Men Seeking Women Page 4

  And that was it. The dream ended there. But even so, I got up the next morning and couldn’t shake the dream from my head for hours.

  “Hello, Peter? It’s Laura. Pick up if you’re there. Peter? Okay, try me later.”

  Terra posted later that day:

  earnings season again, guys. first call estimates a .08 loss/share. whisper number is .07/share. imho, both are too pessimistic. I hear management expects to be profitable by 1Q next year.

  This time I didn’t even hesitate. I was down to 750 shares by now, having sold a little each time the stock seesawed above 16. I immediately bought 1,250 more. And three days later came that second-quarter earnings report that earned me eight thousand dollars in a day. Terra Incognita, whoever she was, was making me rich.

  Dear Laura:

  Well, I guess it’s obvious by now that we seem to be able to live without each other. Do you even remember the last time we spoke in person (i.e. w/o telephone answering machines or e-mail)? I know I’ve been hard to connect with lately, but shouldn’t this lack of contact be telling us something? Well shit, here I am breaking up with you, and I’m doing it via e-mail . . .

  Osiris went crazy for the next week. On Thursday, it went up four points; on Friday, another two-and-change. Over the weekend, there was an article in Barron’s that mentioned Osiris very favorably, and so the stock rallied again on Monday. I was making serious money now, and so were lots of other people. They left ecstatic messages on the board—prozacboy even talked about buying a twin for his beloved orange Boxster—and the “I Love Terra” thread was busier than ever. “This is Nirvana, man,” Warren wrote me. “We’ve all been waiting a long time for this stock to take off. Now it’s payback time.”

  But through it all, Terra herself was silent. She disappeared entirely from the board for days, then weeks. The “I Love Terra” posts started sounding a little desperate. She seemed to be ignoring us. And so we whined:

  terra? terra, are you there? where ARE you, dammit??

  —hawk71

  Meanwhile, Laura stopped calling and started writing e-mails:

  Peter:

  Is there something wrong with your answering machine? I’m beginning to think you might be a jerk. Please call or write to disabuse me of this notion. Love,

  Laura

  Then came the news:

  URGENT!!! See referenced article from ZDNet. It’s about Terra.

  —Phil-R-Up

  At the end of his post was a link to a news item. Breathless, I clicked on it, waited for it to display, and then read:

  SEC INVESTIGATES “IRREGULARITIES”

  (Washington, June 24) The Securities and Exchange Commission today launched an investigation into allegations of securities violations and other trading irregularities involving an employee of Osiris Software Inc., an Internet appliance software maker based in Vienna, Virginia.

  According to an affidavit filed by the company, Edith Sneed, an assistant to the manager of strategic alliances at Osiris, communicated to friends and former colleagues confidential information about the company’s quarterly revenues and pending deal negotiations with potential partner firms. The affidavit also alleges that Ms. Sneed posted similar information pseudonymously on at least one Internet message board devoted to discussions of Osiris stock. . . .

  I was up for most of the night. I lay in bed in my clothes, feeling sick, listening to the traffic go by on the street below my window. The name—Edith Sneed—was horrible, like some character from Dickens who abused children or something. But I tried not to let it get in the way. This woman, Edith Sneed, had sacrificed her entire career for the sake of me and a couple dozen other men she’d never met. It didn’t matter whether she had benefited herself from the inside information; her leaking it to us was an act of total unselfishness. And I just couldn’t understand it.

  The next day was an issue-closing at work, so I didn’t get home until late. I logged on after dinner, bleary-eyed and exhausted. But I didn’t go to the Osiris message board. Instead, I looked up Edith Sneed on 411.com. There were about a dozen listed, but only one anywhere near corporate headquarters in Vienna, Virginia. I printed out the information and called the telephone number listed. There was no answer—not even a machine. I hung up, walked around my apartment a few times, then went back to the computer and grabbed the printout from my desk.

