Dating Disasters, Part 2

by Simone Westfall — May 17, 2007

"BluesMan," aka Rick, contacted me through one of the internet sites on which I once had postings. His photo looked fairly yummy: handsome fiftyish face, fashionably spiky hair, blue eyes and a dreamy gaze. No full-length photos of him on his profile, but his description sounded intriguing enough. He played saxophone with jazz and dance bands, liked reading Harper's and The New Yorker, and spending vacations in Mexico or the Caribbean. None of the usual cornball crap about moonlit walks along the beach or snuggling in front of a roaring fire.

Further correspondence revealed that he lived only about a mile from me on New York's Upper West Side. He owned both a car and a motorcycle, the latter of which he was in the process of selling (men with wheels in the city are a relative scarcity). He did not seem to be broke, overly embittered by ex-wives, or addicted to kinky sex--all of which I have encountered in my travels around the mondo weirdo of internet dating. So we chatted for a bit on a Saturday morning. He had a distinctive New Yawk accent, which I couldn't place until he told me he grew up in the Bronx.

"You sound so much classier than I do," he said at one point.

"My parents were from the Midwest," I explained. "We moved to New York when I was thirteen. I never picked up an accent." I have, in fact, sometimes been mistaken for English when approached by strangers asking for directions. "Does that bother you?"

"Nooooo." He had a rich and resonant laugh--and an appealingly rough voice, and I was soon conjuring visions of a lean, powerful sax player in some smoky jazz club (never mind that there are no more smoky public interiors in the city).

We traded a few more biographical details and then agreed to throw caution to the winds and meet for dinner at a French bistro midway between our apartments. Generally, as stated perhaps ad nauseum, I will meet a man only for a drink, tacking on a real or imagined dinner date to which I will have to dash if the prospect proves to be less appealing than advertised or a crashing bore. But this guy sounded, well, immensely charming.

I arrived early and was shown to a table in the back, but still facing the door and the bar. When I asked to see a menu, I felt immediate sticker shock at the prices, which hovered in the breathless category reserved for eateries on the other side of the park. A few minutes later, a man entered the restaurant, looked around quickly, and settled in at the bar. That couldn't possibly be Rick, I thought. He looked a good decade older than his photo; on his profile he'd claimed to be 53. But after closer examination, I realized it had to be the same man: the haircut and glasses were the just like those in the photo, and he exuded the kind of expectant wariness of a guy waiting for a woman he's never met. And so I sucked in my breath and strode forward to introduce myself. He looked visibly relieved. I was not.

After we settled in at the table, I quickly ordered a glass of wine. Rick asked for a diet Coke. Oh, no, I thought: a guy who doesn't drink and lies about his age.

"Are you disappointed?" he asked, smiling sheepishly.

"Mmmmfffrghah," I responded.

"If I'd told you I was sixty-five, would you have gone out with me?"

"Rffmmfrhahrh," I said, thinking: Look, it's okay to fudge about your age by two years, maybe five years, but twelve????

But, hey, really he wasn't so bad. He looked to be well-built inside a tailored blazer and he did have a lovely smile and the bluest of blue eyes. The conversation moved quickly from pleasantries to more intimate details. He told me about the woman who'd lived with him for 15 years and then abruptly left him three years ago. "I like to get this stuff out of the way early in the game," he said. I agreed, and was happy to note that he didn't break down in tears, the way one of my dates had recently over his split with a long-time partner. I gave him a few details of my divorce a decade ago. Our talk moved seamlessly, with none of the stutters and pauses that sometimes plague these exchanges, as if they were bad cell-phone connections. By the end of dinner, he took my hand and said, "I feel something very real happening between us. Don't you?"

Well, no, um, maybe. I felt even less when the check arrived and sat on its plastic salver like a bad report card you cannot bear to face. And sat there and sat there until I turned it over. Well, fair enough, my two glasses of wine and sole bonne femme far outweighed his diet Coke and seafood salad. But still I do like it when a guy picks up the check on the first date, or at least looks at the check and says something like, How about you pay the tip? I pulled two twenties from my wallet and shoved those and the bill across the table, smiling. "You can take care of the rest."

We parted amicably if not affectionately. I was not exactly swept off my feet, but I was not exactly swinging from the nearest traffic light either. When he called a couple of days later and suggested an evening stroll in Riverside Park, I thought, Why not? It was a gorgeous, mild June evening, and I had nothing better on my dance card.

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.