"Technically it's a business meeting. We're colleagues. We're both doing research on the same project for professional reasons."
"There's coffee."
"There's coffee at business meetings. That's what business meetings are. Coffee and somebody talking too long."
"There's a blanket."
"The blanket," said Theda, "is a wall. You built a wall. People on a date don't build a wall."
"People on a first date build nothing but walls," said Nicky. "That's what a first date is. Two people sitting on either side of a blanket, pretending they're not looking at the blanket." He paused. "That's very good. I should say that in the play."
"It's not in the play?"
"I don't know. I haven't seen the movie." He looked at the remote. "Should I press it?"
"Yes. Press it. Please. Before you say anything else."
"Is that a yes on the date?"
"It's a yes on the button."
He pressed it. The screen went black, then gray, then there was a fanfare of trumpets and a woman in a long Grecian robe holding up a torch on a pedestal, and the word COLUMBIA appeared in a radiance of light, and the old soundtrack crackled and swelled through the Zenith's little speaker into the break room of the Elmwood Avenue bus garage, and Theda, who had grown up three-quarters of the way through the twentieth century without ever once watching a movie made before she was born, leaned forward over her coffee and held her breath.
It was not what she expected. She had expected something stiff and gray and slow, people in evening clothes standing very still and saying things like Darling, I simply can't, while violins played. Instead, within four minutes, Claudette Colbert had told her father off, swept a tray of food onto the floor of a yacht cabin, slapped him, been slapped back, and dived off the deck in her clothes into the Atlantic Ocean, and Theda found that she had put her coffee down on the floor without noticing and was sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees.
"She's fast," she said.
"Everybody's fast," said Nicky. "Listen to them talk. They don't wait for each other to finish."