Part 1
Midwinter
In her living room she looks at me and says,
"I'm forty nine, Sid, and nobody's ever gonna fuck me again."
#
But that's later.
First, we are sitting in my office hours after the rest of the world's work day is over. It has been a long day, working on a long project. We are punch drunk tired. Pre-trial is like that; post-trial is like that, trials are like that. Lawyers are like that. It's been going on for a week. Bench trials - trials before a judge - don't end quickly, like a jury trial, with a verdict. No, the evidence all comes in, the arguments all get made, then there's a week or two of writing post-trial briefs, summarizing what you want the judge to decide, trying to smooth over the points you may have eff'd up during the trial itself, trying to make up for the stupid things your witnesses said, trying ultimately to justify all the time, effort, money, the close to 24/7 adrenalized energy you've spent over the last however many weeks, trying to win.
And now it's finished, we've just submitted the last brief, the proposed findings of fact and law, we've pressed send and we're done doing everything we can do and now the judge takes everything "under advisement" for however many weeks or months she (in this case) wants to take. It's done. The air's out of the balloon. We look at each other, both of us bathed in fluorescent light and light from a computer screen - 21
st
Century light - and she says, "Fuck, Sid, I'm not ready to go home and get in my pajama's yet, I'm still wired as hell. Can we get a drink before the bars close?"
I look at her. Her name is Marta. She is dark-haired, she has almond eyes that tonight are dark-lined, tired, inviting. Her blouse is open-necked, she wears a silver chain necklace that falls across flesh toward the opening, where she is pale, and there is just the hint of cleavage. Her mouth is odd, unusual, her lips strangely flat, the morning's lipstick just a ghost of herself. She has not said the thing about nobody ever fucking her again. That will come later, after:
"It's 11:30," I say. "It's a Thursday."
In this small New England city, where she and I are growing middle aged together - or more to the point, where she's growing into middle age and I'm growing old - the bars are all closed.
"Fuck," she says. She looks at her watch for confirmation.
I try not to look at her legs. Nice legs, shaped, toned in slightly darkened nylons.
Dammit.
She looks at me. Almost sees me almost looking.
Story of our lives.
I have a wife.
I have a wife in Connecticut.
Where she is visiting her ninety three year old mother while I go through two weeks of late nights in court, in the office. In mid-Massachusetts winter And with Marta.
Maybe Susan would be less forgiving, less trusting if she understood that Marta is my if-I'd met-you-under-other-circumstances woman. She's smart, kind, pretty almost to the point of beautiful. Days and long work nights she tells me about her lousy dates with guys she meets on an online site. She doesn't fuck any of them, she tells me: they're wrong, there's no spark, they're dumb, they're dumpy, they're ugly. She doesn't want them, she wants to fall in love.
So do I.
"Then come back with me," she says looking out a window into the mid-winter night. "Just one drink, then I'll send you back to Susan."
We've been here before.
We know we're not going to fuck.
Except, I remind her, my wife is two states away.
Then ask: "And where's your daughter?"
"With her father tonight. If she was there, I'd be okay. If she's awake we'd watch Jimmy Fallon together. Eat ice cream. Be girls. But she's not and I'm not ready to be alone yet. You know how it is. All the goddamn adrenaline and now we're done and I just don't want to be alone right away. One drink, Sid. Keep me company. Be a friend."
A friend.
I take out my phone, look for any texts from Susan.
Nothing. It's late. She's far away. Asleep.
Marta is here.
"Okay," I tell her. "One."
"See," she dazzles my old bones with a smile. "You are a friend."
#
We drive separately, through woods and moonlight.
I am dead-tired.
This is wrong, may be wrong. Isn't wrong.
Because we're not going to ...
We're not.
There is a stretch of road just beyond the city, where our town blends into the neighboring town, where the land crests and starts to fall away toward the Connecticut River. From there, the world is made of meadows, trees in clumps, dark, sleeping houses, distant water, all of it bathed in white and silver.
It is breathtakingly, middle-of-the night beautiful.
So is Marta.
Her headlights visible ahead of me in the dark.
Leading me.
I sigh, deep enough that it feels like I'm breathing out some important part of myself.
And think of Susan, asleep in a fold-out bed in her mother's widowy apartment in a graduated care community outside Bridgeport, among the old, the dying, the dead. Remember her young, middling, and now starting, like me, to be old. Smile at all the years, the sex, our foolish long affections. Waking mornings beside her, her blonde hair greying, straying onto my pillow as she breathes.
"I love you," I say out loud to my empty car.
I don't know who I'm talking to.
*
Her place is a condo in what used to be a meadow in a town on the Holyoke River. I walk in behind her.
Small hallway, narrow kitchen, living room, couch, chairs, TV on the wall.
For all our time together, I've never been here before.
She peels off her jacket, throws it across the back of a chair. Her blouse is sleeveless. Her arms are pale, lightly muscled.
She has told me she does yoga, sitting on a mat in her bedroom in morning sunlight.
She looks at me almost looking.
A small smile flits across her face.
"Thank you," she says.
Her cheeks are faintly rough, a remnant of what I imagine was a difficult adolescence. Her habitual makeup having worn as thin as her lipstick. Tired, hair disarranged, there is nothing artificial about right now.
"That drink," she says. "I've got whiskey, white wine. I'm not much of a bartender."
"Wine," I tell her.
"You need to drive home," she tells me.
"Yeah," I say. "Wine'll do fine."
#
It is two glasses later, amid all the comfort of inconsequential talk that starts with the case just finished and moves on to the inevitable problems with our kids, that she looks at me from the couch, where she is sitting with her bare feet tucked beneath her thighs and says,
"Fuck, Sid, I'm forty nine and nobody's ever gonna fuck me again."
I take her in, the soft full swell of her under her blouse.
Tell her the truth.
"First of all, that isn't true. But, god, you don't know how much I wish I could be the guy who shows you how wrong you are."
She waits a while.
"That," she says, "is perhaps the nicest way anyone has ever said 'I'd like to fuck you,' to me."
#
I have known her for four years, ever since she joined the office. She tells me about the men she doesn't fuck, I've told her about my wife, with whom I sleep after twenty years only occasionally. I have never told her how infrequently. Or that, when we do, my old body can be embarrassingly slow to achieve what, when young, I could never not achieve.
Some things are
verboten
between us.
We are prudent, lonely people.
And now, for a moment, we are awkward.
"This," she says, "is one of those moments I wish I hadn't given up smoking."
Again her broad-lipped, dark-eyed smile.
"I've given up too much, Sid," she tells me.
Stretches, catlike on the couch.
"Sexual desire," she says to me. "For example."
"You don't mean that," I tell her.
"Yeah, I do, Sid. I can go long stretches where it just doesn't seem important anymore. Months. And then, it'll come back and I'll be like a house on fire for a while. And then I won't again. Don't you feel like that sometimes? Do men ever?"
"Hot and cold? On and off? Yeah. I'm older than you, y'know."
