My Inflatable Friend E-Book

Gerald Everett Jones

• Herausgeber: LaPuerta Books and Media
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Misadventures of Rollo Hemphill
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 270

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Trying to make your girlfriend jealous with a life-sized rubber doll might be a bad idea.

A reformed hacker-turned-slacker, twenty-something Rollo Hemphill fantasizes about becoming a top-forty DJ. Unfortunately, he has more talent than ambition. He's settled for a menial job as a car jockey at "The Wuthering Palms," a luxury hotel in Beverly Hills.
 
Proximity to all that glitz and glamour soon stirs his attraction to Felicia Ferrulo, the Sicilian hottie who works in the hotel beauty shop. When Felicia doesn't give him a nod, much less a chance, Rollo devises a desperate plan. It involves dressing up a life-sized doll to look like one of the hotel's reclusive megastar residents and conspicuously driving the fake woman around town in borrowed vehicles.
 
Inspiring jealousy is his goal, but it quickly gets waaaaaaay out of hand. Rollo's clever scheme backfires with stunning success, causing him to fall upward with dizzying speed - as he rockets toward the stars but away from the girl of his dreams.
 
Rollo's fumbling attempts to undo his tangled web is, by turns, pathetic and hysterically funny. My Inflatable Friend is a witty, cautionary tale about the perils of pretending to be someone you're not - and the hazards of stroking every male's most private and vulnerable part - his swelling ego!

 -

"Fast, funny, and sufficiently out there to be banned in Pasadena. Check with your doctor before reading." - Peter Lefcourt, author of The Woody and The Manhattan Beach Project 

"While the entire story is built on the most unbelievable and unrealistic of scenarios, this book is not intended to aim for an award in journalism. What it is, however, is an entrée into the land of the ridiculous, and I just couldn’t stop laughing. An extremely humorous, excruciatingly funny account of one poor soul as he attempts to win the heart of his beloved (whom he has never even gotten a first date with!). Hold onto your stomach because you’ll be laughing so hard you won’t be able to catch your breath!" - The International Review of Books

"Gentlemen, this is a book for every one of us that has had a glorious, highly sexual relationship, albeit imaginary, with the most beautiful woman in the world. Unbelievably funny, unexpected, and very challenging for our boy Rollo. An entertaining read... recommended for those who like a good laugh." - Dan Whitman, Allbooks Review

"Straddles the line between outright drawing-room silliness and romantic comedy... You may root for the charmingly dense Rollo." – Kirkus

"Should be read aloud before large groups for maximum effect. Do not invite your wife or girlfriend." - Marvin J. Wolf, co-writer, Ladies' Night, USA Networks

"Being single and on the make is tough enough when you've had some experience, even if it ended badly. But seeing poor Rollo go splat, it hurts so well when I laugh!" - Tom Blake, syndicated columnist, "Single Again," Orange County Register

Leseprobe

My Inflatable Friend

THE CONFESSIONS OF ROLLO HEMPHILL

GERALD EVERETT JONES

Copyright © 2007 by Gerald Everett Jones

Excerpts: Preface © 2022, Boychik Lit © 2013, Rubber Babes © 2008

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

LaPuerta Books and Media 

Email: [email protected] 

Fan blog: geraldeverettjones.substack.com

The characters and events of this story are fictitious; any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

TRADEMARKS: The author has attempted throughout this book to distinguish proprietary trademarks from descriptive terms by following the capitalization style used by the trademark owner. Any product trademarks, service marks, and registered trademarks appearing herein are the properties of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged. 

EPUB ISBN: 978-0-9794866-7-8

LaPuerta softcover print edition ISBN: 978-0-9794866-1-6 

Editors: Rose Babington, Jason Letts

Cover design by Blinky, 100covers.com

LaPuerta is an imprint of La Puerta Productions https://lapuerta.tv, Santa Monica, California, USA

