‘So how do you use that word “yo”?’ asked Charles. ‘Would you say something like “My bunions are killing me, yo”? Not that I’ve got bunions.’
I giggled. ‘No. You’d say something like [imitating Jesse’s voice] “this shit’s the bomb, yo!”’
‘I see…And what does that mean exactly?’
And so we nattered on, and I began to like him a lot. We made a date for Friday evening and I groaned to myself, oh hell, that’s four whole days away…
On Friday, as our date neared, I applied my make-up carefully. I’d had my hair done that morning, so it was at its optimum. And I put on a sophisticated yet understated outfit: close-fitting black skirt, silk blouse and well-tailored jacket, with black court shoes which looked smart, if a trifle Maggie Thatcher.
I had texted Sara the night before to tell her about this promising new development on the dating front and she wrote back: ‘Sounds good but perhaps you can humour me and as a safety precaution text me the details of your meeting place and time, the fellow’s name and anything else that might be of use in a police investigation.’
‘Ever the optimist, my dear!’
‘Yeah, ha ha…except that I’m serious. So I’m expecting a text saying “meeting Mr. American whatsisname in Mayfair” or wherever, and another one after you’re back home safe and sound. Okay?’
‘Okay, will do. Don’t worry!’
Charles and I did meet in Mayfair, as it happened. In the swish bar at Claridge’s. He had texted me to say he would get there a few minutes early, ‘so that you won’t have to wait and have people wonder what an attractive woman is doing alone in a hotel bar’. Exceptionally considerate.
He sent another text moments before I arrived, saying he was sitting by the window in a dark blue blazer and light blue shirt. As if I wouldn’t recognise him!
I walked in, spotted him right away and was struck by his looks; he was even more handsome than in his photos, and exuded a collegiate air. He glanced up from the magazine he was reading, saw me standing at his table and rose to greet me. Then he ordered me a cocktail and we sat back and I thought how lucky I was to be sitting in this glorious bar with this handsome man, sipping my favourite cocktail.
Perhaps it was luck, but then again maybe it was good project management.
We had that conversation – which I now knew to be standard amongst internet daters – in which we compared notes on previous dating experiences, at least the ones that were entertaining. So Charles recounted his headliner, the story of the attractive young brunette who kept sending him messages pleading for a date. He would reply, reiterating that, at 26, she was much younger than his specified age range of 45 to 58, but she refused to give up. Having wheedled his mobile number out of him, she proceeded to send him fetching pictures of herself. ‘Nothing improper,’ Charles pointed out, ‘just pictures of her looking pretty in the garden, in the kitchen, at her desk, all over the place. In the end, well, you know how weak men are. I gave in and agreed to have a drink with her.’
They arranged to meet before the main entrance at Selfridges, where Charles was standing at the allotted hour, waiting for her to turn up. After bombarding him with so many photos of herself, he was sure he would recognise her. But when he heard his name called out and swung around, he had no idea who the enormously fat woman standing next to him was. That was when it dawned on him that all her photos had been head and shoulders shots.
‘My God,’ said Charles, ‘she had a backside the size of this table.’ And he tapped the table at which we were sitting. I shook my head in amazement. Then I laughed merrily, with the shameless Schadenfreude that a sixty-year-old woman who wears size 10 would naturally feel at hearing such a tale.
His eyes sparkled in the evening sunlight that beamed on him through the window, and he kept them on me while taking another sip of his martini. ‘When I saw you standing there, on the other hand, my first thought was: Wow, who’s she? I’ll tell her I’m waiting for somebody but maybe we can hook up later.’
I laughed again. ‘Schmoozer.’
He told me about another of his dating flops, with a divorcee in her forties, a mother of two young children. ‘I liked her but kept thinking: would she expect me to put her kids through school? I can’t take on that sort of responsibility.’
That could have been me, twenty years earlier. The divorced mum with a challenging domestic set-up was a tough gig for any prospective suitor, as I understood only too well. But for me that problem was ancient history. This was now. And the good news was that, in the contest for Charles’s affections, so far I was beating the competition hands down.
