Page 510 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
with a date who was a real person, one who was articulate, extremely smart, witty, serious about life and family, and, perhaps best of all, toler- ant of me. Dayenu.
But there was more: All that she remembers specifically about the dinner is what I, in my relaxed and giddy state, said when the waiter asked, “Do you have any questions for me?” It was: “Yes. What is the capital of North Dakota?”14 She now says that my sense of humor sealed her deal. I say that the fact that she responded positively to it certainly counted for a lot for me.
We end dinner, I pick up the (fairly big) check without hesitation, and now do something else that is uncharacteristic of me. I hail a second cab to take her to the West Side, from which I take my very new red Acura Legend Coupe, with four on the floor, and drive her all the way to her home in Great Neck. There, on the front steps of 7 Longview Place, I say goodnight and that I must see her again. I close the evening by doing something else that I’d never before done on a first date. I impul- sively kiss her—on her right hand.
A week or so later, we attend Peter Nadel’s fiftieth along with a
14. Bismarck, not Fargo, for those who care. I’d like to say that my response was totally spontane- ous. In fact, however, as I then told Kathy, I had used it for the first time, and spontaneously, on another occasion: The junior partners had been assembled to meet with attorneys whom the firm was interested in attracting to the partnership. On other, similar, occasions, the senior part- ners had essentially failed to consult with the juniors, so there had been somewhat of a ruckus. Thus, this time, we were being “consulted.” (In fact, because the partnership agreement pro- vided that votes from a percentage [I forget how much] of all partners were required to admit a new partner, approval from the juniors might be necessary.) So, we were assembled for the os- tensible purpose of putting us in a position to vote intelligently, even though the Realpolitik dictated that we go along with the plan. The slight problem was that the dance that we were about to go through was all too obviously just that, a dance: When we entered the conference room, the enormous conference table was already laden with food and alcohol for the obvious purpose of having a cocktail party to celebrate the admission of the people whom we were about to meet and “assess.” Murray Cohen introduced the “candidates” and made the pitch for an af- firmative vote, with total confidence that the juniors would do their duty. Thus, when he finished his fifteen-minute description of the obvious benefits of having the two candidates as partners of ours and asked, almost as a challenge, “Does anyone have any questions?” I found myself mut- tering the same question that I was later to pose to the waiter. The junior partners around me were amused; I’m not sure that Murray would have been had he heard me.
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