My Hot Saturday Night

It's 8pm on a particularly mellow Saturday night when I take my book to my favorite Greenpoint polish spot - my sanctuary - and prepare to relax, uninterrupted. I order red borscht with dumplings, the kielbasa and white sausage plate and a big bottle of Lech premium brew, and proceed to eat a long, slow meal, alternately turning the pages of my book and carving my meat into bite size pieces. Forty-five minutes later my is table is clear but for a half-empty beer glass, and I recline cross-legged, engrossed in my novel.

This book of mine is my first-ever Danielle Steel novel (which I am reading for a writing project, I swear), and it has proved an unbearable assignment. I am just beginning to hit my stride when I look up to see the waitress holding a second enormous beer bottle and a fresh, tall glass. "From the gentlemen at the bar," she tells me. I know well enough to be nervous. Slowly I turn my attention to the banquette in fear, curiosity, and to reluctantly give thanks.

My benefactor is grey-haired and probably sixty years old, smiling sheepishly from his stool. "Of course," I think to myself. "Who else takes themselves out to dinner on a Saturday night? Little Miss Stacia and desperate old men." This is a harsh and probably inaccurate appraisal, but the truth is, I have been approached many times by much older men while dining alone, especially on weekend nights when twenty-five year-olds who are expected to be out doing exciting and irresponsible things with their young lives must seem like easy prey. Here I am, gorging myself on pickled cabbage, reading romance novels like I'm eighty-seven. I am probably asking for it.

The grey-haired man beckons me over. His alcoholic donation makes me feel guilty enough to oblige. He tells me his name is Kazimir, but that I should call him "Kaz." Kaz tells me he moved from Poland to the United States twenty years ago and that he hasn't been back to Poland since. He tells me his mother still lives there and won't come visit him in the States because he's without a wife and kids. His quick declaration of singlehood signals to me early on that I'm in trouble, but for a while our conversation passes without incident. He asks me what I'm reading. I show him "Passion's Promise" and tell him how shocked my grandmother was to hear I'd never read one of Steel's novels before. I'm not sure how much of this Kaz understands, as his English is a bit shoddy, but he tells me his mother reads Danielle Steel in Poland and his sister reads her in Canada. "Everyone around the world reads this," he tells me. Then he holds the book up in prayer position between his two flat palms and says, "Whatever is in this book, it is life." This man has obviously never read any Danielle Steel. I am also hoping for his own sake, he's drunk.

"What are you doing this Friday night?" he asks me. "You will be here, no? "I'm having a birthday party here, Friday night, and you will come." It is time for me to get the check.

I ask the waitress to total me up, but Kaz has insisted he will pay. I just want to go home. Kaz won't accept that I'm not coming to his birthday party on Friday. He tells the waitress, apparently a friend of his, that he has "a situation," and that she should talk to me "like girls talk," about coming to his soiree. "I think I'm the one that has the situation," I tell her.

I thank Kaz for the drink and for dinner and wish him a happy birthday. He gets up from his stool to help me into my coat. On my way out the door I shake off the shadow of unwelcome advance, tuck my romance novel into my bag, and for the first time understand why women have ever wanted to read the damn things in the first place.