Getting to Know You

by Simone Westfall — April 21, 2007

Lunch with Sam is at an elegant Japanese restaurant near Grand Central. He looks even better in broad daylight, ruddy-cheeked and boyish. I can't really get a sense of what his body is like because the two times I've seen him he has been wearing banker's suits, and suits can hide an awful lot. He has just the merest suggestion of a paunch, but he has also mentioned early-morning aerobics classes at a gym in his building, and that bodes well for, well, ahem....

He tells me more about his daughter, who is an honors student at Radcliffe, a sophomore English major who is vaguely thinking of going into teaching. I ask what she and the wife are doing during their week in New York.

He scowls. "Fighting, mostly."

"Oh, dear. I guess it's that age....I fought with my mom a lot when I was a teenager." I didn't really, but I want to make him feel better.

He drums his fingers on the table and then opens the menu. I will quickly learn that this is territory he doesn't care to navigate, any discussion whatsoever of his wife. The rest of the lunch is chitchat--and the best sushi I've had in a long while--and as the restaurant is popular and fills up quickly, it becomes more and more difficult to talk. I'm still trying to understand what he does as a banker; it seems to involve trading in foreign currencies. But whenever people begin to discuss finance and investments, my IQ drops about 20 points.

On the street afterward, he takes my hand lightly, holds it for about a block, and then drops it. I realize we are far too close to his office for open displays of affection, but when I spot the bus that I want to take crosstown pulling up to the curb, I quickly kiss him on the cheek and then wipe off the lipstick with my fingers.

Later he emails me: "When we were holding hands, when you wiped your kiss from my face, I started thinking of you as my girlfriend." Sweet.

And later still comes a long and rambling email in which Sam confesses to an affair two years ago, with a married woman in the city, which ended when she and her husband moved to Washington. "She would even take phone calls from him when we were in bed together." Well, it does take all kinds, and this volatile little experiment is opening my eyes to the myriad varieties of mischief out there. He closes by saying that he keeps pulling up my photo on his computer screen ("you're better-looking than your picture") and how much he looks forward to Sunday: "Can I stay overnight?"

I write back. "I'll buy you a toothbrush."

Simone Westfall is the pen name of a novelist and critic in New York City. To read all of Simone's posts in The Dating Life, click here.