The Anglophile by Laurie Gwen Shapiro Page A

basketball date retrieves his cool lighter from his pocket again.
    I extend my palm for a better look. “I noticed that before.”
    He hands it over. “Do you smoke, too?”
    â€œNo, I just wanted to see it.”
    â€œIt is a Zippo. This model is called The Viper.”
    â€œMy uncle once told me that all of the Royal Air Force pilots used to carry only Zippos in the Second World War.”
    Kit nods. “Your uncle must be an old man if he was in that war.”
    â€œHe’s fifteen years older than my mother. She was an accident.” I give it back. “Um, by the way this is a no-smoking floor.”
    â€œDo you care?”
    I’m not about to give him a sermon about my father’s early death, but I did go to the trouble of requesting a non-smoking floor. I glance up. “I do.”
    â€œVery well,” he says with a small, pained smile. He puts away the lighter.
    â€œI appreciate it.” Suddenly I feel at a loss for words. “Do you mind if I close the shade? The light is blinding.”
    â€œBe my guest,” he says nicely, although he looks antsy now that cigarettes have been given the kibosh.
    Goodbye view facing a gorgeous slice of the skyline of Chicago.
    â€œCan I ask why you have a cot in your room?”
    â€œI’m guessing there was a family here before me. The maid probably forgot to take it away.”
    â€œThat’s probably it.”
    I have to fill holes of silence. I am a Jewess, and genetically programmed to do this.
    â€œI can remember when my nursery school cots were rolled out and the nap record went on.”
    â€œYou can?”
    â€œMost likely I remember many days rolled into one. It was always the same record, the soundtrack to the movie Born Free. ”
    â€œThat’s the lion film?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œVery melancholic if I recall?”
    â€œâ€˜Pretend you are Elsa, the poor little orphaned lion cub,’ our liberated braless teacher would say as the music filtered through the room: ‘Born free…’”
    â€œâ€˜As free as the wind blows,’” Kit finishes the lyric line.
    â€œI can still see the shadows racing along the ceiling as I listened, pushing away my thoughts of sleep.”
    â€œYou know of course that you have a wonderful way with description.”
    A Cambridge grad thinks that? “Thank you.”
    There is the sound of a vacuum cleaner in use down the hall.
    Okay, enough. What happened to the randy ass-pinching? His renewed “good breeding” is taxing my patience. I’m thinking maybe Gary is right and this bloke could even be gay until, perhaps emboldened by the industrial soundtrack, he stands up, sits next to me, and kisses me gently on my lips.
    I breathe out. “I really hoped you would do that.”
    â€œI would have been more of a gentleman but with no smokes, see, I needed to speed up the action.”
    I hold up his hand and examine it in front of him. “Tough fingertips.” He smiles as I chew on one. We buss and nuzzle but we don’t get any further carried away; we’re both well aware that there will soon be a room service door-knock. When it comes in the form of an earnest rat-tat-tat, Kit unbolts the door, and in scuttles a twenty-something room service attendant, a young man with a perceptive smile.
    After Kit is back in his chair I reach toward the teapot but he puts a hand on mine and says, “Let me be mother.”
    â€œExcuse me?”
    He pours for us. “That one is a British expression. It just means let me serve. ”
    â€œNew to me. I like it. Men don’t mind saying it?”
    He stops to mull over the question. “I never thought about it too much.”
    I watch him eat, and admit that I’m afraid to eat in front of him after reading in a passage in a British novel about Americans spearing our food like barbarians. He is balancing everything on the back of his fork, and without