“So, Why Have You Never Been Married”
(A Memoir of Love, Loss and Lunacy)
by
Alan Stransman
Copyright © 2011 by Alan I. Stransman
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Then, drop by caustic drop, a perfect cry
Shall string some constant harmony,—
Relentless caper for all those who step
The
legend of their youth into the noon.
Hart Crane, “Legend”
These fragments I have shored against my ruins…
T.S.
Eliot, “The Waste Land”
To the women I have loved, lost and never forgotten.
In the summer of 1992, I was working at a television station in Toronto. I had been working there since August, 1980, having been hired just two weeks after graduating from the Master’s degree program in Film and Television Production at the Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University.
I had started as a Production Manager, but after less than two years at the station, the Managing Director gave me the opportunity to produce a one-hour documentary special on “streetproofing” children, which had been inspired by a terrible incident in which a young girl had been abducted and murdered by a drifter, her body stuffed into a freezer in an abandoned house. The documentary program which I produced received a gold medal and from then on, I was a Producer.
That summer – the summer of 1992 – I had been assigned to supervise the production of a three-hour documentary that had been sold to the station by the daughter of a very prominent Canadian author. Although she had little experience in television production, she had peddled the documentary on the promise of delivering the author Tom Wolfe – a friend of her famous father – as the host of the program, and of persuading Pierre Elliot Trudeau, the former Canadian Prime Minister, to be interviewed – his first interview since retiring from political life – and I was given the job of keeping an eye on her and making sure she didn’t blow the $400,000 that she was reportedly given to produce the program. The gold-medal-winning production that I had done ten years earlier had had a $60,000 budget, but then, I didn’t have connections to Tom Wolfe and Pierre Elliot Trudeau.
I had been assigned to supervise the production in May, but by the middle of June there was still no production to supervise, because negotiations with Wolfe and Trudeau had not been concluded. That was the official explanation, while the scuttlebutt around the station was that the senior executives were fighting with the producer over who had creative control of the program. The Managing Director wanted it, of course, as it was his job to protect the company’s money. The daughter of the famous author wasn’t about to give it up as she had the relationships with Wolfe and Trudeau, and needed to protect them. The impasse dragged on for weeks, and, while it did, I had nothing to do. At that time, I had a small office beside one of the senior Vice-Presidents on the second floor, and I didn’t want him to know that I had nothing to do, so I brought my laptop computer to work and pretended to be typing notes, with my office door closed.
However, since I had nothing to do, I also had nothing to type. The production had not only not gotten underway, but the subject matter was still extremely vague – something to do with how Canadians perceive themselves compared to how Americans see them – and in my one and only meeting with the producer, she had not demonstrated any inclination to take me into her confidence, so, with nothing better to do, I began to doodle on my computer about some of the adventures and misadventures that I had had in the dating world during the previous several months.
In the summer of 1992, I was forty and still single.
And, so, I began writing:
I am sitting in a third floor office, in a swank townhouse development, waiting for someone named Lana.
Robin has just left, taking with her the forms which she had brought me to fill out, and which, judging by the fact that she returned for them three times, took me longer to complete than the average client.
Robin is about twenty-five, very pretty, with shoulder-length blonde hair, and – as I could not help noticing beneath her short skirt – fabulous legs. As she was leaving, I was tempted to ask her if she would like to get together sometime, but something stopped me.
Discretion, perhaps.
Or fear.
It would not likely have gone over well with Lana. Or perhaps it would have greatly simplified things with her.
Who knows?
So, I am waiting for Lana in her smart little office, feeling a bit, what?
Silly? Sheepish? Embarrassed?
Why?
I have good reason to be here.
Lots of good reasons.
Last night, I reviewed the names that had appeared during the previous several months in a list I keep on the right side of my daily journal, under the heading “W”:
Suzanne
Hildy
Marianne
Briar
Sara
Bonnie
Jennifer
Martine
Lisa
Daryl
Bo
Of those eleven names, the last two had appeared with a question mark beside them.
Upon revision, they all deserved one.
I met Suzanne at a fund-raising party which I attended with my friend Jonathan in early April. It was a very classy evening, with a “funky black tie” dress code in effect, and about five hundred people in attendance. This kind of an event is usually a good place to meet women, and, as it turned out, there were a lot of attractive women there.
About an hour after I had arrived a woman named Sari, whom I had dated very briefly a couple of years earlier, came over to greet me. We chatted for a moment, catching up on the previous two years, and she then asked me if she could “take the liberty” of giving my phone number to a friend of hers. “Sure,” I said, but added, “is your friend here tonight?” Sari said she was. “Well, then, bring her over?” I suggested. “Why go through the rigmarole of a blind date?”
A few moments later Sari returned with a quite attractive woman whom she introduced as Suzanne. She was petite, with dark, shoulder-length hair, and a very fine-featured, intelligent-looking face. I said hello, told her a bit about myself, and then asked her what line of work she was in.
She told me that she was the public relations officer for a large telecommunications company but had previously worked in television production. Coincidentally, she had worked on a business show which had been directed by one of my best friends – so we had something in common. We chatted for a couple of minutes, and then Suzanne spotted someone with whom she wanted to speak, so we said our good-byes and off she went.
