A Round-Heeled Woman Read Free Page B

“Blue-eyed female college grad, 49,
5’6’’, seeks nonsmoker, Jewish, male college grad to share, from concerts to
museum openings.”
Often, while I was reading the ads, my attention would wander to vacation rentals and I would fantasize about
“Greenwich Village. 1 BR plus study. Lg. music room, library,
balcony. $4500/month.”
Oh, well. Now, however, I was serious about becoming an advertiser of myself. Now, for I was sure smart people answered these ads, I wanted somebody to answer me. I wanted touching and talking and I wanted it sooner, not later—now, not tomorrow. For I was about to turn sixty-seven.
    $4.55 a word, the
Review
charged. This called for Aristotelian discipline. It would have to be short. It would have to have purpose and an understanding of audience. Honed to its essence, I had to do it. The ad in my head—“Before I turn 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like”— would that be enough? Could I leave out Trollope? Without Trollope, the ad would cost $91 if they didn’t count dashes, $100 if they did. With Trollope, $136.50! Shouldn’t I specify Bay Area? That would cost two words more. Did they take Visa?
    Behind me, the schizophrenic in his red beret roamed the young people’s reading section, spinning the carousels and swearing at the books as they spun. “Lousy fuckers, no hitting the sky.” The beret, torn and damp from the rain, fell to one side of his head as he continued his tirade. I knew better than to shush him. Once, outside the library, when I was on my way home carrying a bag of groceries, he came at me from down the street, his red beret bright as a signal light, cursing and yelling, “Spare change?” He saw the baguette sticking out of my grocery bag, stuck his face into mine, his eyes, blazing with fury, and bellowed, “How about a little bread? Can you spare a little bread?” I walked quickly on by, trying to decide whether to use the special number the police had given the residents of my neighborhood. “If any of these street people give you trouble, call us. We’ll be there immediately,” they promised at a neighborhood meeting. I had never used that number, nor had any neighbor I knew. The people in my neighborhood feel guilty enough keeping their porch lights on all night every night, to discourage the homeless from sleeping there. We all feel guilty and helpless and angry at the disgrace heaped upon our heads by a government—local, state, national—that chooses to ignore the poor and the sick. Is it Thoreau who said the measure of a society is the care it takes of those unable to care for themselves? Our measure is very low.
    In the library, I put my hands over my ears and kept reading
.
“DWF seeks intelligent, sexy, witty, emotionally available, erotically confident, professional man . . .”
She doesn’t want much. I wondered what she’d settle for; how old is she—
“early sixties.”
She’ll settle.
“SWF seeks that special idyll with a literate, caring . . . ”
Nonsense. I counted the words: 34, at $4.55 a word—that ad cost $154.70! It seemed to me that all the ads but mine played around with the truth:
“long walks along the beach . . . love of nature . . . opera . . .”
Somewhere I read that personal ads projected what the writers of them would like to be, not what they were: men’s ads included the out-of-doors; women’s, fireside coziness. It seemed to me that men wanted a way out, women a way in. It also seemed to me that women placed ads, men answered them. In the issue before me, twenty-four of the thirty-two ads were placed by women. What does that mean? Probably not much. Just that women have to work harder to get the attention of men than men do to attract women. It also reflects the fact that there are just more of us than there are men. We continue to compete with one