the matchup: Love’s Labor’s Lost

by Abigail Pickus
Special To The Jewish Week

‘What are you looking for in a man?” asked my new friend.

We were seated at a table by the window at Café Caffit.

Sticking to my dating motto — “Writers make good books but bad boyfriends” — I replied that I was looking for someone who loves the written word, but is not a writer. Someone with artistic sensibilities, but not an artist. Someone who is a Jew, but also a citizen of the world.

I didn’t really expect him to find me this man. After all, he’s a performer, not a miracle worker.

But I underestimated my new friend, a Jerusalemite who had only to turn his head slightly towards Emek Refaim street and survey his raw

material in the form of passersby.

“How about R?” he asked, nodding toward the flash of a baseball cap zipping by. “Nah,” I said, “I hate frat boys.”

My mother, far away in Chicago, was no doubt shuddering, seeing as she’s a tireless advocate for what she calls “keeping an open mind.”

But my insta-judgment, er instincts, were correct.

“On second thought, R’s not right for you. He’s a total player,” said my friend.
Then another flash, this one with a mass of longish, curly hair. My new friend’s eyes widened. “What about A? He teaches English literature at the university. You two can geek out over books.”

“Yes,” I said. And then more adamantly, “Yes!”

It turns out A is a long-haired hippie fueled by an endless supply of good cheer and what he calls “American folk.” Which is to say, despite having lived 40 of his 42 years in Jerusalem, he managed to amass an encyclopedic knowledge of American folk music, including an old favorite of mine, a peculiar little trio from the ’80s called The Roches.

How funny life is, I thought on our first date. To be in Jerusalem in 2009 in a rickety little café in Nachlaot, to be 37 years old and searching for love, to be talking to an Israeli who taught himself to read English with “Catcher in the Rye” and who now teaches courses in Shakespeare at the university.

It seems A had read not just classical literature but also Freud and John Ruskin and a French writer named Jean Genet, whose name, when said fast and with the hint of an Israeli accent, sounds eerily like JonBenet, the first name of that poor little beauty queen who was killed without a trace. Which is another way of saying I’ve never read Genet or Goethe’s “Faust,” for that matter.

What I’m getting at is an Israeli had out-read me in English (and French and German) literature and philosophy!

Or what I’m really getting at is that we connected somehow, which, as anyone navigating single life will tell you, is no small feat.

The only thing that gave me pause was the fact that after a decade in graduate school, A was still working on his master’s degree. The consensus seemed to be that this is very Israeli, but whether someone on the 100-year-track towards his Ph.D. would fly with this bourgeois American remained to be seen.

Still, there was much I liked in A. His sudden burst of laughter, for one, that erupted like thunder, shaking the ground a bit in its wake. I also liked how he hopped around my apartment like an energetic little monkey, full of glee, and how he took my hand when we were sitting on the couch, talking and talking and talking. I liked how he looked at me as if he were really taking me in, without swallowing me whole. That he saw me and rejoiced. That he saw me and still let me be me.

But as quickly as it began, it unraveled.

“Have your feelings for me changed?” I asked after he cancelled plans three times in a row.

At first it was because he had to take his car in to be repaired. But by the third cancellation I no longer understood, especially in tiny Jerusalem, especially when the two of us lived 10 minutes walking distance from each other.

“No,” he assured me, “but we are moving too fast.” He didn’t want to explain over the phone and insisted we make another date to talk in person. But the next day, right before our date, he cancelled again with barely an apology. He sounded distant and withdrawn and exhausted.

By the time we spoke on the phone a few days later, I officially ended what had already come to a quiet, inevitable end. A didn’t seem surprised and only said “OK” before saying goodbye.

As I hung up, my heart full of sadness, I wondered when I’m supposed to stick something out and when I’m smart to move on.

Glancing upwards I asked for a little guidance. “Don’t forget about your bespectacled, bewildered friend,” I said, making my way through winding alleyways towards the shuk.

Abigail Pickus is based in Israel.

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