Men Seeking Women Read online

  A week after Warren had traded pics with Heather, the secretary in Milwaukee, he began to feel that she might be a little something more than most of the women with whom he, in the guise of Jake, had corresponded. Her letters revealed a woman smart, funny, literary, and surprisingly ambitious. In her spare time she was working on a novel (about the Boxer Rebellion—how’s that for being not stupid!). She wrote with flair, and her letters often left Warren laughing aloud. Sure, she made some grammatical mistakes, but she made a whole lot fewer than most of the women with whom he’d traded e-mail.

  And she did not hide her fascination with Jake.

  Over the months, Warren had sculpted the Jake bio until he felt it was smooth enough to be seductive and imperfect enough to be believed. Jake was thirty-three years old. He had worked successfully for a number of years in an advertising firm, but then had dropped out to enroll in the NYU film school. He lived in a big, but not huge, loft in SoHo, which he had inherited from an uncle, of whom he had been very fond and who had died of AIDS five years earlier. Jake was now in the preproduction stages of his thesis film. Meanwhile, a couple of screenplays he’d written were being shopped around Hollywood, and his agent had told him that Ang Lee had shown serious interest in one of them.

  Heather took the bait a little too eagerly for Warren’s taste. He had hoped for a couple of months of heated e-mail, but she wanted more almost right away. “I wish I could afford to come visit you in New York,” Heather wrote. “But I would love to talk to you on the phone. Please give me your number. I want to give you mine, but I don’t want to risk my husband finding out about you. I really would love to hear your voice.”

  Now he found himself with his back against the wall. At this stage, and it had happened many times before, Warren usually stopped responding. The game could advance no further, for he could hardly claim not to have a phone. But Warren didn’t want to drop Heather. He liked Heather. He respected her, and he could hardly say that about most of the women to whom he wrote. He found himself thinking about her almost constantly, writing and rewriting letters to her in his head. At times he almost forgot that he was not Jake, or he would fantasize that he might somehow wake up and find himself transformed into Jake, aspiring filmmaker. He would fly out to Wisconsin and rescue Heather from her husband. He would discover that her body was more like Sandra Quint’s than he had realized. They would have sex in Jake’s hotel room. Jake, who had often been praised for his stamina, would make certain she had multiple orgasms.

  And now Heather wanted to talk on the phone, which meant the end of everything—at least, it might have had Warren not possessed the gift of genius. After an agonized half-hour of contemplation, the answer came to him—not at once, but in methodical pieces—and he drove over to Circuit City, where he bought an inexpensive cell phone. When he returned home, he called the provider and gave a false New York City address. The next day, he planned quite cleverly, he would call the phone-service provider back and explain that he’d decided it would be more convenient to have the bill sent to his Florida address. And there he would be, living in Florida but possessing a New York City phone number, and ready to have a real relationship with Heather.

  “One question,” he said to the customer-service fellow. “Is there any kind of cell phone directory in which my number will be listed?”

  “No, sir. These numbers are automatically unlisted.”

  “What if someone has caller ID or uses *69?”

  The man on the other end of the line hesitated for a moment.

  “I’m a lawyer,” Warren explained, “and it can present problems of client confidentiality if the number isn’t blocked.”

  “I see. The number is blocked automatically. Nothing to worry about, counselor.”

  So, within four hours of receiving Heather’s request for a phone number, Warren had been able to send her one. He loved technology.

  Later that evening, the phone, still plugged in to charge the batteries, began to emit its shrill ring to the tune of “Stars and Stripes Forever.”

  Warren answered after a brief pause and said, “Theo, what’s the word?”

  On the other end he heard a pretty and crisp female voice. “Oh, I’m sorry. Is this Jake?”

  “Yes, it is.” His heart beat so hard in his chest for a moment that Warren feared he might really be having a heart attack. Hot pains shot up his left arm, but they quickly subsided.

  “Hi, it’s Heather.”

  “Heather!” he said. “Wow, this is so great. I’m sorry, I was expecting a call from my agent.” He opened the “Jake Bio” file on his computer and quickly wrote down that his agent’s name was Theo.

  “Is this a bad time? Should I call you back?”

  “No, it’s fine. I have call waiting, and Theo lives on a California schedule. If he says he’ll call back tonight, he might call back next week.”

  She laughed, smooth and delicious. “It’s so great to talk to you. You sound just like your picture.”

  “So do you,” he said. “Your voice is very pretty.”

  She laughed again. “You’re such a charmer,” she purred.

  Conversations like that, he later thought, made him think about taking out a real ad for his real self. What the hell? Maybe he would. Maybe tomorrow. Or the next day.

  Things continued to build momentum with Heather. They talked every day, sometimes for hours. Warren would bring his cell phone to work and call her during his lunch break. Once he forgot the phone, and called her from the English office anyhow, terrified that this would be the one time she decided to hit *69, but during their next conversation she seemed natural and relaxed, and Warren knew that he had her hooked.