For Cheerful Charlie

Contents

Preface

1. My Confession

2. Shot Down

3. The Gruel Thickens

4. A Federal Case

5. Whose Life Is It, Anyway?

6. Personal Preferences

7. FBI Sidebar

8. A Plot Laid and Hatched

9. Taking Action

10. With Lucille and Woody

11. Getting a Head

12. A Hot Star Goes Supernova

13. Surveillance Product

14. Down the Rabbit Hole

15. Cruising on Sunset

16. Unintended Jealousy, a Transcript

17. Reporting to the Bridge, Again

18. I Get to See Monica’s Codicils

19. Holy Shit!

20. I Can’t Tell Felicia

21. Eating Out

22. In and Out

23. Partners in the Presidential Suite

24. Perks for Perps

25. Johnnie Halo

26. On with the Show

27. Success Follows Success

28. A Case of Keppelhoffer’s

29. Living the Role

30. Monica Recuperates

31. Shooting Celebrities

32. It All Unravels

33. It’s All About Her

34. Loose Ends

35. Arlen Weighs In

Now Read the Sequel - Rubber Babes

Explore the Series

Boychik Lit

About the Author

Also by Gerald Everett Jones

You may also want to read…

Preface

When the notion of reissuing Rollo Hemphill’s misadventures floated past in my stream of consciousness, my next thought was, Hey, those stories are evergreen — why not?  But more practical considerations of the publishing marketplace prevailed, necessitating this explanatory note.

My concern isn’t that the characters won’t be relatable or their follies any less funny in the glare of freshly fired-up high-wattage attention. No, the problem is one of perceived technological obsolescence. The first novel in the series — My Inflatable Friend — was released in 2007. To some of you in the shivering audience for whom first impressions can be cool if not downright cold, that era might not seem so long ago. But to others, the crusty tale might as well have occurred just before the undocumented end of the last Ice Age. (There have been more than one, I’m told. Hence the rush to print again, lest the next big freeze overtake us. Hmm. Some in fire, some in ice. We probably don’t get to pick.)

When the first novel in the series was released, cell phones existed but weren’t yet what you’d call smart. Email was a thing, surely, but social media had not yet turned the world’s great newspapers into ezines for old folks.

Some Luddites still clung to their fax (facsimile) machines, especially those who insisted that electronic signature was an oxymoron.

Some movie crews who were filming were still actually using film. Likewise for shows taping.

Into this latter-day Age of Innocence schlepped poor Rollo, whose challenges getting attention from females, then avoiding journalists and G-men, could no doubt have been helped by the option of sending the occasional exculpatory text message. Emojis wouldn’t have hurt his cause either, and an amusing animation, especially if cloned onto his bodily image as a wisecracking avatar, might have put him right over the top. (Or on the bottom. At the outset, positional advantage was far from his foremost concern.)

Back then, climate change could have been mitigated — or didn’t exist — depending on which talking head you credited. In fact, “the end of the world as we know it” was mostly a worn-out sci-fi theme, hardly a topic of almost unremitting daily conversation. A pandemic was a post-WWI episode, not feared to be repeated because threats such as Ebola and AIDS had presumably been contained. The James Bond movie franchise was still going strong because male guilt, belatedly dredged up by #MeToo, had not yet made it necessary (spoiler alert!) to kill the legendary rapist off.

And — perhaps most significant for the sake of Rollo’s first episode — lifelike robots designed for intimate uses may have been in development but were certainly not yet ready for the likes of Rollo.

Mind you, Rollo’s stories need not be read in sequence. Rubber Babes exists in its own quirky paranoid reality, and Farnsworth’s Revenge is no less sweet when not saved for last, but the through-line of Rollo’s lurching character development does flow in a bobbing chronology through these books. Wise readers will know better than to regard him as a role model. Rollo’s problem — if you insist on calling it that — is paradoxical: No matter what scheme he tries or how it fails — he persists in falling ever-upward.

I could wonder, though, whether male-centered comic humor can be written anymore. Men seem more pathetic than funny now, as do some who oddly claim to be both white and marginalized. Satire might still be a useful term, but nowadays its connotations tend to be political. Rollo does get enmeshed in complications on an international scale — but he has no agenda other than self-preservation.

My original inspiration for these novels was my admiration for the novelist and poet Peter De Vries. In the mid-twentieth century, his male-centered comic novels ridiculed religion and extramarital sex — often in the same book. However, the whiff of controversy, so delicious in his day, has not aged well, and some would say positively reeks. In Forever Panting (my favorite), an out-of-work actor divorces his wife and marries his mother-in-law, continuing to lust after his ex. In Slouching Toward Kalamazoo, a female high-school teacher carries on an affair with her tender-aged male student.

Such themes are not exactly fodder for popular humor these days.

