How Not To Run A B&B: A Woman's True Memoir

by Bobby Hutchinson

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Second To The Right, And Then Straight on Till Morning

  (Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie)

  “Bobby. It’s me.”

  The warm, sexy male voice on the phone belonged to Steve, whom I’d labeled Peter Pan. He loved the nickname. He didn’t know about the line in the movie that said about Peter, He cannot love, its part of his condition. Or the line in Barrie’s magical book that described Peter as innocent and heartless.

  I’d met Steve six months before I opened the Blue Collar. I was walking along the river early one morning, and a tall, muscular gorgeous man fell into step beside me. He was a phys ed teacher at a local school who had a window cleaning business on the side.

  Steve had a slight stammer which I found endearing, along with his wide smile and an air of total attentiveness. He’d never been married, he currently lived with his mother, who needed his assistance, but he said he hoped to be able to move into an apartment of his own soon again. We found out that we worked out at the same gym, although I hadn’t seen him there.

  He was younger than me by twelve years, which I pointed out near the end of our walk. I’d been told that in spite of my crop of snow white hair I didn’t look my age, and Steve repeated that compliment several times. Really, how much difference is there between 52 and 40?

  Not enough to matter, apparently, because he asked for my phone number, and I hadn’t been home half an hour before he called and asked if I wanted to go for a ride that evening.

  An intelligent younger man. A date. How exciting. Of course I wanted to go for a ride.

  He drove up in a very old powder blue Cadillac. He liked old cars, he told me. This one wasn’t vintage, it was just old and battered, bench seat, cracked leather upholstery, set seat belts that wouldn’t always fasten, windows that didn’t close or didn’t open.

  It didn’t matter, it was summer in Vancouver. There was a huge yellow moon hanging out over the water, and the downtown city was humming like a tuning fork.

  Steve had once owned a music store, and he had tapes from all the rock and roll bands. He played Tom Petty, Elvis, Rod Stewart, Neil Young, Barry White as he drove me around the city, showing me awnings he’d cleaned, views from obscure hilltops, the house where he’d grown up. We had pizza at an obscure little place at the foot of Main Street. I felt myself growing younger by the moment.

  Steve didn’t drink or smoke. He attended a Pentecostal church every Sunday morning. I couldn’t help but notice he was rather obsessive. He closed the car door three times whenever he got out or in. He did the same with the door at the café. He genuflected, one knee on the floor, before he sat down in the booth.

  His belief system was rigid. He was more than a little homophobic, critical of anyone he considered overweight, and not sympathetic to anyone of color.

  Highly controlling, I deduced. Maybe the child of alcoholic parents? I asked, and he denied it, although I later found out I was right.

  But hey, who among us is without foibles? I wasn’t planning to marry him. I’d obviously drawn him into my life to teach me something. And there was no one else on the horizon at the moment, always a good argument for overlooking someone’s wounds.

  When he asked me out again, this time on a Friday night, I went gladly. I found him weirdly attractive, and yes, I was flattered that he seemed to feel the same about me.

  This time he said, “I have to pick up two friends of mine, Eric and Roger. We always spend Friday night together. Roger’s a pain in the ass, but you’ll like Eric, he’s the smartest guy I ever met. We grew up on the same block.”

  He drove down an alley and honked the horn, and a young Oriental man trotted out and climbed into the back seat.

  “Bobby, this is Eric,” Steve said. And that’s how I met the guy who became my dearest friend.

  We drove around the block and down the street, stopped again, honked the horn, and Roger came out, a pudgy man with a whiney voice, unhealthy color, and what seemed a really bad attitude. He got in the back beside Eric.

  By the end of that first evening, I agreed with Steve. Roger was irascible. Eric was brilliant. He was also more than a little peculiar—but they all were, which I found fascinating. Unlike the other two, Eric had been married and divorced twice, like me.

  I suspected that Roger was gay, and when he came out to his friends a few months later, Steve was devastated, furious and betrayed. He insisted he’d had no idea. Of course, Eric knew.

