Next night, the promised Monday, I made Shrimp de Jonghe, enough for two, a vintage dish that sent me online for its provenance. Thanks to the James Beard Foundation’s website, I learned that the de Jonghe brothers, Belgian immigrants, introduced it at their Chicago restaurant at the turn of the twentieth century. Good; that would give me something to discourse on, should the conversation over wine go cold.
It didn’t. Even before I lifted the lid of the shrimp en casserole, Perry introduced a topic that can only be described as The Two of Us. It wasn’t romantic. It was clinical, The Margate equivalent of a questionnaire in a Masters & Johnson lab: Would I be willing, totally willing, interested in/ever inclined . . . to have relations with him? But wait; let him explain!
Before I recovered, he said he’d made an outline. Could he read it?
Startled but curious to hear what someone with Perry’s heretofore limited emotional range would use to enlist a sex partner, I said, “Okay, shoot.”
“It’s on my iPad,” a reach away on a kitchen counter. He cleared his throat with a stagey ahem, and smiled. “I don’t want you to expect a love letter. It’s a list, not an essay, not a brief.”
The words love letter were so far removed from anything that had passed between us that I wondered if I’d heard him right. “Got it, an outline,” I murmured. “Proceed.”
He straightened himself in his chair. “Okay, number one: We’re both single.” He looked up. “I assume it would’ve come up if you were currently with someone.”
“Correct.”
“And straight.” He looked up again. “It was a guy on the roof, right? The other defendant?”
“Right.”
“Three: home confinement times two.”
Like a good debater I said, “True. But we can have guests. And I could make a case for going online.”
“Are you going online?”
“Not at the present time.”
Next, with less conviction, “Four: We’d be consenting adults, both consenting in advance and . . . when the time came.”
“For sure. Okay, number five?”
“We’re already friends.” He looked up. “Right?”
“Friendly acquaintances maybe; friendly more-or-less business acquaintances.”
“Except we don’t have to answer to an HR department. We can cross certain lines without, as you would point out, disclosing.”
I found myself listening with unexpected attention. I asked how he pictured such a thing moving forward. Where would we start, theoretically speaking?
“Here. Unless you wanted me to come to your place.”
“Not geographically, procedurally. Is it your understanding that we’d just go straight from”—I pointed to the wine and the shrimp—“to bed?”
“Not good? Because that would feel . . . procedural? Abrupt?”
How to answer? I said, “Hardly abrupt, since we’re talking it through. It’s not like you suddenly grabbed a breast.”
He said, “Exactly! I thought the logical approach might appeal to you.”
I wanted to ask if I appeared to be all-logic, but that might be fishing for a compliment. I asked, “Is it—I don’t know—subjective or just ‘need a woman/any woman’?”
Without elaborating he said, “It’s subjective. Quite.”
I walked to a cabinet and got two plates. Back at the table I said, “What number are we up to on your outline? Because I could add this: We wouldn’t have to explain, the way we would with a new sexual partner, ‘Oh, it’s an ankle monitor, can’t take it off. Have I not mentioned I’m under home confinement?’”
“Very true.”
“I assume you’re not enlisting anyone else?”
“I am not.”
“The girlfriend at Gladstone’s—still haven’t heard from her?”
“Radio silence.”
“Likewise,” by which I meant overall nothingness except for the creepy yet identical crank calls from Post hopefuls, who were all well-endowed and suggesting an evening consultation.
“Look,” Perry said. “You’re already coming up here three nights a week. No one has to know. You’ll still bring the picnic basket. No one will notice.”
“People noticing is the least of my worries.”
“Then what’s the most of your worries?”
That question was ten times more psychiatric than any he’d ever posed before. I said, “Here’s a big one: Let’s say we proceed for the same bird-in-hand reason that made you think of me. But I don’t enjoy it? I want out.”
It was, I admit, a coy question along the lines of Give your technique a letter grade. Wouldn’t most men come back with Oh, trust me, little lady, you’re going to enjoy it. But this one said, “No questions asked. In fact”—he read from his iPad—“for only as long as both parties want to participate.”
I allowed, “It’s not crazy. Everyone’s heard of ‘friends with benefits.’”
Perry said, “Sleeping with someone you’re not involved with isn’t exactly a revolutionary notion. It’s been known to happen . . . pretty spontaneously, every night in every borough.”
“That thing that my college roommate used to call ‘a fucking accident’? Like boom!”
“Except this would be the opposite of that, wouldn’t it? Not an accident. Almost like a date.” He read aloud the last item on his screen: “Questions? Comments?”
I said the shrimp needed reheating, maybe sixty seconds in the microwave. When I returned with our plates I said, “If I agreed, and we scheduled a test run, we wouldn’t have to flirt over dinner, okay? We’d just—” I gestured in the direction of his bedroom.
“If that’s what you want. It can even be a night other than Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. No food required.”
I said, “But if the sex doesn’t work out, the catering would be very awkward.”
“We’ve covered that. We’d get over it and go back to our original agreement. Food only.”
I said, “I’d probably still stay for a glass of wine.”
With a smile that seemed fonder than the usual one accompanying his compliments, he said the shrimp was delicious and I should make it again.
I said, “I’ll put Shrimp de Jonghe in the rotation. And with respect to the personal stuff, what’s your time line?”
“No hurry,” he said on this Monday night. “It’s a lot to think about.”
“How about Wednesday?” I asked.