  The next week, Warren had been walking down the hall when his cell phone rang. He normally would have let Heather leave a message rather than speak in public, but Sandra Quint had been standing right there. He answered and said, “Hey, sweetheart. I was hoping you’d call.” Sandra looked at him, Warren firmly believed, just a little differently after that.

  But Heather was the woman he cared about. He hardly ever thought about Sandra anymore. He had stopped sitting in his car outside her apartment, he’d stopped taking out her file and looking over her grades and her course work, and he’d stopped spending hours in the supermarket near her apartment in the hope of running into her.

  Who needed Sandra Quint, aloof and self-impressed, when there was Heather? He could talk to her about anything—Jake’s film thesis, the morass of Hollywood in which his scripts were lost, his dreams for the future. She talked about her problems with her husband and how grateful she was that they had never had children. Vince, the husband, was a devout Catholic who said that he would never even consider divorce. He also suffered, she said, from terrible depression. He came home from his accounting job, ate, watched TV, and went to bed. He refused to talk about anything except the most unavoidable household concerns: a leaky roof or a broken hot-water heater. They had not had sex in over two years. Once Heather had gone out of town for a long weekend to visit her sister in St. Louis, and Vince had refused to feed the three cats the entire time. He claimed to have forgotten, but when she returned Heather had been able to hear their crying from outside the house.

  “For a long time,” she explained, “I thought it would be wrong to leave someone who is obviously sick, but he’s refused to get help, and now I just don’t see that I have any choice. Right now I’m just working up the courage to move out.”

  Warren would respond with encouraging platitudes that he felt landed flat, but she told him she found his advice extraordinarily helpful. She admired his calm, his ability to think things through. Heather needed someone intelligent and creative and driven—someone like Jake. Talking to him made her think about all the things she wished she could change in her life.

  One time she asked Warren to tell her his birthday because she found astrology interesting even if she wasn’t sure she believed in it. Warren had made the mistake of answering truthfully, so two week
s later she asked for his address so that she could send him a birthday card.

  “Save yourself a stamp,” he had told her nervously. “Just send an e-card.”

  “Oh, I love sending real cards,” she’d almost whined. “Some of them are very funny. Do you like ‘The Far Side’?”

  “I have to tell you something,” Warren replied. He could feel his brilliance rising to the surface, bubbling, slick as oil. “The thing is, I’m very active in environmental causes, and I can’t condone the use of paper products when they’re not necessary. I believe a paperless society is a realistic and necessary goal. I know that a card seems like a little thing, but big things are made of little things. It’s very sweet of you to want to send me something, but I just wouldn’t feel right.”

  Heather had been angry and she’d hung up shortly thereafter, but during their next conversation she told him that she found his concern for the environment sexy. If they ever met, she would wear recycled underwear for him.

  Then disaster struck. She called him on a Friday afternoon when he was in the middle of a long lunch in an Americanist’s office.

  “I’m so glad I caught you,” she said. Her voice was nearly two octaves higher than usual, and if there had been more than one person who called Warren on the phone, he might not have known who it was. “I have such great news.”

  He spat out a mouthful of egg salad so he wouldn’t sound utterly repulsive. “Great.”

  “I’m leaving Vince. No, forget that. I’ve left him! I’m gone. Even as we speak, I’m with my sister in St. Louis. I have a lawyer and everything. I didn’t want to tell you about it until it was done. I was afraid that if I talked about it, I might jinx myself. But now it’s real. It’s really, really real. Other than my sister, you’re the first person I’ve told.”

  “That’s fantastic,” Warren said, mustering the energy to sound enthusiastic. But he did not feel anything like enthusiasm. He felt dread. He could hear her displaced cats crying in the background. “Congratulations,” he managed weakly. This moment, he knew, was the beginning of the end.

  Actually, it turned out to be just the plain old end. “Listen,” she said. “My sister is giving me her frequent flier miles, and I want to come to New York to celebrate.”

  “What a great idea,” Warren told her.

  “I want to come tonight,” she said, lowering her voice. “I want you tonight, Jake. It’s been so long for me, and I want you right now. I can hardly stand it.”

  The easy thing, Warren knew, would be to let her fly to New York and then let her figure it out for herself. Just give her a fake address, promise to meet her at the airport, anything like that. Maybe for some ordinary woman he would have done that, but he needed to handle this situation with a gentle touch. Heather deserved better. “Listen,” he explained, “this is terrible timing, I guess, but I’ve got great news too. I just got off the phone with my agent, and I’ve got to fly out to the coast tonight. It looks like Ang Lee wants to do the movie. He wants to meet with me right away.”

  “Oh my God!” She screamed the scream of the victorious. Jake’s success, Warren realized, was not some abstract thing. It was her success too. She envisioned Jake’s seven-figure deal as the ticket to a new life. Not that Heather was a gold digger; she believed that Jake would want them to be together.

  “Oh my God,” she repeated, this time without the screeching. “That’s so wonderful. I can’t believe it. I mean, of course I can believe it, but it’s so great.” Then a pause. “He wants to meet with you on a Saturday?”