  On the drive over to Virginia, I told myself I was an idiot. What was I expecting to happen? I imagined myself driving up to her house—some little suburban ranch, say—and ringing the doorbell. Who would answer? Some sweet, matronly woman with white hair? A goateed, tattooed husband with bad teeth? Or maybe the faceless woman in my dream? “Hi,” I’d say, “my name is Peter. I’m the Huddite, and I just wanted to be with you in your time of trouble.” And what would she do? Would she laugh at me? Slam the door in my face? Rush into my arms and promise to become mine forever?

  The address turned out to be an immaculate little townhouse in a huge development not far from the Metro station in Vienna. Each unit had an identical spotless garbage can in its driveway, strapped to a railing with one of those elastic ropes with hooks on each end. Impatiens and geraniums were arranged along the concrete walks in rows so perfectly straight that you were tempted to kick a few over.

  There was no car in the driveway, but I went up to the front door anyway and rang the bell. After a few agonizing seconds, it was clear that I wasn’t going to get an answer. “Dickhead,” I muttered. I stepped back and checked the second-floor windows, but I knew I was just wasting my time.

  “You looking for Edith Sneed?”

  I turned. There was a guy in a weird kind of silver jogging suit on the sidewalk behind me. He wore thick glasses and an odd little skullcap, like an Arab, though he seemed more German-looking than anything.

  “Is she around?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I was looking for her myself.”

  “You a friend of hers?”

  He looked embarrassed. “Sort of. I know her, a little. From the Internet.”

  “The Osiris message board?” I asked.

  I could see from his face that I was right. I held out my hand. “My name’s Peter. I’m the Huddite.”

  “You’re kidding me. The Huddite? I’m AxelBroder.”

  We shook hands. I guess I should have felt embarrassed or humiliated to be found out like that, but there wasn’t time, since right then another car pulled up. It was an orange Boxster, and out of it popped a scrawny young guy with sneakers, baggy shorts, and a tie-dyed muscle shirt. No question in my mind who this was. “Hey prozacboy,” I said.

  It turned into a party. Or maybe it turned into a wake. prozacboy had two bottles of tequila in his car, and the three of us sat on Terra’s front step, drinking. AxelBroder told us he lived on Capitol Hill and had taken the Metro out, but prozacboy had driven in all the way from Youngstown, Ohio—without stopping. “Hey, man, you see that vehicle over there?” he asked, gesturing at his Boxster. “Two-thirds of that is Terra’s doing. I had to come.”

  We got slowly but determinedly shit-faced. Each of us took turns at the tequila bottle, pausing between slugs to make heartfelt and increasingly maudlin orations on Terra Incognita and the sacrifices she had made for us, the generosity she had shown us, the goddam love she had given us. AxelBroder showed us a little book he’d made on his computer—“The Complete Osiris Postings of Terra Incognita”—and instead of thinking the guy the biggest loser-geek on earth, I sympathized. I even broke down and told them about my dream fragment about her. “The bats,” prozacboy intoned when I finished. “The bats mean something important. And the canoe, man—obviously phallic.”

  By midnight, things began to wind down. AxelBroder said goodnight and wandered off toward the Metro; prozacboy fell asleep on the lawn. Feeling comfortably buzzed, I sat down on the grass beside him, finishing the last few ounces of tequila and wondering if it would be dangerous just to leave him there on the lawn, alone. “He
y, prozac,” I said, pushing his shoulder. “You should sleep it off in that car of yours. You’ll get rheumatism or something on this grass.” But he was totally gone. Sighing, I got to my feet, grabbed one of his hands, and tried to pull him up.

  And that’s when Terra appeared at the end of the walk.

  “Excuse me,” she said—half cautious question, half annoyed assertion. I turned. It’s strange, but I’d been so prepared to be surprised by who she was that I was doubly surprised when she turned out to be exactly like my fantasies of her. Not beautiful, but young and attractive—in her early thirties, long, auburnish hair pulled back tight, a kind of feline softness to her features. She was wearing worn black jeans and a white T-shirt with a little MicroDesign logo on the pocket. “Can I ask what you’re doing on my lawn?” She had one hand in her bag, probably grabbing for a can of pepper spray.

