We had plans tonight? It
Tuesday, the night he’d first suggested, but hadn’t I declined that invitation, and hadn’t he neglected to offer another?
“I’m thinking the Gilded Rose,” he continued. “I have a speaking engagement up in Waupun, so if you don’t mind, let’s make it on the late side. Eight-thirty all right with you?”
The Gilded Rose was the fanciest restaurant in Madison, practically the only fancy restaurant, and I had never been; my friend Rita, who’d been taken there by her nephew and his wife, had told me they had a shrimp cocktail for five dollars. “Charlie, I can’t go out with you,” I said.
“Haven’t we been through this already?”
“I had a chance to think about it, and it’s not that you aren’t appealing or that I’m not—” I paused, but there wasn’t much reason not to be frank with him, especially if it would spare his feelings. “It’s not that I’m not attracted to you. But Dena is my best friend, and this would be unfair to her.”
“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”
I had expected him to agree, or at least to see this as an argument not worth having. I was making myself seem neurotic, and why would he persist with someone who showed her neuroses so quickly? But his utter dismissal of my concerns wasn’t insulting; on the contrary, it gave me a lift of happiness, a hope that he might be right. This hope ran against my certainty that he was not.
“I met your friend about ten minutes before I met you,” he said. “If she thinks she staked some kind of claim on me, she’s crazy, and if you believe her, you’re even crazier than she is.”
“Charlie, questioning a woman’s sanity probably isn’t the most effective way of wooing her,” I said. He laughed, an embarrassed laugh. “But I bet our paths will cross again,” I continued, “so how about if we say goodbye as friends?”
“You know the last time I invited a girl to the Gilded Rose?” He still didn’t sound annoyed; he sounded determined. “Never. I’m a stingy dude, but that’s how hard I’m trying to win you over.”
“I’m flattered, Charlie, I really—”
“Okay, how about this,” he interrupted. “Forget dinner. Come to my speech. It won’t be a date, it’ll be a civic field trip.”
“Your speech tonight?”
“It’s one of those Lions Club gigs. Didn’t you mention that you enjoy listening to people who have nothing to say?”
“Is this because you’re running for Congress?”
“Who says I’m running for Congress? This is how rumors get started, sweetheart.” He was all breeziness and good cheer; when I was talking to him, the world did not seem like such a complicated place. “I promise it won’t be a date,” he said. “We’ll have a lodge full of septuagenarian farmers chaperoning us.”
“Are women even allowed at those things?”
“You kidding me? The Lions love their Lionesses. I gotta go up early and talk with a few folks, so if you’re okay meeting there, the address is 2726 Oak Street, right off Waupun’s main drag. Speech starts at seven.” I could hear him grinning. “Earplugs are optional.”
THAT AFTERNOON, I
went by a store near the capitol that sold not only estate jewelry but also antiques. I felt more comfortable there than I had at the pawnshop, but the man behind the counter—he was about sixty, a thin fellow with a thin mustache and exaggerated inflections that made me almost sure he was homosexual—offered me seventy-five dollars for my mother’s brooch.
“But it’s real, isn’t it?” I said. Here, I was less shy of showing my ignorance about jewelry resale.
“It’s fourteen-carat,” he said. “It contains more base metal than gold. I’d guess it’s Victorian.”
At the pawnshop, my unrealistic sense of hope, my hunch that the brooch probably couldn’t solve my mother’s financial problems but my lack of certainty that this was so—they had made me vulnerable, priming me for disappointment. This time my expectations were low. I wouldn’t try to convince this man of anything.
UPON HANGING UP
after my conversation with Charlie, I’d called Dena and asked if we could postpone the ratatouille until the following night—I’d claimed I’d forgotten that I had prior plans with Rita Alwin—and Dena had said, “Okay, but I’m warning you that the eggplant’s best days are behind it.” I tried to justify the lie by telling myself that when we’d been on the phone earlier, she’d hardly given me the chance to confirm that I could come. But this felt like a weak defense, and I was uneasy as I showered and applied mascara and lipstick. My mood lifted in the car, though— Jimmy Buffett was on the radio, and it really was a nice time for driving, the evening sun a fuzzy gold medallion over the fields.
The Waupun Lions Club was a low brick building that shared a parking lot with a title company. When I walked inside just before seven, about forty people were sitting in sixty chairs, and most members of the audience were in the rows farther from the front. (Something I was to learn quickly is that a turnout’s success can always be judged proportionally. It is better to have twenty-five people and twenty chairs than a hundred and fifty people and six hundred chairs. Though now, I also must confess, the idea of a public audience of either twenty-five or a hundred and fifty makes me quite nostalgic.) I sat halfway back in an aisle seat, and when Charlie saw me—he was standing in front by the podium, wearing a blue-and-white-seersucker jacket, khaki pants, a wide-collared white shirt, and a fat red-and-brown-striped tie—he gestured for me to come closer. In as unobvious a way as I could manage, I shook my head. He tilted his head—
and I had a flashing realization of how little we knew each other. If he thought I was a person who’d want to sit in the front row or, heaven forbid, a person who’d like to be singled out in any way during a speech, then he had
