Men Seeking Women Read online

  MEN SEEKING WOMEN

  Love and Sex On-line

  PO BRONSON, RICHARD DOOLING, ERIC GARCIA, PAUL HOND, GARY KRIST, DAVID LISS, CHRIS OFFUTT, ALEXANDER PARSONS, ROBERT ANTHONY SIEGEL, BRUCE STERLING

  NEW YORK

  Contents

  Title Page

  Editor’s Note / Jonathan Karp

  1. Prisoners of the Heart / Eric Garcia

  2. Payback Time / Gary Krist

  3. No Yellers / Chris Offutt

  4. Minesweeper / David Liss

  5. Dante Visits Inferno Media’s Online Technical-Support Forum / Richard Dooling

  6. Code / Bruce Sterling

  7. The Face in the Glass / Paul Hond

  8. The Risk-Reward Ratio / Robert Anthony Siegel

  9. Calista X / Alexander Parsons

  10. Endpoint / Po Bronson

  About the Contributors

  About AtRandom.com Books

  Copyright Page

  Editor’s Note

  Jonathan Karp

  The title for this anthology of original short stories was inspired by a popular site on America Online, a realm called Love@AOL, where 680,000 men and women post personal ads. A cursory glance through “Men Looking for Women in Buffalo” reveals a typical range of entries, each one with a succinct title, from “Forever Yours” to “Italian Stallion Needs a Rider” to “Chain Me in Your Kitchen.”

  These postings are merely a sliver of the new sexual frontier thriving online. Chat rooms, where members assume anonymous identities and reveal many things they usually wouldn’t, have long been among AOL’s most frequented sites. As author Kara Swisher notes in her history of America Online, aol.com, the popularity of these chat rooms was a crucial factor in the company’s early success. Swisher reports that AOL users spend 25 percent of their online time in forums such as “Black Lesbians” and “Luv Cops N Firemen,” “Hot Hot Nurses,” and “Romantic Millionaires.”

  For all that has been written about Internet culture and the New Economy, the social dimensions of technology often seem to be overlooked. When no less a personage than Rush Limbaugh can announce that he met his most recent wife through an e-mail correspondence, it becomes clear that the means of mating have changed, that new opportunities exist, and that with those opportunities come new questions about the way we communicate and express our most elemental longings.

  To shed light on this romantic revolution, Random House has enlisted ten male authors to create stories from the frontier. Our only directive to each writer was that he write a tale of love and desire online. We left the rest to them, and their contributions are as original and distinct as their literary voices. The quest for love is eternal, but as these stories prove, the landscape keeps changing, and even if you don’t ascribe to all of those Mars/Venus theories, it’s clear that a lot of guys can’t bring themselves to ask for directions.

  We hope our first e-book anthology, Men Seeking Women, will serve as a guide and muse for all of the imaginations and hearts wandering online. May your journey be a satisfying one.

  Jonathan Karp is a Vice President and Senior Editor at Random House.

  PRISONERS OF THE HEART

  Eric Garcia

  Ann-Marie Moore was finished with the world of men. Her last date had ended when the attorney with whom she’d been set up excused himself from the table, vanished into the café bathroom, and didn’t emerge for three hours. Ann-Marie sat there the entire time, tapping her foot to the beat of the mediocre house band, staring at the double doors with murderous intensity. And when her date finally reappeared, glancing around the restaurant like a five-point buck on the first day of hunting season, he didn’t respond to her calls or whistles. No, he kept on walking, past Ann-Marie, past the table, past the bar, out the front door and into the night. By the time she arrived home at her empty two-bedroom apartment at the end of the evening, her left heel broken, makeup streaked with tears, she realized that, all told, it was the best date she’d had in months.

  She was thirty-five years old, carried six thousand dollars’ worth of credit card debt, and owned two cats, one of which she hadn’t seen in weeks. This, predictably, was the male one. She had never been to Paris, though the prior summer she had spent three miserable days in the sweltering Las Vegas heat, and she could count the number of times she’d been truly drunk on seven fingers. Her mother called her every other day, at 8:00 P.M. precisely, and the first question out of her mouth was always whether or not Ann-Marie had eaten. The next question, of course, was about her love life. Most of the time, Mother was spoon-fed a meal of beautiful lies.

