“Hi,” Todd said, coming into the entrance of Sal’s, an Italian restaurant in Chelsea near the movie theater. He was wearing sneakers, but he looked like he’d just gotten a haircut, and he was smiling.
“Hi,” Gert said, standing inside the door. The restaurant was moderate-sized, with a family of six chattering near the back. The tablecloths and walls were a rich red. A waitress appeared and led them back.
“I was just on the subway,” Todd told Gert, “and some woman insisted I’d gone to school with her brother. She kept saying my name was Cody. The whole ride, she stared at me, going, ‘You’re sure you’re not Cody?’”
“You should have showed her your driver’s license.”
“Imagine if I pulled it out, and it said ‘Cody,’” Todd said. “That would be freaky. Like The Twilight Zone.”
“I loved The Twilight Zone!”
“Me, too. The old episodes.”
As they sat down, Gert was glad the conversation had started easily. She was also grateful for the dinner-and-movie date. It was simple, it was inexpensive, and it guaranteed that after dinner you wouldn’t be asked back to the guy’s apartment to watch a video—a common male strategy in college that had meant something else.
“I like this place,” Todd said. “The food’s good, and the prices are right.”
So he was practical. Gert was glad. She didn’t like when people tried to impress her with fancy restaurants that provided mouse-sized meals. Marc’s co-workers at the brokerage firm had taken them to places like that all the time. She had always left starving.
“So,” Todd said, “thanks for coming out on such short notice.”
He seemed a little nervous. Gert smiled. “I wasn’t doing anything special,” she said. Ooh! Her friends would smack her for admitting she was alone on a Saturday. She added, “I could have gone out with my friends tonight, but I can see them anytime.”
“How long have you known them?”
“Since college,” she said. “Well, Hallie since college. Erika is her high school friend.”
“Who was the one with big hair?” Todd asked.
Gert laughed. Everyone had such varying perceptions of looks. Erika had been dressed to kill that night, and Hallie had been practically naked, but what Todd had noticed was big hair.
“I didn’t think either of them had big hair,” Gert said.
“I didn’t mean any offense,” Todd said. “Brian was the one who thought so. I didn’t notice anyone having big hair.”
“That’s okay,” Gert said. “I think Erika was sort of interested in Brian.”
“Girls always like Brian. He’s engaged to a woman he works with.”
“Then why was he at the bar?”
“Why not? We were waiting to meet friends.”
The waitress brought their water, and she stood at the table expectantly. “You ready?” she asked.
“I guess we should pick up our menus first,” Todd said, smiling, and the waitress nodded and took off.
Todd added, “Brian lived in England for a year and he said they never give you water when you sit down. You have to ask for it or you’ll never ever get it.”
“Really?” Gert said. Then, in a barely passable British accent, she added, “That’s rather peculiar, don’t you think?”
“I rather believe so,” Todd said.
“A shame, old boy.”
They ordered appetizers and talked more. Todd spoke animatedly about his job. He said his company’s trains ran from Croxton Yards in Jersey City up to Binghamton, New York. It was a six-hour run, and usually it was just him on the train, plus an engineer who was driving it. There was a children’s hospital that they passed in upstate New York each time, and the kids would always wave out the window at the train. Sometimes, they’d make a sign, like Blow Your Horn! This was Todd’s favorite part of the run.
Todd said to Gert, “Do you like your job?”
Gert told him about working for a marketing and public relations firm that handled only pharmaceutical companies. She had majored in communications in college, but she wasn’t sure what she’d do afterward. She’d finally found a job as an assistant at a PR firm. The pay was low and the people seemed phony, so she kept her eye on the want ads. Then she saw an ad to be the assistant to a vice president of a different firm. The pay would be much higher, and the building was right next to a midtown subway stop, but she’d be less focused on creative work and more on meeting her boss’s needs. Still, she had been happy enough outside of work that she didn’t really care what she was doing during those hours. If she wanted, she could work on a portfolio and move over to the creative side. She actually had wanted to do that for a few years, and had tons of good ideas for product promotions. But for some reason she hadn’t gotten around to finishing her portfolio yet.
“Are you guys responsible for the goodies?” Todd asked. “Like the notepads and rubber pill toys and clipboards doctors get with the names of drugs on them?”
Gert laughed. She usually just got blank stares when she told people what she did. At least Todd was creative. “Our company doesn’t make them, but it does research to see if they’re a good way to increase product name recognition,” she said. “We might get twelve people in a room and bring out a tray full of those toys, then take them out of the room and see which ones they remembered.”
“Wow.” Todd closed his eyes. “I remember…that you’re wearing a red shirt and you have long hair, and dimples.”
Gert smiled shyly.
The waitress set down a bowl of calamari, along with a huge, soft stuffed red pepper. Gert was hungry. She hadn’t eaten Italian food in a while.
They made up their plates, and they ended up talking so rapidly that Gert only ate half her meal. She barely even tasted it. She hadn’t expected to enjoy Todd’s company so much. He told her that if the train broke down anywhere along the route, whether it was pouring rain or sloppy snow or in the middle of a dangerous city at 3:00 a.m., it was his job to jump out with a flashlight and walk the length of the train to find out where the problem was. “Some of those trains are a mile long,” Todd said. “And you don’t want to get out and walk the length of a train in a desolate area at 3:00 a.m.”
“I wouldn’t try it,” Gert said.
She told him about the worst part of her job, dealing with her often-cranky boss, Missy, and about the odd cast of characters at her old job. They had been so brain-dead that after a certain point, she’d stopped smiling for fear they’d complain about not getting the joke.
“So how did you end up in your line of work, anyway?” Gert asked Todd.
“Well,” he said, wiping his mouth, “it was strange. It wasn’t a job that would have occurred to me at all.”
“So what happened?”
He hooked some linguine around his fork. “I majored in history in college,” he said, “and I wasn’t that great a student in school, but history was the one thing I was interested in. I love finding out how things came to be. There are so many stories. I knew I wouldn’t have lots of jobs lined up after graduation with that major, though. For a while I led tours in a museum part-time. Then I was reading the help-wanted ads in the paper one Sunday morning, and I saw this boxed ad at the bottom of the page for an information session for a train company, and something kind of clicked. Working for the railroad is kind of a cliché, but I’d never actually thought