Live Fast Die Hot (22 page)

“It's like Tinder for hot people. Like, you have to be super-hot to be accepted…or Matthew Perry. We have plans.” She smirked proudly. “Remember when I was on that site Beautiful People and I met the Gyno?”

“Wait, that's your code name for him?”

“No. This guy really is my gyno. He's a smokehouse…and he has a big dick.”

“How do you know that?” I looked at her, concerned.

“It's unimportant. Anyway, online is basically the only way I date. I've given up trying to meet people in the real world. I just don't trust someone when I don't know right off the bat what mutual friends we have. It's creepy.”

Maybe Crystal was right. Maybe meeting people face-to-face was passé. But everyone I was friends with online was either a stranger or a celebrity French bulldog. Waylaid by a new prospect, Crystal forgot why she was mad at me and again started showing me pictures of her tits.

I looked back over at the mom in sweatpants, who was now packing up her things and stuffing John Candy into a thin, gauzy sling across her chest. Despite my best efforts to exude confidence and congeniality, I was being overlooked on the playground, the way I'd been my whole life. I'd always suspected the dearth of girlfriends in my childhood was a result of being the new girl in school or my dad buying me clothes from T.J.Maxx, but I wasn't any newer to parenthood than a lot of these bitches. Yes, my linen shirt might have been covered in holes, but I still overpaid for it at Fred Segal.
What was I doing wrong?

That night, Jason and I did what all couples do once their kids are in bed: we stopped speaking and stared at our iPads. After a half hour of silence, I made an announcement.

“Well, I just joined Tinder.”

Jason turned to look at me, at last noticing that I'd camouflaged my acne in a thick coat of Sid's diaper-rash cream.

“Jenny, I'm not having a threesome with some weirdo off Tinder.” He paused for a minute trying to make sense of my DIY Kabuki makeup. “Unless she's hot.”

“I'm over the threesome idea,” I said, applying more cream.

“How do you always get over the threesome idea before I even get a chance to act on it?” he whined. “It's not fair.”

“Because, Jason, I'm a mother now. I'm too tired for threesomes. Unless it's me with two people that aren't you.”

Jason gasped with mock horror, then went back to his iPad. We'd been together long enough that it was no longer offensive to joke about the downsides of monogamy.

“Besides, I'm not joining Tinder to find hot chicks,” I clarified. “I'm joining to find hot moms.”

“Wow. That's sad.” Jason raised his leg above his head like a dancer and farted as loudly as his body would allow. The noise reverberated off the sheets and sent Gina flying across the room like she was escaping an air strike in Baghdad. Jason smiled at me, waiting for my reaction. Knowing it would give him far too much satisfaction, I ignored him.

“I might have just pooped,” he said, still hoping to get a rise out of me.

“ ‘Super-queer cuddle switch with a strong tendency toward big spoon,' ” I read aloud. I held up a picture of a large butch black woman in a neon crop top. “But what's a cuddle switch?”

Jason shrugged and swiped to the next picture.

For the next two hours we fell into a Tinder K-hole.

“What about Connie? She seems normal? She's a wanderer, a reader, and a runner,” I said.

“Okay. Swipe right.”

“Diane could be fun. But her profile picture is just a close-up of one eye.”

“That means she's fat,” Jason explained.

Before we could continue, a notification popped up on the screen. We'd swiped too many profiles and were being suspended from “playing” for the next six hours.

“Boo!” Jason flopped back down on his side of the bed. “Should I start an account?”

“No!” I said.

“Why not? I should get to if you are.” Though Jason often found himself playing the Desi to my Lucy, the truth was that he preferred being an Ethel. Yes, he was a rule dork, the type of guy who if he saw a line would immediately get in it, the type of know-it-all who would have gotten stabbed at my high school for not letting anyone cheat off his midterm. But there was another side to him, the freewheeling lunatic. The kind of guy who, if encouraged, would ask a Costa Rican cabbie for weed, eat street meat in Shanghai, or pay money to bungee jump off a rusty crane in Tijuana. He was impulsive and adventurous in all the ways I wasn't. (Mainly the ways that lead to hospitalization and/or concussions.) He got a thrill out of life in the fast lane, so long as I made a convincing argument for why we needed to carpool illegally. In our early years, my harebrained ideas coupled with his joie de vivre had led to ill-advised tattoos, third-world urgent-care centers, and our almost going to prison in Turkey. But now we were parents, and we couldn't afford to take the same kinds of risks. One of us had to be the designated driver—at least until Sid was old enough to see over the dashboard.

