Gloria (aka: "Wastedhatwix")

Before driving hours in the middle of the night right to Gloria's house, after emailing her, IMing each other, and then talking on the phone, she wanted to be sure I knew she was bi-polar, fat, and smoked pot. I did. I knew. And I set off already dead tired following my Google Maps directions to what were the netherlands of New Jersey, hours and hours from home at two o'clock in the morning.

Her big house in the dark woods was filled with all sorts of bric-a-brac, the sort of pseudo-60's psychedelia that belonged either to a washed-out throwback or a fuck-it-I-like-it person who's brutally sure of themselves, their tastes, what they like. Gloria was 29, not sixties.

I was so exhausted I soon ended up in her bed, just to lie there. It was the place to talk. She kissed me a little, but I wasn't into it. She was just too big, and I was scared anyway. I mean, it would have been weird for me to have sex with a really large Chinese woman. It would certainly have been a first for me. But, in addition to that, and my exhaustion, the entire trip felt as though I were in an intellectual headlock with someone no less capable of liking being put in one herself.

Gloria had the homecourt advantage and I had nowhere else to go. It was like a fiendish story I'd read years back by Pär Lagerkvist about a fat farmer's wife who seduced a man and who later, having run past his wits' end, jumped into the revolving millwheel the next morning while toothlessly, arms folded like loaves, she and her husband above the roar and the din of the millwheel turning from the water and the force of the stream, watched with mirth and laughter as the man was bashed to death by the vanes.

After my drive, I saw there was nowhere else to go. I had been physically too exhausted to move. But I was conscious enough to feel that if something went wrong, I was a dead man. So, the last thing that I could let happen was for my pants to be off. For surely, if I were not aroused by Gloria, I had to be prepared to die.

My paranoia abated when I left her bed, following her suggestion, to sleep on a twin mattress in the guest room. When the next day came, I had to stay. I could not just run. That was still too dangerous. I had to create the aura of my feeling comfortable and at home.

I learned, while I drank orange juice and she got high, that Gloria had not changed her house a bit since her divorce had been finalized. The dishes in the sink hadn't been washed in long time. She told me to guess when. I figured two weeks, three. It was a year ago, she let me know.

I didn't feel she was either lugubrious or stuck. She actually had a kind of psychotic brilliance, and she was disappointed with my own. She'd expected a much edgier aggressive incandescent man. When I feel threatened, however, I tend to get calm and almost easy-going. I adopt a sort of homespun, offhand demeanor that belies my fear. This way I don't threaten my enemy, which of course is the point. I don't endanger myself, and adopt a mien that lets me see full circle what is going on around me. I do not climb into a fox hole.

She cried, wept, when she started washing her dishes. It was a start, and we both knew it.

I thought Gloria was going to smash my computer when she caught a glimpse of one of the women I was pursuing on Match. I had brought her into the ongoings of my project, but had tried to keep the screen from her view. When she saw the woman I was pining for was Asian, that was it. Gloria grew red and furious. She talked about how she was seen as ugly by Chinese. She wanted to know what was my thing with Chinese. My back was against the wall. Now, I was going to die.

To my surprise, she summed up my explanation as aesthetic and intellectual. Her fury, her potential wrath, was centered on the notion of men wanting the little docile submissive Asian female which she was not. She had turned her entire physical being against this stereotype. I felt spared. I felt lucky.

When we talked about my Match project, Gloria was not dazzled by my idea to make a book out of all my Match letters. She thought it was good. For her, it made sense. She was involved in a project, too, one that required a near daily upkeep of her profile, changes she made to it, and a coterie of men who used it almost like a private service. She wanted to develop programs, using algorithms, to make the whole thing interactive. As a computer programmer, she wanted to apply to Match math the way I had applied the word.

We had some sympathetic overlaps. Pot, alcohol, a bottle of meds, and an atomizer next to her couch in the solarium made Gloria's home seem like a place where wrong things could easily happen, where they could go bad fast. She was attracted to my claim in my first email to her of my being three standard deviations out there. I'm sure she really was.

When I gave her a hug goodbye, and felt her body against mine a moment, I felt like Odysseus having escaped Circe's hut, only more narrowly: he had help and outside information and shipmates; I was in the deep woods of New Jersey on my own with a silver car.