48. Wedding reception.

The first time I met Joanne was at a wedding reception.
We sat at the same table.
John and Louise were getting married, I'd known John since primary school but we were never close friends, we always stayed in different circles of friends.
Joanne and I we listening to a man at our table with a cartoon tie (whose name I can't remember) talk about the last wedding reception he was at. He said he sat next to a man who had a prosthetic arm. He said that by the end of the evening the amputee was so drunk that he began dancing with his arm, no longer connected to its stump - as if it were his lost love - the plastic arm gracing the dance-floor in all its prosthetic glory.
The man with the cartoon tie then changed his conversation to the phenomenon of "phantom limbs", which, he said, had first occurred in the American Civil War. He said this "phenomenon" affected people who had recently had one of their limbs removed, and could still feel it itch; by this time I was dying to get away, just to rid myself of this man and his witty remarks.

The table was decorated with carnations (red and white), napkins (creme and pink) and white lace placemats.

The music was a selection of famous tunes from the mid-1950's to the present day, spun by a balding DJ wearing a ridiculously colorful suit.

Although Joanne and I never spoke as we ate our mushroom soup, our medallion steak, with stir-fried vegetables (peppers - red and green, broccoli and cauliflower) and black forest gateaux and during the sipping of our champagne, we shared a mutual understanding.
I knew that she was going to come home with me that night; and she knew it too.