What Do Men Want?
MUNSON, SAM
What Do Men Want? Rick Marin knows the answer. BY SAM MUNSON The word "cad" was never exactly a compliment. But at least it betrayed, in the heyday of the Edwardian bounder, a certain stylishness...
...It is known / to be a lovely and a fearful thing—we're not exactly surprised that beneath Kay's shiny exterior lie fearful and unlovely depths...
...It provides some genuinely chilling moments, particularly his discovery of a clump of her shorn hair in a suitcase and his description of her "KabukiSam Munson is a senior at the University of Chicago...
...After a premature "I love you," a rather harrowing episode involving anti-lice shampoo and a shower, and a Sunday trip to a mental hospital followed by an impromptu gynecological exam, Kay is out of the picture—only to be followed by a new, wealthier woman, also named Kay...
...He does it merely to write a column for a women's magazine, but there is, in fact, something of Jim Dixon's spirit in Cad: the frustrated acuity, the innocuous running amok, and the talent for improvisation in the face of staring absurdities...
...And if he is indeed such a cad, why is Viv, his editor, constantly trying to set him up with her friends...
...He is also capable of genuine, if low-pitched, moral regret: The tone in which he describes his relationship with Tabitha and its subsequent disintegration verges on the remorseful, at moments...
...Though his prose bears all the trademarks of the modern memoir—the sarcastic quotation marks, the capitalized phrases, and the frenetic pace—Marin pulls them off without seeming self-conscious, bitter, or juvenile...
...The women we encounter in Cad are examples of types, certainly: the Crazy One, the Rich One, the Young One, the Strange and Beautiful One...
...Ilene also prompts Marin to do something unprecedented: close his other options...
...It's hard to entertain seriously, after all this, the idea that Marin is a cad in anything other than an ironic way...
...A distressing, engaging account of the romantic and carnal exploits of Marin's early twenties and mid-thirties, Cad paints an absurd and hopelessly funny picture of dating in our anxiety-ridden times...
...He says goodbye to Tabitha, ends his affair with the beautiful and infuriating Solange, and cuts his last ties to his disturbing ex-wife...
...When the second Kay's financial and emotional demands prove too much for Marin, there follow, in rapid succession, a sexologist, a Hobbitologist (Marin's coinage), and, finally, Tabitha, a young editorial intern with whom Marin achieves a certain peace...
...The fact that he experiences an "empty, hollow" feeling in his gut when his affairs disintegrate attests to this...
...The last section of the book takes on a new tone of emotional seriousness that makes its last line, the observation that Ilene "had my number now," all the more convincing...
...The closest he comes to striking a false note is in the subtitle, "Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor...
...But they are also developed as individuals, and they are treated sympathetically and without malice...
...Other examples of this sort of tactical effort abound, but it is very difficult to see in them the machinations of a hardened rogue...
...But at least it betrayed, in the heyday of the Edwardian bounder, a certain stylishness of Malacca canes, monocles, and waxed mustaches...
...But promise looms, nonetheless...
...What follows are months of what Marin calls "Bachelor Hell" in 1990s Manhattan, where Marin worked as a critic for Newsweek and the New York Times...
...At the end of the book's first section, as the divorce from Elisabeth finally comes through, a new, more promising woman comes on the scene as Marin meets, at the party celebrating his divorce, a medical student named Kay, fairly glowing with normalcy...
...Cad is more High Fidelity than The Memoirs of Casanova (not that you'd know it from reading some of the genuinely outraged jacket commentary...
...Tabitha, as another character puts it, "worships" Marin, calling him "sir" more than half-seriously...
...The book opens with the story of Marin's brief, disastrous first marriage, which ended with his wife Elisabeth's departure...
...When Rick Marin calls his new memoir Cad: Confessions of a Toxic Bachelor, the word reveals, if not quite opprobrium, then ironically severe self-deprecation...
...Their relationship devolves into what Marin calls an "Arrangement": occasional, "reliable" sex to ease the pain of loneliness...
...I should mention I have another reason to exculpate him: One of my uncles appears in the book as Marin's friend and adviser...
...Marin is hardly a rake, though he is a masterful tactician: The opening scene of the book centers around the hilariously honest description of a bit Marin uses to get a woman into bed...
...Who is incapable of feeling sympathy for someone struggling so comically in the incomprehensible back-and-forth of men and women...
...Aware as he is of the quirkiness of women, he never paints them in any worse light than he does himself...
...About the worst thing he might be held guilty of is a run of poor judgment, ranging from the slightly bad to the insanely myopic...
...Marin's affecting narration of this tragedy sets up an interesting antithesis: The book opens with the dissolution of his unsettling first marriage, which Marin recycles into "material," while he never draws in the same way on his father's death...
...Marin is right to use the word: He is a bit of a cad...
...Just as much of an emotional focus is the sudden death of his father from a stroke...
...But the first time he describes Ilene as the girl he's "going to marry" is immediately after he leaves his dead father's vacation home...
...We are also fortunate enough to meet a few women in the book's first section: Tiina the enticingly foreign restaurateur, Moira the wholesome figure-skater and actress, Kim the sexpot Canadian tourist...
...Indeed, what he puts the women he dates through seems no worse than what they put him through, from the first Kay's asperging him with Quell to Solange's annoying-ly self-conscious mysteriousness...
...The last line of the second part runs: "'She seems like a real person.'" The "she" is Ilene—and "real" is the most flattering word applied to a woman in the entire book...
...Meticulously noting on his calendar the nights he has sex, he finds his only bright moments at Billy's Topless, a bar he frequents with his cheerfully deranged friend Tad...
...Of course, that was long ago and in another country...
...But not before Marin has gone through a fullblown mating dance with Ilene, spread out over a summer: desperate and successful attempts at coming up with unrefusable dates and months' worth of weekend visits to the Hamptons...
...When the Arrangement ends, it's the first moment of real loss in the book...
...Given that the epigraph to the second section comes from Lord Byron's Don Juan—Alas, the love of women...
...Marin invests more time in Ilene than in anyone else we see, with far more uncertain rewards: After ignoring him utterly at their first meeting, she develops a close, Platonic friendship with Marin (the most dreaded—by men—of all forms of social intercourse...
...We like Jim, and we finish by liking Rick Marin...
...Marin seems to be looking for something: probably the stability promised and never really delivered by his first marriage...
...white" face as she wields a knife to cut their wedding cake...
...At one point in Cad, Marin assumes the name "Jim Dixon," the hero of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim...
Vol. 8 • March 2003 • No. 26
