Going Dutch

The pipes will freeze if you're not careful. And this is what Heinrich had come to tell us, Kino's landlord, the Dutch expat who'd spent twenty years in Manhattan having sordid affairs with his coworkers at the United Nations. I touch his arm when I laugh, when he says things get complicated if you date the boss. And we talk about the sexy forty-something that lives in the loft above the office, a recent divorcee and a friend of his. Heinrich in his liberal Europeanness and artistic soul tells me to approach the older man should I pass him in the stairwell, to invite him for a drink. "He's just devastated," he informs me, elaborating that the man's got a good job as a private pilot for the Canadian equivalent of the Warren Buffet family. Thirty minutes later he tells me I'm a real character, and that he will call the both of us sometime for a drink, the pilot and me, "something informal." A Dutch date where we each cover our own hides and worry not about owing something to the other person.

This morning: frozen pipes. And my new friend calls in the afternoon: "Jordan, I'm so upset with you." This isn't friendly banter; this isn't mild flirtation. I've lost my chance at a Dutch-organized date with the man upstairs. So I guess this is how I pay--my end of the bargain. This is 2007, sisters, and chivalry is dead.