A few minutes later Sari returned, slipped a small folded piece of paper into the breast pocket of my shirt, and whispered, “Suzanne wants you to have her number.”
That was on a Saturday night. The following Monday night I called Suzanne, and we had a very pleasant conversation. In fact, she sounded even more personable and outgoing on the phone than she had at the party, when she had seemed a bit reserved.
During our conversation, I discovered that Suzanne loved her work, was quite successful, had her own home, spent a lot of time reading, and worked out regularly. I asked her to name some of her favorite writers, and she mentioned Ayn Rand and Phillip Roth – two of my favorites, as well. At the end of the conversation we set up a date for the following Sunday afternoon, as she was going to be out of town on business for the rest of the week. The plan was for me to call her at 1 o’clock, after her workout class and my regular Sunday morning run, and we would decide together what we’d like to do.
I was looking forward to our date and told her so.
The following Sunday was a typically cool early-April day, but sunny, and although I had already had a long run, I was thinking about taking a walk with Suzanne and then stopping in somewhere for lunch. At the agreed-upon time, I phoned her. We chatted for a couple of minutes, and then I asked her what she was in the mood to do. “Well,” she said, “I have some bad news.”
A business meeting which had been scheduled for the previous week in New Jersey had been rescheduled for the following morning. She would be flying out that afternoon, so we couldn’t get together. She hadn’t called to tell me, she explained, because she didn’t know my last name.
I was disappointed, but wasn’t about to make an issue of the fact that she hadn’t called, although I did regard it as somewhat inconsiderate. Instead, I asked if she would like to reschedule for the following Sunday. Better not, she said, because she would be in New Jersey for the entire week and would probably be going to New York for the weekend. I gave her my phone number, just in case she changed her mind and returned home earlier than expected and wanted to get together. Failing that, I said, I would call her at the beginning of the following week. But I was still wondering why she hadn’t thought to ask Sari for my phone number instead of waiting until Sunday afternoon and then canceling.
If she were the public relations officer for an international telecommunications company, shouldn’t she be able to find a phone number?
By the end of the following weekend, I had not heard from Suzanne. On the Monday evening, I called her again. She was out, so I left a message for her to call me back.
I didn’t hear from her for the rest of that week.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have called again, seeing that I had already left a message, but I had been looking forward to getting together with her. She was attractive, athletic, and intelligent and it had seemed from our initial telephone conversation that we had a lot in common. We had already met face to face and she had been the one to give me her phone number without my asking. So, on the Monday evening of the next week, I called and left another message.
By the Friday of that week, I had still not heard from her. By then, I was curious, and a little bit concerned.
Had her week-long business meeting in New Jersey turned into a three-week trip?
Not likely.
Maybe something had happened to her. A sudden illness? An attack of some sort? Strictly speaking, she could even be dead. It does happen, especially in New York, although I hadn’t seen anything reported in the newspapers. More than likely, she had changed her mind about the date, or had met someone else.
But let’s say something had happened – would anyone have thought to call me – a guy she was supposed to have a date with on a Sunday afternoon?
And if someone did call, it would likely be the police. Who needs that?
So on Friday morning I called Sari.
“Whatever happened to your friend Suzanne?” I asked.
“What are you talking about?” she said. “I just saw her last night.”
“And was she....well?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Of course,” Sari said. “She was fine. Why?” There was concern in her voice.
I told her about the canceled date and the unreturned phone calls. She expressed surprise at her friend’s behavior, and apologized. That was unnecessary, I told her, as it certainly wasn’t her fault.
Nonetheless, Sari felt responsible, and could offer no explanation for Suzanne’s actions. But she intended to find out. “Fine,” I said. “But if you do, ask her not to call me. I have no interest in hearing from her.”
So Suzanne was scratched from the list.
At the same fund-raising gala at which I had met Suzanne, I had been introduced by my friend Malcolm to a woman named Hildy, who had helped organize the event. Hildy had the look of a fashion model – tall and slender, with thick blonde hair, smooth skin, and high cheekbones. She had been dressed in a black pant suit, and looked very attractive. She had only stopped by for a brief instant while I was talking to Malcolm, as she had lots of people to say hello to, but as soon as she had flitted off, I asked Malcolm if he knew what her situation was. He wasn’t sure, but seemed to recall that his wife had introduced her to someone a few weeks earlier, and that they were still dating.
On the several occasions that I caught sight of her, however, there did not seem to be a man with her. If she were dating someone, he was nowhere in evidence that night.
A few days after the gala, I called Malcolm from my office at the station and asked him, once again, if he knew anything about Hildy’s status. He offered the same vague impression that she was seeing someone, though he agreed that it had not seemed so on the night of the party. He told me that Hildy was selling tickets for another fund-raising gala, and suggested that if I were interested in attending that event – and in having an excuse to connect with her – I should call and arrange to buy a ticket. He gave me her phone number, and I promptly called and left a message. A few hours later, while I was still at work, Hildy called back.
I reminded her of our brief meeting at the gala, but she confessed that, as it had been a very hectic evening for her, she had no recollection of meeting me. I wasn’t insulted, I assured her, and steered the conversation towards the upcoming fund-raiser. It, too, was going to be a large event, she said, and if I wanted to get a ticket for it, I could pick one up from her.