Lest you think I’m preoccupied with peters, I’ll confess that the works of Peter Lefcourt also influenced me. The Woody is brilliant, and by virtue of its inside-the-Beltway setting, it qualifies as legitimately political satire. (Alas, whether Lefcourt was satirizing Gary Hart or Bill Clinton or both is a question not likely to be explored by any contemporary book club.) And he wrote Eleven Karens when it was still possible to bestow the name on a newborn girl.

As well, when I began to stir the pot of silliness on my own, the publishing business had finally been taken over by women — along with the belated recognition that, for decades if not since Gutenberg, the most avid readers have been women. The genre chick-lit had come full flower. Appreciating the polar opposites such as De Vries and Lefcourt, I coined the term boychik lit as a lodestar for sinking ships helmed by ill-fated peters.

So, by way of further explanation — as if any more of my rants were needed to cheer you on to root for Rollo — I append my essay “Boychik Lit” at the end of this volume.

Thank you for the use of the genre. If Rollo’s exploits bring a smile, you needn’t tell anyone.

Gerald Everett Jones

Santa Monica - June, 2022

Chapter1

My Confession

My name is Rollo Hemphill and I’m no pervert.

This little book is the story of what I did with my inflatable friend, and the mostly embarrassing consequences accruing therefrom. As to the details of what I did, I refuse to bottom-line them until you know me better. Please keep an open mind and grant me a few pages by way of exculpatory background before I spill it, which I assure you I did, must, and will do.

Don’t read too much into it, this compulsion to confess my sorry deeds. You might surmise I had to write this as some punitive form of public service, and rather than deny that ugly accusation, I simply won’t say. If I gave you that up front, it would beg a host of other awkward questions, such as how and on what charge I was apprehended, how my public defender screwed the pooch and reamed me, and how society takes a warped view of even the purest and simplest of natural human urges. In short, if I copped to all that now, I’d be giving away the ending, and every Lit 101 student knows it’s hard enough figuring out how to finish a first-person narrative without tipping off the reader on the first page.

But trust me. Let me apply some backstory by way of lubricant, and I promise you’ll get the whole thing in the end.

* * *

Way back when the root of all evil had not yet begun to flower, I was working as a car jockey at the Wuthering Palms Hotel. How, my old friends might ask, does an Exeter man find himself in such a menial position? I was lucky. My hacking career had been going so well that if I had not sent that self-incriminating email to the Feds, today I’d be doing a long stretch in Leavenworth. Too clever for my own good. Story of my life.

It was my Apple got me in trouble, and it didn’t fall far from the tree. My father is supposedly in Costa Rica somewhere, something about a hedge fund or junk bonds, maybe both. My mother has the house in Darien all to herself, grows prize roses, and drinks a lot of “tea.” What passes for her philosophy of parenting holds that if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all — so we never speak.

Long story shortened to not even a story, the Feds took away my encryption chip and made me swear I’d hacked my last, and, okay, I did some time. But they expunged my record because I was a month under eighteen when I let myself get caught. (By the way, I literally dropped out of Exeter. I leaped from a window after curfew, and they locked me out for good.)

At last, here I am parking cars at the Palms and thinking myself damn fortunate to have my very own legit Social Security number for once and a day job I can tell my friends about. If I ever have any.

On one of those dazzlingly bright California mornings that make rednecks back East flush with jealousy every year when they tune into the Rose Parade, I was thinking myself particularly smart to be out for a spin down Sunset in the Rolls Silver Cloud. (It’s the property of a guest who was booked into one of our bungalows for an extended stay.) Now, here is one of the few cars on the planet designed to optimize the ride in the back seat, and it being such a fine day, the sunroof open and the sweet scents of eucalyptus and jasmine in the air, my imagination naturally turned to wondering how many bare behinds had been caressed by that buttery-soft calfskin as upright conduct was driven ardently home to them while the chauffeur did his own driving home trying his damnedest to keep his curious, beady eyes on the road. I mean, what’s the point of owning the most luxurious car in the world if it doesn’t get you laid? (Attention span: Think of the boost you’d get from the throb of the turbines in a corporate jet!)

