Art and Artists

The woman didn't just enter the restaurant where I was having lunch; she swept into it, filling it with a sudden infusion of energy.

She walked up to the table where the two ladies she was meeting had been sitting – she was fashionably late – greeted them warmly, then headed to the ladies room.

I couldn't keep my eyes off of her as she walked by my table. She was probably around 40, a little taller than average with a trim, but curvy body that was well-displayed in a pair of tight blue jeans and a snug blouse.

She had dark hair that swept back to her shoulder blades and a dusky complexion that suggested some Latin or perhaps a Creole background.

The eyes, though, were what caught me. They were big, brown and remarkably expressive, and set in a broad face that wasn't classically beautiful, but was striking nonetheless.

I must confess that I stared at her as she passed in both directions, taking note of the unfastened top button on her blouse that revealed just a hint of a plump pair of tits, the sparkling smile she gave my dining companion and the sassy sway of her taut butt as she walked back to her table.

And for the first time in more than two years, I felt something approaching sexual desire for a woman.

I was having lunch with my insurance agent, who was trying – successfully, I might add – to sell me a new catastrophic medical policy. After what I had been through, I wanted to make sure I was covered and my children were taken care of.

Ken watched with some amusement as I boldly ogled the woman who had passed, and made sure I knew he'd noticed.

"Well, I see something got your attention," he said.

"Oh, you know, it doesn't cost anything to look," I said. "She seemed to recognize you. You know her?"

"Sure I do," Ken said. "That's Kristi Golden."

"The artist?" I said.

Somehow, I had not envisioned Kristi Golden as someone who looked as vivacious and down to earth as this woman obviously was.

Kristi Golden is a minor celebrity in the area I've called home ever since my college days, some 25-plus years previously. She's quite a talented artist, and her work is displayed all over town and across the region, as well.

I don't keep up with the art world, so I don't know how well-known she is on a wider scale, but I'd stack her work up against just about anyone. It's not cutting-edge art, or anything like that, but rather similar to Thomas Kincade, stuff that's more soothing to the eyes than stimulating to the mind.

"If you want, I'll introduce you," Ken said, shaking me from a distracted reverie. "She's just now getting back on the market, if you will. Apparently, she found out her husband was screwing his secretary and divorced him. Because she has her studio and everything at their house, and because she has custody of their son, she got it in the settlement. She pretty much put him out to pasture, and made him pay for the privilege. Beats me why a man would fuck around when he had something like that at home. I'll never understand cheaters. Anyway, she's available, but probably not for long, so now's your chance."

"Gee, Ken, I don't know..." I said.

"Damn it, Stu, it's about time you got out and lived again," Ken said forcefully. "It's been two years now, and you know damn good and well that Shirley didn't want to see you live alone the rest of your life. Besides, you know Shelby needs a mom. And Kristi would make a good one."

So it was that my friend Ken did introduce me to Kristi Golden, and it turned out she knew who I was.

"I see your picture in the paper with your column every week," she said after we shook hands in greeting. "What? You don't think I read the Sports page? Of course, I do. I love sports and I enjoy good writing, and you're a very good writer."

"I'm flattered, but it's just putting it out one day at a time," I said. "Some stories are better than others. But they all end up the same place, lining the bottom of the bird cage."

She laughed at that, and we took that as our signal to leave the ladies to their lunch. Ken just gave me an arched eyebrow and a knowing look as we shook hands and agreed to meet in his office sometime the next week.

As I headed in to work, I thought about Kristi Golden and thought about my life over the previous two years. Was I ready to get back in the game? As I asked myself that question, I thought about Shirley and how I had reached that point in my life.

^ ^ ^ ^

I met Shirley Beasley in college, my junior year and her sophomore year at the university in town. I had moved into an apartment that was sort of a duplex a couple of blocks off campus. It was actually a house that had been converted into two apartments, and she lived in the other half of the house.

She was a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty who was studying to be a teacher, while I was in journalism. We never had any classes together, but we often had classes in the same building, so we got to where we'd walk to school together.

