She came up and asked how I can be so funny.
I know this is a trap and say “very funny.”
“No, I mean it,” she persists so I say, “I was actually correcting you.”
She laughs upon which I am now her frien. I hold the d in reserve.
“Alright, how can you be so very funny.”
It falls to few to summon the laughter and fewer still understand its power. This one had flaxen hair and a beguiling curl of mouth, this one laughed like a chorus girl carny barker. An alliterative oxymoron laugh, but a laugh nevertheless. The contest was met.
“Gypsy curse. How can you have such a beguiling curl of mouth?”
Her next moment’s expression told me she was a cat person and making fun of Sheldon’s handlegrip tassels in third grade was her biggest regret for dashing the nascent romance.
“You’re beguiled? Easily?”
“Constantly, relentlessly, helplessly— by the merest suggestion of kindness. Are you kind?”
“It says so on my business card.”
“I had so hoped this was more than business.” The placement of “so” in the last sentence tipped me off. I’d been in inner monologue, maybe since beguiling curl of mouth. Simultaneously, I’d drawn a languorous mental cartoon of her curled up with book and a cat, though two tails on close inspection peeked from beneath the Laura Ashley quilt—stop it! Inner monologue paisleys now?!—way beyond amber alert. I had been on d too long.
I looked over her proffered card with “Christina Kindley” blind embossed in Copperplate Roman, held it to my ear and flicked a fingernail across its edge, summoning a tenor baritone plunk. “Business cards are very competitive, I’m thinking of having mine printed on sheetrock.”
“You think it’s too much?”
“Does it matter what I think, Ms. Kindley?” I affected what I believed was a beguiling curl of mustache.
“You think it’s too much.”
She was on d now but I had no idea where the ball went. She’d gone all soft on me and the ball needs something hard to bounce off of. I knew she was the serious kind of cat person whose scruples forbade breast jokes. Pity, I had some good ones.
Something immediately in her glance told me she knew all my breast jokes and that my last marriage dwarfed the Pleistocene eruption of Yellowstone.
“It augurs certitude.” A beat. The laugh again, this time with hints of praline.
“You hate it.”
I clench the card, warding it off, it eludes my grip, flips free and does repeated vicious sorties at my scalp. I studied with a foremost French playing card prestidigitator, my hands are moths when I desire; moths with an avaricious appetite for Laura Ashley prints.
“Shucks, I don’t hate it.” I am now somehow committed to shucks, how did this happen?
“Common courtesy demands reciprocation of calling cards, suh.” She’s now gone southern belle and I have a mortal fear, a clinical pathology, a homicidal loathing of Vivian Leigh though thankfully her timbre more approximates Mae West who I’m cool with.
“My last one is hiding the hole beside the toilet paper dispenser.” I make no effort at an accent, but it comes out McConaughey for fuck’s sake. “The spackle makes it hard to read anyway.”
“Then what, if I may inquire, is your name?”
I reject Sheldon as provocative and give another.