Old

by Stan Charnofsky

  I smile at his clever example. I wonder if my swimming pool ring could be a ruby. That is what I mean when I say that Zandor is a friend who has my welfare at heart. But before I can respond to him, he embellishes his statement with a revelation that nearly knocks me off my bench.

  “Your depiction of my marriage as a successful historical achievement is accurate, but I never told you that in order to keep it perking along, I’ve enjoyed a few indulgences along the way. The latest was only a year ago, and, at my age, I had a little dalliance with a forty-year-old saleswoman who drops in at my office. Lovely experience. The sex was hot, and I’d go home and feel closer to my wife for all the elegant connections we have.”

  “Zan!”

  He peers at me, bemused. I can see through the steam that he is enjoying confessing his libertine pursuits, and in the process demolishing the image I always had of him.

  “Yesss?” he says in a mock, drawn out tone.

  “And Gwen has no idea? She doesn’t suspect?”

  “Gwen loves me. I love her. It has little to do with stirring the blood now and then with an erotic diversion.”

  “What about loyalty? What about honesty?”

  “For all I know, she’s been double-dipping as well. Don’t ask, don’t tell is our motto. Our lives work rather well and we don’t poke around in each other’s outside activities.”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t be jealous if you found out she’s sleeping with another guy?”

  “I don’t want to find out. Our sex life, Gwen’s and mine, plods along like an old friend we call on intermittently. It’s a tribute to familiarity. She satisfies me and I satisfy her. We know what each other likes. But soaring passion? Novelty? Those things ended long ago. If I want fire in my life I have to go elsewhere, so I do.”

  I shake my head in bewilderment. I’m no prude. Don’t normally judge people’s style. It is clear to me that folks satisfy their needs in a myriad of ways, not all of them within the bounds of our culture’s overt moral system. I say overt because I also know that Americans enjoy immeasurable degrees of freedom, and many indulge in a robust secret life, denied in churches and temples, ignored in the media. But, Zandor had never revealed any of his escapades to me, and I admit to being caught off guard, assuming a scolding posture, skewering him with my sarcasm and pointed questions. I try to soften my condemnation.

  “Well, more power to you. Both of you. Not sure I could pull off what you do, but I do have respect for what could be called your disrespect for standard mores.”

  All at once I am aware that the heat in the sauna is oppressive, the attendant periodically adding water to the steaming rocks, my tolerance level evaporating as well. I wonder also about my tolerance level for partnership violation, in my thoughts the very word denoting judgment.

  Zandor laughs, beginning to stand, the heat becoming too much for him. I see a streak of red rash along his rib cage. He ties his towel around him and says, “Bull shit. You’re blown away. That’s okay. I won’t ask you about your secrets.”

  I want to blurt out, “I don’t have any! My ethical life has been a boring anthem to the mundane!”

  Instead I say, “You know I wouldn’t keep any secrets from you, Zan.”

  We are in one car, and, on the way home, Zandor, who is driving, casually asks, “How’s Megan doing in your classes?”

  “Great,” I respond. “She’s an ultra-bright woman.”

  “Been in touch with Julie?”

  “No way. I don’t think Megan has either. She keeps tabs by way of a mutual cousin.”

  “Now, from your steady flow of admiring adjectives, I’d say you have a boner for Megan.” He looks over at me and holds his glance a bit too long.

  “Asshole!” I say. “She’s my stepdaughter.”

  “Not the same bloodline.”

  “She’s a kid.”

  “My last lady was younger than she.”

  “You’re you, I’m me.”

  “I know, but are you happy with you?”

  THIRTY

  Some people think a man without a woman is like a martini without an olive, or a Margarita without salt. I’ve ordered saltless Margaritas in the past, and I know a couple of people who hate olives but adore martinis.

  For me, it is a lot like the self-chosen hunger strikes of a Gandhi or a King, or a Chavez. They aren’t really starving, since the refusal to eat is for a cause and is their decision. In the same way, my single status could be construed to be my choice, and therefore not a hardship.

