You Had Me At A Glance

The beautiful girl, the silver wig, the hot nightclub with its impassable velvet rope, and jealousy.

We’re away celebrating our 40th anniversary. This post, originally published March 2024, has been edited for brevity. I’ve also noted the influence of my jealousy, a pro-mating trait, in accelerating our romance.

My wife Debbie and I met in 1984 when I was 22 and she was 21, brought together through a series of improbable and random events including, notably, my first glance at Debbie’s face.

There are more substantial foundations for a relationship than an instant perception of beauty. But at that time in my life, no other spark could have created such a fierce and relentless desire.

In middle school, I’d overheard a girl say about me, “how could anyone possibly be more ugly?” That pronouncement was not just an indictment, but a verdict from which I had no appeal. So I had a long history of shyness around girls and never thought I’d be worthy of the love of one who I thought was beautiful.

I would have been unable then to articulate what beauty meant to me, but thinking back now on my teenage crushes––Olivia Newton-John, Stevie Nicks, and Lindsay Wagner (the Bionic Woman)–– I can see a similarity in how they looked. Faces more round than sharp, light hair, and clothes that were modest. ¹

Would I have been happy being with a beautiful girl even if her beauty had made her vain, prideful, and spoiled?

These are questions I can’t answer because Debbie did not believe she was beautiful. That disbelief, or misbelief according to me, made her avoid the pitfalls that can come with beauty.

Maybe the key to our coming together was the gap between my appraisal and her own. She’d had many boys fall for her. Some had worshipped her, some had fought over her. But none of it seemed to have gone to her head.

Later, I learned that Debbie was shy. Especially in crowds. She was often intimidated by other women. The combination of her shyness and her looks led some women to think of her as aloof, unapproachable, unlikeable.

But all that was far in the future, and the night we met, neither of us was shy.

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When I first met her, my wife was wearing a silver wig. I was at the crowded bar of a night club called Area. It was October 28^th, 1984, I was twenty-two, and Area was having its moment as the Manhattan nightclub no one you knew could get into. ²

The scene outside Area on a typical night

But this was a Sunday night, and Area had been commandeered by the Jewish Guild for the Blind’s Junior Committee for their annual benefit. Pay twenty-five dollars and on this one night the velvet rope would drop for you.

My best friend Steve was determined that he and I see the inside of Area. He had taken responsibility for my social life but I was reluctant to go–––a rainy Sunday night, a long trip all the way downtown––but Steve was persistent, and the path of least resistance was to go with him and leave early.

Steve and I were at the bar when we were approached by two girls. The more aggressive of the two and the more suggestively dressed––fishnet stockings, low cut blouse, a witch’s hat––came up to Steve. Her name was Gail, and a moment later I lost sight of Steve, of Gail, and of the tip of her witch’s hat.

I was left talking with the other girl who turned to grab candy (a Rolo) from the bar. I saw her face in profile and then head on, fringed all around by her silver wig, and I thought, this girl is beautiful.

When we started speaking, there was a pleasant flutter of excitement in my chest, like the feeling I still get when I know I’m about to receive very good news. I was serene and without guile so I said whatever came naturally to me. That seemed to work as we walked and talked and explored the different sections of Area.  

We inspected the tableaux vivant––the live actors undulating behind glass.  We checked out the communal restrooms with shared sinks for men and women, avant-garde for its time.

Debbie moved freely in her simple red dress. She wasn’t encumbered by a pocketbook or any other accessory. The club was mostly in shadows, and when she smiled, there was a flash of light to compete with the flash from her silver wig. I’d never seen her without the wig so to me it was a natural part of her, something that served to highlight her face.

Once we had circuited the club, we stopped and continued talking. Did we talk about deep and important things? Yes, provided you were as passionate as we both were about the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3. ³

She thought it was funny that I had no idea what she actually looked like. She took off her wig, and her blonde hair come tumbling out. Somehow I knew what I had to do next. I asked for her wig and put it on. She laughed and told me it looked good on me. Later, I learned that by putting her wig on, I had compensated for anything awkward or off-putting I might have said.

Debbie suggested we leave. We walked outside into the mist and the rain. We stepped into a narrow doorway for protection. We stood inches apart. It was a long and passionate kiss. I felt both the physical thrill of the kiss and the thrill of knowing I was kissing her.