  For Ann-Marie had worked her way through the visible spectrum of males, finding herself deep in love and lust with men of all races and skin tones. Strong arms, strong backs, skinny legs, wide butts, caramel tones, pale faces; a smorgasbord of masculine delights. But one by one, regardless of their physical differences, regardless of their varying professions, hobbies, and personalities, each and every one of them had a single element in common, a collective trait that both identified and grouped them as members of the male gender:

  They left.

  At the end of the day, after the roses and the chocolates and the sweet whispers in bed, Jason and Miguel and Brian and T.J. and Elton and George and the rest of them found an escape clause in their vows of love and took off into the night. Walter flew the coop at high noon, actually, running out the front door with his jacket thrown over his shoulder, as if he were on a train platform and chasing after the 4:09 Southbound for Atlanta.

  So as of Sunday night at 11:34 P.M., Ann-Marie Moore was finished with the world of men, and good riddance to them. After fifteen years of hard dating, her bank account was substantially depleted, her bedframe was cracked in three places, and her self-esteem had found a tight little hole deep down inside some gutter in which to curl up and die. It was enough, and finally, gratefully, it was over.

  On Monday morning, flush with the excitement of a new, untested lifestyle, she treated herself to a bubble bath. Called in late to work, told them she had a spot of flu. She ran the hot water, submerged herself, closed her eyes, and drifted off to a world where men didn’t walk out of restaurants and ignore their dates; where men didn’t act like wild animals, treating women like gristle on the bone; where men were, finally, what all of the fairy tales and romance books said they were supposed to be: Men.

  And for an hour and a half, it was glorious.

  When the phone rang at eleven, she answered it out of habit. Realizing that she was still supposed to be ill, Ann-Marie flopped sideways in the bath, hanging her head off the edge in order to lend her voice the proper amount of nasal stuffiness. “Hello?” she said hoarsely.

  “I found him.”

  Ann-Marie sat up quickly, water splashing onto the bathroom linoleum. “Excuse me?”

  “I found him. I found the man for me.” It was Ellen, always Ellen, three-phone-calls-a-day Ellen, who regularly regaled Ann-Marie with sob stories of her own sordid love life.

  “What man?”

  “Ulysses,” she said proudly, with a hint of grandeur. “He lives upstate.”

  Ann-Marie stood and grabbed for a towel, balancing on her left foot as she tried to lean across the tub. The terry cloth felt good against her bare skin. “You’re being vague, here, Ellen. I’m late for work.”

  “Forget work. Call in sick.”

  “I did already. I took a half day.”

  “Then take a full day. You must get online.”

  Ann-Marie clucked her tongue. Ellen was always full of demands, no matter the situation. She was barely able to start a sentence without some variation of the word must. “Why?”

  “Because I’ve found paradise, darling. We’ve been looking in the wrong places for years.
Go online as soon as possible—I’m telling you, that’s where they are.”

  “Who?”

  “The men,” sighed Ellen. “All the luscious men.”

  They were in front of Ellen’s computer forty minutes later, staring at the screen as the old modem dialed up a connection. “So I’m online, just messing around,” Ellen explained, “bouncing from page to page, checking out links, and I hit this amazing site . . .”

  Ann-Marie didn’t own a computer. She hadn’t ever bounced around anywhere, let alone from page to page, and didn’t much care about the whole Internet craze. She thought of it as a sidebar to her life, a state of affairs that, while meaning a great deal to a certain percentage of the population, could just as easily continue its existence parallel to hers, without the two ever crossing.

  But suddenly Ellen was talking about websites and search engines and pen pals and then, as if it were the most logical transition in the world, she was on to men. And she was on to Ulysses.

  “I wrote him first,” she said, “because that’s how the rules work. You read their profiles, you find one of them that you like, and you e-mail him a message.”

