The Man With the Truffles

There’s a measure of truth to the adage that good things come to those who wait. What they don’t bother to tell you, of course, is (1) how long, exactly, that wait is going to be, or (2) that it may take so long you will have forgotten what it was you were waiting for when it finally arrives.

In a nutshell, I was tired of waiting.

The tumultuous relationship with “Dick” had steadily chipped away at my faith in the dream that I could ever have more than a part-time, wishy-washy paramour. Dick, you see, had a hard time extricating himself from his estranged wife, Estelle. “It’s just not a good time” became his standard reply every time I queried when, exactly, their break would be final.

You’ll never meet someone new,” my best friend warned, “as long as you’re keeping yourself hopelessly attached to someone else.” While I knew she was right, there still lingered the anxiety of never meeting anyone at all. Thus reconciled to this somewhat drekky half-life until I could find the courage to break free, I decided to take advantage of an especially aggressive airfare war and go to Scotland.

It was my second trip to the U.K. The co-worker who decided to join me—and who shared the popular view that Dick was a jerk—saw it as a chance to research her ancestry and maybe even catch a glimpse of Mel Gibson playing “Braveheart.” I saw it as an opportunity to not only contemplate the murky future but to give Dick plenty of time to miss me.

The first few days had been earmarked for sightseeing around London. “…and then I’ve blocked out all of Tuesday for a side-trip to Stonehenge and Bath,” my traveling companion informed me. It was a responsibility at which she excelled—planning every hour of our two week itinerary down to the last angstrom of detail. While such micro-managing behavior ordinarily irritates the hell out of me, I was content to let someone else do all the thinking for the time being and, thus, allow me to save valuable brain-space for thoughts of Dick. The fact she also volunteered to do all the driving and calculate the fluctuating exchange rate was an added bonus.

Bath, for those of you unfamiliar with English history, dates back to the Romans. What these early warriors may have lacked in terms of educational/literary pursuits was more than made up for by their ability to recognize a good party town when they found one. Bath—with its abundance of steaming mineral springs (rumored to yield strange and magical powers)—fit the bill for the perfect Roman Holiday.

Quicker than you could say “Et tu?”, they had erected what would be the forerunner of Club Med, along with a number of imposing statues of themselves around the perimeter so as to leave no question regarding authorship of the whole idea. Off came the togas, in came the tourists, and Bath today still looks pretty much like the Bath of yore, except that the pool now resembles an Olympic-size petri dish which would probably dissolve anything that, literally, set foot in it.

It was just before lunch and our guide had directed us to the final stop on the tour of this ancient spa—an indoor well of water that, in the right light, resembled a giant community hot tub. “The legend,” she explained, “says that anything asked for at this magic pool will come true.”

As I withdrew £2 from my purse, my traveling companion cautioned me to ‘wish wisely’. Obviously she knew I was going to wish for Dick to come to his senses and make good on his romantic promises. “The problem with putting a specific name on a wish,” she said, “is that it cuts out all the potential candidates who could meet the same criteria.”

Fortunately, I was in a listening mood that day. I closed my eyes and made the request, “May a knight in shining armor be waiting for me when I get home, and may our love and trust in one another be everlasting.”

Kerplunk!

So what did you wish for?” I asked my friend as we were leaving.

She smiled. “I wished that Dick would get exactly what he deserves.”

TWO WEEKS LATER…

To my dismay, there were only two messages on my machine from Dick when I got home. The first was to whine that he missed me and that he and Estelle were definitely going to be thinking of talking about maybe getting a divorce. The second was that they were going to Lake Tahoe on vacation.

I dragged myself into the office on Monday, still suffering the effects of jet lag and yet another punch in the heart. It was raining that day. I remember that because the next person who came through the door was wearing a western-style overcoat and hat that had seen recent sprinkles. What I noticed first, though, was that he had the kindest smile and a pair of blue eyes full of sparkle and life.

Apparently my eyes caught his attention as well and he complimented me on them. “And in that moment you said ‘thank you’,” he later told me, “I felt as if I knew everything there was to know about you.”

Later’, of course, is the operative word in this tale of love at first sight.

For nearly 3 years after that first hello, he’d stop by for impromptu meetings with the Department’s director and various administrative officers. And each time, he’d linger at my desk a little longer. Oftentimes, he’d also bring a single truffle in a small white box from See’s Candy, having once asked me what it would take to get a meeting with someone and being told, “I can be bribed with chocolate.”