  “You’re Terra, aren’t you?” I asked. “Or Edith, I mean? Edith Sneed?”

  Her face cloaked a little. “Who are you?”

  “I’m the Huddite.” I kicked the crumpled pile at my feet. “And this is prozacboy. We came to say thanks.”

  “Oh my god,” she said. She took a step back and put a hand up to her chest like a bad actress expressing surprise in a movie. But then her expression changed. “Jesus, Huddite. I feel like I know you.” She was smiling, and I felt that maybe it wasn’t so stupid of me to be there. Finally, after some obvious internal process of risk-assessment, she asked me: “You want to come in for tea?”

  Together, we grabbed prozacboy by the armpits and lugged him into the house. We dumped him onto the couch in the living room, and then I followed her into the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was tidy and nondescript, with a few girly touches—artificial greenery, fussy little window treatments—all of which screamed “recently divorced” as loudly as a sheaf of separation papers would have.

  I watched as Terra went through the motions of filling the kettle from the tap, twisting on the gas range, and stuffing tea bags into two green mugs.

  “So you’re in trouble.” This was my brilliant attempt to restart the conversation.

  “You might say that. I’ll never eat lunch in the New Economy again, that’s for sure.” Then she crossed her arms and said, “Look, I don’t know why you all went and tracked me down like this, but if you’re worried about trouble with the SEC or Osiris, you shouldn’t. None of you had any idea who I was, so you can’t be charged with any trading violations or anything like that. For all you knew, I was just a lucky guesser.”

  “That’s not why I’m here,” I said.

  “Okay, then. Why are you here?”

  I shrugged. “Like I said, I wanted to thank you. And I guess I just needed to know why you gave us all that information. When you must have known what could happen if you were caught.”

  “Oh, geez, I don’t know, Hud—or Peter, that’s your name, right? I read your profile.” This embarrassed her. She looked away. “Why does anybody do anything? I’d been following the board for months before I said boo, and you all seemed so funny and loopy, and so totally clueless about Osiris stock. I just thought I’d help you out.”

  “But you didn’t even know us.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, I didn’t. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?”

  The water was boiling. She poured some into each mug and carried them over to the kitchen table. “It’s been a rough year for me,” she said, turning her back toward me as she got some spoons. “I guess I just wanted a little adoration for a change. And god, did you all oblige, especially prozacboy out there.” She turned to face me. “Hey, he’s kinda cute, isn’t he? In a skateboardy kind of way?”

  I didn’t answer. It’s strange, but all I could think about was the fact that Terra was right here before me, that she was perfect, perfect—attractive, simpatico, everything. And yet, despite all of that, I had to admit that she wasn’t what I wanted. My fantasy had landed on a platter in front of me—thwok!—but just as it landed, my own wanting had gone somewhere else. I want to be clear: Terra was in no way a disappointment. But all I could feel was this sense of release, of being set free.

  “I should go,” I said then, a little abruptly.

  This seemed to hit her. I saw her eyes cut to the untouched mugs of tea, then cut away to the kitchen window. “Do you have to?” she asked. “I thought you might like to stay.”

  I couldn’t have dreamed it better than this, I told myself. She was propositioning me—I was sure she was propositioning me. She had looked up my profile, after all. She’d been as intrigued by me as I had been by her. Before.

  “I’ve got a girlfriend,” I blurted after an awkward pause. “She’s home right now.” This was bad enough, but then I said something really lame: “Maybe next time.”

  She seemed to flinch at this. “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.” She carried both cups of tea to the sink and poured them out. When she turned back, she was all business: “But listen, I can’t let you drive home after all that tequila or whatever it is you two have been drinking. I’ll call you a cab.”

  She moved past me into the living room to make the call. I watched her go, thinking of my dream, wondering why I wasn’t wondering if I was making a mistake. But my itch to leave now was almost unbearable. I felt I had to get home and get started, though on what I had no idea.

