The Pot Thief Who Studied Escoffier by J. Michael Orenduff Page A

know? I didn’t date much in high school except before big algebra tests. That’s when the girls would smile and speak to me.”
    “That’s sad, Hubie.”
    “I didn’t see it that way. I liked being more popular than the jocks even if for only a few days. And I got to smooch with a few of the girls after the tutoring sessions.”
    “Define ‘smooch’.”
    “A few kisses behind the 510 shelves in the library.”
    “The 510 shelves?”
    “The Dewey Decimal number for math books.”
    “Jeez. And it never even crossed your mind to wonder if one of those girls would end up as your wife?”
    “I was a teenager. I figured I’d meet my wife when I was really old, like thirty.”
    She shook her head slowly. “No wonder relations between the sexes are so messed up. Girls grow up dreaming of being married, and guys grow up dreaming of being sports stars and assuming a beautiful wife will plop into their lives at some point.”
    “That was me, except for the sports star part. But it hasn’t happened, so I have to do something about it or grow old alone.”
    “You have to shop for a wife.”
    “Forget I said that.”
    “Which brings me back to my question. Is Dolly the one?”
    “That’s the problem. I don’t know. She’s a nice person. She has a sense of humor. She’s sexy.”
    “Well if nice, funny, and sexy don’t give you a clue, what else are you looking for?”
    “Fabulously wealthy would be nice.” She threw a chip at me, and I amazed both of us by catching it.
    I decided to hazard a serious answer to her question. “Dolly is fun to be with now because we’re dating. We’re together only for special events, so to speak, one of us cooking and the other being a guest. Or we go to the Balloon Festival or see a movie. But if we were married, we’d be together all the time.”
    “And that would be bad?”
    “I don’t know. We don’t have many interests in common. She likes decorating, gardening, and watching television. I like reading and watching the stars. She’s not interested in Indian pottery or anthropology. If I bring up one of my anthropological theories, she listens politely, but she’s obviously not interested.”
    “She’s not the only one whose eyes glaze over when you start explaining one of your theories.”
    “I know. But it’s not just anthropology. She doesn’t seem interested in abstract ideas generally. When you see a painting, you think about what it means, what the artist was trying to do. When Dolly see’s it, she wonders if it would look good over the sofa.”
    “Hubert! That’s an awful thing to say.”
    “I didn’t mean it as an insult. I don’t think less of her because she’s not an art historian or an anthropologist. But when I think of marriage, I wonder what we’d talk about.”
    “My parents talk about the weather and the chores they have for the day.”
    “Mine talked about what they had done during the day. They had a cocktail hour just like we do, but they didn’t call it the cocktail hour. They called it ‘general conversation’.”
    “So neither of our parents talked about big abstract ideas. But my parents have a great marriage and so did yours.”
    She was right. “There’s something else,” I said. “It seems… I don’t know, illogical I guess, that now that I’m thinking about marriage, the person I happen to be dating goes to the top of the list. Maybe the other women I’ve dated would be a better match, but I don’t know it because I wasn’t thinking about marriage when I was with them.”
    “So what’s your plan, Hubert? You want to go out with all your exes again to make sure you didn’t miss something?”
    “No, of course not,” I said emphatically. Then in my Groucho Marx voice, I said, “But there were a couple of them that might make me say the magic woid.”
    She laughed and said I sounded nothing like Groucho Marx. I pointed out that I must have because she knew who I was trying to sound like.
    “So why don’t