Finding A Good Man

LAST SUMMER, when trouble started heating up in the apartment building next door, it occurred to me that I was a potential statistic: a single woman in a groundfloor apartment on the wrong side of town. Exhausted from lying awake till all hours with my ear cocked for the faintest sounds of forced entry, I decided to do something.

So I got a dog. Barney was a middle-aged, raggedy black cocker-spaniel mix with a gray muzzle, legs like lacquered canes, and paws the size of oven mitts. He was talented: knew how to sit, stay, and "go lie down." He could also, as a neighbor's kid discovered, shake a paw — something I'd never have figured out, because I wouldn't have risked embarrassing him by trying. Barney conscientiously set to work warding off evil — a task that consisted mainly of barking at the couple upstairs, whose telltale smokers' coughs unrolled every day in the hallway like a suicidal lovers' duet.

For the first month after I brought him home from the pound, Barney crept into my bed at night and wedged himself tightly against my back. Asleep, he shivered and wept and shook, caught in the grip of nightmarish memories. I soothed and quieted him, stroking his body and murmuring, "It's all right. . . . You're safe now. . . . Safe." Some mornings I'd turn over and find him lying beside me with his head on the pillow, nose pointed toward the ceiling, like a husband.

I HAVE NOT BEEN in a relationship with a man for more than a year now, a situation that has resulted in a dangerously high increase in my doughnut consumption. I eat doughnuts each time I realize, with fresh pain, that the men I'm attracted to are completely out of reach: monogamous, left-leaning, gentle-spirited, broad-shouldered carpenters with a love for the works of minor poets — and, inevitably, a family.

I see this type of man in hardware and grocery stores. He's dazed from sleep, and his hair resembles a cornfield after a flying saucer has landed. He shuffles slowly down the aisle, work boots untied, children hanging off him like Christmas-tree ornaments. He's like an old sofa you can lie down on without worrying about spilling food. But there's also an air of thoughtfulness about him, a sense that he's going over lists and calculations in his head as he stands motionless, staring at the items in the sale bins. He's the type who speaks infrequently, and when he does, your ears prick up, because you imagine any ideas that have taken so long to develop are definitely worth considering.

On Saturday night, this guy gets cleaned up to gq level and stands in line at the movie theater with his wife, who is usually tall, slim, and self-contained. She believes that, without her, this man would lose his sense of direction and become just one more dreamy, cosmic, hairy-chested innocent wading through a sea of inchoate emotions. She imagines that she helps him to realize who he is and what he wants.

He allows her this illusion.

THE CITY WHERE I LIVE is small historic, picturesque — a city of century-old limestone buildings and annual boating events. It has one good university, five penitentiaries, and two factories: one manufacturing plastics, the other aluminum. In a nationwide almanac, my city is listed as being a good place for senior citizens to retire. Single, educated women outnumber comparable men here by about four to one.

How I ended up here is not very interesting, nor is the reason I continue to live here. I have a handful of friends, but no one I would miss terribly were I to be transplanted to some other city tomorrow. I stay because I'm a reclusive painter, because this place is familiar, and because I can't think of anywhere else to go.

For the past few years, I've looked for love in the personals. Almost without exception, the men who place ads list sports as their number-one hobby. They want a woman who is (surprise!) also into sports and is "happy" or at least "easygoing." There are those seeking a "slim" woman and others looking for someone "queen-sized" or "height-weight proportionate." I once read an ad by a man who said he'd take any woman who wasn't "too ugly to look at or too stupid to talk to." Then there are the cheaters: the sly, bored, unhappily-married-but-powerless-to-leave-her men looking for a "discreet relationship."

Dispirited, I barely glance at the men-seeking-women ads anymore. I stick to creating my own, which I hope convey something in utter contrast to the meat market that surrounds them.

I met my last boyfriend through the personals. Tall, soft-spoken Curtis was a farmer who walked naked in his fields to feel the warm summer air caress every part of him. He was the most complicated man I'd ever met: beautifully articulate, emotionally expressive, and clinically depressed.