  Eric worked in a back room as an underpaid dental mechanic, although he’d passed the real estate board exam and could probably have been a nuclear scientist or a brain surgeon. He had a mind that trapped chunks of information about millions of different subjects and regurgitated them at will. He was a walking research department for a writer.

  He was curious about everything, open to any weird hypothesis, made friends of the most unlikely people, and had a childlike eagerness about the world. He was consistently good natured. He read indiscriminately, as I did, and he loved words for their own sake. And he could repair anything.

  Like Steve, both Eric and Roger still lived at home. Roger worked for Steve at the window cleaning business, and while Eric and I talked about transcendental meditation and The Dancing Wu Lei Masters, they bickered about the safety of ladders, the best time to start in the morning, the manner in which customers should be treated, what tape to play next.

  That first Friday was the beginning of my strange midlife summer spent driving around in cars with three men I labeled the Lost Boys.

  They were all chronologically middle aged, although emotionally they’d never really grown up. They didn’t want to. When I asked what they wanted out of life, Steve answered for all of them by misquoting Cindy Lauper.

  “Boys just want to have fun.”

  None of them traveled outside the Lower Mainland—unlike the real Peter Pan, they were all afraid of flying. None of them was currently involved in any sort of committed relationship. None owned real estate. Roger and Eric didn’t own or drive cars.

  None lived independently. Steve, I found out, had only lived on his own once—for two weeks, at which point he hightailed it back home to Mom.

  Eric used his bike for transportation and wore his bike helmet like a security blanket. He spent every Sunday morning making lunch for his mother and father. None of them drank, or smoked, or—as far as I could tell—fornicated much, if at all.

  Despite his studly appearance and seductive attentiveness, Steve and I made love exactly once, about two weeks after I’d met him. It seemed to go well, at least as well as first encounters ever do. I looked forward to a repeat performance, but although he went on calling me every evening, taking me to the gym, inviting me on long walks or to the beach, and of course picking me up for those Friday night expeditions, Steve never again laid a hand or lip or other body part on me.

  I was baffled and hurt. Not to brag, but my prowess as a sensual, desirable woman had never before been called into question. Until now, no one had ever kicked me out of bed, literally or figuratively.

  I talked The Situation over with my women friends, all of whom were as mystified as I was. None of us had come across this particular version of male battiness.

  I finally asked him pointblank what had turned him off sexually with me, and he said that it wasn’t me at all.

  Because of his religion, he was saving himself for marriage, and he’d never met a woman who qualified to be his wife. I, sadly, didn’t qualify because I was too old.

  Stunned, I thought that one over. Had my vagina shriveled up when I was paying too much attention to my fingernails, I demanded? Or was it simply that I was post menopausal and couldn’t produce an heir and a spare?

  Oh no, he assured me. He wasn’t planning on having children, he saw enough of them in school and didn’t want the responsibility. No, it was just that he preferred younger women. They were less opinionated.

  I’m afraid I laughed until I couldn’t stand up, and he took umbra
ge and didn’t call me again for two weeks.

  But then he did, as if nothing had ever happened, and I climbed back into the old Caddie because I missed Eric and the music and those addictive hot summer nights that made me feel sixteen again. (How much older than Peter was Wendy, anyhow?)

  Steve was always careful to drop me off last on Friday’s. I suspected he wanted his friends to believe he and I were having a passionate affair, the sad, bad, crazy man.

  What was really going on was that with a little encouragement, (writers are notoriously curious, I have to know what’s going on at the back of everyone’s head,) Steve began to confide in me about other women he’d dated, and I realized that he went about every conquest the same way, charming the woman out of her panties exactly once, and then driving the poor lady berserk by suddenly becoming celibate.

  It was the strangest case of coitus interruptus I’d ever come across, and of course it had everything to do with an extreme need to control and nothing whatsoever to do with religion or age or wifely qualifications.