It turned out that her apartment was just down the street from mine. “In that case,” I ventured, “why don’t we meet for coffee?” I confessed that I had queried Malcolm about her availability, and that he had said that he thought she was seeing someone, but wasn’t sure. “No harm in asking,” I explained. She said that she was dating several guys, though none seriously. “I’m not in a committed relationship right now,” she said, to avoid any misunderstanding, adding that getting together for coffee would be fine.
We agreed to meet at a little cafe just up the street on Sunday afternoon at 1, a week after my aborted date with Suzanne.
Sunday was cool and overcast, but I was in the mood for a bit of fresh air. When Hildy arrived at the cafe, I asked if she were interested in a walk, and she said she was, so rather than having coffee in the neighborhood, we set off with no particular destination in mind. Our only constraint was that she wanted to attend her young nephew’s swim class at 3.
We walked for about an hour and the conversation was easy and enjoyable. Hildy had studied Fine Art at university and was working as an interior designer, but had just applied to the School of Architecture. She seemed to be passionate about books and movies, and to enjoy discussing them.
Stopping into a downtown cafe, she told me a bit more about her family, her education, and her plans to study architecture. As she was, by then, in a bit of a hurry to get back, we only stayed for about twenty minutes. On the walk home I asked if she would like to get together for a movie later in the week. She said yes, adding that she felt very comfortable with me. As I dropped her off at her apartment, I thought to myself, how nice would it be to go out with her? She was bright, attractive, passionate and athletic – and she lived just down the street from me.
The very next night – a Monday – I was in a grocery store around the corner from my apartment at about 9 o’clock, when a very cute woman, pushing a shopping cart, came up to me and said hello. I looked at her for a few seconds, but couldn’t place her. There was no point pretending, so I said, “I know you, but I can’t remember how.” “It’s Marianne,” she said, brightly.
Then I remembered.
I had met Marianne about five years earlier. At that time she was working in her family’s carpet business, but thinking of pursuing a career in the television industry. Our meeting had come about when a mutual friend had met her while buying a carpet. Marianne had said that she was trying to break into television and my friend suggested that she call me, thinking that I might be able to help or advise her.
I distinctly remember the moment that I got the call from Marianne asking if she could come up to the station to meet me. At the time, I was dating a woman named Adrienne. We had been going out for about eight months but our relationship was going nowhere.
The phone call from Marianne is etched clearly in my mind because of what it had revealed to me about my feelings for Adrienne, or, the lack thereof. It began with Marianne’s voice – very soft and sweet, a girlish whisper, really, and very sexy. Based upon what she told me during our conversation about her background and education, I assumed that she was in her mid-to-late twenties – too old to have a voice like that, to be frank – which made it all the more alluring.
As I hung up the phone, having made arrangements to meet with her in my office later in the week, I hoped that Marianne wouldn’t turn out to be as sexy as her voice. I knew that if she did, it would be ‘curtains’ with Adrienne. Though I tried to deny it, I was looking for the ejector seat in our relationship, and I knew that the first attractive woman who crossed my path would help me find it.
A few days later Marianne came to see me at the station and she was very attractive. She had very thick, wavy brunette hair, large, brown eyes, and a very warm smile. She wore no makeup, and had a natural, girl-next-door quality, which was enhanced by the soft, theatrically-breathy voice. Though her voice might have better- suited to a film or television actress, she said that she was interested in being an investigative reporter or talk show host. She would have a hard time projecting gravitas with that whisper, I thought, but there was nothing to be gained by telling her that. Besides, I didn’t really care what she did or didn’t do in the television industry. I made some polite suggestions as to how she might get started, and spent the rest of the meeting thinking about how long I should wait before asking her out.
Not long, as it turned out.
A few days later, I called and invited Marianne to lunch. The pretext – entirely bogus, of course – was further career counseling. We met at a casual downtown restaurant. It was a late spring day – warm and pleasant – and we enjoyed our meal outside. I had only an hour or so to spend with her, but by the end of it, whatever affliction my relationship with Adrienne had been suffering from had become terminal.
A week or so after our lunch I asked Marianne out for dinner, and, again, we had a lovely time. She invited me back to her stylish studio apartment for coffee and when I left, kissed me warmly. But then her behavior turned strange. It became difficult to pin her down for another date and whenever we had made one, she canceled. Finally, she admitted that she was hung up on a guy in New York and was planning to move there. Since her background was in art history, she was trying to get a job with Sotheby’s. What had happened to the news anchor idea, I wondered, but didn’t bother to ask. We never got together again and I had not seen or heard from Marianne until I ran into her in the grocery store – the night after my date with Hildy!
She was still attractive and had the same girl-next-door quality that she had had when I had dated her five years before. As I walked her to her car she gave me a quick recap of the intervening years. She had moved to New York but the job with Sotheby’s had fallen through. Instead, she had done a Master’s degree in Fine Art and gone to work for an antique carpet dealer. There had been a long love affair with a man who was now a reporter in Washington – not, however, the man whom she had moved to New York to be with, but they hadn’t seen each other in over a year. She was back in the old neighborhood and back in the family business. I asked if she were “datable” and she said that she was.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have been so eager to go out with someone else, after the vibe that I had had the day before with Hildy. But I knew that she was dating other men, not only because she had told me she was, but because on my way home the night before, just hours after our date, I had seen her walking down the street with another guy. I asked Marianne if she would like to get together. She said yes, and gave me her phone number. I told her that I would call her as soon as I got home and that we could then check our schedules and set up a time.
