The secretary who worked next to me was a singing wench.  I’ll call her Eleanor, in honor of the queen of Aquitane, for whom she subbed sometimes, when the regular Eleanor of Aquitane couldn’t make it to the Renaissance festival out in the suburbs where the secretary spent her weekends pretending to be medieval.  Eleanor was pleasant and pretty enough, her pelt of red hair and her peasant blouses adding to her wenchlike allure when she crooned bloodthirsty madrigals while trying to wrench jammed paper out of the laser printer.  Her presence somewhat eased the shock of re-entry into the nine-to-five world, a place I was being compelled to visit more frequently these days when the freelance writing assignments proved elusive.
     Eleanor’s roommate was the Archbishop of Canterbury.  I couldn’t imagine what the Archbishop would do at a Renaissance Fair to amuse the fans of faux history among the jugglers, singers and jousters.  Eleanor told me that the Archbishop—Patrick to his friends— choreographed the fights and jousts.  He had a particular interest in, and collection of, obsolete weapons of hand-to-hand combat.
     And he wanted to go out with me.
     He would call to speak to Eleanor and end up talking to me while Eleanor battled with the printer.  Eleanor had carried home tales of the law firm, how I rose to the challenge of daily peril with my keen wit and superior typing speed.  Patrick had read some of whatever novel I was working on at the time, pieces of which Eleanor had also carried home.  I had become a fascinating character in his mind.
     I knew he had created an ideal—some combination of Katherine Hepburn and Cate Blanchett —that I would never be able to meet.  I heard hints on the phone of what he believed was owed to him.  He felt entitled to beautiful women as some people feel entitled to an endless summer.  Since I carry my share of frost, I knew when he met me he would be disappointed, but I found it hard to voice this—what could I say?  “I’d love to meet you, too, but I’m ugly.” 
      I was afraid.  I gave excuses.  I didn’t date actors, I said (and after having dated several of them, this had indeed become a policy).  I didn’t do blind dates.  I didn’t like the name Patrick.  He persisted, pouted, sent a dozen long-stemmed red roses to the office.  (I had never received long-stemmed red roses from anybody, ever, for any reason, although during my adolescence they arrived for my pom-pom captain stepsister with a tedious regularity.)  The roses caused a commotion in the office. “Congratulations on your fourth-coming novel” the card read, no double-entrendre intended, just a spelling error on his part or his florist’s.  “You wrote a novel?”  my boss asked, delivering the flowers after he read the card.  I found this odd, since I had been routinely berated in that office for being a novelist in the corporate world.  “In the California offices [of the firm],” one unhappily-transferred lawyer sniffed, “we had real, trained legal secretaries.  None of these wenches or failed novelists.”
Finally, I agreed to meet Patrick for dinner.
And so we met face to face.  When he saw me, his expression was the expression a man might have if, in a restaurant, he had ordered filet mignon and been served meatloaf, with the apology that there was nothing else in the kitchen that night.  Not anything close to what he had hoped for, in order words—but still, a man’s gotta eat.
     “So.  Shall we?”  He inclined his head toward the dining room.  We had met at the bar.  I slid off the barstool and adjusted my skirt.  “Go on ahead,” he said.  “I want to see your legs.”
      And my gait, presumably.  Having sprung for the roses, sight unseen, he must have thought it only fair that he could take my measure, as he would of a horse he had bet on.  I should have been grateful that he didn’t ask to count my teeth.
      I don’t remember much of the dinner conversation, except that I filled a pause in his litany of stories of auditions and acting classes to ask why he, with such a heavy schedule of activities and an engrossing social life, had been so insistent on meeting me.  A voice on the phone, words on a page, his roommate’s reluctant co-worker—me.
      “Well, I’ve been with a lot of beautiful women,” he said.  “Now I want someone real.”
      “Good luck finding her,” I hissed to myself as I took a sip of wine.
      And eventually the evening ended, as I comforted myself throughout it that it would.  We never saw each other again.  We never spoke again.  Eleanor, having learned sign language, become involved with a theater for the deaf and moved out west.  We both left the firm and as an extra bonus, the firm itself eventually dissolved.
      Of course I knew the meaning of the word “crestfallen,” but I had never used it and rarely encountered it outside of Victorian novels.  But when I met the Archbishop, his crest fell.  His eyebrows were raised and his cheekbones were lifted in the expectation of a smile but as I turned around when he called my name and he saw me, his features crashed along with his expectations.
     I never wanted to see that look on anyone’s face again, that disappointment inspired by the very sight of me.  So that was the last of my blind dates.  I refused to engage in internet dating or to meet a girlfriend’s boyfriend’s kind-of -goofy-but-sort-of- cute-once-you-get-past-it former college roommate.  I didn’t cultivate this shyness into a full-fledged social phobia requiring medication, but I still braced myself when meeting for the first time anyone who had “heard so much about” me.
     “You did tell him I’m not pretty, right?”
