And there she was, pretty as a cool breeze on a hot day, polka-dotted and smiling, standing at my door a whole 10 minutes early.
I’d planned a grand dinner for two. I’d sprung for a R500 bottle of cologne.
I’d cooked the ultimate bulgar and spinach pilaf and spent the afternoon waxing the teak floors. All these things I was regretting.
You see, she brought a friend.
“Sorry, I tried to call to find out if it was okay if Paul came, but you didn’t answer.”
I must have had Bill Withers’ Just The Two Of Us on too loud to hear the phone ring.
“I hope there’s enough food,” she said. “Oh, there’s definitely enough for three.” By which I meant, there’d probably be enough for Paul alone who, by the looks of him, could stop a Humvee with the simple furrowing of his low brow.
Four days after the Rugby World Cup final, he was wearing a Springbok rugby jersey. I could only assume that either he owned more than one of them, or was an aggressive washer-drier. Either way, his blood was green and he had yet to see a physician about the condition.
Don’t get me wrong. Paul turned out to be charming.
Sure, the conversation took a while to get going. I was a little distracted by his hand on her thigh. Things went a bit quiet when she mentioned a guy at work she thought I was perfect for. And when we attempted to discuss President Thabo Mbeki’s plummeting approval rating, he had some trouble coming to grips with the percentage system.
I probably shouldn’t have asked why he had his rugby jersey’s collar turned up. He argued that he was shielding his neck from the sun. In self-defence, I accepted his explanation, despite the fact that it was past 9pm and we were indoors.
It wasn’t long before we began to find common ground, though. Bonded, even.
If not like two brothers, then like a brother and his little sister.
I’d missed the big game, so Paul recounted the action with lump-in-the-throat conviction.
His description of a member of the opposition having his face rubbed off against the turf was pure poetry.
“I’ll drop off a copy on video tape,” he said. I said: “I’ve already ordered the DVD.”
The girl was hypnotised. Even a joke about how Chianti is the Fanta Grape of the wine world failed to draw her from the tractor beam of manliness emanating from Paul, a man with shoulders so broad he could walk down both sides of the street at the same time.
The Big Game was a victory for The Real Man and a crushing defeat for the illusion that we will ever admire anything as much as a good bit of bone-crunching.
Sure, we’ll nod and smile in the general direction of the man wearing the Amanda Laird Cherry shirt and the baby carrier. Even rugby players appear in GQ and Cosmo Man spreads, wearing fine suits and not running into one another. But, for a guy, getting in touch with your feminine side does little to advance your chances of getting in touch with a real live woman’s feminine side.
Does this all sound like bitterness? I don’t mean it that way. There’s probably something in the fact that, of all the reports I got in school, it’s the pre-primary one that reads: “Lev can run, jump and catch a ball” that I’m most proud of. Sadly, my athletic career assumed a sharp downward trajectory from there and I can no longer claim proficiency in any of these disciplines.
If I could do it again, I would play more sport. Eat more sausages. Construct fewer sentences.
After all, they’re all wearing rugby jerseys on the evening news. Not just the players, not just the fans, but the presidents and the newsreaders too. When JM Coetzee won the Nobel, nobody wore his shirt and drank beer through a funnel in his honour.
Who wouldn’t want that much love?