Lightning

'Dinner and a movie?'

'All right.'

'Tonight? Pick you up at six?'

'Okay.'

After she hung up she stood for a while, staring at the phone. Finally she said aloud, 'Shane, are you nuts?' Then she said, 'But he told me my writing was 'so beautiful and so real.' '

She went into her bedroom and looked at the collection of toads on the nightstand. She said, 'He's inarticulate and silent one time, a babbler the next. He could be a psycho killer, Shane.' Then she said, 'Yeah, he could be, but he's also a great literary critic.'

Because he had suggested dinner and a movie, Laura dressed in a gray skirt, white blouse, and maroon sweater, but he showed up in a dark blue suit, white shirt with French cuffs, blue silk tie with tie chain, silk display handkerchief, and highly polished black wingtips, as if he were going to the season opener at the opera. He carried an umbrella and escorted her from her apartment to his car with one hand under her right arm, with such solemn concern that he seemed convinced that she would dissolve if touched by one drop of rain or shatter into a million pieces if she slipped and fell.

Considering the difference in their dress and the considerable difference in their size — at five-five, she was one foot shorter than he was; at a hundred fifteen pounds, she was less than half his weight — she felt almost as if she were going on a date with her father or an older brother. She was not a petite woman, but on his arm and under his umbrella she felt positively tiny.

He was uncommunicative again in the car, but he blamed it on the need to drive with special care in such rotten weather. They went to a small Italian restaurant in Costa Mesa, a place in which Laura had eaten a few good meals in the past. They sat down at their table and were given menus, but even before the waitress could ask if they would like a drink, Daniel said, 'This is no good, this is all wrong, let's find another place.'

Surprised, she said, 'But why? This is fine. Their food's very good here.'

'No, really, this is all wrong. No atmosphere, no style, I don't want you to think, ummmm,' and now he was babbling as he'd done on the phone, blushing, 'ummmm, well, anyway, this is no good, not right for our first date, I want this to be special,' and he got up, 'ummmm, I think I know just the place, I'm sorry, Miss' — this to the startled young waitress—'I hope we haven't inconvenienced you,' and he was pulling back Laura's chair, helping her up, 'I know just the place, you'll like it, I've never eaten there but I've heard it's really good, excellent.' Other customers were staring, so Laura stopped protesting. 'It's close, too, just a couple of blocks from here.'

They returned to his car, drove two blocks, and parked in front of an unpretentious-looking restaurant in a strip shopping center.

By now Laura knew him well enough to realize that his sense of courtliness required her to wait for him to come around and open her car door, but when he opened it she saw he was standing in a ten-inch-deep puddle. 'Oh, your shoes!' she said.

'They'll dry out. Here, you hold the umbrella over yourself, and I'll lift you across the puddle.'

Nonplussed, she allowed herself to be plucked from the car and carried over the puddle as if she weighed no more than a feather pillow. He put her down on higher pavement and, without the umbrella, he sloshed back to the car to close the door.

The French restaurant had less atmosphere than the Italian place. They were shown to a corner table too near the kitchen, and Daniel's saturated shoes squished and squeaked all the way across the room.

'You'll catch pneumonia,' she worried when they were seated and had ordered two Dry Sacks on the rocks.

'Not me. I've got a good immune system. Never get sick. One time in Nam, during an action, I was cut off from my unit, spent a week on my own in the jungle, rained every minute, I was shriveled by the time I found my way back to friendly territory, but I never even got the sniffles.'

As they sipped their drinks and studied the menu and ordered, he was more relaxed than Laura had yet seen him, and he actually proved to be a coherent, pleasant, even amusing conversationalist. But when the appetizers were served — salmon in dill sauce for her, scallops in pastry for him — it swiftly became clear that the food was terrible, even though the prices were twice those at the Italian place that they had left, and course by course, as his embarrassment grew, his ability to sustain his end of the conversation declined drastically. Laura proclaimed everything delicious and choked down every bite, but it was no use; he was not fooled.

The kitchen staff and the waiter were also slow. By the time Daniel had paid the check and escorted her back to the car — lifting her across the puddle again as if she were a little girl — they were half an hour late for the movie they had intended to see.

'That's all right,' she said, 'we can go in late and stay to see the first half hour of the next showing.'

'No, no,' he said. 'That's a terrible way to see a movie. It'll ruin it for you. I wanted this night to be perfect.'

'Relax,' she said. 'I'm having fun.'

He looked at her with disbelief, and she smiled, and he smiled, too, but his smile was sick.

'If you don't want to go to the movie now,' she said, 'that's all right, too. Wherever you want to go, I'm game.'

He nodded, started the car, and drove out to the street. They had gone a few miles before she realized that he was taking her home.

All the way from his car to her door, he apologized for what a lousy evening it had been, and she repeatedly assured him that she was not in the least disappointed with a moment of it. At her apartment, the instant she inserted her key in the door, he turned and fled down the stairs from the second-floor veranda, neither asking for a goodnight kiss nor giving her a chance to invite him in.

She stepped to the head of the stairs and watched him descend, and he was halfway down when a gust of wind turned his umbrella inside out. He fought with it the rest of the way, twice almost losing his balance. When he reached the walk below, he finally got the umbrella corrected — and the wind immediately turned it inside out again. In frustration he threw it into some nearby shrubbery, then looked up at Laura. He was soaked from head to toe by then, and in the pale light from a lamppost she could see that his suit hung on him shapelessly. He was a huge man, strong as two bulls, but he had been done in by little things — puddles, a gust of wind — and there was something quite funny about that. She knew she should not laugh, dared not laugh, but a laugh burst from her anyway.

'You're too damned beautiful, Laura Shane!' he shouted from the walk below. 'God help me, you're just too beautiful.' Then he hurried away through the night.

Feeling bad about laughing but unable to stop, she went into the apartment and changed into pajamas. It was only twenty till nine.

He was either a hopeless basket case or the sweetest man she had known since her father died.

At nine-thirty the phone rang. He said, 'Will you ever go out with me again?'

'I thought you'd never call.'

'You will?'

'Sure.'

'Dinner and a movie?' he asked.

'Sounds good.'

'We won't go back to that horrible French place. I'm sorry about that, I really am.'

'I don't care where we go,' she said, 'but once we sit down in the restaurant, promise me we'll stay there.'

'I'm a bonehead about some things. And like I said… I never have been able to cope around beautiful women.'

'Your mother.'

'That's right. Rejected me. Rejected my father. Never felt any warmth from that woman. Walked out on us when I was eleven.'

'Must've hurt.'

'You're more beautiful than she was, and you scare me to death.'

'How flattering.'

'Well, sorry, but I meant it to be. The thing is, beautiful as you are, you're not half