Old

by Stan Charnofsky

  “Massage?”

  “Yeah, you know, where strong fingers dig into your skin, probe your muscles, make you feel like you’re about to come.”

  “I doubt it. I don’t believe in substitutes.”

  “So, it comes close. What’s bad about that?”

  “When did you arrange for us to have this heavenly rub?”

  “They’re open seven days a week, and, since you still teach and see sick people, I’ve set it up for Sunday at ten in the morning.”

  “Not sick people, Zan, folks who are troubled and trying to understand their problems.”

  “Whatever. Today, if my memory hasn’t failed me, is Friday, so I’ll pick you up day after tomorrow at nine-thirty. Sound okay?”

  I ponder the idea for only a moment. Why not? It had probably been over twenty years since anyone gave me a massage. “Sure. I’ll be outside. No need to honk. You’ll wake the Sunday morning sleep-ins.”

  I sign off the phone and my restlessness kicks back in. Zandor’s sexual image makes me uncomfortable. I ought to be too old for those kinds of seductive references. When we were youths, we joked all the time about whom we wanted to nail, and how we might get a babe alone. Now we resort to joking about orgasms coming by way of alternate stimuli. That is Zandor for you. He probably still gets his now-and-then sexual event with his wife. Well, good for him. Damn, why am I so bitter?

  It is a masseuse and she is gorgeous, wearing white, like a nurse, but low-cut in front, showing cleavage, and with powerful fingers. They say the secret is in the thumbs, though I wouldn’t know. I will say that it is the closest thing to erotic touching from a female that I have had in a hell of a long time. She laughs and carries on a cute repartee, bordering on the risqué, and I wonder if they instruct her about the subject matter. I join in and we exchange stories. I think I make her laugh—honestly, not part of the theatre—and it makes me feel younger.

  When it is over, Zandor and I go out to brunch, and I say, “You almost got it right this time, Zan. Not quite a ‘come’ situation, but remarkably stimulating. I think I fell in love, briefly and fleetingly, of course, but nonetheless in love with Brandy. What was yours’ name?”

  “Hey, mine was Brandy too. Maybe they call all of them Brandy. Maybe there is a Brandy one and a Brandy two and, you know…”

  “Think your cousin is that creative?”

  “My wife’s cousin, and no, he’s not. But someone in his group knows how to put on a good show.”

  “I’m glad I did this, though it stirs me up and I’m afraid leaves me unsatisfied.”

  “So, satisfy yourself. Find someone.”

  I ponder whether I want to let Zandor in on Megan’s entry onto the scene. He is not, I am aware, a good listener, and will surely give me some off-the-wall advice. Okay, as I’ve said, he loves me, and has my welfare at heart. Sure, why not.

  “Guess what, old buddy?”

  “Guess what about what? Are you going to tell me you have found someone?”

  “Not in the way you think, but someone has been found.”

  He looks puzzled, knows my history, knows who’s been lost, would likely blurt out something about Julie. Instead, he smiles sardonically, and waits.

  “In our orientation on Thursday, one of the applicants came up to me afterwards. I didn’t even recognize her. It was Megan.”

  “No shit!”

  “She actually gave me a hug. We went for coffee. It was like a dream, the whole experience. She will likely join our program.”

  “Fill me in, pal. What’s she been up to? Where’s she been?’

  I tell him some of what Megan had revealed about her life after running away from her mother and me. Astonishingly, he doesn’t interrupt. I think he is fascinated at Megan’s emergence. He used to be fond of her, used to tell me how bright she was. While I am talking, there is a brattling sound from the nearby kitchen; Zandor seems to ignore my story, reacts instead to the noise.

  “Shouldn’t have sat by the kitchen, too distracting.”

  “Have you been listening to me?” I ask, irritated. I might have known there would be no payoff opening up to Zandor.

  “Of course. She lives with a Mexican dude, works in the music industry, sells real estate, has been keeping track of her mother. So, re-connecting with your stepdaughter—how does that make you feel?”