  Well, that would be sophistry. It is my choice in one sense—that I refuse to pair up with someone I don’t love, am not attracted to and don’t want to be with twenty-four hours a day. I really do not simply want to fill up my townhouse with another person. Yet, if the right person came along and was willing to partner with me, I’d welcome her as if she were Annie come back to life.

  Two months slither by, the way September and October do in Southern California, when the thermals blow oppressive dry heat in off the desert into the basin. It is not like southern heat, which, in so many ways, is exactly like a sauna, but is instead arid and searing, often over a hundred in my valley, yet almost without perspiration. I like it and I don’t. It forces me to stay indoors more than I like, in my air-conditioned office or my air-conditioned town-home. The evenings are glorious, mild and embracing.

  Students in my class are asked to do presentations on the different therapy theories, Megan choosing a famous humanistic psychologist, Carl Rogers. I watch and listen eagerly when it is her turn, and am rewarded beyond expectation. Despite her protestation to me on the phone that she chokes up when in front of a large group, I see her offering as insightful, pointed, rich in depth, filled with understanding of the concepts, and most remarkably, both calm and clever, her delivery an entertaining mix of examples and applications.

  “You were superb!” I tell her when class is over.

  “I was terrified.”

  “It didn’t show.”

  “I’ve become skilled at hiding my angst.”

  “That’s a talent in itself.”

  “Don’t!”

  “What?”

  “Praise me if it isn’t genuine.”

  “But it is.”

  “I don’t want fatherly approval.”

  “I’m not your father so I can’t give that.”

  “Honestly, Teddy, was it okay, I mean did I get the assignment right?”

  “More than right, Megan. Carl Rogers himself would have been impressed. You are a humanist, so, delving into his approach comes naturally to you. I want to avoid charges of favoritism, but frankly, yours was the best so far.”

  She seems surprised. I see blotches on her neck, a Rorschach design, creeping up like a rising red river. I notice she looks away, about, out the window at the dusky evening sky, a pensive look taking over, eyes focused somewhere, on something else.

  She says, “I don’t want anyone to think I’m getting special treatment from you. Learning these skills has to be my achievement.”

  “Hey, what have I done? So far, I’ve only reacted to your outstanding work. I would praise the others too, if their contributions were as seamlessly presented.”

  She seems mollified and says, “Just establishing the boundaries. I treasure our special connection, but I want my schoolwork to succeed on its own merit.”

  I admire her pointed independent streak—she always had that, refused, ever, to be one of the crowd, insisted, always, on carving out her own path. It is what brought her into frequent conflict with Julie, what led, eventually, to her running away, a crafty bird intent on escaping what she viewed as her confining cage.

  We are walking to our cars on a quiet, dark campus, evoking for me the image of a settling parachute with its air sucked away, the afternoon ebullience of a thousand young students replaced by the seriousness of the older, dedicated evening learners.

  “Tino,” she says, “wanted me to call when I finished so we could meet for a drink to
celebrate my achievement.”

  I nod, aware that this is yet one more instance of spending heady moments with an attractive woman, and going home alone.

  Then she adds, “I could arrange to meet at the Tortilla Inn down the street. They’re open till midnight. Like to join us?”

  Of every possibility I might conjure up about Megan and me, being the third wheel is the least appealing. In an odd way, I feel seduced by the compulsion to know more about the man, what pulls Megan toward him, what, as is said so often, she sees in him. But I cannot imagine suffering through a manufactured ménage a trois with Megan and her boyfriend. Foolish, I know. My own brand of manufactured romanticism. They see me as the elder statesman, the professor, Megan’s stepfather. No competition there, no third party trying to break into a closed partnership.

  “I’m a bit tired,” I say without conviction. “Think I’ll head on home.”

  She looks wounded and says, “You’re a great teacher, you know. The students love you.”

  “That’s good to hear.”

  She waits as we stop at her car, then says with a tender tone I ache to decipher more explicitly, “I love you too.”