  “They’ll be here in two minutes,” she said, coming back. “The taxi stand is just over by the Metro, so it doesn’t take them long.”

  “You’ll be okay here? I mean, with prozacboy on your couch?”

  “He looks harmless enough. Besides, I’m too old for him. Isn’t he the one who likes fourteen-year-old girls? Or was that eddiehaskell?”

  “No, it was him.”

  We walked into the living room and stood side by side, looking down at prozacboy. He had a line of drool running down his chin and into the frilly cushions.

  “I guess you can wait for the cab outside,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said, feeling awful suddenly. “Good luck with your legal problems. Let me know if there’s anything I can do. To help, I mean. And thanks—for being such a good sport.”

  “That’s me, Peter,” she said bitterly, “always a good sport.” Then, brightening suddenly, she went over to the phone table and wrote something down on a pad. She ripped the page out, folded it, and handed it to me. “Open this when you get into the cab. Whether you do anything about it is your decision. Just make sure you toss this paper and forget I ever gave it to you.” She pushed me toward the door. “Now go.”

  One of those dilapidated Virginia cabs—a rusted yellow Impala—was waiting at the curb. I walked slowly down the walkway toward it, fingering the piece of paper Terra had given me. When I got in, I looked out the window toward the door, but she had already pushed it closed.

  The driver, a rail-thin Vietnamese kid who looked barely old enough to drive, looked back at me expectantly.

  “Just head to Dupont Circle,” I told him. “I’ll direct you from there.”

  As we pulled away from the curb, I unfolded the little note. It read, in small, perfectly formed handwriting:

  formal takeover bid from totura sometime in the next 2 weeks. probably $25–30/share. osiris will accept. happy trails. —terra

  I folded the paper again and stuffed it into my pocket. This woman was incredible, I told myself. She’d just given me the chance I needed to remake my whole life. Tomorrow, I would put everything I had into Osiris. I’d borrow from my mother, from my brother, and leverage it all on margin. Conceivably, I could make enough to move to L.A. and pay for a year or two of grad school.

  The cab driver’s eyes met mine in the rearview. “You my first fare ever,” he said. “I get my cabbie license today, first time.”

  “Congratulations,” I said. “Just promise me you won’t crash.” Then I leaned back, closed my eyes, and let myself be taken home to bed.

  NO YELLERS

  Chris Offutt

  This whole notion of an electron
ics singles club is new to me. I will never admit to doing this. Right off the bat, you need to know that I have never placed or answered an ad of this nature. I’m not a businessman seeking discreet afternoon fun, or a New Yorker looking for a fellow snobby Ivy Leaguer, or a rural single hoping to end lonely days (and nights) far from town.

  The woman who runs this cyber café explained the Internet until the cows came home. She is patient. The best I can figure is that it’s like a magazine on your computer, and you can turn the pages, read what’s there, and stick something up for other folks to see.

  According to the chart she gave me, I am a SWM NS ND, but what I feel like is a lonely man. I don’t seek friendship and maybe more. I want the whole kit and caboodle. Part of me doesn’t care who you are or what you look like, but that seems like a bad thing to put here. I do care. I’m very caring. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be imagining that you, a stranger staring at a fake magazine somewhere, would have an interest in me.

  Which brings me to the main things—who are you and what do you want? I hope you’re reading this because you’re shy, not desperate. I don’t think I’m desperate, but I wonder if this is a desperate act—paying twenty-five dollars by credit card to write whatever I want, then have access to what women write.

  I am forty-two and it is hard to date at my age, hard to meet women when you live in the country—harder still when you don’t like country music, sitting in bars, or going to church. I have a few male friends, but the only women they know are aunts or sisters. When you get right down to it, I don’t have all that many male friends, either. Men require some form of activity in order to be together, but I despise sports. I’ll be damned before I join a men’s group and pound my leather drum and share my greatest macho moment with a bunch of fearful, neurotic, deformed, insecure, overly sensitive misfits who’d complain if you hung them with a new rope. I’d rather be alone.