The Stranger Just One Night Part 1(14)

It was rejection that stirred that brew, insult that spurred my rebellion. So I will talk to Dave. I’ll face the music. And if the music is rough, I’ll find a way to smooth out its edges, I’ll unplug the electric guitars and dismantle the bass until there’s nothing left but a soft, unthreatening tune that I can sway to.

It’s not until the doorbell rings that I have second thoughts.

Dave stands on my doorstep with a dozen white roses. There had been white roses at the luncheon where we first met . . . six years ago. Forever ago . . . but right now the memory’s close enough to touch. When he walked me to my car, we had passed a florist and Dave had insisted that I, too, have white roses; he bought me a dozen to take home. He had asked for my number then and I had been moved to give it to him. Most girls will give up something for a bouquet: a phone number, a smile, even anger. But of course the most frequent price for such a gift is the loss of one’s resolve.

I move aside, let him in, and watch as he disappears into my kitchen then reemerges with the roses arranged neatly in a vase. He finds the perfect place for them on my dining table.

Dave and I still haven’t said so much as hello but the roses are speaking with something more tangible than words.

“I overreacted last night,” he says. He’s starring at the roses, not me, but I don’t mind the evasion. “I didn’t want to move to LA, did you know that? I just did it for work.”

I shrug noncommittally. He’s told me this before but I don’t see how it’s relevant.

“It’s such a gaudy city,” he continues. “A place where the men smile at you with bleached white teeth and the women thrust their fake boobs in your face. Everyone here is aggressive but the women . . . they act like men. Like drag queens with a lust for exhibitionism. They’re not ladies. They’re not you.”

“I’m a lady?”

“But you’re also strong,” Dave adds quickly. He sits in one of my upholstered dining room chairs. “Strong, ambitious, controlled, quiet, beautiful.” He pauses as he works to find a metaphor. “You’re a concealed weapon. A pistol hidden inside an Hermès handbag.”

I like the image.

“The woman with the Hermès knows that she can only reach for that gun when she needs to keep the wolves at bay. Only in cases of extreme danger. Because a gun in the hand is vulgar, common,” he says. “But when it’s kept neatly in a couture bag, it becomes something else.”

As the metaphor is stretched, it loses its appeal. A gun that can’t be handled becomes useless. It’s denied its raison d’être.

But I see his point. Last night I wasn’t the woman he wanted me to be, the woman I had always been with him, the woman he had fallen in love with. Last night the gun had come out of the bag.

“I overreacted last night,” he says again. “But you scared me. Not because what you said was so extreme but because it wasn’t something you would say.”

He rises again, pulls a single rose from the bouquet, and extends it toward me. “Remember when I first bought you white roses? The day we met?”

“I had just finished graduate school,” I say, nodding at the memory. “Ellis took me to her Notre Dame alumni event because the Harvard events weren’t bringing me any interesting job offers. ”

“I remember the way you held yourself,” he says, “your modesty and your strength. . . . As soon as I saw you, I wanted to be near you.”

My eyes focus on the flowers as my mind travels back.

Dave had looked good that day. Boyish, sweet . . . maybe a little awkward in his red-pinstriped shirt and navy tie worn in a city where ties are reserved for car salesmen and bank clerks. But I liked that he didn’t play by the LA-style rules. He stood out. He was a throwback to a time and place where educated men were expected to be gentlemen and elitism wasn’t such a dirty word.

He was shy when we first started talking but he quickly gathered confidence as we delved further into our conversation. He said he would put in a good word for me with the global consulting firm I had once hoped to work for. They had declined to recruit me right out of Harvard but Dave’s godfather was the company’s founder. He could give me the perversely rare and exceedingly cultivated second chance.

And then he started to tell me about himself, how he had been living in LA for two years. He hated the smog, hated the traffic, hated the people and the Hollywood culture. But he liked his law firm and loved the wealth he was able to coax out of the city’s Armani-stitched pockets. It would be irresponsible for him to leave just so he could live in a city more to his taste.