a forty ninth story...'when I paint my masterpiece'

She was playing with her hair and listening to him talk.  It wasn’t easy.  He took it as a sign she was interested.  She wasn’t.  In fact she was bored out of her skull.  ‘When I paint my masterpiece…’ he was saying.  She was looking over his shoulder at the door.  ‘When I paint my masterpiece’ he repeated, hoping for effect.  She examined her nails.  ‘When you do what?’, she heard him the first time.  He took a sip of wine.  ‘I am a painter’ he said grandly.  ‘I see’ she replied and regretted opening up another line of conversation.

‘I didn’t bother with art at school..You can’t teach people to express themselves, can you?’ he asked, chewing on a cocktail stick in the corner of his mouth.  She shrugged: ‘I don’t know’ she said, but inside she was thinking how she always ended up on dates like this, and that it seemed sometimes there wasn’t a normal guy left out there anymore.  ‘You see teachers do not understand freedom of expression, they do not see that a painting should directly reflect a person’s character’, he cleared his throat and pressed on.  She couldn’t believe she was listening to this.  It felt like she was in a lecture.

The boy with the stammer hadn’t been too bad.  In fact she had thought him rather cute, but something about him made her impatient.  But the banker had been a bore, and the other artist she had been out with...  Back in the now, he was still indulging himself, ‘Art is more about concept than design.  Art is…’  But her mind quickly returned to the boy with the stammer and then she moved onto thinking about famous people with stammers.  James Stewart was the first one that came to her.  Somewhere she had read how he cured his stammer by putting a stone in his mouth, she didn’t know why, but at that moment she wished she had a stone: she thought she could put it to several uses.

When at last they asked the waiter for the check she felt relief washing over her in a tremendous wave.  In fairness, he had agreed to pay for the meal – ‘the pleasure is all mine’ he said, and it had been.   While he was visiting the restrooms for the last time she sat and looked around the dining room.  There were several young couples chattering away, helping themselves to each others plates, all shiny and happy, all having fun.  She put on some lip balm, closed her purse and wanted so badly for the waiting to be over.