in wearing his fitted Jack London number. He had Rhonda the receptionist tittering like a schoolgirl. I heard the commotion and looked up from my computer to see him there, leaning over reception with his elbow cocked on the upper lip of the front desk. He was invading her space and she was enjoying every minute of it. Clearly, she was in the ‘some women do’ category, just like me.
Andy was doing what I now call his ‘Fake Salesman Laugh’.
It goes: huh-huh- HAAAA! Two short, one long and is always disproportionate to the joke. He can do it on cue and often does it AT me because he knows I am onto him. But Rhonda, a woman who fancied herself a fun sort of lady when the lights were low, was chuckling into her chins the way middle-aged women do when young men flirt with them. She was a soft target if ever there was one. I went out to meet him and he looked up at me and said “Hello,” as though my sudden appearance was the most enormous pleasure he’d had all day.
“Andrew Straw?” I asked.
He extended his hand and did that thing where he looked right into my eyes. “I’m the garbage guy,” he said without shame. “And you must be . . . ?"
“Nell, the bus shelter girl. Well, there’s a few of us and I’m one of them.”
“The Bus Shelter Girls, sounds like a band.”
“Or a community dance troupe.”
Then he did something else that endeared him to me. He sang a doo-doo-doo version of “do the bus stop” and did the bus stop disco moves. Right there in reception, with our austere modern logo as his backdrop.
Who is this fool? One side of my brain was thinking, while the other romantic, idiotic side found it stupidly attractive. Which just goes to show, there’s no formula for human attraction. What you say you find attractive, is actually not what your heart has in mind at all.
Rhonda of course, was HOOTING with laughter. Then she ruined it by yelling, “Medic!”
A look passed between Andy and I; conspiratorial. “Well,” I said, ushering him away from Rhonda’s gaze, lest she get too distracted to answer the phones, “This way, garbage guy.”
The meeting went like all meetings go; a lot of people talking and no one saying much of anything that couldn’t have been put in a bullet-pointed email and sent in place of Andrew Straw the Garbage Guy. But being an all-female design team of three, we appreciated the testosterone in the room, if nothing else. Andy was the kind of man who oozed testosterone. Even my mentoring senior partner, Ellen Thomas, was not immune to his charm. After she’d appraised his notes on the brief with her glasses on and asked a few very pointed questions about how things aligned and why so many recycling bins were needed in that particular spot, he even broke her cool exterior by saying, “I’m guessing you’re the captain of the bus shelter girls?”
To which I snickered and Ellen see-sawed forward in the way she does when something really makes her laugh. Then she busied herself making notes on her brief and said casually, “We’ll be down at The Duck and Swan later this arvo, Andy—team drinks—if you want to join us.”
As though she wasn’t up to anything, anything at all.
I was ordering the second round at The Duck and Swan when Andy appeared across the other side of the bar. His eyes widened and he pointed at me as if to say, ‘There you are!’ which I also found endearing; he wasn’t playing it cool at all. He was totally up front about the fact that he was looking for me. To a twenty-seven-year-old woman, who was used to men being all coy and elusive about their intentions, this was a revelation.
He made his way around the crowded bar and gave me a peck on the cheek.
“Hello, hello,” he said.
“You made it.”
“I never turn down a beer invitation.” This much still holds true, although from a wife’s perspective, not so attractive.
Ellen was happy to see him, too. She was playing matchmaker, it turned out, which was another of her favourite things to do, although I’m not necessarily saying she has a flair for it.
In the past she had attempted to set me up with a ‘dear old friend’ of hers, a lovely guy who had mysteriously never had a serious relationship with a woman.
“But Tony’s a lovely guy,” she promised. “You’ll really like him.”
Turned out I did like Tony, mostly because he was gay and I love gay men. I knew it as soon as my ‘date’ turned up brandishing a classy bottle of pinot grigio, which he simply ‘raved’ about. He also talked a lot about his mum.
On the night of that attempted match, Ellen kept pulling me aside and whispering excitedly, “How’s it going? Do you think there’s chemistry?”
To which I could only say, “Ellen, we’ll talk about this later.”
Back at the Duck and Swan, Ellen ushered Andy to sit and then instructed me to sit beside Andy. She ‘scootched’ us together so our thighs were touching. For all her attempts, this would be her crowning triumph as a matchmaker and she has never let us forget it. She’s the sort of person who still likes to mail a card or send a thank you note. Every year on our anniversary we get the obligatory card from Ellen, a thoughtful note written in her impeccable architect’s hand.
Her self-appointed role on the night was to interview us both, like the middle chair host on a panel show.
“Andy, Nell is one of our most talented designers. I was her tutor at university and I handpicked her for this project.”
“Andy, do you have any brothers or sisters?”
“Nell has one older sister who lives in San Francisco, tell him about your sister, Nell.”
“So, Andy, have you done any travelling? Nell has been to the US to visit her sister, but never to Europe, can you imagine? She’s twenty-seven and never been to Europe!”
Sometimes Ellen gets so invested in her role as matchmaker she forgets when to withdraw her presence. And so, for another two rounds, Andy and I played end-chair guests on Ellen’s matchmaking chat show. She was right, however, there was chemistry, she just needed to get out of the damn way.
Which was why I eventually did something very forward that was somewhat out of character. Generally I am the sort of person who sits back. But every now and then, when I see something I like, I just step forward and elbow everyone else out of the way.
I excused myself and went to the bathroom. On my way back, I stood at a distance from the table where Ellen and our group were sitting. I waited for Andy to look up. Then I gave him a ‘Let’s get out of here’ gesture and exited stage left. It was a flick of my head and a raised eyebrow, which he says he’s never forgotten. And his instant recognition of it proved, beyond a doubt, that we were simpatico.
Still, he took his time about it. I stood on the quiet inner-city street, wondering if maybe I’d been too confident. I’m
