As Adam stood up, Keri asked, “Are you mad?”
“No, I just need to get going. I have three old girlfriends I want to stalk before midnight. That’s a lot of jacking off to do in the next two hours,” he said sarcastically, as he looked at his watch. “Obviously, you realize this date is over, right?”
“Will you at least give me a ride home?”
“Hey, just because I’m a pervert doesn’t mean I’m not a gentleman.”
After Adam dropped Keri off, he began to think for the first time that it was all payback for the years of reckless dating. From the time he’d gotten rid of the glasses and braces, getting women was never a problem; the problem was finding ones he liked. He had dated and fooled around a lot. But now he was almost 32, and he had never been in love. To make matters worse, there wasn’t one woman he had ever dated whom he regretted losing. It sucked.
Was Adam even capable of being in love? The words of the nurse at Georgetown Law School who gave him his weekly allergy shots now seemed prophetic. During law school, Adam had the blessing and the curse of having the prettiest, most popular, smartest law co-ed, Barbie Bettsman, head-over-heals in love with him. When dignitaries came to visit the school, Barbie was the one the administration picked to escort them. She was model tall, with smartly cut shoulder length blonde hair, sea blue eyes, and perfect white teeth. During one of Adam’s visits to the nurse, she asked him when he planned to get engaged to Barbie. When Adam said that she wasn’t “it” for him, the nurse snapped, “Maybe you’re not capable of being in love.”
Had the nurse nailed it? Adam still clung to the hope that the ability to fall in love was within him.
Well, there was Zoë. No one had ever lived up to her. Maybe he was glamorizing an infatuation into something more than it was, but Adam was waiting for that feeling again. Zoë and Adam spent several summers working together at overnight camp but hadn’t seen each other in nearly 10 years. Had they lived in the same city, something might have evolved. But she lived in Canada, and he was in Minnesota, and naturally they drifted apart. Adam had no regrets about Zoë. He believed their paths were meant to intersect at a certain time, and that was that. At 15, no one dared to call it love, but now Adam was convinced that it was. He could still recall in excruciating detail the day they met at the synagogue’s youth conference.
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