Tonight it’s just me and that lady over there with the black dress in all her middle-aged glory. I should go say something to her. I really should, because you let a moment of this magnitude go and you’re gonna stumble around like some lost soul the rest of your days, muttering to yourself about the one that got away. Or like that guy in Citizen Kane—the funny-looking fellow who takes care of the accounts—who says this really sweet thing about seeing a girl on the ferry and not approaching her and regretting it ever since then. It’ll be like that, and I’ll just be sore at myself for not doing it. I’m already running the little home movies in my head, you know, about what it’d be like to grab her hand and race out of here, steal a car, maybe, or just get married, have a kid, and grow old. Those sorts of things. I mean, I think most men carry around a secret library full of films they’ve shot of every woman they ever met. Crude little sequences strung together that help us imagine what life might be like with a particular person—buying a car, going to Disneyland, standing around in Sears while she checks the price on bath towels. Despite popular belief, guys don’t mentally undress every woman they meet; they simply thread them up and run them through the imaginary film projector in their heads to see what comes of it. And that’s what’s happening right now. I’m watching her, my hostess, as I pour our pretend life out onto the white wall of the living room. I want to know her. Love her. Just talk to her, even, pull her out onto the pool patio and find out where she grew up, went to school, why she married that jerk who never laughs and green-lights lousy movies.