Chapter 5 Chapter 5 The Beautiful Woman

In early June, Andrew spent time in Buenos Aires.When he returned to the United States from his second trip to Argentina, Valerie seemed more radiant than ever.A dinner in town, bringing the betrothed couple up with their respective best man and maid of honor, was one of the best evenings Andrew had ever had, and Colette found him charming. As he awaits his planned wedding at the end of the month, Andrew spends his days and most evenings meticulously revising his essay, which he sometimes dreams of winning a Pulitzer for. The air conditioner in his apartment failed completely, and the would-be newlyweds bought Valerie's two-bedroom East Village apartment.Sometimes Andrew would stay at the newspaper until midnight, because when he was working at Valerie's house, the sound of his typing on the keyboard would keep Valerie awake.

The heat in the city was starting to become unbearable, and the TV said that a terrible storm would hit Manhattan every day.When he heard the word "terrible," Andrew hadn't imagined how soon his own life would be disrupted. He made a big promise to Valerie: no more strip clubs, no more single-girl nightclubs, just an evening with friends. To commemorate Andrew's coming to an end as a bachelor, Simon invites him to dinner at one of the hottest new restaurants of the moment.In New York, popular restaurants open and close as often as the seasons. "Have you really decided?" Simon asked while looking at the menu.

"I'm still hesitating between a sirloin steak and a tenderloin tip," Andrew replied lazily. "I mean your life." "I knew." "So what?" "What do you want me to tell you, Simon?" "Every time I mention your marriage, you always talk about other things. I'm your best friend! I just want to share with you the experience of your life." "Liar, you are observing me like a little mouse in the laboratory. You want to know what I am thinking now, so that you can refer to it when you encounter similar situations in the future."

"Not at all!" "I would have said that a few months ago." "Then what made you take this step in the end?" Simon approached Andrew and asked, "Well, you are indeed my lab mouse, now tell me if you feel that you have made this decision? Has your life changed?" "I'm thirty-eight years old, and so are you. I only see two paths ahead of us: one is to continue playing with these dream beauties who are rolling around in the fashion industry..." "That sounds pretty good!" exclaimed Simon. "...and then become those handsome lonely old men who flirt with girls thirty years younger than them, believing that in this way they can catch the youth that can run faster than them."

"I don't want you to preach to me, I want you to tell me if you think you love Valerie enough to spend your life with her." "Well, I, if I hadn't asked you to be my best man, I'd probably answer you directly and say, it's none of your business." "But I'm already your best man!" "My whole life, I don't know, there are things that don't just depend on me. Anyway, now I can't imagine my life without Valerie. I'm happy, and when she's not around, I think about She, I'm never bored when I'm around her, I love her laugh, she laughs so much. I think that's what I find most attractive about a woman. As for our sex life- "

"Okay," Simon interrupted him, "you've convinced me! The rest has nothing to do with me." "You promised to witness our wedding, didn't you?" "I don't need to bear witness for what happens after the lamp is turned on." "Ah, but actually we never turn off the lights—" "Enough, Andrew, stop talking! Can we talk about something else?" "I'll go with the tenderloin," Andrew said. "You know what really makes me happiest?" "Let me help you write a speech to be read during the wedding ceremony."

"No, I won't ask you to do something you can't do, I just think we can go to my favorite new bistro to finish the evening." “That Cuban bar in Tribeca!” "It's an Argentinian bar." "I feel something different, but tonight is yours, you decide, I obey." Novi Sandori is packed with people.With great difficulty, Simon and Andrew squeezed their way to the bar. Andrew ordered a Fernet-Coke.Simon took a sip at his urging, and winked at the bitterness of the wine.He chooses to have a glass of red wine. "How can you drink this thing? This thing is really bitter."

"Recently I've been inquiring in a few bars in Buenos Aires. They drink it that way, and trust me, you'll love it in the end." "I guess I'm unlikely." Simon noticed a beautiful woman with slender legs in the bar, and he immediately left Andrew without a word of apology.Andrew stayed alone at the bar, watching his friend go away, and smiled.Of the two life paths just mentioned, which one Simon chose, there is no doubt about the answer. A woman sat on the stool Simon had just sat on. Andrew ordered another Fernet-Coke, and the woman smiled at him. They chatted casually for a few insignificant words.The young woman told him she was surprised to see an American enjoying the drink, which is really rare.Andrew replied that he would have been a rare guy.The woman's smile became more obvious, and she asked Andrew what was different from the others.Andrew was a little embarrassed by this question, especially when he saw the deep meaning in his chat partner's eyes, he looked even more embarrassed.