  When she was a teenager and we all lived together, I never once thought of Megan in an erotic way. Julie was my wife, I loved her; Megan was her daughter, I loved her.

  What is so different now? Might be because I’m alone, might be because Julie and I are no longer together, might even be because Megan is a bright and beautiful woman, past being a kid, no longer part of the culture-of-family we had carved out. Just my luck, though, that this amazing woman pops back into my life already taken, as unavailable, as untouchable as she was when we lived in the same house thirty years ago.

  I go home and feel disappointment in my arms, my legs, my heart. My teeth are disappointed. I feel old, ought to start cupping my ears to hear, walk with a cane, no longer pee straight, lose weight, lose height.

  Old is a mind thing; I’m minding my age, don’t relish caving in to the vagaries of old.

  How trapped I feel when I get into the age debate, fettered by custom, by cultural expectation. Damn it all, I don’t like being old.

  When I was twenty, I thought of death as absurd, a distant cartoon, a finale reserved for the spent and the hopeless. I would hear people who had reached fifty ponder the length of their lives, hoping for twenty or even thirty more years. Now, friends in my age group shrink their prospects, wondering if they have six or eight or ten years left. George Bernard Shaw lived past ninety and he abhorred exercise. Churchill reached his nineties and smoked cigars and drank whiskey every day. I monitor my body daily––have the advantage of knowing the value of vitamin supplements, fish oil, green vegetables, oats and flax. I don’t ponder my death, never have, refuse to, expect to live as long as I live. But, damn it, when I think of someone like Megan, being old gets me down.

  Moods shift with the wind. Megan calls me late on the next afternoon and a new wind begins to blow.

  “I’ve been crying,” she tells me, “for three hours. Can we meet? I need to overhaul my life. Need a practiced ear to catch my words, a caring heart to tell me it’ll be okay.”

  I think of quotes taken from little children when asked about the meaning of love. One little boy, Billy, age four, said, “When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth.”

  “Megan,” I reply, hoping with all my energy that I say her name in a way that makes her feel safe, “come on over. You know the address. Jiggle my doorknocker. I’ll wait for you.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Her face wears a pale mask of startle, and I let her in and wonder what can be beating her down. She hardly notices my décor, the books, my modern furniture, mostly oak and walnut, straight lines, no gaudy loops or frills, goes directly toward my kitchen and sits at the small, drop-leaf table.

  “Can I have a cup of tea? Decaffeinated if you have it. I don’t like caffeine in the evening.”

  “Of course. Any special flavor? I have apple, lemon zinger, mint, maybe two or three others.”

  “Not mint. Anything else is okay.”

  I steam up the kettle, place the tea bags in two large mugs, gifts of appreciation from our alumni-student network, pour steaming water up to the lips, and slide into a chair across from Megan.

  “Here,” I say, “nectar of the gods. Guaranteed to soothe rattled nerves.”

  “Teddy, I’m a goddamned piece of crap. People slide off me like I’m covered with oil.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I can’t hold on to anybody. I have no long-term friends. I have little interest in re-connecting with my own mother. The lovers I’ve had were chased away by my discontent. Who wants to be close to a scorpion, someone with a sting?”

  “You think you have a sting.”

  “I do. I’m never satisfied. A man comes into my life and I treat him with care for a time, maybe a few months, then I lose patience, can’t tolerate the idiosyncrasies, skewer him with ‘why can’t you be…’ or ‘do you have to…?’ I’m harsh, judgmental. How could I ever be a counselor?”

  She cries. I wait, though I want desperately to encircle her with my arms, console her, dissuade her, illustrate to her a man who would not be driven away, a tolerant partner, appreciative of her wants, of what she believes are her faults.

  Mostly I want to propose to her that perhaps she has never found the “right” man, one who would not stir up her critical juices, but such a proposal would be too obvious, a naked, foolish suggestion more out of personal wish than practicality.

