A Way With Women

At a client dinner in a Brazilian steakhouse, a red-headed waitress appears at your table and gifts you a shot.

“Thank you,” you say, which makes her giggle.

“It’s like you’re not even surprised.” She clinks her little glass to yours. “Saúde, Senhor Cool.” Her skin is so translucent, you glimpse the pulse inside her wrist.

Your client watches her walk off. “Tell me how you do it,” he says. He sits back, interlaces his fingers over his gut, studies you. “It’s not like you’re Brad Pitt. What’s the secret?”

You force a laugh, as is your custom with this client, with whom you do not share a sense of humor. “Brad Pitt’s got nothing on me.”

The secret to your success isn’t much of a secret: You don’t need anything from women that they’re not eager to give you. You listen more than you talk. You cleared six feet in high school. Now you’re 35 with most of your hair and the income to have your suits tailored and the sense to wear invisible socks inside your sneakers. Attracting women is hardly brain surgery. It’s more like that game, Operation: Relax and don’t touch anything you’re not supposed to.

As a baby, you uttered, “I see you,” your first full sentence, while staring at some woman in the grocery store who howled with laughter: “Any girl who walks into this kid’s crosshairs is screwed!” You don’t remember the scene and suspect it’s apocryphal, but thanks to your mother’s frequent recounting, you absorbed the message. Perhaps you’ve fulfilled the prophecy.

“You know I’m grateful,” Lance says, leaning toward you, adjusting his glasses. “How many gourmet gift baskets have we sent your ass?” Lance has an extra button undone, a tuft of curly gray hair sprouting in the opening. “It’s just that dollar signs don’t hit me the way they used to. I’m not going Communist on you. But money isn’t…” he gestures vaguely, looking around for the word, “it isn’t everything,” he concludes, as if he’s the first to posit the theory. “I thought divorce would be more satisfying, you know?” He drinks half his single malt in one gulp. “I’m done paying for bottle service; I want to be minding my own business and then out of the clear blue a little redhead with a nice rack hands me a shot. Where’s my non-transactional attention?”

“I’m sure you pull plenty of girls, man.” The words feel strange in your mouth. You’re used to praising your clients—assuring them they’re savvy even when they’re idiots; calling them bad-ass, even though they get pedicures. But “I’m sure you pull plenty of girls, man” makes you flinch; now you’re not just disingenuous but driving out of your lane.

“I’ll put you on retainer,” Lance says. “Fifty k.”

“You know there are guys who teach this stuff. Pickup artists.”

“Those jokers. Come on.” He holds out his hand to shake. He knows you don’t say no to clients. You wish you weren’t facing the restaurant’s front window, where an unidentifiable animal hangs skinned from a sturdy hook. “I see how chicks are with you.”

“How they are with me?”

“You connect.”

You would like this conversation to end. The flattery is oppressive. “You said ‘transactional’ like it’s one of many options.”

“Yeah?”

“Transaction is inescapable. It’s the crux of society.”

“See what I’m saying? You’re like a philosopher. I need you. Be my wingman. Be my Cyrano de Bergerac. Get me to where I’m knee-deep in--” The waitress materializes with a carving knife and a towering skewer of sirloin. “You’re scaring me with that big knife,” Lance tells her.

She looks only at you and asks, “Want to try picanha?”

You see that she’s applied bright red lipstick.

*

You just have to pump the guy’s ego a bit, get him comfortable at the bar but not wasted, call a few women over and let it slip to them that he’s loaded. You’ll pepper Lance with advice to give him his money’s worth: Until you take them to bed, ignore their bodies from the nose down, you’ll say. Don’t leer at them like a pervert, you’ll say. You’ll think of a nicer way to say that.

But it is not so simple. Women shun Lance. When you try to redirect their attention to him, they recoil, as though you’ve scooped a hair wad from the shower drain and shoved it in their faces.

“Just tell me the secret,” Lance says as you leave the bar together. “I’ll practice.”

You do not know a secret. “Next time you’re interacting with a woman, lean back.”

“Yeah?”

“But subtly.”

“Subtly,” he echoes.

“When you’re alone, practice in the mirror,” you add.

When you get home, you stand before the bathroom mirror and lean away from it. The leaning renders you repulsed and terrified, as though a relative is giving you a lap dance.

As you brush your teeth, a lawyer you’ve been sleeping with sends you a text message: “hi” with a purple devil face. She is always up late, writing a brief or suffering from her anxiety disorder. You spit into the sink and turn off your phone, relieved to feel untraceable, even if it’s an illusion—like the false sense of security that follows locking your front door.

*

The next Friday evening, you meet Lance outside another bar and present him with three gifts wrapped up in brown paper: a small black notebook, a quill, a glass bottle of ink.

“What in the founding fathers is this?”

“Hey, don’t knock our nation’s first womanizers. You’ll sit at the bar writing with a quill and ink and for sure girls will ask you what you’re up to.”

“And then what?”

“Well.” You haven’t thought that far ahead. “Just smile, but don’t look up. Make them work harder for your attention.”

The quill looks strange in his big, hairy hand. “What am I supposed to write, a sonnet?”

