Men Seeking Women Page 6

  Heather’s letter turned out to be provocative and teasing without being explicitly sexy. Warren liked that. Some of the women he’d written to liked to talk dirty almost right away: tell me your favorite position, what is the strangest place you ever did it. Not for Warren, thank you. Maybe later on, when things got serious, but if the sex surfaced too quickly, Warren grew suspicious: psycho, or more likely, man in disguise. Anyone who sent a nude pic right away was also almost certainly a male asshole loser who couldn’t face up to being gay. Warren had nothing against gays; sometimes his ads, which were so perfectly constructed they should have won him a Nobel prize, attracted some hopeful gay interest. These queries—Warren liked the pun—always met with polite replies: thank you very much for your flattering interest, I’m only looking to meet women, but best of luck to you. Warren believed in being polite.

  So that he could script his reply perfectly, Warren read Heather’s letters a couple of times. It was important to match someone’s intelligence, sense of humor, interests, and general disposition if you were going to form some kind of bond. It took him about forty-five minutes to get his four-paragraph reply in perfect order. He showed some wit, threw out a couple of casual details that made him interesting, demonstrated sympathy for Heather’s horrible marriage, and signed off with cheerful expectation. And, of course, he would have to attach a couple of photos.

  Warren glanced up to the corkboard where Asshole Rick had tacked a dozen photos of himself: Rick on the beach, showing off his tan and muscles; Rick in a suit at a friend’s wedding; Rick in sport coat giving a paper on Eliza Haywood at an eighteenth-century lit conference; Rick sitting at a bar with friends, looking just tipsy enough to show the world that, despite academic success, he knew how to have a good time. The guy thought he was a model or something. It had been no problem to steal the pictures, scan then, and put them back all in the space of an hour. Rick never knew that Warren was spreading his image to lonely housewives and hopeful spinsters in the far-flung corners of these United States.

  Warren was thirty-eight years old, and not nearly as unattractive as he had led himself to believe, but sometime in his early twenties he had settled into the role of the ugly man, and he found a certain dependable comfort there. He was a bit on the short side, and he had allowed himself to round out over the years, but he had rounded out proportionately, distributing his fat with meticulous evenhandedness, so he appeared more soft than heavy. If he had been able to examine his life with anything like clarity, he would have recognized that by now, and indeed since at least the sixth grade, he had no greater enemy than his own personal style. He wore his hair longish, in a Meet-the-Beatles shag, and he had bushy muttonchop sideburns that reminded people in the department of a distracted barrister on the cover of a paperback Dickens novel; he knew that some of the graduate students had taken to calling him Mr. Havisham behind his back, and they called the English department the Circumlocution Office.

  And then there were his clothes. Warren had met Anne, his college girlfriend, while wearing a vintage olive blazer and green jeans. Things had not lasted more than a semester with Anne, but Warren now owned two dozen blazers, in various shades of green, and four pairs of green Levi’s. Thanks in part to his sideburns, on those occasions that he chose to wear his green fedora he looked impossibly like a leprechaun.

  Warren returned to his desk at a quarter after one, green blazer unbuttoned, exposing a tuxedo shirt underneath. He’d barely sat down when Tucker popped his head out of his office. “Can I see you in here a minute, Warr?” Only Tucker called him Warr.

  The chair’s office, in the corner of the main English department office, looked like the site of a DEA search. Documents lay sprawled out over every possible surface. Books were piled, rather than stacked, haphazardly on the floor. Even the pictures on the wall hung crooked. Mort Tucker was, by all estimates, the worst department chair in the university. He had won the job in part because no one else had wanted it and in part because no one had not wanted Tucker to have it, but his policy of delay and obfuscation had turned him into the most hated person on the faculty. Hires had fallen through because Tucker had failed to make the necessary follow-up calls. Junior professors had been denied tenure because Tucker hadn’t remembered to send files to the administrative offices. But Tucker was due not only to step down at the end of the next year, but to retire as well, and so even his most vicious enemies thought it best simply to wait him out.

  “Listen, Warr. Have a seat,” he said. He remained behind his desk, fanning himself with a thick folder despite the fact that the office was over-air-conditioned. Tucker had come from Canada, and even looking out his window at the south Florida landscape made him sweat.

  Warren had a seat and waited for it.

  “Warr, we’ve had some complaints.” Tucker had a thin face, and he had a habit of sucking in his cheeks during pauses in conversation. “A couple of the graduate students, and I’m not going to name names, have come to me and told me that you’ve been just a little, well, rude to them. That you don’t like to hand over the documents they need, you give them a hard time when they hand things over to you. That you make them wait unnecessarily.”

  “Other graduate students,” Warren said.

  “What?”

  “I’m also a graduate student, so the complaints have come from ‘other graduate students’ not ‘graduate students.’ ”

  “Of course. The thing is, we’ve talked about this before. Dealing with other graduate students is part of your job, and it just isn’t right to make them feel like they’re wasting your time when they have questions or need something.”

  “I’m not sure,” Warren muttered.

