BLIND DATE
A short story by
NICOLAS TRAVERS
Temptation can be hard to
resist, especially if one is a man turning 40, and life seems to be standing
still, or even sleeping. Jack Humphries works for a big City bank as a sales
team investment analyst, seated at a
computer screen searching the stockmarket for promising investment
opportunities for the team’s two salesmen to hawk round client institutions,
and writing up endless reports. But it is a pretty thankless task, for Jack
knows that he competes directly with scores of other analysts in other banks
and financial institutions, each seated in front of a computer screen, each
searching and searching, and that many of his carefully crafted efforts will
end up casually crumpled into corporate wastebins. He is also unhappy at home,
because Sarah Humphries, his wife of some sixteen years, has taken to playing a
great deal of tennis, and preening herself archly in the tennis club bar,
particularly when a certain wealthy local hairdresser has dropped by – and a
couple of Jack’s friends have been dropping hints tipped with poisoned barbs.
Jack is a placid man who
hates confrontations and has never lost his temper in his life, and he is also
much too controlled by nature to take to drink. But he has begun to escape by
using his screen to surf the Internet, and has spent increasing chunks of his
lunch hour – and sometimes an hour or so of his spare time when he should
rightly be safely on his way home - staring in guilty amazement at a stream of
women and girls exploring sexual practices that might well be expected to make
Sarah spit with a most righteous fury. For Saturday nights in the Humphries
household are a time for the most rapid conventionality, and Sarah has a pet
dictum: ‘Only perverts play at sex’ (though Jack sometimes wonders whether she
never plays games with hairdressers).
He has also begun scanning lonelyheart
sites. The impersonality and the mystery of the Internet are a charm and a joy:
Jack has transformed himself into a prosperous garage owner named Harry
Thompson, built himself a nice little free website and papered it with pictures
of himself taken at rather an earlier age, before he had begun losing his hair
and billowing around his waistline. He has added photographs of a nice shiny
car (property of one of the bank’s directors, photographed by flashlight in the
bank’s underground carpark), and a nice big house (courtesy of a friend working
for a local estate agent). He has credited Harry/Jack with a healthy, though
unspecified, income, and written roguishly of seeking a playmate for weekend
jaunts to Majorca. It is all a laugh, of course, because Jack has a big, big
mortgage, and could barely afford a dirty night out in London for one, let
alone a lush Spanish weekend for two. But he has his dreams, and perhaps one
day he will win the Lottery, and have enough cash to sock Sarah hard in the eye
and escape.
Email has begun to transform
his life from a grind of grim reality into something approaching a living
daydream. Harry/Jack has swapped romantic little billets-doux with a wealthy Texan
widow and a Spanish countess caring for her ageing mother in a ramshackle
castle, has been hard put to resist an invitation to cut and run to Brazil,
where another wealthy widow is desperate for a good man to manage her
magnificent coffee plantations, and has discreetly fought off a dozen
beseeching single mothers, all – from their pictures – lissom lasses, and all
desperate to whip up tasty little repasts, darn his socks, and pander to any
need he might envision.
It matters not a great deal
that Jack suspects that many, if not most, of his email correspondents may be
as fraudulent as himself. It is the game that counts. The Texan widow writes
like a man, filling her notes with scarcely veiled allusions to the
satisfactions she could grant to a suitable suitor – and Jack is certain for
sure that she/he is hinting at oral sex, and seeking to exchange the most vivid
and detailed scenarios. It matters not, because he is playing very hard to get,
and countering an ever more pressing Texan passion with tasteful little
descriptions of how he might squire a wealthy widow to a night at the theatre,
drawing a discreet veil over what might happen thereafter – though he also
hints that he is a man possessed of the most animal lusts and powers. It
matters not that he will never, never be able to visit Brazil – unless of
course he wins the Lottery. The Brazilian is probably only a hardup divorcee,
living in a tawdry block of flats, dreaming of days that might have been, had
she granted her favours to a certain wealthy local landowner, instead of
marrying a travelling salesman with a passion for fishing. The single mothers
are probably all fat, and spotty, and surrounded by brats from hell,
masquerading behind pictures cut from local newspapers.
