you touched it. I would go early to the class and hang around in the refectory first, hoping to see her. She was always alone. She didn’t sit with others, even the other people from her class. Sometimes she would arrive half an hour before the class started and sit in the refectory with her textbooks, reading through something in them, or looking over a printout of what was probably her latest assignment. I sat at the back and watched her: the way her shoulders hunched, the way she sat, her legs crossed at the ankle under the plastic chair.
And I kept seeing Eleanor, each Thursday evening. Each time I saw her I wanted her a little bit more. The hardest part of the process, of course, was making that initial contact. Having the guts to go up and talk to her. I asked Nigel, making subtle changes to the situation since the whole point of the class was not soliciting for sex but rather for business. So I asked him about cold calling (which I’d cleverly worked out was probably the workplace equivalent).
He told me that people buy from human beings. Make the initial contact personal, open and friendly. Think about how you talk to your friends, Nigel said. Think about the tone of voice, the posture, the way you smile at them.
Easier said than done, of course.
If you don’t ask, you don’t get, said Nigel. Quitters are never winners. The only thing stopping you is you.
In the end, I just sat down in front of her one Thursday in the refectory. ‘My name is Colin,’ I said, offering her my hand.
She looked startled, but shook my hand nonetheless. ‘Eleanor,’ she said.
‘What class are you taking?’ I asked.
‘Italian,’ she said. ‘Room six.’
Up close, she was even more attractive: dark eyes, a clear, pale complexion. I cleared my throat. ‘Is it any good?’
‘It’s OK.’
It wasn’t going particularly well so far. She was holding her coffee cup with both hands, as though she was cold. I mirrored her position, even though I didn’t have a drink to hold. I searched around desperately for something to say, something intelligent, something engaging.
‘Il miglior fabbro,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘Eliot. It’s his epigram to Ezra Pound, for The Waste Land. “Il Miglior Fabbro” – he made it better, he was the better craftsman. I believe that’s what it means, in any case.’
‘Oh, right,’ she said. Then, ‘We’re still on “Please can you direct me to the railway station?”’
I smiled at her. ‘Well, you can keep Eliot in mind for the future, then.’
She seemed to be relaxing, if her posture was anything to go by. She moved one of her hands under the table and I did the same.
‘Do you live locally?’ I said. It sounded lame. Why was this so bloody difficult?
‘Just in town,’ she said.
‘Will you come for a drink with me, after class?’
The question, so carefully prepared and phrased – no ‘I wonder if you’d like to’ or ‘I don’t suppose you’re free…’ – just a definite, firm, confident question. She could only say no, after all.
She looked startled. I thought she was going to refuse, so I tried again. ‘I’ll meet you outside, at half-past nine.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Alright, then.’
That was the moment when I knew it was going to work. You can’t have doubt when you’re trying to bring people around to a particular way of thinking using NLP – you have to at least try to believe what you’re saying or else the message will be diluted and might not get through. I knew I had a long way to go and that I needed to refine my technique, but that ‘yes’ from Eleanor gave me the confidence to work at it. If I could get a woman to agree to meet me, the possibilities that opened up were beautiful and endless, a warm sea lapping against a tropical island.
The classes were due to begin and the refectory was starting to empty, chairs scraping noisily on the tiled floor. We both stood up. What was I supposed to say now? How could I reinforce it?
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘See you later, then.’
‘Sure. See you later.’
Dammit. ‘Thanks’? How lame! Still, she went off to her class and I went off to mine, and all through it I could hardly keep still, writing notes in my book about what I would say to her, topics to keep the conversation flowing, and notes in the margin… ‘own it’… ‘be the message’.