Thinking it pointless to concentrate on sex for very long unless it’s in the same room with me, I deliberately turned my attention to the incredible ride, the physical sensation of controlling the old gal, for all her hulk and heft. In this latter-day era of McPherson struts, rack and pinion steering, and computer-mitigated everything, the Silver Cloud is a miracle of traditional, conservatively bred elegance in motion. In the jaunty bounce-bounce of her coil and semi-elliptic springs, the saucy pump-pump of her silky pistons, her reciprocating ball joint — she has nothing remotely new, just standup workmanship in heavy metal. She held her course like a planet-sized rock hurtling through airless space, and if any of her old joints were the slightest bit loose from all those years of bumping and grinding, she gave not a whimper of protest. Oh, you Brits, you stuck-up, hedonistic hypocrites — you built a banker’s fuckmobile!

I’m obsessed with sex. Isn’t that normal?

As a matter of continuing education for potential career advancement, I was prone to using these little spins, supplemented by otherwise idle time spent in parked cars, to practice my improvisational skills as a shock-jock deejay. Perhaps because I hadn’t scored in a lizard’s lifetime, I was going through a Blue Period, trying for Howard Stern but with more edge. Personally, I would just as soon listen to real blues or even bluegrass at such times, but the voiceover style I was attempting was more like a heavy-metal shitstorm tantrum. Grabbing an empty bottle of Evian from the floorboard to use as a mic, I let fly:

“It’s Rockin’ Rollo the Rocknroller in the ER — electroshock radio — where we just keep shovin’ it atcha. That was ‘Can’t Get No More’ by the Skin Lollipops. Super-ficial! Next up, pud-whackers, it’s number seven on the charts, ‘Gotta Getcha’ by the Road Warriors. It’s goin’ out to Felicia from you-know-who, who’s you know what — gotta getcha!”

I can give ’em raw, if that’s what it takes. No sooner did I end my rant than the blues wafted over me for real. It’s not so much that I didn’t like what I did. My stylings, the inflections, the energy — the whole glib patter thing — was okay technically. I just didn’t like myself when I was doing it.

It helps the realism to be able to fade the music down going into the patter and up coming out of it, but if I’m driving and holding the mic, I don’t have a hand free to work my iPod. I could lose the mic, but my ego needed the prop.

The circuitous route of my mentations and motoring brought me eventually to the portals of my employer. I eased the old gal into the Palms and brought her to rest ostentatiously under the arch in the circular drive at the prestigious guest entrance.

My blood up from the stimulation of the ride, I leapt out with elan, looking every bit the playboy, I hoped, in my crested blazer, knife-edged gabardine trousers, open-neck crêpe-de-Chine shirt, and Morocco slip-ons (all celebrity castoffs from Goodwill). Tossing my silk scarf rakishly over one shoulder, I strode confidently down the welcoming red carpet, wanting to give the impression of a valued guest in an important hurry.

My way was blocked oafishly by Laszlo, our exceptionally short Hungarian doorman, who apparently did not understand his role in the script and instead of enhancing my image by making straight my way, interposed his diminutive, plump self dumbly between me and the door.

“Later, Laszlo,” I uttered with an aristocratic air as I shoved him gently but firmly aside, striving to maintain my forward momentum. He looked as though he were about to speak, which I noted with an ill-timed turn of my head, as I entered the huge revolving glass door. Whether he were about to caution me about some defect in the door mechanism or simply wanted to wish me a nice day, I never found out, because my looking back combined with my forward motion had the effect of lifting my scarf in the breeze of the door’s whirl, causing the tassels to lodge inconveniently between the door and the jamb, halting its rapid revolution, trapping me inside, constricting my neck, and very nearly choking me to death.

Perhaps confused about my intentions and not quick enough to prevent the mishap, Laszlo nevertheless bravely hurtled his small self to the rescue and began tugging furiously on the door. This must have been the opposite of the required action, because the door froze with a terrifying squeak, the scarf stretched tighter, and I could feel the blood rushing to my anguished face.

Pleading through the glass at the balding little man, my cries made no sound, for I could summon no air to stir my vocal cords. Instinctively, I strained my head to the end of its tether, which only served to wedge me in tighter and further constrict my windpipe. Laszlo’s worried face began to dissolve into a blissful pink cloud, and just as I was going under, I heard him exclaim, “Some big shot! Pullingk ven he should be —”

He must have decided then and there he’d be the one to change direction and threw all his hundred pounds at me.