  “You know, we’ve been awfully lenient here with you. You take long lunches, you take a lot of sick days, and no one gives you a hard time about it. You’ve been working in the department for quite a while now, and you’re an important part of the team, but in certain areas you just haven’t been holding up your end.”

  “I think we ought to rearrange the office,” Warren replied. “It would be better to move the desks so they face the door rather than keeping them perpendicular to the door.”

  “That seems like a good idea,” Tucker said slowly, and then proceeded to talk with Warren for fifteen minutes on the virtues of rearranging the desks. Finally, when the desk conversation appeared to have run its course, Tucker tried to regroup. “These complaints I mentioned before. I think they’re worth talking about.”

  “Sometimes,” Warren said under his breath, not entirely aware that his response had nothing to do with Tucker’s statement.

  “I hope you will at least think about what I’ve said.”

  Warren sighed and then did his best to telegraph boredom. He leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs, and examined his nails, which he trimmed to almost painful shortness every other day.

  Tucker did not dare fire him. Tucker did not dare make things difficult for him. Though he might be lazy, he got the things done he had to, including the things no one else could do. Good luck finding the files for the new hire. What chance would they have in locating the tenure-review forms? There were dozens of documents, dozens of procedures, that Warren had buried over the years in byzantine filing systems and within inscrutable layers of computer file trees. If Warren left, it would take the department a year to get back up to speed.

  “I’ve had some stuff going on,” he finally offered, knowing that he needed to offer something, but really his thoughts hovered around Heather and some clever lines he wished he had included in his e-mail. He might send her another one right after work, even if she had not yet replied to the first. He already had her hooked, and he couldn’t think of a good reason not to show her his interest.

  “Anything you care to talk about?”

  “No,” Warren said. “It’s okay now.”

  “Good,” Tucker said. “That’s just the way I like it.”

  It had been eleven years since Warren had enrolled in the doc
toral program at South Florida State, located thirty miles west of Fort Lauderdale. It was, depending on who you talked to, either a low second-tier school or a high third-tier one. South Florida had been the only program to offer Warren any kind of fellowship package, so he hadn’t been in a position to say no. Nevertheless, he had hated to leave New York, where he had grown up and gone to college. His B.A. from Columbia had not been the result of especially impressive grades, but Warren had managed to steal enough English department stationery to forge a few wonderfully crafted letters of recommendation. They hadn’t quite done the trick at Harvard or Berkeley, but they’d been good enough to get by the admissions committee at South Florida State.

  Warren hated Florida, with its ubiquitous SUVs and strip malls and vacuous women in shorts. He hated living in a place where failure to use air-conditioning could be fatal. He hated the Hooters and the Houlihans and the ChiChis that littered the landscape. No one had stared at him in New York, but they stared here—in shopping malls, in grocery stores, on line waiting to rent videos.

  Still, with his grades he’d been happy to get into South Florida State at the time, and he’d begun the doctoral program with a great deal of energy, envisioning a dissertation that would rethink the eighteenth-century origins of the novel—despite his advisers warning him that “origin of the novel” projects were passé. Five years later, with his fellowship expired, and his first chapter outlined sketchily at best, Warren had taken the job in the English department to pay his bills while he finished his work. But the work somehow never got done. He could not even remember the last time he’d looked at his notes.

  Meanwhile, along came Rick, who started grad school after Warren and had already finished his degree program—at a school not much better than South Florida State, a fact that especially infuriated Warren—and landed a tenure-track job. He’d published about a half-dozen articles in major journals, he and some grad-school buddy of his had edited an essay collection, and his first book, which would allegedly recast the idea of gender in the first half of the eighteenth century, would be published by Cambridge next month. Once it was out, everyone seemed to agree, Rick would be able to wave bye-bye to South Florida State and take some cushy senior-professor job. Warren was just the guy who worked in the English department, but Rick was a hot property.

  The next day Rick hovered over Warren’s desk. “Were you using my office yesterday?”

  Warren tried not to look up. He’d been playing Minesweeper, and he might have been on the verge of an all-time best score. “Office?” he asked. “No, Rick. Why would I?”

  “I don’t know why you would,” he said, “but I found crumbs all over my chair.”

  He’d forgotten to wipe that down. “I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe they were from Tuesday.” Warren clicked on the wrong square and set off a mine, so the game was shot to hell. He knew that Minesweeper was a stupid little game—it came preloaded on the computer—but it had a certain appeal. You had to figure out where the mines were without setting any of them off—part logic, part intuition, part thinking fast. It was like working in the English department. It was like meeting women on the Internet. Sometimes when he played he liked to imagine that he had been captured by hostile aliens who made him play for his life. He had to beat a certain score or they would push him out the airlock.

  “I didn’t eat in my office on Tuesday,” Rick said, making no effort to keep his voice down. “Come on, Warren, I’ve talked to you about this. I don’t want you going into my office when I’m not there.”

  Warren looked up for the first time. Asshole Rick had some sort of expensive shirt, and he wore those tailored pants that made him look like he had no ass. He’d just had his blond, beach-boy hair cut, so he looked unnaturally well groomed. Did women really fall for that blond hair, blue-eyed, tanned thing?

