What I learned: he may be perfect on paper. Reality is another story.

A colleague fixed me up on a blind date. I spoke to him beforehand. His voice was deep. He owned his own law firm. He owned an apartment in Union Square. A penthouse. He was single. Supposedly straight. We were to meet in Bryant Park. He told me to meet him on the Southwest corner and he would be wearing a Yankees hat.

This is where things started to go wrong. You see, my sense of direction is non-existent. And I will overthink until my brain explodes. Southwest corner of the city? Southwest corner of the park? Southwest corner of the street?

“I’ll be in a black sundress.”

There is no baseball cap. There is no one here at all. Except for some pigeons pecking at pizza, some teenagers in a pack on a bench.

“You’re not wearing a baseball cap?” I said. His first lie to me.

“Yes, in case Steve was playing a trick on me. You could be really fat. It could be a joke.”

We went to the oyster bar in Grand Central. Drank, talked. He started mocking strangers at the bar. Making fun of people. That night, a refrigerator overheated in the famed tiled restaurant and the oyster bar burned down.

Sitting in the wrap around porch overlooking the city, the Empire State Building in the bedroom window, the water towers, blinking lights, I wondered about dating a man just for his apartment. “Can’t you just close your eyes and think of something else?” my friend Cathy asked.

He called me “Grand Central.” His computer was filled with investments, Vanguard statements, and porn. His mind was filled with perversion. His heart, like him, not present. His body, his skeletal system was like a fish, the spine and body long, all the same, no curves or crevices. His butt was as if God had taken a black Sharpie and simply drew a line on his back. He drank gin martinis every night, popped Viagra and sleeping pills.

When he won a million dollars, he said he wanted to go to Vegas and have sex with hookers.

“He looks like a rat,” my brother said after we broke up. “Big ears. Let’s call him rat boy.” My brother made up a song. “Rat boy salon.” It was about his nice apartment.

Years later, he married his cleaning lady, who smelled like Fabuloso. She was thinking of something else.