Bill came to my apartment for a double-date, blind-date, Chinese dinner date with me and my friend and her boyfriend.
I still wore my work clothes, a teal green sweater and slim black skirt and high heels, which showed off my legs and made me look pretty and professional and a little bit sexy.
Bill was tall and slim, dressed casually but also like he’d thought about it. He hugged my friend hello and shook her boyfriend’s hand. The way he greeted them, said their names and looked in their eyes, made him seem like a really, really nice guy.
He shook my hand and said my name, too. Strands of curly silver hair mixed with his dark curly hair. His smile made creases around his eyes. He was handsome. A really, really handsome guy.
Immediately I went shy, and my voice went still inside me. Something about this man, this moment, all that I wanted to do differently.
We walked the few blocks to the Chinese restaurant. Bill and I ahead, my friend and her boyfriend behind. Bill had his hands in his pockets, like a really-relaxed-not-nervous guy.
“Did you just get off work?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re a counselor, right?”
“Yes,” I said.
Maybe I could say something interesting about work. I looked ahead of me, looked at the ground, looked at my pumps tap-tapping the cement. The spotlight of my friend and her boyfriend right behind us, like we were on The Dating Game and they were the audience deciding if they should cheer this man to pick me.
The pressure of it blocked up all my words, all my thoughts.
At the Chinese restaurant, Bill and my friend talked, and sometimes the boyfriend talked. I poked my fork through the Kung Pao chicken. My friend kept looking at me with eyes that said, Say something! Why are you so quiet?
Mom used to say she didn’t much like small talk. I guessed I shared this with her. Possible topics floated up in my head and flattened inside me. Do you like movies? How do you like your job? What books do you like? Everything seemed obvious and forced and small.
I wanted Bill to give me that smile again. I wanted him to Dating-Game pick me. If I could be alone with him there would be no spotlight. If I didn’t know what to say, I could use my body to show him I wasn’t shy.
Possibly I hadn’t learned a thing about how to be different with a man.
After dinner, we went back to my apartment. I must have seemed dull, and Bill must have wondered why our friend had set us up.
“Well.” My friend took her boyfriend’s hand. “We have to go. We, um, kind of double scheduled.”
Her boyfriend looked at her with raised eyebrows. “What?”
She nudged him with her elbow and said, “Yeah, you know.”
Obvious and awkward, but they left. Now was my chance.
Bill stayed near the door after they left. My date, getting ready to pick door number two or girl number three or anyone besides me.
“Do you want something to drink?” I hoped it didn’t sound too urgent or too surprising, me putting a whole sentence together.
“Sure,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
I stood there.
“All I have is water or milk,” I said.
“Water would be great.”
I went to the kitchen and turned on the tap and ran my finger under the stream of water. This is what I always do, I thought. Making a man more than he is. Hoping to make him like me before I even decide if I like him. Making him so perfect and important that all my thoughts and all my words and my self dry up and float away.
The water had gone cold and I watched it run.
This is me.
But this time, I could see how I had absented myself from this man, from letting him see me or get to know me.
I filled the glass and took a long drink.
“He’s just a man,” I whispered. Then I filled the glass again and went back out to him.
He was leaning up against the arm of the sofa. He looked strong like a firefighter and at the same time fragile like a man who’d had some hurt. That hurt showed around his eyes and in the slimness of him. Like he hadn’t always been quite as slim, like his eyes once had a little more easy trust than they did now.
I handed him the glass and sat on the couch and took a breath. The blocked-up feeling in my chest eased a little. My shoulders loosened.
He drank some water and put the glass on the coffee table and sat down near me, not too close, not too far.
“So,” I said.
“So,” he said.
When Mom said she didn’t like small talk, she also said she’d learned how to avoid it. People like it when you ask questions. Plus it takes the attention off of you.
“So,” I said again. “If I were to get to know you, what would you want to tell me, and what wouldn’t you want to tell me?” A twisty kind of Dating-Game question, a no-small-talk question.
He looked at me, head tipped a little to one side. Maybe my turn from mute to this one laser question had given him whiplash.