  “He’s leaving for Hong Kong on Sunday,” Warren explained, “and my agent thinks he’s hoping to sign a contract before he goes. It’s all happening so fast, which is I guess how things go in Hollywood. Nothing happens for a long time, and then everything happens at once. I really wish I could see you, Heather, but after this is all over, we can celebrate.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Why don’t I fly out to L.A. and meet you there? I bet they’re putting you up in a nice hotel. I love hotels.”

  “I wish we could, but I’m going to be so busy,” Warren said.

  “Jake,” she breathed. “You’re only going to be busy during the day. I want to keep you busy at night.”

  “It’s really tempting, but I need to be focused for this. If my mind is wandering, it can cost me a lot of money or I might lose control of the project. I’ll call you as soon as I’m done, and we’ll work something out. I can stay out in L.A. if you want to come out west, I can come to you, we can go to New York together. Whatever you want.”

  “Oh, Jake, I understand, but I was so hoping I could be with you tonight.”

  “I know. The idea is driving me crazy, but it just isn’t right. But it’s only a day or two.” He paused for a moment. “This may sound crazy since we’ve never actually met in person, but I don’t think two people have to be in the same room to know something like this. The truth is, I love you, Heather.”

  Not even a pause. “I love you, too, Jake.”

  “I have to run,” he said, “the car is waiting for me downstairs. But I just wanted to tell you that before I go. I love you, and I will see you very, very soon.”

  As soon as Warren disconnected, he called his phone-service provider and canceled the account.

  He had a hard time falling asleep that night. He felt kind of unhappy about the way things had turned out. Heather had been great. She’d really been the most exciting woman he’d yet found, and the relationship had lasted longer and had been more intense than any Internet relationship he had ever known. And now it was all over. Still, as bad as he felt, he knew it could not have gone any other way. He could hardly have met her, not after sending her pictures of Rick. No, it had to end. That was just how these things went.

  The next day he answered a few ads, and by Sunday night he had a couple of live prospects. Warren felt a whole lot better.

  Meanwhile, Rick’s book on gender in early eighteenth-century narratives had hit the shelves, and while the slow progress of academia meant that the major journals would not review it for months, maybe even years, it had already made a splash in the profession. It was one of those rare must-read books that everyone, even those outside Rick’s specialization, felt they had to account for. Warren heard the other graduate students talking about it incessantly. Rick had a lock, they said, on the Modern Language Association’s first-book award. Lecture offers had begun to pour in for Rick. The administration now treated him like a big shot.

  Rick started acting like a movie star. He greeted people in the hall by pointing and winking. He bought a bunch of new clothes. Before the book came out, he would scowl when he saw Warren playing Minesweeper. Now he offered a smile or some stupid encouraging remark. To balance things out, to keep the cosmos in order, Warren knew he had to heat up the stalker campaign, which he had allowed to lapse during his torrid affair with Heather.

  “I was in the audience when you gave that lecture last Thursday,” Warren wrote in the voice of stalking Tina, hot on the heels of a fund-raising talk Rick had delivered to the alumni association. “I like hearing you talk, but I would like to hear you cry a little too. You seem to me like your sensitive enough to cry. I sometimes think that maybe your a faggot.” Warren loved to throw in little misspellings because they made the letters more frightening.

  Three days after Rick received that last letter, Warren had stepped out of the English office for his lunch break when he noticed an attractive woman in her forties wandering around the hallways, casually glancing at the graduate-student mailboxes. She wore jeans and a T-shirt, and had, in Warren’s opinion, a decent body. Her unremarkable brown hair was cut short, and she kept it in the kind of functional perm that Warren associated with the Midwest.

  “You work in that office?” she asked Warren.

  “Yeah,” he said both cautiously and casually.

  “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  “What about?”

  She took a step forward and offe
red him a very professional-looking smile. “I’m a state-licensed investigator, and I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Warren studied her again. A state-licensed investigator? What the hell did that mean? “What state are you licensed in?” he asked slowly, as though avoiding stepping on something dangerous.

  The answer terrified him. “Missouri.”

  He nodded, trying not to show his panic. “You’re a private dick?” He placed a special emphasis on the last word.

  “Maybe you’re a public one, huh? Come on, sport. I just want to ask you a few questions.”

  “Shoot.”

  “You know this guy?” She held up a print of one of the pictures of Rick that Warren had been circulating around the Internet.

  “Yeah, he’s a professor here. What’s this about?”

  “What do you know about him? Is he married, single, or what?”

  “He’s single.”

  “He ever been to New York?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe for conferences or something.”

  “Yeah? He have a girlfriend?”

  “Why, are you looking to date him?”

  “You’re clever, aren’t you, sweetie?” Her cell phone rang. She excused herself and grunted a couple of yesses and nos and then said she’d call later. She cast a glance at Warren’s lime-colored blazer and olive jeans. “That was the Jolly Green Giant on the line for you, Sprout. Wants to know where you’ve been.”

  “You insult everyone you interrogate?”

  “Yeah, I do. It’s a bad habit. Look, you know anything odd about this guy? He do a lot of Internet dating? That sort of thing?”