CHAPTER NINE: Dinner Date

It was the middle of April, and I was just starting to look forward to another round of reports from Community Singles Group when I received a letter from a man named Allen.  His accompanying report looked promising.  He didn’t smoke, claimed to like children, was six feet tall, and held a respectable job as a chemistry professor at a local university.  I called the number he gave in his letter and reached an answering machine. 

The message piqued my interest immediately.  After introductory remarks and inviting the caller to leave a message, Allen added, “I just bought this new answering machine, but you have to be a damned college professor to work out how – ”

The beep cut him off in mid-sentence. 

The voice was deep and very sexy, and Allen obviously had a sense of humor.  Being a college professor, he had to be intelligent and earn a good wage too.  This compensated for the fact that he was six years older than me.  Jim was nine years older than I was, and the age difference had always bothered me.

I left a message.

Allen called back the next day.  After a few minutes of small talk, I asked him, “So, would you like to meet somewhere for coffee?”

“Not so fast,” he replied.  “I’d like to talk some more and get to know you a little, first.”

I was game for this but quickly found out that Allen’s idea of getting to know me was to ask me a long series of questions.  He actually went so far as to tell me that this was to be a kind of test; the answers I gave would determine whether or not he wanted to meet me.

I seemed to be doing okay until a question about movies came up. 

“What did you think of Silence of the Lambs?” he asked.

“I loved it,” I said.  “I’m a big horror movie fan.”  I realized I’d failed miserably when Allen informed me that he hated horror movies, especially ones involving violence toward women.

The second question I failed was: “Do you like the singer, Leonard Cohen?”

“I love his songs,” I said, “especially the one about ‘Suzanne takes me down to her place by the river, where she feeds me tea and oranges that come all the way from China.’  I have an L.P. of his.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Allen said.  “I went out with a woman recently who also liked Leonard Cohen.  I think he’s so depressing.  I don’t get what people see in him.”

“Oh,” I said.  “I guess I failed that test too, then, didn’t I?”

After nearly an hour of back and forth, Allen finally invited me out; but not for coffee.  He wanted to go on a dinner date so we could relax and talk.  Apparently my two miserable failures weren’t enough to deem me totally ineligible for a second chance.  

“Could you tell me a bit about what you look like?” I asked.  “All I know is you don’t weigh a ton, and you’re six feet tall.”

“Well, I think I’m okay-looking,” Allen said.  “I’m not really good-looking, but I’m pleasant enough to look at, and I keep myself in pretty good shape.  I do have a beard, but I keep it neatly trimmed.”

My heart sank at the word “beard.”  As I mentioned previously, I hate the things.  They do nothing for me, interfere with kissing, and food gets stuck in them.  However, we had come this far, I was pretty interested, and his voice was so sexy.  I decided to meet the beard and see what happened.  We set up a date for a few days later at a Chinese restaurant. 

When I told Andrea and Bronwyn about my date, they good-naturedly resigned themselves to another stay at Grandma’s house.  This wasn’t too great a hardship for them because Grandma kept a candy tin in her kitchen cupboard.  Firm, but fair, she spoiled them quite a lot. 

Grandma was also a Star Trek fan.  On the trips to school in the morning, her little red Geo Metro became a space craft.  She and the girls took turns shooting at marauding aliens with a dashboard-mounted contraption that made various space-age noises.  Since yellow school buses were deemed to be enemy Ferengi, the trip to school was a very noisy affair. 

Being a novice Trekkie myself, I was quite unaccomplished at using the noise machine.  As a passenger on one of the school runs in the Geo spacecraft, I hit the wrong button when I spied an approaching school bus.  Instead of laser gun whoops, a ringing noise issued forth. 

“Mom, you just phoned the Ferengi!” the girls admonished me.  We almost wet our pants, it was so funny. 

As my date with Allen approached, I dressed in form-hugging pants and top, fluffed out my hair, and painted my fingernails red.  I never, ever paint my nails but I wanted to look sexy and attractive.  First impressions mattered and this date did show some promise.

When I pulled up at the Chinese restaurant in my sporty Chevy Cavalier, Allen was waiting on the steps.  I looked him over as I climbed the steps to meet him.  True to his word, he did seem about six feet tall and quite slim, with long, mid-brown hair swept off of his forehead, and deep-set, greenish-hazel eyes.  His nose was a bit big, and of course there was the beard, but from what I could make out, he had nice lips and a good chin. 

He smiled hello, revealing an over-white, slightly protruding front tooth, which I later learned was the result of a lacrosse accident.  It gave him a friendly chipmunk look.  My first impression from the ample laugh lines at the corners of his eyes was one of kind cheerfulness.

I preceded Allen into the restaurant in my tight pants, wondering if he was checking out my bubble-butt. I gave it a few extra wiggles, just in case.  Over dinner, we exchanged background details and general getting-to-know-you information.  He grew up in Canada and moved to the area a couple of years ago.  He hadn’t had a girlfriend for the past year.  Being a rather nerdy science type, he spent a lot of time in his lab and seemed the last person I would expect to do something like joining a dating service. 

As the date progressed, however, I revised my opinion of Allen.  He wasn’t as nerdy as I’d initially thought.  Wacky scientist was a more apt description.  He was full of fun, very witty, and couldn’t stay serious for more than a few minutes, but when I regaled him with the story of my tenant woes and Johnny, the belligerent brother, he proved to be a good listener and was suitably sympathetic.  Over all, he was a very satisfactory dinner companion.

I could see myself reflected in his eyes: a thin five-foot-seven, who, like every good anorexic personality, thought she was fat;  mid-brown, shoulder-length hair bearing the remnants of a perm; a reasonably attractive face with a bump in the middle of my nose, courtesy of my mother, and a lump at the end, courtesy of my father; topped off by a pair of blue eyes that changed color according to my mood, the weather, or that day’s outfit. 

Wackiness aside, Allen didn’t appear to be a man who was easily fooled.  Maybe he discerned the real me beneath the teased hair and red fingernails and liked what he saw, because after dinner he suggested we go on to a movie. 

Now, this could be a risky proposition because of our different taste in movies, but maybe it was to be another test.  Looking up at the list of movies at the local mall, I redeemed myself in Allen’s eyes one hundred and ten percent when I announced I wouldn’t mind seeing Wayne’s World. 

We both enjoyed the movie and enjoyed each other enjoying the movie.  Allen laughed frequently and very loudly, but at least his laugh wasn’t as raucous as Wim’s laugh, which sounds like a wounded sea lion barking, much to my mother’s embarrassment. 

A successful date, I decided as I drove home that night.  No sparks of infatuation or romance, but Allen seemed to be one of those rare breeds of genuinely nice men.  He was kind, generous, and caring, and I needed that.  I looked forward to describing my date to the fearless Ferengi annihilators when I picked them up from my mom’s house the next day.