A few minutes later, we arranged a date for the following Friday night. On Thursday night of that week, I called Hildy. I already had a date with Marianne, I figured, so why not ask Hildy out for Saturday night or Sunday afternoon and turn it into a potentially very interesting weekend.
Hildy’s voice was warm and friendly on the phone and after a few minutes of pleasant conversation, I asked if she wanted to get together for a movie on the weekend. “No,” she said, in her typically forthright manner, “and I’ll tell you why.”
The night before, she said, she had had dinner with a woman with whom she had just recently struck up a friendship. Her name just happened to be – Marianne. They had been discussing their plans for the weekend and Marianne had said that she had run into a guy that she used to date and that they were going to have dinner on Friday night. “I wonder if you know him,” Marianne added, and mentioned my name. “Yes, I do know him,” said Hildy. “I had a date with him last Sunday.”
Small world, as a comedian once noted, but you wouldn’t want to paint it.
Hildy said she couldn’t go out with me if I were dating her friend Marianne. But I wasn’t dating Marianne – I had just made a date with her. There was no point splitting hairs with Hildy, however, and I just had to accept that it was an unfortunate coincidence and leave it at that. Besides, I really had the feeling that things were going to click with Marianne. The timing seemed right this time.
So Hildy was scratched off the list.
The next morning – a Friday – at about 10 o’clock, I called Marianne at work to confirm our arrangements for the evening as I had told her I would. She was busy with a customer, so I left a message. By 11:30 she had still not called back and I began to suspect that something might be wrong. I was afraid that she was now going to cancel our date for the same reason that Hildy had. Not wanting to wait any longer than I had to for the bad news, I called her again. This time she came to the phone.
“Are we...uh... getting together tonight?” I asked, trying not to sound as unsure as I felt.
“Rumor has it,” she said. “Why?”
“Just checking,” I answered.
I wasn’t about to explain the cause of my uncertainty to Marianne.
At 8:30 that evening, I arrived at Marianne’s apartment building. I buzzed her and she invited me in. As she was still getting dressed, she said she would leave the door open for me.
I let myself into her apartment, which was tastefully and expensively furnished. As she finished getting ready, I wandered around the living room. There were numerous framed photographs of her at various stages in her life. I was struck by how photogenic she was. In all of the pictures of her, whether with family or friends, she was smiling broadly and looking radiant. It seemed that she had always been beautiful. If she had ever gone through an awkward stage, it wasn’t represented in the photographs.
I took particular note of a picture of her with a young man, obviously an old boyfriend. It was the type of picture I had seen many times before in the apartments of women I had dated. Captured at a party or event, they had their arms around each other, and appeared to be very much in love. I tried to determine whether this photograph had been taken before or after I had first met Marianne.
What did it matter?
It didn’t – but still, the picture evoked a faint wisp of jealousy.
Marianne came out of her bedroom dressed in the casual, preppy style favored by boys’ private schools and which only a very feminine woman can pull off with aplomb. She had on a navy blue blazer, a powder-blue button-down shirt, and khaki pants. She had no makeup or lipstick, and her hair was very full and thick.
She looked lovely.
We headed downtown with no specific destination in mind. I suggested a few of my favorite haunts, but Marianne proposed a restaurant in an artsy part of town that I was happy to try, so we headed there instead. The place she had suggested was a small, cozy Italian restaurant with a half dozen tables in the front and a big open kitchen in the back. It would have been perfect for a romantic dinner but, unfortunately, there were several couples waiting to be seated ahead of us. Since we were both hungry, we decided to take our chances and explore what else was on the street.
We found a Thai restaurant which wasn’t crowded and decided to give it a shot. We soon discovered why it wasn’t busy. The food was greasy and too spicy – at least, it was for me – but the conversation with Marianne made up for it. She told me about her time in New York, her relationship with the man who was now in Washington, her studies and her friends. And she seemed very interested in hearing about the projects that I had worked on during the years she was away.
After dinner – which I paid for – she suggested we have coffee and dessert at a small cafe down the street. The offerings there were substantially better. This time, Marianne insisted on paying the bill. Since that is usually a sign that your companion is having a good time and wishes to establish a reciprocal basis for a relationship, I was pleased.
When we arrived back at Marianne’s apartment building she leaned over and kissed me sweetly on the lips. I probably would not have tried to kiss her, not wishing to appear too anxious, but her tender gesture pre-empted my indecision. As I drove home I thought about how appealing the prospect was of getting into a relationship with Marianne.
The next day I felt like calling her but didn’t. Again, I was trying not to appear too anxious or impatient, so I waited until Sunday night to call. It was about 9:30 when I rung up and as soon as she answered the phone I knew that something was wrong. Marianne’s voice was very subdued, almost inaudible. She said that she was very tired and asked if we could talk the following night. That would be fine, I said, although she sounded more depressed than tired.
By 9:30 the following evening I had still not heard from her. There could have been a thousand reasons why she hadn’t called by then – after all, it was only 9:30.
