by Rusk, Day
The way I figured it, if she was brought up in a strict household, chances are she wasn’t the type to embrace one-night stands. You see it on TV and in movies all the time; the third date is supposed to equal sex. I don’t know who came up with that rule, but I’m sure it wasn’t set in stone; actually, based on past relationships, I can guarantee you it wasn’t set in stone. Considering Safia’s background, I figured it would take a long time for her to become comfortable with me and be willing to share that part of her in a relationship – probably months. And I was okay with that. I really wanted to get to know her; yes, I know some guys right now are rolling their eyes and wondering if I was gay, but that’s the truth. Sex is only one component of a relationship; unless you and the woman you’re with plan to spend every waking hour together in bed, sharing bodily fluids, let’s face it, other aspects of the relationship had to be developed and nurtured, made strong, like the ability to just enjoy each other’s company, whether it’s going for a walk, or sitting down and watching a movie. I wanted to know who Safia really was and for her to know who I really was, before we explored anything carnal. So, I guess in that way, if I’d guessed right, I could live with waiting for that intimacy with her. You see, her parents would hate me, but I really cared for their daughter and had the best of intentions.
All this really didn’t matter, I guess if I blew the second date. I’d made a good first impression, but we were still getting to know one another, so the potential to blow it was still very real – and I really didn’t trust myself to not blow it.
The second date is as important as the first date – possibly even more important. On the first date you’ve both been on your best behavior, and if things went well, the two of you covered a lot of ground. If you’ve covered that ground and you’ve made it to a second date, well, that’s a good thing.
In the past, traditionally, a second date would involve another restaurant and a movie, but with Safia I decided to try something different; luckily, she was up for it. Instead of going out to dinner and a movie, I invited her to my place for a homemade meal and a movie. I was hoping that if I cooked for her, she’d find that engaging and loveable.
“I have to say, I was a bit reluctant inviting you over. I wasn’t sure you’d come,” I said to Safia as she made herself comfortable on my living room couch.
“A second date at the man’s house, that is a bit dodgy; I mean it’s only a second date, for all I know you could be a serial killer,” she said.
“True, but it could be worst.”
“How’s that?” she asked.
“I could be a serial killer in training,” I said.
She just looked at me.
“I mean, if you’re going to fall prey to a serial killer you want to fall prey to an experienced serial killer, not some trainee. A trainee would be sloppy, still learning his trade. He’d be messy and probably muck things up, whereas an experienced serial killer would be efficient and get the job done right.”
“I see you’ve given this some thought,” she said.
“My Dad always taught me you should take pride in your work.”
“Do I have to worry?” she asked, smiling.
“No, it seems like too much work. And being a serial killer, it’s a messy job; the dry cleaning bill alone just wouldn’t make sense,” I paused for a second. “You know, this is an equal opportunity world. Should I be worried? There have been more documented cases of female serial killers.”
“I like to surprise my dates,” she said with a mischievous smile.
“So,” I said, my arms outstretched indicating my home, “What do you think.”
Safia took a couple of seconds to look around. “It’s very tidy. You are into women, aren’t you?”
“Last I checked.”
“Let’s see,” she said as she picked up a pile of magazines on my coffee table. “Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, The Economist, I’m impressed.”
“That one’s more decorative,” I said pointing to The Economist, “makes me look smart.”
“And a bunch of history magazines, nothing to worry about there,” she said as she put them back down on the coffee table.
“Oh dear,” I said, looking at the coffee table. She looked at me puzzled.
“The magazines,” I said.
She looked down at them, then back at me.
“They’re, for lack of a better word, askew.”
“Askew?”
“Messed up,” I continued. I got up off my chair and straightened out the magazines on the coffee table as she watched. “You see, now they’re neat and tidy, the way I like them.”
“Really? That’s interesting,” she said.
“I’m sorry; it’s just a pet peeve of mine. I can’t stand it if I go someplace and there’s a stack of magazines or books and they’re all askew. It just doesn’t look right.”
“So you straighten them out.”
“I do,” I said.
I don’t know if a second date is the time for revealing one’s unique idiosyncrasies, but I figured, what the hell, I might as well put it out there.
“It’s a pet peeve of mine,” I continued.
“So,” she said, “If I were to just mess them up a little, you couldn’t stand it. You’d have to straighten them up again?”
“Definitely.”
“What if I said, let’s skip dinner and go into the bedroom and make passionate love to one another, all night, just as long as you let me mess them up, make them askew, as it were? Could you do that, knowing what was happening down here on the coffee table?”
I took a moment to think about that.
“I’m afraid, if passionate sex was what you were looking for, I couldn’t give you that, knowing that down here the magazines on my coffee table were all messed up. I’m afraid I’d have to say no to that.”
Safia laughed.
“Interesting,” she said. “Any other pet peeves I should be aware of?”
