Beauty

She remembers the first time he told her she was beautiful. It was on their third date and it was over dinner at the local Spaghetti Factory (all his budget could afford). After sourdough and small talk, halfway through their second glass of the house red, he casually threw it sideways into a conversation about exercise. "You run seven miles everyday? I'll have to tell my friends that's how you stay so fit and beautiful."

He said it with a hearty laugh and she laughed right along, hoping that her exaggerated smile would hide the reddening of her face. And she wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Was it a joke, did he mean it, was he being kind or cruel or clueless, was it a casual slip of the tongue? All these possibilities were calculated, weighed one against the other, filtered through an intuitive algorithm. But before the cyphers could sort out the permutations, their waiter returned and it was time to order.

On his part, the utterance was purposeful insomuch as he had meant to throw the line in somehow. He had wanted to speak the words so many times before but he is awkward, insecure, clumsy around women and he didn't want to scare her away by being too forward. And so the bit about telling his friends about her beauty was by design. The reference to friends was his way of inserting one degree of separation between complement and complemented because he wasn't telling her she was beautiful directly, he was telling her what he was going to tell his friends. And the way he saw it, not only was he telling her he thought she was beautiful, he was also telling her that he was telling his friends about her. A two for one deal, if you will.

Dinner progressed swimmingly. Italian, even when inexpensive, always makes a meal something of an event. And though the pasta was boiled beyond al dente and the sauce lacked any sort of refinement, it was more than thirty dollars would have gotten them anywhere else. At the table, the topic of beauty (hers or otherwise) never came up again, but that one line was on both their minds.

The rest of the date went well. Buoyant on the swirl that comes from being lightly dusted by alcohol (they'd finished the bottle between them), they segued effortlessly to window shopping then a movie then cafe cappuccino and finally the walk back to her house.