We returned to Debbie’s apartment on 23^rd Street. In the semi-darkness of Debbie’s bathroom, I saw on the door a framed photo of an extremely handsome man with an impressive physique. Was that an old boyfriend? If so, why put a picture of him in her bathroom? If she ever saw me shirtless, would that be the end? On closer inspection, the buff boyfriend in the bathroom photo turned out to be Richard Gere in his role of “Mayo” in An Officer and a Gentleman.

On Halloween, Debbie and I went to a downtown restaurant so we could catch glimpses of the famed Greenwich Village Halloween parade with its outrageous costumes. At dinner, I told Debbie that my favorite childhood Halloween costume had been an astronaut helmet that had a working visor.

She told me that she had a serious boyfriend, Bob, one semester behind at college. An eighteen month relationship. She felt guilty that I didn’t know.

I remember looking down, not knowing how to react. I looked up and said what I felt. “I don’t care.”

That weekend, Debbie declared that she needed to see if I would eat sushi. I’d never eaten it, she’d loved it since it first came to New York in the 70s. I passed her test as a beginner (salmon and shrimp).

This was a girl who knew her own mind and had certain non-negotiables: sushi yes, smoking no, and, I later learned, no upturned collars or sockless loafers or anything flagrantly preppy.

December approached, and Debbie had not yet broken up with Bob or told him about me. I decided to take Debbie away with me to LA the last week of December.

Before that, however, I went with my family to Palm Beach and Debbie stayed in New York. She was with Bob who had come back to New York from college.

It upset me to no end that she was with Bob. I was a perfect, terrible idiot to my family in Palm Beach. Like it or not, jealousy helps our genes survive even as it makes us and the people around us miserable. ⁴

When Debbie and I met in LA she told me she had decided to break up with Bob. She would tell him after our trip. It’s what I had waited and longed for.

My reaction was muted, which surprised Debbie. It surprised me too. I was happy, but I was also solemn. I knew that something momentous had happened. Debbie had loved Bob, but not, she said, in the way she loved me. Her decision meant that our relationship would advance. My thoughts stopped there. Beyond “advance” was too much to take in all at once. ⁵

One night on that trip, she and I went to Vegas, and I suppose the glow she gave off in her white dress made people ask us if we were on our honeymoon. Back in New York, we started talking in code about marriage, dancing around it with wordplay that left just enough room for doubt to amuse us.

In June I uttered the four word question that we both knew was coming. We were married in November, just about a year after we met.

Writing this post was traveling back in time. The more I thought about that night, the more I remembered and the more emotional I became. The vividness of my memories made me feel once again that fluttering of excitement in my chest. ⁶

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Question for the comments:

There was a primordial aspect to my pursuit of Debbie since I was competing with a rival and jealousy is a genetic survival trait. ⁷

Our emotions have been created by many thousands of generations of genetic sorting under primitive conditions. So are we unlucky to live in a modern world ill-suited to those emotions.

1. Olivia Newton-John in Grease, Stevie Nicks Interview in 1977, Lindsay Wagner as the Bionic Woman Perhaps teenage crushes are reliable predictors of what men come to think of as beautiful and what women come to think of as handsome.

2. Fashion Industry Broadcast quoting PaperMag about Area: “Inside you would find the most extraordinary concentration of world famous people. It was almost like everyone was world famous. And then there were people like me. Within a 10 meter radius near the bar there would be Andy Warhol talking about his new art installation “Invisible Sculpture”, next to Graffiti artist Keith Haring, Billy Idol, Madonna, Bianca Jagger. Everyone who was anyone at the time was there, and they were all knee deep in mischief. There will never be another club to rival Area. It was a blast.”

3. In 1984, Lotus was the king of spreadsheets. The first version of Excel was still a year away.

4. Good Reasons For Bad Feelings by Randolph Nesse, an expert in evolution’s effects on our emotions:

“Imagine two men, one with a tendency for jealousy when he senses his partner straying, another who is mellow with whatever goes down. Which one would have more children? The mellow one might well have a happier life but his partner would be at a higher-than-average risk of becoming pregnant by someone else. That would make her infertile during the pregnancy and for several years more if she breastfeeds the baby. So men who lack jealousy tend to have fewer children than men [who are jealous]-––obnoxious, dangerous, as it is to all parties and society.”

5. Bob never married. Debbie’s mother still talks fondly about Bob to my children.  

6. A vivid enough memory can reproduce a physical sensation, the opposite order from how the taste of Proust’s famous tisane-dipped madeleine reproduced his childhood in Combray.

7. See footnote 4 above.