"what do you do?" "Reporter." Andrew stammered. "It's an interesting career." "It also depends on the day." Andrew replied. "Are you a financial reporter?" "Oh no, why do you think so?" "Because it's not far from Wall Street." "If I'm drinking in the meat industry, you're probably thinking I'm a butcher?" The young woman laughed out loud, and Andrew liked her laugh. "Politics?" she asked again. "No." "Well, I like riddles," she said. "You have a very tanned skin, and I can deduce that you travel a lot."

"It's summer and you have a very dark tan...but well, the truth is, my job requires me to travel a lot." "I was born with dark skin. So you're a famous reporter?" "Yes, so to speak." "What are you investigating now?" "Things that can't be said to you in a bar." "What if it's not in the bar?" she whispered. "It can only be in the office of the newspaper's writing team." Andrew suddenly felt a wave of heat surge up.He picked up a tissue from the bar and wiped his neck. He couldn't wait to ask the woman some questions as well, but in order to properly frame his questions, he had to find something better than a riddle.

"What about you?" He asked vaguely while searching for Simon's figure with his eyes in despair. The young woman looked at her watch and stood up. "Sorry," she said, "I didn't check the time, I should go. Nice to meet you, what's your name?" "Andrew Steelman," he answered, standing up. "Maybe in the future we will..." The woman waved to him.Andrew’s gaze never left her.He even hoped that the woman would turn around as she stepped out the door of the bar, but he'd never know.Simon's hand on his shoulder surprised him. "What are you looking at?" "Let's go, how about it?" Andrew asked dryly. "Let's go now?" "I want some fresh air." Simon shrugged and pulled Andrew out. "What's wrong with you, your face looks as white as the sheets, did the drink you just had made you feel uncomfortable?" Simon asked worriedly after walking out of the bar. "I just want to go back." "You've got to tell me what happened first. You're mad! I'd love to respect your professional secrecy, but right now, we're talking about what I know." "And in the past ten years, what have you said that I haven't understood?" Andrew didn't answer, he walked towards the west side of Broadway.Simon followed closely. "I think I just fell in love at first sight." Andrew muttered to himself. Simon laughed, and Andrew quickened his pace. "Are you serious?" Simon caught up and asked. "very serious." "You fell in love with that strange woman at first sight when I went to the bathroom?" "You didn't go to the bathroom." "You fell madly in love with her in five minutes?" "You left me alone at the bar for almost a quarter of an hour." "On the surface, you are not so lonely and empty, can you explain why?" "There's nothing to explain, I don't even know her name..." "Oh?" "I think I just met the one of my destiny. I've never felt like this, Simon." Simon grabbed Andrew's arm and told him to stop. "You didn't meet anyone who fell in love at first sight. You were just a little too drunk, and your wedding was coming up, and it was just the horrible effect of the stimulation of a cocktail." "I mean it, Simon, I really didn't mean to be joking." "Then I didn't either! You're just being cowardly when you say that. In order to go back to the way you were before, you don't hesitate to make up a reason." "I'm not timid, Simon. Well, not before I stepped into this bar." "What did you say when that beauty approached you?" "I was just talking nonsense with her, and I didn't realize how sad I was until she left." "It's quite unique that my little lab mouse is discovering the side effects of the marriage poison, especially when he knows he hasn't contracted the marriage virus..." "Like you said!" "Tomorrow morning, you won't even be able to remember what this woman looked like. Well, what we're going to do is we'll forget about this evening in Novi Sando and everything will be back to normal." "Wish it was that simple." "Do you still want us to come here again tomorrow night? If you're lucky, your strange beauty will still be there, and when you see her again, your heart will calm down." "I can't do that to Valerie. I'm married in fifteen days!" Although Andrew sometimes showed some wanton demeanor, which may be a display of arrogance in the eyes of others, he was still an honest man of faith.He'd had too much to drink tonight, and it was keeping him from thinking things through. Simon was probably right, and fear of marriage was driving him off the rails.Valerie is a very special woman, life has blessed him by accident, her best friend Colette always tells him so. Andrew made Simon swear that he would never reveal the secret of tonight, not tell anyone what had just happened, and then he thanked Simon for convincing himself. They jumped into the same taxi, and Simon dropped Andrew off in the West Village, promising to call him at noon the next day to find out what was going on. When he woke up the next day, Andrew found that Simon's prediction last night was not right at all.The appearance of that strange woman in Novi Sando was still clearly imprinted in his memory, as was the smell of her perfume.As long as he closes his eyes, he can see her slender hands shaking the wine glass, and he