Jack knows that the
temptations of fantasy are fast threatening to take over from the imperatives
of reality, but he does not really care. Tapping out emails at times when he
should be writing analyses may be quite, quite mad, but it is a safe way of
dicing with danger, and the Internet shields him increasingly from having to
interface with Sarah in the few evening hours he spends at home.
Not that Sarah greatly cares,
for Mrs. Humphries has dreams of her own. Her hairdresser has fought his way
through two unfortunate marriages, and now talks of finding a good woman and
settling down – and Sarah reckons Jack might squeeze out a tidy sum in a
divorce, because he has a generous pension plan and they jointly own a nice
house in a select part of Richmond, itself one of London’s smarter suburbs.
Meanwhile she can quite comfortably handle him sulking behind his computer,
where she suspects he is trawling the Internet for porn, because the more he
sulks upstairs in the tiny bedroom he has turned into a study, the more soaps
she can watch.
(She also dreams of one day
creeping upstairs silently to open Jack’s study door in a rush and pounce on
him porning away, though she has never yet done it. But the time must come
soon, for Sarah is partial to games, and the pleasures of keeping Jack panting
on Saturdays have long since palled).
So Jack slides deeper and
deeper into folly, whilst Sarah bides her time. But today Jack feels very
bright. A couple of former colleagues have set up a cute little financial PR
operation to promote clients via the Net, and signed up with his bank for
backing. He has been given exclusive rights to write the operation up, and
stands to share a tidy sum with the two salesmen in his team by way of
bonus if the shares start to motor. The
operation is a bit of a blue sky thing – lots of chat and precious little
action – but a paucity of hard facts will allow him to let his imagination rip,
and Jack is already plotting the shares on a pathway to glory. It is also a
bright summer morning, the girls on his morning train seem to have been
prettier than usual, and he has several emails waiting for him in his inbox.
Life is good, and filled with promise.
However he takes himself very
seriously as an analyst, so he focuses first on work, dashing off the final paragraphs
of his investment report, and tweaking it masterfully here and there, before
adding a little additional polish, and emailing it off to the former colleagues
for their blessing. Then he sits back with a cup of coffee and opens his inbox.
Texas comes up first, pushy to the very bounds of decorum, and then a little
wail from Brazil. But there is also an email from someone totally unknown.
‘Dear Stranger,’ it starts.
‘You look nice, and I want to admire you. I am an artist, a sculptress – I
fashion beauty from clay. Now I want to fashion joy from a man’s emotions, and
capture that joy for the world. My stars tell me you may be that man, and I am
filled with excitement. Speak to me from your secret hideaway in cyberspace,
and let us correspond. Perhaps, if we are not in different lands, we may even
meet. I languish in expectation. Venus.’
Jack scans the electronic
words and is filled with a sudden excitement. He notices that the email also
carries a paperclip sign pointing to an attachment, and clicks on it quickly,
to catch his breath suddenly as a picture of a woman in her late twenties or
early thirties downloads. She is pleasant, rather than sensational, with dark
hair falling to her shoulders, and she appears to be wearing a pair of
dungarees bespattered with paint. But there is something sensual about her,
perhaps in the tigerish narrowing of her eyes, and the hungriness of her smile,
in her body language and the way in which she is half turned towards the camera
to emphasize the curves of her breasts and hips, that calls to him. She is a
magic woman, a dream woman, all flesh and desire.
He clicks on his new-mail
button to open a reply - Jack has a phobia about reprising incoming mail –
checks that his screen is set to switch back instantaneously to a bank research
programme if any prying colleagues should try coming up behind him quietly to
peer inquisitively over his shoulder, and chews his lower lip thoughtfully. He
has learned from hard experience that emails typed on the spur of the moment
tend to fall flat on their keyboards, and that good letters flow from careful
composition, nicely balanced thinking and well chosen phrasing. The email on
his screen is plainly designed to provoke and must be countered with
provocation. He types a few words quickly, shakes his head, and starts again.
