Jean (aka: "Pinkroadster")

The first thing Jean was concerned with when I met her for coffee in White Plains was how she appeared to me; that is, did I mind that she was much plainer in person than she had been in the picture she had put up of herself online. That is, until she had changed her photo for another the night before. That is, did I mind that she had done that? That is, could I like her this way?

Before that, she was absolutely, dropdead stunning. In person, she was attractive enough, but no head-turner. I wouldn't have thrown her out of bed, nor would I have taken her home to Mom and Dad. Still, it's embarrassing when no sooner than two people from Match do meet, they start analyzing Match itself. It means it's dead in the water: if that, Match itself is the only thing two people can muster up to talk about together, if the only common denominator between two people is the system they used to bring them together, and to discuss their past experiences, all of which ipso facto must not have worked out, then there is equally as little promise they will not either.

Still, I remained intellectually curious to hear Jean, a well-paid accountant, break down in percentages the men she found eligible candidates. Just by showing up, by my not cancelling at the last minute, or wishing to change the date, I realized, by her reckoning, I was already in the top 10%.

From there, though, the odds seemed to decrease exponentially. There, in that last 2 1/2%, by keeping to schedule and my word, is where Jean let me know I happened to be. Somewhere there she was saved, it seemed, for some lucky sonuvbitch who'd give her the whole farm and a promissory note for collateral.

She told of a tale of being taken out to an expensive steak dinner by a Wall Street executive. When he asked her, she related, "Do you like sex?" she stopped at appetizers, claiming to the gentleman that she was no longer hungry. Her point, I suppose, before me was to show me she had morals, and would not take a man for one single steak if she found his values repellent or unattractive.

"What," she asked me, "do you think about a question like that?" Naturally, hoping not to just as abruptly end our date at the cafeteria style coffeehouse we were seated at, not at some fancy joint where the big boys pumped up their cholesterol and balls over a thick slab of Angus, I concurred with Jean; without, at the same time, wholly condemning my own semi-salacious and libidinous tendency, so as not to possibly, however slim the chance, find myself in a contradictory bind of logic I could not surmount should the evening pan out in such a way that I was questioned again by Jean over wherefore my fingertips were prowling at the top of her underpants.

But this, I doubted, would ever happen: for by her bringing up the past steakhouse episode and the serious affront to her character it had caused her then, now being displayed as a lesson to me through symbolic narration meant clearly that her response, had she responded to the gentleman in question over her liking for sex, would have have to have been "No"; and if not "No" itself, then something punitive for sex with her, something like offering to her the stars and moon and one's firstborn's toenails' clippings drowned in Aramaic vinegar and then sealed forever in amber in order to get her pants off, would be required.

She took me entirely wrong when I suggested we go somewhere else to continue our talk. She felt interrupted, dislodged, and altogether, I suppose, minimized. My forehead was hot from all the intellectual fervor. I just needed a change of location, I tried to explain to her, along with an apology, as she now stood on the curb of the sidewalk and pointed to the direction she was crossing to, and pointed to the direction perpendicular where she told me I was to go.