“Besides,” he continued, “I'm much better with women than you are.” Shopping for girlfriends was precisely the type of shenanigan that Jason loved. Not only did it give him an excuse to perform, but it also allowed him to compete with me. Aside from when it came to Sid, or our dogs, our therapist, our couples friends, or our dry cleaner Nick, I avoided competing with Jason, because it only made me frustrated when he won. And annoyingly, he nearly always won. He was faster, stronger, and able to answer almost any
Jeopardy!
question, or at least the ones they put in the backs of New York City cabs.

I'm therapized enough to admit that my need to outdo Jason (and every man I've ever met) is the direct result of having been raised by my first husband, otherwise known as my dad, who encouraged me to do great things, but mainly so they'd reflect well on him. He allowed me victories, money, and attention, just so long as
he
always had more. When you grow up waiting in the wings, watching your dad-husband soak in a particular kind of spotlight, it's hard not to resent a legitimately famous person.

When I first met Jason, I instantly rooted for his demise. Not because I didn't like him; I didn't even know him. What I didn't like was that he was successful and famous and I wasn't. It triggered me. Before meeting him for the first time, a producer friend (who was trying to get in good with me so he could fuck my sister) had sent me a password so I could watch all the audition footage for a movie I was up for. I was only supposed to watch the tapes that pertained to my role, but after spending two hours trying to decide who would win in a fight between Lauren German's face and Lake Bell's boobs, I stumbled upon the two guys they were looking at for the lead. One was Joe Schmostein and one was Jason Biggs.

“Fuck Jason Biggs,” I said to the producer, having never met him or seen any of his films.

“Really?” he replied. “Did you see his audition?”

“I don't need to. I already think the other guy is better.” I had to root for the underdog, I
was
the underdog. And in a weird, Freudian way, Jason Biggs was my dad. (Please forget you ever read that.)

Eventually, my friend asked me to watch Jason's tape, and to my surprise, he was outstanding. He literally blew me away. And somehow, through my desktop Dell, he made me fall in love with him. I told my friend as much, and within several days we were set up on a blind date. The rest is history—and by history, I mean in my first book.

Even though I love my husband and consider him the greatest thing to ever happen to me before Sid and after Teets, it still irks me when I am brushed to the side as people clamor to talk to him. It's not that I'm not proud of him or grateful for his success. It's that the last thing I need in my life is to feel eclipsed by another fucking man. Sure, I'm partly to blame for being attracted to successful people, but there is no denying that being around them tends to ignite a certain unhealthy resentment in me.

This is why I didn't want Jason making a Tinder profile. Because I knew if he did, he'd probably have more mom friends than me. And that could not happen. Unlike my goal of dying with more Twitter followers than Jason, having more mom friends was something within my reach. It was something I knew I could do quickly, without great effort, and without showing my vagina. Or so I thought.

“Why am I not getting any matches? Do you think I need to show my vagina?” I said. I took Jason's phone out of his hand and hid it on my side of the bed. “Baby, I'm the mom. We're focused on me right now.”

Jason looked at my profile picture, a publicity shot of David Bowie juggling three crystal orbs from the movie
Labyrinth.

“Jareth the Goblin King?”

“What? Bowie is awesome,” I said, defensive.

“Doesn't he steal children?”

“I—” I didn't have a great response, so I deflected by bursting into song.
“Dance magic dance!”

Jason could see how desperate I was, and so, like a true gentleman (who knows he is secretly better than you), he allowed Tinder to be strictly my thing.

For the next few days, I checked my matches every chance I got. But nobody seemed to want anything real. Two women started conversations with me, but they never went anywhere. After several quips like “Hiya,” “Psst,” and “You bi?” the correspondence would abruptly stop. After a while I started to realize that Tinder wasn't about meeting people, it was actually just another way to avoid meeting people. If you can hide behind your phone and get your ego massaged by knowing people want to date you, what's the point of leaving your house to physically engage with them? Even if it's casual sex you're after, after a few tries, the idea quickly becomes hotter than the act itself. The act is messy and awkward and requires someone knowing you're ten years older than your profile pic. Having an ongoing texting relationship with a handful of strangers offers all of the intrigue of a budding romance with none of the disappointment. Frustrated at work? Fire off a “Hiya.” Get in a fight with your parents? Throw out a “What's up?” Break up with your real-life girlfriend? “Drinks soon?” Instantly, you are back in the game and feeling strong. I didn't need Tinder for validation; I already used Twitter for that. What I needed was a real-life woman who wasn't all talk and was willing to put out or, at the very least, offer a nursery-school recommendation.