  “So there are rules?” Already Ann-Marie was suspicious. If, as she’d decided, she was through with the world of men, then she was through with the world of men, digital or otherwise. Any extra regulations would only complicate matters further.

  But Ellen was already online and typing away, slapping a URL into the location box of her browser. In the time that it took for the page to load, Ann-Marie decided that she would listen to Ellen for five minutes, then stand up from the ergonomically correct desk chair and walk out of the apartment, down to her car, and make it back to work just in time for her boss to bawl her out for missing the morning meetings.

  That’s when the page fully loaded, and there it was, five inches high on the seventeen-inch monitor, glaring out at Ann-Marie in a bright, gaudy, Web-design-in-a-box font, replete with whirling animation:

  Prisoners4Love.com

  Ann-Marie tried not to laugh. She understood that this was important to Ellen—in the way that everything was important to Ellen—but it was difficult to take seriously. Below the blinking homepage title was a small cartoon prisoner in black-and-white cartoon stripes, peering out from behind small cartoon bars, a small cartoon heart beating in his small cartoon chest. We made mistakes in life, the caption read. Don’t make a mistake in love!

  “Armed robbery, if that’s what you’re thinking,” said Ellen.

  “They’re all . . . armed robbers?”

  “No, that’s what Ulysses is in for. Armed robbery. But he was framed.”

  Ann-Marie smiled her best smile—this was her friend, after all—and grabbed her pocketbook. “It’s all fascinating, Ellen,” she said, “but Mr. Saponaro is gonna give me the boot if I don’t get in by two—”

  “Sit, sit,” said Ellen, pulling Ann-Marie back into the seat. “Ten minutes. You must try it for ten minutes, and if you don’t find someone fascinating, you can go.”

  Ann-Marie looked at her watch. If her car started properly and if traffic held up right, she could sacrifice the time and still make it into the office before the two o’clock deadline. Ellen was a kook, but she was a kind kook, and the least Ann-Marie could do was humor her for a while.

  “Ten minutes?”

  “No more. I swear it.”

  Six hours and three apologetic phone calls to Mr. Saponaro later, Ann-Marie was still busy searching through the Prisoners4Love website. She’d already browsed nearly a hundred profiles under the Men Seeking Women subheading, and was amazed to find that she’d scavenged her way through only 10 percent of the available male inmates.

  “Ooh,” squealed Ellen, “click that one, click that one.”

  “Raymundo Ruiz?”

  “Listen to that name. Rrrraymundo,” she trilled. “Rrrraymundo Rrrruiz. The things it does to my tongue . . .”

  “Then you write him,” Ann-Marie suggested.

  “I’ve got Ulysses,” said Ellen. She’d been going on about her new beau the whole time, showing Ann-Marie the e-mails they’d been sending back and forth for the last two weeks. Ulysses was indeed in prison for armed robbery, and, to hear him tell it, he’d been set up by the police as a result of his being the wealthiest pawnshop patron this side of the tracks. He never quite gave corroborating evidence or any logical link between the two, but Ellen believed him with all her soul, and that was all that mattered to Ann-Marie. Ulysses would be up for parole in six years. After that, said Ellen, the heart would lead the way.

  Most of the prisoners’ profiles read in much the same way. Name, birthdate, reason for incarceration, sob story regarding said reason, a litany of likes and dislikes, and a heartfelt plea to send e-mail, cookies, cigarettes, and such. Photographs were not allowed on the site, though the inmates went to a good deal of trouble describing themselves in intimate detail. Ann-Marie was skeptical of all their claims, partially because of their incarceration, but more so because of the sheer fact that they were proud owners of penises. But she stuck it out because, after the first thirty minutes of searching, Ann-Marie suddenly realized that despite their genetic inadequacies, the men on the Prisoners4Love website had one inhibiting factor that had never held back the men in the free world:

  They couldn’t run away.

  And this made them fantastically attractive.

  “Try that one!” Ellen said, pointing a manicured nail at the screen. “Claude.”

