NOT QUITE MISSED CONNECTIONS, CRAIGSLIST.ORG

You were the boy with the crew cut sitting on my left in the Phoenix Theater on Twelfth Street, a Sunday matinee in September. I was the girl dressed all in black, alone. Do you remember me? Please let me know. I stayed in my seat during the intermission to work on the Times crossword puzzle. The theme was existentialism. I wrote Simone de Beauvoir, across, and you leaned over and with your pencil wrote "The Mandarins," down. The play was Shaw’s "Saint Joan," starring Siobhan McKenna, who is gone now, as is the Phoenix Theater. If you remember all this please be in touch. I would like to talk to you again the way we did when we went for coffee after the play, then rode back to Brooklyn on the subway. I got off at Utica Avenue and you continued on. The next night you called. Do you have any recollection of this? I had a date with a tall blond boy who had tickets to the Budapest String Quartet but I broke it. We talked on the phone till late, that night and many other nights. We got married and raised two children. You must remember that. I would love to talk to you again, to ask you, after so many years, how it has been for you, what you think about your life spent with me, and in particular what possessed you to write on my puzzle so boldly and impressively, "The Mandarins," because I think that was why I married you. In Brooklyn I’d never met any boy who knew about existentialism or Simone de Beauvoir and I must have thought I never would again so I’d better seize the opportunity. And I would like to know what were your reasons. If you still remember.