But I knew that something had happened. I just sensed it.
And I knew that she wasn’t going to call me. So I called her.
Marianne answered the phone with the same deathly tone as she had the night before. She was on the other line, she told me, and would call me back. By the time she did, an hour and a half later, I had already written her off.
“Hello,” I said.
“It’s Marianne,” she said, her voice still a barely audible whisper.
“How are you?” I asked.
“Oh...I don’t know,” she replied.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m just....overwhelmed.” Oh brother, I groaned to myself.
‘Why are you overwhelmed, Marianne?” I asked, trying to sound neutral.
“I just get like this,” she said. “I can’t seem to cope with things.”
“Like what things?”
“My ex-boyfriend just called me from Washington. I haven’t seen him in over a year. He wants to get back together.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. “I thought you were happy living here. Does he plan to relocate?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “I don’t know what to do. I guess I should get together with him and see,” she said, not sounding terribly convincing.
“So that means that you and I aren’t going to get together again, doesn’t it, Marianne?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
“I guess not,” she replied, somewhat despondently. “The timing just isn’t right.”
Cue Leonard Cohen. So Long, Marianne.
The next name on the list was Briar. Her family used to live on a street called Briar Hill, and that’s how she got her unusual name. I met Briar a couple of years earlier, while I was co-producing a low-budget daytime television series. It was a courtroom drama and she had been cast as one of the recurring lawyer characters. We produced four episodes a day and sometimes five, in a mind-numbing, assembly-line production process. One cast would be running lines in the rehearsal set while another was shooting an episode in the main set. My job was to make any necessary script revisions at the rehearsal stage to bring the show out “to time”. That often meant writing a couple of new pages of dialogue on the spot, if the scripts were running short.
Some actors could be given a new page or two of dialogue and learn them right away and others couldn’t. Briar had been one who could. On a number of occasions I had written a new scene for her, and had read lines with her during the crew break, getting to know her on a friendly yet professional basis. Since I was always in the rehearsal set or the main set I had only seen her in wardrobe – I had never seen her in street clothes.
Because the Executive Producer believed the comely young women in the show had to be “sexed down”, as he put it, in order to be credible as lawyers, Briar’s beautiful blonde hair, by the time she came into the set, had been swept up and shellacked into a permanently rigid wave that gave the appearance of having a jai alai racquet stuck to her head.
It was not until the wrap party that I had gotten to see how utterly gorgeous Briar actually was. She had come to the party wearing bell-bottom blue jeans with a white stripe down the side, and a white cable-knit sweater. Her long, blonde hair was brushed out and hung down to the middle of her back.
I had come with Tammy, a production assistant whom I was dating at the time, and Briar had come alone. Tammy was very attractive, but Briar was to die for. Towards the end of the evening I had a brief conversation with her at the bar, but that was it. I was in a relationship with Tammy at the time and had no intention of pursuing anything with Briar.
By coincidence, my friend Gordon turned out to have a casual acquaintanceship with Briar’s brother – who had the unusual name of King – and about three months after production had wrapped on the courtroom drama, he told me that he was having lunch with him. By this time, my relationship with Tammy had ended, and I asked Gordon to scope out what was happening with Briar. Following the lunch, he reported that Briar was living with someone, and had been for a long time.
Okay – no big surprise there.
A few months later, Gordon had scheduled another lunch meeting with King, and I asked him to see if he could get an update on Briar’s status. This time he returned with the news that Briar’s relationship was on shaky ground and that she might even welcome the opportunity to date someone new.
It had now been about eight months since I had last seen Briar, and since I hadn’t really known her all that well to begin with, I didn’t feel comfortable calling her “out of the blue”. My biggest concern was that she would not remember me and that I would have to endure a sweat-inducing explanation along the lines of, “I was the guy who wrote additional scenes for you when the shows were running short….” so I decided to call her brother instead – even though I had never met him. I figured I’d get him to ask his sister if I could call her.
Gordon had assured me that King was a man’s man and that he wouldn’t be offended by an “off-the-wall” phone call, so I rang him up. I introduced myself, explained that I had worked with his sister the previous summer, that I thought she was drop-dead gorgeous, and that I wanted to go out with her.
What kind of guy named King wouldn’t understand that?
He understood completely, he said, and the next time he saw Briar, he assured me, he would mention our conversation to her. I thanked him and gave him my phone number.
A few days later, however, he called to say that Briar had just been selected to go to Europe as part of a performing dance troupe and that she would be away for the next four months.
So much for that.
I had just about forgotten about Briar when, six months later, Gordon told me that he was having lunch again with her brother. This time he came back with the cheery report that Briar had broken up with her boyfriend for good. “Excellent,” I said. “I’m calling King.”
“Remember me?” I asked when I had gotten him on the line, “the guy with the crush on your beautiful sister?”
He remembered, which wasn’t, perhaps, that surprising, given the circumstances, and said that with the ex-boyfriend out of the way, things were looking pretty good for me. “Go for it,” he urged me. “Now’s the time.”
Wow, I thought. No wonder they called this guy King.
Once again, he said he’d mention it to Briar the next time he saw her. He certainly seemed to be supportive of my interest in his sister, even though we had never met. Or, it might just have been that he had never liked the ex-boyfriend.
