Of Red Dresses and Absinthe...

You know how I have managed to built a troop of old married admirers at work? You remember how I took one of them to HR and how my manager took the other one for me? The guy who was always trying to find me a red dress to wear at parties was the one my managers empathized with me on. Anyway, now that I’m no longer working at that office, I ran into him (the admirer, not the manager) at Absinthe. I said hello, and he waved a quick hello, too, in a rush to get out of the restaurant with his wife. Yesterday, however, he probably spent a few long minutes trying to search through his e-mail to find the goodbye e-mail I sent companywide, containing my e-mail address, and shot me an e-mail.

Hi!

It was great (and surprising) to see you Saturday at Absinthe. They say this is a small town—I guess they’re right. I’m really sorry I couldn’t stop and talk; the three ladies who preceded me out the door were in a hurry to vacate—my wife to go home, my daughter (the tall blonde) and her friend (the manager at Absinthe) to party… That was my Father’s Day dinner, because they’ll all be out of town next week.

So how are you, where are you working now and what brought you to Absinthe? (And did you have one [absinthe]? I don’t much like the taste of licorice, but that went down smooooooothly.) I guess—from your e-mail address—that you want to write. How is that going? My daughter is also an erstwhile author, and is currently interning at the Guardian to achieve that end. She reports a troubling reluctance to apply her backside to the writing chair, though… do you have that trouble?

Let me know what you’re up to—I missed your going-away party, so if you are working downtown maybe we could have a drink some afternoon…I’m out at Laguna Honda for the next few months, so I can get anywhere pretty easily.

Best,

D-----


And he’s the one who I didn’t mind so much. The other guy, the one I went to HR about? The one who had to “fight himself to keep his hands off me”, the one who, “couldn’t control himself around me”? He wrote to me the day I left. Really. What do men think they’re doing? Do they never get it???