What about the Love Part

good for the frog "i have to tell you," Jasper said to me on the phone Jasper's the one I tell my boy troubles to. It's a form of flirting, but I keep it carefully reined in, just to the point where he could see it if he were ever to look, but otherwise not. I won't mention how long I've been doing this. "He's my dream guy," I tell my sort-of boyfriend, Rob, when a glitch in Rob's call-waiting reveals him to be talking to a woman named Emily, whom, he ends up telling me, he thinks he might like to have a life with, though he's never actually gotten up the nerve to ask her on a date. There's been a string of Robs. I have to remember not to go out with anyone named that anymore, I found myself thinking. Actually, I dreamed that solution, but it seems as much worth trying as anything. I try to think of what I'll answer if Rob asks me why I said the thing about JasperI try to remember what I know about Jasper. He plays an inspired infield; he takes mysterious-looking photographs of houses; he looks right at you when you talk, with intense dark eyes, either brown or blue or green, I can't remember. He lives three thousand miles away, in San Francisco. Which is the way I like it, I always add to myself heartily, as if I'm telling a joke, working hard to entertain a lone party guest. Also, Jasper netted me a lot of points in the contest my best friend, Sarah, and I devised over the summer, when I was living at her house in Salt Lake City, to round out the long evenings of staying up late talking about her bad dates and listening to the messages left on her answering machine by men she didn't want to talk to. We'd play them over and over, memorizing them, saying them in unison, screaming with laughter. I worry that it's immature to have this kind of a best friend at thirty-two. "Are you sure you're not a lesbian?" Rob asked me when I first met him. I was just back from Sarah's, and it must have seemed strange to him that I talked about her so much. "Listen," I told him, "I wish. Believe me." I stopped just before I told him not to take that personally, that it had nothing to do with the fact that he was phenomenally lousy in bed, and that what was usually going through my head when we'd make love was something like, Shit, I could've gone to the gym. What I'd really likeI didn't tell him this, eitheris to ask Sarah to be in my family. Sarah's and my contest was to see which one of us could become interested in or involved with the most inappropriate man, and Jasper was worth a lotmore, unbelievably, than the celibate fundamentalist born-again Christian I'd tried to convince myself I could change for; more, evenwe had to check and recheck thisthan the man Sarah was currently seeing, who was fifteen years older than she was, a Republican, married, and living with his wife and four children, two states away. But three thousand miles was worth a lot of points; so was "Probably Has a Girlfriend," and "Isn't Interested in Me." We haven't tallied Rob yet. Sarah hasn't met him, but when she heard me describe him, she said maybe we'd have to invent some new categories. "I have to tell you," Jasper said. "This might sound harsh, but I think you have kind of a bad attitude toward men." I calculated that he had probably just gotten my letter, in which I'd described a Swing Dance class I'd gone to the night before, and then segued to Rob, and tRosenfeld, Stephanie is the author of 'What about the Love Part' with ISBN 9780345448231 and ISBN 0345448235.