by Daniel Quinn
Ginny nodded. “This was the look they were after. It was a whips and chains crowd.”
“I’ve never seen it on the stands.”
“You’re not likely to. It folded after the second issue. None of them wanted to sell advertising.”
“Ah, business,” he said. “Anything else?”
Ginny shrugged. “A couple of annual reports. Very Swiss, very elegant. And a line of running shoes.”
“Good heavens. I saw those when I came in. It didn’t occur to me they were even part of the show.”
“Swine. They won second place in some category or other.”
“Running shoes, probably.”
She shook her head admiringly. “You really know how to make a girl feel good.”
Greg thought for a moment. “Do you know Sasha’s?”
“Sasha’s? What is it?”
“A Russian restaurant. The most romantic restaurant in Chicago. Closed a few years ago.”
Ginny laughed. “So?”
“That’s where I would’ve taken you if it was still there.”
“Wow. Sounds like it would have been terrific.”
He nodded solemnly. “It would have been, believe me. Caviar. Honest-to-God beef Stroganoff. Plush banquettes, nice low-key atmosphere. Still, there’s Chez Paul.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “There’s still Chez Paul.” She looked up at him innocently. “Are you proposing to break the heart of that nice fat girl with the mustache?”
“Oh, her.” He waved her away. “There’s nothing between us but sex.”
“Good. I’m glad. But, honestly, I’m not dressed for Chez Paul.” Greg almost told her she was dressed for Chez Paul, Maxim’s, the Forum of the Twelve Caesars, or any other res-taurant in the world, but caught himself in time. He proposed Armando’s as an alternative, and it was accepted.
Over a pair of drinks each they discovered they’d done work for the same companies at various times and shared several acquaintances. During dinner they exchanged sketchy life histories, and over coffee, Greg asked her if she knew Mandarine Napoléon. “No. Is it like Sasha’s?”
Greg shook his head. “It’s a prince in the world of liqueurs.” He signaled the waiter and ordered one for each of them. When they arrived in snifters, she held hers up to the light. “Lovely. Tangerine.” She took a sip and said, “Woof. Elegant.”
“It goes well with your dress,” Greg said. “For that matter, it goes well with your eyes. And your hair. And your com-plexion.”
“I’ll keep a glass of it with me always.”
“And do you know,” he said thoughtfully, “I think I’m already three-quarters in love with you.”
Her eyes widened. “What? Only three-quarters?”
He shrugged. “If I said ‘totally,’ you might think I was exaggerating.”
She looked down at her glass, suddenly serious. “Don’t be,” she said.
“Don’t be what?”
“In love with me.”
Greg felt her words as a blow to the solar plexus, but he managed to hold onto a smile. “Why not?”
“Just don’t.”
And Greg, who knew that he was already totally and irrevocably in love, could think of nothing to say. Ginny saved the moment by holding up her glass. “This is marvelous stuff. I thank you for introducing it to me.”
“Listen,” he said, shaking off his desolation, “that’s nothing. I do card tricks.”
“I can hardly wait.”
Greg was stunned when the maitre d’, bowing them out, said, “Good night, Miss Winters.”
“What’s this,” he asked when they were outside, “your neighborhood restaurant?”
“Almost. I only live a couple blocks away. I take a lot of clients there for lunch.”
Suddenly Greg pictured them: ruggedly handsome men with manicured nails, fifty-dollar haircuts. and eight-hundred-dollar suits. He was ready to kill them all.
As though reading his thoughts, Ginny looped her arm around his. “But you introduced me to Armando’s stuffed mushrooms—and to Mandarine Napoléon.”
Greg grinned foolishly, thinking, boy, you’ve got it bad.
In less than five minutes they were standing in front of a tall-windowed graystone apartment building, and Ginny asked if he wanted to come in for some coffee. Greg had spent the last two minutes considering his response to this predictable offer. On a number of grounds—chief among them that he didn’t want the evening to fizzle out anticlimatically—he had decided to make an unpredictable response.
