The art of bedding a girl

The telegram reads: New Library upstairs 1605. Day after tomorrow, Wednesday. Before your 1700 shift. Please please please. If you feel half as miserable as me you feel terrible. Cliché forever – ABC.

A fabulous love letter delivered in caps; white strips.

I look at the faded orange envelope, delivered to my doorstep on the 12th floor of my flat a lifetime ago and for the life of me can’t remember if I made the rendezvous.

I hope I did because he paid per word for that telegram. My little Aristotle with his grey hair and black frames ... and I was too stupid to be his Jackie O.

How I regret it. This little American worked around us not having phones: telegrams instead of emojis, a taxi long before the word Uber existed.

A telegram? Was always bad news – and delivered to your door with a sense of urgency – unless it was from Ari who could pay for the extra pleases even though he lived three blocks from me and I’m a block from the rendezvous. Style, I call it.

He, after all, wrote for Reader’s Digest at 20c a word in the late ’70s and used my pearls. And hoped I would get into James Michener’s The Drifters. I never did, but still got the book inscribed: From Ari, this Book, to Carine – my ABC.

But he did introduce me to Advocaat, yellow, sticky and sicky, in a club at 3am. I hated it and walked out with the glass. The bouncer took exception until Ari slipped him five bucks – and, true to form, the bouncer was knifed just after we left.

Ari was ecstatic. We changed the world through a bribe – a word not in my vocabulary 40 years ago, just saying.

But I’m sitting with a faded telegram and wonder how we ever found love without cellphones, WhatsApp, Tinder.

Simple: extra effort. And no cellphones. Three rings from a public telephone, post office box you gave your parents after the movie.

Pick me up, I’m safe.

A telegram delivered to my door? I am so unsafe.

But we walked your extra mile, Ari. No emoji, ABC. That’s my real smile a lifetime later. Thank you, artful dodger. You stole my fantasies.

You must’ve loved me.