It was after 10.30pm but the hotel was a five-star establishment, so their restaurant was still open and quite busy. Kate looked so ravishing in a simple black sheath dress and with her golden hair piled high - and somewhat older and more sophisticated than her eighteen years - that the waiters were elbowing each other out of the way for the privilege of serving at our table. We eventually got it down to two winners, Jeffrey and Nigel, both of who fussed and preened for her and took very little notice of me. Kate lapped up all the attention, which was her due, and I let her order for the both of us, the wine as well. While we were waiting for our wine to be served I looked around the room and, even though many of the women were very attractive, and obviously very expensively dressed, I was with the drop-down-dead most beautiful woman there. I felt really good about that. Mind you, after the glorious lovemaking with Kate she could have looked like a horse and I would still be besotted with her.
We sat quietly, holding hands across the table. She had a secretive little smile on her lips. “What are you dreaming up now you gorgeous trollop?”
“I was thinking about the taxi driver – he was so sweet. He hit on me for a date on the way here. He also said that you looked very young to be my father.”
I recalled that the driver was a very handsome Greek or Yugoslavian guy in his early twenties. “What did you tell him?”
“I said that you are really fifty-five and it’s the booze and drugs that keep you looking as young as you do. But Mom and I are trying to wean you off them.”
“You didn’t!”
“I did, and he’s been hanging around the hotel all day - just waiting for me to come out so that he can take me somewhere! I couldn’t really tell him you are my lover or he might have crashed the taxi.”
“You’re not ashamed of my age are you?”
“Weeell, perhaps you should be with a older, more beautiful woman like that one over there.” She indicated an extremely chic, dark haired woman in her late twenties, sitting at a nearby table with a man in a business suit who looked considerably older than her.
I leaned across the table and whispered to Kate, “Comparing the two of you is like putting an IBM 486 up against the latest zillion megahertz Intel Pentium. You leave her for dead. Besides, she’s a whore!”
“You mean a real live “lady of the night”?”
“Yep.”
“How do you know?”
“Look at the difference in their ages.”
“But the gap’s no wider than the difference in ours. Do all the other people here think I’m a whore too?”
“Of course not! The other thing to look for is their behaviour. If you watch them closely, they don’t know each other at all. In fact, she’s doing “her job” and entertaining him. Now when people look at us they can see that we are “together”. Okay, so I might be your well-drugs-and-booze-preserved daddy – I’m gonna have trouble forgiving you for that one - but at least they can see that we know each other very well. If they knew how ‘very well’ it’d blow their socks off!”
She squeezed my hand; “I’m still having trouble believing it myself!”
Just then the wine waiter disturbed our conversation. Kate did the tasting and the approval and I one hundred percent agreed with her choice of a nice crisp New Zealand Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc. “I’ve chosen a super Barossa Valley Shiraz for the main course,” she advised me gravely. “We don’t have to drink all of either of them – we can take the leftovers back to our room or even have them saved for us for tomorrow night.”
“Or we could give them to your favourite waiter to drown his sorrows at not impressing you enough.”
“Or that poor taxi driver for hanging around all day without any luck!” she laughed.
Just then our first course arrived, a dozen Sydney Rock oysters in the shell for me – to build up my “strength” no doubt – and plain steamed Moreton Bay Bugs with cut lime wedges on the side for her. Like lovers the world over we fed each other titbits from our plates and toasted each other with our eyes. If people these people can’t figure out our relationship now, I thought, they have to be as thick as…
The first course done with, I resumed our deep conversation: “Tell me,” I asked, “For a “mere teenager” – joke, joke, joke – your vocabulary is very “adult”. What I mean by that is that you don’t intersperse your conversation with the argot you teenagers often use to keep us Crusties on the outside. Plus…” I leaned towards her and whispered, “I’d like to know how an “innocent virgin” like you knows so many sophisticated sexual techniques - I thought I would be teaching you, but it’s the other way round!”
“Two questions at once, Gregory! But the answer to the first one is easy… Mom and Daddy have always treated Kevin and I as adults and talk to us on that level. Sometimes, I can hardly understand the kids at school either. But I don’t feel it’s necessary to descend to their level when I’ve been brought up to respect the English language.