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Peg (aka: "Winterwithlight")
I had Japanese food with Peg and even though she had offered at the end of our lacklustre date to pay for half, I countered by paying for the whole. After all, it was thirty bucks and I didn't feel like figuring out how much to tip and all that with her. It just wasn't worth the fifteen or sixteen or seventeen bucks it was going to cost me not to have done that.
After all, I had blown it right from the start when this lithe and green-eyed Scottish beauty had said, almost as the first thing when we sat down, that I looked much younger than my pictures, and much better than them too. No, I couldn't say: "Thank you. And while you are no doubt a great beauty, you look your age of 46, the same age as me," or something along those lines, which was basically the only thing I could think of at the moment. That pause after her compliment, my male lack of a response where one was due, where it was pretty much obligatory, just to be courteous actually, was pretty much all telling.
I have to say, too, that her speaking in all sorts of esoteric-philosophical ways about her work as a painter; and my expressing my reluctance to show her any of my work as a writer–over my own set of esoteric-philosophical reasons, all of which were just as true and truth-seeking as were hers in explaining to me her ars poetica–didn't help. We were two artists and we did not match at all.
I probably blew it before that even when I was five minutes late meeting her in Union Square due to my having been stuck standing in the express line across the street at Whole Foods to buy twenty bucks of chocolate. Nothing, before meeting a woman you are interested in, should ever hold you up or be a priority over her; and telling Peg that that's what I had done, which, if one has done such a thing in the first place, one in the second place then never confesses to, I also did.
It made me seem lackadaisical, which, in retrospect, I suppose I was. We just went through politely the motions of a date. It all must have gone through her like an arrow, one that did not pierce her; it just went in and went out. No bleeding, no pain, much of little felt.
Afterwards, we sent each other cordial emails that confirmed that there was nothing there.
# 4
