That answer is easy. No. I interpreted our encounter as a flirtation, but an obligitory, professional flourish of feminine wiles against gawky male confuzzlement.
We were the same age, and still are, but she seemed to have a world of experience ahead of me. But did she? Does she? She went the starlet route, almost certainly forgetting we ever met.
She remains a minor fixture in the Society pages, postsing to social media about Prada bags and posting old pictures of herself with recently dead celebs.
No, I never knew her, but our signals blipped, and crossed. Through chance and forensic grubbing I unwittingly summoned her name and exact street address down to the apartment number. This was maybe 10 years ago. Rummaging public records is just something I do. It’s like sorting through trash cans looking for identities to steal, only my intentions are innocuous at best, harmelss at worst.
I just like to dig. I put together the life stories of strangers and neighbors and friends alike. As I once explained to a bemused cemetery worker at Old Calvary, I do this with the dead. The fun of traipsing cemeteries all those years was not just for the beauty of the spaces but also learning something about the people whose names I documented. I remember finding the guy who’d patented a bunch of oil refining techniques. Another guy patented a jewelry-making contraption. And the saga of the mighty Johnston Mausoleum.
This woman I revisited last night had minor roles in movies and she modeled and wrote some articles. She was on magazine covers and movie posters.
Through the magic of public records (which I think share far too much) I learned last night that she lives in a bedbug infested shithole in midtown, with no heat in the winter and rats in the summer. She’s a real New Yorker I see postings to social media where it’s all Prada bags and name-dropping other minor celebrities who don’t sseem to respond to her shoutouts. She posts heavily doctored photos of herself, some from decades ago when she had a certain Jackie Kennedy look about her. All whil swatting bedbugs and mice.
Nothing wrong with that. We all have our times of highs and lows in the motel of life. To me it providesever more proof that social media is a blanket of lies. And those of us who go for the truth are waived off, dismissed as attention-whores, drama-jocks. Lying works. Among my many character flaws I sometimes ask myself why being a compulsive liar could not have been one of them