A Record

What was your longest relationship? A year? Two decades? A couple of months?

How would you define it? Where did it start, where did it end? It’s surprisingly easy to forget pertinent facts like those, especially when you reach the age where brain cells are important enough to count.

So, think. What would you say?

You’d probably scratch your head and look at the date on your watch, which is a pretty useless thing to do because what relevance has today’s date got to do with a question about the past? “Oh yeah,” you might eventually state, “We met on this date and we divorced on that one, so that’s fourteen years, three months, seven days and about twenty-three minutes.”

Very definite. I’d be impressed – but I wouldn’t believe it. I remember details like that because I’m anal, but I don’t accept that anyone else does. Old married couples will have you believe that they can. They’re always so precise with their memories, as if that’s all they’ve got left to hold onto.

Imagine this: you’re at a dinner or a gathering with some older folks and the subject of relationships comes around. A worn out gray husband, wearing a hard-knotted tie he should’ve taken off four decades ago, paired with a tired shirt that’s back in fashion for the third time, gets to his feet. He stares into a far away spot beyond the corner where the yellowed ceiling meets the wall and tells everyone he’s been happily married to Fannie Mae for the last seventy-eight years.

He’ll tell you the date they met, the time, what was on the radio and what he had for dinner. Within seconds he’ll have jumped to a diatribe on the changing of the times and you’ll hear how wonderful things were back then, how it’s all gone to hell in a hand basket since the war and how the kids don’t know they’re born today. After twenty minutes, he’s all misty-eyed and warbling an unknown song that was popular when the Queen Mother was a little girl and his equally aged wife’s nodding like a muppet on steroids. All you can do, through the fake smile that’s squeezing your face like a vice, is wonder about how best to place a person to person call to Doctor Kevorkian; for yourself.

My longest is about four years. I know when and where we met – on a Saturday night visit in 1985 to a Scottish fish ‘n’ chip shop in New Jersey - but the ending was rather vague. Longevity’s a non-starter, given that I don’t know when it finished. Besides, there was a year’s split in the middle when she got deported. Time off for good behavior, you might say, ha ha ha, although, I doubt that many people would accept an intervening affair with a married woman as evidence of good behavior. Let’s agree that the details are none of your business and move on.

What about shortness? What was your briefest encounter? Aside from financial transactions occurring in countries where restaurants serve a suspiciously high number of dishes tasting like chicken, mine was Deirdra and you might get a chuckle or two about a few choice facts from that escapade.

We met in a bar. I didn’t see her when she first came in, so I shouldn’t claim any credit for those moments when I was at the old Wurlitzer jukebox and my back was turned. I didn’t even know she was there until I ran out of change, but I’d set Sinatra playing and she knew it was my doing. I usually say we met when the first beats of Fly Me To The Moon tapped out. Maybe she heard it from outside and that’s what brought her in, to see who’d play it. Fabian’s had about as many people as you might expect for a dusty little corner saloon on a wintry Saturday just after dark, so it couldn’t have been hard to figure out who was responsible. Besides, I was still pushing buttons.

Maybe you’d disagree and say we didn’t meet until I turned around and saw her, perched on a stool like a leather-clad brunette goddess. I never knew non-mortals came with dolphin tattoos on their shoulders, but now I do. Pushing a red straw around an ice-laden drink and leaning back against the bar to thrust her chest forward, she stared at me, unblinking. I don’t know where girls learn moves like that, but my pulse went bip-bop-bop and she seduced me in a heartbeat.

So, if we agree that moment was the starting point, I’d say we could subtract a couple of minutes from the relationship. Another one or two if we advance it to the point when she said, “Nice tunes,” with just the hint a smile.

I did what you’d expect – walked over, talked, sat, drank, moved closer, talked some more and bought her a drink when she told me her name was Deirdra. Then the music ran out. She had change and pushed it forward, so I chose more Sinatra and some Chris Isaak. We got touchie-feelie at the bar, then smooched and slow-danced to Summer Wind, grinding around on the spot until my leg went numb.

Then we left, melded together as one - and you don’t win any points for guessing it wasn’t to go sight-seeing.

Now you know how we met. Not everything, but the pertinent facts. You know Deirdra was hot, you know about the music and you know it was early. What you don’t know is that I was there to meet a blind date.

It’s important to mention that it was the Sunday after the day when the clocks changed; the second half of the spring-forward, fall-back thing. Imagine how easy it would be for someone with the remains of a hangover and tired from a previous late night, to not know about the time change and to arrive an hour early to meet someone he’d not seen before. Someone whose name he’d forgotten. Someone whose partially-remembered description matched that of the dark-haired siren who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Or, at the wrong time, depending on your perspective. Do I need to connect the dots?

Maybe you don’t do blind dates or, if you do, maybe you don’t have one almost every night of the week and keep their details in a black three-ring loose leaf binder in the kitchen; but that’s your choice and I’ll make no judgment upon you in that regard.

