Our first real date was in Budapest. No, really. Tom took me to what had been an old-fashioned burger joint, which a charming, elderly Hungarian couple had turned into a small European style café on the upper eastside of Manhattan on Second Avenue. The lighting was dim and dreamy as we sat at the long lunch counter, drank May wine, and admired the old world, candy box charm of the little establishment. As I would come to appreciate later, the Tip-Top was one of Tom's discoveries, an overlooked gem that served delicious, home cooked Hungarian specialties at a very affordable price.

All fancied up for my date in high heeled pumps to die for, I confess to being disappointed by my first impression of the Tip-Top, fearing I had overdressed. I’d expected to be taken somewhere a bit more impressive. High fashion models are used to being wined and dined at very chic places. I should have realized I was dating a real actor: no money, but lots of style and imagination. The Tip-Top was pure romance, so, in a very short time, high heels didn’t seem at all out of place. After all, I didn’t tower over Tom in my heels, and he had worn a jacket, tie, and a pair of slacks.

Ours was a generation that aspired to romance. We sort of took it for granted that romance of any kind was highly desirable, but very hard to genuinely achieve. I have never understood today's love story movies, which seem more like how-to sex manuals for the carnally deprived, rather than stories about two people falling in love. The movies we'd been raised on savored all the twists and turns leading up to the first kiss. After that, I'm pretty sure most of us had figured out what came next without any help from Hollywood.

The juke box serenaded us with its classical music selections. By the time the friendly Hungarian owner/waiter showed us to our booth and gave us the small menu of what his wife was cooking that evening, I was totally entranced. Chicken Paprikash with Spaetzle and sour cream was Tom's recommendation for dinner. It was delicious, and spaetzle was a revelation. Dessert was palacsinta, a thin crepe pancake, with a cherry filling and topped with whipped cream, followed by cappuccino. (I still have the mimeographed copy of the recipes.) If it's romance you want, go Hungarian, 'For the man the sword, for the woman the rose.' Dinner in Budapest was a most memorable night.

At the end of the meal, the owner and his wife came out and shared a brandy with us. We sat enjoying the brandy, and Tom proceeded to tell me about two of his favorite movies, both of which happened to be tragic romances. Waterloo Bridge was the first one. It's a war movie starring Vivien Leigh as a ballet dancer who risks everything to marry an aristocratic flyer, Robert Taylor, but sinks into degradation to earn a living when she believes him to be killed in World War One. He returns alive, but her fall into prostitution leaves her too shattered to marry him, and she commits suicide. How could I, a devoted Vivien Leigh fan, have neither heard of nor seen this movie, and this big masculine Marine, I mean Army guy, knew it by heart? How did that happen?

Seeing he had my complete attention, he went on to describe a second movie, To Each His Own, starring Olivia de Havilland as a wartime young woman who gets pregnant by a World War One ace pilot. Unfortunately, he is killed before he can marry her and make their child legitimate. Then, she inadvertently and anonymously gives up her child to rich, but childless old friends. Crushed, she throws herself into her career as a face cream manufacturer and is very successful but remains lonely until that child comes back into her life in London as another pilot, this time in World War Two, just like the father he never knew. At last, she is able to do real, motherly type things to make him happy. It's a total tear jerker and a movie not to be missed. Never heard of that one either. What was going on here? I was the diehard romantic. Yet, here was a man who understood and loved romantic movies, too.

Movies were a language Tom and I spoke to each other for the rest of our lives starting on that first date. The sharing of movies was our personal code, woven through our lives right through to our last date on Liberty Street, before the bottom fell out of our love story. We were always quoting our favorite movie lines to each other. Film stories meant a lot to both of us. Neither of our families had been very good role models, so we looked to the movies to see what other people thought and felt about life.

Interestingly, both of these movies would turn out to be very revealing Freudian slips and have some interesting parallels to Tom's secret life which I only learned after he'd passed away. Not that I could have guessed anything at the time. I was simply very pleased that he was a romantic like me.

But in case we missed the point that we were each other’s destiny, Tom accidentally provided the proper soundtrack. He had been feeding the juke box coins all evening to play his classical favorites. At dessert, he had a piece by Wagner he particularly wanted me to hear. He popped his coins into the machine and returned to the table, eager for me to experience the music. But instead of whatever he thought he'd played, Wagner's classic Wedding March filled the little cafe. Tom was very embarrassed and tried to laugh it off. To prove his point and play the correct Wagner classic, he went back, put his money in again, and returned to his seat. And once again the Wedding March played. This time, he was too mortified to do anything but blush. Faulty jukebox? I don't think so. Not anymore. I think the spirits of our loved ones watch over us and clunk us on the head occasionally to make sure we don’t miss that something important is happening in our life and we should pay attention with our whole mind and heart. This counts as the third Freudian slip.

It was a very romantic date with a very romantic man. There was nothing in his behavior to suggest that true love was any less important to him than it was to me. Everything he did or said seemed very genuine, and I still believe it was.

Once he passed over, I started reading his diaries. They provided some pretty interesting insights into what he was thinking. Here is the entry about our first date.

"May 5 (Tom's Diary) Sunday. When I met Marcy, something seemed to click, like it’s really right for us to be together. I could very easily get crazy over her, but I’m afraid I’d scare her off. It’s been years since I’ve felt like this. I know this sounds absurd, but she could be the one. Time will tell. I hope the Gods are with me on this one. It would be great if she felt as strongly about me as I do about her."

It’s diary entries like this that really puzzle me, because it’s almost impossible to understand how Tom could write these words and yet do the things he subsequently did. Clearly, there was some part of Tom that really wanted someone to love and to be loved by.