  As time went on, he became more and more open with me about his conquests, even bringing a couple of them over to meet me, exhibiting a trust that boggled me.

  (Actually, one of my former husbands did the same thing. He brought a lady friend home to meet me. She asked why we’d divorced, and when I told her physical and mental cruelty, she dumped him. I wonder why?)

  Steve had always phoned me a number of times each day—part of his obsessive nature--and now he began phoning late every evening, after The Soprano’s finished. He loved the show and would dump us all off early so he could get home in time to watch it.

  He’d talk far into the night about dating teachers, waitresses, hairdressers, artists—even a rather well known country western star. You name the category, Steve had sampled it--according to Steve.

  I had my doubts. I finally asked Eric if even half of his stories were true, and Eric said he was pretty much telling the truth, he’d witnessed the hit parade. Not the sex part, but the women, and the slow, seductive buildup followed by the quick reversal.

  Apparently Steve paraded his females in front of his friends like trophies, which of course they were. He was Da Man.

  And the man was a walking fly trap when it came to women. He should have come with a warning label.

  The summer turned to fall. I started the B&B and became too busy to play with the lost boys on Friday evenings. Steve found yet another unsuspecting female to focus his attention on and after I got call display and stopped taking his calls, he stopped phoning me.

  Roger came out of the closet and began to hang around with gay friends, bringing them over to meet me, which I very much enjoyed. They were mostly frankly weird, scary smart, and so wickedly sarcastic I couldn’t help but adore them. They asked me to their parties, insisting that with a little help in the wardrobe department and some hair color, I could double for Cher. Which was patently untrue, but immensely flattering.

  Eric took to dropping by for tea and conversation—with his tool box. I hadn’t seen or heard from Steve for months when the phone call came.

  “It’s Peter Pan, how’s it going?”

  We exchanged pleasantries before he said, “Do you have room for a guest this coming week? She’s flying in from Brunei.” His deep, seductive voice oozed repressed excitement. “She works for the Sultan. We met on the Internet, and she’s coming to meet me. Her name’s Jane.”

  Jane, who worked for the Sultan of Brunei, flying all the way to Vancouver to meet Steve? Even for him, this was a stretch. Intrigued, I checked my calendar and reserved a room, already feeling sorry for Jane, who couldn’t have the slightest idea what she was getting into.

  Steve was beside himself. In his entire career as a one night stand lothario, no woman had ever flown across half the world just to be with him. It was whipped cream on his sundae.

  He began phoning me again every day, drunk with the romance and excitement of it all, speculating about whether or not she’d been part of the Sultan’s harem and how rich she was—everyone in Brunei was rich, the Sultan was the richest man in the world, things equal to the same thing, etc.

  In between Steve’s obsessive phone calls I did some research on Brunei, a tiny country on the northwest border of Borneo. His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Muzzaddin Waddaulah was the Supreme Ruler, and until recently he was one of the richest men in the world, thanks to Shell Oil. Oil is his country’s only resource, but fortunately, supply seems unlimited.

  His fortune was estimated at 40 billion, but unfortunately, he’s now down to a mere 10 big ones, peanuts when it comes to international wealth these days.

  So how did he blow 30 billion? A bit of research put it down to plain old financial incompetence, way too much fun, and perhaps the prolonged fall in the price of oil and the Asian crash of 1997.

  The Sultan, it goes without saying, is a big spender who likes to have a good time. He built a palace with 1,788 rooms, probably because he could. Among other toys, he has 2000 luxury limos—in a county sadly lacking in roads—plus his own jumbo jet which normally seats 400. Oh yes, six smaller planes and two helicopters as well.

  In the spirit of anything you can do, he and his brother built Jerudong Park, a theme park like Disneyland, which cost a cool billion. It used to be free for the citizens of Brunei, but due to the Sultan’s financial difficulties, there’s now a nominal entrance fee.

