Fiction: The Blind Date

Of course, the blind date was inevitable. Whatever would or would not result, we just had to meet. It was written. So to speak. 

Her very close friend (since Grade IV) Annie had married my very close friend (since Grade VII) Bernie. That was four years ago. Now they were very happy together, enjoying a stability they could only hope to share with their respective friends, Polly and me. Jake. 

Who knows what they told Polly about Jake. I don’t. Never did. They probably don’t remember. I know Polly doesn’t. In fact, she doesn’t remember the date at all. As far as she is concerned, I made the whole thing up. All this I made up. What I’m remembering I’m imagining. That happens. 

But I certainly remember what they told me about Polly. She was like me, they said, an English grad, a poet, a hippie. Very Bohemian, they said. Like me. 

Of course, even in this kind of extended family all things are relative. Annie was a nurse, Bern a sociologist, so I guess to them my being a supposedly swinging bachelor with English degrees and a few poetry readings behind — below? — my belt made me a hippie. 

That’s certainly not how I thought of myself. I’d gone straight through from high school, through a BA and MA, then — after two years of teaching at a rural junior college to save the money — on to a British PhD in English. Pre-Shakespearean fiction, in fact, which is not your usual Head-land. I was no hippie, not compared to all the college drop-outs and acid heads I used to know. At 26 I had a PhD and a tenure-track job. I was if anything a nerd, not a hippie. 

Back then, of course, the term was “brain.” Spoken with the same sneer now accorded “nerd.” The implication of the earlier term was that the designate was predominantly, perhaps even only, a “brain,” all other avenues of being left negligible.

But. Compared to the other profs at my new Ontario university…? 

I was the only one in the department still single. The only one thumbing along on the late ‘60s drug and sex trips. I didn’t seek much out but willingly went along with what was offered. Did the grass, the hash on the electric coil and tin-foiled pipe, the mescaline, the acid. Even cocaine, once, on a train hurtling through the night to Montreal with a stripper I met in that transit. After a week she dumped me for a Satan’s Choice guy. Because I was a nerd, I assured myself. A”brain.” Her failing in imagination, not mine.

I was also the only English prof in jeans and a leather sport jacket (a style I begrudgingly retained even after Trudeau made it fashionable). The only one with a pony tail (back then: very black. Now there’s a growing bald spot where the pony tail used to start. I digress.)

Then there was my discipline. In the academic sense. 

In the new Department of English and Film Studies I was The Film Guy. That alone made me cool, hip, if not indeed a hippie. 

I also did pop culture. Public lecture on the Beatles’ White Album. The themes and structure thereof. Themes and structure in Monty Python. Themes and structure in the Herman and B.C. cartoons. Separate papers, those. I was into themes and structure. 

My academic work left the department oddly ambivalent. A lively lot, they were quite happy to offer my courses in the department: Intro to Film Studies, The Director’s Cinema, The Silent Film, Studies in National Cinemas. But they could not be persuaded to accept any of them in place of the English major requirements. 

I could assure them that my analytic strategies in film were precisely theirs in literature. At the Learned Socks I unloaded a paper, “Breathless in the English Class,” which proved that. 

But I was analyzing films not literary texts. And some were in foreign language. 

Finally they offered a compromise.  The other courses would be acceptable as options, but only The Silent Cinema could be taken as an English credit. There the students were at least reading the inter-titles. That reading made it English. 
      They were a lively lot.

So compared to my colleagues I was a hippie — as I seemed to Annie and Bern. But not to me. And to Polly? Who knew. 

I hoped she’d find me that. At least, find me kindred in spirit, interests, values, but mainly that spirit. I was 29 then, ready for The Relationship I’d decided to forgo until I had my Phud in hand and tenure on track. And if I were going to gamble on marrying, a friend of such close friends brought some reassurance. Especially if she was as hippie as I was. 

Not more, not less, just right. That would be nice.

One other thing they told me about Polly. I remember. They said she was on the rebound. “That’s good,” I said, “because I’m a bounder. Something in common. That should work out.” 

So why not. I was in Vancouver for a Shakespeare conference. August, 1971. I have evenings to spend. Or invest.  Polly has a flat in an old house in Kits. Annie gave me Polly’s number and I called. So she was expecting to hear from me. I called and we made a date.

***

“Come in,” I heard, after my firm but wary knock. “It’s unlocked.”

“It’s me. Jake.”

“Hi. I’m Polly. I’m in the bath. Make yourself at home there. I’ll be out in a jiff.” 

