"Starved," I replied.
As witty repartee went, so far we were scoring a zero. Next we'd be talking about the weather. No wonder I hadn't been on a date in over a year; it was about as lively as a trip to the dentist. The waiter stuck two menus under his arm and marched off among the brightly colored tables with their mismatched plates. We followed.
"Did you have a nice trip from Birmingham?" I asked, in the interest of keeping the conversational ball rolling.
"Not bad," he said, draping his too neatly folded raincoat over the back of his chair. And there was silence. I concentrated on shaking the deep blue napkin out over my skirt. Jay rearranged his coat. The waiter hovered solicitously.
"Would you care for a drink to start?" the waiter asked.
Would I ever.
I ordered white wine. Jay ordered beer.
As the waiter retreated, I observed Jay covertly from behind my menu. At least he wasn't a wine snob. That was a point in his favor.
But beer it was so deliberately unpretentious that it smacked of pretension, like a plaid shirt. It screamed, I'm just one of the guys. Wouldn't a man who was comfortable with his own masculinity be able to order a glass of wine? What was he trying to prove?
I realized I was staring, and scuttled back behind the neatly printed rows of saags and naan, feeling like an idiot.
I was going to stop it now. Ordering beer didn't mean anything other than that he felt like beer. And I wasn't allowed to read into his entrée order, either, or the fact that he'd chosen to wear a jacket but not a tie. A jacket without a tie was a bit like a designer beer, too dressy to be really casual. I'd be willing to bet his apartment was filled with furniture hewed off at odd angles, expensive electronic devices from Sharper Image, and dishes that had been deliberately treated with a lumpy glaze designed to make them look like the painstaking product of Guatemalan peasants (only twenty bucks per plate at Bloomies).
Staring unseeingly at a neat column of entrees, I remembered something Alex had said to me ages ago. Okay, fine, three months ago, but it felt like ages. I'd been moaning about my single state, and griping about the dearth of datable prospects in London. After I'd explained why every single person at Pammy's latest dinner partyeven the single ones of the right age who didn't live with their parents and had no obvious deformitieswas ineligible for some reason or other, there had been a long pause.
"Nobody wants me," I moaned. "I'm going to be alone forevvvvvvver."
In one of those very measured voices that people use when they know they're saying something that their hearer is not going to like, Alex had said, "Have you ever thought, Eloise, that it's not that they write you offit's that you write them off?"
No, I hadn't. Me write them off? Who was kidding whom here? I couldn't help it if men were scared away by the fact that my degrees were better than theirs.
"Uh-huh," said Alex.
She just didn't understand. How could she, when she'd been with Sean since college? Dating had changed. After about twenty-six or so, it got gruesome, all those defensive men out there who were just looking for sweet young things to bolster their egos. Look at the way Grant had ditched me for that twenty-two-year-old art historian, the one who thought all his articles were brilliant, giggled at even the lamest of his puns (and a pun is, by definition, lame), and would never have pointed out that his argument in footnote forty-three made no sense. I had little lines next to my eyes when I smiled, and sometimes even when I didn't smile. I was too old, too prickly, too opinionated.
Maybe Alex had been right.
After all, here was a perfectly presentable specimen of American manhood sitting in front of me, whose only flaws thus far were excessive grooming and dubious beverage choice, and I was already racking up the reasons why we would never work and preparing a mental report to Grandma on same, to be presented in bullet points, in triplicate.
It wasn't his fault he wasn't a snippy Englishman.
In fact, that ought to be to his credit. That, I thought, scowling at the menu, was my problem. My stomach always went into flutters for the wrong sort of man. I chose the showy, the flashy, the obvious. I gravitated to those men who exuded brash confidence, the sort who could usually be found dominating a podium or monopolizing the conversation at a cocktail party. Underneath the garrulous exterior, they were inevitably melting marshmallows of insecurity. But by the time I discovered the gooey center, it was always too late. I was stuck.
Take Grant as case in point. Brilliant at a podium, needy as hell in private.
"Would you like to share some naan?" I asked Jay, as part of my genuine, good-faith effort to give the date a chance.