I won't bore you with the details, but we became friends, we started dating, then we became lovers. As soon as I graduated we were married. I was 22, she was 21 and we thought it would last forever.

Forever turned out to be 23 years, five months and 13 days.

Three years into our marriage, we had a son, Sean, and three years later our daughter Susan arrived. We thought we were finished with children, but a little over six years after Susan was born, we got a surprise and our younger daughter Shelby came along.

Shirley was a fun-loving woman who always had a smile for everyone, an outgoing nature and a really warped sense of humor. She tolerated the odd hours I worked at the newspaper as I was moving up into my current position as sports editor.

Because her family is all from the area, and she was very close to her widowed mother, we never left the town where we went to college. Shirley went to work for the school system and I cheerfully sank down roots.

I grew up in a small town a couple of states over, and outdoor pursuits were always my passion. One of the things I did every year was take a hunting trip to Colorado with my father, my brother and brother-in-law.

It was one of those male family bonding deals, where the fellowship and good times are as important as actually getting an animal. However, I did get a couple of trophy bucks, and it was a good way to stock the freezer with meat through the winter.

We usually stayed at a lodge in a very rural part of western Colorado, where communication is haphazard at best.

Two years prior to the events I'm relating here, we had made the trip in early November, arriving on a Saturday after a long flight into Denver, then a five-hour drive to the lodge. Sunday we had spent scouting the area and Monday we spent in a futile day of unsuccessful hunting.

After a long day of traipsing up and down the mountains, then having a couple of medicinal brews to ease the aches and pains, I was sleeping quite soundly that night when I vaguely heard the door to the lodge open, and the proprietor came in.

"Mr. Callahan?" he said softly. "Stuart Callahan?"

"That's me," I said groggily, and I heard the grumblings and rustling from my dad and my brother when they realized they weren't the Mr. Callahan being paged. But they were curious about why the man was there in the middle of the night.

"Your son is on the phone, says it's an emergency," the owner said. "The phone is in my office. I'll meet you there and tell him you're on your way."

I was fully alert and awake then, and I got some wickedly bad vibes as I hurriedly dressed. My intuition was correct. Sean could barely communicate from the way he was blubbering on the phone.

"Dad, it's Mom," he wailed. "She ... she's gone."

That was all I got out of him. Our next-door neighbor came on the line and told me the grim news about my wife.

Shirley had been watching the Monday Night Football game while she graded some papers when she started to complain about having a severe headache. She started into the kitchen to take something for the pain when she collapsed.

My 10-year-old daughter heard the commotion, saw her mother lying motionless on the floor and smartly called 911. The paramedics worked on her for an hour, but it was too late. She'd had an aneurysm in her brain that had burst.

My beloved wife died, just like that, way too young at age 44. Sean was already in college, a sophomore at the university in town, and Susan was a senior in high school. Somehow I got through that year, but I'm not sure how I did it.

I just felt so guilty about not being there, for simply going off and taking her for granted, just assuming she'd be there when I came home. I'm not proud of this, but if it hadn't been for my children, especially Shelby, I'd have taken my own life and gone to join my wife.

Of course, after Shirley's death, I completely gave up hunting. I let Sean have my deer rifle and sold my other firearms.

Every time I even thought about it, I'd remember that I wasn't there when Shirley was stricken, that I never got a chance to tell her goodbye or tell her one more time how much I loved her. It probably wouldn't have made a difference, but my guilt still does funny things to me.

The tradeoff was that I started doing far more fishing than I ever did before. I live in the South, where the freshwater fishing is magnificent and there are literally hundreds of places to fish.

I enjoyed the solitude of fishing, still do, in fact. The rivers, lakes and ponds where I would go were places where I could be alone to cry, talk to God – talk to Shirley – and just take the time to grieve. Sometimes I'd take Shelby, and we would talk about her mom and why God had to take her from us.

At first, when I went with Shelby, we'd just cry together, but soon we got past the crying phase and it just became conversation between a single father and a little girl who was growing up much too quickly.