  I am mollified. He is eerily capable of both non-sequiturs and the subject at hand. “I am delighted,” I say. “She is a vibrant woman.” I decide to abandon the personal and say, “She will make a superb therapist.”

  He nods and focuses on his food.

  I am thankfully aware that he does not connect Megan’s re-appearance with his challenge of a moment earlier, ‘find someone,’ though knowing Zandor as I do, I would expect him to file the notion away and throw it at me later, when I least expect it.

  “I wonder,” I say, as if thinking aloud, “if my life will now change drastically.”

  I see Zandor grin mischievously, and he says, “Could get Julie back into the picture if Megan decides to contact her.”

  “I doubt that,” I reply, and add, “since she has her own relationship five hundred miles from here.”

  I am also aware that it makes perfect sense for Zandor to leap to Julie as a possible consequence of Megan’s return. Good. I wouldn’t want him conjuring up any improbable connection between Megan and me. Why would he? It is my own absurd non-sequitur.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  It is eerie how life, at any time, whether one is youthful and capricious or old and mellow, can present challenges that stir the juices and defy reason. I am not one for melodrama, nor do I toy with destiny as a causative factor. I believe we make our own way, pitfalls and triumphs, and must live with the consequences of our choices.

  My choices have brought me to my alone status, here, now, at my ripe, young age of seventy. How inane to call it destiny! How narrow to try to accommodate the myriad variables of a human life into an “it was meant to be” philosophy! As I have noted, I might have chosen differently if I had it all to do over again, but I don’t, and I am content to assume the mantel of responsibility for my present situation with all its plusses and minuses.

  Here I am, starting yet another semester at my university, only this time enriched by my own stepdaughter, if not in all of my classes, at least in our program, on campus two or three days a week. I am delighted to be able to see her regularly. She is a breath of fresh air on my septuagenarian landscape.

  I get to meet Celestino, or, as Megan calls him for short, Tino. He picks her up after class, the one class of mine she is in of four she is taking. He is a handsome man, rather light-skinned for a Latino, his hair long and black, but with a slight graying at the temples. He is not tall, maybe five feet nine (Megan is about five feet six), but appears strong, as if he works out regularly, wide in the shoulders with large biceps and forearms. He smiles broadly at me (great, even white teeth), and proffers a friendly hand.

  I have mixed feelings meeting him. In one sense, it demystifies the man so that my imagination cannot run wild with speculation, and, in the opposite sense, it solidifies what I already know, that Megan is taken, involved with a real, flesh-and-blood person, off the market, so to speak. How foolish, anyway! She would not be in my market, taken or not.

  One thing does irritate me, and that is Tino calling me ‘Sir’ and saying as we part, “Nice to meet Megan’s father at last.” Why don’t I think of myself as Megan’s father? I lived in the same house with her for six or more years, and, as Julie’s husband, I assumed the role of her father. She would come to me for consultation over certain issues and we always seemed to have an amicable connection. She would hug me freely and with clear affection. I recall, in fact, feeling more her confidant than Julie was—especially when she became a teenager and friction escalated between them. We, Megan and I, had a pristine love for each other, the way a father and a daughter ought to love each other. Now thirty years later, I’m feeling anything but fath
erly toward her.

  As Megan and Tino walk away from me this evening I hear her say to him, “Well, he’s not really my father.”

  Then, as the world spins (remember, I am fascinated with circles) in its timeless fashion and humans ponder their existence, while some old lives fade away and new ones begin, Megan comes up to me after class one night, waits for other students to leave, and says, “Coffee?”

  In my uncertainty, she offers an alternative, “Or tea?”

  “Either one,” I say at last, stunned at my good fortune.

  We drive in separate cars to a café on the boulevard beyond the campus borders; it is ten o’clock and most university people have gone home for the night, the eatery nearly empty except for two young couples in the far corner, in their broadcast T-shirts, championing water polo and surfing. We both ignore the originally suggested choices and order chocolate milkshakes.

  “Did you see the moon? Like a perfect marigold.”

  “You always were skilled at similes,” I reply.

