There was a new contestant on my Dating Game last week. Pablo. He’s like a slightly oversized munchkin, you want to just hug him. I want to emphasize that You would want to just hug him, I would want to roll him down the Yellow Brick Road and into a field of poppies and smother him with kisses. We had a great day together, first tea at Samovar, then walking out near the old Sutro Baths, then munching down the overpriced munchables at Louis’. He kissed me when he dropped me off, and I felt a really nice connection forming. Very easy-going, uncomplicated…
The next night he came over for dinner and a movie and after-the-first-date possibilities, and noticed a picture of my Foreign Correspondent. “Hey, do you know Blah Blah?” I answered yes, and immediately felt it coming, the moment I’d warned my Foreign Correspondent about during my several edicts of General Amnesty issued after the discovery of each successive indiscretion, the ones he wouldn’t tell me about and whom I warned him would eventually pop up. I felt no validation in having my long-held suspicions confirmed—yet again—just a profound sense of disappointment. I had tried so hard to create an atmosphere where honesty could flower, so sensitive to his issues and needs… but my own needs just kind of discarded. I couldn’t hide my disappointment. Plus Pablo and I had just watched the world end. In The Rapture, Mimi Rogers’ faith—and, let’s admit it, slight impatience to get to heaven—lead her to kill her child (who keeps begging, annoyingly, to go to heaven anyway, Pleeeeease mommy!). By the time He does come around—and it’s just like in the Bible, with the Four Horsemen and trumpets and stuff—after she’s killed her child and lost her husband (David Duchovny, in a senseless office killing), she’s so shaken by what she’s been put through, that she says No to God. She just couldn’t be with someone who could do that to her. The film ends with her alone, in darkness… forever.
I would have tried to work it out with God, told him how his behavior made me feel, see if he could change. We’d be friends for a while, but every once in a while I’d succumb to that deep voice and let him have his way with me, then we’d fall back into old patterns, Listen, God, I really just want to be friends, then he’d beg me over and over and over to stay and not leave him, that he could change, just give him once more chance…
So Pablo left, and then sent me a message saying he looked forward to being my platonic friend. This kind of annoyed me, that he couldn’t relate to what I was feeling, seeing red flags instead of potential. But what can you do? He feels what he feels. I suppose this told me more about him than I could have learned talking to him: that intimacy, real intimacy, that is, sharing what’s really going on, isn’t something that he can relate to or seems to be particularly interested in.
Giancarlo restored my faith in men in general, briefly, the following weekend, with a fabulous lunch at Camino, then a tour of the Julia Morgan-designed Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland. The columbarium is bathed in a rich golden Pre-Raphaelite light, the architecture a delightful early-modernist take on gothic themes, arrayed in a multi-level labyrinth, each room landscaped with flowers and babbling fountains. Giancarlo is a sweet man, really a treat to be around, but I can’t tell yet if there’s any heat there. He has adopted a visual style reminiscent of another time, a style that unfortunately for me conjures an image of the emasculated middle-aged man of early 60s TV sitcoms—more Ward Cleaver than Don Draper.
The Major is still around. I’ve made it clear that I’d like to just be friends, but every time we’re together I have so much fun and just want to have sex with him. In the movie of my life, we’d probably end up together. But we’d only have to spend 120 minutes together. Not being able to share Antonioni or Fassbinder with him makes it hard to imagine any real life-partner compatibility. I mean, he walked out on The Romantic Englishwoman—that kind of guy. I am very glad to have him in my life, though, as the corner that he occupies is a very sunny happy place to visit.