“Whatever you feel moved to write.”

“I’m not a bard, man.”

It is true that Lance is not a bard. You’re not quite sure what Lance is. Years ago, his father gifted him lucrative construction companies. Had you not stepped in at his father’s behest, encouraging Lance to retire young, he would have run them into the ground.

“Sure you are,” you say, pushing him toward the door. “I’ll sit on the other side of the bar, in case you need me. You won’t need me.”

Unfortunately, the place clears out shortly thereafter because the happy hour special ends and because the ambience is kind of chick-repellent—harsh lighting, old music no one ever liked, even when it was new. At some point, a very drunk bachelorette party teeters in. They survey the scene and stumble right back out. You hear the bartender, a kid who looks too young to serve alcohol, ask Lance, “Whatchya got there? A feather?”

*

After sex, the lawyer koala-clings to your body. She whispers, “Hold me tighter,” which makes bile rise in your throat. “Whoa,” she says, pressing a palm to your chest. “Your heart’s racing.”

To change the subject, you tell her about Lance.

“Fifty thousand dollars?”

“Honestly, I don’t care about that part.”

“How can you not care about that part?”

“I don’t know. I don’t see money the way we’re supposed to.”

“How do you see it?”

You consider the question. Lance believes, as you have heard him say, that “money talks.” You’ve never been partial to the metaphor. Why anthropomorphize numbers? They’re perfect as they are. Upon reaching a certain level of wealth, people get so needy, as if money is their mother, as if money might give them something they neglect to give themselves. “I guess I can’t take it seriously. I mean, do you take the law seriously?”

“I do.”

“Oh. Well. Bad analogy. Anyway, maybe I take money seriously. I’m just…not attached to it.”

“Babe,” she says. Uh-oh. She’s never called you that before. “What are you attached to?”

“Nothing.” You add, “Not that I’m Buddhist.”

A few minutes later, she asks, “What about people?”

You feign sleep. You feel it deep in your chest that you’re about to ghost this woman. You’re sorry for her, sort of, but you look forward to the quiet.

*

One thing you never tell your clients is that you trust your market premonitions. Of course your moves are calculated, rooted in experience, but sometimes you feel what’s coming, the way a dog feels a storm. You’re good at your job. As Lance’s coach or wingman or whatever this is, you’re failing. You have no intuitive sense, only a hard nut of dread in your sternum.

Your premonitions began in childhood, after the divorce, when the house was relentlessly quiet. Without siblings to entertain you, you sat outside your mother’s closed door, wordlessly communicating with it. At some point—and in retrospect, you realize this seems implausible—you learned to feel the door’s opening before it opened.

Oh, you scared me, your mother would say, walking around you to the bathroom.

Now she’s different, of course: Why don’t you call? When are you coming home? But it’s too late. She taught you the art of self-containment. Truly, you’re grateful to her for it.

You try to imagine yourself female, to enter the mind of the women Lance approaches. You concentrate so hard, you feel your body become buoyant. As a woman, you are soft-skinned and hyper-vigilant. You search for exit signs, just in case. You silently battle the bread basket, negotiating with warm rolls swaddled in linen. You see Lance in a bright Hawaiian shirt, waving his arms over his big stupid head, as though he’s marooned on a tropical island. You know that somehow, this image is symbolic, but you’re annoyed that he needs a rescue.

*

Your next idea is sushi because every woman you know loves sushi.

“Be like sushi,” you tell Lance, as you sit side by side at the bar, watching the chef whisk a bamboo mat out from under a perfect maki log. You finally had the right idea; this place is a chick fest—a few on dates with men, but mostly small groups drinking sake, speaking intensely, using chopsticks to pluck pieces from a shared wooden boat.

“Fishy?” Lance says, cracking himself up.

You join his laughter an awkward second too late. “Good sushi isn’t fishy,” you say. “Good sushi doesn’t come on too strong.”

Your phone keeps buzzing in your pocket. The lawyer has been texting all week and is coming unglued from your not responding.

“Let’s send those girls drinks,” Lance says, nodding toward the end of the bar.

“We don’t send drinks.”

“Oh, right. Right, man! They should send us drinks.”

“If they want.”

“I was thinking about what you said. About transaction. At first I thought it was cynical, but I see what you meant. You meant if everything’s transactional, I’d better make sure I’m the one getting the better deal.”

That was not what you meant. You meant quit being so needy and accept reality, Lance. You meant learn to be enough for yourself.

When Lance goes to the bathroom, you check your phone and read a bit of the latest diatribe: Honestly I pity you. You think you’re teaching that guy to connect with women? You’re too much of a coward to connect with anyone! Blind leading the blind! Guess what? No one looks back on life and thinks “I’m glad I was alone.”

You power your phone down, loosen your tie, wipe your sweaty palms on your napkin.

On his way back from the bathroom, Lance approaches the women he wanted to send drinks to. You read the women’s body language, cringe at the glances they exchange.

But maybe you’re missing something.

This is what’s plagued you since that night at the steakhouse—the unshakeable sense that you’re missing something.