After awhile, one of the questions she started asking was when I'd start dating again. I guess that meant the family counselor she was seeing had done a good job with her, because she had an awful lot of trauma to get through to get back to a normal frame of mind.

My stock answer at the time was that I was a 47-year-old widower with a 12-year-old and no sane woman would to want me, with all the baggage I brought. Of course, she would throw back at me that, as far as she's concerned, she had the cutest daddy of anyone in her school.

I guess you've figured out by now that I've got pretty good kids, for which I give their mother all the credit, because more often than not, she was the one who was home doing the parenting.

So there I was facing a third Christmas without Shirley, and thinking decidedly erotic thoughts about Kristi Golden, which made me feel guilty as hell.

^ ^ ^ ^

My friend Ken's thoughts notwithstanding, I didn't figure I had a snowball's chance in hell of getting a date with Kristi Golden. The reason I'd never met her before, or even knew what she looked like, was because we ran in completely different social circles.

She was a country-club type, someone whose success in her field had thrust her into the elite in our community.

I, on the other hand, am more comfortable in a more modest social circle. My friends are my colleagues at the paper, high school coaches, teachers and other more middle-class folks. I can deal with the upper crust, but I'm not comfortable doing so.

There was also the problem of how to approach her. The week following my encounter with Kristi at the restaurant, I had my follow-up meeting with Ken to finalize the insurance paperwork, so I asked him.

"Pick up the phone and call her," Ken said, fumbling in his day planner then fishing out a business card. "Here. Her numbers are unlisted; the better to keep the ex-husband away. Call her. I think she's interested in you. She certainly knew a lot more about you than you knew about her."

I started dialing Kristi's phone number three times before I finally mustered the courage to dial all 10 numbers. I paced the floor in my kitchen nervously as the phone rang once, twice, three times before I heard the click and a cheery voice answered.

"Is this Kristi?" I said, then mentally kicked myself for asking a really stupid question.

"It is," she said, guardedly.

I introduced myself and I could hear her relax noticeably when she learned it was me calling. We talked a minute or two about the weather, she asked me about the football coach at the university who had just been fired after another losing season, then the conversation started to peter out. Finally, I knew it was time to take the bull by the horns.

"Kristi, I'm not very good at this, and it's been a long time since I asked anyone out," I said, haltingly.

"The answer is yes," she said, interrupting my fumbling attempt at asking for a date.

"You don't even know what I was going to say," I said.

"You're asking me out on a date, and I said yes," she said in a no-nonsense tone of voice. "Look, Stu, I'm just as out-to-lunch on this dating business as you are. My ex really did a number on my self-esteem by what he did to me, and I know how hard it was for you to work up the courage to call after what you've been through. Trust me, I never knew Shirley, but I know a lot of people who did, and they all said she was a princess, and that you two had a great relationship. So, to answer your question. I'm very willing to go wherever you want and do whatever you want... Within reason, of course."

Then she laughed, and I was absolutely captivated by the sound. It was like the music of a glockenspiel, sweet and lively, a mirthful sound that seemed to reach into my soul.

I barely knew this woman, but if her laugh was any indication of what kind of person she was, I was going to do my utmost to reel her in, before anyone else had a chance. I knew in that moment that what Ken had said was right. Kristi Golden wasn't going to be single long.

Our first date was pretty mundane. We had lunch at Chili's as a sort of feeling-out process, where we could get to know each other and see if there was anything there.

Truthfully, I left the restaurant thinking there was, and I guess she felt the same way, because we made plans for a more romantic evening a few days down the road.

Our fourth date was when things started turning intimate. Kristi invited me to dinner at her house, and she pulled out all the stops. The house was impeccable, her son was off on a sleepover, and the dinner was fantastic, shrimp scampi over rice perfectly done.

After dinner, we retired to her living room, where she put some soft jazz on the stereo and we sat on the sofa. I'll confess, I was having trouble hiding my arousal, and I could see an excitement in her face that hadn't been there the previous three dates.

"Stu, please don't take offense, but I'm curious about how a man deals with a loss like yours," Kristi said softly. "How has it been for you sexually? Have you had any desire for it, or is that part of the grieving process?"