“ — Pushingk!” I heard his exasperated cough as the door gave way, spinning me inside, loosening the stranglehold, granting me a glorious, dizzying gulp of air, and throwing me onto the ornate splendor of the Persian rug in the lobby with little Laszlo on top of me looking pathetically like a Pomeranian trying to hump a Great Dane.

With remarkable grace, I thought, he rolled off me, stood, retrieved his billed cap, and fastidiously brushed his uniform, finishing by dusting off the gilt epaulets. Adjusting his cap and straightening his tie, he looked down at me, an unusual angle for him. “Some big shot,” he muttered, then turned and waltzed back through the ill-designed door to resume his post at the curb.

With a weak smile of grateful appreciation and trying to suppress the idea I’d just had intimate bodily contact with a homely, short man, I stood slowly, expecting my pratfall had made me the humorous butt of the assembled crowd in the busy hotel lobby.

To my amazement, no one was watching. Not that the place was empty — far from it. There must have been fifty people in there, but my entrance hadn’t drawn the slightest attention. Instead, all eyes were on a half-dozen television screens strategically located at conversational gathering points in the large room.

One glance at a monitor told me there was no use competing with the most famous pair of tits in Hollywood.

Monica LaMonica, her cleavage cut so low you wondered how physical support was achieved, puckered up to plant a big, wet, passionate one on Buck Morehead, her leading hunk du jour. Ignoring the fact that such immodest décolletage was not the practice in the antebellum South, Monica’s costumers had her in ringlet curls, a velvet choker with a heart-shaped diamond setting off her ivory throat. Conveniently for the sake of historical accuracy on his part, Dick wore nothing above the waist but a gleaming coat of coconut oil.

Must be a fantasy sequence, I thought — knowing well, along with the rest of the free world, that The Edge of Endlessness is a contemporary Upper East Side melodrama centering on the engrossing peccadilloes of gorgeous and conniving professionals in today’s fast-paced, cutthroat media industry.

Realizing that my cover had not been blown, I sauntered over to the bar with a renewed air of overconfidence, there to greet Nigel, our redoubtable concierge, who was sipping a Midori neat, totally out of keeping with company policy about drinking on the job.

“What’s the big deal?” I asked him.

He shushed me, indicating the screen. “Jessica is going to tell Courtenay he’s history.”

“Not before he tells her he’s got a week to live.”

“That’s impossible. His transplant took. You out sick yesterday?”

I couldn’t take any more. “Why doesn’t she get the disease of the week?” I wondered, knowing it was a ridiculous question. Turning from the screen, I spied a copy of Loose Lips on the bar.

Four-walling her fame, as the publicists in this town would say, Monica’s color picture was on the front page of the tabloid. Above her trademark heart-shaped sunglasses and profusion of red hair, the headline read: “MONICA LaMONICA — SHE WANTS TO BE ALONE!”

Perhaps too loudly, I asked Nigel or no one, “When was she ever alone?”

“We’re telling them she’s in the south of France.”

“I see London, I see France. I bet we’re washing her underpants.”

He sneered as if I were some disloyal footman and went back to watching the steamy episode.

Having spotted her stretch limo on the lot just moments ago, I had a pretty good idea where I would find the hotel’s most notorious secret resident. I had another, more urgent reason to go there, so, resuming my air of bored nobility, I set off across the expansive lobby toward the beauty shop.

An older couple perched on a settee in the center of the room. (My guess was third-generation German from Milwaukee — lousy tippers.) He had a camcorder slung around his neck and a Map of the Stars’ Homes stuffed in a thick Michener paperback. All he needed was a placard: “TOURIST CARRIES $500 IN TRAVELERS’ CHECKS.” Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the two of them scoping me, assessing my St. Tropez look and self-important walk, wondering who I am.

Good question, I think.

The reception area of the beauty shop was empty and dark. Opening the inside door to the workstations, I caught my heart’s desire in an innocently erotic pose.

Felicia Ferrulo, a gorgeous, dark, hot-blooded lady whose ancestors must surely have been Sicilian, was bent over a draped woman in the chair. Felicia’s back was toward me, and her micro-mini had hiked up so the plump bottoms of her sweet cheeks peeked out, separated by a small wedge of hot-pink undies with lace trim.

Enthralled in the moment, I took a long, deep breath. Felicia! If she had given me a tumble then, all this would not have been necessary.

