Other female undergraduate students seemed to indicate to me that this was the right thing to do. They smiled at me and greeted me warmly in the immediate aftermath of my encounter in the hall with Ann Marie. A couple of weeks later I walked on the sidewalk in mid-town Manhattan. As I crossed a crowded busy crosswalk, I saw Ann Marie looking at me and walking in the direction towards me. I smiled as if to say to her, "You see, I care enough for you not to pressure you about stuff, and now look." She seemed in shock as she passed me by.
Based on later interactions with other students and Tommy, my thesis advisor, I guessed that Ann Marie worked at an art gallery that represented Tommy and happened to reside near that intersection where I encountered her. In June of 1991, I went to that gallery to check things out. This was after I'd not seen Ann Marie for several weeks after that encounter in the intersection. My trip to the gallery represented a last ditch effort to get with her, because up until then, I had the expectation that I'd have heard from her somehow, because I figured that the whole gesture of letting Ann Marie go and then seeing her on the street would impress her enough that she would appear in my life somehow. Like at my graduation ceremony, but she never did.
I went to the Gallery, asked the guy behind the counter if one of my former fellow grad student classmates was working that day, the guy behind the counter said that Lance was on vacation. i asked a question or two about the current exhibit. I heard an attractive-sounding, young-sounding woman on the phone at a desk through an entryway behind the front desk. I couldn't see this woman, and I wondered if it was Ann Marie. She finished talking on the phone as I looked at a brochure. The guy behind the front desk cleared his throat, I waited a few seconds for the woman from the back to appear up front or something, then I walked out when nothing like that happened.
Fuck her! It was as much about me giving her a chance as it was about her giving me a chance. As I saw it, my move of letting her go at the end of the semester only to see her on the street was good enough for me, even if she implied that it wasn't good enough for her. As fixated on her as I was, it took a lot of self-discipline to let go of the whole deal in that gallery and walk out like I did. I went back to the gallery a week, week and a half later, but it was like flogging a dead horse by that point, and nothing came of it.
At this one business a few years ago, September 2014 into January 2015, to be exact, this virgin girl fired a shot across my bow. I was fifty, and she was like, twenty-one. After almost two months of hemming and hawing, where I spent a month trying to avoid this girl, I decided to just deal with it. I took my time and gave her a chance, but I never asked her out. I busted her dumbass little game instead, but I had totally given her a chance to prove herself worthy of my efforts to get to know her socially, and she came up short because I figured out that she just wanted to win at some stupid game.
There was this other much younger woman at this business just this past couple years. I liked her lot. I would allow myself to be around her to see if she had much of an interest in engaging with me. Again, I didn't try to force any interaction. That one shook out the way it did when I asked this young woman a question related to her job a couple of times. That was the most I'd ever talked to her over the several years period I would see her at this business. I must have really liked her to let things go on for so long and to not force anything that whole time. Anyway, after I'd talked to her those couple of times about something related to her job, I went in there and she gave me this snarly look, as if I disgusted her somehow. That ended that deal right then and there, and I said so on this blog. That was last March, I think.
I gave that virgin girl four whole months to prove herself somehow, and she never did, and I gave this more recent girl a long time, in large part because I put our whole deal on a back burner, but give her a chance I did. There's this very young girl I talk about in these last several posts. I must like her a lot, because I'm willing to give this deal some time too. With that virgin girl, I really didn't have much choice but to just slow things down, pick my spots, and make a decision. I could take her or leave her, really, but I did give her a chance. I like this current girl enough to give her something of a chance.
But here's the deal. It seems to fall on me to set the pace and the agenda in these deals, so I will do just that. If this girl still works at this place in the coming days, weeks, or months, I will see to it that things are resolved to my satisfaction, if the past experiences I relate in the above passages are any indicator. I may or may not make some big move to get with her, but I will probably resolve matters to my satisfaction.