in triumph. “I’ll have the hamburger.”
A curt nod from the waiter. He snatched the menu from my un-continental hands.
“Ahm—burr—gare,” Celine pronounced.
Oh. Hamburger. In French.
“Om—birr—gahr,” I tried.
Celine laughed lightly. As our food arrived, the conversation turned to Manhattan’s coffee shops. “I just don’t understand what Americans have done to coffee,” Celine was saying. I never drank coffee in my life, I thought as Celine compared the expansion of the Starbucks chain to “entrepreneurial genocide.” Maybe I should start. Of course, to drink coffee, I would have to be a whole different person. A guy with not only body hair, but facial hair, too. A mustache. Maybe I should be a whole new person. If I was all sophisticated and disdainful like Celine, if I was all sophisticated and disdainful with Celine, I wouldn’t care about everything so much. I wouldn’t care about not being good at sports like Luke. And I wouldn’t worry about guys like Johnny Frackas calling me a fag. If I spent the weekend drinking coffee out of tiny cups with a French girl and sported a mustache, no one could call me a fag.
Wait, maybe they still could. Scratch that. If I had a girlfriend, no one could call me a fag. So I needed to make moves. While Celine was chewing on foie gras, I spoke up. “I have something for you,” I said.
Over her greasy-looking and expensive liver, Celine looked surprised. I removed a small package from my pocket and set it in front of her. It was a book with a ribbon wrapped around it, like a present without wrapping. I’d tied the ribbon myself.
“It’s No Exit,” I told her. “I remembered you said it was your favorite play.”
Celine looked at the cover as if it enshrined an object from an alien spaceship, something she didn’t know how to touch or open.
“But it’s not my birthday,” Celine said.
“No,” I said. “It’s just a gift.”
“For what?” Celine first looked confused, but then the confusion softened to sympathy when my eyes met hers. She didn’t get why I was trying so hard. Disappointment and embarrassment swept over me. For the rest of dinner, Celine made an effort to be nice, like I was a speech-impaired kid assigned to her camp cabin. She smiled and nodded a lot, and even reached to touch my hand a few times. But she refused coffee after dinner, and the waiter delivered the check to me. I guess he knew I would pay because this was a date, even if it was the lamest date in the world. Or maybe he just couldn’t fit a check anywhere among Celine’s many plates, each of which had cost me… wow. My dad would really regret giving me this credit card. Celine grabbed her purse and I carried the book for her.
Out on the sidewalk, Celine abruptly stopped her diatribe against some kind of shoe called a FitFlop, and I said, “Let me walk you home.”
“Oh…” Celine tried to glance at a watch, but she wasn’t wearing one. Then she pointed vaguely in two different directions. “I’m going way uptown, so I’m taking the subway.”
“I can walk you there,” I said halfheartedly.
I knew the restaurant and the gift had been too much. But I really did want to be a gentleman to the end.
“Don’t bother!” Celine’s sharp nails waved me off. “You’re completely in the other direction.”
Actually, I had no idea which direction the train station was. This was my second trip to Manhattan ever. But I said, “Okay…” and hesitated. Now it was time to say good-bye. Right here on this busy sidewalk. The whole street was lined with the tables of outdoor restaurants, so we were being interrupted by other people’s conversations and lethal amounts of secondhand smoke. God, people in New York smoked a lot.
Celine reached up, popping onto the balls of her feet, to kiss me good-bye. No, not kiss me, kiss me. She went for the cheek. There was nothing romantic or sexual about it—even heterosexual Frenchmen kiss each other like that. To me, the kiss felt like a consolation prize.
The problem was that, at the same time, I leaned down to hug Celine. My head was headed for her right shoulder. Her lips were pursed toward my left cheek. As a result—
We kissed on the lips.
Or, more accurately, we collided.
The shock pushed Celine back on her heels. My arms hung empty in front of me like I was imitating a gorilla.
“Oh, Finbar!” Celine cooed with sympathy. She gave