A week or so later he called and said that Briar was expecting my call.
I rang her that night and we had a good conversation. As it turned out, she did remember me from the television series we had done together. We talked about that project and what we had been doing since then. After a few minutes, I asked her about getting together. We could, she said, but added a few caveats. She would be working, she said, at an industrial show for the next ten days from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Following that, she was going to Vancouver for another industrial show for ten days and would be staying on for a week or two after that with friends.
On the off-chance that I wasn’t thoroughly discouraged, she added that she was in the process of “getting back or not getting back” with her boyfriend.
“However,” she said, “if you want to meet for a coffee during my break, we can.”
Nothing like an offer I couldn’t possibly refuse.
It was not what I had had in mind when I had called her.
Then – I had been dreaming about having a long, leisurely brunch with her on a Sunday afternoon and if things had gone well, taking in a movie. A quick coffee while she was at work and still trying to decide what to do about her ex-boyfriend? No, thanks.
I told Briar that I would call her during the next few days, but, after thinking it over, decided not to bother.
That might seem like the end of the Briar story, but it isn’t.
A few months after my telephone conversation with her, I got a call from my friend Chris. By this time, I had all but forgotten about Briar. “What would be in it for me,” he wanted to know, “if I were to get you a date with the woman of your dreams?”
Chris is an actor who earns his living doing mostly voice work, which means that he hardly works at all. He spends most of his time at the Y, where lots of other actors and actresses hang out. Over the previous few months he had gotten to know a very attractive fellow thespian named Gina. He had been talking to her one day when she had happened to mention that she had just spent the weekend in New York. Nosing around for a possible opening with Gina, Chris asked if she had gone to New York alone. No, Gina had said, she had gone with her best friend Briar.
“Briar!” Chris exclaimed. “A friend of mine has been trying to date a woman named Briar for two years!”
Of course, it turned out to be the same Briar.
Gina asked Chris if my intentions were “honorable” and Chris said that they were, meaning, I suppose, that I wasn’t married, that I wanted to date Briar and get to know her, and not just get her into bed. Had he said that I wanted to marry Briar he would not have been far off. Gina said that she would check the situation out with Briar. Of course, neither she nor Chris knew that I had spoken to Briar several months earlier, and that I had never managed to arrange a proper date with her.
A few days later, Gina reported to Chris that Briar had said that I already had her number and that I should call her. A few nights later I did. She wasn’t home, so I left a message. “Briar,” I said, “you and I are just destined to get together,” adding, “and, at the very least, I hope you can appreciate the humor in this situation.”
Three days later – at about 10:30 at night – she called back. She was drinking tea and munching on an apple, her manner as cool and breezy as ever. She had just come back from up north where she had signed on to do summer stock at the local theatre. She would be leaving in about three weeks, and would be away for two months.
Briar sounded great on the phone, the ultimate cool chick, hip, funny and full of life, and we talked for well over an hour. She confessed that when I had called her the last time, she had purposely given me a hard time. When I asked why she said that she had been “under the influence” of her ex-boyfriend, whatever that meant, but that he was now out of her life.
She didn’t blame me, she said, for not calling her back. This time she was eager to get together. She suggested lunch on Saturday afternoon, but I already had plans for the early evening, so we agreed on Tuesday evening of the following week. The plan was for me to meet her after her dance class. We both said that we were really looking forward to getting together before we rang off.
The following Tuesday evening at 8:30, I arrived downtown, parked in one of the lots near the dance studio and waited on the street for Briar. It was a very cool, clear night in mid-May, not ideal for eating at an outdoor patio, but certainly bearable if you were dressed warmly enough and had an adventurous spirit. I planned to leave it to Briar to decide what we would do but was guessing that she have worked up an appetite during two hours of dancing.
As I stood on the street waiting for Briar, I was struck by how clean and fresh the night air seemed. Only two hours earlier, these same downtown streets had been clogged with rush hour commuters spewing out toxic exhaust.
As I drew in the cool evening breeze, I felt incredibly healthy and vibrant. I had worked out a couple of times on the weekend, running and swimming, and had had a good workout in the pool at the Y over lunch that day. I had also taken about twenty minutes of sun on the patio afterwards and still had lots of color leftover from the weekend.
At the end of Woody Allen’s film “Manhattan”, Isaac Davis, the character played by Allen, itemizes the things that make life worth living; Groucho Marks, Willie Mays, the second movement of the “Jupiter Symphony”, Louis Armstrong’s “Potato Head Blues”. My list would certainly include standing on the street on a delicious spring evening, waiting for a beautiful woman to arrive – knowing that at that very moment she is showering, dressing, or brushing her hair in anticipation of meeting me. Even before you set eyes upon her there is a subtle, almost sensual, connection. As I waited for Briar I wasn’t tense or anxious. My mind and body felt relaxed, yet excited. I had a sense that the evening would play out like a sweet romantic dream and that the memory of it would linger for a long time.
In this dreamy state, I watched the women emerge from the dance studio. Some had not showered, and were still flushed from the exertion of the class. Others had their wet hair slicked straight back. All had the lissome sexiness characteristic of dancers. One of the last to come out was Briar. Her thick blonde hair, cut to shoulder length, was still wet from her shower and brushed back. She wore no makeup or lipstick and had on black jeans, a white sweater, black ankle-length boots, and a loose-fitting brown suede jacket with fringe on the sleeves.
