Free Instant Love by Jami Attenberg Page A

his boss. Better yet, he would get him tickets as a birthday present. Maggie agreed with him. She was a big supporter of any sort of gift-giving or, at the very least, shopping. I kept my head down in the program, contributing an occasional tidbit of information from the cast biographies.
    “Did you see that Mary Magdalene was on
Law and Order
? I thought I recognized her.”
    “No way,” said Robert.
    “Way,” I said.
    “Honey, did you hear that?” said Robert. “
Law and Order
. I wonder if she was a criminal.”
    Sometimes I roll my eyes in such a fierce way that they actually hurt. I should really stop doing that.
    “Maybe she was a corpse,” I said.
     
     
    WHEN GARETH ARRIVED, I was nursing a chardonnay at the bar and staring at the smoke-stained wood paneling behind the bartender’s head. I noticed first his cowlick, combed and pressed. I parsed the syllables, envisioned the sweaty tongue of a cow feeding on a trough of water. I opened up my vision to take in the rest: Gareth was wearing a three-piece suit. I had assumed this was a low-pressure date. He had just jacked it through the roof. I suppose I did appreciate the effort, though it made me regret not going home after work to change first, as the inequality of our intentions were now rendered so painfully obvious, which is to say he had some and I did not.
    Though to be fair—to me? to him?—lately I’ve been lazy about my appearance, slipping on clothes that require the least work, shirts without buttons, pants that I can wash and dry and wear. When I picture myself with an iron going at my clothes, it’s on an old-fashioned board, and I am suddenly wearing a frilly gingham apron, perhaps with a cross-stitched homily on the front of it, and my feet are clad in simultaneously high yet sensible heels and my hair is in pin curls. Somehow I am naked under all of this, ironing, humming, steam rising from what are soon to be perfectly pressed pants. And then I reach for an old college sweatshirt and a pair of Levi’s, which is what I ended up wearing when I saw Gareth.
    “Don’t you look fresh in that suit,” I said. Gareth is an enormous man, well over six feet and probably pushing 250. The weight is in a solid block, though it’s not muscle. The suit did him a favor, though. It made him look impressive rather than merely overweight. I pictured him as a king, raising a jeweled goblet to the sky, toasting some bloodthirsty victory or a peace accord between nations.
    He thanked me, and sat down slowly next to me. “I like to dress up for a first date,” he said. “It’s just me. I’m old-fashioned.” And then he quickly added, “But you, Holly, you look lovely as is. You would look perfect whether in a formal gown or, oh I don’t know, hiking gear. Your beauty is transcendent.”
    I considered this. I didn’t see myself as a transcendent beauty, though I did think my looks were from another time, all my curly hair, the curves of my hips and belly. I’ve recognized myself in ancient paintings in museums, but never on the pages of a fashion magazine.
    “Trust me, it takes a lot of work to look like I’m not trying,” I said.
    I spent the next hour listening to Gareth tell me how spectacular he found me. How when he interviewed me two weeks ago he was instantly smitten, how he knew I was special right away.
    “In this city it is easy to find candor in a woman,” he said. “But it is usually mean-spirited. Not so with you.” He looked concerned for a moment, but then his face changed to a delighted disbelief, as if he had found a hundred-dollar bill on the ground. “It’s just refreshing, that’s all.”
    Clearly he had mistaken me for someone else.
    Gareth was a writer (children’s books, mainly, though I did notice he’d also authored a book of satire when I searched him on Amazon) and occasional commentator for the local NPR station, and had contacted me as a source for a piece on women in modern science. (I’m a scientist. I