We're on the phone. The phone is an amazing instrument because you can learn so much about a man from a short conversation.

He wants to meet half way. This is a turn off. If he's already calculating the distance between us, unwilling to make a little effort in the driving department, what will happen on a dinner date? By that time, he'll have reached maximum laziness level and I'll have to fork-feed him from my plate.

"What about meeting half way?" he asks. "I thought you said you'd meet me half way." Another conversational downer. I make an excuse about not wanting to drive. This doesn't discourage him. Now we must find a place to meet.

"What about a Dunkin' Donuts?" he asks. Pause before I tell him gently that I don't want to meet at Dunkin' Donuts. "I don't care where we meet," he says. I don't tell him that I care deeply, that I judge a man, in part, by his ability to set up a meet. It's too late for that sort of deep disclosure.

"Do you know a Starbucks?" He wants to stick to the main road he's familiar with, a straight line off the highway to his destination. I ask about a GPS. He doesn't have a GPS. I ask about MapQuest. He doesn't use MapQuest. I sit in front of the computer, talking him through the various Starbucks that pop up on my search, but he's not biting. The main road, Route 77, sticks to his mind like a pimple on the roof of his mouth.

I am scrolling through the possibilities, searching, searching until he finally logs onto his computer and agrees on the Starbucks I suggested twenty minutes earlier. Whew. During the time we've been talking, I have been scratching my brain to figure out a way to disconnect the phone and abort this meet. I thought about hanging up in mid-sentence, and not responding when he called back. Somewhere I read that this works, that no one on the other end of the phone would dream you'd hang up on yourself. On purpose.

Although this man is a teacher with a Master's degree, there is nothing to indicate any of the qualities I associate with teacher-ness. Perception, humor, flexibility (Oh, all right. There's a smidgen of flexibility there.) Worst of all, he's a wipe-out technology-wise. How does he thrive in a profession (I'm a teacher, I should know.) requiring that we at least have a working knowledge of a computer and be willing to occasionally make use of it.

He tells me the computer directions according to Starbucks are confusing and he'll call the place. "OK, great," I say. "And we've got our cell phones in case you get lost or you're late."

*****

I yank open the door to Starbucks. I've seen him through the glass. Nevertheless, we stare at one another for a few seconds until he mouths my name, points at me, gets up finally and shakes my hand. He treats me to an herbal tea. I order a small. No mention of sharing a cookie. Yes, I take notes on everything. I am shameless, subtracting points (He drove farther than me, 40 points; he has no sense of the playful, subtract 400 points, and on and on like that.) He has rabbit teeth, one of them wonky near the gums, slightly discolored as if it has been repaired badly, and I notice within six minutes of sitting opposite him, the tufts of black hair growing out of his ears. This is a man who has been without a woman for a long long time. When he gets up to put milk in his coffee, there are the baggy jeans four inches too long and all puffed up over his sneakers. Casual dress, suiteable for working in the garden, especially with the big zip-collared sweatshirt.

Really, he is not a bad looking man. The thing is that he has made no effort in the dress department. And neither have I. I am rather proud of this fact because it is so not me. What I've done is to take a 45-minute walk, wipe off my pits at my mom's house, spray on the necessary deodorants and sweet-smelling lotions to appear fresher than I really am, and meet him in my walking clothes, including sneakers. After all, he's wearing sneakers. I've upgraded my exercise uniform with an almost-clean T-shirt and my new Gap cardigan. My conscience is clear.

We make small talk. Then, he sets the tone of the meet with a story.

He went to a swing dance a week earlier, one of the best and biggest, with a great band. I dance regularly, so I'm familiar with the place. A woman invited him to dance and he warned her that he didn't know the steps. "I love dancing," he tells me. "But I don't like dances with steps. What's the point in learning steps anyway? It takes all the fun out of it."

At the end of the number, the woman told him that if he continued to show up at the swing dance, he needed to learn how to dance. "After all, it's a swing dance," she said.

"Well, I told her that I would go home and think about what she said for barley two seconds," he tells me. "And then I would forget it. Of course, what I really wanted to tell her was to go f**k herself. But I didn't say that."

This guy continues to demonstrate his charming side. Before meeting, we emailed about how we both liked to write. Now he asks about the kind of writing I do, thinks about it for two seconds, and says he is looking for a ghost writer for his book. "We can work together. As a team. I really don't like writing. I'm more of a journalist. I had a job back in Vietnam, as a journalist." He tells me about putting together a weekly newspaper there, so long ago. "I don't like details. I like to write the meaty stuff."

I sit thinking about the meaty stuff and how the real meat is in the details. "What's your book about?" I ask politely.

"It's about, you know, life. Back then, Vietnam. The things that happened to me. And everything that's been going on since then."

"That's a bit general. Can you tell me in one or two sentences about your book?" He wants me to do the heavy lifting. The writing. He can stick in an adjective, maybe even an adverb. Holden Caufield comes to mind, Holden writing the papers for his pimply roommate, who figured he needed a few commas and Holden could supply a comma, a semi-colon, clean up a few small errors in grammar.

"One or two sentences? Are you kidding?" He sounds outraged, in a mild way. "I can't even tell you in one or two sentences what the book I'm reading is about." It is about Greg Allman's brother, it turns out. The dead brother.

"Well," is all I can muster. This guy is a teacher? He teaches how to write a summary, among other things? "That sounds like a biography of Duane Allman." Wow, that was difficult, distilling that one down to a sentence.

"Interested in what?" I know what's coming. My dislike of this man must be showing on my face, perhaps written across my forehead as a sign of evil thoughts lurking within.

"Ghost writing my book." He taps his finger on his coffee cup. "What would you need?"

"Money," I say. "Lots of money."

"Of course. How much?"

I can't believe he's serious. "Oh, I don't know."

"We can do this as a project together."

This is the guy who couldn't find his way to Starbucks with a map on his computer, no, it's worse. He couldn't even find his way to MapQuest on his computer. "Well, if I'm writing your book, I wouldn't have much time for my book."

He nods with understanding of my dilemma. From that discussion, we're on to the girlfriend who typed his manuscript in exchange for dinner out every once in a while, a story about Arlo Guthrie who was rude enough not to respond to his offer of $500.00 for a storytelling session at his school ("I never even heard back from him. I didn't have his address, but I know the town where he lives."), and then he mentions a singer named Nanci Griffith.

"You know her, don't you? She's one of the best."

"Um, not really," I said.

"I can't believe you don't know Nanci Griffith. She's as famous as Whitney Houston."

Or maybe he said Billy Joel.

Or Frank Sinatra or Nancy Sinatra.

I don't remember.

Once I got home, I thought about what he said for barely two seconds.

And then I forgot it.