types

The presence of a man’s hands on your body, when you’re paying him, doesn’t necessarily mean anything. No matter how young and attractive you are, and no matter how young and attractive he is, it is still a business transaction. I should have been somewhat aroused by the experience, but I wasn’t. Is it the medication? Or the fact that the encounter was costing me $65 and therefore could not be sexual lest my subconscious mind were to feel like a john? Did he get an erection, or part of one, seeing me, touching me, like that?

His name was Liam, and he was incredible. He is, according to Marie, “really hot”; that is not how I would describe him when I first saw him. Not my type, I thought.

He talks all through the massage; our conversation was almost entirely natural. We touched on matters that could have been risqué: racism, fate, and foreign policy, but we talked only in the way people talk when they’re not interested in having a serious conversation. They could have a serious conversation, if one party wasn’t naked and the other wasn’t getting paid to touch her, but instead they simply imply intelligence and wisdom.

I suspect he saw my breasts, some pubic hair, and two stray hairs on my leg I somehow missed in my last shave. I hope his sight of the first redeems the possibly disgust he may have felt upon seeing the latter two, but I don’t know, and don’t really care.

As I’m cooking some spaghettini alfredo for dinner, it occurs to me that Liam is the Liam in the pictures Marie sent me, in a joking attempt to show me all the hot friends her "boyfriend" could set me up with at some point in the future.

See, this began about one year ago. Marie and I, acquaintances, officially became friends about a year ago. At this time, Marie also signed up for a fake identity on a local free internet dating site, and became acquainted with several men. It was all kind of a joke thing on her end, but there was one guy she really had a thing for, after a while, called Nick. Nick and Marie started e-mailing constantly, and chatting, though Marie was never forthright with him regarding her name, age, or physical appearance. As in, she lied about these things to him.

Scared to confess that their cyber relationship was predicated on multiple lies, Marie was certain she would never meet Nick.

Then she goes to Sweden, for school, in January. She comes clean with Nick about her identity, and sends him pictures etc. He claims to not care, given that he is so in love with “the real her.” Nick is a late-20s soon-to-be-divorced man with an 8-year-old daughter. Marie believes that she and Nick are in love.

Things are pretty serious between them now, as far as cyber relations go. They chat online for an average of six hours a day, and usually talk an hour or so by phone daily as well. They have cyber and phone sex regularly. I’m extremely worried for Marie. She’s, for all intents and purposes, my best friend. She’s never been in a serious relationship before and, though Nick is fairly physically attractive, he’s not very well-off, may or may not be even remotely intelligent, and seems to have poor judgment in the ladies department, given the fact that he’d been married for, like, 6 months when they decided to get a divorce. This implies that he either did not know himself, or the woman he was marrying, or both, before entering marriage. Anyway. You don’t want to hear my antiquated views on marriage, but this whole divorce/8-yr-old thing rubs me the wrong way.

So Nick’s best friend is Liam, who had his unbelievably strong hands all over me (except, regrettably, my feet. Oh well). When I relay the experience to Marie, she quickly informs me that not only is Liam not-single, but he’s a “dog.” Apparently he makes regular trips out of province to get laid by women who would have no possible connexion to his girlfriend. Yeah.

Anyway, this is 3rd-hand information (Liam tells Nick, who tells Marie, who tells me) so I’m not putting too much stock in it but either way, you know, he’s not really my type anyway.

My type is Jean, a teacher at the school I teach at who is unbearably gorgeous and funny and just-a-bit-not-too-much-just-enough dark (personality-wise, that is). He has a thick French accent—normally I dislike all accents, but on him it sounds terribly awesome—and a girl-friend he’s been dating for three years.

So this is a roundabout way of saying I have no news and no prospects. But Michael Ondaatje has a new novel out, and when I was reading it, I forgot it was Michael Ondaatje and thought I was reading Alice Munro, which was extremely pleasant. Life’s not so awful after all.