by MARY ELIZABETH (LEACH) RAINES
He sits next to me, sneaks a quick up-and-down glance, and smiles. “Tell me about yourself,” he says.
The strong scent of his cologne is overpowering. It reminds me of the liquid hospital soap I used in the clinic bathroom after getting all the requisite shots—you know, the ones that are required for working in remote places on other continents. Most people over the age of 15 would recoil at the heavy swirls of fragrance emanating from him. Not me. I am fine with the smell.
That’s probably because my nose is used to being overwhelmed by far more obnoxious scents, like the chemicals in the lab. Or the sweaty guys at the job site who labor all day in the sun without the benefit of regular access to showers. Thus I don’t mind a bit that simply by virtue of sitting a few inches away from him, the stench of his cologne already clings to my dress and will remain there long after I wash it.
My dress. I swivel to face him and cross my legs, feeling glad that I decided to wear a dress instead of my usual cargo pants—although all those pockets in the pants are handy for carrying a myriad of tools, and even better, I don’t have to hold in my stomach when I’m wearing them, which I must do in this slinky blue dress I’ve donned. The dress has no pockets. That alarms me on some level far more than any smells could because I am so used to having pockets. Still, I’d put it on in hopes that it would make me look more approachable, and the scent-laden guy seems to be proving me right.
I’m also happy that I’ve worn the earrings with the mosaic rhinestone patterns on them. They flatter my face and take attention away from the thick lenses of my glasses. When I reach up to push my glasses back, I also check the earrings to make sure that they are still fastened, fearing that they might slip off because they are just clip-ons. It has been so long since I’ve worn pierced earrings that impenetrable hymen-like flesh has grown over the holes in my earlobes.
This man with the strong cologne who is curious about me has gorgeous hair. It’s not quite gay-gorgeous—darn it; why does their team get all the best-looking men?—but still, it is really good hair. He pushes back some untethered locks that have fallen onto his forehead. They apparently prefer being there and tumble right back down as soon as he removes his hand. I’m not used to seeing good hair on men. The guys at my job usually wear baseball caps, never turned askew in some rakish fashion, but sensibly protecting their faces from sun and sweat. It isn’t pretty when they take their hats off. I often wear such a cap myself.
I say, “What would you like to know?”
“Well,” he says, still smiling, “for starters, what do you do?”
I really don’t want to tell him. Whenever I answer that question, men’s pupils contract and they quickly find excuses to bolt away, which has left me with very few opportunities to wade into the stimulating waters of flirtation. Even I am aware that the pupils of someone’s eyes grow larger, not smaller, when they are interested in you.
I fiddle with my strawberry margarita. To color-coordinate with the rosy drink, the bartender has coated the wide rim of the margarita glass with extra-large blushing-pink Himalayan salt crystals.
He asks again. “What is it that you do?”
Thinking wistfully that I will soon have to say adieu to that tempting head of hair, I finally answer his question. “I’m a paleogeneticist.”
He makes me repeat it two more times, but to my astonishment he does not run away.
“What does a paleogeneticist do?” he asks.
At first I stammer a little. He thinks I am tongue-tied because my job is difficult to explain, but that isn’t it. I am simply (and delightfully) floored because this heady man is actually showing interest in me. Taking in a deep cologne-saturated breath, I forge ahead and launch into my answer. I tell him how, on my latest project, I painstakingly supervised the extraction of the hairy stomach contents of an Ice Age wolf, encased them in a sterile container much the way one does with a heart ready to be transplanted, and flew with it back to the lab—the one full of nasty chemical smells—and then, after assiduously slicing off tiny bits and analyzing them to find out exactly what that wolf had eaten 14,400 years ago, I’d found that the wolf’s final dinner had turned out to be a mammuthus primigenius, otherwise known as a wooly mammoth, and its DNA showed conclusively there’d been no inbreeding, revealing that the mammoth had come from a healthy population….
I stop and flush, realizing I’ve been blabbering for way too long. I do that because I truly find my work stimulating. As noted, however, men usually roll their eyes as soon as they hear the word paleogeneticist and quickly make excuses to leave. To my dismay, just like all the rest of them, he does not respond to my chatty rant, not even giving me so much as an affirmative grunt. He avoids eye contact so that I cannot see the inevitable shrinking of his pupils. It seems that once again, in spite of the blue dress and earrings, I’ve blown my chances.
“Understand—we didn’t find an entire mammoth inside the wolf,” I mumble in a final pathetic joke, trying fruitlessly to make it better. “I’m sure he had to share it with the rest of his pack.”
The silence is disheartening. Crestfallen, as I wait for him to come up with the inevitable excuse to get away, I turn my gaze to the as-yet-untouched margarita and compulsively begin counting the pink salt crystals coating the rim of the glass, because that’s the way my mind works.
As I count, I start to stick my hands in my pockets in defeat, and then sadly realize that the dress doesn’t have any. Rather than sit here wretchedly while waiting for him to flee, it occurs to me that I can save my dignity by being the first to leave. I decide to tell him that I have to use the ladies’ room, and then escape out the back door. Mentally rehearsing my speech and preparing for flight, I peer over at him.
His head is still lowered. That wondrous, glorious head of hair (with just the teeniest bare patch on the crown) fills my vision, and the potent scent of his cologne floods over me, blotting out my scheme to run away.
Instead, I switch tactics and bravely crow, “Penny for your thoughts?”
He raises his head, looks up at me with a guilty face, and says, “Oh, I’m sorry. I was counting how many salt crystals there were on the rim of your margarita.”
Of course we immediately fall in love
ONE YEAR LATER
We have been reasonably happy together, but today I am going to break up with him.
This morning I was doing some online research, browsing through the internet to discover if there were any new paleontology tools, the kind that can deftly slice through the skin, flesh, and bone of a fossilized animal. The computer brought up a news article that it decided pertained to my search. I was surprised to see the picture of a younger version of him accompanying the story. Naturally, I began reading it.
It seems that a few years ago my lover had been married. As I read on, my curiosity turned to dismay, for the report said that he had murdered his wife. Over a period of five days, using the same kinds of tools that I was looking for, he had meticulously chopped her body up into small pieces and flushed them down the toilet. For most people the smell of decay would have become unbearable by the fourth day, but if he had been wearing his trademark cologne, he probably hadn’t noticed.
He was busted when his wife’s finger, still wearing an engraved wedding ring, got stuck in the city’s wastewater sewage trap. The arresting officers were so horrified by the gruesome circumstances of the murder that they failed to read him his rights, so he was was freed on a technicality.
That is not why I intend to break up with him, though. I am breaking up with him because he has started to go bald.
***
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