violin. The music goes lower still. Deirdre and Becky are laughing.
I take a drink, sigh, and nod at Howard. “When I was in San Francisco last June to see my friend Susan, I got in a night before I said I would, and she wasn’t in town,” I say. “I was going to surprise her, and she was the one who surprised me. It was no big deal. I was tired from the flight and by the time I got there I was happy to have the excuse to check into a hotel, because if she’d been there we’d have talked all night. Acting like Becky with Deirdre, right?”
Howard rolls his eyes and nods.
“So I went to a hotel and checked in and took a bath, and suddenly I got my second wind and I thought what the hell, why not go to the restaurant right next to the hotel—or in the hotel, I guess it was—and have a great dinner, since it was supposed to be such a great place.”
“What restaurant?”
“L’Etoile.”
“Yeah,” he says. “What happened?”
“I’m telling you what happened. You have to be patient. Girls always know to be patient with other girls.”
He nods yes again.
“They were very nice to me. It was about three-quarters full. They put me at a table, and the minute I sat down I looked up and there was a man on a banquette across the room from me. He was looking at me, and I was looking at him, and it was almost impossible not to keep eye contact. It just hit both of us, obviously. And almost on the other side of the curve of the banquette was a woman, who wasn’t terribly attractive. She had on a wedding ring. He didn’t. They were eating in silence. I had to force myself to look somewhere else, but when I did look up he’d look up, or he’d already be looking up. At some point he left the table. I saw that in my peripheral vision, when I had my head turned to hear a conversation on my right and I was chewing my food. Then after a while he paid the check and the two of them left. She walked ahead of him, and he didn’t seem to be with her. I mean, he walked quite far behind her. But naturally he didn’t turn his head. And after they left I thought, That’s amazing. It was really like kinetic energy. Just wham. So I had coffee, and then I paid my check, and when I was leaving I was walking up the steep steps to the street and the waiter came up behind me and said, ‘Excuse me. I don’t know what I should do, but I didn’t want to embarrass you in the restaurant. The gentleman left this for you on his way out.’ And he handed me an envelope. I was pretty taken aback, but I just said, ‘Thank you,’ and continued up the steps, and when I got outside I looked around. He wasn’t there, naturally. So I opened the envelope, and his business card was inside. He was one of the partners in a law firm. And underneath his name he had written, ‘Who are you? Please call.’ ”
Howard is smiling.
“So I put it in my purse and I walked for a few blocks, and I thought, Well, what for, really? Some man in San Francisco? For what? A one-night stand? I went back to the hotel, and when I walked in the man behind the desk stood up and said, ‘Excuse me. Were you just eating dinner?,’ and I said, ‘A few minutes ago,’ and he said, ‘Someone left this for you.’ It was a hotel envelope. In the elevator on the way to my room, I opened it, and it was the same business card, with ‘Please call’ written on it.”
“I hope you called,” Howard says.
“I decided to sleep on it. And in the morning I decided not to. But I kept the card. And then at the end of August I was walking in the East Village, and a couple obviously from out of town were walking in front of me, and a punk kid got up off the stoop where he was sitting and said to them, ‘Hey—I want my picture taken with you.’ I went into a store, and when I came out the couple and the punk kid were all laughing together, holding these Polaroid snaps that another punk had taken. It was a joke, not a scam. The man gave the kid a dollar for one of the pictures, and they walked off, and the punk sat back down on the stoop. So I walked back to where he was sitting, and I said, ‘Could you do me a real favor? Could I have my picture taken with you, too?’ ”
“What?” Howard says. The violin is soaring. He gets up and turns the music down a notch. He looks over his shoulder. “Yeah?” he says.
“The kid wanted to know why I wanted it, and I told him because it would upset my boyfriend. So he said yeah—his face lit up when I said that—but that he really would appreciate two bucks for more film. So I gave it to him, and then he put his arm around me and really mugged for the camera. He was like a human boa constrictor around my neck, and he did a Mick Jagger pout. I couldn’t believe how well the picture came out. And that night, on the white part on the bottom I wrote, ‘I’m somebody whose name you still don’t know. Are you going to find me?’ and I put it in an envelope and mailed it to him in San Francisco. I don’t know why I did it. I mean, it doesn’t seem like something I’d ever do, you know?”
“But how will he find you?” Howard says.
“I’ve still got his card,” I say, shrugging my good shoulder toward my purse on the floor.
“You don’t know what you’re going to do?” Howard says.
“I haven’t thought about it in months.”
“How is that possible?”
“How is it possible that somebody can go into a restaurant and be hit by lightning and the other person is, too? It’s like a bad movie or something.”
“Of course it can happen,” Howard says. “Seriously, what are you going to do?”
“Let some time pass. Maybe send him something he can follow up on if he still wants to.”
“That’s an amazing story,” Howard says.
“Sometimes—well, I hadn’t thought about it in a while, but at the end of summer, after I mailed the picture, I’d be walking along or doing whatever I was doing and this feeling would come over me that he was thinking about me.”
Howard looks at me strangely. “He probably was,” he says. “He doesn’t know how to get in touch with you.”
“You used to be a screenwriter. What should he do?”
“Couldn’t he figure out from the background that it was the Village?”
