She was nice. Everything about her was nice. She looked very nice. Smelled nice. Smiled nice. Talked nice. Thought nice. This is going to be a nice, breathlessly boring date. Niceing each other to death.
She suggested a place at his request and it was — right — nice. A quiet, dark but not too dark, nice little place with good service and probably good food and wine. He didn't taste anything because he had Rita Haubrich to look at and taste. Pitiful and nobody's proud of being a slobbering, drooling sex maniac, but these are the facts, ma'am.
Rita drank a chilled white wine which she had to order as he had been struck numb, dumb, and pantingly goofy by the tactile senses that her presence had assaulted. He ordered something and it sat there untouched in front of him while they talked.
Yes, dammit to blazes, it was NICE talking with her about all kinds of things. He liked her a bunch and she seemed to be able to somehow tolerate Eichord, even laughing at his attempts at good humor. But then who wouldn't be charmed by the sophisticated, rapier wit and hilariously piercing
'Well, how time flies,' she had said to him with her big smile lighting up the dark corners of the restaurant. 'We've been talking, or I should say I have been talking on and on. Did you want to do something else this evening?' And Jack Eichord replied — and get this now for some of that repartee, he didn't hesitate a moment — he replied brilliantly, 'Hammma, hammma, ham-mma,' which she had the taste to think was sublimely funny. She had probably seen various folk struck numb, dumb, and pantingly goofy before. She was what they used to call a looker. She had always been pretty. But now she was nothing less than SENSATIONAL.
They had fun talking and they sat there for hours making fools out of themselves not in the least. Rita kidded him that he was the first adult male she'd ever known who wasn't a lawyer.
'Are you sure you didn't become a lawyer in all that time?'
'I assure you I —'
'Promise.' She made a pretty face. 'Cops sometimes study for the bar.'
'Cross my heart. Defense rests.' He knew when to let a straight line go by untouched.
'Are you WANTING to be a lawyer?'
''Fraid not. Is that good or bad?'
'Yes, probably one or the other but irrelevant. It's just so very wonderfully different. You are the only adult of the male persuasion I've ever met in the last twenty years who wasn't a lawyer.'
'Still just a plain old cop.'
'Cop, maybe. Old, ehhhh. Plain. Huh-uh.' She laughed. She looked at his dark black hair flecked with gray, and dark eyes that bored into her soulfully, and that was when it happened.
'Oh, shucks,' he said, summoning up a hidden wellspring of conversational brilliance. Thrilled to his sex-mad core. He
'You know,' he began, some lame crap just to say something and he just couldn't finish the stupid sentence. He was absolutely bowled over by her and he let it hang there unfinished, just looking at her in admiration.
'Yeah?' is what another woman might have said to his unfinished dialogue. She thought it and he understood. And he thought that she could read the sincerity in his eyes. It was ridiculous, of course, but it was so damned biochemical and metaphysical and dad-gummed blue-eyed fun that he just nodded at her as if to say, Yes, I agree it was nice to be able to have a conversation without speaking. And then suddenly both of them got very self-conscious about it and at the exact moment Rita started to say, 'It's interesting how a person can —' he started to say, 'Have you ever considered the fact —' and they said them in unison and both broke up laughing and then they said, 'Go ahead.'
'I wasn't going to say anything.'
'You go ahead, I wasn't going to say anything either.'
'Would you believe I'm having lots of fun sitting here having the dumbest conversation that has ever been held?'
'Me too.' And he wanted to ask her if he took an ink pen and connected all the little tiny dots on her body would it be some kind of far-out beautiful Picasso-like Cubistic artwork? And could he try that later, maybe? He could use something water-soluable. He had other thoughts, too.
They talked about old times. The St. Louis they both loved back in the delightful, SoHoish Gaslight Square days that made the town seem like an oasis of hip in the hopeless desert of the Midwest. They laughed about a district attorney, a preposterous guy who both of them still remembered. She told him all about her dad, a former judge and lawyer turned pol and long since retired. Her brother was a well-known criminal lawyer in Kansas City, and her former husband, Winslow Haubrich, was an upwardly mobile trust lawyer with North, Haubrich and Dechter, a firm solidly plugged into the St. Louis banking system.
Pretty soon they found themselves flirting with each other uncontrollably, and then they started laughing at themselves and that was fun too. It was as if the intervening years had never happened. And Jack didn't know for certain but he thought if she'd just let him kiss her once he could go home and compose a 300,000-word essay about that face with its special collection of perfections. Delicate bones that stopped just on the comfortable side of being cover-girl, traffic-stopper looks. Yippee.
Ex-husband notwithstanding he sensed a kind of virginal, fresh, and tender thing about her. Rita looked like one of those girls whom you take back to their apartment and it's all chintz and lace and four-poster-bed room and plants out the kazoo, Lautrec on the wall or a bullfight poster, or worse — horses or velvet children with the eyes — but she wasn't. She was one great, fan-damn-tastic, ummmmmmm-good, super surprise.
'God!' he said again. 'Rita
On the way to her place he started making a list of the things that were phenomenal about this lady. He'd start just with her face. Just the purely physical stuff:
1. The red hair
2. The lips (a: smile) (b: corners) (c: fullness) (d: coloration)
3. The nose
4. The chin
5. The eyes
6. The eyelashes
7. The eyebrows (he'd
8. The cheeks (a: cheekbones) (b: flawless skin)
9. The ears
10. The forehead.
She was the first woman he could ever remember seeing about whom he could actually say there were ten beautiful things just above the neck alone and that's not counting the back of her head, her teeth, her tongue, et cetera.
But even before he got to the wonderful sloping upper chest and that long and lovely throat and the other 469 things he thought were terrific about Rita, there was the apartment. One more surprise.
She'd met him at the door, so he hadn't seen inside her apartment. He was surprise to find it sparse, white, and functional. Not that high-tech crap with all the chrome things and everything all self-consciously spherical and slick, but a great pad. Even the greenery looked good. He liked everything about this lady.
She was another one of those rather pretty women who age like wine. The ones who suddenly wake up one day in their late twenties to find out they've done something miraculous. Or rather that God has. He's let them turn sensational-looking while they were asleep. Because those women sometimes seem to get that way overnight. It's not a slow, evolutionary thing, but a fast, breathtaking process that comes on them while asleep. And plain Jane wakes up one morning in Knockout City. Reasonably pretty Rita wakes up beautiful.
It doesn't happen a lot. But when it does, it can be heady stuff and not every woman or man can deal with it. A woman like that sometimes can get a real crush on her mirror if she isn't careful. Not Rita. She handled it by not believing she was sensational-looking at all. She laughed at Eichord's compliments. He told her how pretty she was and it really put her away and she laughed hard and the laughter was genuine. What a comic he was. And that knocked him out too.
