Katie

I got to the bar before she did; she got to the bar on time. It had rained, hard, in the hour before we were supposed to meet. I had wanted to bike to the date — I had thought about it all day — but because of the rain I took the subway. She had planned to take the subway, but because of the rain she drove. While sitting in her car during the downpour she texted me to apologize in advance for looking like a drowned rat. I reacted to this with a heart, then replied to say that we would “make it work 🤜🤛”

But when she arrived she was pretty. Her hair showed no sign of having been rained on, and her clothes seemed dry, and her mood was almost bubbly. She was Katie. We had barely communicated up until this moment; Katie didn’t even have the dating app on her phone. Her friend, Caitlin, manages their joint account, which specified that they were “not a package deal.” As I read these words I chuckled to myself, then swiped through their pictures again, then swiped right. In our subsequent chat Caitlin told me that I seemed “emotionally aware” and “hot.” Then she said that she was going out of town for a few weeks, but that I should go out with Katie in the meantime.

I had been to this bar a few months earlier on a different first date. That date had gone well — we both liked each other — but now here I was again, sitting at a low, round table, the candlelight twinkling in my eyes. You could say that Katie was twinkling in my eyes a little too, and I could tell that I was twinkling a little in hers.

“So where exactly do you live,” I asked her. I knew she had driven to our date from the Upper East Side, but for some reason I thought she lived closer to me, in Brooklyn.

Katie confirmed that she had come from the Upper East Side, from the apartment she keeps there. “But I live up north,” she said.

“Up north where,” I said.

“Near Greenwich,” she said.

“Greenwich, cool,” I said, laughing. Not closer to Brooklyn.

We discussed the various Old Fashioneds on the menu, and she decided to order one of them. I ordered something rummy that claimed to be a riff on a Negroni. Katie made fun of me for saying that the bar we were at was in Midtown, when it was actually in Gramercy. “I’m from Crown Heights,” I said. “For me Midtown starts at Washington Square Park.” We traded sips of each other’s drinks, a ritual that seemed to signify that we were both open, tentatively, to kissing each other at some point. I honestly didn’t love either of our drinks, but I liked mine more than I liked hers. She seemed to genuinely like hers.

We talked about work — each other’s work. Katie is a lawyer, and I’m a writer. She works all the time, she said. If there’s something she wants to avoid thinking about, she said, she can always do more at work. I thought about asking if there was something she wanted to avoid thinking about, but instead I asked how much of her sense of personal edification came from her work. She said she couldn’t give a number but that it was a lot.

The table next to us seemed to be on a first date too. She was pretty, and seemed used to it, and he seemed like he wasn’t used to being out with someone so pretty. But Katie and I were well matched. We talked openly about our respective divorces, and about how we were approaching dating now. She said that I should try dating someone much younger. The first age she threw out was twenty-three — two decades my junior — but then she settled on twenty-eight. Somehow we both made steady progress on our drinks. When Katie had taken her last sip, and mine had about a sip and a half left, she gave her glass a wiggle and informed me that she was going to have another. “What are you gonna do,” she said tauntingly.