last thursday night part II

so i stay at christine's again because we are going to carpool to sausalito the next morning for a client meeting. i decide to go out for dinner instead of cooking [smart move to avoid all those 'what it was like cooking for you moments']. so we go to shabu shabu. good food, great conversation, nice hip san mateo neo-nipponese crowd and decor. you could almost imagine that you are far away from suburbia. i get distracted by an attractive nihongo-jin thirty-something hipster stand next to our table waiting for something until i notice the gawdy nails. total sensory fantasy bail out occurs in 32 nanoseconds. [it is a strange thing to experience this sitting acros the table from your not-quite-ex-wife. who if i would have asked her what she thought of this woman would have given me a straightforward assessment and probably in a as-matter-of-factly manner. she might even point someone else in the place who seems more interesting. she is very cool that way].

we stop for ice cream after leaving the restaurant. it is funny to see her eat ice cream. she says, since i can't eat wheat at all, a little ice cream isn't going to hurt. well, yeah...it's not like you have to watch what you eat. [she works out everyday. our friend rob jokes, what? as if she isn't skinny enough? i tell him it's better than taking out the excess energy at anger management classes! hehe!!!]

on the stroll back, we walk by this beautiful church. it is an old stone building with beautifully polished huge gothic arched shaped doors. it has a cute garden strewn with a couple of large oaks and beds of newly bloomed flowers. we remark that the church reminds us of the one we got married in. i say that it seems all the episcopal churches i've seen tend to look nicer, none of them are of the late 60's post-modern-post-le corbusier-star-trek-gone-bad-ugly. they seem to be always constructed of stone or brick. there is a moment of mutual reminiscence going on the we are interrupted by her cell phone ringing. it is her ex-boyfriend. i can tell. i was kind of wondering when he would call. we walk and she talks. i keep an eye out for asian-suv drivers as we cross el camino real. we make it back to the apartment building safely and she is off of the phone. she says she'll call later. she tells me it was marc, yeah, i could tell. she adds, i don't really want to talk to him...[trails off].

later she comes out of the bedroom, they shrank it! huh? shrank what? i thought she was talking about the bedsheets or something. turns out it was the cover for the mattress blanket she had sent to get dry cleaned. it was six inches short of its width. i say, it was laundered. not dry cleaned. they screwed it up. that cover is not cheap either. moments later, i am standing across the bed helping her put on new sheets. another one of those remarkable "hey, i've done this before" goes through my head. hmm...the more i hang around her, the more those moments happen.

so we sleep in the same bed again. but different, it is one of those things that you can only describe the experience from the inside and it is in a language that is not made for anyone else but you. yet even then, the vocabulary is something that you feel is just beyond your grasp. language communicates what you feel, what you think and what you sense. but lying there on the bed next to christine the three universes of interaction seem not to be coinciding in my mind.

anyway, the highlight of the evening was christine saying that she really wanted to go to vietnam with me if i didn't mind. [the trip to vietnam is part for work, part for fun] sure, i don't mind. [in the back of my head, hmm...that is where we went for our honeymoon]. this should be very interesting...