First Date
A first date leads to a twenty year relationship.
"A lot of people lived in that house at the time," a renewed acquaintance recently reminded me. "I know," I replied, "I married one of them."
The subject in question was wearing a blue bathrobe. It was ratty, I seem to remember, though today, some twenty years later, I'm certain I was wrong; after all, I have lived with her mania for cleanliness now for almost half my life. I know I'm right about the other details, though: her tousled hair and tired eyes, for those too have become staples of my existence.
Had I told her then, at that moment, while she was making herself soup after a long night on the town, that that particular physical combination gave her the look of a French movie star - making her a kind of Anglo Jeanne Moreau - I would have experienced my first ever flash of those oversized teeth, which, with a sudden toss of the head and a tensing of her muscley neck, was what you always got whenever you made her laugh - a monopoly that continues.
Instead, I contented myself with remaining silent, awed by her presence, while she stirred her soup, watching her from the nearby table at which I sat with her roomies, friends I had recently made who were bringing me into their fold, the last echo of hippie-era commune-style living. Talk of the shared conventions of their lives broke out - university, travel, parties - and I realized in a few simple lines that despite the striking face and the flash of perfectly formed leg that her bathrobe offered, this woman's best feature was something that you could not, unless she spoke, see: brains.
My intimidation, I was certain, would abate as I got to know her better; maybe she would even return my admiration for her by becoming as aware of my unique charms as I had become of hers. Not a chance. Any such process in this person, I came to discover, took weeks, months, years. And so, the more I got to know her, the more distant I felt.
It was an alienation rooted in other factors, too: our ages - she had five years on me -our backgrounds - rich (her) versus poor - and our body types - athletic (her again!) versus thin. Still, I knew from our brief encounters that beneath the surface of all that lay enough commonalities -our love of high art, popular culture and involved discussion - to sustain something.
Our first date took place at - where else if you're going to go out with me? - the movies; Merchant-Ivory's first international success, A Room With A View.
As I waited for her in a long line at that downtown art house (a block from which, unimaginably, we would be living together in four years), my mind began to seriously re-frame my usual first date agenda; given this woman's intelligence, maturity, and reluctance to go out with me (she had been seriously coerced), I knew I could not use the moves left over from my adolescence that still did the trick with the girlish types I continued to see. This was an occasion that called for the utmost decorum.
Good plan. Too bad she showed up wearing the shortest skirt imaginable, and smelling of intoxicating French perfume.
To this day, I cannot tell you one scene - not one frame, in fact - of that Merchant-Ivory movie. The only masterpiece I saw that night was her, and that I could describe in minute detail. The others in that crowded theatre could have Helen Bonham-Carter; my eyes were for my date only.
We parted, and a few dates later, she took the gamble, informing me - with notable apprehension albeit - that she felt ready to attempt a lasting relationship.
Two months ago, on our twentieth anniversary, the plan was to go out not to a movie but to dinner. Times were tough again (it happens all too often when you're in the arts) and that was all I could repay her with for what, all those years ago, she had chancily given me: the belief that some crazy how - even when art, popular culture and intellectual discussion inevitably make way for the individual and mutual struggles that threaten coupleship - we could grow as one.
You see: brains.
