“So, are you going to give her a call?”
“Who?”
“The redhead, of course!”
I tried to remember who that was.
“Don’t tell me you missed how into you she was?!”
I respected her opinion as a woman, but I thought she was completely wrong on this count.
“No!”
“She kept talking to you, touching your arm!”
“She talked to Alex too!” I said defensively.
“She didn’t touch me though,” Alex said, walking past me. “She barely looked at me.”
I was left gob smacked; I had no idea. I thought the woman was merely being friendly.
I was always missing these social queues.
But I did have a girlfriend once, for a few months. At least, I think she was my girlfriend. I had met her at a networking event for the IT sector, back when I was still a young entrepreneur. I already had Zoë, but she was with a sitter, so I was a free agent for the night. The girl was called Sally and she was a software engineer. She was a bit too serious for me, but I had to choose between talking to her or the guy sitting on my other side, who seemed to be a health freak and said there were too many germs at events like this. He kept wiping down his glass and glancing suspiciously around as if looking to catch a waiter in an unsanitary act.
Talking to Sally about data management and statistical analysis got me through the night. I was surprised when she invited me for a drink afterwards, and when this led to sex, I was too grateful to question it.
I called her after that, to be polite, and she invited me to dinner. Next thing I knew, I was meeting her parents and we were discussing summer plans in The Hamptons.
“Let me get this straight,” Simone asked me one day. “You don’t even like her, but you are meeting her parents?”
It was true that I didn’t like her that much. She was very bright, but had the personality of a computer mouse, which is to say, none. Apart from work and software updates, we didn’t have anything to talk about. She wasn’t unattractive, and it was nice to have someone to go out with now and then.
When she started talking about moving in together, I woke up though. The thought of sharing my life with someone whose idea of fun was to clear out her email, gave me the creeps.
I steered clear of the dating scene after that.
My sister once tried to fix me up with a restaurant owner she had met while working at an upmarket eatery. She convinced me to meet this woman for a date and, for a while, everything went well. Until the woman told me she was still married. That came as a shock, but then she followed it up with the even more unpleasant fact that her husband was serving time in prison for drug trafficking and had links to South American cartels.
“I hope he won’t take offense to us having a drink,” I said, trying to lighten up the situation.
The woman had responded with a troubled, “I don’t think so.”
I couldn’t get out of there fast enough and for a while, I was a little jumpy when I walked around alone at night.
I found most women confusing and complex, like Chinese kitchen appliances that came with instructions that I could never quite figure out. I was always scared to turn on the switch after having assembled the new purchase myself, in case the blades came off and decapitated me in my own kitchen.
It didn’t help that I couldn’t seem to keep a nanny for Zoë.
I had always needed help with her since she was little. But it was always a mixed bag of dope heads and wannabe musicians, all kind of girls that looked great on paper and turned out to be depressed and suicidal weeks or months later, as I would realize after finding them out on the gallery one day after work, threatening to jump because why was the world such a cruel place.
I found especially the younger girls didn’t stay around too long. Sometimes they were new to the country or trying to find other work and doing childcare only temporarily. They wanted to travel, to meet a rich man and get married.
It seemed any rich man would do.
It had taken me a while to figure out that our last nanny, Shelley, was interested in more than taking care of Zoë’s needs. She was so friendly and helpful, and always around. Even at night, when she was off duty, she’d hang out with us and play games, which had been quite fun. Then I started picking up some strange signals from her, but until the night she came onto me, I’d had no idea that she was trying to hook up with me.
I woke up in the middle of the night, aware that someone was in bed with me. I thought it was Zoë who’d had a bad dream. She often came to me in the night. I opened my arms to give her a hug and felt a very different body slide up against me.