Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me - Ben Karlin [71]
“Hi, Harry,” she said, kissing him on the cheek. “Sorry I’m late.”
“That’s perfectly all right,” said Harry, who was every bit as unsettled as he had been the first time he met her at the sorority house and helped her on with her coat. His choice of Trader Vic’s had been a good one, but for another reason. He wanted to be alone with her in the dark setting.
He led her off to the restaurant and after they had settled into the corner booth and ordered Mai Tais, she said he looked exactly the same.
“Maybe a little less hair,” she said, after another quick study.
Harry raised one hand to his forehead and felt it was a fair appraisal. Actually, he felt he had gotten off easy.
“And you look fabulous,” he said, deciding in his new maturity not to add that she hadn’t aged a day. He decided to leave age out altogether.
“I couldn’t figure out what to wear,” she said. “I thought maybe kneesocks.”
“Kneesocks,” he said reverentially. The thought of her long slender legs in kneesocks made him dizzy. He wanted to run right off with her and have her put some on for him.
He said it again.
“Kneesocks.”
She brought him up to date on her life—her marriage to a developer, the divorce, the twins, the humdrum suburban life, which was obviously no match for what she perceived as Harry’s exciting one—and said that one reason she had come to the city was to see if she could find work in the theatre.
“I thought possibly you could help me.”
“What kinds of parts would you play?” he asked.
Her face fell and Harry saw that she had taken it the wrong way—or maybe the right way—and he wished he could have taken back the question. As it was, he made a limp effort to paper it over.
“Now that I think about it,” he said, “there are all kinds of roles you could handle.”
She took a little time to recover, but once they were back on track he quickly worked Julie into the conversation, saying they were great friends and had been living together for two years at the beach.
“She’s a carpenter,” said Harry.
The fact that she and Harry were great friends and that she was a carpenter didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Sybil.
“I’m so delighted you remembered me,” she said.
Harry was happy to admit that not only did he remember her but that she had rarely been out of his thoughts. And then he couldn’t resist reminding her of the sudden and seemingly cruel way in which she had dropped him, without so much as a farewell photograph.
“I hated my photograph, Harry,” she said. “Surely you didn’t expect me to give you a photograph I hated.”
Then she lowered her eyes.
“And I was afraid of you then. You were so sophisticated.”
All of this was news to Harry. The photograph explanation made sense, but the thought of Harry being sophisticated at twenty—and of someone being afraid of him—was laughable. He wasn’t sure how sophisticated he was right that minute.
“I wasn’t ready for you then,” she added, leaving the impression—unless Harry was way off the mark again—that she just might be ready for him now.
To shore up his man-of-the-world credentials, Harry stretched back and said he had done just about everything. She matched him in the erotic department by saying she had done just about everything herself. Then she cocked her head and thought for a second, as if to set the record straight.
“Except two things.”
Harry didn’t inquire as to what they were. Why take the risk of having the reunion come to a crashing halt. But he certainly did wonder what the two things were. He guessed that one of them had to do with the backdoor route. As to the second, he didn’t have a clue.
“I guess I’ve been waiting for the right time to do them.”
Harry couldn’t handle that one at all, so he let it sit for a while. Then she asked him if he was free for dinner. She was meeting her sister and brother-in-law, who was a psychiatrist. The plan was for them to attend a party on Riverside Drive for a woman who was dying. Friends and relatives had been invited to sit around with her, in a party atmosphere, with incense burning, while she continued to die.
“It