the blog-conscious date

The nicest part of the date was getting there, walking through Manhattan on a lovely spring evening as the sky slowly got darker, taking buses in not-much-traffic and admiring the passing Sunday evening scene.

The wait for mm2 (Max the matchmaker’s second offering — I rejected the first) in the restaurant was the transition between enjoyment of the cityscape and the date itself. mm2 had first said we’d meet at 8:30, then 8, then ‘between 8 and 8:30,’ and when I asked him which he preferred, he said, ‘I’ll be there between 8 and 8:30.’ He seemed incapable of settling on a time, and he changed the restaurant twice.

I arrived at 8:10, and he arrived at 8:30, so I had a wait which began interesting (a lovely restaurant, pleasant atmosphere, good music, good dim light, pleasant & unpretentious diners, good wait-staff) and ended boring (twenty minutes was sufficient time to admire the restaurant, the atmosphere, the music, the light, the other diners, and the staff).

From very soon after I met mm2 till the moment I got home and started this post, I was thinking about how I would talk about the date on the blog.

Not a good sign: dating for the sake of blogging. I’m not the first to allude to this problem.

mm2 was good-looking — at first sight. He was tall & lean, with lots of grey hair, wearing a nice grey jacket and pale pink tie. I didn’t notice till he got up from the table after dinner that he was wearing jeans, not that it mattered.

The real problem, I think, is that mm2 was not interested in dating; not just not-interested in me, but not interested in dating at all, so far as I could tell. mm2 was preoccupied: he had a lot of unresolved family problems on his mind, all of which he told me about in some detail, and he devoted much of the meal to hustling and networking for his business — a sad sign, I think, in a 66-year-old man. He was too eager in his conversations with the restaurant manager and the couple at the table next to us.

In fact his energy, which had begun to flag a bit as our meal progressed, revived when he struck up a conversation with the couple, but it revived only to the extent that he could give the husband information that related to his [mm2's] business. Of course the men exchanged business cards….the wife and I had no choice but to begin a conversation also. She was very pleasant, and I’m sure the moment they left the restaurant they asked each other about us: ‘were they married? or were they on a date? how well do you think they knew one another?’ They’ll never know, I guess. But I can imagine the conversation:

I thought she seemed bored.

Well, he wasn’t talking to her!

She smiled a lot.

Yes, but she was smiling at you, not at him.

Maybe their marriage is disintegrating.

They weren’t married: you could tell. She was too — too detached.

You’re right. And she offered him cash for the bill.

I think it was a date.

I wonder how they met.

And so on…

Business cards, talking with the people at the next table — reminiscent of my date with Bert, and not a good sign on a first date.

Of course I kept thinking about x, and how different our first date (I hope) will be.

By the time we parted, after about 15 minutes of conversation with the husband and wife, what little connection between us there had been had vanished entirely. I wonder if he remembered my name. He asked how I was getting home, and when I told him which subway I was taking, he said enthusiastically, ‘Good idea!’, as if it had been genius to figure out where the closest stop on the 6-train was. We were only two blocks from the stop, and it might have been polite, around 10:30 at night with a fairly empty Lexington Avenue, to have walked me there, but that courtly gesture never seemed to have occurred to him.

As we parted, however, he reminded me of the PBS program whose plot he had told me in detail and once more encouraged me to look it up on the PBS website.

I think he urged me to ’stay in touch’ — not ‘I’ll be in touch,’ but it meant the same thing: have a good life!

I couldn’t wait to get home to my computer.

* * *

Well, the food was delicious, and I’d go back to that restaurant any time. But the man, poor mm2, was entirely preoccupied with his family problems and his business that needed growing, and the date (oh? am I on a date? I imagined him reminding himself every now and then) was a reality that seemed to keep receding into the distance.

Sad guy, really.

* * *

Explore posts in the same categories: first-date restaurants, matchmakers, uneccentric 60+ jewish men