Time for honesty. ‘I’m older than you think, Charles.’
‘Really?’
I nodded. ‘Sixty,’ I said with a mock dramatic flourish. Then I leaned forward, elbows on the table. ‘Do you mind?’
When he replied, ‘Not at all,’ I eased back into my chair.
After we’d had three cocktails apiece and the booze had begun to go my head, I suggested we go someplace for a bite to eat. So we headed off down the road to a local Italian restaurant I knew, where we had pasta and a bottle of full-bodied red, and by now I was well and truly merry. But Charles wasn’t done yet.
He called the waiter over and ordered two Limoncellos and I thought uh-oh. The last time I had indulged in this deceptively potent Italian liqueur, on a Tuscan holiday, I’d woken up feeling as if King Kong were banging on my head. The trouble was I rather liked the stuff and had no trouble downing it. As soon as I’d finished the last lethal drop, Charles asked the waiter for two more of the sticky yellow snifters.
I had been matching Charles drink for drink, although I was five foot four and he was six foot two. Naturally he would be the one to stay sober and I the one to get tipsy and misbehave. I hadn’t planned to. In fact I had determined to follow Vanessa’s rules to the letter and be thoroughly ladylike and respectable. No inviting him home, no sex on the first date.
That was the plan. But looking across the table at his handsome face, a face I’d been wanting to kiss all evening, and emboldened by the Limoncellos, I opened my mouth and without further ado took the sophisticated, yet understated approach: ‘Why don’t you take me home and fuck my brains out?’
His eyes met mine and I didn’t note, through the boozy fug, whether or not he smiled or showed any surprise. I only heard three little words: ‘I’d love to.’
I had little recollection afterwards of how we got to my house, only a dim sense of having ridden up and down some tube escalators (another transgression for which Vanessa would no doubt give me the tut-tut treatment). Then all of a sudden I found myself unlocking the door and climbing up the stairs and dropping down onto my bed, with Charles gently pulling off my shoes.
I wriggled out of my clothes, crawled under the duvet and was easing into a heavy sleep when I gasped and sat up abruptly. ‘My mobile, my mobile,’ I mumbled. ‘Have to text Sara. Have to tell her I’m okay.’ The next thing I knew Charles was handing me my phone. God knows how I sent a coherent text in my woolly state, and with faultless spelling and punctuation, to boot. Just goes to show how the technology has now seeped right into our brain cells. Is that good? I don’t know. But all that mattered was that I performed my duty to my daughter-in-law, and with that I flopped back down on the pillow and was over and out.
Sometime in the middle of the night I was awake again, with Charles lying beside me. I reached over and touched his cheek, and he turned to me. My fuzziness was gone. There was just enough light for me to make out his face; he was peering down at me and I thought he was smiling. ‘You all right?’ he asked and I answered with a small ‘Mm-hm’.
A little later, as he made love to me slowly and gently, I cried for a brief moment – just a single gasp and a couple of warm tears which wet my face – and had no idea why.
*
It was mid-morning and we were still in bed, talking, our arms around each other, as my hangover gradually slipped away. He describ
ed to me the bachelor apartment he bought after his divorce, in a mansion block in Marylebone. ‘It’s smaller than the place I had with my wife, but it’s got everything I want. You’ll have to come over and see it soon.’
For my part, I mused on the matter of my half-owned house and when I might finally sell and move on to…who knew where? With a sigh I said, ‘I’m in limbo.’
Charles didn’t ‘do breakfast’, so after getting dressed and downing a large orange juice, he was ready for me to drive him down to the tube station. As he glanced out the window at the humdrum 1930s suburban houses along the way, he said casually, ‘You should make your age on the site even lower, to 49. You could easily pull it off. And you’d have an even better hit rate.’
I found his remark vaguely upsetting. Not the bit about my age, obviously. But that he considered it a good idea for me to be dating more – and not fewer – men.
