Knowing Your Customer
In the waning stretch of the day’s final panel on a sunny mid-October Tuesday when everyone wanted to be somewhere else, Tom Doyle found his gaze wandering to the neck and left ear of the woman in front of him. The speaker was droning on about know-your-customer regulations, and every now-and-then Tom glanced at whatever PowerPoint slide was being displayed as he stifled a yawn. His gaze kept doing its wandering.
She looked nothing like Wendy, his late wife. Wendy was blonde and short and this woman was brunette and medium height and well-curved with a perfect perfectly-round face and thick lips. While he thought Wendy was beautiful, this woman was gorgeous. He noticed that she had no ring on her left ring-finger.
When the final “thank-you”s were offered by the conference’s host, Tom gathered his things and hurried to the woman. “Excuse me,” he looked at her name tag, “may I call you Eileen?” He was stumped, not having formulated what he would next say. He’d never approached a stranger in this way and had no idea how it should be done.
“Of course,” and she looked at his name tag, which showed him to be a senior vice president at the Manhattan-headquartered bank hosting the conference, “Tom. What can I do for you?”
“I, er, noticed how attentive you were during the final panel and I was wondering whether you could let me know about some things I think I missed.” Lame, but the best he could come up.
She saw that he was wearing a wedding band and when he noticed that, he quickly added, “Actually I wondered if you might like to get a drink or something. And,” he turned his left hand towards her, “I am a widower and have never had the heart to take this off.”
He did not look like a philanderer to Eileen—as if she’d know what one looked like—and she said she’d like that, Simon’s existence silently thrown over the side. She, her own nametag revealed, was a generic vice-president in a small suburban bank.
The pair crossed Madison Avenue to one of the many Irishy pubs in midtown, this one on the north side of 47th Street. It was too early for there to be many patrons. When the hostess asked whether they wanted a table or to sit at the bar, they exchanged glances and after Eileen said a table would be fine they were led up a flight of steps to an empty dining room. When the waitress arrived, he ordered a Guinness and she a club soda with a lemon twist.
When the waitress was gone, she said, “I’m a cheap date.”
“Is this a date?” he laughed.
“Not yet. Right now, it’s just drinks.” She paused. “If it is a date, I have to warn you that I am not very good at it. And the club soda. I haven’t had a drink since the day of my husband’s funeral. So, I’ve been on the wagon since 2010.”
When he asked whether it was okay for him to have ordered the Guinness, she said, “That is not a problem. It is my choice and I deal with my temptations but I don’t push them on others.” It had in fact been something of a struggle but with the support of her daughter and other members of her and Michael’s families, some AA meetings, and some therapy Eileen had put it behind her. She wondered why she was so quick to tell him about it. It, in fact, just slipped out much as the cheap-date line had. For some reason, it was something she felt comfortable saying to this man.
When they were about half-way through their drinks, they agreed to order dinner. It was still on the early side and only a few of the other tables were occupied, but neither was in a hurry to leave and both were hungry.
Eileen quickly told Tom about herself. She was a widow—she’d already let that be known when she mentioned her husband’s funeral—who lived in Tuckahoe, with her only child, Kerry, living at home, and in her second year at Columbia Law. She had a brother and sister who lived in Fairfield County and a bunch of nieces and nephews who she saw now-and-then.
She worked at a White Plains bank, which explained her presence at the conference. “And that,” she finished with a smile, “is me.”
“I’m sure there’s a lot more of you than that,” Tom said, and Eileen blushed a bit at the innuendo implicit in how it was said. After a brief pause Tom—he was Tommy only to the kids he grew up with—told his story, about being born and raised outside of Boston, going to Boston College, and working for State Street. His eyes got a bit distant when he remembered having run into Wendy Riordan, a New Yorker, with whom he’d had a fling in college, at a BC football game in 1987 and how she had induced, “or should I say ‘seduced,'” (he smiled) him to try for a job in a New York. In a just-the-facts-Ma’am manner, he got a job at a big commercial bank in midtown and worked his way up to become a Senior VP in the risk-assessment department, his current position.
After living, separately and then together, in Astoria, Queens for a few years, he and Wendy married and after their second, and last, child was born moved first to Irvington, on the Hudson, and then up to his current house in Chappaqua in northern Westchester. It was almost horse country but better known as where the Clintons live.