The Lovebird Read Online Free Page B

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    AFTER I RECOVERED FROM THE MALADY that had inspired Simon to offer me his office sofa, he invited me to dinner. He wanted to take me to a restaurant he loved near the beach. I agonized over what to wear. I had never imagined, when I dreamed of dates on which I never went with college boys who never talked to me, that anyone would take me to an actual sit-down restaurant. The dark-haired dates of my daydreams unfailingly escorted me to one of San Diego’s numerous two-dollar taco stands, where my homespun sundresses were always appropriate.
    But, of course, Simon Mellinkoff was not a boy. And he, the descendant of millers, had milled me in his office. And then, a few days later, he had written, in his standard red ink, a message at the bottom of my latest Latin quiz: “Will you have dinner with me?” (It had been a daring move on his part, I thought, considering that, had I been capricious or conniving, or simply regretful about what had happened between us, I could have handed that quiz cum invitation straight to the dean.
Pretty complacent
, I thought.) So I had to find something nice to wear, a task so challenging I actually solicited the opinions of my roommates.
    “Um, who is the guy?” asked Amy, a pasty chemistry majorwho subsisted on sugary fruit tarts and never cleaned their gelatinous drippings out of the toaster oven.
    “Oh, just somebody I met at school.” I cleared my throat. “In Latin.”
    I held up my only two
dressy
dresses: a floral-printed polyester frock with a lace collar and sleeves that verged dangerously toward puffy, which I’d worn to my confirmation at Holy Rosary at age fourteen (I hadn’t grown much since then), and a vintage white sheath accompanied by a slender brass belt with a buffalo-shaped buckle that I had spontaneously and sneakily taken from Rasha’s closet over winter break.
    “If he takes Latin he’d probly prefer the white,” opined Amy. “It’s sort of toga-like.”
    Winnie was an exchange student from Taiwan who kept a pet gerbil in her bedroom. During one of our few social interactions, she had introduced me to the Double Happiness #1 Chinese Goods Emporium in downtown San Diego, where I’d bought a pair of intricately embroidered red cloth shoes that I believed by their brightness alone would bring me good luck. Winnie recommended the floral. “It will show him that you are a modest girl,” she said.
    In the end, I wore neither of those dresses but instead made a harried trip to the mall, where I procured a black jersey va-va-voom with no sleeves at all, the most grown-up dress I’d ever had, and a pair of high-heeled peep toes. I little suspected when I bought the peep toes, for which I took the time to put a fresh coat of red paint on my biggest and second-biggest toes (remembering Simon’s feelings about feet), that I would wear them only once. But that was what happened because, after dinner, as he walked me to my station wagon with his arm wrapped around my waist, before whispering in my ear that I should follow him home, Simon looked toward the ground with a frown and asked, “Are those genuine leather?”
    •  •  •
    SIMON HAD CHOSEN A TINY MEXICAN PLACE for our rendezvous, but it was different from any restaurant I had ever visited because, as I discovered upon reading the menu, every dish was prepared without meat or dairy products.
    “Wow, this looks delicious,” I offered, genuinely intrigued by the prospect of potato-filled taquitos smothered in soy cheese. Simon nodded. He appeared as nervous as me and was charmingly tongue-tied. After all, we had only been alone together once before.
    “Your dress,” he said, and then drifted off. We looked at the walls. They were adorned with Frida Kahlo prints and lots of old black-and-white photographs of soldierly sorts wearing big-brimmed hats and mustaches, all of them toting guns and bedecked in bandoliers.
    Simon saw me studying them. “Zapatistas,” he said. Before I could