Curtis had answered several women's ads at the same time, he confessed, and I was the only one who'd called him back. Almost immediately, he told me about his depression.

"That's ok," I said. "I think I'm agoraphobic. I'm looking into it."

"Really?" He brightened. "My dog's agoraphobic." He told me how he'd rescued it from a neighbor who'd kept it shut up in a barn for the first six months of its life.

Curtis said that meeting me was a gift, and that it cured him of wanting to be a tree — stationary, uninvolved. He requested that I give him a ring to let other women know he was taken. I picked one designed by a jeweler friend of mine. It seemed made for Curtis, with flowing, interwoven strands of silver — like water, like roots. I said it was ok that he couldn't afford to buy me one.

It was a potent attraction. For three months, we made love fiercely, marveling at our amazing good fortune at having found each other. Then the hints of trouble I'd been ignoring came more clearly into view: Curtis talked only about himself and was rarely interested in the daily workings of my life. He called a former lover a "dragon-breath bitch." When I told him I was thinking of writing a story about us, he offered as a possible opening line "Pine trees are the architects of their own destinies because of the space they create around themselves." And then he actually said, "I want someone in my life without that person affecting my life." And finally: "I'm sick of you."

I don't know when he left the ring I'd given him in the dark blue velvet box in my desk drawer. I hadn't noticed that he'd stopped wearing it. For a long time afterward, whenever I had to go into that drawer, I'd tell myself that I really should move the ring someplace where I wouldn't have to see it. But I couldn't bear to touch it. I think I needed periodically to experience the shock of finding it, a tangible reminder of my phenomenal lapse in judgment.

I RETREATED FROM THE PERSONALS and focused on trying to be single with integrity. I devoured all the books I'd accumulated from yard sales but never gotten around to reading, took a yoga class, and got together with my women friends for videos and popcorn. I alternated between feeling relief at having myself back again and grappling with the low-grade depression that always accompanies my not being in a relationship. My friends preached to me about how happy, fulfilled people attract love, and emotionally needy people repel it. Be self-sufficient and industrious, they advised, act as if you don't need anyone, and you'll attract someone who'll love you as an independent equal. Of course, most of the women who imparted this advice were in relationships themselves and therefore not stuck for someone to massage their backs at night.

My single women friends weren't much better. Most of them had gone without relationships for years, like camels without water. Some were perpetual students, full of enthusiasm, with an insatiable desire to learn. "The world is such a fascinating place," they'd say. "There's so much to do that there's just no time for the emotional demands of a relationship."

I, on the other hand, crave those emotional demands, though I admit I approach relationships irrationally. As I begin to fall in love, it's like an ego death. I lose myself to the intoxicating drug of lovesickness. I barely eat or sleep, and something inside me explodes with creativity: even before the possibility of sex is on the table, I have accurately sketched, from memory, the face of the man who has me enthralled and richly celebrated him in a poem, which I've then likely set to music. When I love a man, I want to portray something of his beauty to the world — or maybe just to myself.

My friends tell me I'm too intense, that in a past life I was probably a medieval troubador, writing sonnets for my lady, wearing her colors into battle. I'm at my most hopeful and believing when in love. True, it dissipates after a while, becomes something familiar, sedate — but that's agreeable, too. I love the comfort and companionship of doing a crossword puzzle together over breakfast, or going on yard sale excursions, or driving to the ocean. I'd even settle for just helping each other fold the laundry. I'm easy to please where love is concerned because, to me, being alone is just running errands, remembering to floss, and making sure the recycling goes out on the right night. It's having no one to consult at the video store who actually has a stake in which movie I choose. It's watching people make love in those movies and feeling as though they're the ones leading a normal life, while I'm living on a piece of celluloid. Being alone is spending too many nights in a row sharing doughnuts with my dog.

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