     “Don’t be so stupid!”  I would be scolded by a friend who knew the story.  “That guy was just an incredible asshole.”
      And it is the incredible assholes of this world who inflict the wounds which linger.
      One night, over ten years after the date that lived in infamy, I was at a party for a theater company I had become involved with.  I was talking to a woman who, like me, scheduled her creative pursuits around the more consuming demands of her full-time corporate job.  She crunched numbers at a big accounting firm.
     “But on the weekends I sing sea shanties at a Renaissance fair,” she told me.
     “Oh, that’s interesting,” I said, bravely maintaining composure by focusing on the ten thousand things I would rather do than sing sea shanties in public on the weekend.  “I used to work with this woman, Eleanor, who was a singing wench at a Renaissance fair.  I went out with her roommate once.”
      And I bent down to drag my broccoli spear through the ranch dressing dip.
     “He was an incredible asshole,” I added.
I straightened up and bit into the broccoli just as the sea shanty singer smacked the arm of the man standing next to her, who had been introduced to me as her husband.
     “Honey!  You used to be Eleanor’s roommate!”
Her husband did not look at me.  He stared straight ahead at some point of light that only he could see.  His face was so without expression that there was no doubt he had once been an actor; no one else could so steadfastly display such blankness.
     “This guy was the Archbishop of Canterbury,” I heard myself say.
     “Honey!”  Another exclamation, another smack on the arm.  “You used to be the Archbishop of Canterbury!”
     “I think his name was Tom,” I said desperately, since I seemed to have fallen into a hypnotic state that would not allow me to change the subject or to see, suddenly, a dear, dear friend across the room.  “Tom” was all I could think to say to throw the sea shanty singer off the scent.
“Who do we know named Tom?” she mused, chewing on a fingernail.
     “Maybe it wasn’t Tom, I don’t remember, it was a long time ago,” I babbled, diving down for more broccoli.  “So!  Sea shanties, huh?  How’d you get into that?”
      I didn’t recognize him.  I wouldn’t have recognized him if we had danced face-to-face all night.  He recognized me, though; he had from the first.  I had noted his discomfort when we were introduced but had dismissed it because, after all, how could it be about me?  I had never met the man, I thought.  I wouldn’t have given him a second look just as ten years earlier I wouldn’t have given him a second look, but then, the significance of that encounter had never involved my impression of him, but the power of his reaction.  It wasn’t about his looks, but his look. 
      Many people have romantic obsessions so intense that the object of the romance is soon overshadowed by the obsession itself, which takes on a life of its own.  The most obvious example is the Shah Jehan who spent 22 years building a tomb commemorating his second wife, Mumtaz Mahal; it is thought that the “Taj” in “Taj Mahal” is an abbreviation of her first name.  History and art are full of such touching tributes.  But mine was not a romantic obsession.  It was a rejection obsession.  In this field, my compatriots would not be Dante or Petrarch or Leonardo da Vinci, but inmates of various kinds of lockups.
      His look of disappointment had haunted me all my life.   I had come to describe myself as “not an across-a-crowded-room-kind-of-girl” to those who would encourage me to attend some event where I knew no one (“You might meet someone!”)  and here I was, in a crowded room with the man who had done so much to help me cultivate that view of myself, a man who was inarguably the most garden-variety sort of guy in the room, no more capable of making a grand impression than I was.
      No, actually, he was worse.  In the felicitous phrase of my niece, a drama student, he was a “Ren Fest geek.”  I was unfamiliar with the term “Ren Fest,” but apparently it had become a term of disdain to describe a person lacking the social skills necessary to attend a Star Trek convention.  My niece was particularly scornful of Ren Fest geeks, with “their crushed velvet robes and their swordplay, worrying about who gets to be the king next weekend.”  The Archbishop of Canterbury, as I had known him, displayed no such worries.   He was not only a proud and permanent Archbishop but was also the joust director and fight choreographer.  He had an extensive personal collection of medieval weapons. 
      I had mocked him for this during our date of infamy.  I thought that I had mocked gently, but still, it is perhaps best not to make fun of  a man’s dirk and claymore on the first date and expect him not to complain about it to his singing wench roommate, hiding behind the well-worn date phrase “no chemistry” (or perhaps in this case, he had said “no alchemy”).
Patrick stared stonily into space alongside his sea-shanty singing spouse.  He had a wife who sang hey-nonny-nonny and I had a romantic history peacefully unblemished by memories of watching my boyfriend pack his weapons every weekend to head for some campsite and re-enact battles.  Maybe it had never been about appearance at all.  Maybe all the time it had been about acceptance. 
      At last I saw someone, across the crowded room, whom I could pretend I was dying to talk to.  “Oh, look!  Oh, hello!  Oh,” I turned to the wife, “Will you excuse me?”
     “Sure,” she said.  “It was really nice to meet you.”
     “Oh, same here.  Really nice.  And you, Patrick,” I added, and I walked away, freed from my enchantment.