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• You will feel great, justified, and, most of all, incredibly relieved when the gorgeous model whom you have been watching and admir- ing surreptitiously throughout your Massachusetts bike trip takes shelter with you and you alone in a bar during a sudden cloudburst on the last day, demonstrates a strong desire to talk and drink with you for hours and hours, and then turns out to be about the dullest person whom you have ever met. You will find that feeling of relief to be quite liberating.
Act Two, Scene Two
[Fade in.] The elevator door closes, and the very pretty and unaffected auburn-haired young woman, as you will recall, about five-seven, with a natural and inviting smile and a red coat, approaches, and, even when she greets me, she seems like a lot more than “number 137.” We walk out to the corner of Second Avenue and 17th Street, intending to go to an Italian restaurant that she has selected and, because of the weather, a topic about which she turns out to be quite expert (she thinks that a use- ful addition to the culture would be a radio show in which each morning she not only gives the predictions but also advises people on what they should wear), I do something that is entirely uncharacteristic, some- thing that I will be reminded about for the rest of my life: I hail a cab.
At this point, it is already clear that she must be special. We get to the restaurant, and, frankly, I don’t remember much of the conversation. I do know that she did speak using compound sentences and seemed very unlike anyone whom I had met during my quest. She is a graduate of Yale Law School (which I didn’t get into), Pembroke (which always impressed the hell out of me and which, as was mentioned in Chapter Two, shares its name with a street in Manhattan Beach), and the divorced mother of two boys (sound familiar?), but I know that it was not her spectacular resume that sealed the deal (in other words, made me anx- ious to have at least a second date with her). If she was anything that evening like the woman I got to know, I have no doubt that I was dealing
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