Card Sharks by Liz Maverick Page A

greens. She called it her “showplace” because it was what her bosses would have expected to see if they ever came over for dinner.
    Of course, her bosses never came over for dinner, and Marianne could have afforded a much flashier place. But once she had moved, she couldn’t bring herself to move again, though she would probably have been much happier somewhere busier and more energetic, like the Grove or Brentwood. She shrugged and went back into the kitchen and began mixing drinks and arranging tapas, a sigh escaping from her mouth before she even realized it was forming.
    How many times had she and Bijoux repeated this scenario? It wasn’t that Marianne was unhappy. There wasn’t enough going on to be unhappy about. It wasn’t like hangingout with her best friend was some kind of hardship. If they’d just lower their standards, they could easily be hanging out with other people—men people.
    Yes, there were tons of perfectly acceptable, average men to date. There were even perfectly acceptable, average men to date who liked smart, successful women and didn’t give lectures about women who’d spent their best years concentrating on a career only to wake up at thirty-five and bitch about the men who were left and didn’t it serve those selfish bitches right.
    A young single woman’s search for a mate was not inherently an act of desperation, though in all fairness it was understandable why so many people confused the two.
    She had a friend who’d been proposed to during a football game while watching TV with a bunch of friends. The guy had turned to her during halftime and said, “So, do you want to get married?” She’d said, “Uh. Okay.” And that, in a nutshell, was Marianne’s idea of hell. The whole relationship . . . so uninspired . . . such a lack of sparkle. Everything about it screamed, You’re here, I’m here, we might as well.
    We might as well wasn’t at all what Marianne was looking for. She was looking for the guy who would look back at her as if she were the best thing he’d ever seen and would just know that without her, the sparkle in his life would be missing. That was the kind of relationship Marianne wanted. The one with the sparkle. For a moment there she’d thought she’d found it with Donny. Now she wasn’t sure she’d ever find it.
    The trouble with Los Angeles, first of all, was that it was a handicapped city from the get-go. Everyone was so damn defensive.
    Meeting people in this town was built around the concept of“not.” As in not someone who was an actor/writer/musician/ model. Not someone who was in “industry.” Not someone who was into the whole L.A. bullshit. Not. It was like a whole extra layer of not -ness separating people from each other.
    There was a reason people complained it was impossible to meet eligible mates in this town. A million factors conspired. A) Everybody was in their car. B) When not in their car, everybody was taking a phone call. C) Oftentimes, people were both in their cars and making phone calls, which had the effect of killing off some of the overall population from which to choose.
    Preconceived notions and stereotypes based on locale to go along with the preconceived notions and stereotypes about women in general. That’s what the women in L.A. today were dealing with. There was something so irritating about men who specified that they were only willing to meet women who were at least five years younger or more. It wasn’t just the fertility issue, because apparently any women who crossed over to the hell known as thirty-four-plus became a disgusting, unattractive, desperate shriveled prune of a shell of a human being.
    But also it was because women who didn’t have a man by then obviously had been self-absorbed in their own selfish careers and selves. The way Marianne saw it was, what the hell else were you