You Had Me At A Glance

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

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. It took nearly a decade for me to release myself from the conviction that I was hideous to look at.

So I had a long history of shyness and doubt around girls. And even when my self-confidence was restored, I thought I’d never be worthy of the love of a beautiful girl.

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

Was beauty all I wanted? Was I that shallow? 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.

It was a Halloween party, costumes encouraged. I was dressed in a super-skinny red and blue striped tie and a blue on blue herringbone sports jacket, an outfit bought under Steve’s tutelage. No Halloween costumes for Steve or me, just an attempt to look as if a night at Area was routine for us.

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 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.

I didn’t take in the separate parts of her face. Rather it was a general impression of her beauty––symmetrical and soft, vital and radiant. Especially when she smiled.

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

Debbie’s job was to do all the analytics for a small real estate firm. She outclassed me in Lotus.  She could link different spreadsheets. She could create macros that put formulas into action with the press of a single button. I could do none of that. I used a program called Symphony that integrated Lotus with a word processor. Symphony was all I had in my quiver, and I tried to convince Debbie that Symphony was better than Lotus. Debbie had no use for Symphony––she laughed at it––and neither did the company, as Symphony was soon discontinued.

After exchanging where we worked––I was an investment banker and Debbie noted my lackluster effort at a costume––we talked about schools and colleges. I had gone to Wharton, and she had gone to Babson, two undergraduate business schools, mine more famous than hers. Stupidly, I told her I’d never heard of Babson.

But I had. I’d visited Babson with my friend Steve when he was looking at colleges. I was teasing her. Overconfidence had led me astray.

Debbie decided to educate me about Babson–– its entrepreneurship program, her on-campus dry cleaning business, and how at Babson she’d been inspired by meeting Famous Amos of chocolate chip cookie fame. She also slipped in that she had been on Babson’s female rugby team, that the boys played first, and then the girls would wear for their game the boys’ battle-scored shirts, the bloodier the better.

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. The way she looked with her real hair made me doubt whether I could ever appeal to her romantically.

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 more than compensated for my blunder of Wharton snobbery.

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.

After our kiss, Debbie, with no pocketbook, remembered she’d asked her friend Gail to hold her keys. We couldn’t find Steve or Gail in the club, and Steve didn’t answer his home phone (no cell phones in 1984; public payphones were essential). So we took a taxi uptown to the apartment of Debbie’s parents to get the extra key they kept.

It was after midnight, and her parents couldn’t have been pleased to see Debbie at that hour with a strange boy. They had come up to Debbie and me a few times at the benefit, and Debbie had shooed them away.

What I didn’t know then was that Debbie had a boyfriend, Bob, who was a semester behind her at Babson. It had been Bob’s older sister who had invited Debbie to the benefit that night. And Debbie’s parents loved Bob. They thought he was perfect.

We returned, key in hand, 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?

The next day, it was hard, but I waited until precisely noon to call Debbie to ask her out that night. After our date, we returned to Debbie’s apartment. 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.

Two nights later, on actual 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 still at Babson. Bob. An eighteen month relationship. She hadn’t told Bob about me, but she felt guilty that I didn’t know about him.

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.

I went shopping all day in Soho with Debbie for a leather skirt. I was of no help in the choosing, because I thought every skirt looked great on her. The flaws she saw that a skirt brought out in her legs or hips were invisible to me. (Fast forward ten years and Debbie stands before a mirror and asks me, have I always looked this ugly? I laugh at the brilliant yes/no trap laid by her question.)

I hated to shop, but seeing Debbie parade in leather skirts was heaven to me. My world had been divided into two vastly unequal parts. There was Debbie, and there was everyone and everything else.

From there, things moved fast. Two months later, at the end of December, I met Debbie in LA for our first trip together. I was coming from a family vacation at the Breakers in Palm Beach, and she was coming from New York, having just seen Bob.

The persistence of Bob in Debbie’s life had put me in a dark, belligerent, and reckless mood during that family vacation. I’d been a snarling, muttering terror to everyone. I threw my racquet playing tennis. I tried to pick up an attractive thirty-something divorcee at the Palm Beach Country Club.

I’d been patient about Bob. Besides, for those two months, Debbie and I were almost exclusive, together almost every night.

But “almost” had become torture to me. Still not torture enough to risk giving Debbie an ultimatum. ⁴

In the rental car leaving LAX, Debbie 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, I felt I was traveling back in time. The more I thought about that night, the more I remembered and the more emotional I became. A few times my eyes filled with tears, not of regret but of gratitude. And the vividness of my memories made me feel once again that fluttering of excitement in my chest. ⁶

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Unbeknownst to me, I had seen a picture of Debbie before I met her

The picture below of Debbie and her brother Ken is from Ken’s 1984 Browning School yearbook page. I saw this picture in the summer of 1984, months before I met Debbie, because my two brothers, younger than Ken, also went to Browning and brought home their yearbooks.

Debbie and her brother Ken taken we think in 1983

As I was flipping through my brother’s Browning yearbook, I saw that picture, and assumed the girl was the graduating senior’s girlfriend. I felt sorely aggrieved that someone five years younger than I had such a girlfriend, and I remember saying, “What’s a young punk doing with a girl like that?”

Debbie and I discovered the coincidence many months after Debbie and I had met.

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I’m eager for your comments.

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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. A very close friend, A., who had not yet met Debbie, counseled me to break up with her unless she broke up with Bob. Forty years later, Debbie still teases A. about it.

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.