“Let’s see,” I replied. “Well there is one thing. You know when you go to the book store and you buy a remaindered hardcover, it usually has a big round sticker on the front of it?”
She nodded her head, “Yes.”
“I can’t stand it when people don’t peel that sticker off the book; they just leave it on. That drives me crazy.”
“Because you don’t like stickers?” she asked, somewhat mockingly.
“There could be that,” I conceded, “but it just doesn’t look right and it’s not fair to the book.”
This prompted a curious look.
“Think about it,” I continued. “At one point in time that hardcover book was worth thirty, forty or fifty bucks. It sat majestically on the book store shelf waiting to be read, to be chosen and it wasn’t. Now it’s been relegated to a table with a bunch of other misfit books that failed to sale, and it now features prominently on its countenance a vile sticker advertising it for five or six ninety-nine, a mere fraction of its once glorious price. That sticker is the equivalent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. You know the book in which a woman is forced to prominently wear a large letter ‘A’ on her dress to indicate to one and all she is an adulterer?”
Safia nodded, “Yes.”
“Well that sticker is the scarlet sticker, mocking that book and its past glory; its failure to find a reader in its glory days. The sticker is offensive and just has to go, that’s all.”
“Are you sure you’re just not trying to hide the fact that you’re cheap? That you bought the book at a discount?” she asked, smiling.
“No, I’ll tell people I bought it on remainder; I just don’t think it has to be publicly branded for one and all to see. I’ll peel off the sticker and if I’m at someone’s house and I see a book like that, I’ll peel off the sticker there as well. It’s just the right thing to do; the humane thing to do for the book.”
“Interesting,” she said, as she leaned back on the couch, nodding her head.
“Now that I’ve come clean, what
are your pet peeves?” I asked.
She sat back up. “Pet peeves? I’m afraid I don’t have any. I forgot to feed them and they died.”
I smiled. She was quick. I liked that.
Safia was looking around again.
“What are you looking for?” I asked.
“Books,” she said. “You’re a writer. I expected to find book shelves in your living room, lined with books.”
“Follow me,” I said, getting up. “They’re all in my den, my work area.”
I led Safia to a room off to the side of the living room. I opened the door to a den full of book shelves lining the walls and a wooden desk sitting in the middle of it, messy with my notes and various scribbling. She smiled as she stepped into the room.
“This is what I was expecting,” she said, as she began scanning the book shelves, but not before looking closely at my desk. “You do realize your desk is an utter mess, not neat and tidy, like I assume you like things.”
“Go figure,” I said with a shrug.
I watched her carefully as she began scanning the spines of books on my shelves, occasionally reaching up and pulling one out for closer examination. She was taking her time, drinking it all in. I took a seat on the edge of my desk and waited.
“There’s hardly any fiction in here,” she finally said, “mostly non-fiction.”
“I used to read a lot of fiction, but at one point in time, I just gave it up. I found I wasn’t interested unless it was true. You know biographies or books on history.”
“There’s quite a variety of stuff here, covering a lot of ground.”
“I’m interested in a lot of eras; lots of things,” I said.
“Oh, look at this,” she said bending down and picking a book off the shelf. I knew exactly what had caught her attention. She stood back up a book in her hand.
“The Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom. And it looks like there are a couple of others, Juliette and Justine?”
“That’s right,” I said.
“The Marquis de Sade?” she asked, as she flipped through the pages.
“Wouldn’t you be fascinated by the man who inspired the word sadism?”
“I don’t know what this means; I don’t know if I should be worried,” she said.
I smiled. “120 Days of Sodom is probably one of the vilest and most disgusting books ever written, or in its case, written but never completed. It’s a tomb full of debauchery. Just for that pedigree alone, doesn’t it deserve to be discovered and read?”
“You’re not secretly into S&M, are you?” she asked.
I laughed. “No, not at all. I’ve always been fascinated with evil, pure evil, which also accounts for the Hitler and Himmler biographies. The funny thing about de Sade is his worst crimes were drugging some prostitutes, engaging in sexual practices that are today considered normal, like sodomy, and having a poor attitude towards the Church and not being afraid to vent it, especially during his sexual escapades. He beat The Exorcist to the use of Crucifixes during sex, by a century or more.”
She looked intrigued.
“For the most part, he spent the majority of his life locked up in prison, his mother-in-law, who detested him, paying his room and board, and ensuring he stayed that way. It was the books he wrote and had smuggled out of those prisons, including the legendary Bastille, that account for his notoriety today. His imagination and pen were more evil than he ever was in real life.”
“And the Hitler biographies?” she asked.
“Always looking for answers as to how he and those around him could actually commit themselves to the task of trying to eradicate a whole race of people from the planet, and not during the Middle Ages or some primitive time, but during the 20th Century.”
She just looked at me.
“They provide no answers, although I keep reading the bios looking for something to try and make any sense out of it at all,” I said, speaking the truth.