“That’s a great question,” he said. “I like your directness.”
The watching part of me clapped her hands. He liked direct. My power.
“I have a hard time with small talk,” I said. “That’s probably kind of obvious. I was nervous at dinner.”
“You were,” he said.
My one question led to two hours of talk. Not small. What he wanted to tell me (he liked his job, he was close to his family, he tried to eat healthy, he ran, all the classes he’d taken, he liked to travel). What he didn’t want to tell me (this last marriage was not his first, and the divorces felt like failures, especially the part about losing trust and feeling betrayed, he was afraid of that happening again and his health had gotten bad from the stress of it, he felt scared inside himself sometimes).
That one question led to him asking it back to me, me telling him what I wanted to tell (I was proud of where I came from, I had great fun with my nephew and nieces, I’d made a list of what I wanted in a job and got that job and really liked it, the classes I’d gone to and how they changed everything and that was part of the end of my marriage); and what I didn’t want to tell (the breakup from the man I’d thought was the one and how much it hurt and I was still trying to work that out, how that man was part of the end of my marriage too, that I questioned whether I was capable of having a good relationship).
And I told what I wanted to tell (because it was always there on the tip of my tongue, the one big awful thing that had happened to me and maybe it made me seem brave and strong because I’d come through it and thought I was fine, but I’d mostly stopped speaking of because the reactions when I told were too curious or too distant), and I didn’t want to tell (because maybe it would look like I needed attention from it, and maybe I did need attention, his attention, but not his pity).
“I was raped when I was twenty,” I said.
The space those words make between a man and a woman. It’s always there until it’s told, and then it’s there still.
We were facing each other. Bill had an arm propped on the back of sofa, his chin resting on his palm. He didn’t say anything, but his eyes were on my eyes.
I wanted to tell more, to tell it all, to keep speaking of it until I was tired of this story.
“I’m okay,” I said. Any more was too much to put on a man I’d just met. “Anyway, it was eight years ago.”
He reached out and touched my shoulder. “I’m sorry that happened to you,” he said. And this seemed true.
Now, when people ask us how we met, I say, “We were a blind date.” Because I like that it’s kind of old fashioned and a little bit corny, and a little bit of a mystery.
Sometimes people ask, “Did you know immediately that you liked each other?”
“I liked him right off the bat,” I say. I don’t mention that every man I’d been with I’d liked right off the bat.
Bill says, “I wasn’t that attracted to her at first. She was so quiet. And when our friends left, I thought, ‘Well this will be interesting, I wonder if this woman will have anything to say.’ But then we were alone, and she was real and direct and curious. That’s when I saw she was pretty too.”
It was with Bill that I learned that what is inside me animates me, and this gives me beauty.
I told him how I’d made a list of what I wanted in a man.
“What was on that list?” he asked.
After I went through what was on the list, he said, “Mine would be pretty close to that. What I’d want in a woman. Honesty would be a big thing on it. Honesty and trust.”
Honesty and trust. Didn’t everyone want those things? I’d always thought I did. But I was beginning to understand it was hard to be honest with someone else if you weren’t being that way with yourself. And if you weren’t honest with yourself, how did you even know?
Eventually, he looked at his watch. “The time went fast,” he said. “I should be going.”
He stood up and I stood up, thinking maybe this is the part where he wants to do more than talk. Because this is what I always did, moved past the talking.
“Can I give you a hug?” he asked.
A hug.
“Yes,” I said.
It was an arms-around-me, straight-on hug. And then he stepped back. He had a scar on his upper lip, faded and thin.
“I don’t quite know what it is about you,” he said. “But I really want to see you again. We seem to want the same things in life.”
I felt off kilter and a little bit proud. We met, we talked, we hugged goodnight. A proper date.
I went to the window and watched him go out to his car. The tall, slim, back of him, that head of curly hair, the way he held his shoulders curved in a little. Two marriages, he’d said. That was a lot of marrying and divorcing for a man not quite forty. But who was I to speak, with the long line behind me? I was beginning to regard that line, all those boys and men, not as failures, but as research.