I expected to find Monica in Felicia’s chair, but it was another guest, one who was rich enough but fameless. At that moment, Ms. LaMonica was probably safely installed in our Bungalow B, where she’d registered last week as “Jayne Jones — Inquiries to Manager.” She had quickly developed a fondness for Felicia, who in her capacity as caregiver was a trusted member of the star’s life-support team. My contact with our stellar guest had been limited to opening her car door now and then, and my own survival sense told me to keep it that way.

Not finding the star there made me bolder. “Babe, we are gonna be so fantastic,” I muttered, thinking about kissing the moist lips under the pink wedgie.

Felicia paid no attention and turned to wash her gooey hands in the sink. Thinking I was still unnoticed, I walked up behind her and reached for the moon. But before I could make contact, my wrist was stopped and clamped tight as an iron manacle.

Her pouty face turned toward me now, and I grew all the more excited seeing she was flushed and sweaty from her labors. Her nails dug into my wrist as her wet-look rouged lips formed a sensuous, sneering French pucker. She blew a puff of air upward, dislodging a damp, dangling curl from her noble, perspiring forehead. “What we have is not necessarily a relationship, and my name’s not Babe.”

I distinctly remember starting to say, “We need to talk. I’ll drop by tonight with a bottle of Chateau —”

“No, you won’t,” Felicia said, cutting me off as she closed the door behind me.

Oh! I would walk on hot coals for this woman, but she knew I was already cooked, and she was not having any.

Chapter2

Shot Down

Dante had his Beatrice. For me it’s Felicia. Not only is the object of my desire heart-stoppingly beautiful herself, but she can also create beauty. As a qualified Sassoon graduate, she knows her scissor work and razor cuts, her lotions and mudpacks, her depilatories, dyes, and balms. Unfortunately for my span of attention on anything else but her, I see her every day at the Palms.

Ah! (Knuckle bite.)

She said we didn’t, but we had a relationship to speak of — that is, we were on speaking terms. She’d rushed me out of her shop today, but usually she didn’t seem to mind my stopping by on my break. She’d talk as she worked, sometimes even directly to me. (It sounded like singing, I thought.) I would listen and try to think of charming and witty rejoinders, but mostly I just stared in awe. She was genuine second-generation Italian, with that cappuccino-colored Mediterranean skin, jet-black hair worn in a passionate tease, red pouty lips that said “You don’t own me” (but dared you to die trying), and that little bead of sweat on her upper lip when she got steamed — which happened when she expressed herself forcefully, as she often did with characteristic Sicilian zeal. Many were the times I fantasized about that little string of sweat beads breaking out in the hot throes of physical passion induced by my ardent thrusting.

Ah!

Undeterred and having rehearsed my speech before the mirror at home, I dropped ’round to her place as promised. I carried a chilled bottle of Dom (borrowed from a room-service tray — I don’t make that kind of money). I sported a velour sweat suit — a comfortable, package-flattering ensemble that could be shucked quickly, I pictured, for that long-awaited, hastily consummated romp in her bedroom.

The apartment door swung open graciously at my buzzing to reveal her, drop-dead gorgeous in a floor-length silk evening gown with pendant earrings. Although I’m sure I mentioned earlier that day I’d be paying a visit, I hadn’t said anything about stepping out, especially in such style. So there we were — she dressed for the ballroom at the Ritz, me for pizza and TV, albeit with a respectable sparkling wine.

No matter. We’d both be undressed soon enough, hiccuping and giggling at the oddity and delight of lovers’ first coupling.

A puzzled look passed over her face like a wispy cloud temporarily hiding the sun. “Rollo, that’s right. You said you had something to ask me, but I didn’t think you meant you’d be showing up, uh, here.”

If not now, not ever. “I was just wondering whether you’d be interested in getting married. To me, I mean.”

The little cloud became a thunderhead and shot a bolt into her brain. I thought she stumbled back, but maybe she just blinked.

“You’d better come in,” she said numbly.

It was the first time I’d been to her place. The walls were filled with her paintings, the exclusive subject matter of which was puppies staring out with abnormally large, watery, affectionate eyes. Apparently, my love was the Keane of canine portraiture.

Ah, there was so much more about her I would learn, and eagerly!

She didn’t invite me to sit, didn’t offer a beverage or snack. In fact, she seemed disoriented in her own house. I stood frozen, holding the bottle of Dom behind my back.

