By this time, I have chased after my parked car on four different streets, each with its own persuasive claim in fickle memory. In the past when I’ve been unable to find my car after giving more than sufficient time to the search, I saw no point in beating myself up over it. So I conceded the loss and got home by other means. Perhaps the car had been stolen — what other explanation could there be, I had pretty much covered the area looking for it — and so, as I depended on a car, I considered buying a new one or perhaps a previously owned one in near-new condition, though a native caution restrained me from rushing into something I might later regret. At the same time, I saw no point in sacrificing my life to a seemingly endless search for an unrecoverable object no matter my affection for it. I’ve been in this situation, I admit with some reluctance, more than once and I have avoided excessive despair in each case. Sanity, as I see it, is knowing when to throw away false hope. In my weaker moments, I concede that the world is haunted.
The above was what Joshua told Clarissa, his dinner companion, a woman he had met through a matchmaking service on the internet in which applicants filled out a detailed personality profile. Clarissa had asked him for a revealing anecdote about himself and he took the risk of telling about his disappeared car. They had made a point of sharing embarrassing stories as a way of getting to know the other while easing the awkwardness of what was after all a blind date. His counselor from the MatchesMadeInHeaven.com service had told him unofficially that Clarissa’s personality profile indicated an unusual capacity for empathy and so Josh was cautiously hopeful of being understood without being judged. A woman with an interestingly ruined face, Clarissa was, in her own words, a former litigations lawyer who, having risen from the ashes of a midlife crisis, had reinvented herself as a psychotherapist. Josh, on the other hand, had attended medical school without completing the course, had published two books of poems and a mystery novel (under a pseudonym), had taught at different times in his life, history, Renaissance poetry and filmmaking and was currently the book review editor of a small highly respected journal of opinion with extremely limited financial resources. Since his divorce 6 months ago, he tended to eat most of his meals out, though at less up-scale places than the one Clarissa had chosen for their first date.
He couldn’t exactly say why but there was something about Clarissa that spoke to his deepest urges. Moments after she sat down across from him, he fantasized undressing her in slow motion, pressing his face into her slightly protruding belly, sliding his tongue down the incline into the sweet space between her legs. It was not a usual urge and he wondered if this was what it was like to connect with one’s soul mate?
“I don’t think we’re all that much alike,” she said to him at one point, “and I mean that, I really do, as a positive.”
Her assertion soured his mood. “How so?”
“Well,” she said, “for one, if I misplaced something that I valued I wouldn’t give up looking for it until I recovered it.”
“I used to be that way,” he said, “but I’ve learned to be less absolute.”
“I wasn’t being critical of you,” she said. “Did you think I was?”
This was when the waiter appeared to take their orders and Josh discovered that Clarissa had ordered the very entree he had in mind for himself, which put him in a temporary bind. To assert that he was his own person, he ordered instead something he had no intention of ordering, something he had always wanted to try but had managed up until now to avoid, a spur of the moment improvisatory maneuver.
“I don’t know what to make of your choice,” she said. “I was told that your profile indicated that we have similar tastes in food and that, like me, what you put in your mouth is important to you. Herman and I — Herman was my second husband — always used to order the same entrees in restaurants, that is, until I discovered that I was accommodating myself to his tastes, which were not mine at all.”
Often without warning — it was an aspect of the haunted thing — attraction would turn itself into repulsion for him and back again like changes in the weather. “Look,” he said, “I need to get this off my chest so there’ll be no misunderstanding down the road. I’m not really looking for a long term relationship.” Listening to himself, he deplored his crudeness, but at the same time he was pleased, as it seemed to him, to clear the air.
“Good,” she said. “It’s a relief to have that out of the way.” She held out her hand for him to shake, which he took with gratitude, after a moment’s hesitation followed by internal crosswinds of wonder and trepidation. Whatever he had agreed to, it was an agreement whose terms remained elusive.
When the waiter delivered dessert menus, Clarissa turned them away with a wave of her hand. “We can do better than this at my place,” she said. “I have two-thirds of a very good pear cobbler and some excellent French roast decaf. How does that sound?”
“Isn’t it getting late?” he said, looking at his watch for confirmation after the question.
She gave him a sympathetic smile punctuated by a charming, perhaps even seductive shrug. “It’s not late for me,” she said. “I’m a night person.”
A huge raucous laugh went up at the table behind them, a chorus of near-hysterical discordant amusement. At first it seemed to be a table of eight women, but then he noticed that one of them, the one apparently amusing the others, was a man with a ponytail.
When the check arrived, Clarissa covered it with her hand and edged it over to her side of the table. “This is mine,” she said.
“Why don’t we just split it,” he said, but by the time he extracted his credit card from his wallet, she had already handed the bill, trumped with her own plastic, to a passing waiter.
He felt defeated and somewhat embittered. “I’ll get the next one,” he said.
“I’ll hold you to it,” she said.
More shrill laughter from the table behind them, one of the women falling out of her chair with a thump and an ear-shattering squeal to applause from the others. On the way out of the restaurant, the oldest looking of the women at the noisy table, winked at him as he passed.
The advertised pear cobbler had a suspicion of mold at the edges and Clarissa, sighing her apology, scraped both plates into the garbage with an unnerving decisiveness.
“It’s all right,” Josh said, more disturbed by Clarissa’s abruptness than the loss of dessert. It felt to him somehow as if he had been the one discarded.
“Why don’t we go to bed for dessert,” she said, “and after that, if something else is required, I’ll make us a pot of coffee.”
“Clarissa, if it’s all right with you, I’d prefer having my coffee before dessert,” he said, postponing what he wanted or didn’t want most.
“Oh my God,” she said. “I totally knew you were going to say that, I could have spoken your lines for you.”
“Really?” he said. “And what am I going to say now?”
“You were going to ask the very question you just asked,” she said, laughing.
He considered his options as if he had several, wanting to reclaim his uniqueness by doing something she would never have anticipated.
So striving for the unexpected, he opted for sex before coffee and afterwards rejected the coffee option and went home before she was ready to part with him.
The next morning he thought of phoning Clarissa, but kept finding reasons to postpone what hard-wired instinct told him was a necessary gesture.