Love Sick by Frances Kuffel

Author:Frances Kuffel
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-06-02T21:00:00+00:00

Seven

Each breeding season, male humpback whales sing a new tune, which might incorporate bits of last season’s melodies or be new releases. These new songs pass from whale to whale for four thousand miles.

Any chronicler of dating is presented with a challenge in that good dates are generally alike. It is unhappy dating that, as Tolstoy says of families, is unique in its unhappiness and therefore lends itself to storytelling. So far, I’d been courted by jerks, freaks, fundamentalists and criminals, but my luck was about to run out. I would come to look back on my early summer’s abortive tries with nostalgia. Not only were they excellent practitioners of their weirdness, but they had no desire to pit their weirdness against mine.

Using a date to play Jeopardy! is exhausting.

• • •

One morning, after I had harvested my crops and collected rents on my Facebook games, thereby keeping up my position in the higher ranks of my Farm and City friends, I found myself looking for more ways to put off marking forty essays. I decided to weed out my email accounts and landed at my dating inbox. There wasn’t time to troll through all the exciting news (!) each site had to offer about tips, hot dates, special deals, psychological insights and the latest success stories, so I deleted steadily until I got to “You have a new message.”

The first paper on my pile was about gangsta rap.

I opened the message with a micro-prayer that it would make me forget that the second essay was on the controversy over the balls used in the World Cup.

“Looking for Lou” was—har-har—named Lou, DWM, no children. He wrote that he was a junior high math teacher and had just spent a month bicycling around Ireland. He picked up on my statement that my hobbies include what I call “travel porn.” “I definitely need to know more about that!”

I quickly typed a note about my compulsion to plan trips to places on my bucket list, even though I had neither money nor time to take them. I sent it, sighed and went back to essays.

By the time I worked my way through a scramble of verb tenses, Lou wrote back that he was boning up on elliptic functions for a summer course he was taking and finishing off a cold key lime soufflé from a dinner party he’d had the night before; did I want to have dinner in the Heights that evening?

• • •

Lou was so tall and skinny that he made me think of Ichabod Crane. I laughed as I waited for the light to change, and I watched his smile widen. He didn’t know that I was thinking that, at five foot eight, I’m used to wearing flats on first dates. I could have worn stilts that night.

My tummy fluppered. Why does one person respond to another? Was it because I’d Googled elliptic functions and found a quote from a nineteenth-century mathematician, “Invert, always invert”? and it had reminded me of E.

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