Shoshana Wore Red

Clicking through the dating site Jdate recently, I saw a profile that stopped me cold. The face looked familiar, but I could not be sure. I opened the lengthy profile and began to read. Sure enough, I had stumbled on the new profile of Shoshana (not her real name), a woman who blazed through my life this past fall with a promise of hope and happiness. I looked hard at the profile photos, since I had no pictures of Shoshana. She chose photos of startling contrast. One of them featured an obviously careful application of lipstick, eyeliner and other cosmetics, to fine effect. Another, looked, well . . . more casual, to be charitable. The funny thing is, neither showed Shoshana the way I remembered her.

Here's what I remember:

We "met cute," as they say in the movies. I encountered Shoshana online while she window-shopped men's profiles on Jdate with a friend who actually belonged to that Jewish dating site. I could tell that the friend clicked on my Jdate profile, so I started an online chat. Shoshana took over the keyboard, abashed that I knew they looked at me, but pleased at the attention. In our chat and a long follow-up email, Shoshana told me about her changing life: she was a bubbly executive and mother, newly divorced after a long marriage, with a "Mediterranean-Semitic" look. I liked what she said.

She wrote, "I have been enjoying 'meeting' you through the computer and though it's a bit earlier than I had planned, I would be happy to continue getting to know each other if you're still game." So, she warned me, but my restless and captivated heart plunged ahead. The subject line of my reply said, "Yes, still game."

Initially wary, she soon trusted me and in a week I knew her name, her phone numbers, and an email address she created just for our communications. Our messages built an emotional intimacy that became more comfortable and revealing day by day. Details of our first meeting on a drizzly fall day are etched in memory: my first glimpse on Broadway of a woman who looked exactly as she described herself, a lingering lunch at Bombay Masala in Manhattan, wandering the aisles at Eichler's Judaica. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, not an easy day to forget; Shoshana wore red. Shoshana later said I had a huge smile on my face the moment I saw her. She was right; her Mediterranean-Semitic appearance and sunny personality instantly connected with a reptilian boy-girl attraction node deep in my brain.

Whenever we spoke, I secretly thrilled to her voice, laced with that true rarity, a sexy New York accent. Tendrils of Shoshana curled into private places, as I added her cell and office numbers to my cell phone and made "Shoshana2004" the password on my office computer, so I could type her name repeatedly during the day, the adult version of grade schoolers' doodling the names of crushes in notebooks. I saved a long message on my cell phone that started with the delirious words "Hi, I've been thinking about you . . ." A "Shoshana" file on my computer held her deliciously warm and readable emails. Was I smitten? What do you think?

After dinner at a Malaysian restaurant in late December, before she left for a family gathering, I surprised Shoshana with a Hanukkah gift, a two-CD set of Cajun and Zydeco music, reflecting our interest in world music and her knowledge of French. She called me from an airport a few days later to thank me. I doubt she understood what a huge emotional leap I had to make to buy her a gift. Or, given what followed, perhaps she understood my gesture all too well and it frightened her.

I heard nothing while Shoshana was away, but that didn't surprise me, given the press of family matters, distance, and the decompression of recent divorce. As I initially wrote to her, we could take things as fast or slow as she wanted.

New Year's Eve passed, the work week started. No calls, no post card, nothing. I sent her an email with the jaunty subject line, "Welcome back from the land of" and mentioned where she went. A deep unease was seeping into me, as if I stood on a deserted subway platform at midnight. I tried to forestall the chill with the phrase "write/call after you get settled in," so I could kid myself that she was just "settling in" rather than ignoring me and hoping I would interpret her silence as a plea that I should just meekly go away.

By Friday afternoon, I could wait no longer. I had to know. I called her cell phone, but she was in a meeting and said she'd call me back. An hour later, she did. After throat-clearing chit-chat, Shoshana said she had been thinking about me on her vacation, and she decided she couldn't pursue a relationship with anybody so soon after her divorce. Family came first and she could not divide her attention. While I was a nice guy, I "snuck up" on her before she was ready. My mouth went cotton-dry as our acquaintance slid all the way back to her original hesitation, to the stranger phase.

I couldn't argue against her feelings, but I had to say something and not roll over. Finally, I told Shoshana I was "disappointed" but I understood. We agreed we weren't "burning any bridges," as the face-saving circumlocution goes.

Oh, by the way, she really liked the music I got her.

After we hung up, I felt like an animal that had stumbled into a steel-toothed trap. I wanted to gnaw my leg off to ease the pain but I couldn't. Soon I dashed off a note to another online friend, Sophie, with whom I swap bulletins on our ill-starred romantic escapades. My thoughts poured out: "I don't think ill of Shoshana, I'm sure this was hard for her, but I just feel incredibly frustrated that she cut me off without even ongoing contact. I could accept being friends, an occasional email, but even that's more than she can handle. I tell myself I could call her around Passover, but I'm basing that on my current emotions. I just need to clamp down and move ahead. No law says she can't contact me."

By Sunday, I had moved ahead to the deletion phase, with the speed-dial entries purged. By Wednesday, I decided to change the laptop password so I would no longer imagine I was stroking her face and hair every time my fingers typed "Shoshana." Sophie2004 became the new one. That had a good ring to it, so that became the new password. Sophie likes it, too.