True-Life Adventure

didn’t want to go home. There was no one but Spot there.
    As soon as I thought that, I could see the paradox in it. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, but I didn’t want to be alone. That certainly simplified matters.
    The thing to do, I supposed, was go to a bar. That way I could have as much human contact as I wanted and never have to say a word to a soul.
    But it probably wouldn’t work that way. I’d go in all morose, and I’d drink something or maybe a couple of somethings, and then things would start looking better. I’d perk up a little and someone would get up the nerve to speak to me, and it would be a dumb someone with nothing interesting to say. And I’d talk to him— or her— because I didn’t want to add any more layers of jerkhood to my already severely endangered soul.
    I looked at my watch. It was early yet. Barely 6:30. Maybe I could find someone to have dinner with, someone I wouldn’t mind talking to. But who?
    It was a dumb question. There was only one person I wanted to have dinner with and she didn’t like me. Ordinarily I wouldn’t have called someone who didn’t like me, but this was an emergency. I went home and dialed Pandorf Associates. She was still there.
    “Hey, listen,” I said. “I’m really not as low-down as Birnbaum. It only seems that way until you get to know me. Underneath the hostile asshole most people see, there’s a sweet, timid guy struggling to get out.”
    She did me the honor of a polite chuckle. “I was snippy. I’m sorry.”
    “You mean the hatchet’s buried? Just like that?”
    “Sure.”
    “I can’t believe it.”
    “Why not?”
    “I thought I was going to have to plead with you over dinner. I mean, that was going to be my excuse for asking you to dinner. Now I don’t have one.”
    I talked fast, not letting her get a word in. “Some guys would give up at this point. But not me. No sirree. I’m going to think of another excuse before you have a chance to turn me down. Just watch. I’m thinking now.”
    “Listen, Paul, I…”
    “I know. We’ve gotta celebrate. That’s it.”
    “Celebrate what?”
    “Resolving our differences. It’s a momentous moment.”
    “You’re sweet, but really, I have a lot of work to do. Maybe another time.”
    “Sardis? I really need somebody to talk to.” It was hard for me to say stuff like that, but I felt pretty strongly about seeing her.
    “You do?” she said. “About Lindsay and all that?”
    “Yes. Would you have dinner with me, please? I could have you back at your office in a couple of hours.”
    “Oh, the hell with it. I’ll come in early tomorrow.”
    We went to Basta Pasta, which is one of two restaurants in town that always seem to feed you even if you don’t have reservations.
    A little red wine, a little French bread, and both of us started to unwind. For a while we just kind of chatted, like any couple on a first date. She was a curious young woman— twenty-eight years old and still angry about a lot of things. It was hard on her, being an adolescent misfit; it was hard on all of us, but she was in the South at the time and she said that made it worse.
    She’d come to California with a degree in art and a lot of talent and chutzpah (to hear her tell it, anyway), and she’d started out doing paste- up for a firm of graphic designers. For the first time in her life she met the kind of people she always imagined there must be somewhere, and these people she described as the sort who would speak to her honestly without meaning something other than what they were saying.
    About then I started catching on that maybe her adolescence actually had been tougher than the average. Anyway, she later moved to another firm, where she was a designer herself, and from there to Pandorf, where she was an executive— a “project coordinator,” meaning a person who organized the getting together of C.I.’s. She’d been doing this for two years and she was beginning to hate it. She wanted to paint.
    Much like a thousand other stories in the naked city. Much like mine, when you got down to it. But I found her fascinating. She seemed a lot like me in a lot of respects— her background, all that early teenage, early young adult stuff, and her anger, held even after it was all over and she had come out on top. I identified with it as if I were in her skin. I carried the same anger and I knew it.
    But that wasn’t what made her fascinating. It was the way she was different from me. She had a