He must match humour with humour, and set a small flame burning.
Then, for a split second
moment, a dreadful thought edges its way into his mind. Perhaps this woman is
as dire as the rest, or - dreadful thought - not really a woman at all. But he
pushes the traitor suspicion away. Emails are poor disguises, and pedestrian
woman, men masquerading as women, and similar trash, have always semaphored
their underlying realities. Phrasing, choice of words, conceptual approaches,
have always given them away in their first few lines. But this email comes from
a different world. It possesses spirit, and shows understanding. It flows from
a woman, a real woman, and a woman he is strangely curious to learn more about.
She has already begun to enflame him, and he must press on, and they must meet,
if meeting be possible, and he can feel himself fired with a sensual longing,
an ardour of the flesh that has begun to smoulder within him, and begins to
write again.
‘Venus, allow me to unveil. I
am in Richmond, just outside London, and your words enthrall me. Let me come
one day and stand in your studio - wherever you may be - for you to fashion as
you will; let us entwine our fingers, and look down on your couch, and share a
flame that already rises within me. I shall be a Daniel, entering your den, but
I shall not be harmed, and we will share in the rejoicing.”
Jack licks his lips, and
reads his message, and smiles to himself. The message is really one of his best
efforts to date. It is brief, but really quite explicit, it flags his
enthusiasm, without pinning himself down too closely: it is a baited hook to
match a hook baited to catch him. He presses his send button, and quickly
closes his email programme to protect himself from further temptation. He
cannot spend all day flirting with cyberdamsels: he must get on with his work.
The afternoon drifts by in a
blur of research, and his report comes back from his former colleagues not only
with scarcely any changes at all, but also tagged with a little attachment
praising him for his work, something that makes Jack glow with virtuous
pleasure. He rewards himself by allowing himself just a single little peek at
his inbox before logging off for the day and packing up to catch his train
home. But sadly his inbox is bare, totally devoid of cybermail, and he sighs to
himself as he reluctantly closes down for the day. Perhaps he can spend a few
moments after supper surfing, once Sarah is safely tucked into a soap, explore
some free fetish sites, and give himself a cheap thrill, providing of course
that the sites are not con tricks offering free tours to any fool prepared to
surrender a credit number, because Jack has come across more than a few seeking
credit card numbers as proof that he is over 18, and very much suspects that he
could deal his credit a painful blow if he acceded.
He dozes on his train home,
and dreams of girls in paint-spattered dungarees striking bold attitudes for
his pleasure, and he is a happy man. Sarah is even quite pleasant as he walks
through his front door, because she has had a very steamy afternoon, and there
is duck for dinner, with new potatoes and beans, and a bottle of rose, and
quite a good comedy on the telly, and they watch it together, all thoughts of
surfing and pouncing quite abandoned, and laugh together in chorus, and the
evening is good.
Jack wakes the following
morning with an erection, which is a promising sign, and enormous hopes. He
advances under his duvet towards Sarah, still fast asleep, and tries to
interest her in his condition. But she rolls away. Mrs. Humphries knows that
marital duties only occur at weekends, and she is damned if she is going to
surface from her half waking state to satisfy her husband.
“Make me a cup of tea.” Her
command is peremptory, and Jack’s erection vanishes. He hauls himself out of
bed and cleans his teeth and shaves, and reads his morning paper a little
glumly as he reflects about his missed opportunity. Sarah is quick and
competent. She knows her wifely duties very well – she will make Jack a cup of
coffee and a single slice of toast before she has her morning shower, and drive
him to the station on the way to her job as administrative co-ordinator at a
local technical college, but he can whistle in the wind if he wants more. Sex
has no place in her breakfast diary, not – at any rate – until hairdressers
replace husbands, and perhaps not even then. She waits for Jack to shave, and
then closes their bathroom behind her and preens a little as she inspects
herself in the bathroom mirror. She still has her looks, even if she is nearing
forty, and tennis has kept her shape nice and trim. She really must start
pressuring the hairdresser just a little, because Jack has grown into a
frightful bore with his computer, and she is sure she could find another
potential suitor at the drop of a nice lace-edged hankie, or even the drop of a
nice lace-edged pair of panties, and here she giggles to herself, because she
thinks she has recently grown really rather fond of sex, particularly illicit.
