Swim

“Sorry I stood you up,” Gary said. “Something suddenly came up. I could meet you after work any night this week, or if you’re free we could hook up tomorrow.”
    I stared at the message for a while. Maybe Lonelyguy was all there was for girls like me. Girls like Taryn, the gorgeous, confident ones, got the pick of the litter; girls like me got to choose among the also-rans and wannabes, the humor-impaired pistachio-eaters who’d think they were doing us a big favor by dating us and expect a lifetime of gratitude, not to mention oral sex, as recompense.
    I thought of Gary in the coffee shop, all shaving cuts and eagerness, without any of Robert’s edge, his black, cutting humor, and I wrote, “What occurs to me after a careful reading of your profile is that you were right. Sorry to be blunt, but there’s very little here to distinguish you from any other guy your age. Do you have any hobbies? Pets? Passions? Talents? Anything?”
    I sent it before I could reconsider. It was mean, I knew, but I was feeling like my heart had been shredded after my grand-mother had accused me of hiding, of burying myself underwater and failing to make her happy before she died. If inflicting some of my misery onto Lonelyguy meant I’d be able to sleep, I wouldn’t hesitate.
    His reply arrived in my in-box five minutes later. “Can juggle a little. Can bake cookies. Have read every book Raymond Carver and Russell Banks have ever written. No pets, though. Should I get one?”
    Christ. I typed, “I think getting a pet so you can pick up girls online is tantamount to animal abuse. PS: Please add reading stuff to profile. Chicks dig books.”
    “Will do,” he wrote back almost instantly. “Re: pickup pet. I’d give it a good home and feed it that organic stuff they sell at Whole Foods. What do chicks dig? Cats? Dogs? Ferrets?”
    “No idea,” I typed back. I was wondering how much I could pour from Grandma’s dusty bottle of Baileys without her noticing and thinking that, at my age, it was probably time for me to start buying my own nightcaps.
    “Meet me at the valet parking stand at the Beverly Center at three o’clock tomorrow afternoon to discuss,” he wrote. “It can be a consult. I will pay.”
    “Fair enough,” I murmured, clicking on the X in the corner of his message and sending it to electronic oblivion.
    “No. I won’t do it,” I said, and shook my head, refusing to move another inch closer to the pet-shop windows that overlooked the fourth floor of the Beverly Center shopping mall. “No, no, no. I’m not going in there, and you are not buying a pickup pet from a puppy mill.”
    “Lot of p’ s in that sentence,” said Gary, pulling a bag of nuts from a plastic bag looped over his wrist. “Pistachio?”
    I looked in the bag. “Those are cashews.”
    “Yes, but pistachios sounded funnier.” He bent downand peered through the glass. A skinny Chihuahua looked out at us with wet brown eyes and wagged its thin tail hopefully.
    I’d showed up at the Beverly Center parking stand at the appointed hour and found Lonelyguy waiting. I’d allowed him to steer me toward the escalators, then up to the fourth floor, where, on the way to the pet shop, he’d asked whether I’d ever done any online dating myself.
    “No,” I said. “Maybe some day. But I just got out of this long-term thing...”
    He nodded sympathetically. “Prison?”
    “A long-term relationship,” I clarified. Okay, not technically true, but how was he going to know that? “Long-term relationship” definitely sounded better than “one misguided drunken blow job, given to a guy who eloped to Puerto Vallarta with Taryn Montaine two days later.” The Chihuahua yawned and curled up on its side in a nest of shredded newspaper with its back to me. Fabulous. My pathetic excuse for a love life wasn’t even interesting to lesser species.
    “I’ve got a date tonight,” he said.
    “Well, that was fast,” I replied, feeling an unpleasant twinge of emotion I couldn’t name.
    “Yep. I put a new picture up and added the stuff about the writers, and the cookies, and I got five responses by noon, and tonight I am seeing”—he stared at the shopping-mall ceiling, clicking his tongue against the roof of his mouth—“a d-girl named Dana.”
    “Well, good,” I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. “That’s great!”
    “I could use some wardrobe advice. What do you think?”
    I studied his outfit. From its glass enclosure, the dog