date with a man

The date was kind of exciting at the time, but on reflection the best thing that came out of it was a new dress. yesterday morning I received a very business like email from the aging executive I agreed to go out with denoting a selection of all the most obvious cocktail bars and restaurants. Tonight is the night the email said. I was confused because I had planned for the next night, and when a quick look through my email confirmed he was right, immediately panic- stricken about my outfit. Through some deep subconscious resistance, I had dressed like a child that day in a cloth dress with canvas sneakers and ankle socks. This is not a joke. Ironically, this was the very first day I had indulged in my preferred style of dress at the office.. I had even brought my bike along. I thought I would choose a place from his list near home so I could quickly change into something that would set Humbert's mind at ease. Alas, like the predictable banker he is, he'd only listed places downtown, probably thinking he had a hip twenty-something to impress. Little did he know I am closer to a teenager in both style and substance. Thankfully I had the good sense to tell Rand about my predicament and she had a solution: we meet in a coffee shop and switch outfits in the bathroom. When we met thirty minutes before my date, we decided to go shopping instead. In no time Rand like a pro had picked out something grown-up for me, a flowy Laura Day number. A very fun whirlwind of a Cinderella adventure, we got the salesgirls in on the mission. They sprayed me down with anti-static potion and took the censor off the dress as I was wearing it, calling "have fun on your date!" as I skipped out the door to cobblestones streets.

The next good thing that happened was finding the great new bar that the man had picked out (Weather Up is the very same that joanna godard frequents on all her first dates, so no surprise there, but in good taste nonetheless.) He's attractive enough, as they say. Tall and thin with a completely normal face of bones. He wears suits (on both occasions) and little rimless glasses. I would say not my type, but he is typeless. Right away he started asking me about work and books. He seemed to have read everyone. But I was careful not to be dazzled by his knowledge, realizing that in years and years I will probably have read much more too. Then quite out of the blue he asked what i thought of Occupy Wall Street. I thought he was testing me to see if I remembered he was a money man himself. He talked about his job, which he claims doesn't involve any evil-doing. "Though I used to work for the most evil," tongue in cheek, I think. I knew from Chax what he was talking about. "You worked at Goldman Sachs?" He had. His most interesting project now is one he sees as very ethical indeed: advising a client who has developed a technology to ease the environmental effects of FRACKING. "All i know about fracking is that it's very bad and should be illegal," I said. He didn't take it as an accusation, luckily I guess, but as an invitation to describe the process in great duhTAIL (as he would say, in his fake British accent). Try as i might, I could not listen to a single word. I wondered, does he have any idea how boring this is? I had assumed his English accent was fake, but really it's just a bit muddled because he has not lived in England since he was nineteen, which is a very long time ago for someone who is...thirty-six. Yep. He sounds Australian if you ask me, though in some roundabout way he was trying to assure me it was posh). As the convo progressed, he asked me lots of questions and then insisted we move on to a restaurant.

Over a sixty dollar bottle of wine at dinner, the conversation became much more interesting, especially when we came to the topic of the devolution of his MARRIAGE. Dear God. Looking back I'm embarrassed at how interested I seemed in him. I guess he will come to think of me as quite the tease. Trying to be smooth (was he?) he came off as weird. He reclined way too much in the booth at dinner and refused to mirror my body language as I exaggerated an upright posture and literally perched on the edge of my seat like i was balancing a book on my head. He touched my arm a lot to punctuate conversation, like to emphasize points, even though he made no points. I was trying to think "here is a person that wants desperately to talk to you, take advantage of getting to know anything you want about him." In other words, use him to learn about people in general. I was able to use him to learn what it's like to work in a very serious bank and make lots of money. What it's like to have been married and gone through marriage therapy and have drifted apart all the same. A few good stories came out of this, like the day he told his boss he was getting a divorce and how understanding his boss had been, saying he'd personally see to it that he got all the financial support he needed during this difficult time. Also how his brother got married soon after the divorce and asked if he would feel comfortable giving a speech at the wedding.I remember thinking the speech (which he recreated for me) was profound but looking back it seems lifted from Hugh Grant. I feel like a traitor and ashamed today, even though he was nice enough. I would like to make these things more fun in the future, less educational.