Mark's Pages

August 5, 2003:

Shower. Friends' house, San Francisco, 1983. Your former lover and her new boyfriend. You've come to sleep on the couch and spend time with them both.

The bathroom door opens. Your former lover walks in, stops in the middle of the room, looks you up and down through tinted shower-glass with an appraising leer. Your jaw drops. Pleased with herself, turns on her heel, walks out, leaving the door open behind her.

You never visit again.

"Do you know a good singles' bar?"

Hotel back office, La Jolla, 1987. Gray-blonde desk clerk, fortyish, eyes muddy-looking after a lifetime of alcohol abuse. Leering.

Black-haired hotel manager, lanky, thirtyish, tight-lipped with displeasure. "I wouldn't be caught dead in a singles' bar," he says succinctly.

She's not ready to give up yet. Grasping for one of his hands she says, a little breathlessly, "You have such...long... fingers..."

Scowling he takes his hand back, resisting the urge to turn it to a fist. Fortunately for them both after a few more days she's caught with her hand in the till.

Birthday party, Marin County, December 2002. Large home, wood, skylights, trees. "Chakra been berry berry good to me..."

Mid-fiftyish gray-haired woman dyed blonde. Lies about her age, says she's ten years younger. With peculiar vain arrogance believes she gets away with it. Professional therapist. Throws you a towel in a room full of people you've never met before, saying, "Let's have a jacuzzi before dinner." Leering.

You decline as politely as possible. But that's the last time you've ever agreed to see her without several other friends present.

After a hike and a lunch and a couple of phone calls you wrote, "I'm not interested in continuing. Good luck and I hope you find someone you'll really like."

She responded with months of emails and phone messages describing her dreams and fantasies, implying you owed her something because her dreams and fantasies revolved around you.

Now reverse the genders. What word would you use to describe these experiences if they'd happened to a woman?