  “You’ve talked to me about it,” Warren said. “I didn’t go in.”

  “Goddamn it.” Rick allowed a little spittle to fly from his mouth. “You know what the issues are. I don’t want anyone in my office. It’s not a joke.” He dropped a disk on the desk. “I need the document on there printed in the next hour.” He walked off.

  That was exactly the sort of behavior that left Warren feeling more than justified in his little campaign.

  As it turned out, Rick had good reason for his concerns about security in his office. He had a stalker. He had been receiving threatening notes, first by e-mail, and then with scary little packages sent to the department. And he deserved all of it. Every last bit.

  This is what happened: Warren had been coasting the men-seeking-women personal ads; he liked to see what tricks the competition might have devised so he might fine-tune his own personality profile. While trawling for ideas he came across an ad for a twenty-nine-year-old professor of English literature living in South Florida. Just how many people out there had a doctorate and a job by the time they were twenty-nine? How many universities were there in South Florida? It had to be Rick. Warren had been pretty sure, but just to be absolutely certain, he’d cobbled together a false female persona and written back, asking for some details: which university, what area he specialized in (his faux female respondent had been an English major in college), and so forth. Just to keep things interesting, Warren threw in the pics from one of the better-looking women with whom he’d hooked up online.

  Sure enough, Rick wrote back. They had a hot little correspondence for a while. Rick loved sexual innuendoes. He believed thoroughly in his own cleverness. He boasted that he had no trouble meeting women, but there were so few intelligent people out there. Warren made sure this woman, called Tina, showed herself to be intelligent and funny. She had read a lot, and still loved to read. She had a real interest in eighteenth-century lit, Rick’s own area. What were the chances, after all, of Rick meeting another woman who loved to read Pope and Swift?

  They traded e-mails, sometimes several each day, and discussed the most intimate things. Tina told Rick how she liked to be kissed, and then, a little later on, how much she enjoyed oral sex. Rick told her that he had always been praised for his great stamina. It was more common than not, he said, for women he was with to have multiple orgasms. Rick wrote that he loved women with big, bushy pubic hair. Rick had the Greek letters of his fraternity tattooed on his ass.

  Around the office, Rick walked with an extra spring in his step. He seemed especially cheerful, even to Warren. “I think he’s in love,” Edgardo speculated. But Warren knew that there was something missing: Rick had not yet met this woman of his dreams. Tina sent him e-mails saying that she had been masturbating while thinking about him, but, inexplicably, she had been unable to find a free evening in her schedule. She had to go out of town for a meeting. Her best friend broke her leg. Rick grew insistent; he wrote that he couldn’t help but feel she was putting him off. He wanted to meet her, if only for five minutes, so he could see her in the flesh. At least she could give him his number so they could talk on the phone. Warren could not see a way out, but he hated the idea of ending their exchange. He therefore came up with the most incredible idea: Tina would go psycho.

  “You are a fucking asshole,” she wrote in her next letter, sent not to his personals mailbox, but to his university e-mail address. (Warren always sent these sorts of things from a free e-mail service that he logged on to from an internet café. No point risking arrest.) “You think you are so fucking smug. How smug are you going to be when we meet for real?”

  Rick wrote back. He wanted to know what was going on. He begged her to tell him if he had in some way offended her. Surely there had been some kind of misunderstanding that might be worked out. But Tina just would not engage. Instead, she sent Rick letters in which she flaunted her knowledge of the details of his life. She knew his last name, even though he had never given it to her, his home address, what kind of car he drove. Tina read Rick’s published articles and tore them apart for their obviousness and reliance on clever wording rather than original thinking. She began sending
notes to Rick in the English department, and then packages that left Rick worrying about bombs. These letters didn’t come particularly often. Sometimes more than a month would go by now—enough time to let Rick think she had lost interest. But just when he began to get comfortable, Tina would strike once more.

  Warren lived in a one-bedroom apartment about five miles from campus on the second floor of a two-story rental complex. He’d once heard that the whole place had been overrun by crack addicts until it had been taken over in the mid-nineties. Now most of the other tenants were transient types—men with long greasy hair tied into ponytails who drove pickup trucks with Confederate flags on the back window, or women with permed hair, too much makeup, and too many screaming kids who always had to be dragged by the arm. The walls of his apartment were paper thin, and he knew when his neighbors sneezed or fucked or thought something was funny.

  The apartment did have some advantages besides price. Across the street stood a much more expensive building, ten stories high, and some of the women on the upper floors liked to get undressed without lowering their blinds. Warren kept a pair of high-powered binoculars by the window.

  He also improved things by keeping the apartment meticulously tidy. He had six different filing cabinets to help keep all his stuff neat; for example, he had filed every ATM receipt he’d ever received in chronological order going back more than fifteen years. He did not own many books, since he had a library card, which made ownership redundant. But he had ten bookcases of videotapes. Cops was the only show he watched with any regularity, and he kept every episode ever aired. He recorded almost everything that he could from American Movie Classics, but he’d seen only about a quarter of the tapes he had in his apartment. He used to try to watch eight or ten movies each weekend, but that was before he got into meeting women online.