assured him. “Just say you’ll be glad to hear from any woman, even someone earning nothing at all and loaded with debt. You’ll have women falling all over you.” Stan laughed loudly at his joke, while Bill grimaced. Bill then switched the conversation topic and inquired about Stan’s children. They talked about the kids and other less personal things, before returning to their offices for the afternoon.
Chapter 5
On the way back to his office, Bill pondered his dating situation with all the honesty he could muster.
When he was still a teenager, he had begun to date. Since then he had never been without a steady girlfriend for more than a couple of weeks, but now the road of relationships he had traveled seemed to have come to an end. With Linda, he felt he had left the paved road of his past, as bumpy and swerving as that had become, for a narrow, rocky, dirty byway, where he had been stuck in the mud again and again and nearly shaken to pieces. Now a path for two-person vehicles had entirely disappeared, and he was on foot in a wilderness where he did not know in which direction to go to reach a road again. He felt lost and alone, but he had sense enough to know that turning around and looking for Linda was not the way forward.
He needed to meet new women. That was a certainty. But as he looked around on the crowded sidewalks of Midtown, where many women were passing, none of whom caught his eye, he said to himself, “They have to be the type for me.” Bill was trying to be honest with himself. Although he was no Adonis, he thought that his happiness depended on finding an Aphrodite. Linda, his ex-wife, and all the women he had dated had been remarkably good-looking and much younger. They were the type of women that other men would stop and stare at. That was the reason he had dated them. No matter how much inner beauty a woman possessed, unless she had that something extra on the outside, a young extra something, Bill sighed, she wasn’t meant for him. His ideal woman, he thought, would have the kindness, generosity, and patience of a saint. And she would look like a sinner, a young sinner, with a body that made him want to sin and sin again. He preferred to find a woman with both qualities—a heart of gold and the shape of a super model—but he would settle for someone who came close to meeting the second criterion. He knew he had to be somewhat flexible, if he really wanted to find a replacement for Linda.
He had met Linda, and several other dates before her, through a matchmaking agency, but he wasn’t eager to return there. None of the women, whom the agency had paired him with, had ever worked out, and the cost of the service was much too high for such misfires. He didn’t want to remember what he had paid. At that agency, he thought, he was at a disadvantage, too, because he lived in a rental studio. One of the matchmakers had once said, looking at him as if he was a homeless person, “Most of our women prefer to find men who own houses,” which he felt was insulting, because his studio was big enough for two people. He could even make room in the closets, he thought, for a woman to have one-third of the space. As much as he disliked online dating, Bill thought that he might have more and better prospects there than with an agency. He didn’t have to immediately tell any woman, whom he met online, where he lived.
By the time Bill entered the building in which his office was located, he had completed the honest appraisal of his situation and reached a plan of action.
A half hour after he returned from lunch, he put into execution the first step of his plan. He left his seat and strolled over to the office manager’s desk. Katie, the office manager, was busy chatting with friends and exchanging photos over the Internet, as she normally did for at least three business hours every day. A young woman in her early twenties, she instinctively knew that her personal life was more important than her professional activity. She kept a low profile in the office and never did more than she was asked or required to do. Even her clothes and