“Thank you, lady of my dreams,” he said, “but I think not tonight.” He smiled at her disconcerted look. “However, I will see you to your door, in hopes of being called upon to trample a dragon or two on the way.”
At her door on the second floor, he said, “And when next I come, you can be sure I’ll bring a deck of cards.”
She laughed. Taking her shoulders he bent down to kiss her, and she offered her lips without hesitation. It was brief, casual, and—for Greg at least—ecstatic. He released her after a moment but couldn’t resist the temptation to lift a hand to her cheek. Smiling, she leaned into it lightly.
“It was nice,” she said.
“Damned right it was,” Greg whispered, and kissed her again, even more briefly. Then he turned and left.
Outside it was all he could do to restrain himself from jumping up and down like a madman or tearing down the street yelling at the top of his lungs. Instead he turned east and with long strides headed toward Michigan Avenue.
God, he thought, I feel just like that simp in West Side Story who swans around singing “Maria! I just met a girl named Maria!” I want to go back and spend the night casting lovesick glances up at her window. Wow. Terrible.
But he wasn’t feeling terrible. He was bursting with happiness, and he thought of dragging Aaron out of bed to release some of the pressure by sharing it with him. Grinning ruefully, Greg shook his head and reminded himself that there is no one in the world more boring than someone who has just fallen in love. What is there to say after you’ve said “I’m in love”? Greg looked up and smiled at the stars glittering over-head.
After you say “I’m in love,” you say, “I’m in love!” Wide-awake and stone sober, he considered walking the thirty blocks home. Better sense prevailed, and he flagged down a taxi.
V
GREG WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING feeling wondrously whole and content. Smiling, he wondered what Agnes Tillford would make of the dream he’d had just before waking. Probably nothing, he decided. Even she’d have to concede that a lot of dreams are just meaningless pranks of the unconscious.
Suddenly bristling with energy and hungry for activity, he rolled out of bed and headed for the bathroom. After a quick shower and a cup of coffee, he lightheartedly tackled the kitchen, which in the past few days had become a bachelor sty of open cans, unscraped dishes, and overflowing bags of trash. When it had achieved a state that would win even Karen’s approval, he made breakfast—and afterward tidied up again.
He went through the bedroom and living room just as methodically, picking up odd bits of clothes, shelving books, squaring up stacks of manuscript, dusting window sills, gathering cobwebs from corners. Finished at last by midmorning, he carried a cup of coffee to the sofa to contemplate smugly the transformation he’d wrought on his environment. It had been carried out in a sort of giddy unthinking trance, and it was only now that he understood what he’d been doing.
He’d been getting ready for company. Not for company still to arrive, company that had already arrived: Ginny.
It seemed to him that Ginny already lived inside of him, that she totally inhabited the interior space that had formerly housed only Greg Donner. It was Ginny who had brought order to his apartment. It was Ginny who wiggled his fingers and toes. And it was certainly Ginny who filled his body with an intensely pleasurable ache of yearning.
For the first time in days, Greg settled down to work without the distraction of wishing he was so
mewhere else, doing something else. From time to time he would pause over a word, look out at the lake—blue today and scintillating with sunlight—smile, and think: Ginny. Then, without a pang, he would go back to work. Effortlessly, he shaped story after story into a tidy package of wit and irony. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that he had a knack for what he was doing, that he was deriving from it a kind of pleasure he rarely experienced in his work.
At a growl from his stomach, he checked the time and was astonished to see that it was nearly four. He’d been working for six hours straight, and it seemed like no more than two or three, he stood up, stretched, and allowed himself to wonder what he was going to do about Ginny. He wanted to call her that instant, to try to see her that evening. Instinct and experience told him it would be a mistake to do either one.
“Don’t be in love with me,” she had told him. But at the door of her apartment she had responded to his kiss, to his touch. Had responded like a woman who wanted to be loved.
Nevertheless, she had said: Don’t be in love with me.
