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from another country or state any more interesting that the ones who live close by? Why do I risk my health or safety in embarking on these encounters when deep down inside I have doubts? One word comes to mind: hope.

5  
    Don’t Waste Too Much Time on the First Phone Call  
    October 1998

    After an eight-month hiatus from Internet dating, I decided to repost my profile and give it another go. Saul, an American Jewish cosmetic surgeon wrote me a lovely letter accompanied by what appeared to be a recent photograph. I say recent because you can never be too sure (right?). He was attractive and bright-eyed, so I felt compelled to give him my phone number. By the time I returned home from work, Saul had called twice. No sooner had I changed into my jeans and T-shirt, than the phone rang. It was Saul. Instinctively, I looked at my kitchen clock, then my answering machine, then back to my kitchen clock, all the while talking to Saul and walking from room to room. He had called three times within the last hour! The first call came forty-eight minutes earlier, the second, only eighteen minutes ago. This unnerved me. I received three phone calls in one hour. Like in the cartoons, I felt a tiny little poke in my lower neck (remember that little red devil with trident in hand, perched on one shoulder, and the angel with the harp on the other?). Well, the poke I felt was not from an angel’s harp!
    I could have easily jumped to conclusions, like I have recently trained myself to do, and categorized Saul as nothing more than a desperate nutcase responding to a photo of me. Magically I heard the angel’s harp all of a sudden in my left ear. So I chose to give him the benefit of the doubt. After all, he was a surgeon. Maybe he was between surgeries or patient rounds and he stole an hour to reach me. That’s normal, right?
    The conversation began in the sweetest of ways. “I hope I am not disturbing you. This is Saul, you remember, right?” How could I not remember, when he had left two messages thirty minutes apart, and no one else had called me that day, which was a dry day for me.
    “Sure, Saul. How are you? I got your messages, and I was just thinking about you.
    “Really, that’s reassuring.”
    Reassuring? I had found a cosmetic surgeon with self-image issues? If so, we had that in common. Maybe he had just chosen the wrong words.
    After an hour and ten minutes of verbal volleyball, I gathered the following information about Saul. He was a forty-one-year-old cosmetic surgeon, educated at NYU, and had recently completed his fellowship at NYU Medical Center. His favorite things were playing and watching hockey, attending the opera, wine collecting, and playing tennis. He resided in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and was unmarried but had hopes of marriage in the future.
    The phone call flowed so well, I was eager to meet him. I painted this mental picture of him as we spoke. I pictured him somewhere between Ben Affleck and Harrison Ford, with an air of professionalism apparent.
    We planned to meet a few days later outside a café in the West Village, for Sunday brunch. Since our conversation had gone so well (and was inordinately lengthy), I agreed to a meal date as our first meeting. As I approached West Tenth Street and Greenwich, I asked the cab driver to drop me off a block or so before the café. I needed at least a block’s walk to gather my thoughts. Also, during that short stroll, I might catch a glimpse of him from a comfortable distance. As fate would have it, that is exactly what happened! He was exiting his brand-new BMW right outside the bistro! I stopped dead in my tracks. So abruptly, that the woman behind me pushing her child in an open stroller smacked into my Achilles tendons. While we exchanged polite apologies, I somehow lost sight of him. Obviously, he had gone in. With less than half a block to go, the little pitchfork poked me in the neck again. What was wrong with what I just saw? What was it about his physical