They are both silent as they eat breakfast,
both barricaded behind their respective morning newspapers. Jack is lost in a
world of cyberpassion, whilst Sarah’s thoughts follow much the same lines, but
at a far more terrestrial level. Jack pretends to be still immersed in company
reports and share prices as Sarah drives him to the station, but he emerges a
little from his shell as he travels by train towards the City, for it is a hot
summer day, and some of his fellow commuters are really most attractive.
However his interest does him little good, because his attractive fellow
commuters avert their eyes every time he makes eye contact, so in the end he
lets his eyelids droop and daydreams about passionate clinches on studio
couches.
Both salesmen on his team are waiting
for him as he reaches his desk, and both are jubilant. Major investors have
taken a real shine to the cute little financial PR operation and they have
already placed a sizeable slice of equity between them. It looks as though the
whole exercise could be safely tied up well before launch day, and the shares
might well then open at a sizeable premium. They whisper together, and their
whispering is a temptation. Might Jack be interested in a slice for himself, to
be allocated ostensibly to a friendly fund operation, but sold for the benefit
of nobody but himself?
Jack demurs, because what they are
suggesting is wholly illegal, and against all of the bank’s rules, even though
it is something that happens quite often. But their whispering is insistent,
and he succumbs to temptation, on condition that he be given the most cast-iron
guarantees against discovery, and the three men shake hands, and wink at each
other, because nothing will be put to paper, but all three will gain in wealth
as a result of their agreement.
The salesmen then disappear, off to the
nearest winebar, and Jack heads for the office canteen. He decides to discuss a
small salad and a glass of mineral water, because it is time to start bringing
his figure under control, and he will diet hard to become lissom and svelte on
the magic day that he strips off for his new friend’s studio couch. There is
not much of a queue, and he is in luck, because he finds himself next to a
rather curvaceous girl from the bank’s public relations office. But sadly the
rather curvaceous girl has her own sights set on a callow youth two steps ahead
of Jack, and he is rather more than bothered when she raises her arms to pat
some straggling tendrils of hair into place, because the movement makes her
blouse lift in a really most provocative way, and he can feel his trousers
beginning to swell anew, which is really most embarrassing, because he is
always careful never to think explicitly about sex when he is at work. So he
scurries off with his salad and glass of water to sit on his own, and pretend
that he is not looking at anything in particular, though he cannot prevent
himself looking at the girl every few moments, and he is very bothered,
especially as the girl shoots him a most challenging look when she gets up to
leave with the callow youth, and he knows that he has been weighed and found
wanting.
He then spends the next half hour striding
around the City, working himself into a remedial sweat, before returning to his
desk, and the rest of his afternoon passes uneventfully. His departmental head
calls him for a briefing on the financial PR funding, and sends him back to his
desk with a few well-chosen words of praise, Jack makes and takes half a dozen
phone calls, and looks at another couple of Internet proposals, including an
Internet auction idea that seems nothing short of a crude demand for a large
slug of cash, drinks several cups of strong black coffee, and glances at the
clock on his office wall from time to time in a bid to hurry the passage of
time.
At last the hands touch half past five, and
he is free. He accesses the Net quickly, and types his inbox address in at
speed. It opens to list a couple of junk mailings, an email from Spain, and
another that looks to be from his dream sculptress. Jack opens the email with
fingers that tremble on his keyboard.
‘Well, well, and I am in Kew, just next
door to you. I shall be on Richmond Green on Saturday morning, say about
midday. I shall seek you out, my unveiler, and you will be fashioned, and
possibly entwined as well.’
The message is unsigned, but its provenance
is unmistakable. Jack swallows, and suddenly his mouth is dry, and a most
unexpected sensation runs through his veins. He is gripped by excitement, joy,
alarm, and fear in quick succession. Is this real, or some kind of hoax? Can
somebody be accessing his email, and laying a fake trail for him? Will he meet
paint-splattered dungarees, or some dread banking equivalent of ‘Candid
Camera’?
