COLUMN: Little white lies for love

From Joe Chasnott's, "Ferrari Krishna," Fall '96 From Joe Chasnott's, "Ferrari Krishna," Fall '96An older woman'e attentionFrom Joe Chasnott's, "Ferrari Krishna," Fall '96An older woman'e attentionprompts half-truths galore.From Joe Chasnott's, "Ferrari Krishna," Fall '96An older woman'e attentionprompts half-truths galore. We all get bitten by the love bug every once in a while. It's a shame no one ever told me the bite could be lethal. She was peering into Abba Eban's Memoirs of a Middle Eastern Nomad: From Damascus to Eilat, Hummus on the Side. She was attractive in an unusual way: secretive, all-ruing, mysterious. Maybe it was the black patch over her left eye. I checked the index of How to Satisfy a Woman for any references to eye patches, but the closest I came was a chapter on prosthetic fingers -- and you had to be really gutsy to try that on a stranger. Gutsy I was not, so I took the standard approach and asked her if she came to the bookstore often. "Only half as often as I used to," she replied, and I realized this was going to be an uphill battle. "Call me Michelle," she said, and, as I mentioned earlier, I made the mistake of assuming that this was her name. She was 27, a doctoral student in the English Department at NYU, and a huge fan of Art Garfunkel. So we had one thing in common, but I decided to play this one for all I could (i.e., lie my ass off). I proceeded to tell her that I was 25 years old. "But you just said you were a senior at Penn," she reminded me. "Oh, I am," I replied. "I was in the military for a while after high school." (Lie number two.) "Where?" "Oh? Fort? Evanston? ville. Yeah, Fort Evanstonville, it's right on the border of Evanston and Evansville, so they just combined them into, 'Evanstonville.' You know, in Virginia." "I'm from Virginia!" "Yep, West Virginia," I continued. "Secret operations and stuff. Artillery. You know, secret artillery." (Lies 3-7, inclusive.) "Did you see any action?" she asked. "Well, there was an all-female base down the road, but we only saw them on alternate weekends. So, no, not much. Not much." (Not a lie by any means whatsoever.) She gave me her phone number at work, and I assured her I'd give her a ring in the next few days. Our conversations were boring and predictable at the beginning: where are you from, do you have any brothers and sisters, what's your favorite form of capital punishment? the usual small talk. Over the next few weeks, our five-minute conversations developed into 25-minute conversations, and, eventually, into 20 five-minute conversations (for a total of 100 net minutes) spaced evenly over the course of her workday. Until one day, that is, when she said, "Let me give you my home number." Yes! Michelle and I went out for seven weeks. Seven magnificent, glorious, glow-in-the dark weeks. Never before had I met a girl who made me feel so comfortable, so myself in such a short amount of time. She said, "I love you," after three weeks. I farted in front of her after four. There was no limit as to how far this relationship could go. Except for that age-gap thing. "You know, I saw your Bar Mitzvah certificate on your wall," Michelle told me after 6-and-6/7ths weeks of our relationship had passed. "It was dated 1987. What year were you born?" I quickly did the math? if I was going to turn 26 in December, that means I must have been born in? "1970," I told her. Holy cow! 1970? A year earlier my parents had graduated college! That would call for an altogether new explanation if I didn't handle this quickly. "Yep, 1970," I reiterated. "I'm 25." "I know," she said. "That means you were 17 at your Bar Mitzvah." Whoa! I had somehow forgotten about that element of the story. Before I could reply, Michelle continued, "Is that because of the Jewish calendar thing? Don't Jews use a different calendar?" Bingo! I had my explanation. "Yeah, it's because of the lunar calendar. Jews follow the lunar calendar. So it's a bit off from the American one. You know, because of the moon--" "--you fall behind four-and-a-half years," she finished. "Yeah, well," I explained, "It was a leap year. See, in the American calendar, you have a leap year once every four years. But in the Jewish calendar, you add four years once every year. So that's why my Bar Mitzvah was when I was 17. It's all because of the moon." "I see," she replied. "Gabe," I told my younger brother later that evening, "don't ever lie to a woman. She'll nab you every time. Then she'll spit on you, drag your name through the gutter and see to it that every girl in the county does the same. You'll be on your own, lost, abandoned -- without a friend in the world." "Right," he said, and I started up the stairs to my bedroom. "Where you going?" Gabe asked. "I'm just going to my room to read," I replied. "I've got this great book: How to Satisfy a Woman Every Time."