  “I’m afraid in business it is easy to become literal, even stolid. Imagination is routed by hard-nosed practicality. I try hard to retain some semblance of creativity.”

  I watch the four students, frivolous in their youth, no evidence of studying anywhere about them; I wonder how, on a mid-week evening, they can eschew their books and devote energy to mindless socializing. I realize I am too hard on them, that I am judging them shamefully.

  “Creativity,” I say, feeling off balance at my intolerance, “is your forte. I remember when you were a young girl, the ceramics you molded, the hats you made and the quilts you crocheted.”

  “It can be glorious and it can terrify. Creativity, I mean. Imagine all the creations of folks who have passed, ignored by their survivors, most lost forever in the dust of uninspired antiquity. The great ones live on, of course, but for the bulk of us, pleasure for our inventive offspring must be immediate and personal, in most cases the process more satisfying than the product.”

  “Well said, Megan. I caution my psychology patients not to get hooked into the product. Being functional is a lifelong process, never an end product. If, I tell them, you do learn how to live more immediately, more effectively, it is a guarded treasure to be vigilantly monitored, never an end in itself. You are constantly ‘becoming.’”

  I stop, aware that I am pontificating. “Sorry for sounding professorial.”

  “Love it!” she responds at once. “That is how I remember you from my teens, sweetly professorial.”

  She takes a long draw on her milkshake, smiles at me with what I desperately want to read as affection, and says, “People didn’t know, thirty years ago, how good chocolate was for them. Thought it was full of fat and sugar and nothing else. Now we know it has anti-oxidants, same as dark vegetables and fruits. I eat blueberries and broccoli, drink cranberry juice, sprinkle flax seed on my oatmeal, and understand that my whole life is a process of trying to stay ahead of the pollutants. And you know what? People die anyway. Cancer and heart disease claim the most diligent of health addicts.”

  I want to join in her health inventory so I say, “Americans are the most obese people in the world, waddling about in baggy pants to hide their adiposity. And do you know what? I don’t poke fun at them, because a few meager changes in my diet and exercise routines and I would be among them. I simply love ice cream and fudge and peanut butter and cheese and all kinds of pasta. Don’t know why, but I seem to be able to put a lid on my food addictions. Some eerie inner wisdom commands me to stop.”

  She smiles and says, again with what I want to label as affection, “I can see.” Then with some pomposity she tacks on, “You are a physical wonder, Teddy Bronte. Fit as a fiddle and…” She stops.

  I am aware that there is a song from an old Gene Kelly musical that goes, “Fit as a fiddle and ready for love.” I imagine that Megan knows the end of her sentence as well. I imagine she doesn’t want to embarrass me, or maybe us.

  “The next line is,” I say, “‘I could jump over the moon up above.’ You loved musicals when you were a teen.” I am aware that I skirt the missing line and change topics, safer, and indeed less embarrassing for an old coot like me.

  “Still do. Want to go with me sometime? I think Pajama Game is being revived at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse.”

  Do I want to go with her? Is she kidding? What about Tino?

  Before I can say anything, she embellishes her invitation with, “Tino doesn’t know about musicals. He’s a salsa fan.”

  “Sure. Tell me when.”

  She looks serious for a quick instant, raises her right hand over her head and brushes back some stray hairs; for the first time, I notice she wears a ruby ring on her pinky finger. She says, “In my routine, I ignore bigger issues, tumble through my days without pondering essentials, get caught up in trivia, the must-get-done stuff, obligations, the chores of maintaining a residence, duties of being a citizen.”

  “Dutiful,” I tell her.

  “I am reluctant to go to life-meaning issues, yet coming up with a solid philosophy of living is exactly the elixir I need.”

  “Becoming a therapist forces you to deal with deeper meaning, yours and the people you try to help. It’s a heady search. You’re going to love it.”

  “That’s why I brought it up, since I’ve already been stirred by my classes, yours and the others. What a trip! Digging into the goodies of why people behave the way they do, what motivates them, how they distort and accommodate.”