Back home I finally thought to check my mobile and found a text from Sara. ‘Is he second date material, then?’
‘Definitely. Think I’ll be seeing him again soon.’
‘So, not too well-behaved not to have sex appeal. Sounds good!’
During my next aqua class, two days later, I swam up to Vanessa, and yelling to be heard above the thumping Abba remix, eagerly told her about the date with ‘my Yank’, Charles2013.
She seemed to be thinking hard, as we leapt to left and right in unison. ‘Does he travel a lot, some sort of businessman, lives in…Marylebone?’ she called out.
‘Yes! How do you know?’
‘He messaged me not long ago. But I didn’t respond.’ I threw her a curious look. ‘Tell you about it later, darling!’ she said as she splashed off through the churning water.
Reconvening in the steam room after class, Vanessa told me that she had felt there was something dubious about Charles, which was why she ignored his attempt to establish contact with her.
‘Dubious in what way?’
‘Dunno. Maybe it’s just me, maybe he’s really fine. But he’s not my type. Anyway, you like him, so go for it.’
‘Yes I do like him. And he’s great in bed.’ I added in a more weighty tone, ‘He’s the first guy I’ve met on that site who is proper relationship material.’
She tilted her head at me. ‘I thought you were only after a good time?’
I turned to Vanessa and shrugged. ‘Hmm. Not sure.’ It was true that according to my profile I wasn’t in search of a long-term relationship (the oft-cited yet elusive LTR), but would any woman turn one away, should a promising prospect unexpectedly crop up?
Then with a guffaw she regaled me with her own latest dating antics. She had been naughty and broken her own rules. ‘That guy Dennis who’d been messaging me for ages – I told you about him, right? He’s the nice-looking 50-year-old sales manager – well I finally gave in and said he could take me out. We had four bottles of champagne and were getting on like a house on fire, so I let him take me home and he came in and we started snogging. He was a great kisser. And I thought, he’s bloody sexy, so when he said he wanted to have sex, I said yeah why not, and off we went to the bedroom.’ She took a breather for effect, and as the sweat dripped off our heads, I wondered what the others in the steam room – a muscular young man and two dumpy middle-aged Indian women – were making of her story.
‘So anyway,’ she went on, ‘he took off all his clothes and his body was completely covered in grey hair…and I took one look and said “Ugh! Put your clothes back on, I’m not having that in my bed!” It was disgusting. I made him get dressed again and sent him packing. I mean – what the fuck – I’m not going to bed with a werewolf!’
Vanessa was such a scream.
Returning to the subject of Charles, she offered to play the little game that she sometimes indulged in with another friend of hers, who also subscribed to our dating site, whenever one of them started seeing a man they liked. They would ‘put him to the test’.
If it looked as though a relationship might be forming for either of them, the other would send a wink or message to the man involved, to see how he responded to temptation. Did he express an interest or politely refuse because he had “already found someone”? Now Vanessa said: ‘If you like I can test your Yank to find out if he’s still interested in me. And I’ll ask him if he’s met anyone special on the site, see what he says.’
But I said no. I didn’t think I wanted to know how he would respond to temptation. Following my fiasco with SuperA, I knew I mustn’t mind how much time any man was spending on the site, winking and flirting, or how many dates he was going on with others. But with Charles I suspected I would mind, too much.
Besides Charles there was only one other I cared about and that was Pup. I was very fond of him and believed it to be reciprocated. There was a bond between us. But of course that was different. That was never going to be a ‘proper relationship’. That (as Nick Hornby would have said) was about a boy.
CHAPTER TEN
While getting ready for my second date with Charles (we were dining out at a hip Vietnamese restaurant near me), I imagined introducing him to my sons and considered how they would get on. They could hardly fail to be impressed by his many attributes. I pictured us all sitting around a dinner table, bantering, growing familiar, forming bonds. And I knew Charles would just love my smart, funny, attractive sons. He didn’t have children of his own. Perhaps mine would add a valuable dimension to his life which was missing.
