It Just Never Took Off

(I’m guessing this is a Falcon 900)

DUKE: I am arriving at JFK from Zurich, Zagreb at 4:00pm today and leaving at 11:00pm for Hong Kong. What are you doing today?

ME: What do you think? I’m at work, silly. Am I going to have to play hooky?

DUKE: I am en route now somewhere over Greenland and landing at the private jetport at JFK (TERMINAL 4) at 14:00. I’ll call you as soon as I can on the satellite phone to see if you might be available AFTER work. How far is it for me to come down to Phillie, or you come here, or we meet half way? Ciao for now.

ME: Philly and NYC are only close on maps! There is a pretty hotel there (a Hyatt or a Hilton, forget which), that I used to go to for brunch. Wouldn’t mind meeting there for dinner; it’s only an hour away from my house.

DUKE: My chauffeur says that the trip from JFK to Princeton, and back to JFK wouldn’t allow us much opportunity to chat. I have to come back here in 2 weeks, with a week on tap, so that would avoid the “interuptus” and quick nature of the visit. Let’s shoot for 2 weeks from now.

ME: Barring the Apocalypse, in which case you can fly me out of the country.

That’s when I remembered why we broke up.  We’d spent a wonderful week in Washington D.C.  I was taking a class in calculating learning curves and he had a series of face-to-face meetings with Wolfowitz and Tobias, trying to get them to release the millions for African aid that they’d promised.  After our whirlwind romance, gassing for hours about mining and geopolitics he told me he was “done looking.” He’d found the woman he wanted.  He wanted to be exclusive.

I was enormously flattered, but we’d only just met!  He wasn’t even a U.S. citizen and he traveled ALL. THE. TIME.  “Let’s date for six months and see how it goes,” I suggested. Well, that was that.  I never saw him again.  He was deeply hurt, wanted to know if he’d done or said something wrong and I felt so awful. “I really want to see how often we actually SEE one another before I stop meeting new people.  If you’re traveling all the time and I never see you, what’s the point?”

And that’s how I lost a perfectly good hyper-billionaire boyfriend.   I think his two ex-wives had told him the exact same thing, and once he heard the same thing to me he just flew away.