A few months ago I emailed a woman who I thought was very pretty. She was blonde and wore scarves. In one picture she was dancing in a turquoise dress, twirling towards the camera with a grin, her face flushed and ruddy. She reminded me of Meryl Streep, simultaneously firm and fragile, lovely and unapologetic.
She gave me her number and asked me to call her a few days later. I called her one night as I was leaving work, walking through the empty parking lot in the cold air. When she answered her voice sounded completely different from the impression I had gotten from her pictures. It was husky and insulated, an octave below my own nasally drone. She sounded like a cartoon character; an some exaggerated reduction borrowed from a Saturday Night Live sketch.
I felt a touch of giddiness pressing her number into my phone. I was ready to wash off the lingering touch of office lights and cubicle beige with some flirty wordplay. Hearing her voice made all that hopeful suggestion feel painfully vapid and useless. Her voice was humorless and deliberate, like a Vice-Principal. I felt like we should have been talking about anthropology or bird migration. Whatever we had to talk about should have been weighty, not some conversational cotton candy meant to add a flicker of neon to an otherwise dry Tuesday night.
I like to imagine women I'm dating with shaved heads to see if I would still find them attractive. It's easy to create an insinuated image of who you want to be with fashion and body decoration, but absent all those outward vanities is there still an attraction? I am vain. I stare at myself in the mirror daily. When I go to the bathroom at work, I almost always spend an extra thirty seconds looking into my own eyes in the mirror. I am still surprised by how many particular details there are in my own appearance that I have almost no connection with.
The body is always the first thing I'm attracted to, usually the face. I recall conversations with women I've been attracted to, spending minutes barely listening, stealing the details of their bodies. The soft wrinkles of the lips, a freckled eyelid, the bony ridges of the sternum, the bawdy smell of their breath caught in between perfume and lip gloss. I've seen that same look returned to me. Running my mouth off about some impassioned idea while a woman stares at my glasses or jawline, trying to listen while manically twisting her hair or fiddling with a shirt.
It feels like I'm with a stranger in moments like these. I can feel my body like some opaque box covering up the truer parts inside. It's like waking up in the morning with my arm twisted unnaturally under my neck. The circulation is cut off and the limb is dead weight, immobile, dangling from the rest of my body like a helpless anchor. When there's nothing else to hold onto, the body is the easiest thing to reach for, to convince yourself that there's a reason to hang on to someone.
I still liked the woman once I got over the shock of hearing her voice. We spoke for a few minutes, then agreed to talk later in the week to setup something for the weekend. She called me a few days later and left a voicemail. I called her back and left her a voicemail, and I've never heard from her since. Maybe it was the tinny sound of my voice.
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