John and Natalia met online.
Well ... perhaps 'met' is the wrong word. Natalia sent John a WINK on a dating site. When John responded, Natalia immediately replied with a request that they meet in person, which led to a dinner date at a popular hotel restaurant in the city where Natalia lived.
John came up by train and arrived at the restaurant fifteen minutes early. He was shown to a table-for-two by the window and he took a small beer while he waited, enjoying the moment of anticipation. This was the seventh date he was on since joining the dating site some months ago, but he felt optimistic about Natalia for several reasons:
(i) Her three photographs showed a slim, dark-haired woman in her mid-thirties who was feminine without the
'And I Love Me So'
vibe of many attractive women's profiles.
(ii) There was no bullet-list of requirements.
(iii) She had made first contact.
For John, this last was the most important. He had been the initiator of his six previous dates, and it had never worked out. John was a red-haired man in his mid-forties, divorced with two adolescent boys he saw every other weekend, and he learned early on that sending WINKs and messages to younger, good-looking women was a waste of time. Instead, he focused his efforts on women roughly his own age and level of attractiveness, assuming they would approach the dating process with his own pragmatism.
They never did.
When John met the women, he could see in their eyes that they wanted to be treated as though they were gorgeous. And when he played along -- acting as though they were retired movie stars rather than okay-looking females -- they smiled and laughed and wanted to see him again. He'd go home thinking, 'How can intelligent women be this dumb?' The following day, he would send the woman a short email telling her he'd had 'a nice time', while omitting the suggestion of a second date. This gave the woman the chance to politely reject him without having been 'officially' rejected herself. After all, they were all intelligent women. They got the message.
Natalia was fifteen minutes late. John had finished his beer and was wondering whether to order another, when he saw her arrive at the desk of the maître d'. His instant reaction was disappointment.
Natalia was small with big hair -- long black hair pumped up by back-combing and hairspray. When the maître d' took off her long coat, John saw a black outfit—dress, stockings, high heels—which was supposed to look sexy, but instead made her look fragile. A man has to be careful with fragile women and John felt a wave of tiredness at the prospect of the evening ahead. Still, he shook it off as his date was being led towards him. John got to his feet and gave the approaching lady his warmest smile.
Natalia was flustered as she shook John's hand. She apologised for being late, then apologised for her Slavic-accented English, and finally apologised for apologising so much. John smiled as he assured her and reassured her that everything was fine. The waitress brought them menus and took their order for two glasses of white wine. Natalia noticed the empty beer glass as the waitress plucked it off the table and told John she would be okay if he wanted to change his mind. John said he was fine with wine, and Natalia apologised for bringing it up. Then she groaned and shook her head.
'I'm sorry,' she said as she looked at the menu. 'I'm not usually this nervous.'
'Well...' said John, and he was about to say: I'll take that as a compliment. But, in his head, it sounded smarmy and he paused to think of something else.
'Well, what?' said Natalia.
'I don't know,' said John.
'Or perhaps you do know, and you don't want to say?'
John looked at her. Within the mass of black hair and blacker mascara were two bright, dark eyes which gazed directly at him. No nervousness this time.
John smiled. He raised his wine glass to her.
'Correct,' he said. 'Two points to you.'
Natalia laughed. She pushed her hair away from her face so she could take a drink of her own wine. She looked back at John.
'So, what was it you didn't want to say?' she said.
John paused. He leaned on the table and looked the woman in the eye.
'When you said you weren't usually nervous,' he said, 'I was going to say,
"I'll take that as a compliment"
. You know, as though my devastating handsomeness was the cause of your being nervous. But then it occurred to me that you might be nervous for a hundred other reasons, so I changed my mind.'
'But you meant it as a joke, yes?' said Natalia.
'Yes, I suppose,' said John. 'But jokes are meant to be funny.'
'True.'
'And making jokes while you were nervous also struck me as a bad idea.'
'Possibly true.'
'Although, I have to say...' said John, swirling his glass. 'You seem okay now.'
'It helps that I'm sitting across from an intelligent man,' said Natalia.
'Thanks for the compliment.'
'It's not a compliment. It's a fact.' She paused. 'And you strike me as a man who already knows that, but you don't want to appear arrogant.'
Natalia took a slow sip of wine, her gaze never leaving the man before her. John looked back at her, frowned, and looked down. Below the table, a full-sized erection had appeared out of nowhere, and John tried to focus his attention on the opened menu.
'So...' he said, his voice even. 'What looks good to you?'
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++
On the last train going home, John stared out of the window watching the night flash past. He knew he wasn't in love with Natalia, yet he liked her a lot. More than that, she had genuinely impressed him. During dinner, when she spoke of her childhood in Romania after the dictatorship or her work as a paralegal doing contracts in five languages—five fucking languages!—she left his jaw hanging. Plus, her attitude to men was refreshing. At one point in the evening, John and Natalia swapped nightmare dating stories and some of hers were
hilarious
, but there was no sign of the usual outrage. The other women always took male buffoonery so personally, as though these men were on a mission to insult womanhood. It was nice to hear a woman regard bad behaviour as brainless ineptitude rather than deliberate sexism.
That wasn't all. Natalia had sent two text messages which made his phone feel like a heat generator in his inside pocket. He couldn't stop tugging his jacket away from his chest, as though it was going to burn him. He'd received the first just as his train was pulling out of the station:
'John! I had a wonderful evening! You are a great deep beautiful man and I hope you want to see me again, because I definitely want to see you! Talia xxx'
Five minutes later, the second message arrived:
'John! Don't feel you need to reply. I will switch off my phone after sending this. Sleep well and thank you again for a wonderful dinner! Talia xxx'
This unexpected thoughtfulness moved John. Usually, he was expected to be the selfless, considerate one, and it was lovely to be on the receiving end for a change. John was fast coming to the conclusion that Natalia was an exceptional woman, and that his negative opinions about her perhaps overdone make-up or what she did with her hair were unkind and trivial.
But the following day, when he sat down to compose an email, John felt conflicted. Natalia hadn't said anything specific, but it was clear that she longed to be loved and cherished in the context of 'a serious relationship'. He also knew that he had zero desire to be the man who did this for her. John wanted sex. Fragility be damned, he wanted to fuck her. That being the case, the morally correct thing would be to send the usual email and let her reject him. Or to type
'I just want to fuck you'
and see what happened.
John did neither. He suggested a second date. That same day, Natalia sent back an email accepting.
Two weeks later, on a Friday, John was back on the train heading for her city. He told himself that Natalia was a grown woman, that he shouldn't do her thinking for her, that he was totally prepared to be honest about what he wanted if she asked. But when his phone rang and he saw it was her, his first reaction was relief. Natalia had figured it out for herself and was going to cancel. John picked up the call, already prepared to be gracious and understanding, with just the right amount of disappointment.
But she wasn't cancelling.
Something unexpected had happened and Natalia wanted a change of plan: instead of meeting at the restaurant, that they have dinner at her place. She told him to take the metro from the train station and said she would meet him at her metro stop. John agreed, then stared at his phone after she ended the call.
'Don't take anything for granted,' he told himself.
John stepped out of the metro station and into a neighbourhood of limestone and concrete houses. Natalia was waiting for him, once again dressed in black, but this time black jeans, cowboy boots and a leather jacket. Her hair was tied back in a rough ponytail, her make-up was minimal, and John found her ten times more attractive. They walked side-by-side, her boots making a pleasing sound on the pavement, and John asked her what happened.