remembers her voice and her gaze.When he got up to make his coffee, he felt a void, or rather, a longing to fill it up, an impatience to rediscover the one who could fill it. The phone rang; Valerie's voice brought him back to reality, which tormented his heart.Valerie asked him if last night had been as good as he expected.He said he and Simon had dinner at a nice restaurant and then had a drink at a bar in Tribeca.Nothing particularly exciting.When he put down the microphone, for the first time, Andrew felt a sense of guilt for deceiving the woman who was going to marry him. Of course he told a little lie when he returned from Buenos Aires and assured Valerie that he had changed his wedding dress.As if to cover up the mistake, he immediately called the tailor and asked him to meet him at lunch. Maybe that's where the uncomfortable feeling comes from.All things in life have a meaning, and this one reminded him to hem his dress trousers and cut his coat sleeves short.And all this would happen to him, just to save him from making a fool of himself at the wedding, when he appeared in front of the bride and people thought he had borrowed his dress from his brother. "You don't even have a brother, fool," grumbled Andrew to himself. "It's hard to find a worse fool than you." At noon, Andrew left the newspaper office.The tailor painted the part of the sleeve that needed to be cut with white chalk, bent over and said that if he wanted to make the dress look more stylish, he needed to change it here and there, and complained again and again that his customers always suffered The dress was changed at the last minute.Andrew felt very uncomfortable.As soon as the fittings were over, he took off his coat, had it taken by the tailor, and put on his own clothes.The gown can be changed next Friday, and Andrew can pick it up later in the morning. When he opened his phone, he found several text messages from Valerie.Valerie was in a hurry because she had been waiting an hour for their lunch appointment on 42nd Street. Andrew called her to apologize and said he had just been in a conference room with an impromptu meeting: if his secretary said he was out it was only because no one at this paper paid attention to what other people were doing .Second lie of the day. In the evening, Andrew went to Valerie's house with a bouquet of flowers.Since he proposed to Valerie, he has often sent her flowers.Purple roses, her favorite flower.He found the room empty, and there was a hastily written note on the small table in the living room. Emergency call.I'll be back later.Don't wait for me.I love you. He went down to dinner at "Mary's Cooking Fish".During the meal, Andrew kept looking at his watch, and finally asked for the bill before he even finished the main course.As soon as he was out the door, he hopped into a taxi. Coming out of the bar in Tribeca and walking across the sidewalk in front of Novi Sando, Andrew suddenly longed to go in for a drink.The doorman in charge of security took out a cigarette and asked him if there was a fire.Andrew has not smoked for a long time. "Would you like to go in? It's a quiet night." Andrew thought the invitation was a second omen. That strange beauty was not sitting at the bar last night.Andrew searched the bar with his eyes, the doorman didn't lie to him, just a quick glance to know that she didn't come again.Feeling ridiculous, he drained his Fernet-Coke in one gulp and called the bartender for the bill. "Just one drink tonight?" the bartender asked. "You remember me?" "Yes, I recognized you just now, and I think, anyway, it's not easy to forget that I drank five Fernet-Cokes in one sitting yesterday." Andrew hesitated for a moment before asking the bartender for another drink, and when the bartender filled his glass, he asked a surprising question from the mouth of a soon-to-be-married man. "The woman sitting next to me last night, do you remember her, she is a regular visitor here?" The bartender looked thoughtful. "Beautiful woman, I've seen a lot in this bar. No, I didn't notice her, does it matter?" "Yes, ah, no," Andrew replied, "I should go back and tell me how much I should give." The bartender turns around and checks at the cash register. "If by chance," Andrew left three twenty-dollar bills on the bar, "she comes here again and asks you who the man who drank five Fernet-Cokes is, here's my business card , please give it to her for me." "Are you a reporter for The New York Times?" "It's written on the business card..." "If you'd like to write something for our pub someday, please do so." "I'll think about it," said Andrew, "and you too, don't forget." The bartender put the card away in the drawer, and he winked at Andrew. When walking out of Novi Sando, Andrew checked the time.If Valerie's office visits had been extended, he might have been home before her.If the situation were reversed, he could say that he was working overtime at the newspaper.He didn't think it was a lie. Since this night, Andrew has never had a good rest.Day after day, he knew that the peace of the past had completely abandoned him.He even got into a big fight with a colleague who was meddling in his affairs.Freddie Olsen, the prying guy, was jealous and tripped him up, but Andrew hadn't been easily irritated by him in the past.He thought