Therapy

gave me this long, soulful look out of his pale blue, bloodshot eyes.
    I tell you, I broke out in goosebumps all over, and it wasn’t because of the breeze coming off the ocean. I suddenly realized what this date was all about. I realized that it was in this very restaurant that I had tried to seduce him all those years ago... Yeah! The whole thing came flooding back into my head, like a flashback sequence in an old film noir. We’d had a nice dinner and a bottle of wine and I’d snuck out to the Ladies’ room between courses to do some blow... Yeah, I was doing drugs in those days... Always carried a stash in my handbag, Colombia’s favourite cash crop... But Tubby wasn’t into that sorta stuff. He thought when people offered him coke at a party they meant a drink. He thought being loaded meant having a lotta money. Even the idea of smoking pot freaked him out, so I never let on I was snorting the hard stuff. I wonder he never guessed, the way I used to laugh at his little English quips. Anyway, there I was, feeling high and horny, and there was this nice clean Englishman sitting opposite who obviously fancied me but was too decent or too timid to take the initiative, so I took it myself. Apparently I said I’d like to take him home and fuck his brains out... Yeah. He quoted the exact words to me. They were engraved on his memory. You see what I mean? This whole date was like a reprise of the one all those years ago. The Venice restaurant, the table outside, the Napa Valley Chardonnay... That was why he was so upset that I’d changed my car and the fish restaurant had turned into a Thai restaurant and I didn’t drink whiskey sours any more. That was why he made us sit outside. He was trying to recreate the exact circumstances of that evening four years ago as far as possible in every detail. Every detail except one... Exactly! Now that his wife had walked out on him he wanted to take me up on my offer to fuck him. He’d flown all the way from England specifically for that purpose. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that my circumstances might have changed in the meantime, not to mention my mood. I guess in his head I was forever sitting at that table beside the ocean, gazing wistfully out to sea and waiting for him to reappear, released from his matrimonial vows, to sweep me into his arms. Wait a minute, I got another call...
    Hi. How did we exist before Call Waiting? That was Gloria Fawn’s agent. She passed on Switchback. So what’s new, I don’t suppose he even showed her the script. Well, fuck ’em... Oh yeah, so like I was saying, it really freaked me out to think that this guy had flown six thousand miles to change his mind about a proposition that was four years old. It was like you said to someone, pass the salt, and four years later he shows up with a salt cellar. Well, I figured I’d better set him straight as soon as possible, so when he tried to top up my wine glass I put my hand over it and said I was cutting down because I was trying to conceive and if I succeeded I’d have to give up completely... Yeah. I thought I’d better go for it. The old biological clock is ticking away. Nick is keen... Well, thanks, Stella. I’m relying on you for some chic maternity wear... Anyway, this announcement stopped Tubby Passmore in his tracks, but he still didn’t get it. I think for a moment he thought I wanted to have a child by him... Well, you can laugh, but this guy is unreal, I’m telling you. So then I explained I was with Nick and he like crumpled in front of my eyes. I thought he was going to start crying into his shrimp and lemon-grass soup. I said to him, “What’s the matter?” though I knew very well what was the matter, and he quoted Kierkegaard at me... Yeah, Kierkegaard the philosopher. Not Kierkegaard the smorgasbord. Heh heh. He said, “The most dreadful thing that can happen to a man is to become ridiculous in his own eyes in a matter of essential importance.” Yeah. That was it. I wrote it down afterwards.
    Well, as you can imagine, the evening never recovered. I ate all the food and he drank all the wine, and I did all the talking. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the guy, so I told him about Prozac. Believe it or not, he’d never heard of it. He shook his head and said he never took tranquillizers. “I had a bad experience with Valium, once,” he said. Valium! I mean this guy is pharmaceutically in the Stone Age. I explained to him that Prozac wasn’t a