Be casual, be playful, be witty, be fun, be crazy, be tender.
But don’t be in love.
All right. Granting that he didn’t know what it meant, he could understand it, sort of. Perhaps she’d been hurt in an earlier affair. Perhaps—and Greg winced at this—maybe she meant, “Don’t be in love with me . . . because I’m in love with someone else.”
He shook his head, rejecting this. Forget what she said. Consider what she said more plainly when he kissed her, when he touched her cheek: Your kiss is welcome; your touch is welcome.
But don’t be in love.
It meant—it had to mean—don’t overwhelm me. Take it slow. Greg nodded. Yes. He would take it slow. He ached to hear her voice. He yearned to have her in his arms again. But he would take it slow. He would be casual and playful and witty and fun and crazy—and tender.
But he would also be in love; his feelings were his own and Ginny didn’t need to know about them until she was ready to.
He would wait till next week to call her. Groaning, he thought of the empty days that stretched ahead. Then he thought again: Sunday brunch? Acceptably casual—and leaving less than one day to be lived through without her. Brunch. Then what? An equally casual good-bye? A stroll through Lincoln Park Zoo, for God’s sake? He shook his head: brunch was all wrong.
He would call her Wednesday afternoon. Well, Tuesday afternoon. Three days.
On an impulse, he called Agnes and asked if she’d like to join him in a Saturday night pub crawl. “My dear boy,” she said. “You’re sure you’re not after my body?”
“Your mind, Agnes. I love your mind. And the way you hold a martini glass.”
“I don’t drink martinis, as you well know.”
“Oh. Then it must have been someone else.”
Agnes giggled and asked him what pubs he was thinking of, his or hers?
“Let’s placate my sense of gallantry and say yours.”
“That’s fine. Except there’s only one I regularly crawl in. Freddie’s, just south of Evanston on Sheridan.” They arranged to meet at eight.
Greg checked his watch and decided he might as well get in another couple hours of work.
Freddie’s turned out to be not a pub but a steak house with a separate, cavernously dark cocktail lounge. When Greg’s eyes adjusted to the meager light, he saw Agnes waving at him from a booth near the back.
As he slid into the seat across from her, he asked, “Are they expecting an air raid?”
“In the dark night of the soul,” Agnes intoned somberly, “it’s always three o’clock in the morning.”
“Good lord. Are we doing quotations tonight?”
“Let’s.”
In the course of the evening, Greg told her he’d met the girl of his dreams. She raised an eyebrow and asked if he meant the exact girl he’d dreamed about. When he said he did, she told him to tell her about it.
When he was finished, she smiled benignly and said, “I like that part where she thought you said, ‘We were being chaste.’ Puns like that are very common in dreams.”
“Except this wasn’t a dream.”
“I realize that.” She gave him a speculative look. “You’re not thinking this is some sort of preternatural event—meeting someone in real life that you’ve only known in your dreams.”
“Well, not preternatural. But it’s certainly a hell of a coincidence.”
“Not really. You’re in related fields, you share some of the same clients and acquaintances. It would almost be a miracle if you hadn’t seen her around—probably more than once. It may only have been a glimpse, but that would be enough.”
“True.” He asked if she’d like to hear a couple of dreams.
“Sure. Next to gossip, I love to hear dreams.”
“This one I had this morning just before I woke up,” Greg said, and went on to describe it. He and Ginny had been back at Armando’s. They’d had cocktails and dinner, but he remembered little of that. Then he’d signaled for the check. They dawdled over the last of their coffee and drinks. Soon he realized they’d been waiting an uncommonly long time for their check. Looking around, he spotted their waiter across the room in excited conversation with the maitre d’ and some other waiters. When Greg finally managed to catch his eye, he hurried over nervously, and Greg asked what the problem was.
“Oh, no problem, sir,” the waiter said, obviously lying. “Your check will be here in a moment. Someone will bring it.”
