“Something bad for me,” she said. “Caffeine and sugar and salt things. French fries, probably some Coke. You know, just stuff that jolts your system. You order.”

“Okay,” he said. “Two cheeseburgers well done, a large order of fries, two Cokes, and whatever other carcinogens you have. Thanks.”

“Oh,” she said, “that guy Gary was going to set me up with called.”

“What guy?” he said.

“I told you,” she said. “Gary was gonna get me a blind date with this friend of his.”

“Really?” he said. “I don’t remember you telling me that. What does he do?”

“He’s a screenwriter,” she said.

“Oh, a screenwriter,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said, “he just did a script for Spielberg.”

“Really?” he said. “So you talked to him and . . .”

“Well,” she said, “he has a huge vocabulary.”

“It sounds like maybe it’s a little too huge,” he said. “I mean, normally you don’t notice people’s vocabularies, do you? It’s like with your teeth. You don’t want people to say, ‘Good caps.’ You want them to think you have a nice smile. A huge vocabulary.”

“No, no, not too huge,” she said. “But he did use two words I didn’t know.”

“Really?” he said. “What words?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, I understood the sense of the sentence, but I didn’t know the words.”

“Really?” he said. “So he’s trying to impress you with the way he talks. So, when are you going out with him?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “He said he’d call me back. He was at his agent’s office and he had to go. I don’t know what he looks like or anything, but he was funny. I told him about the Oedipal thing, about my father leaving when I was very young so I knew how to pine for men, but not how to love them. So he said, ‘You probably would have been perfect for somebody in World War Two. You’d meet him and then he would get shipped overseas.’ And I said, ‘Maybe on our date I could drop you off and you could enlist,’ and he said he would just go out and rent a uniform. So he was very funny.”

“Really?” he said. “That’s funny? I guess that’s funny. You told him that, though? You told him the thing about the pining? Why would you tell him that?”

“Well, he was a very smart guy,” she said. “It was interesting. Gary says this is a great guy. He’s very young.”

“Really?” he said. “How old is he?”