"It's OK. A year ago, I'd have been hurt by the question, but time has a way of healing even the worst wounds," I said. "For one thing, I felt so incredibly guilty that I actively suppressed every sexual feeling I had. I guess maybe eight months ago, I finally gave in and masturbated, and that helped some. But I really didn't have any desire for sex until I saw you at the café that day when Ken introduced us. You were the first woman I'd seen since Shirley passed away that really spiked my interest."

"I'm flattered," she said softly, a second or two before she kissed me, and I lost myself in her full lips and her active tongue.

I could feel the heat of her body as we embraced, and I could feel my erection straining at my slacks from the nearness of her delicious curves.

I smiled inwardly as Kristi sighed and pressed her body to mine when I softly kneaded one of her breasts.

It gave me a great sense of satisfaction to know I still had it after all this time, that my seduction skills were still intact despite being dormant for over 25 years. It's like riding a bicycle; once you learn how to play a woman's body, you never forget how to do it.

Still, I had a clear understanding that I wasn't going to fuck Kristi Golden right at that moment. I had learned that for all of her sensuality, she was actually quite religious, though she's a long way from being preachy about it, and not the least bit easy.

And that was all right with me. I didn't want a woman who fell into bed at the first sign of arousal. Also, I still wasn't sure about my own feelings, about whether I was ready to give my love to another woman after Shirley.

Nevertheless, the man in me had to try, so I snaked a hand between her jean-covered legs and started to caress her crotch, and as expected, she pulled away and gently removed my hand.

"It's not time," she said softly. "Not for you and not for me."

"But I do have a chance, don't I?" I said teasingly.

"You're in the ball park," Kristi said with a smile.

Left unsaid was the fact that I wasn't the only man she was dating. I'd seen her out to dinner a week or so earlier with a fairly prominent local politician, who had been involved in a rather public divorce several years earlier.

I'd had to fight off the vague pangs of jealousy, and that both worried and encouraged me. I understood that I was falling for Kristi Golden, but I also knew that we weren't exclusive, not yet.

At that moment, I had a sudden urge. I needed a better understanding of Kristi, and I knew how to get it.

"Do you mind if I see your studio," I said. "I want to see where you work, where you get the inspiration for your art."

She hesitated, as if pondering whether to let me into what I quickly understood was her inner sanctum, the place where she went to get away from the world, the place where she let her dreams run rampant.

"Sure," she said finally. "Just don't mind the clutter. It's organized chaos in there."

She was right about that. There were all sorts of card tables covered with tubes of oil paint, colored chalk, crayons in a bewildering array of colors, pencils and ink pens, and tins of watercolor paints.

She had easels standing everywhere with half-finished works and works that were barely begun. There were caricatures, portraits, landscapes, dreamscapes, even a couple of abstract drawings that I assumed were experiments of some kind.

"Good art is often a messy process," Kristi said as she leaned into me with what I interpreted as some affection.

"I know what you mean," I said. "This reminds me a lot of my computer desk at home."

I explained then that my home office was cluttered with CD-ROMs, floppy disks, paper printouts, even hand-written notebooks filled with a wide – a wild – variety of writings and musings that I had done over the years.

Indeed, one of the ways I'd tried to cope with Shirley's death was to write about it, to express my grief on paper in hopes of analyzing why this dreadful thing had happened to me, to us. I had written dozens of love letters to her, even though I knew she'd never see them, and I think that had helped in the whole grieving process.

"Have you ever thought about getting it all published?" Kristi said. "Because just based on what I've read in the paper, you're a better writer than 90 percent of the people on the best-seller lists. John Grisham's got nothing on you."

"Do you really think so?" I said, a little incredulous. "I've never thought of myself as anything other than a meat-and-potatoes journalist, a guy who goes to games and writes about them. What I do professionally isn't literature. And a lot of what I've written at home is awfully personal. I'm not sure how comfortable I'd feel about baring my soul like that. I've written stuff that's pretty raw."