T. Boyle: T. C. Boyle Stories

There was no exchange of body fluids on the first date, and that suited both of us just fine. I picked her up at seven, took her to Mee Grop, where she meticulously separated each sliver of meat from her Phat Thai, watched her down four bottles of Singha at three dollars per, and then gently stroked her balsam-smelling hair while she snoozed through The Terminator at the Circle Shopping Center theater. We had a late-night drink at Rigoletto’s Pizza Bar (and two slices, plain cheese), and I dropped her off. The moment we pulled up in front of her apartment she had the door open. She turned to me with the long, elegant, mournful face of her Puritan ancestors and held out her hand.

“It’s been fun,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, taking her hand.

She was wearing gloves.

“I’ll call you,” she said.

“Good,” I said, giving her my richest smile. “And I’ll call you.”

On the second date we got acquainted.

“I can’t tell you what a strain it was for me the other night,” she said, staring down into her chocolate-mocha-fudge sundae. It was early afternoon, we were in Helmut’s Olde Tyme Ice Cream Parlor in Mamaroneck, and the sun streamed through the thick frosted windows and lit the place like a convalescent home. The fixtures glowed behind the counter, the brass rail was buffed to a reflective sheen, and everything smelled of disinfectant. We were the only people in the place.

“What do you mean?” I said, my mouth glutinous with melted marshmallow and caramel.

“I mean Thai food, the seats in the movie theater, the ladies’ room in that place for god’s sake …”

“Thai food?” I wasn’t following her. I recalled the maneuver with the strips of pork and the fastidious dissection of the glass noodles. “You’re a vegetarian?”

She looked away in exasperation, and then gave me the full, wide-eyed shock of her ice-blue eyes. “Have you seen the Health Department statistics on sanitary conditions in ethnic restaurants?”

I hadn’t.

Her eyebrows leapt up. She was earnest. She was lecturing. “These people are refugees. They have — well, different standards. They haven’t even been inoculated.” I watched her dig the tiny spoon into the recesses of the dish and part her lips for a neat, foursquare morsel of ice cream and fudge.

“The illegals, anyway. And that’s half of them.” She swallowed with an almost imperceptible movement, a shudder, her throat dipping and rising like a gazelle’s. “I got drunk from fear,” she said. “Blind panic. I couldn’t help thinking I’d wind up with hepatitis or dysentery or dengue fever or something.”

“Dengue fever?”

“I usually bring a disposable sanitary sheet for public theaters — just think of who might have been in that seat before you, and how many times, and what sort of nasty festering little cultures of this and that there must be in all those ancient dribbles of taffy and Coke and extra-butter popcorn — but I didn’t want you to think I was too extreme or anything on the first date, so I didn’t. And then the ladies’ room … You don’t think I’m overreacting, do you?”

As a matter of fact, I did. Of course I did. I liked Thai food — and sushi and ginger crab and greasy souvlaki at the corner stand too. There was the look of the mad saint in her eye, the obsessive, the mortifier of the flesh, but I didn’t care. She was lovely, wilting, clear-eyed, and pure, as cool and matchless as if she’d stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting, and I was in love. Besides, I tended a little that way myself. Hypochondria. Anal retentiveness. The ordered environment and alphabetized books. I was a thirty-three-year-old bachelor, I carried some scars and I read the newspapers — herpes, AIDS, the Asian clap that foiled every antibiotic in the book. I was willing to take it slow. “No,” I said, “I don’t think you’re overreacting at all.”

I paused to draw in a breath so deep it might have been a sigh. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, giving her a doglike look of contrition. “I didn’t know.”

She reached out then and touched my hand — touched it, skin to skin — and murmured that it was all right, she’d been through worse. “If you want to know,” she breathed, “I like places like this.”

I glanced around. The place was still empty, but for Helmut, in a blinding white jumpsuit and toque, studiously polishing the tile walls. “I know what you mean,” I said.

We dated for a month — museums, drives in the country, French and German restaurants, ice-cream emporia, fern bars — before we kissed. And when we kissed, after a showing of David and Lisa at a revival house all the way up in Rhinebeck and on a night so cold no run-of-the-mill bacterium or commonplace virus could have survived it, it was the merest brushing of the lips. She was wearing a big-shouldered coat of synthetic fur and a knit hat pulled down over her brow and she hugged my arm as we stepped out of the theater and into the blast of the night. “God,” she said, “did you see him when he screamed ‘You touched me!’? Wasn’t that priceless?” Her eyes were big and she seemed weirdly excited. “Sure,” I said, “yeah, it was great,” and then she pulled me close and kissed me. I felt the soft flicker of her lips against mine. “I love you,” she said, “I think.”

A month of dating and one dry fluttering kiss. At this point you might begin to wonder about me, but really, I didn’t mind. As I say, I was willing to wait — I had the patience of Sisyphus — and it was enough just to be with her. Why rush things? I thought. This is good, this is charming, like the slow sweet unfolding of the romance in a Frank Capra movie, where sweetness and light always prevail. Sure, she had her idiosyncrasies, but who didn’t? Frankly, I’d never been comfortable with the three-drinks-dinner-and-bed sort of thing, the girls who come on like they’ve been in prison for six years and just got out in time to put on their makeup and jump into the passenger seat of your car. Breda — that was her name, Breda Drumhill, and the very sound and syllabification of it made me melt — was different.

Finally, two weeks after the trek to Rhinebeck, she invited me to her apartment. Cocktails, she said. Dinner. A quiet evening in front of the tube.

She lived in Croton, on the ground floor of a restored Victorian, half a mile from the Harmon station, where she caught the train each morning for Manhattan and her job as an editor of Anthropology Today. She’d held the job since graduating from Barnard six years earlier (with a double major in Rhetoric and Alien Cultures), and it suited her temperament perfectly. Field anthropologists living among the River Dyak of Borneo or the Kurds of Kurdistan would send her rough and grammatically tortured accounts of their observations and she would whip them into shape for popular consumption. Naturally, filth and exotic disease, as well as outlandish customs and revolting habits, played a leading role in her rewrites. Every other day or so she’d call me from work and in a voice that could barely contain its joy give me the details of some new and horrific disease she’d discovered.