, having grown up with stories of the old country strained through generations of omission and embellishment, were ripe for the romantic advances of a native-born Mick.