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the suggestion before, he ventured to say, “Why don’t you try
online dating again?”
    “That’s just a bunch of emails back and forth,” Bill
grumbled with disdain, “that tapers off to nothing. Once I did meet someone
through a dating site. But she didn’t look anything like her pictures. She must
have been ten years older than her photos. At least ten years older. I didn’t
recognize her at all in person.”
    Stan had heard that story before. “I read that seventy-five
percent of people over the age of forty-five find dates online,” he remarked.
    “Don’t remind me of my age. You know I don’t like that.
How’s your food?” Bill’s plate was picked clean of every rice grain, and he was
acting restless.
    “OK,” Stan replied. “It’s edible. It’s worth five dollars,
maybe even six dollars.” Despite his effort to consume quickly, he had eaten
only half of his lunch. He kept on eating. “I think you should try online
dating again,” he said.
    Bill didn’t like the idea. When he had tried it before, he
had received no responses from most women he had emailed. This was probably
because they had the most beautiful pictures he could find, and they were all
much younger than him. But still the results had been very disappointing, and
he wasn’t eager to be ignored by more women. The old computer he owned also made
online dating very tiresome, because it operated so slowly and often froze.
When that happened, his passion for finding someone was interrupted, and it
didn’t always return after rebooting. However, Bill knew that Stan was trying
to be helpful, and he had heard of happy couples, who had met online, so he replied without any enthusiasm, “Maybe I will. I know
Linda is doing it. Her profile says she only wants to meet guys making at least
twice what I do.”
    “You’ll find someone before she will,” Stan assured him.
“Just say you’ll be glad to hear from any woman, even someone earning nothing
at all and loaded with debt. You’ll have women falling all over you.” Stan
laughed loudly at his joke, while Bill grimaced. Bill then switched the
conversation topic and inquired about Stan’s children. They talked about the
kids and other less personal things, before returning to their offices for the
afternoon.

 

Chapter 5

 
 
    On the way back to his office, Bill pondered his dating
situation with all the honesty he could muster.
    When he was still a teenager, he had begun to date. Since
then he had never been without a steady girlfriend for more than a couple of
weeks, but now the road of relationships he had traveled seemed to have come to
an end. With Linda, he felt he had left the paved road of his past, as bumpy
and swerving as that had become, for a narrow, rocky, dirty byway, where he had
been stuck in the mud again and again and nearly shaken to pieces. Now a path
for two-person vehicles had entirely disappeared, and he was on foot in a
wilderness where he did not know in which direction to go to reach a road
again. He felt lost and alone, but he had sense enough to know that turning
around and looking for Linda was not the way forward.
    He needed to meet new women. That was a certainty. But as he
looked around on the crowded sidewalks of Midtown, where many women were
passing, none of whom caught his eye, he said to
himself, “They have to be the type for me.” Bill was trying to be honest with himself . Although he was no Adonis, he thought that his
happiness depended on finding an Aphrodite. Linda, his ex-wife, and all the
women he had dated had been remarkably good-looking and much younger. They were
the type of women that other men would stop and stare at. That was the reason
he had dated them. No matter how much inner beauty a woman possessed, unless
she had that something extra on the outside, a young extra something, Bill sighed, she wasn’t meant for him. His ideal woman, he thought, would have the kindness,
generosity, and patience of a saint. And she would