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I read your story. I’ll tell you what I like about it first.
First, the style itself–brittle, crisp, confident– is great. It reminds me of Woody Allen. Were you ever a New Yorker? The dialogue has that edge to it.
The narrator is a woman, of course, maybe because you’re a woman. I mean, I realize that a woman can write a story from a man’s POV, but, frankly, I never really believe it. I’m always thinking, Isn’t this woman-writer doing a nice job as a man-narrator. It’s distracting.
But you’re telling this romantic intrigue from a woman’s point of view, illustrating that we can be just as acerbic, just as off-handedly unfaithful as a Woody Allen character. Just about the right amount of angst thrown in.
I love the way the woman is just there in the bookstore, idly handling a few books, and just looks up and sees him. I like the fact that he is perusing a book of poetry that’s on one of those open tables, and that he looks up at the same time, at her. I mean, you have the bookstore fairly filled with women (it’s after a dull reading of something about cooking with tempeh) and the only reason the man is even in the bookstore is that he stopped for a coffee at the concession next door and just wandered in, killing time.
I love the way they just meet eyes. It seems a cliché, but you make it – somehow!!—really a connection, an instant understanding.
He asks her if she wants to have a drink across the street—an intimate little bar, as you describe it—because he’s in no hurry. The fact that there’s someone at home, at his home, doesn’t bother the woman, the narrator. She’s game for the game.
“And there’s just that instant connection, you know,” she writes. Or the character thinks.
He confesses to a few pangs, but thinks what the hell (the character, the man, tells the narrator this, she doesn’t shift POV) and from the bookstore to the bar to the hotel up the street—which they, conveniently can walk to – it’s all sudden and satisfying and they agree to meet again. They have partners at home, so you cleverly devise excuses for them: he is getting in shape by joining a volleyball team at the Y. She is fascinated by cooking (causing her to return to the store to buy the tempeh cookbook) and signs up for classes. And off they go, guilt not in their way at all. You leave us hanging—can they continue after these “classes” end?
So: well done!
Except. Except this very big criticism. My husband has been playing volleyball, or so he says. And you, my good friend, who is interested not in cooking but in kittens and puppies went to a reading for a book on cats, and haven’t been in touch since. I looked up my journal—the night of that reading – September 3—Walt said he wanted to see a documentary that I wasn’t interested in – and made up some damn thing about running into an old college buddy at the show and having a late drink. A buddy who persuaded him to join the Y because of its good sports program and exercise.
Some exercise.
I read your story all right. How dare you???