We solemnly discussed the merits of onion as opposed to garlic naan. Countries have been ceded and boundaries redrawn with less deliberation. The waiter hovered a bit, left to bring our drinks, and then hovered again. I could practically see him thinking, "Sod it all, just order them both and get it over with."
We finally settled on onion and placed our order. I ought to have felt a sense of great accomplishment. Instead, I just felt tired. And hungry.
I settled back in my chair, which had a curious egg-shaped back, and wrapped my fingers around the stem of my wineglass.
He really was perfectly good-looking. No warts. No visible deformities. He didn't have a squeaky voice, or a lisp, or an embarrassing overbite.
It shouldn't matter that the sight of him didn't set little butterflies fluttering in my chest. I'd had flutters for Grant in the beginning, and, far more recently, for Colin. Flutters didn't last. Shared background and experience did. As he handed his menu back to the waiter, I totted up all the reasons why Jay was a good idea. Nice boy. No warts. Friend of the family. Steady job. I didn't even know if Colin had a job.
Jay, I reminded myself. I was supposed to be focusing on Jay. Not Colin.
"What are you doing in England?" I asked, beginning the obligatory first-date inquisition. "Grandma didn't say."
"I help technological service providers actualize their human resource objectives," Jay said.
I could have sworn the individual words were all in English, but they didn't seem to fit together in any comprehensible way. I broke it down into its component parts and attempted a translation. "You work with computers?"
Jay smiled tolerantly. "Close. I work with people who work with computers."
"Ah," I said intelligently. "So what's your role, then?"
I won't attempt to reproduce the answerI couldn't do it justice. Essentially, his role seemed to have something to do with herding temperamental computer scientists into line and making them work harder and more efficiently. This was followed by a long explanation of something called "interfacing," which boiled down to being a middleman between clients and the computer scientists. The computer scientists apparently spoke Java, with a side of Klingon, and the businesspeople communicated in various dialects designed to maximize the number of syllables, while minimizing actual content.
"How interesting!" I exclaimed. It sounded deathly dull. "How did you get into that?"
It turned out that when he graduated from college, with a degree in econ, he knew a guy who knew another guy. Three guys later, we had made it past the first joyous euphoria of the Internet bubble, politely mourned the wreckage of his first two Internet start-up companies, and gone backpacking in the Himalayas. At least, I think he said the Himalayas. Wherever it was, they had mountain peaks and no hair-dryers.
"Birmingham must be pretty dull after that," I said.
"I'm not there most weekends. My mother said you're in school here?" Jay asked, politely turning the conversation to me. He added, "I have some friends at the LSE."
I'd been through this before. Independent researchers, not affiliated with an English university, tended to occupy a somewhat anomalous position, for all that there were a lot of us in London.
"I'm actually doing my doctorate at Harvard, but I'm here on my research year," I explained. "So I'm still affiliated with Harvard, even though I'm over here. Almost everyone in the history department goes abroad in their fourth or fifth year to do their dissertation research."
"And you're in "
"My fifth year," I supplied.
He didn't say "And you're not done yet?" although I could tell he was thinking it. I gave him points for that. I'd never forget Grandma's reaction when I told her my degree would take an average of seven years, possibly more. Panic on the other end of the phone, followed by, "You can leave if you get married, can't you?"
"That's a lot of time," he said instead, which I supposed was a more neutral way of expressing the same sentiment.
"It's a long program," I agreed. "We used to have fourteenth-years floating around the department, but they just passed a ten-years-and-you're-out rule."
"Ten years?" Jay choked on foam. "My MBA was only two. And that was one year too long."
"Well, people get sucked into teaching," I explained. "You're only funded for your first two years, so after that, you have to teach to support yourself while you write the dissertation. But teaching tends to expand to fill all available time, so it just becomes a vicious cycle: You teach so you can write, but you're so busy teaching that you have no time to write. It just goes on and on, and suddenly people wake up, and they've been there for ten years. Like Rip Van Winkle," I added helpfully.
"What's your dissertation on?"