  “You’re starting to ponder life and death issues, what we older folks have had to do to get where we are without crashing and burning.”

  She looks askance and I wonder if she remembers that her Aunt Annie was a victim of a crash and burn accident, I wonder if she thinks I chose my metaphor unwisely. I do that a lot: say something and then regret it and try to reel it back in, salvage my true meaning.

  “At my stage I tend to deny death. I was reading that the existentialists claim we cannot truly live until we accept our death.”

  “I agree with that,” I say. “It isn’t morbidity. It is the acknowledgement that no one gets out of here alive. Death is our true classmate, and owning its inevitability gives us permission to live every moment fully.”

  That wonderful smile again, and Megan says, “I’m beginning to see that you seem to have acquired that skill, or better said, have learned to experience moments deeply, without shame or guilt or profitless yearning for what might have been.”

  I feel embarrassed and want to assure Megan that I have conquered relatively few of my fears, do not know the secrets of a flourishing existence; if I did, I wouldn’t be alone at my age, wishing for a loving partnership.

  “Remember,” I say, “it is a process. I’m learning, but I also am yearning. It seems endless, like an ocean that goes on far beyond the horizon.”

  I think she perceives me showing resignation, like in some eastern philosophies, because she puts her hand on my arm and says, “I worry when you permit melancholy to invade your mood. You were always, for me, an uplifting example of optimism.”

  I scan the small café, am reminded, briefly, of the coffee shop Kacey and I retreated to from Genieve Wolfe’s bookstore so many years ago, the awkward moments, the breakthrough when she leaned over and kissed me. Much water under (and over) the bridge since then. Megan is so different, a precious gem, (a ruby?) struggling to understand her personal truths.

  The students in the corner prepare to leave, standing and moving with knotty postures that only the young can assume. One of the men pushes the other, playfully, and he nearly falls but recovers remarkably, displaying a kind of athletic skill I no longer have. The young women giggle, their heads together as if sharing a secret, eyes luminous with admiration.

  With Megan’s hand on my arm, I say, “And you were always, for me, the finale to Beethoven’s ninth, an ode to joy.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  “So,” Zandor says with a know-it-all smile, “how come you’
re so sad lately? Old age catching up with you? Disappointed in love?”

  “Go to hell,” I say playfully. He knows I love him, years of friendship overriding his snippety barbs. But damn it, he is picking up on something.

  “Seriously, is there a burden of some kind pulling you down?”

  We are back for another massage at his wife’s cousin’s parlor, thrilled again by the Brandy assigned to each of us. I am slightly uncomfortable with a gorgeous woman perusing my old, naked bod, though she seems unaware, or at least unconcerned, about wrinkles, moles, love handles and other deteriorations. Again, the thought rises that self-consciousness about my body has kept me from trying to pursue good-looking women.

  We are now in the sauna, towels over our private parts, the heat torturing and, simultaneously, cleansing.

  “One can’t be disappointed in love unless there are expectations. I have no expectations.” I lied. Well, not exactly, since I have wishes rather than expectations.

  “See,” he pokes at me, “you give up. That’ll get you nowhere. Remember the song from Damn Yankees: ‘You gotta have hope; mustn’t sit around and mope.’”

  “Look, Zan, realism is more practical than fantasy. You have a long-term connection with someone where the history is as adhesive as the love. I would have to start fresh with someone. I remember the other song, ‘…and the days grow short when you reach September.’ I haven’t got time for the games young lovers play. I haven’t got the patience to court and woo and try to win someone.”

  “Ah, time is relative. The twenty years you probably have left could be a lifetime with the right woman.”

  “Given that someone did look at life that way, I’d still have to convince her to pair up with me, and that takes too much effort and time.”

  He shakes his head and sticks his lower lip over his upper, popping it away to speak: “That’s what I mean. You throw in the towel without even raising a sweat. You never know what’s out there waiting for you unless you give it a try. It’s like looking for a ring that was lost in a swimming pool. You won’t find it until you take a deep breath and dive to the bottom—with your eyes wide open.”