Eight-Minute Man

by Shirley Goldberg, ed. by James Hanna

William Warby

Vincent crouches on the toilet seat in The Thinker position. He is in the men’s room of a restaurant whose name he has forgotten, the smell of disinfectant strangely more reassuring than being out there.

Out there, seated at little numbered café tables, women await him for this serious business called Eight Minute Dating. Eight Minute Dating, LLC. Everyone has ten opportunities, each lasting eight minutes, to meet and impress. Eight minutes to make the sale.

The door swings open as someone enters the men’s room. For a moment, Vincent is sure he’ll throw in the towel, give up the ghost, wave the white flag. Before his mind can rattle off more clichés, the sound of urine splashing off the sides of the urinal gives him pause. The toilet provides the perfect place to contemplate how passivity has failed him. Passivity was his go-to response to his ex wife’s badgering, designed to annoy her and amuse him. Oh, the games we play, the games we play.

He fingers his name tag: Vincent. Wordsmithy, loves movies, books, and a belly laugh.

​The queasiness starts, a reminder his stomach is not the iron organ of the old days. And this eight minute contrived way to meet women is doing a job on his head and gut simultaneously. A comfortable way to meet face-to-face, went the website rhetoric.

“Comfortable my ass,” mutters Vincent on the toilet.

He’s taken refuge in the toilet stall because he needs an interrogation break. With barely a hello, one woman after another demanded to know what he did, if he owned or rented, and why he was divorced — all with an air of entitlement and a flick of overstyled hair, pen ready to cross him off, move on to the next. Because of this, Vincent approached each table warily, bearing an invisible wound, well, more of an abrasion.

As he approached his sixth table, a solid woman in a flowery puff of a blouse held up her index finger, the classic wait-a-second signal. Beefy thumbs worked her cell for a full sixty-three seconds of texting as he stood waiting, fingers laced.

When she finished and looked up, Vincent extended his hand. In return, she offered the old fish shake, allowing him the sight of underarm flesh, alive and wriggling. First impressions are made in the first few seconds galloped through his head from an article on speed dating.

Her eyes settled on his name tag. “Hi Vinnie. How are you?” She smiled, and he noticed with a start the white mound in the middle of her chin, a zit ready to pop.

He concentrated on her smile. “Vincent. I never was a Vinnie.”

“All righty then.” She leaned closer to squint at his tag. “What’s a wordsmithy?”

Vincent sat for a few beats, thoughts jumbled like dust bunnies.

​“Are you looking for a long-term relationship?” she asked. “I have to be honest. I’m not here to waste time.” Her eyes dropped to her notepad and Vincent eyeballed her notes, curious about his competition despite a lack of interest. “I’m tired of serial daters and men who push for sex. Friends first, I say. Don’t you agree?”

Although her look begged a serious response, Vincent had no opinions on the subject. “I don’t disagree,” he stammered.

“Dating should be fun,” she said.

He nodded, understanding this wisdom, his mind on the early years of his marriage, when the word “fun” described everything he and his wife did together. Summer travel to a few bed and breakfasts. A naturist habitat where they’d stripped in the woods, wearing hiking boots and leaving their shorts and shirts and underwear on a tree branch. They’d made love behind a boulder on a pile of leaves, where Vincent had volunteered to be on the bottom, a gallant gesture he was proud of, aware of the benefit of having her on top where he could watch her humping, breasts swinging like chandeliers.

In those days she cooked perfect homey dinners served on chic dinnerware, surrounded by friends and colleagues.

After their daughter Percy went away to college, and the years passed, less and less happened between them. One evening, his wife asked him to occupy the guest bedroom.​

​Vincent jerked his mind from this unsettling memory, watched the woman scrawl notes.

When he stretched his neck for a peek, she blocked his view with a curved palm, and so Vincent, unwilling to wait for the bell to toll, scurried to the men’s room.

​Emerging from his toilet break, Vincent surveys the men and women at their little tables. He squints in the low light and everyone becomes more attractive. For this occasion, Vincent’s hair is styled in a George Clooney, his friend Marlene’s idea. The Clooney suggests an attitude of nonchalance that he fakes. Ever since his recent birthday — he turned sixty a week after the two-year anniversary of his divorce — he’s been edgy.

Sixty has grown large in his mind and he can’t get rid of the number, thinking, wondering if everyone he has ever known sees a difference. Did you know Vincent is sixty? Is he that old? It is as if he has an old fashioned fluorescent light, the kind found in dark, dank basements, illuminating this factoid for all to see.

Marlene calls him a paranoid fool.

​Everyone rises with the ringing bell and Vincent decides to put his best toe forward. He is a lover of words, well considered words written by thoughtful writers who have chosen deliberately, the way Vincent chose the title of the Love to Hate Grammar book. A book that has legs, written and reissued twice in twelve years and published in thirteen countries. The very book that allowed Vincent to put a substantial down payment on a house with hardwood floors and two fireplaces after his divorce, and to send Percy to Florence for Italian immersion. Yes, all the living inside his head has been good to Vincent, full professor at a significant university in New Haven.

Something on the floor catches his attention: a dark splotch three inches from his shoe. Angst crawls up his spine, beginning at his tailbone. I have worn the wrong shoes. I have no cool shoes, no cool shoes, and I should not have worn these trousers because… He can feel the wedgie in his ass-crack when he looks down at an impossibly pretty blonde woman who looks up expectantly, her smile all for him. Amber. His kidneys leap.

