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Julianne (aka: "Classact")
Julianne was open to meeting me for a cup of coffee, so she agreed to meet me for lunch at a mid-town Moroccan restaurant that I'd picked by going online and searching for one. When I got in, I knew it was the wrong place and the wrong girl; I mean, I knew it was the girl I'd agreed to meet, but she looked nothing like her picture and it had to be her because, besides me now, she was the only other customer in the dead restaurant.
Julianne was homely, her clothes were in terrible taste--her red knit dress had stitched into it some tacky designer label word like "Armand" in script over and over the entire thing; her hair was thin & the ends split; her skin was just terrible. All in all she just looked like an unhealthy human being who'd been eating too many potato sticks and other junk food out of cans and didn't know a thing about grooming herself.
Even these things I could have tolerated, or excused, but during our meal she picked her teeth behind the turned fingers of one hand to cover what she was doing in her mouth with the fingers of the other. During our meal she took four cell phone calls--three business and one personal. Julianne had, in short, a gross lack of grace and etiquette. It was systemic. She wasn't rude to the extent that sometimes what she said or did was off color, or on occasion vulgar. She was, I hate saying this, altogether common.
It was for this that I could neither fault nor blame Julianne for anything. She made me feel in contradistinction my many privileges that I could see I take generally for granted, even if it makes me also feel a little bit guilty of feeling at times a bit snobbish, when, in fact, I really do not see myself really as a snob at all.
I simply have had the good fortune to be well-educated, good looking, well-groomed, and healthy. These are the corners of my many advantages, none of which Julianne herself in life appeared to possess. So, how could I fault her? She, like me, was just another person trying to make it the best way she could in this world.
Throughout our date, I was polite, good humored, and courteous. I asked Julianne questions, but did not probe. I talked a bit about my job, and Julianne said very little about hers, only that she worked nearby in finance. With the waitstaff, I was friendly, but not overly so. All in all, I was personal, but easy going.
It is easy for me to be this way, and I left on the table an appropriate and decent tip along with the check. Having exited the restaurant, whose food had been mediocre at a stretch, I walked Julianne to the nearest corner; she didn't thank me for taking her out. She didn't know to shake a hand.
In this world, I later realized, it is perfectly easy to behave like a gentleman before a beautiful, aware, intelligent, and joyous woman. Anyone can do that. It is easy. But a real gentleman knows how to be one and is one when the chips are down, and the person opposite him lacks all the graces and good fortune that somehow, through luck and birth and experience, he has had in life, and she, for no fault of her own, has not. A date is a date, lunch is lunch, and a commitment to have lunch with another human being for an hour is a commitment. It is kept. That is all.
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