No matter what kind of day I was having, my spirits were always significantly lifted whenever the door opened and he walked in. I’d find myself saving up my funniest stories to share with him, just to prolong his being there. Whether or not anyone else noticed this pattern of flirtation, they didn’t say.

Certainly from our own respective viewpoints, it was a habit that wasn’t going to develop any further. I simply assumed that a man as nice as this one was probably happily married. He assumed that someone like me was taken as well. In fact, when I once shared with him that I was taking my annual spring trip to Washington DC with a friend, he pictured me tucked away in a quaint B&B in Virginia with an adoring beau who looked like Tom Selleck. Little did he know that I was referring to my best friend, Susan.

So why did he never ask?” you may ask.

The bottom line is that Mark is a man who possesses more honor and integrity than anyone I have ever known. It wouldn’t have been right, he later explained, to have a personal relationship with someone who worked in an office with which he had official business. The additional fact that I might have said “no” would have made it awkward in his subsequent visits to the office.

Things changed dramatically in February of 1997, owing to two major events.

The first was Valentine’s Day.

I was still seeing Dick and being miserable. “I’m bringing you a surprise at lunch,” he promised. I found myself hoping that it would be Estelle’s head on a platter…or at least her name on divorce papers. Instead, he showed up with a pathetically scraggly bouquet of daisies and carnations in a vase of water which looked like it had come from Bath. My first reaction was that he had my real flowers—preferably roses and a lot of them—behind his back. He didn’t.

So there I sat all afternoon with my limp-looking bouquet while delivery-after-delivery of breathtaking red roses arrived for my co-workers. I didn’t even have a romantic evening to look forward to. It was, after all, Valentine’s Day which, according to Dick, was not one of those favored times to desert one’s maniacal spouse.

At five minutes to five, the door opened and in walked Mark. “These are for you,” he said, almost sheepishly, and handed me a red box from See’s containing not one but six of my favorite truffles. What I didn’t know—but had started to suspect—was that he was handing me more than a box of chocolate that day; he was handing me his heart.

The second event that month was that I got a promotion which meant a transfer out of downtown and into a field office.

I saw Mark the day after I had accepted the job and boldly informed him that “choice dates are still available” to take me to lunch to celebrate the promotion. To my delight, he calendared one immediately. What I didn’t know is that he went back to his office, jumped around in glee for a moment, and then went into panic at the prospect of spending an entire hour with this woman he had been secretly in love with since 1994.

Actually, it turned into much more than an hour. Three, to be precise—two hours and 55 minutes of which I spent yakking away out of nervousness. I gave him my new office number when we parted. “Maybe we can stay in touch,” I said.

No one was more surprised than I was when he called me two weeks later to see how the job was going. “We could get together for a glass of wine sometime,” I said.

The wine date proved to be yet another benchmark in our growing attraction, capped by my closing remark that I hoped we’d always be “buddies.”

BUDDIES????? Arghghghgh!

I don’t want to be her buddy!” his brain raged during his drive home. “I want to be her husband!”

The next time I heard from him was April. Having remembered that I always celebrate my birthday for the entire month he called to see if “any choice lunchdates” were still available.

I told him The Day itself was free.

His first thought was “Yippee!” His second thought was, “I wonder why that clown she’s going with isn’t whisking her off to someplace romantic. What a jerk.”

I agreed to meet him at noon in the courtyard of The Firehouse, a popular restaurant in the historic sector of Sacramento. I arrived a few minutes before he did and, in fact, wasn’t facing the courtyard gate when he entered. Almost as if knowing he was there, I turned at the precise moment he walked in.

Movie magic.

Think of Jane Seymour in “Somewhere in Time” when she turned to smile at Christopher Reeve while she was getting her picture taken. At least that’s the sunlit memory indelibly locked in Mark’s brain. He also knew at that moment he couldn’t leave the restaurant that day without declaring his feelings.

It was another three hour lunch, at least an hour and a half of which was spent with neither one of us saying anything, just holding hands across the table and not wanting to ever let go.

He proposed to me that day and I accepted, the irony being that we hadn’t even exchanged our first kiss or had our first date. It’s also uncanny how many things we had in common, in spite of never talking about any of them during what is usually the Q&A period of exploring a new relationship. By the time we left The Firehouse, we had determined we’d marry in a castle, honeymoon in the Scottish Highlands, and live happily ever after.

Having finally wished wisely and well, I can only add that Once a Knight is More Than Enough for a lifetime.

P.S. The wish about Dick also came true. He is still with Estelle.