Jowita Bydlowska - Guy

“Great. See you tonight, Princess,” I say. The nickname just pops into my head like that, perhaps because I am a nice, magical vampire prince.

FOR DINNER, I MAKE A CHILLED CAULIFLOWER VELOUTÉ AND kataifi pastry–crusted blue prawns with Romanesco broccoli and cilantro cream. This is the amuse-bouche, which I follow with some langoustines (wrapped in crispy potato and serrano ham) as an appetizer – I’m keeping to a relatively loose nautical theme.

The main is yellowfin tuna steak drizzled with some olive oil, paired with panisse and marinated anchovies.

For dessert, a Korean-grocery staple: black sesame ice cream accented with a dollop of green tea ice cream to offset the tacky sweetness with a nice bitter tang.

I serve some Pinot Grigio with the food, sparkling water on the side.

Dolores shows up right at six, and she’s extremely pink. Her face is pink, her arms are pink, her dress is pink and her white shoes have pink shoelaces in them.

“You look nice. I love those shoelaces,” I say, using the easiest trick in the book, my book, which is to compliment a girl on a detail in addition to the more expected, general flattery. In my experience, a woman remembers very well when you note the details: the unique piece of jewellery lost amid a stylish dress, the discreet scarf in the expanse of the more obvious coat, the way she does her hair (instead of just telling her she’s got nice hair, say that you love it in a ponytail).

Dolores stares at her shoes and smiles.

The dining room is lit by candles. This, I hope, creates an ambience that evokes those fantasies of vampire boyfriends.

“Please sit down.” I pull out the chair for her.

“This is amazing,” she says, I’m not sure about what.

I serve our meal.

Dolores gets pinker with every course. “This is so amazing. So amazing.”

There’s quiet classical music coming from the speakers strategically placed on the walls – a slow, melancholic piano rainfall by Erik Satie, whom I talk about when Dolores asks. I tell her the story about Satie’s twelve identical suits, found in the closet of a small room he lived in on the outskirts of Paris. I tell her about Satie carrying a small piano on his back as he travelled to the city to play in cafes, straining under the weight of his instrument and the weight of his largely undiscovered talent as he walked home in the night after his performances, quietly inserting himself back into his stark attic.

I move on to other subjects: the food we were just eating, how I got into the music business. How I was with $isi when she was nominated for her first Album of the Year award. How I had to console her afterwards because she lost to a gay cowboy – I give Dolores a PG-rated bullshit fable starring $isi and I going out for sorbet and seeing a flick with a funny actor in it to distract ourselves.

I ask Dolores about her family. She’s not very forthcoming, says something about her father living in Mexico with a new wife, much younger than him. Her mother is dating a manager at the bank where she works. That’s about it. “Nothing too exciting, everyone’s cool, the end,” Dolores says. She asks me about my family: are my parents still together?

“Yes,” I say. (They share a nice plot at the cemetery, finally sleeping next to each other after years of separate bedrooms.)

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

I talk about my sister moving to Australia a few years ago.

“Why did she move there?”

“She met a guy.”

“What is her husband like?”

I’ve never met him. I make up someone loosely based on the character from Crocodile Dundee , a rugged, snake-skin-wearing, lovable goof.

“How many kids do they have?”

“One. Sorry, two.” I’ve never met them, either.

“Don’t you miss them?” Dolores almost shouts.

“Very much so.”

“What are their names?”

“Alice. And –”

I get up and grab the bottle of wine, muttering something about it being almost finished. It isn’t, but I can’t remember the boy’s name. My sister and I talk once a year, on my birthday.

I say, “Albert.”

“Oh, I love that name,” Dolores says softly.

“Because of the book you were reading. That was the name of the prince, right?”

“It’s stupid.”

“No, not stupid at all. You should never apologize for what you like. So, why do you like this Albert so much?”

“It’s about conflict for me, I think? I mean, he wants to be with his soulmate, but he can’t because he’ll kill her if he tries to. So. He’s very tortured? I mean it’s kind of cheesy, but he’s just –”

I sit down and fill her glass. I’m still trying to remember what my sister’s boy is really called.

I ask Dolores more questions about Dolores. The intense attention is part of the seduction. And not only that: you have to make whatever she says seem interesting to her too: “What other exciting things are you up to this summer?”

“Not that exciting. Making up a calculus course because I have to have two maths before getting into statistics, and I only have one math and I’m not very good at it, so it’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be difficult to study in the summer, but what can you do. I will probably also –”

After a while we move to the living room, where Dolores giggles over the nudes in the Helmut Newton coffee-table book. She opens the Eric Kroll book Fetish Girls and slams it shut, giggles some more.

She drinks her wine. She drinks gin and tonic. I open more wine. I drink more wine.

She looks through my CD collection, asks me why I hold onto CDs even though there’s iTunes, doesn’t wait for an answer, puts on my $isi Speaks album and gets up to sway side to side while mouthing the words.

I concentrate on her pink shoelaces, swirling before my eyes. I usually don’t drink this much.

Now she’s sitting on the floor, right at my knees, leaning gently against my leg. I consider putting my hand on her head – think about how much I’d enjoy the soft feeling of her wispy hair – but I don’t do that.

And again, she talks about the vampire prince from her book, Albert, and why she and her friends like him so much, how the boys their age could never measure up to someone so sophisticated and gentlemanly. All of a sudden, I recall my nephew’s name: Anthony .

Dolores talks and talks. I remain passive, letting her direct the evening. I’m straining to stay awake and be Albert-like as I lounge on the couch with what I hope is an Albert-like look of fascination, longing and internal conflict.

Eventually, the evening ends. There’s a kiss; a plan to meet the next day.

I sleep a drunken, dreamless sleep.

DOLORES IS WAITING BY THE SMOOTHIE SHACK. SHE’S WEARING a dress similar to the one she wore to dinner last night except this one is blue. I compliment her on the dress immediately, make sure to mention the cool pattern on it.

She blushes and says, “They’re snowflakes, I think? Thank you so much.”

The dress probably belongs to one of her friends – it’s digging into the skin above her breasts. It’s too tight in the back as well, making angry red rows when she moves, possibly feeling my eyes there. It’s not her discomfort that excites me (though perhaps there’s a little bit of that too) but how impossible it is for Dolores to get it right .