Chapter 10
Possibly it was my biological ponderings, along with subliminal fears that I might be moving into the Viagra crowd myself, that led me to imagine April was coming on to me at the knitting group meetings and even during our occasional encounters in the hallway of the apartment building. What could he have been thinking, you're asking yourself. Hold on – I'm going to tell you. There was no denying that she was smiling at me a lot in the meetings and laughing at witticisms that weren't that creative and taking extra time to explain this stitch or that, with our fingers making brief electrical contact as she demonstrated the proper movements with my needles. And maybe following me out to the kitchen to chat a little bit while I made coffee or, if the group was meeting in the strangely bare apartment she shared with boyfriend Arthur, asking me some trivial question just as the others were going out the door, so that I'd have to stay behind alone for a minute or two. There were also the occasional hallway meetings, the broad smile and the little extra swivel in her hips as she went up the stairs. . . That's what I thought, anyway.
I'm not crazy. Where women are concerned, however, I can be schizophrenic. In the real world I noted these smiles and tarryings, aligned them side by side with my personal statistics as described in the previous chapter, and decided they must all be perfectly innocent behaviors painted with an erotic wash by my endlessly hopeful mental brush. But there was also the realm of fantasy; and on that stage I had no trouble at all creating scenarios in which a juicy, elastic young thing like April would find reasons (although these had to be left suitably vague) for putting moves on a retired gentleman who was rapidly tipping over into old age.
And so in the days after the knitting group met I would find myself imagining some minor domestic emergency in the upstairs apartment: for example, the toilet won't stop running, and April will call down in a panic, afraid it's going to overflow. Arthur will be out of town, of course, so I bravely mount the stairs to take a look at the problem. April, surprisingly short and vulnerable without her shoes on, is waiting at the door in a flowered silk kimono, arms folded anxiously beneath her substantial breasts. She leads me to the bathroom, where a steady rush of water can be heard. I lean over to peer into the algal brown darkness of the tank, thinking I should have brought a flashlight. April, close behind me, leans over too, ostensibly to see what I'm doing, pressing softly against my back and shoulder. I jiggle the ball-cock mechanism, and the long arm of the float valve springs up abruptly, freed from whatever was pinning it against the wall of the tank. The flow of water stops. I straighten and turn to look at her. She looks back.
I believed none of this, of course. It was like the kind of bad movie whose embarrassingly lazy plot merely provides an excuse to screen a lot of shooting, exploding sports cars pinwheeling end over end, and profound cleavage. In my loneliness and sexual deprivation – which admittedly for a 60-year-old is more theoretical than real – I was happy enough to have April smile at me in what I could see as a provocative way if I squinted my eyes, and more than happy to usher her ahead of me into the front entrance in my gentlemanly way so I could follow her sashaying butt up the stairs. As far as I was concerned, it was all about screenplay. As long as she kept doing what she was doing (whether she was really doing it or not) – in fact, even if she didn't, because by now the idea was planted in my head – enough fresh pages would come rolling out of my mental printer to keep me insulated from the yellowing newsprint of reality.
In any case, there was boyfriend Arthur, whose combination of gravity and bulk gave him what could be interpreted as a slightly menacing air. He wasn't around a lot – he seemed to do a lot of traveling – but you got the feeling that he didn't miss much. And there was also Leilah, who, in the fantasy world at least, I hadn't quite given up on, although in my more realistic moments I knew that bird had flown. But there was an ambivalence there too, because, as hinted above, I wouldn't have minded getting back at her a little bit.
As I look back on it now, I believe there was a gradually escalating campaign for several weeks, and maybe even some impatience on April's part, while I, having already decided what the situation was, continued thoughtlessly in my role of creative director by night and passive spectator in the light of day. One evening, after a knitting group meeting at which Victor Carogna had bragged shamelessly about his success in teaching me to shoot, April telephoned down. The toilet had refused to stop running after she flushed it, and she was afraid it was going to overflow. Could I come up and take a look at it? She was waiting at the door in a flowered silk kimono, with her arms crossed anxiously beneath her bosom. In the bathroom I peered into the gloomy depths of the toilet tank, wishing I'd brought a flashlight. April leaned over close behind to see what I was doing, pressing her breast gently against my back and shoulder. I freed the float valve and straightened up to look at her.
It all seemed suspiciously easy, but my personal chemical factory, operating at maximum output, somehow made it believable, and I went ahead, because there didn't seem to be any good reason to resist. At my age, how many more Aprils are there, anyway? That's what I thought. Or that's what I thought I was thinking. But thought is not the name of the mental process that takes place in that sort of situation.
I did manage to bring up the name Arthur while she lit the candle next to the bed. April, I observed without noticing, was being very cool about this whole event. “What about him?” she replied. “Your boyfriend?” They didn't have that kind of relationship, she assured me. More of a business partnership. He traveled a lot – was out of town at that very moment, in fact. I didn't inquire further, although I was beginning to be interested in what kind of relationship they did have.
Everything went quite well, from the physical point of view at least, but after the storm surge of adrenaline I found to my disappointment, despite the luxurious heft of her body and an unexpected virtuosity, that April was not Leilah. The whole exercise in fact produced the sort of dry satisfaction you might expect from sanding a fine piece of furniture. That is, it was the kind of sex I'd more or less forgotten about in 25 years of married life, even after, or especially after, sex had become a side issue between Leilah and me – the kind of sex where on the whole you'd just as soon be somewhere else when it was over.
So I was kind of disconsolate, lying next to April on the platform bed that was the only item of furniture in the room, staring up toward the dark ceiling in the wavering light of the smoky candle. Part of the problem was that I was still feeling uncomfortable about the Arthur factor, since I don't believe you should trust a disclaimer from the mouth of only one of the partners in a relationship. I tried to bring up the subject by asking her about the business partnership.
“We have this other . . . studio that we operate out of,” she told me. "That's why it's so bare in this apartment – we had to go into debt to furnish the other place. It's kind of hard to explain, what we do,” she said, rather shyly it seemed to me. I waited, thinking about what would be a polite interval before I could leave. It had been a long time, and I'd forgotten the conventions. “Do you have my cell phone number?” she finally asked. “You could Google it and find our website. Actually, that's the best thing to do. It'll tell you everything.”
She picked up my gloomy mood, or maybe she was just accustomed to that aftereffect, and turned cuddly. “Do you want to stay?” she said, with friendly hands traveling around. “Arthur won't be coming home, so we've got all night. We could take a shower, or get something to eat, whatever. Sleep for a while.” But that's sex for you. The slope on the far side of the high is way steeper than it is for any of those other drugs I mentioned; it's a precipice, in fact. Especially for old men. I now had no interest in playing around. I felt slack and disillusioned and not at all cuddly. All I really wanted to do was go to bed, in my own bed, and sleep.
I told her I had to get up early in the morning, but I'm sure she knew it was bullshit. She probably wasn't sorry to see me go,
as a matter of fact. At the door, wrapped again in the kimono, she pecked me on the cheek and giggled a little. “Google the cell phone,” she said. “It'll be interesting.” It was, too.