The other week I was asked out by a Gorgeous Spaniard, or at least I think I was.
He’s a performer, and the company he’s a member of was doing a show at my theater. One night he was the company’s box office liaison, and when I let him inside my office to put his stuff down I admired his coiffure, his glasses, his scruff. Then he began to speak, in seductive, surprising cadences, the words falling out of his mouth like fucking European glitter. I thrilled to his presence; it had gifted an unremarkable evening with wattage.
We began to batner. I thought to myself, don’t get carried away, he’s way too gorgeous to be into you, flirting is like breathing to a Gorgeous Spaniard, even his farts bat their eyelashes, and then I thought, fuck it, I’m going to get better at this and flirt back a little, for practice, or at least a memory to cling to irrationally when I’m old and crossing the street with my Duane Reade bags. And then, as the curtain went up and he was signing the box office reports, he said, “I feel like having a glass of wine before I head home. Would you like to join me for a glass of wine?”
My face got hot, my clothed body parts began to sweat, and my heart fistbumped my ribcage. It seemed like such a natural question, and it was so smoothly asked, like in a movie or the life of a confident person. I wanted so desperately to say yes.
But I couldn’t. I had a dinner meeting in a half an hour with someone insufferable, and I didn’t want to cancel at such late notice. “I would love to, but I can’t,” I said tragically, “I have to meet this guy about a thing,” and then I asked, “But what about tomorrow? I could do tomorrow,” and he said, “OK, tomorrow,” and left.
As I walked to dinner I felt vibrant and triumphant, like Angela Bassett at the climax of all of her movies. I’d met and in a matter of two hours been asked out by a dashing man who smelled nice and said his sentences like questions. At the dinner with the guy about the thing, which was excruciating, I kept thinking about making crazy Almodóvar love to the Gorgeous Spaniard — I imagined us collapsing in a heaving heap on his kitchen floor in Williamsburg, covered in flour and Spanish wine, tatters of his shirt in my fists, my earlobe bloody from the hoop earring he tore out with his teeth.
That night I didn’t get a wink of sleep. I wanted this man in such a high-stakes way that the excitement gave way to fear. As the garbage truck made its sunrise route along 181st Street I was awake and convinced that we hadn’t made firm-enough plans for an actual date, and that the movie I was in did not star Angela Bassett, it starred Imelda Staunton.
My fears were grounded. He did not show up to the theater the following night. There was a work-related reason, the company manager assured me, but I was too busy weeping and why-god-whying to hear it. I scraped together a shred of the previous night’s high, stole his number from the contact sheet, and texted him, asking if he’d still like to get that glass of wine sometime.
And I have not heard a gorgeous word from him since. De radio el silencio. I mean, what? Does he have glasses of wine with men every night, and that first night was my only shot because he had a last-minute cancellation? Did it even happen? Was there a Gorgeous Spaniard? I suppose I’ll never know.
I do have a memento — high-end shaving cream, provided by one of his company’s sponsors, which he gave me from a gift bag the night he worked. It’s under a pile of papers right now, but every now an then I open it up and smell it. It’s pretty amazing. I can’t use it; I can’t do fragrances, on account of my eczema, which is worse than ever, what with the mild days and the cold days, and the going to bed in a crowd-pleasing romantic comedy and waking up in a Mike Leigh despair porn.