Truth in Advertising Page 0,59

as long as that’s Tanqueray and tonic on the rocks.” And then she is gone.

I order her drink and wait. It arrives as she returns from the ladies’ room.

“How great is that timing?” Rachel says, nudging me, wide-eyed, laughing too hard.

Her coat and hat are off. She has an extraordinary mane of dark brown, tightly curled hair. For some reason it dawns on me that pamplemousse is one of the only words I know in French, and that I remember it only because it sounds ridiculous.

We are shown to a table. She organizes her coat on the back of her chair, bends to put her bag on the floor. I involuntarily look at her ass. She’s talking, perhaps to her bag, possibly to me.

“. . . but that’s the only time. So funny that you should pick this place,” she says.

“I know,” I say, smiling. “I really like it.”

“So you know Stefano,” she says, sitting, exhaling.

“I do. A great guy.”

“Such a great guy. We worked together years ago. I used to be in advertising. Cheers.”

We both take big pulls from our drinks.

She has taken time to do her makeup, her hair, her outfit. I can tell. Don’t let him be another loser, she has thought. She called a friend right before she walked in, for support. “Call me as soon as it’s over,” the friend said.

She says, “These things make me tipsy.”

“That’s the idea,” I say, smiling.

“Hey. No kidding,” she says and laughs hard.

Why are we talking like this?

“So you write for television,” I say. I make a conscious effort to stop bouncing my left leg. My hands are cold so I place them under my thighs.

She’s talking but I am thinking of her hips, her marvelous round ass in that black, clingy skirt.

“. . . and then I hooked up with Who’s That Guy? in its second season. It’s been great. I love that we shoot in New York. Have you seen the show?”

“He’s a sewer inspector who wants to be a poet?”

“That’s the one,” she says, nodding.

“It’s funny,” I lie. Stefano showed it to me online. It was awful. “I like the goat,” I add.

“My idea. Thank you. I just thought it would be funny. Goats are funny.”

“They are funny.”

I don’t know where to go from here. I sip my drink.

“That must be exciting, writing for TV,” I say.

“Fin, it’s incredibly exciting at times, let me tell you, but there are days where I want to hack people to death with a machete. These stars”—she makes quote signs with her hands—“are brutal. What a spectacular bunch of egotistical assholes, the lot of them, excuse my French.”

Pamplemousse.

“. . . wouldn’t ever get involved with one of them again. Huge mistake. What does your father do?”

“My father?”

My father is dead. My father is almost dead. My father left us. My father beat my brothers and drove my mother to death.

“He’s . . . retired. He was a police officer.”

“Ohmigod. So sexy. What is it about those guys?”

“I don’t know. But I have to say that my father is incredibly sexy.”

Mid-drink, she spits an ice cube back into her glass as she laughs way too hard for it to be honest.

She says, “My father’s a podiatrist. His father sold sturgeon.”

I try to imagine that job.

“. . . and still runs three miles every single day of his life.”

“That’s awesome.”

“I’m starved. You hungry? I could eat a dog. Let’s split the calamari.”

We order food. We order wine. We watch the absurd, awkward wine dance, the new glasses, the small pour, the taste, the search for the right words (“I’m getting a hint of . . . wine?”). She talks. About her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, about her sister’s divorce, about TV shows I don’t watch, pilot season, the importance of the executive producer credit. I listen. I nod. I drift.

Will we have sex tonight? Will we click and find that animal magnetism that makes one person want to bite another? Will we say things in the night, feel a closeness? Is this the woman who will be my wife? I love you, Rachel Levin. Will I one day say these words? Will I send flowers to her office for no other reason than that I love her? Will she keep a photo of me, of us, from that time we went to the vineyard/Costa Rica/Taos, tanned, smiling, on her desk? Will I nurse her through a nasty bout of food poisoning, rampant diarrhea, where her hair is flat and greasy and smells