That started it. The debate. What to do.

The original plan — my proposal when I called — was a quick bite, then a movie, then a drink after to talk about it. That was always my date plan. The bite to introduce ourselves, the movie for a shared experience, the chat to get our minds working and possibly (oh, please!) in tandem. As I used to say, Is the unexamined film worth watching?

The film was to be Carnal Knowledge. Just released. Jules Feiffer script, Mike Nichols directed, great cast — and the kind of subject matter that could be expected to break the ice. A good First Date movie, I figured. 

But Polly was apparently running late. Apparently too late for that schedule. We’d probably need the food. So that would cut out the movie. Shit. The problem with running late.

Or was she? 

What if she weren’t “accidentally” running late? What if she just didn’t buy into the plan? 

What if she were hippier than I — by a long chalk. Whatever that means. (From an Ealing comedy, I suspect.) What if she planned to be “running late,” to be in the tub, to be naked, when I got there. 

What if this were her test for me? They said he was hip, but how hip is he? Let’s just see.

  I knew what a straight guy would do. Shuck the light jacket, sit on the sofa and start browsing through that Malahat Revierw lying on the coffee table. That’s what. Cool and simple. Flexible, rolls with the punches. Reads. 

But what if she didn’t want another boring straight? What if instead she wanted to see how hip I was?  

This was a rare situation, I realized. We were arranged to meet by people who knew us both well. They assumed we’d hit it off. So we had a head start on a new relationship. 

Now there we were. She’s naked in the tub, I’m clothed on the sofa. I could go in to her. 

I could first say something cool and gallant, like “Can I scrub your back?” 

Corny.

I could just go in and start.

Intrusive, presumptuous, most uncool. By today’s standard, an assault. Hip or not, actionable. 

Or…. 

I could take off all my clothes, leave them on the sofa with the Review, and walk into her bathroom naked. My naked to her naked. That would be a sharing not an imposition.

Now, that would make this first date An Experience. Given that head start, if I did that we would be meeting naked, open, unabashed. Instead of two strangers meeting and gradually feeling each other out, guessing about what’s hidden, slowly probing, uncovering together, we’d be starting out with a full exposure. We’d meet in full openness. Nothing hidden. Then from there proceed to a relationship. 

Meeting cute? We’d be meeting clean. And cute. 

We’d be putting on links instead of removing layers.

We’d also be finding out what nakedness with a total stranger feels like. Not a total stranger, of course, because that aforementioned “head start” lent legitimacy. That would be an experience. 

I could even hop into the tub with her. No, the water displaced could be messy. Too much.

That would be a first date to remember — and proof that neither one of us was stifled by convention. If it all worked out, it would be an experience we could share hilariously with Annie and Bern (“Oh, those wild kids!”). 

We’d never tell our children. 

But wait. What if she wasn’t testing me? What if she truly was running accidentally late? Did I want to risk that? 

What would she say? “That is not what I meant at all, at all. That is not what I meant at all.”

What to do. To seem. Who to be.

I picked up the Review and read a Robin Matthews story. Or maybe it was some verse. I don’t remember all the details. Pretty sure it was Robin. 

Though it could’ve been George Bowering.

Eventually Polly came out and we had our date. 

I don’t remember a thing about it. Nothing happened. No click. No follow-up.

My guess is we would have gone out for Chinese because that was Vancouver. I saw Carnal Knowledge on my own a night or two later. It wasn’t the same. That kind of film you have to have someone to discuss it with. To connect over. 

I have absolutely no memory of Polly except her name and our common friends who set us up. What I clearly remember — and often replay in my mind — is the idea, the urge, that I had and was too timid to try. One of those Frosty roads not taken. Should instead have heeded Yogi: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

But I didn’t and nothing came of it, not even a fuller memory. My recollection in tranquility froze on that indecision. 

***

A year later I was in a love affair back home. Another year later we had a daughter and got married. After three years we split up. 

Some 40 years after that I meet Polly in Victoria. She’s a retired teacher, a much published and honoured poet. She has written fine, very moving poems about, inter alia, her lost loves. Of course I am not among them. Oddly, I can’t help regretting that.

Whenever I heard her name or came across her poetry I assumed she was the hippie from that long ago blind date.  But now I don’t know. She has no memory whatever of me, that date, even that our friends set us up. She doesn’t remember ever being a Bohemian.
      "I was so frightened in those years. So timid. Oh, if you had walked in on me like that, in the bathroom.... I would have just died!"

I suppose I could have the wrong girl. Or the wrong memory.