Good Riddance(4)

“So what was my telling gesture?”

“Many.” His gaze was, I now recognize, faux fond. “Starting with your thanking the busboy for the bread . . . Don’t give me that skeptical look. To most women, busboys are invisible.”

“I waitressed all through college.” But instead of shedding light on the topic by revealing how many busboys I’d had summer flings with, I said, “We were all college students. We’d go out after work, the whole crew. It didn’t matter if they were waiters or busboys or delivery guys.”

“Because you’re not a snob. That’s what I saw in that gesture. You probably don’t know it, but there’s an innocence to you.”

Yes, there used to be, a big dangerous innocence honed by my six years as a Montessori teacher and exactly why I was targeted by Holden Phillips IV. Despite what I would later characterize as flattery and bullshit, I went on a second date with him. The marriage entreaties were often soft-pedaled in phrases such as “You realize, of course, we’ll be married one day. FYI, that’s not a proposal, because I know you think I haven’t earned you yet.”

“Insecurity,” the girlfriends said. “Not a good sign. Is he desperate?” They Googled him and saw his photos. Holden was not, as my maternal grandmother used to say, an oil painting.

But he did introduce the unaffordable into my budgeted, between-careers life. He’d order a bottle of wine rather than two glasses and the up-charged desserts on a prix fixe. Yes to that sprinkle of black or white truffle, the chocolate soufflé that required advance notice. And there were orchestra seats to shows that were famously sold out for the rest of any given year.

I was a bought woman—an overstatement, but I deserve it. He called himself an entrepreneur, having cofounded a start-up with a business school pal. Most people didn’t ask for more than that explanation. If pressed, I’d add, “It’s called Life’s Too Short. It helps you hire people to do stuff you don’t want to do yourself.”

It might sound as if a successful guy would have already found a wife by the time we met. He on the cusp of forty. I was not yet thirty. When I asked if the big rush was about procreating, he scoffed. “Procreating! Who said anything about wanting children! You’ve had your fill, right? Not even looking for another teaching job?”

“You don’t ever want children?”

He sensed that he’d gone one selling point too far in the wrong direction. “I just meant I’m not one of those guys whose aim is a young, fertile woman. I mean it’s not my first, second, or third priority. I’m not the guy who puts an ad in a Russian newspaper: American male seeking attractive blonde. Wide pelvis a must.”

When I looked startled, he said, “I’m joking! At least give me credit for composing a clever fake ad on the spot.”

“Of course you were joking. I knew that.”

My emerald-cut diamond was huge by New Hampshire standards. And a woman approaching thirty can be stunned into a yes when a little velvet box is perched on a dessert plate decorated with raspberry jus spelling out “Will you marry me?” upon her return from the ladies’ room.

We wouldn’t have met in the natural course of either life except for our both going to a CVS for flu shots. We were sitting side by side. I was wearing a boat-neck, long-sleeved jersey tight in the arms so it would be easier to expose the required flesh downward from the shoulder rather than work the sleeve north. He was dark-haired, going gray, neither handsome nor unattractive, wearing a big lump of a class ring and a camel coat. I said, exposing a bra strap, “Don’t look.”

He took that as a sexual advance, which might have led to a conversation if I hadn’t fainted the moment the needle touched my skin. Within seconds, he’d lowered my head between my knees. I came to, repeating, “I didn’t faint, I didn’t faint, I’m okay.” The pharmacist, looking stunned, managed to say that a small percentage of people faint after any vaccination.

Apparently, I started walking toward the escalator without my coat or pocketbook, giving the impression that I wasn’t in possession of my faculties.

“Where do you think you’re going?” asked this concerned citizen, leading me back to my chair. He introduced himself as Holden and said he was putting me in a cab.

An apparently more senior pharmacist had been summoned. “You’re not going anywhere yet, little lady. We have a protocol.”

I shut my eyes so I didn’t have to watch Holden getting his shot. He helped me with my coat and arranged the strap of my pocketbook over my noninjected arm. Out on the sidewalk, he hailed a taxi and got in after me. I protested, but he said, “How else will it be my treat?”

That same afternoon, he sent me flowers care of the doorman on duty when he’d dropped me off. His business card was attached. [email protected].

I could hardly fail to acknowledge flowers, especially ones like these—rare, exotic, out of season, from a shop inside the Plaza Hotel.

I’m only revisiting this to illustrate how occurrences outside the everyday can take on the aura of romance. Fainting is one of those things. I am wiser now, having discovered this humiliating fact: Holden was only acting the part of do-gooder, then suitor, then fiancé, then husband. His marriage motivation was financial: He needed a wife in order to shake free the good-size fortune his grandparents had left him, a condition I deduced from a remark a bigmouth friend let slip in a very careless, frat-boy toast. Had his grandparents seen something in Holden that gave them pause? Or was it their experience that bachelors squander money on boats and fancy cars? Apparently, he’d seen in me an easy mark for a whirlwind courtship and marriage, the kind from two centuries ago, about property and inheritance.