Questions 67 and 68

“Was your hair that red Friday night?”

That was the first question he asked me, when at 11:55 a.m. Central Time on Labor Day, I came to the front gate to enter the code to let him into my fortress strong.

So we were for all intents and purposes on a blind date because clearly he was blind to my hair color three nights prior when we met at the Duck. But interestingly, I came to find out several weeks after Labor Day, we had been matched as dance partners at the Duck by Therese and her decorator friend, Craig, on the basis of hair color although his reddish highlights were more subdued than my brassy red hair. My Parisian hairdresser, Sebastien, referred to us, his clientele, the female physicians from M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, as his “painted ladies.”

I dismissed his question as one of sincerity and not approbation and invited him in. I pulled him through the corridors pretty quickly, as I recall, trying to avoid the man down the hall that I had canceled the date with for Labor Day. (That was fairly easy because his sister fielded the call when I canceled.)

Inside my unit the next thing I suggested still causes laughter: I invited him to have a quick cup of hot coffee in my kitchen when it was 105 degrees outside. I did not know that he was not accustomed to slamming a cup of Joe like a physician does before heading to the OR. So he politely sipped at hot coffee in spite of not wanting it.

He drove us to River Oaks Theaters in his black Tahoe to see Celestial Clockwork, my choice.

I lost all movie picking privileges very early in the relationship. Since that time we have both returned to IMDb to see there just were no good movie picks for that Labor Day weekend. Just like there are probably no good movie picks for this Labor Day weekend. It is historically not a good movie release week. Try not to start a relationship with a movie date on Labor Day weekend.

In the parking lot of River Oaks Theaters, I noticed that his car had two bumper stickers, Fly Girls and a Darwin fish. I didn’t understand either one.

Questions. He asked a million questions, which he later told me was because he was nervous.

At one point I felt like invoking my grandfather Farmer's line: "You ask the damnedest questions!"

In the Darwin fish car in the movie parking lot, he asked me what nationality my last name was. I told him it was my ex-husband’s last name. That silenced him for a while.

The movie was no sleeper. It grossed 410,000 dollars in the US. Ten of those were ours.

On the way back to my apartment, we passed Randall’s on Westheimer. He asked me if I wanted to go out to eat for dinner. I said I had picked up a few things for dinner.

That was the understatement of the year. Susan had spent her last day in Houston helping me shop two or three stores for this date. But I wasn’t going to mention any of the date prep to him.

You see after I left him in the parking lot of the Duck the Friday prior, I decided and vowed to my best friends that there was no way I would try to find him if he did not call me Sunday as promised. Evidently, the call almost never happened because by the time he looked on his hand for the phone number later that night, he found that most of it had transferred onto the steering wheel of the Tahoe, most likely while the song "Good" by Better Than Ezra played over the car airwaves. (My friend Barrow dated a guy in that band back in Baton Rouge.)

The night after I gave him my number, I spent with my girlfriends at Cezanne, the jazz club above the Black Labrador Pub, listening to an African American woman deliver jazz standards with a “sultry, meet you after midnight voice” (Susan’s words, as told to me in a personal correspondence last week).

The day before the date, Suzanne flew back to Louisville early, and Susan and I hung out, shopping at Whole Foods (the small one that was closer to I-59 in Shepherd Plaza), Whole Earth Provision, Cactus Records and Randall’s. I won’t tell you everything Susan suggested I buy, but I will tell you it was fun.

After the movie, back in my kitchen I had the chicken breasts, Tahini sauce, eggplant, and a salad I prepared of avocado, Kalamata olives and grapefruit.

During this second visit to my kitchen, he noticed the photo of the little girl on the beach at Galveston mock surfing on a piece of driftwood and asked who that was.

“That’s my daughter.”

The questions stopped for a while longer. Then I asked him to do something for me: Grill our dinner on the patio. He had told me he was a volunteer fireman in Austin. I figured he could stand the heat.

We ate at my dining room table with clover cutouts, a hand-me-down from my Hoffmann grandparents’ Germantown kitchen. He pushed the salad around on his plate, not mentioning that he hated olives.

Then we moved to the sofa for more Q and A. Somewhere between questions 67 and 68, we fell asleep. Then we woke at two and he went home.


Can this feeling that we have together/
Oooh, suddenly exist between/
Did this meeting of our minds together/
Oooh, happen just today, some way

“Questions 67 and 68,” Robert Lamm