He closes down his terminal, and realises
that he is sweating profusely. But at the same time a corner of him, quite a
substantial chunk of him, feels like a teenager all over again. He is facing an
adventure, a challenge to a most unadventurous man, and a challenge that must
be taken, or leave him as a most timid knave and coward.
He chews on this for a moment, and then
squares his chest, or the folds of flesh that serve him as chest, and makes a
decision. He will go to Richmond Green, and face fate with bravado. He will be
brave, and courageous, even if the venture is surrounded with risks, and he
will prove himself a hero. Here Jack, who is already waiting for his homeward
train, grows by at least an inch, and a couple of passing girls eye him with an
attention that almost passes for interest, because here is a man who seems
quite sexy inside his conventional office suit. But they pass on, because
sexiness in middleaged men is always grasping, and Jack is too lost in his
dreams to notice them anyway.
When he reaches his home station he is distant, and Sarah wonders
for a moment, as she prepares his dinner, whether he has a girlfriend. But she
pushes the thought away scornfully, because Jack Humphries is a very timid and
cautious man, when it comes to women, and even some heavy tippling at the
tennis club’s annual shindig barely roused enough courage in him to kiss a
nubile younger member keen to find a job in banking for her teenage son. Thoughts of younger women then turn her
thinking into a new channel as she deftly whisks up a white sauce to go with a
couple of chicken breasts she is baking. Her hairdresser had called to cancel
their next meeting, just before she set out to collect Jack from the station,
and she wonders whether she has competition. She is in a bit of a quandary.
Logic suggests that a girl should grow warmer if a man starts to grow colder,
but she is a married woman, and well-known in the neighbourhood, and she has no
wish to set tongues wagging even faster than they may be wagging already. She
sets a chicken breast out on a plate, slices it deftly, spoons some sauce to
one side, adds sauté potatoes and a helping of green beans tossed with dill and
butter, all neatly laid parallel to the chicken, admires her handiwork for a
moment, and rings the small handbell she keeps to signal mealtimes. Chicken,
and half a nice bottle of white Bordeaux, may clear her thinking and help point
a way forward.
Husband and wife eat largely in silence,
each preoccupied with their own thoughts. After supper Jack clears the table
and loads the dishwasher, whilst Sarah brews fresh coffee, and they exchange
polite notes about their respective days at work, and stories in the evening
paper Jack has brought home with him, and ponder the evening’s television offerings.
But both of them are really miles away, and lechery is a barrier between them.
Saturday morning arrives, and it is a
clear, fine day, warm and sunny. Sarah has shopping to do, and tries to tempt
Jack into pushing a Sainsburys trolley. But he has already prepared his excuses
– he has agreed to meet a colleague for a midday drink, he lies, and he is
committed. Sarah eyes him pensively, because he seems to be bubbling just
beneath the surface. But Jack has told her of the Internet PR deal, and some of
its ramifications, and she decides that he is fuelled by his expectations. She
will keep him tame by granting him his normal couple of Saturday afternoon
hours, and possibly throw in a little oral sex to underwrite her control, even
though it is not something for which she much cares, and very possibly first
compensate by buying herself a new dress, because she has seen something rather
dishy in her favourite boutique, and it is rather pricey. So she drives off,
and Jack dresses with care, because he faces a challenge, and he must be worthy
of his encounter.
