He got me with The Thin Man.

But first he had to get my attention. It wasn’t tough. Colin had all the equipment: pearl-gray eyes, fauxhawk hair and a deft way of embedding words like “soporific” and “inculcate” in that vermouth-over-ice voice of his.

I’d come to the bar as a refugee from a recent breakup. So had he. We found our way to a booth in the back. I started on a string of lemon drop martinis. He ordered the first of several bourbons, neat. 

And we were off.

That meant talking about our immediate exes. I told him about Derek. He was a board game freak. Hella 90s. Catan. He played them all. One day he went old school and tried to take me on at chess. He cheated at en passant. I dumped him.

Colin offered up Tova. He called her Take Two Tova. No matter what they did—finding the hottest Ecuadorian restaurant or apple-picking in Poughquag—she always wanted to repeat the experience. We weren’t sufficiently in the moment. That’s what she’d say. And then they went to Amish country. Colin knew what was coming. He couldn’t stomach another slice of Guggisberg. He cut her loose.

“It was going to happen, anyway,” he said. “I mean, she didn’t get The Thin Man.”

There it was. His hook.

Colin explained it was a film (never movie, always film) made in 1934. It was with William Powell and Myrna Loy. He was a retired detective who wasn’t really retired. She was rich. They had a charismatic, wire-haired fox terrier named Asta. There was a murder. It needed solving.

That was just the framework, Colin noted. The real magic was the tone, the texture. They were elegant, unapologetic drunks who consorted with criminals, wastrels and other elegant, unapologetic drunks. It was a glib, sub-nihilistic, urbane gag gracefully sustained over its one-hour-and-thirty-three-minute running time.

“You have to see it,” Colin declared. “As in, like, now.”

I was floating through my third martini, which put me in an agreeable mood. We went to his place and started watching The Thin Man and fired up some smoke. He had a stash of OG Kush. It was okay, but I converted him on the spot to my Amnesia Haze. It’s a modern woman’s way of dressing up her man.

I admit it. I loved the film. It was funny and bracing and zigged where I thought it would zag. Colin told me the film had been a hit. You know what that means. Sequels. Lots of sequels. So we sprawled on his couch and binged on The Thin Man for the rest of the night and into the morning: After the Thin Man. Another Thin Man. Shadow of the Thin Man. The Thin Man Goes Home. Song of the Thin Man.

My interest started flagging after Another Thin Man, but my interest in Colin had legs. I stayed at his place through the next day. And the next. I only went back to my place for clean clothes and my dwindling cache of Amnesia Haze. We were cosseted in that lush, early relationship stage when everything we did seemed effortlessly appealing and endearing and seductive. We met each other’s friends, sojourned to our favorite bars, immersed ourselves in Salmon Toor at the Whitney, the Sidney Bechet revival at Smalls, and, yes, the William Powell Retrospective Series at the Quad.

And then came Wendy Wren.

We ran into her while wandering the stacks at The Strand. Wendy was a friend of Colin’s from college. She invited us to a party she was throwing that weekend. By the time we got to her apartment, it was past midnight and her place was jammed. We both knew people there and, after scoring drinks, Colin and I separated to play catch-up with friends. After an hour, I started scanning the multitudes for Colin. He was in a corner, talking to Wendy Wren and two girls I didn’t know. I quietly approached from behind. Call it eavesdropping. I wanted to hear what Colin was talking about when I wasn’t around. It only took a few words to grasp the content. It’s not the storyline, but the underlying tone, a sub-nihilistic, urbane gag gracefully sustained… and so forth.

One of the girls looked over his shoulder at me. Colin saw her looking and turned. Our eyes locked and something shot across his face. It was quick, but sometimes the lifespan of a glimpse is more than enough. I saw Colin. All of him.

I don’t remember much of the rest of the night, except on the cab ride home he kept trying to look into my eyes, while I looked out the window.

We lasted another week. I even caught him watching The Thin Man on his laptop one night after he thought I’d fallen asleep. The next day I told him I had to go back to my place to pick something up. I got home, waited an hour, then called him back.

“I think I’m staying here tonight, if that’s okay.”

There was a pause. Not too long, but long enough.

“Okay,” he said.

Some moments have a sound. This one was: thunk.

That was it. A few months later I heard he’d gotten back with Take Two Tova after a two-month dalliance with Wendy Wren. I’d bet my last ounce of smoke that several slices of Guggisberg were in his future.

As for me, I ran into Derek at a party in the West Fifties. He surprised me by apologizing for cheating at en passant. He threw in a confession that he’d never really understood the King’s Indian Defense. It charmed me. On our first night back together, I did something. I don’t know why. I pulled up The Thin Man on my laptop. I watched him watching the screen. I wanted to see if he got it. If he did, we’d move on to the sequels.