I think she only spoke to me because there was no one else.

I suppose she was beautiful. Her eyes were a solid chocolate as impenetrable as her foundation. I didn’t really want to talk to her but there was no one else.

She had an expensive beauty. Is that fair to say? It sounds mean and I don’t want to be. I don’t intend to imply she was not beautiful without the expense. The quality of the beauty she chose to present was by all accounts time consuming and affluent.

Our discussion ranged from livable places in town to our educational backgrounds. Her opening game was, to be fair, stronger than mine but I find so few resources to maintain the normal conversational conventions. So perhaps her strength was simply a willingness for topics I avoided. That I was simply drawing a blank on more eccentric entrances was more a testament to my present lack of imagination than anything else. Indeed, there are conversations where silences don’t matter, where they are as full as any other interaction. Lovingly so sometimes. Those are a peace that this conversation lacked and I could tell she maintained her awareness of the track only out of social etiquette.

When I found out she studied and practiced law, I thought I may regain her interest and gain some conversational ground if I approached from a more intellectual level and attempted to broach the subject of ‘people management’ after she mentioned she considered herself naturally skilled at its politics.

I think this approach was the first major misstep – but I’m not totally sure why. Maybe I gave too much of an impression of feigned humility and untried confidence by suggesting that I would like to improve my abilities in this area. Perhaps she wished to leave the tedium of her work behind, perhaps she felt I was challenging her to prove her assertion or perhaps she inadvertently went into a defensive lawyer mode and was no longer reachable on a human level. Maybe I was too young.

In any case, her body was there but she was itching to move to another circle. Where I may take it as a personal challenge to win someone over, it seemed that only a politeness nailed her feet to the spot. It’s tough to assess your own appearance – to smell your own social scent and there was no one in the conversation to help me gauge my status. By all accounts, I was failing miserably.

(Aside from this evening’s talk,) I too think that I’m fairly good at managing my interactions with people but admittedly don’t have the professional backing that she would have. So, here we have two at least internally self-declared social experts talking head to head that don’t really want to be. This is either a short conversation or a recipe for successful exit handling, yes?

Well the point of this set up is to vent my petty grievances. It’s so small and stupid but it was the first time it happened to me in a social gathering that I can remember. Perhaps if I wasn’t so desperate to talk to someone, I wouldn’t be so hurt. It was the method of her departure that did it. It was classic, obviously contrived and remarkably patronizing – simply because of its knowing falsehood. She left with a suppressed smile, kindly patting my arm in consolation as she informed me she had to fill up her partially empty glass.

I knew she knew I knew her contrivance. Why didn’t it just bounce off me like some minor thing? Somehow, two people, one open about her professedly good people management skills and another secretly arrogant about his own attempting to match wits, had to resort to playing an unimaginative and well used social card in order to end a conversation that probably shouldn’t have commenced in the first place.

She knew no kindness could placate the gesture but played it anyway. And for all the leading I used to direct the conversation, I left her no opening of escape but a device she felt only mildly embarrassed using and that left me feeling small, young and stupid.

The so called expert in me didn’t rebound after that. My wits were dulled by irritation and a sense of isolated failure on which my ego secretly thrives. I take comfort in the fact that it’s a diet on which most egos indulge.

It’s tough assessing people’s confidence in socializing. Small nuances and gaps between the conventions all have hidden flows of intention, conscious and unconcious. Reading them and guiding them is such a delicate talent at which I wish I was better.