Of course I realised I was jumping the gun – this was only our second date, after all – but I had spent a lifetime being impetuous and I wasn’t about to change now.
As I watched him amble across the street from the tube station to my car, I was struck all over again by his classic American good looks, and felt a little stab of gratification that he should be attracted to me. It was a warm, sunny evening in early June, he wore an open-necked shirt and I wore a fetching silk frock, we both had our shades on, and as we roared off in the direction of West Hampstead I thought we made a fine-looking pair.
Over dinner our relaxed conversation flowed effortlessly, as we were surrounded by tablefuls of animated Londoners, mostly young, enjoying the weather outside, the ambience inside, the exotic fare. This was unassuming West Hampstead at its most seductive and we were part of it all, and if I had thought about it – which I didn’t – I would have realised that it was one of ‘those moments’ when you are blissfully, stupidly, totally happy.
Back at my place afterwards he handed me the stiff paper bag he’d brought with him from town. ‘Something for you,’ he said.
It contained a bottle of Limoncello, with a card which read: ‘Thank you for accelerating matters between us by making your true intentions known during the course of our first date…and thank you to the makers of Limoncello, for their part in the acceleration!’
I laughed and stood on my toes to give him a kiss.
That night in bed we had the ‘orgasm conversation’. (I had been through this a few times already, with others.) Charles had been applying himself with expertise and much careful attention to the chief erogenous area, but as I’d been expecting, sensuous and highly pleasurable though it all was, ‘it’ didn’t happen. That was because, for me, orgasms had become a very tricky number. Since splitting up with my partner, no one else seemed capable of making it happen for me. Not even dear Little Pup, who, for one so young, was surprisingly adept at the orals. Possibly it was all to do with what was inside my head…or not inside my head, as the case may be.
That night, more than anything, I wanted Charles to be able to perform magic. I wanted him to be the one to break through the barrier. But he couldn’t. He was persistent and would have carried on, slaving away at the coalface, but I didn’t want him to get bored. People in the 21st century didn’t generally have much of an attention span.
‘Sorry,’ I mumbled, as I held his shoulders and pulled him up towards me. I tried to explain. ‘The crazy thing is, it can only happen with my vibrator these days. D
unno why…’ But the truth was that even my trusty vibrator had been taking an age to pull it off. Not five or ten minutes like in earlier times. But half an hour, forty-five minutes. Ridiculous! The batteries didn’t last long, I can tell you.
What had caused this physiological change in me? I worried about it. If it went on like this, could I perhaps lose the ability to climax altogether? Christ, could I be developing the dreaded ‘Wendy syndrome’?
Wendy had been a friend of mine since our kids were in nursery school together, and over the decades we had had many a heartfelt chinwag about the great issues of life: love and relationships, marriage and divorce, sex and no sex. The usual things women talk about when their menfolk aren’t there. And one of Wendy’s defining characteristics was that she had never had an orgasm, and I mean never. She had absolutely no idea what an orgasm was like, and yet was utterly unbothered by the fact that this most basic of life’s sensations had somehow passed her by.
She was with her husband Frank for more than thirty years, they had virtually been childhood sweethearts, and were in many ways a devoted couple. As Wendy often said: ‘We’re best friends.’ Frank was tall and well-built and attractive, with one of those craggy, lived-in faces. He gave Wendy a good life, two great kids, big house and annual holidays on the Med. But he could never give her an orgasm. She shrugged it off.
I was the reverse. I was twenty-one when I discovered this particular pleasure – a late start, but then there was no stopping me. In my early twenties I would sometimes even pop into the ladies’ room at work for a quick DIY job during office hours. Five minutes and back to my desk, feeling well pleased with things. No problem.
But that was long, long ago. Now, at sixty, I was becoming orgasmically deprived. It was getting to be an ever rarer occurrence. And such hard work. I was even starting to wonder, Wendy-like, whether the orgasm wasn’t perhaps an overrated biological function. Which was ironic in the extreme, because it was at precisely this time that Wendy, at long last, had her first orgasm, aged 61.
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