A Note on Flirting

I have never actually “known” how to flirt. It has always just happened. I talk to a guy, pretty much any guy, and out comes witticisms and allusions and smirks and jokes and, voila, someone tells me I was flirting. Or they try to kiss me. Only then do I know. So I have thought that it was always second nature, that when I felt the heat of a blush on my cheeks, or the tell-tale knock-out-drag-down- war between the desire to stare into their eyes and the total aversion to eye contact, that then, okay, I was flirting. Even through all of the other relationships I have had, I have never been able to not flirt, it could not be helped. I spoke with a male-person, and up came the blush.

I guess flirting has to do with withholding, with temptation, with teasing. The smallest promise of sex has to be there and one, or the other, will jump into playing a cat-and-mouse game, trying to get the other person to admit attraction at the very least.

I visit at least two out of five banks daily. Four of them have young foreign male tellers. BOA has an Hispanic dude who asks me questions about what I do. EagleBank has an Indian who comments on what I wear, joking about the day I wore all black because I had a funeral to go to. HSBC has a middle easterner who knows the secrets of our firm. And Cardinal Bank has the bluest-eyed man whose grandparents must be Scandinavian, or Eastern European. On top of this, there is a new lawyer on the floor, whom I shall call Fit Lawyer, who shaves his balding head and has the face of someone who would sit next to you in a scary movie and make fun of your reactions the entire time, but also holding your hand so tight it loses feeling. I pass him in the hallway sometimes. Until today, when I had to notarize his DC Bar Application. I now have his address. And license number.

These men talk to me almost as a peer. Which is a change from many of the other men I meet around DC during my work, who talk to me like what I am, the Young Female Assistant. Some days it makes more sense than others, because some days I dress nicer, or care more, or am more or less intimidated by them.

I always expect myself to have been flirting back with these young men when they ask what I do, and what that entails, or where I am going next. I wait for the blush to appear, I find a spot on the desk to stare at so that when I feel I need to look away I have some place I am concentrating on. I expect that I button my coat so that I don’t have to worry about revealing the slob shirt I am wearing that day.

But now things are different. My interactions with men are weird. I realized that the blush doesn’t come, I have no problem making only necessary eye contact, I button my coat because I am cold. I smile to be kind, not to be coy. I avoid cleverness. I close the door of the banks behind me with the thought; “It must be hard, being them. I mean, it must be so hard existing as The Inferior, when The Perfect is out there somewhere, texting that Young Female Assistant that just walked out the door, about where they will go together this weekend. What do you do when you try your entire life to write the perfect sentence, but it has already been written, and you know you will get nowhere close?”

And it is while I am thinking these thoughts that a giant, coy smile crosses my face, and I start tapping out a message with a joke and an allusion in it, skirting the subject, avoiding eye contact, blushing.