His friend Marlene says older guys with hair are rare exotic creatures, as in-demand on the dating market as men who can talk about their feelings, or middle-aged guys with flat stomachs and future pensions that include lifelong medical insurance. It’s true that Vincent is hair-blessed; waves spill across his forehead, a smidgen of gray at the sides. “Perfecto hair,” Marlene called it during one of their many dating discussions. “That’s what you’ve got. You give good head Vincent.” She laughed, enjoying her own wit.

Whereas he winced, achingly aware of his limitations. Three painful meets with women who didn’t get him, a resulting dislike of internet dating, and a growing dependence on Marlene.

Marlene, no spring pullet herself, has been dating for almost five years, ever since her marriage disintegrated. It is Marlene’s fault that he is partaking of this activity.

“A wordsmithy,” pretty Amber trills, shaking him out of his reverie. “Movies, books, and a good belly laugh. Cute.”

“What?” he says. “Oh, yes, you’re reading my tag.” She must be ten years younger, with the ease and confidence of a woman who’s enjoyed success in the meeting men department.

This thought does not please him.

“What sorts of movies are you into?” she asks.

“Into?” He hesitates, embarrassed at this inability to respond. He wants to sound intelligent, clever, deserving of this golden woman with well-formed breasts. “Well, I’m into a few directors.”

“You’ve never done this before, have you?” she says.

“God no,” he answers. It is the most honest thing he has said all night.

“Look, relax. It’s not so bad.” She leans forward, her chin thrust out. “At the very least, you’ll take a name or two, meet a few women. It’ll be fine.”

He looks around the room at couples leaning in to whisper, the smiles over the white tablecloths, a single rose in a blue vase at each table. He considers the possibility that Amber will choose him, then discards the idea. Amber will collect plenty of numbers; she is mistress of this game. Whereas he cannot relax. Nothing will be fine and no one will choose him. He has come to the wrong place. What he craves will not appear at a café table in eight minutes.

What did Marlene say last night when browbeating him to attend this thing? Something about intentions being everything. What does that mean? Is it the same as It’s the thought that counts? The thought doesn’t count any more than words count. As much as he loves words, they are nothing without actions behind them; they sit like a row of empty flower pots on a windowsill.

The bell rings and Vincent nods goodbye to Amber. A short dumpish man wearing an obvious hairpiece replaces him at her table. Vincent wants the real thing. The real thing will evolve slowly, imperfectly, and it will take time, far more than a stinkin’ eight minutes.

His feet drag as he makes his way to the next table. Instead of sitting, he pivots and heads for the men’s room where he enters a stall and removes his trousers. Balling up the offending tight, white article, he pulls his trousers back up and tosses the underpants into a trash bin. He pauses in front of the mirror, relieved his trousers are on the baggy side. It’s important to see this thing through, if only to laugh with Marlene during their next debriefing.

Thank God for Marlene. After all, on whose sofa bed did he end up the evening his wife announced her desire for a divorce in the middle of their French bistro dinner, right before the salad?

“You’re happy with so little, Vincent,” his wife had said, her eyes glinting a strange pinkish red. “I want more.”

Discontent was exhausting. Yah, a divorce. Years of misery evaporated as he lurched out of the narrow Bistro seat and drove off, leaving his wife to pay and find her way home. At the red light, he switched on a rock station, blasted the volume, then peeled away, something he hadn’t done in thirty years. Or ever.

Emerging from the men’s room, wedgie free, Vincent sprints to the last table with renewed courage. This is it. The last, at last. A plumpish woman with an angular face and dark hair down to her shoulders awaits him. Her arms are crossed and she barely cracks a smile as she nods and mumbles a hello.

“Hi,” says Vincent, falling into the seat. The single rose in the blue vase stares at him. He places it carefully at his feet.

“So, how’s it going for you?” she asks.

“Oh. As well as can be expected. I suppose.”

“And what exactly did you expect?” she asks. Vincent blinks, wonders if she is trying to be funny. “Not much. Not much at all.”

“Great expectations,” she says deadpan. “Me too.”

He looks at her tag. Susan. Likes to laugh, dance, and read. Her name tag is pinned to her right breast, a finer breast than blonde Amber’s breast. It is a more pert breast. Is perter a word? It is now. He throws up his hands. “A friend of mine told me something about dating. In the first thirty minutes of meeting someone, you are projecting your real self because you don’t know the other person well enough to fake it.”

“Ahh, you’re an analyzer,” says Susan.

“Maybe it’s true also of the first eight minutes,” Vincent says.

They sit, saying nothing, looking at one another as though floating on a private planet. A line will not impress this woman, because he believes what Marlene told him, believes it because it suits him and also frees him completely. They have time, infinite minutes to know one another, not eight brief minutes. The others are trying too hard, flailing to connect. As the buzz fades into the background, Vincent leans back in his chair and squints at Susan. She looks really good from this narrowed view; he watches her relax, uncross her arms and lean back, matching his posture.

“I hate this,” he whispers. “Positively hate this. Do you hate this as much as I do? I hope so, I really really hope so.”

She bursts out laughing. She bends at the waist, her arms raised, and her laugh is like a long, drawn out rumble, low and then higher, resounding off the ceiling and then the walls, and then her laugh hits him and he laughs too, unaware that all the talking at the café tables has stopped. Everyone stares and then the buzz begins again, a gradual buzz, and Vincent is thinking now, now, now. Susan and he should make a run for it, out the door, but does he dare? Would he grab her hand and would she follow? Would he? Would she? Would she?

His arm has a mind of its own as it slides across the table to where Susan’s arm, resting at the edge, moves toward his.

---

Shirley Goldberg finds the humor in what makes people click. Or not. Her forthcoming novel, Middle Ageish, is a how-to guide to Internet dating — or how not to. She has lived in Paris, Casablanca, and Crete, and now makes her home in Sarasota, Florida. This is her first published story.