“Why don’t you bring it?” Greg asked stiffly, but the waiter had already turned away in embarrassment.
Greg shrugged and told Ginny, “It’ll be here in a minute.” She said nothing. After a few moments she nodded to his left to indicate that someone was coming.
It was the old magician from the storefront, still in his shirt sleeves, but lacking the confident air he’d displayed while performing his coin trick. He slid the check across the table and, looking away, said, “I’m sorry, sir.”
Greg glanced at the check and blurted, “This is ridiculous.”
It was for $643.17.
“I know, sir. Would you like me to go through it for you?”
“I sure as hell would.”
The old man took out a pencil and touched the items on the bill one by one, identifying each, and Greg saw that, somehow or other, it did indeed total $643.17. “This is ridiculous,” he repeated. “Six hundred dollars for dinner for two?”
“Dinner and drinks, sir. The menu does list all the prices, you know.”
“I know that, goddamn it, but—”
Ginny put a hand on his arm. “I tried to warn you, Greg,” she said in a strangely flat tone. “Don’t make a scene.”
“Don’t make a scene! My God—” Biting his lip, he tried to bring himself under control. “Okay,” he said at last and slipped a credit card out of his billfold.
The old man cringed with embarrassment. “I’m sorry, sir, but a bill of this size . . . I’m afraid we must have cash. You understand.”
“I certainly do not understand,” Greg snapped. “Do you mean a check?”
Pained, the old man turned his eyes up to the ceiling. “Ah, no sir. I’m afraid I mean cash. A policy of the management.”
Greg exploded into wrath. Patrons at other tables turned to stare at him yelling and pounding on the table. “One moment,” the old man said. “I’ll bring the manager.”
Glancing across the table, Greg saw that Ginny was gone. He looked around frantically and saw her standing by the exit, rigidly disassociating herself from him. As he watched, she looked longingly down the stairs to the front door, as if she wished she could leave.
The old man returned with the manager, and a hysterical argument began. The dream dragged to a close in a numbing chaos of accusations and threats.
“It must’ve been an unusually vivid dream,” Agnes observed.
“It was. So what does it mean?”
She smiled. “That’s obv
ious enough, I think.” She regarded him benevolently. “So you’ve met the girl of your dreams. What was your reaction to her?”
“What do you mean?” When she raised her eyebrows at him, he shifted his gaze to the drink in front of him. “I guess my reaction was a pretty powerful one.”
“Don’t kid me, sonny. It was the thunderbolt. You fell in love.”
Greg shrugged and nodded ruefully.
“Head over heels? The complete madness?” Smiling, he nodded again. “Okay. This is something new for you? Never happened before?”
“No, not like this.”
“Then the dream is obvious. Under the delirium, you’re a bit apprehensive. You’re afraid it’s going to cost you plenty. You’ve never been in love before—maybe the price always seemed too high. But here you are, head over heels, and you’re going to have to pay for it at last. And you’re worried that it may turn out to be more than you can afford—emotionally speaking, of course. But, once again, the magician—that Wise Old Man of your dreams—makes it plain that your fears are absurd. You know damn well there’s no restaurant in Chicago where you can spend six hundred bucks on dinner for two.”
Greg nodded. “Very neat. But I don’t feel worried.”
She peered at him skeptically. “Goodness, you must have nerves of steel. No butterflies in the stomach? No fear of rejection? You’re confident it’s all a sure thing?”
Don’t fall in love with me.
He made a face. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
“Anyone in love is in a position of extreme emotional risk. That’s part of the excitement, after all.”
“True.” He looked up at her and blinked. “Would you like to hear another one?”
“Another dream? Sure. As I say, right next to gossip.”
He told her about the dream in which he and Ginny had sought refuge in the observatory atop a country house planted in the middle of the city. When he was done, she smiled and shook her head. “You have such straightforward dreams. There’s no challenge to them at all. You don’t see what this is about?”
“Nope. Next to gossip, I love hearing dreams explained.”
