True-Life Adventure

softness, a vulnerability, a way of speech and manner that seemed to treat each person she met— me, the waiter, each fellow human being— with a respect that bordered on awe. How could she be like that and be so much like me? That was the fascinating part.
    After she told her tale, I reciprocated with a little spellbinding information about myself— how I was the first person in my family to go to college and how I had to clean toilets to do it, even though I had scholarships, and how I became an ace but unappreciated reporter for a metropolitan daily and ultimately a ghostwriter for a private detective.
    I even mentioned Maureen to her, and I didn’t talk about Maureen much. She’s kind of the one who got away, though I doubt if she’d see it that way. I said something to Sardis that I’d never said before. I said that I regretted losing Maureen. The reason I never said it is that I never thought it before. Never thought it because I was the one who dumped Maureen.
    Lately, though, something funny had been going on. I’d started feeling things I hadn’t felt before, and one of them was Maureen-regret. It probably had to do with my age and level of achievement. I wished it would get lost.
    Anyway, the thing about Maureen popped out and all of a sudden Sardis was crying. I didn’t know what to say. I offered her some water and she refused. Then I just sat there, twisting my napkin till she could speak.
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m feeling sort of vulnerable.”
    “You regret something, too,” I said.
    “Yes. But he dumped me, you see. I couldn’t stop the thing.”
    “Was it recently?”
    “Last month.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I want to tell you about it. I think you ought to know.”
    I didn’t really want to know, to tell you the truth. I hardly knew this woman and the ought in her sentence sounded possessive. It sounded like maybe she thought we were going to be seeing each other on a regular basis. That got my hackles up.
    Why? you may ask. You might point out that I thought she was terrific in just about every way and she was the only person in the world I wanted to be with that night. So why didn’t I like the idea of seeing her on a regular basis? Well, I did, so long as she wasn’t so amenable to it. Does that make sense? Hell, no, of course it doesn’t.
    But that’s the way it was. I didn’t like Sardis thinking there was something I ought to know and I didn’t want to hear her goddam heartbreak story. I didn’t want to hear anybody’s heartbreak story; I didn’t want to know anybody that well.
    But I couldn’t ask her not to tell it without alienating her forever, and if I did that, I couldn’t see her on a regular basis. See what a bind I was in?
    I answered her as noncommitally as possible. “Oh?” I said.
    “I just had an abortion. I mean, a few weeks ago.” Her eyes were filling up again.
    “That’s tough,” I said, hoping I was making my voice gentle enough to sound sympathetic. God, I was awful at this stuff. I was embarrassed as hell and beginning to sweat.
    “The man I was seeing was married and he lied and… it’s the usual story.”
    I nodded. I knew exactly the story she meant.
    “The thing was, the guy was a client. He stopped using Pandorf when it was over. I mean, he stopped on account of me. I personally cost the company several hundred thousand dollars.”
    Maybe I didn’t know what story she meant. Maybe I was losing my grip. Was her heart broken, or was she worried about losing business?
    “I shouldn’t have gone out with a client. It’s unprofessional as hell, and I could probably get fired for it. But probably I wouldn’t get fired. Probably I just wouldn’t get any good assignments anymore. It wouldn’t happen to a man, of course, if the situation were reversed, but that’s the breaks. It’s happened before at Pandorf, and at other corporations I know of. Your career just sort of unofficially stops dead. You get a ‘reputation,’ like in the nineteenth century.”
    “But if no one knows about it…”
    “Jack Birnbaum did. I thought you ought to know.”
    Oho. “I thought you didn’t know him.”
    “Those messages he left. The first two said he wanted to talk to me about A&L. That’s the name of my friend’s company. The third one mentioned the man by name. So that’s how I happened to remember your name after I saw it in the paper— I was pretty interested in the Birnbaum story. And that’s why I spoke to you