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you always wear look like they’ve been through the Boer War.” Charlene helped me look through the size-22 petites, although she shopped on the second floor, in the tall section of Lane Bryant. Petite was one of the euphemisms clothes designers used to make us short, fat babes feel better. No way I was ever petite.
    “ A few pounds would do me absolutely no good. I’d have to lose at least fifty to even tentatively qualify as pleasantly plump. And I refuse to buy a new pair of jeans when I have at least five pairs that would fit me perfectly if I could only lose fifteen pounds but I can’t lose even ten pounds so there you are.” I was out of breath.
     
     
    Three days later I was on a plane to Florida. I hate airplanes. The seats are too small and I get dirty looks from fellow passengers who have to sit next to me. Then I have to deal with the pain of descent when my ears explode. Gum does no good. By the time I hit the ground I’m deaf for a week. Finally, my bag is always the last one to come through the baggage carousel.
    On this flight all I could think about was Sheldon. There was the usual alta cocker trying to make a pass at me to see if I’d be open to a little post-flight dalliance but I didn’t bother to respond to his compliments. The flight attendant came around with a snack pack that actually looked appetizing but I turned it down. I asked for a vodka martini instead although I never drank on flights. What I really needed was a tranquilizer.
    After our theatre date, Sheldon still hadn’t and I was so desperate to hear from him, I‘d started checking my cell every five minutes, but that little message icon was just sitting there not jumping up and down. I couldn’t call him because he hadn’t left his number and when I looked at my Caller ID list all I saw was “unknown caller” at the times he’d called me. It was incredibly frustrating. I couldn’t exactly Google him—I only knew his first name. I couldn’t stop thinking about his eyes, his smile, that hard body. Maybe a little too hard, but at least he didn’t have to work out every day to get that way. I replayed our night at Fiddler in my head over and over. Why would he have cried on my shoulder and opened up with me like that if he was planning on taking off? Actually maybe that was the reason—he figured he wasn’t going to see me again so he could tell me the truth. I could go around in circles endlessly with this kind of reasoning.
    If I hadn’t recorded our interview, I would have started doubting my own senses. What did I really know about him? Could he really be a vampire? Was I imagining the white skin, the lack of reflection in the mirror, the pointy incisors? Could he have just been trying to impress me? Vampires are so trendy these days. Maybe he was angling for a reality series, filmed at night of course. Actually, that wasn’t a bad idea. I resolved when I got back to find out if there were other vampires, maybe a vampire family who would agree to having cameras set up in their lair, wherever that was. I started imagining crumbling Victorian mansions in New Orleans, and then I remembered that Sheldon was a Jewish vampire who lived among the Hasidim in Crown Heights. OK, a brownstone would do. We could film local color during the day and Jewish vampires at night.
    My fantasy was to break into TV one way or another, maybe produce a reality series. It was a long shot, but I had very little going for me work-wise these days. I was tired of working for Bottom Line and had burned out on magazine work. Too many prima donna editors who assigned a piece, then kept changing their minds, then killed whatever I had spent months writing, paying me a mere twenty-five-percent kill fee if they paid me at all. The print industry was dying anyway. The Internet was taking over, but there were so many wannabe writers out there that websites could easily get free articles. Besides Bottom Line , I more or less depended on infusions of cash