The great ones always make it look effortless.
Her movements, as she rushed out the door, fearing that she was late, were brisk and energetic.
“Jesus, Briar,” I said, “did you have to be the last one out of the class?”
“Sorry,” she replied apologetically, “I just couldn’t meet you without having a shower.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve already been waiting a couple of years. What’s another ten minutes?”
Then I kissed her on the cheek.
I asked her what she was in the mood for and she said that she was up for anything. I suggested an Italian restaurant that has a spacious outdoor patio, but warned her that the evening might get cool. I knew that I would be comfortable because I like the cold, but I wanted to be sure that she wouldn’t get chilled. She’d be fine, she said, and agreed that the place sounded terrific. And, as I had anticipated, she was very hungry.
The restaurant wasn’t crowded, and most of the people who were there had chosen to eat indoors. That was fine by me because the tables on the patio were empty. We settled into one right by the sidewalk, each ordered a beer, and decided to share an order of bruschetta, Caesar salad, and pasta. Briar was a great dinner companion – by turns, funny, irreverent, feisty, vulnerable and occasionally vulgar, and just lovely to look at.
Though it was a week night and I had worked all day, I felt as if I were on vacation. The working world seemed a million miles away. As we sat under the canopy enjoying the food and the Italian music, it felt as though we could have been in Italy. Neither of us was anxious for the evening to end and we stayed well past midnight, by which time the cold night air had settled in. Briar had taken the subway downtown, and so, of course, I offered to drive her home. As we walked to my car she said that it would be fine for me to drop her off at the subway. She lived out on the west side of town, a fair distance from me, and realized that I had to be up early the next morning. She was being very considerate.
Drop her off at the subway? Do guys really do that?
What an inelegant way for the evening to end!
Besides, to drop a woman – any woman – let alone one you’ve just enjoyed a magical evening with, at the subway late at night is, as far as I am concerned, to tell her that you have no regard whatsoever for her safety and well-being.”Briar,” I said, “if I dropped you off at the subway, the next time I called you, I’d expect you to hang up on me.” The truth was, I didn’t really care where Briar lived or how long it would take to get there.
The longer the better.
Tomorrow would just have to take care of itself. I had made my way through many a working day on only four or five hours of sleep, and sometimes on considerably less.
When we got to Briar’s neighborhood, she gave me a little tour. We drove by the house in which she had grown up, which had since been sold, and she pointed out the window of the room that used to be her bedroom. It was a suburban home typical of the 1960’s, with an enormous front yard. I imagined her as a beautiful, rambunctious teenager, with lots of horny young boys chasing her. We then drove past the house where her parents currently lived, which was just down the street from her apartment. She lived in a part of the city that I had never been in, and, with its maze of crescents and cul-de-sacs that seemed to wind back upon themselves, I soon got disoriented. I had no idea how to get back to a major thoroughfare to make my way home after dropping her off.
To make matters worse, my gas tank was almost empty, and I had probably just enough gas to get home if I didn’t make any wrong turns. It was already after 2 o’clock, so I couldn’t count on finding an open gas station. Neither Briar nor I had a pen or paper so she drew a little map with her finger in the moist film that had been formed by our warm breath on the inside of the windshield. “What’s going to happen if I call you, Briar?” I asked as she got out of the car. “You’re just going to have to take your chances,” she replied. It would have been nice to hear her say, “I really had a good time. Let’s get together soon!” but she was not the kind of woman who would say that. Which woman is? Briar had to leave it so that when I called her again, I wouldn’t know where I stood.
And I knew that she would never call me. Not Briar. That’s one of the very first rules that all the really cute little girls with naturally blonde hair are taught – in kindergarten – while all of the other kids are playing with doilies.
Never, never, never make it easy.
I have heard women say that they will call a guy after a date if he hasn’t called within a reasonable time. I have heard this, but I have only experienced it once. It was while I was doing my graduate degree at Syracuse. There was a very pretty young woman named Holly in one of my classes, and I asked her out. She was lovely to look at but we couldn’t seem to find anything to talk about, and after a particularly dull dinner date, I concluded that she wasn’t for me. I didn’t plan to call her back.
A few days had gone by, perhaps a week, and then Holly called me. She wanted to know what had happened. We had gone out, she said, she had had a good time, and then I had disappeared. She wanted to know why. I was amazed.
Amazed!
I went out with her a couple of times after that. Nothing ever came of it because, as I initially feared, there just wasn’t much chemistry between us, but I admired her directness and have never forgotten it.
For the next couple of days I considered not calling Briar at all, because I sometimes get tired of constantly being the one to take the initiative with women, but by the third day my desire to see her again had taken over. I called her at about 10 o’clock on Friday morning. She was in high spirits, as she had just gotten cast in a commercial. She said she was glad to hear that her finger-painted map had gotten me home safely after our date. Actually, it almost hadn’t. After I had dropped her off, I drove about a quarter of a mile, and completely missed the street where I was supposed to turn. I must have exhaled onto a crucial section of the map. I turned right at the next intersection, which got me going in the completely wrong direction, followed the road along, and by a pure stroke of luck found a gas station that was open. I asked directions from the night cashier and after he had repeated them for the second time without my catching them, I asked if he would be good enough to write them down. “Nah,” he said, “too busy,” and besides it was dead easy – “a right, a left and a right” – and I’d be on the road that would take me home.