  “I think,” she says at last, “that it goes back to my adolescence, where I struggled to find out who I really was. It’s what convinced me to run away; I had to find myself, not live in the shadow-land of dear, overprotective Mommy. Probably what keeps me from contacting her—the shadow might still be there. Here I am in my mid-forties still not knowing who I am. Nor do I know what life’s all about. Meaning. Purpose. I chase people away because I don’t know what I want.”

  I think of the developmental stages we study to become psychologists. (Why do I do that? Apply all my issues to academics?) I recall the old formula: identity before intimacy. One cannot expect to give to an intimate connection with another, if she does not know what she has to give.

  “It’s a tough journey, this identity business,” I tell her. “You aren’t the same person you were thirty years ago, and you are in a process now of becoming something else quite different. It’s tough, yet it’s glorious, a challenging pursuit guaranteed to frustrate but with the promise of riches.”

  “I’m getting worn down by the process,” she answers. “I think I’m too tired, too damned disappointed, to continue the pursuit.”

  I look at her with an odd mixture in my heart, a loving sense that goes back years, a loving feeling that has only recently been stirred, and a confusion that picks up a scrambled message from Megan: she feels like giving up, yet has a passion that seems to want to engage life, slough off lethargy, embrace novelty, learn, become more than she is.

  “I see the fatigue, but I also see a fire in you for exploration. You have just started a new career choice and it’s bubbling over with possibilities. It has opened you up to people, their motivations, what makes them tick, and I’ve seen you sink your teeth into the material, an eager scholar.”

  She seems surprised by my words, looks at me with what I read as curiosity. “You really think I’d be good in this profession?”

  “No. Great!”

  I catch a bare hint of a smile. “Teddy, you aren’t objective. I’m an odd duck. I know I’m smart enough, but I think I’m a wounded specimen.”

  “As am I, as are we all.”

  “But, you think I can overcome my faults, become a real helper to others.”

  “I know it. You will be a magnificent therapist.”

  She grows silent, for the first time looks around my home, eyes flitting, thoughts racing; I can tel
l she is processing the arguments, while the furniture, appliances, white noise of the refrigerator, the click of my oversized wall clock, all cold artifacts that allow her to stay inside.

  She smiles more broadly and says, “Tino is a good person, but not for me.” She pauses, then, as if sermonizing from a pulpit, announces: “I kissed him off this afternoon. I may regret it. One other loss. But, I had to do it.”

  “Broke up with him.”

  “Asked him to leave and not come back. We didn’t live together, but he was there two, three nights a week. You’ll appreciate what I mean when I say he wasn’t deep enough. Never pondered the imponderables. Didn’t care about infinity, the universe, what life is all about. Not once did he ask me if I had goals. Well, that could be because he didn’t seem to have any—except for good food and sex. I know I must seem like some elitist; it kills me to see myself that way, but I do want challenge in my relationship, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative way. I want to be stimulated, stretched, feel that my partner and I learn from each other, come home each day to intellectual and emotional surprises.”

  Oh, what fire burns in me, hearing her words, from a woman overflowing with passion for life, a hunger for communion with a like-minded person, aching for connection (as am I), sated from aborted tries that did not measure up!

  “There are no Yellow Pages for life,” I say. “We plot our own course, and create our own tapestry, sometimes a motel wall painting, sometimes a masterpiece. But what I’ve learned to appreciate is that no one else can accurately measure us. Success or failure of a life script is an internal assessment. You are your own judge.”

  “Well, I’m a harsh one.”

  Alone with Megan on my turf, her vulnerability exploding, neediness wildly apparent, I realize that, a few times in the last weeks, in a burst of enthusiasm, she has placed her hands on me, on my arm, my shoulder. I have not dared to initiate such contact with her.

  Now, in her distress over yet another scuttled relationship, her pain seduces me to reach out for her, show affection in more than words. It is a matter of revving up courage. With my age-related insecurities, I do not anticipate a positive outcome to any overt physical action on my part.