“A fascination with evil, huh,” she said, putting the de Sade book back on the book shelf and continuing to peruse the others.
“Not everything is based on evil. There’s a whole collection of Lincoln biographies, books on Rome and Alexander the Great, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and much more. Which reminds me, I got you a present.”
Safia turned in my direction, a curious look on her face, as I moved to the drawer of my desk and opened it, pulling out a present I had wrapped for her just for this occasion. I handed it to her.
“It feels like a book,” she said, holding it and smiling, “possibly written by someone I know?”
She ripped apart the wrapping, and when I say ripped, I mean ripped. No dainty, let’s take this apart so we can save the wrapping and use it for something else later, just ripping with wild abandon. I liked that about her.
Once she had cast the wrapping paper aside, she looked at the book, her excited expression turning from one of excitement to one of puzzlement.
“The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal?” she said, holding up a mint copy of The Selected Essays of Gore Vidal, one of my favorite authors.
“Yeah, and it’s autographed,” I said.
She flipped open the front of the book and turned a couple of pages until she came to Gore Vidal’s signature. It read, “To Safia, from Gore Vidal.” She looked even more puzzled.
“Seeing how I’ve never seen Gore’s autograph, that signature probably won’t hold up to any scrutiny, if passed off as authentic,” I said.
“Gore Vidal?” she said. “What about your book?”
“He’s a much better writer than me,” I offered.
She just stared at me.
“Okay,” I said, reaching back into my desk and pulling out a copy of my book. “It’s yours.”
She took my book, a big smile on her face.
“It’s autographed,” I said.
She quickly opened the book and turned a couple of pages until she reached the autograph.
“To Safia, from Gore Vidal,” she said, reading the autograph. She looked up at me, puzzled.
“I find people are a lot more excited to get his autograph than mine,” I said, with a smile.
“You’re definitely a little unconventional,” she said, “and, thank you.”
Dinner was great. I wasn’t sure what she would or wouldn’t like, or for that matter, what she was or wasn’t allowed to eat, so I took a chance on making salmon, with some asparagus and rice. I also had a nice red and white wine on hand. I know one of them went with fish, but I didn’t know which one. As much as I like to pass myself off as cultured, I’m still a simple boy from the suburbs.
“This is lovely,” she said, as I poured her a glass of white wine.
“Thank you,” I said. “I didn’t know what you’d like. I make a killer meatloaf, but I wasn’t sure you’d like meatloaf. I was also looking to impress you and meatloaf just doesn’t say cultured and refined, does it?”
“It would have been fine,” she said. “A man that can cook is a catch, you know?”
“So what excuse did you use to get out of the house tonight?”
“Maybe I told my parents about you,” she said.
“Did you?” I asked.
“Are you nuts? I’m supposed to be staying over at Kareena’s tonight. Her parents are out of town, but my parents don’t know that.”
“It must be a pain in the ass having to lie to them?”
“It’s just the way it is,” she said.
“What’s the worst that could happen if they knew where you were? Who you were with? Would it be the end of the world?” I asked.
“Probably not, but I’m not quite ready to go there yet. It’s just easier this way.”
“I guess. But I feel like a leper, or something.”
“I’m sorry, it’s just complicated,” she smiled. “But I promise you, one day you’ll have the opportunity to straighten up the magazines on my parent’s coffee table, they’re a mess.”
“How am I supposed to enjoy my meal, k
nowing that?”
“And, if I’m not mistaken, my sister is a non-peeler when she buys books.”
“It looks like I met you just in the nick of time,” I said, holding up my wine glass in a toast. “To the potential for happiness the future may hold.”
“To the future,” she said, as we both stared into one another’s eyes while sipping on our wine.
It’s a little quirk of mine, but the first movie I see with a girl I want to be special – something memorable. Some people have their first songs, I have our first movie, and normally that movie isn’t playing in a movie theatre nearby. Actually, it’s hard to find a good current movie that you’re willing to call your movie; you need an old standby, a classic, if you will.
“So, what are we watching,” Safia asked as she settled into a comfortable lounge chair in my movie room. Yes, I’ve dedicated an entire room in my place for the sole art of watching movies properly; a big screen, Blu-Ray, surround sound, track lighting and comfortable chairs. Collecting movies is a hobby, so I invested a little in my hobby so I could do it up right.
“A romantic comedy,” I replied. “But not just any romantic comedy, a classic, starring John Wayne.”
The look on her face said it all.
“John Wayne in a romantic comedy?” she asked.
“You see, you’re like everyone else. As far as you’re concerned he did nothing but Westerns and War movies.”
“Didn’t he?”
“He made about one hundred and fifty movies, you know. I’ll bet you didn’t know about Trouble Along the Way co-starring Donna Reed, a wonderful romantic comedy set in the world of college football, did you?”