  “No last name,” mumbled Ann-Marie. “Why’s that?”

  “Who cares? It’s all the more mysterious that way.”

  Ann-Marie shrugged and clicked on Claude’s name. The main page disappeared, the lights on the 56K went wild, and a stream of letters poured onto the screen.

  My name is Claude, the new page read, and I am a prisoner of the state. More important, I am a prisoner of the heart.

  Cheesy standard intro. Must be some sort of form opening they discuss in the mess hall. But Ann-Marie read on.

  I understand what it is to be without choice. I understand what it is to be without hope. And I understand what it is to be without love. This is what defines me today, in here, but I know, out there, that it defines you, as well.

  For there are those who will treat women as if they were possessions, to be discarded along with the refuse. I will never do this. There are those who will get what they want and then vanish like the morning mist. I will always stay. I am the boat, and you are the rock to which I wish to attach myself. Your love is the port in my storm.

  But I am more than flowery words on a computer screen. I am flesh and blood, locked up because of my intellectual beliefs, because of my voice. More than anything else, I seek companionship, a woman with whom to share my thoughts and feelings, and, more important, a woman who wishes to share her thoughts and feelings with me.

  I seek an equal, a partner. A lover of life, and a lifer in love. Please, if you are this special woman, hear my plea and write me back.

  Claude.

  “Oooh, I like him. Try it,” Ellen suggested.

  Ann-Marie wasn’t convinced. “I don’t know . . .”

  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  “He gets angry, breaks out of prison, finds a hunting knife, and tracks me down.”

  “Okay,” said Ellen, “but he’ll probably buy you dinner first.”

  Ann-Marie’s e-mail to Claude was short and, she felt, rather impersonal. That was how she wanted it, at least to start. She gave her first name only, just as he had, and listed very little about her life. Instead, she wrote out a laundry list of qualities that she found unacceptable in a mate, and hoped that he wouldn’t have too many of them.

  Claude’s answer came back within an hour. Ann-Marie, he wrote, I am pleased to make your acquaintance, and I hope that we will become fast friends. Regarding your list of negative qualities, I am glad to say that as of this moment, I am free of all but one: I have indeed seen a number of Clint Eastw
ood movies—here in prison, in fact—but rest assured that I am much more a fan of Every Which Way But Loose than, say, Dirty Harry. I hope this is to your satisfaction.

  And it was.

  Over the next three weeks, Ann-Marie logged in more than fifty e-mails from Claude, sending return letters across the electronic void as often and as quickly as possible. Much of her time at home was taken up at the WebTV system she’d purchased, sitting in front of her twenty-one-inch television, typing away as fast as her fingers would allow. At work, Ann-Marie finagled her way onto a computer linked to the office T1 connection, prompting Mr. Saponaro to congratulate her on her initiative. Now that she was gaining computer skills, he said, she’d be eligible for promotion. Ann-Marie smiled and thanked him, but didn’t care about moving up the company ladder; she just wanted access to the e-mail server.

  It began, as many of her prior relationships had, with the small things, the superficial aspects of their lives. Ann-Marie’s favorite foods, colors, television shows—chicken curry, magenta, Alice reruns. The way Claude brushed his hair when he was allowed grooming utensils, how he stared out at the sunlight through the bars, watching it stream past the prison walls. It was the kind of idle chitchat that usually took up space on a first date if the waiter was slow bringing the food. But as their relationship matured, so did the meat of their conversations.

  Claude, she learned, was a radical in his youth, an intellectual whose ideas about the government and its secret projects threw a monkey wrench of fear into the workings of the establishment. He described himself as an innocent who was thrust into the world of knowledge, an untamed beast who was suddenly trained and educated, and therefore had a moral imperative to train and educate others. More than once, he referred to the Tarzan legend, though Ann-Marie never quite saw the connection. In any case, his outspoken views on everything from the Kennedy assassination to secret underground labs and genetic engineering were viewed as subversive and dangerous and not to be tolerated.