it was probably because the second half of June was going to be a busy period.He had to finish the story that took him to Argentina twice, and he hoped it would be as successful as his last one on Asia.The due date is next Monday, but writing director Olivia Stein is a particularly picky person, especially when the investigation takes up the entirety of Tuesday.She likes to have a full Saturday to review the manuscript, then email the original author directly that evening with her suggested revisions.This Saturday was going to be a weird day, because it was the same day Andrew would swear before God.The following Sunday was just as weird, and he had to ask Valerie to forgive him for having to put off their honeymoon because of this damn job and this report that his female boss took seriously. But none of this could erase the figure of that strange beauty in Novi Sando from Andrew's mind.The desire to see her again became an obsession that even he didn't understand. On Friday, Andrew was on his way to pick up his wedding dress, feeling more out of his mind than ever.The tailor heard him sigh a long sigh as he looked at his feet in the mirror. "Aren't you happy with the cut?" he asked in an apologetic tone. "No, Mr. Zanelli, your work is perfect." The tailor watched Andrew, and lifted the right shoulder of his coat. "But something seems to be bothering you, am I right?" He said, fastening a pin on his cuff. "It's more complicated than that." "One of your arms is longer than the other. I didn't notice it during the last fitting. Please give me a few more minutes, and I can fix it in a while." "Don't bother, we only wear this dress once in our lives, don't we?" "I hope it is for you, but it's the kind of photo that stays with us for life, and when your grandkids tell you that your dress coat doesn't fit you well, I don't want you to tell them it's because of your style." Tailoring sucks. Well, let me do my job." "Because I have a very important article to finish tonight, Mr. Zanelli." "That's right, and for me, I have a very important dress that needs to be changed in fifteen minutes. You just said that things seem to be more complicated?" "That's right." Andrew sighed. "What kind of thing, if it's not too presumptuous to ask?" "I suppose you can keep your professional secret too, Mister Zanelli?" "If you can put a little effort into not calling me by the wrong name again, I can. My name is Zanetti, not Zanelli! Take off this coat, sit in a chair, and I can keep working while we chat .” When Mr. Zanetti changed the sleeves of Andrew's dress, Andrew told him how he re-met his boyhood lover when he walked out of the bar a year ago, and how he met him in another bar on the eve of his wedding. A woman who made him fall in love at first sight and haunt him forever. "Maybe you should stop going to these clubbing places for a while, it will make your life easier. But I must also admit that your story is indeed extraordinary." The tailor got up to get the hemming thread from the wardrobe drawer added. "Simon, my best friend, he said the exact opposite to me." "Your Simon has an odd conception of life. May I ask you a question?" "If you can help me figure things out, feel free to ask." "If you could do it all over again, Mr. Steelman, if you could choose between not meeting the woman you were going to marry again and not meeting the woman who disturbed you, what would you choose?" "One of them is my close friend, and the other... I don't even know her name." "Look, it's not that complicated." "from this angle……" "Given the age gap between us, I think I can speak to you from the standpoint of a father, Mr. Steelman. Of course, speaking to you in this way, I must admit that I have no children myself, so I have no experience in this regard. rare……" "Please tell me." "Since you asked me to say it! Life is not a modern machine, where you just press a button to repeat the selected part again. There is no possibility of going back to the past, and some of our actions may have irreparable consequences. For example Falling in love with a strange beautiful woman on the eve of your wedding, no matter how intriguing she is. If you continue to be stubborn, I'm afraid you will really regret it, not to mention the damage you have done to those around you How big it will be. You may tell me that people can't force themselves to do what they have to do, but you have brains, so please use your brains. There is nothing to blame for being disturbed by a woman , as long as things don't go further than that." "Have you never felt like you've met a soul mate, Mr. Zanetti?" "Soul mate, what a wonderful idea! When I was twenty, I believed I would meet her every Saturday night when I went dancing. I was a great dance partner when I was young, and a real bum .I often wonder why people believe they've met their soul mate before building something together." "Are you married, Mr. Zanetti?" "I've been married four times and I'm telling you this just to show that I know what I'm talking about!" When Andrew was about to leave, Mr. Zanetti told him that the length of the sleeves was just right and nothing could spoil the happiness that was waiting for him.Andrew Steelman came out of the tailor's workshop, determined to dress the wedding dress neatly and in good spirits tomorrow.