At least I had a full gas tank.
As I got back into the car, I repeated the cashier’s simple directions to myself. After following the road for about a mile, I began to worry that I had missed the gas station where he had said to turn, but I hadn’t. Just as he had said – a right, a left, and then a quick right – and I had found myself on the road home. I decided not to tell Briar about my little misadventure. Instead, when she mentioned the road map she had ingeniously drawn on my windshield, I said, “Thanks, it was no problem.”
We talked for a while, and then I said, “What’s the deal, Briar? Are we going to get together again?” Her weekend was crazy, she told me, but I could meet her again the following Tuesday after her dance class if I wished. That was the night of the fund-raising gala for which I had bought a ticket from Hildy, so I suggested Thursday night. Briar said that would be fine.
Weeks fly by – even months – in the blink of an eye, but when you have to wait six days to see a woman like Briar, it can feel like an eternity. By Sunday morning I had decided that I didn’t want to wait until Thursday night to see her. Why go to a fund-raising event to try to meet women when I already had a date with Briar? A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. And that’s an average bird. How many birds in the bush was Briar worth? Besides, I was shrewdly calculating – if we went out Tuesday night I could ask Briar out for the weekend – whereas if we went out on Thursday night – and I asked her out for the weekend?
Too pushy.
So switching our date to Tuesday night gave me a shot at a weekend date with Briar.
Prime time!
I called her and she wasn’t home so I left a message asking if her Tuesday night were still open. Later that evening, she called back to say that it was. On our first date, I had told Briar about a couple of episodes that I had written for the daytime drama we had worked on together and had suggested that she might get a kick out of seeing them, because they were really quite a departure from the rest of the series. “Maybe we’ll watch those shows you were telling me about,” she suggested during our conversation on the Sunday evening.
Good, I said to myself. Very good idea.
I didn’t want to appear too anxious, however, to have Briar come back to my apartment, so I replied, “Sure, or we can see a movie, if you feel like it.” Since I was still counting on the possibility of seeing her on the weekend, when there would be ample time to have her come back to my place, I had the luxury of playing it cool. I interpreted her suggestion, however, as a sign that things were moving in the right direction.
At 9:00 o’clock on Tuesday evening, I pulled up in front of the dance studio to wait for Briar. A few minutes later she came out, dressed in a short skirt, red tights and a red sweater. Once again, no lipstick or makeup.
And, as always, she looked great.
Since she had said that she needed more time to shower and change after her dance class before getting together, we decided to stay downtown, and take in a movie, which we both enjoyed. Afterwards, as I was driving her home, she asked if I wanted to experience one of the landmarks of her adolescence, a burger joint where they had great French fries and grape soda. It was already after midnight, and I had a dentist appointment early the next morning, but, I figured, what the hell?
As we shared an order of fries, and drank grape soda, Briar told me about the nights that she had gone there on dates while still in high school. I tried to conjure an image of her at sixteen, the pale, slender face with its aquiline nose, long, thick blonde hair, slim, coltish body. Every guy who had brought her to this burger bar must have hoped that, a half hour later, he would have his hands on the cool, white skin beneath her sweater.
I was hoping that myself.
But who was the first to experience the indescribable pleasure of Briar’s young body?
One of her high school boyfriends?
Probably.
Where was he now? Somewhere, locked in his mind and nowhere else, was the memory of what Briar had been like when she made love for the very first time.
I wondered if he ever thought about it.
I drove Briar home and as I stopped in front of her apartment, I asked if we could get together again before she went away. I knew that she was leaving for the summer stock production in about ten days. No, Briar said, she wouldn’t have a single free night. She was going to visit some friends in Ottawa on the weekend, then to Los Angeles to shoot the commercial, and, after that, would be up north for the run of the play. She reached over and placed her hand very gently on my face and said, “Besides, I’m not interested in anyone being interested in me right now.”
“What does that mean, Briar? Am I not supposed to call you ever again, or what?”
“Not right now,” she replied. “Maybe some other time.”
“Sure, Briar,” I said, “but, I’ll tell you what. I’ve been chasing you around for almost two years, so I’ve done my part. If you ever want to get together, you can call me. I won’t call you. Does that sound fair?”
She agreed that it did.
She got out of the car, and I waited until she got to the front door of her building. She waved and I waved back and then drove off.
Several weeks went by, and I had not heard from Briar. I hadn’t expected to, of course, but I was still thinking about her every now and then. There was no point in pursuing her, but I didn’t see any harm in sending her a short note at the theatre saying that I would like to stop by for a matinee performance and perhaps take her out for dinner. She was appearing in a production of “A Chorus Line”, which I had never seen on stage, and was only an hour and a half away. I thought I might even head up there on a Saturday, do some biking during the day, and then catch the Sunday afternoon performance. I sent her a very simple note stating my interest in seeing a matinee and getting together for dinner. She wrote back a few days later to say that she was rehearsing a second show between performances of “A Chorus Line”, and simply had no time to get together. The tone of her note was typically cool and breezy.