Richmond Green is a pretty place, a quiet
open space surrounded by fine old houses where old men doze in the sun on
benches and children play undisturbed. Jack pauses on the edge of the neatly trimmed
grass and glances at his watch. It lacks just a minute to midday. He can feel
his heart thumping and his mouth is dry, and he has a feeling that he stands on
the brink of an adventure that will dramatically transmute his Internet
daydreams into the most exciting encounter of his life. He swallows, and takes
a deep breath. He is dressed in a dark blue silk shirt and light blue cotton
chinos, and he has polished his black shoes to a most brilliant shine. He is a
brave knight on a valiant adventure, and he must challenge and win a most fair
damsel, and – if luck smiles on him – he will spend all afternoon exercising
and sating his most secret passions, and possibly stay overnight to pant and
sweat all over again, and he will give Sarah the biggest shock she has ever
had. He chooses a path bisecting the Green and holds his head high as he sets
out on a tour of inspection. He is a hero, and he is marching to victory. But
sadly the tour proves something of a disappointment. One or two pairs of women
are chatting as they keep a watchful eye on their offspring, but none are
seated on their own. Jack circles the Green again, and doubt starts to nag at
his mind. Perhaps the woman has been forced to change her plans, or has made up
her mind she does not want to go through with a blind date. Perhaps she has
already seen him, and made herself scarce.
Now he is on his third circuit, and his
doubts are starting to gain the upper hand. Then he notices that two newcomers
are strolling towards him. They are still a little way distant, but one has
shoulderlength hair, and looks remarkably like the woman in his Internet
picture, though now she is sporting a bright summer frock. Her companion is
also lissom in a white blouse and short white skirt, with her fair hair pinned
up in bunches, possibly on her way to or from a game of tennis. Here Jack’s
blood chills a little. But he calls courage back to his aid. He does not belong
to Sarah’s club, and has not been near it for the best part of two years, since
one of her friends attempted to seduce him, all but landing Jack in a punch-up
with her husband, and Richmond has more than one tennisclub anyway.
The two women stop, and inspect him with
interest, and it is plain that they are waiting for him to say something. Jack
realises that he really is now face to face with his Internet sculptress, and
beams. Heaven is blessing him, for she is even better looking than her picture,
and remarkably well shaped, and he knows that she will heat his blood to a most
fevered pitch.
Both women smile in reply, though the one
in white seems a little uncertain.
He makes eyes at the woman in the bright
summer frock, and it is a thing he has not done for many years. “You look
really magic.”
“Thank you.” Her voice is low, and
well-modulated, a whole world away from Sarah’s sharp-edged tones of command.
“I thought we might have a drink.” Jack
does not look at the second woman, and his omission hints plainly that she
might care to move on.
“Jackie came along to give me moral
support.” The well-modulated voice is amused. “Surfing the Net can be risky.”
“Okay, I’ll buy you both a drink.” Jack
oozes charm. He has hooked a rare prize, and he cannot risk losing it. Perhaps
the woman in white will also come to the studio, and they will enjoy a
threesome. The thought makes him start to swell, and he is on the verge of
panting.
“What do you think, Jackie?” His sculptress
is obviously playing with him, and greatly amusing herself. But Jack does not
mind, because this is a testing, and he will pass with flying colours, and his
reward will come with his proving, and it will be magnificent.
“I like the Mercedes.” The fair-haired
girl in white smiles more broadly, and Jack is suddenly on his guard, because
the remark is unexpected.
He hurries to regain control of the
situation. “There’s a pub down by the river. They serve tasty lunches as well.”
“You could both come and have lunch at the
club.”
Now Jack is fully alert. The fair-haired
girl plainly has trouble in mind, and he scents danger. He smiles a little
weakly. “I’ll treat you both.”
“You’d be better on a diet.” The
fair-haired girl’s voice is dismissive, but a razor has sliced at him.
“I showed Jackie your picture, and she said
she knew your wife.” Now Jack’s sculptress is carving her words, and her
modulation takes on a harsh note. “We thought we’d have a bit of a laugh.”
He stares at her, and her eyes are hard and
cold, and her laughter has melted away. “You’d better go home, and tidy up your
homepage. There’s an awful lot of fraud out on the Net. People aren’t always
what they seem.”
Jack opens his mouth to say something,
anything, to explain, to apologise, to justify himself. But the two women have
already begun to walk away from him, and they are talking and laughing
together, and he is wholly excluded. He has made a fool of himself, and now he
can only pray that he has paid the full price of his folly. Temptation proved
too hard to resist, and suffering may well
follow from yielding.