Will she guess I swiped it?

She turned her head away (to wipe a tear?) and on turning back said, “I didn’t see this coming, Rollo. People usually, I don’t know, date first.”

“I’m new at this,” was all I could find to say, playing the Fool card of naivete, since worldliness obviously wasn’t my strong suit.

From somewhere within herself she summoned fire, and I got a flash of my mother’s nine-pound Pekingese Shotzi, who quickly bites male dogs of any size squarely on the nose as they approach. Neither of these gals need ever fear a Rottweiler in a dark alley.

As abruptly as I’d popped the question, she turned me down, and, ignoring the implications on the duration of my visit or my life’s entire future course, I dumbly asked for the reasons why.

“Why would I marry you is a much shorter list,” she explained carefully. “Let’s keep this positive.

“You’re cute and sweet,” she continued, “and you have a nice sense of humor when you let yourself relax.” This girl didn’t have any trouble expressing herself, a trait I really admired, even as I was stung by the sharp truth of her list, not to mention its conciseness. I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.

“But why don’t you...?” I couldn’t help it coming out as a whine.

Her glance flitted from her watch to a wall clock, and I was impressed that she would bother to synchronize them, especially at this moment.

She became impatient and apparently decided to break her own rule about avoiding criticism. “For one thing, you’re unfocused.”

“I turned a corner in my life today,” I protested. “I decided you’re my future.”

“And you’re mine?” she asked incredulously as if it were an undeserved condemnation. “Did you apply for a job at Charles Schwab? Win a Rhodes scholarship? Lose a rich uncle?”

“Hey, one step at a time.”

“Okay, Rollo. For example. Where’s the ring?”

It was a very good question. I had already told her I was new at this, so that excuse wouldn’t work again. “I thought we’d pick it out, you know, together.”

“So I could co-sign for the time payments? A ring is supposed to be two months’ salary, Rollo. Now, I’m not saying I’d insist on that, but I’m giving you some perspective here.” She paused for emphasis. “You can’t afford the prize in a Happy Meal.”

“Babe, I got plans.”

“Yeah, two rubbers in your pocket,” she smoldered. I marveled at her X-ray vision (she was even looking at the right pocket). “My name’s not Babe.” Was her upper lip breaking into a dew? “And you’re clumsy. If we had a baby, you might drop it.”

Where does this come from?

I searched my memory for some inexcusable gaffe I’d committed in front of her, but I was at a loss. It was such a silly reason that I began to see her objections as nothing more than anxious denial — a reluctance to confront the intensity of her true feelings for me!

I started toward her, an approach that I meant to end in a comforting embrace. As I said, “Everybody worries, but that never happens,” I raised my arms in supplication, swinging the ice-cold bottle of Dom. Its slick, clammy surface defied my grasp. The bottle slipped from my hand and thudded to the floor, connecting with the toe of my right Reebok and inducing a sharp pain and what would eventually become an ugly multicolored bruise.

“Owwwwwwww.” Desperate for any affection at this point, I would gratefully accept sympathy. Although the embarrassment hurt more than my foot did, I went for an agonized wince and gave a little hop.

I thought I detected genuine concern. But just then, the doorbell rang, and her expression changed to panic.

“You can’t stay,” she said, indicating that menace lurked on the other side of the door.

“But we —”

She was conflicted now about whether to answer the door or tend my foot. “Did you think I dressed for you?”

A sense of my own boyish charm returned, perhaps because I was in free fall, with no hope of pulling out. “Well, now,” I said, “I didn’t think you were taking the dog for a walk.”

She didn’t have a dog, which suddenly struck me as odd, given the recurring theme of her artwork. It would certainly give us something to talk about next time. I’d invite her for dinner some night, try to find a way to suggest casual dress and modest fare.

She primped before a mirror, straightening a wisp of hair and delicately wiping the delicious sweat from her lip, finishing in a sexy pucker.

“His name is Stan,” she said emphatically. “We’re going to the opera.”

What a droll sense of humor, I thought. It was her deft way of easing my pain without resorting to physical touching, not the choice I would have preferred. “You can’t take a dog to the opera,” I laughed, appreciating her joke.

I knew a good exit line when I had one, and as she moved toward the door, I grasped the knob and opened it wide.