Chapter 6

Cape Garardeau's restaurant choices were not quite up to San Francisco or Paris, but there were several decent places to eat, and I selected my own favorite -- an Italian specialty house that was short on decor and too dark to read the menu -- but long on well-prepared cuisine.

Our evening was a moderate success. The date was casual and unhurried, but it was a genuine date. Shirley Kiner was no dummy. She could tell I was interested, and while she kept the conversation light and easy, she seemed to be watching me, with some skepticism, at the same time.

I surmised that she was waiting for me to make a wrong move. Waiting, perhaps, for me to act on my earthier instincts. My best guess was, Shirley was accustomed to being rushed by men.

I was determined not to rush her.

After a leisurely dinner, and several glasses of wine, I invited her to walk with me alongside the Mississippi, at the point that I knew offered the city's most attractive riverside vistas. I guessed that, as a newcomer, Shirley probably hadn't had time to discover these little byways for herself. It turned out that I was correct.

"It's really a lovely little town, when you get accustomed to the enormous change of pace," she said.

"Yes. It isn't Los Angeles, certainly, but I like to think of it as Cloverdale, except all grown up and much-improved from the original."

"I really think I'm going to like it here," Shirley said.

"How did you come to choose Southeast?"

"Well, when I decided to go to college at long last, I first thought about going somewhere completely new -- maybe a big university in some western state where I'd never been. I wanted anonymity, if I could find it."

"But, instead, you came almost-home."

"That was because of my parents. I'd only recently made peace with them. They have been -- difficult -- about some of my life choices, beginning with the Penthouse thing. But my Dad was getting older, and his health was declining. I decided to enroll here, where I'd be close enough to the folks to visit them on a weekend once in awhile."

"And then your Dad died, before you could even complete the move back to Missouri."

"Yes. But at least my Dad knew I was making the move, and he was very pleased with my decision. Now, as it turns out, I have much less reason to be enrolled in school here. But I had made the choice, applied, been accepted. Changing my plan would likely have involved at least a semester's delay. I thought I ought to just -- press on."

I stopped walking and guided Shirley to a nearby park bench. The area was well-lighted, the evening was mild and pleasant, and the lights of the city sparkled on the surface of the river.

"I know you were a little -- disappointed when you found out that Herm and I were campus regulars here," I said.

"Yes. I had assumed that all my old classmates would be long-since through with their college experience, and I could lose myself here, among younger strangers."

"Neither Herm nor I has any intention of making incursions on your privacy," I told her. "At least, not unless we're invited. I've been hoping you and I could see each other again, and become better acquainted."

"I've had a nice evening," Shirley said. "I don't see why we couldn't do it again, sometime."

That "sometime" phrasing was a little discouraging. I wondered whether it was meant the way it had sounded -- like I could expect only a cool reception, were I to ask Shirley out again. I decided there was no time like the present to try to clarify matters. "I was -- hoping that we could see each other again quite soon," I said, "not just -- 'sometime.'"

"When I thought about starting a new life," Shirley said, "I pictured myself starting it with new people."

"Well, it's not as if you and I were old-time lovers or something," I protested. "I mean, I may have had certain designs on you, all the way back to high school, but we barely knew each other's names, in those days."

"That's true," she said, "but, now, you know so much -- about me. You know about the Penthouse pictorial, and I told you myself, you and Herm and his wife, about the other pictures."

"But Shirley, isn't that a good thing? The fact that we know about those things? Were you intending to try to keep them a secret from the people you met in the future? Didn't you suggest yourself, just last week, how futile that would probably be?"

She didn't answer me right away. Finally, she stood up and said, "Let's head back toward the car." When we were back on the sidewalk, she said "I never intended to hide anything from -- people I met in the future. But I thought it might be nice at least to be able to begin a relationship first, before all that stuff from my past had to be dealt with."

Now it was my turn to be silent.

"Take me home now, please, Chad," Shirley said.

So I gave her some space, and waited for more than a week before calling her again. Before I called, I cleared it with Herm and Betsy -- I'd invite her to their place for Friday night dinner. Just the four of us. If she accepted, it would have been one day short of two weeks between engagements.

She said yes. She volunteered that she was pleased that I'd called her back. "I was afraid I'd scared you off completely," she said.

Betsy was a fantastic cook, and Herm and Betsy's four-year-old son was -- at least for that evening -- sweet and enchanting. If I could have captured Shirley's heart as rapidly as that little guy did, I'd have been a happy man.

Well. Maybe I'd be a happy man. I still wasn't confident that building a relationship with Shirley Kiner was a wise thing for me to be trying to do. I had what the psychologists liked to call an "approach-avoidance conflict." On the one hand, her physical attractiveness was nearly overwhelming, and the more I was with her, the more I realized that she also possessed a fine mind and a ready wit -- albeit one tempered by frequent lapses into silences that felt like melancholy, or even, possibly, depression.