  But forget the harem. The Sultan only has two wives. He’s allowed to have four at any given moment, but he’s a man who shows great restraint in certain areas, obviously. Or else the high cost of Viagra has curtailed him. He has only eleven children.

  He divorced one wife, a former flight attendant, instead of just demoting her to third place. It wasn’t an amicable divorce. He stripped the poor woman of all her royal titles before he replaced her with a TV star, 32 years his junior. It’s a wonder he didn’t have his last duchess beheaded, because he could.

  His subjects are not allowed to vote. He is the Sultan by birth, but by his own decree he is also the Prime Minister, the Minister of Defense and the Minister of Finance. In 2006 he reportedly changed Brunei’s constitution to make himself infallible under Bruneian law.

  Obviously, a self made man.

  To give the guy his due, he has made an effort to share some of his wealth with his subjects. Brunei is known as the Shellfare State. No one pays personal or corporation taxes, medical services are free, as is education.

  Obviously, his subjects aren’t rolling in green if Jane was staying with me instead of booking into the Pan Pacific down on the waterfront. Steve had obviously overlooked the fact that the Blue Collar offers exceptional value for the money, but a five star resort it ain’t.

  J Day finally arrived. I was watching from the front window when Steve drove up. He’d washed the Caddie. He was wearing a dark suit, and he looked exceptionally handsome. He also looked exceptionally downcast. As he helped Jane out and shouldered her luggage, I could see that all was not well.

  Knowing Steve, it wasn’t hard for me to figure out what some of the problems were even before they came in the house.

  Jane was very dark skinned, a fact I later learned had somehow escaped his notice on the Internet. She was also more than a little plump, and given his list of prejudices, those two items alone were enough to turn him off.

  She, on the other hand, was glowing. She was cradling the bouquet of flowers I’d suggested he take to the airport to welcome her, and judging by her Steve struck, lovesick expression whenever she glanced his way, she was down for the count.

  Steve introduced us, avoiding my gaze, and said he was sorry but he had to go, he was in the middle of a window washing job, which I knew to be a lie. He’d told me he was taking the day off to show her around. The rat was skittering off the tilting ship.

  But Jane surprised us both by reminding him in a firm, loud voice that he was showing her around Vancouver and then taking her out to dinner, yes? She had to freshen up, it
had been a long flight, but then she expected him to come by for her. Exactly what time was he picking her up? And, oh yes, she wanted to meet the voice teacher he’d said he knew, she wanted some lessons while she was here. And had he managed to get her the special rate he’d promised?

  Hoist on his own petard, Steve mumbled that he’d see about it.

  “Please do so right away, because I am here for only a week this first time,” Jane said in an imperious tone. “There is no time to waste.”

  Steve blanched at this reference to subsequent visits.

  “Now,” she said. “What time shall I expect you?”

  “Five,” Steve mumbled. It was Friday, and I figured he’d be picking up Eric at seven. He was rigid about his Friday routine. He’d probably corral Roger as well, gay or not gay. My hunch was he’d take refuge in numbers, so as not to be alone with Jane.

  He made his escape, looking hunted.

  A WORD FROM MY MOTHER TO THE SULTAN

  You never see a U Haul hitched behind a hearse.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Karma rules

  I took Jane up to her room, invited her for tea, and when she came down I settled back to hear her side of Steve and the Brunei romance.

  “Steven and I met on an Internet dating site three months ago,” she gushed in her accented lilting English. “I, too, am a teacher and also a student of music, so we have much in common.”

  A teacher? Steve had insinuated she was at least the Sultan’s personal secretary.

  “You teach the Sultan’s children?”

  She looked at me as if I was mentally challenged.

  “No, no, no, of course not, there are special governesses who do that, I have nothing to do with the Sultan whatsoever. His children are dreadfully spoiled, they get everything they want. No, no, no, I teach in the general school system, we have very good schools in Brunei, although the students are not well behaved. They lack discipline. In my family, discipline was important.”