The personals columns in the newspapers were my new social scene and the fervor with which I approached this project could not be paralleled by any mission in history. At any one time, I had overlapping ads in the New York Times, the Village Voice and several local rags. Not only was I meticulous about recording details in that binder – because my memory has always been less than perfect - but I had analyzed, planned, plotted and mapped everything that could transpire between the first anxious meeting to the subsequent parting with a goodnight kiss and the promise of more to come. Such analysis had not extended into the gray area of what could happen on a second date or a third, which might then lead into a nocturnal visit, because no such event had yet occurred. There simply had not been a second or third date with anyone because I was so firmly entrenched in analyzing a series of firsts. Some mistakes are only obvious with the glaring clarity of hindsight.

On the short but chilly walk to my apartment, I began to suspect that my residence might not be quite the palatial lovenest expected by a goddess of the quality on my arm. That suspicion grew, along with an increasing ache somewhere within my inner regions. By the time I guided Deirdra under the dim porch light, across the aged mosaic tiles in the old hallway and through the back door into the cold outside air, down the steel steps and into what must’ve seemed like the centre of the planet, I was experiencing the kind of anxiety of someone about to lose his virginity. I was also suffering stomach pains of the proportions of a ruptured spleen.

I don’t actually know what went through Deirdra’s mind as I opened the apartment door and ushered her into a pitch-dark room, entirely devoid of furniture and reeking of the unmistakable smell of recently burnt paper and plastic, but I would guess that it wasn’t complimentary.

Sometimes, I try to put myself in her place and imagine Deirdra’s perception of the evening. One moment, you’re in a local saloon, dressed nicely for a Saturday evening and having a quiet drink by yourself, when a reasonably attractive Englishman, dressed like the Fonz and who’s been playing your kind of music on the jukebox, starts paying you plenty of attention and buying you drinks. You decide to go home with him – what harm’s a one night stand, after all – but then things take a turn for the worse. He leads you into a basement where there’s no light except a candle in the bedroom, no furniture and the place stinks of fire. Is it a trap? Is this man a recently released madman? It’s OK, you think, he has money and musical taste – but then you see that the lack of furniture isn’t confined to the living areas – there’s no bed, just a futon on the floor and a giant box of condoms. None of the lights work, not even the bathroom vanity. What kind of place is this? Are you going to get out alive or will the river police find what’s left of you floating somewhere upstream on the Hudson? Will your disappearance make the national local papers or just the local ones? One thing’s certain – you won’t be going back to Fabian’s in a hurry.

If asked, I could claim extenuating circumstances to excuse the lack of furniture, but I wasn’t and felt no need to explain myself. Anyway, who really needs more than a futon? Let’s say it’s a lifestyle choice and call it Bohemian. People are too soft these days.

As for the darkness and the smell of fire, I suppose you need a limited explanation if you’re to not think of me as a total waster. I’m really not, but sometimes a situation just occurs through circumstance and then gets worse by inaction – the snowball effect.

It was impossible to reach the ceiling to change dead bulbs without anything to stand on so, as each light breathed its last, the basement increased in darkness towards the level of a black hole. Eventually, the oven light found extra purpose and the stove top became a desk for reviewing details of the evening’s imminent date.

Domestic conflagration is not what we’re discussing, so I will say only that I was rushing and carelessly left the binder on the stove, directly over the gas pilot lights. That should be enough detail. Just remember that this incident occurred before I managed to read up on the evening’s meeting, which explains the lack of information, the misplaced barroom confidence and the mistaken identity.

The escapade taught me many things, including how difficult it is, naked and wet from the shower, to put out a fire using only the kitchen sink hose, trying to ignore the screech of the alarm above your head and with no light other than from the flames you are extinguishing. I would not recommend this method, should you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

Anyway, I digress...

You deserve to know a few more things; that the relationship wasn’t consummated, that Deirdra got the jitters and I got the giggles, that the ache in my belly overcame everything and that I had to leave her alone with the sole remaining candle and retire to the bathroom, where I promptly fell asleep on the toilet.

I emerged an hour later to find an empty bedroom, the candle burnt out and the front door wide open. Condoms scattered the floor like miniature banana skins and a dent in the wall, that matched the remains of the portable CD player, suggested that the machine had been kicked there with some force.

Whose fault was it, that insalubrious ending? Mine, for screwing up the music so Fly Me to the Moon repeated forever whilst I sat, comatose, with my head on my chest? Hers, for being unsympathetic to my inner plight, re-discovering a child’s fear of the dark whilst Frank sang and suffering a personal meltdown in a dark and unfamiliar bedroom?

Deirdra vansihed from the face of the earth, so I’ll never know. I retain the imagined vision of her leather-clad figure creeping up the fire stairs and into the street sometime after midnight on that frigid Monday morning, perhaps grateful that she had escaped with her life.

Maybe if I’d been a little more direct and said, “Hey, this is how I live, we all do it like this in England,” it might have added a degree of charm. Conceivably, we’d still be together today and I’d be that old geezer in the knotted tie and faded clothes, singing tunelessly into the ceiling after describing my Fannie Mae. Might leave out the diarrhea though.

So how long were we together?

When all’s said and done, stretching and un-stretching boundaries and calculating what might be longest and shortest span, it’s still a conundrum. Were we were The Real Thing for six hours, a little less than five and a half, or an indeterminate period somewhere in between?

Whatever the answer, it’s still something of a personal record.