"Spies during the Napoleonic Wars. You know, like the Scarlet Pimpernel."
"The who?" Jay squinted at me over his beer.
"The Scarlet Pimpernel. There was a book about him, by Baroness Orczy. It's pretty well-known."
I tried to tell myself that it didn't matter that he didn't know who the Scarlet Pimpernel was; after all, most Americans have only a nodding acquaintance with English history and literature, and I'd already shown I know nothing at all about either computers or business. If he was willing to overlook that, I could overlook historical illiteracy.
Alex would be so proud of me.
Jay was clearly making an effort, too. "What was it called?" he asked.
"The Scarlet Pimpernel," I said apologetically.
"Oh," said Jay.
Since that was proving to be a conversation killer, I hurried on. "But he's only one of the spies I'm researching. Right now, I'm looking into the role of English spies in quashing the Irish rebellion of 1803."
It belatedly occurred to me that if Jay didn't know who the Scarlet Pimpernel was, he certainly wasn't going to know about the Irish rebellion of 1803. Oh, well. The name was fairly self- explanatorylike the color of George Washington's white horse. The boy had gone to Stanford; he should be able to figure it out. At least, I hoped he could.
"An Irish rebellion." Jay mulled it over. Well, he'd gotten the salient bits right, even if he seemed to have forgotten the year already. "It doesn't upset you?"
Many things upset me. The computer in the Manuscript Room. Miss Gwen's handwriting. The fact that the BL cafeteria had been serving watery potato soup for lunch, and had been all out of croutons, to boot. But I couldn't say the Irish rebellion was on that list.
I took a sip of my wine. "Why should it?"
"Come on," said Jay, grinning at me. "Red hair. Kelly. You have to feel some loyalty to the Irish side."
I shrugged. "It was two hundred years ago. It's hard to maintain a grudge for that long."
"Lots of people do. Look at the Balkans."
"I'd rather not," I said honestly. Genocide depresses me.
"Don't you feel like you're betraying your ancestors?"
"I would hope my ancestors would have more sense than that."
Actually, I had my doubts about that. My ancestors may have been many things, but sensible wasn't high on the list. I switched tactics.
"The English behaved horribly in Ireland, but they had their reasons for what they were doing at the time, even if they weren't what we would consider good reasons. It's like reading Gone With the Wind," I tried to explain. "You know that slavery is morally wrong, but while you're reading it, you can't help empathizing with the South anyway."
It belatedly occurred to me that a man who hadn't read The Scarlet Pimpernel most likely hadn't read Gone With the Wind, either.
Jay leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. "So you're a moral relativist, then."
I hate people who act like they have you all figured out.
"I didn't say that," I said quickly.
Jay had clearly been a debater in college. His eyes gleamed with the thrill of argumentor maybe just the beer. Dammit, where was the waiter with our food?
"Then what would you call it?"
I planted my elbows on the table. "Look, you have to evaluate events in context. To the English, Ireland was a dangerous security threat. They were fighting a losing war against the French; their continental allies were entirely unreliable; and they were in constant danger of being invaded."
"And that justifies their behavior?"
"It's not a question of justification." I could hear my voice rising with annoyance, and quickly resorted to my wineglass. Adopting a gentler tone, I tried again. "My job as a historian isn't to justify or to judge. My job is to try to get inside their heads, to understand their world on their own terms."
"Sounds like a cop-out to me."
"It isn't a cop-out; it's responsible scholarship. Otherwise, what you have isn't a scholarly work. It's an op-ed piece."
"I like op-ed pieces," opined Jay.
"So do I," I gritted out. "In context. Oooh, look! There's our food."
It wasn't, actually. It was the next table's food. But it provided an excellent distraction. Jay immediately turned around to look. As he did, the door to the street burst open, and three guys barreled through in a blast of cold air and masculine banter, the steam from their breath adding to the haze on the glass door. One pointed to the bar, while another shoved out of his coat. And the third
Those traitorous flutters, those flutters that hadn't so much as quivered when I saw Jay at the bar, woke up from their nap and started dancing a Highland fling, complete with tartan and bagpipes.