As I reached my late-forties, I found myself somewhat at loose ends. My wife of nearly thirty years had passed on. Ellen had been ill for several years and I really hadn't been able to have a meaningful communication with her for most of that time. Much as I hate to admit it, there was a certain relief in her passing. The vibrant woman I had married in my early twenties and expected to grow old with had disappeared from my life as a meaningful companion shortly after an auto accident. She had remained in a coma in skilled nursing care for several years (thank God for my firm's insurance) and I had religiously visited her, daily at first and at least weekly towards the end. But she really wasn't there and I, though still married, had become accustomed to living alone. Her passing had closed out the last vestige of that part of my life. Because my Ellen was in a care center in San Francisco, I had leased out our home in the Berkeley Hills and taken up residence in a boxy little apartment in the Sunset neighborhood in San Francisco. It provided me with easy access to the institution in which she was housed and to my job in the City's financial district, saving me from having to commute from our home in the hills of north Berkeley.
During that long period of married, but not married, I had focused on my work. I was employed by an export-import company which I owned a substantial part of. I was their senior VP of logistics. If you are going to import and export goods, someone had to focus on getting them into and out of the country on a timely and cost-efficient basis--from our offshore suppliers through customs and to our warehouses, and from our warehouses to our customers, or the other way around if the goods were headed offshore. That was my job. With my ownership interest in the company, it paid quite well.
Six months after my wife's passing, my job evaporated in an acquisition by a much larger company. I was one of the so-called synergies they used to justify the outrageous price they paid for our company. The money I received for my interest in the company eliminated any need for me to ever work again. The job was satisfying enough I guess, but when I am honest with myself, I must admit that it was never what I had desired as a career. It did a good job of paying the bills and I liked the people I worked with, but now that it was gone, I wasn't going to miss it.
So, as I said, I was at loose ends. In a relatively brief period, my need to visit my wife and my need to work had disappeared. There was nothing about the apartment I liked. Its only value had been that it simplified my life, my need to see my wife and get to my job. Those needs were now gone and one thing I was certain of was that I needed to live somewhere else.
Shortly after it became clear that my wife was going to be in a long-term coma, I had leased out our home in the Berkeley hills to a visiting professor. During the long period that followed it was leased to a succession of visiting professors. They make good tenants. They don't throw wild parties and they pay the rent regularly. Importantly, the lease terms allowed me to maintain access to my wine cellar. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to return to living in our home in Berkeley, but for now it was an obvious improvement over the dismal little apartment in San Francisco. It took a bit of effort to dispose of the furnishings from the San Francisco apartment, terminate the lease and move the things I wanted to keep (clothing, books, records, etc.) back to Berkeley. I had given notice of termination of the lease to the latest tenant shortly after my wife died and now that my job had disappeared, I could see no reason not to move back to Berkeley.
The home was a 1920's craftsman style house set on a generous lot in the north Berkeley hills. There were large trees throughout the neighborhood, mostly eucalyptus, fir, and a few large old redwoods. There was a porch off the master bedroom on the second floor that allowed a narrow view between the neighbor's trees of a small bit of the Bay including Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge. My wife and I had used it on sunny afternoons to sit, sipping a gin and tonic and watching the fog begin to slip in through the Gate. We called it the G&T deck.
After spending a couple of weeks moving back into the Berkely home and organizing it to my tastes, I realized that I needed to develop a plan B for my life. Sure, I was 48 years old, but for most of us, at least those of us who are not T-boned by a drunken driver at age 40 as Ellen had been, there is a lot of life to live after 48. I thought about consulting with people who could use my logistics skills and quickly rejected that. I didn't want to spend my time worrying about shipments of next Christmas' game toys from Shanghai being tied up on a freighter waiting for dock space in Long Beach.
One thought that occurred to me, as it likely does to many healthy and still active retired people, was to write. My college degree had been an English major, which had nothing to do with my life's work up to now. But there was a start on a novel I had made while still in college. It took a bit of digging, but I found the old partial manuscript. After a day or two of sitting in a coffee house in North Berkeley and on the G&T Deck, I concluded that the best thing to do with the manuscript was to toss it. What seems like great wisdom at age 22 pretty much looks like tripe at age 48. The words weren't bad. I've always been good at spinning out a readable sentence. The problem was what the words said. Tripe, as I said. No, that work was not going to ever see an audience of readers.
During the years of being a near hermit living in my dismal little San Francisco apartment, I had developed a passing interest in erotica. Specifically erotic writing. I had felt compelled to honor my marriage vows to my wife, but I didn't think of watching and reading porn and relieving my sex drive manually as a violation of those vows. The thought occurred to me that perhaps I should try writing my own dirty stories and posting them on the Literotica site just to get some feedback. During those years I wrote and posted quite a few stories. I discovered that there are a goodly number of trolls who love to write scathing, even crude, reviews all of which I learned to ignore. However, there were also reviews that were complimentary and a few that were constructive. I didn't think I was writing anything that was great literature (or even mediocre literature), but people were reading it and enough people were voting a score to give me meaningful feedback on each story. Lacking an idea for the Great American Novel, I continued to spend some time each day writing erotica.
The neighbors that Ellen and I had known had all moved away during the years I lived in the boxy little apartment in the city, so moving back into my old home felt a bit like moving to a new town where I knew no one. The friends I did have were mostly work friends, many of whom had moved to Dallas with the acquirer of our company. As a result, I was surprised one afternoon when I heard the doorbell ring. I think it was original equipment that had come with the house when it was built in 1921. It always made a buzzing sound before the chimes sounded. I had often wondered if it had an electrical short.
I trotted down the stairs from the G&T deck and opened the door to find a relatively tall and attractive woman of about my age standing with several items of my mail that had been delivered to her in error. I learned that her name was Britt Sanders and that she lived in the house immediately next door to me. I introduced myself as Dave Chandler, which matched the name on the mail.
As I chatted with her, I was struck by her appearance. She was tall and slender, not movie star slender but trim for her age, which I guessed to be about the same as mine. She had long blonde hair that she wore stacked on the top of her head. To be fair, it had likely been a gorgeous thick blonde mane in her youth, but while still thick and lustrous, it was now streaked with grey, which she was obviously doing nothing to hide. Her clothing was conservative. Work casual, dockers and loafers a white blouse beneath a blue blazer. Nothing was tight, but still, it looked to me like she retained the bulk of what had been a spectacular figure in her youth.
Our conversation was brief, and as she walked down the walk and driveway I continued to speculate about her figure. The neighborhood is looking up, I thought. Then I laughed at myself, thinking, what do you care, you old goat? You haven't had real sex with a woman since... yeah since Ellen's accident. You can write about sex by simply cloning what you see others write... but really doing it? Not likely.
A week or so later I was sitting in a Starbucks on the first floor of an office building down on Shattuck Avenue drinking coffee as I killed time before an appointment in the building. I heard a pleasant voice behind me say, "Well hello neighbor," and I turned to see Britt standing behind me holding a cup of coffee.
"Oh hello, Britt" I responded. "What brings you down here?"
"My office is in this building. I have a patient coming in to see me in half an hour, but I wanted a coffee first."
"You're a doctor?" I had seen a lifetime's worth of doctors between my wife's injury and her death, and I wasn't really a fan of them.
"Well, I'm mostly retired," she said. "I worked for years as a clinical psychiatrist, but after my husband passed, I quit. I do a little marriage counseling now on a referral basis for former colleagues who want to spend their time on the juicer cases. They really don't want to be bothered with people who are just struggling to live together, but that is about as serious as I want things to get," she said. As she spoke, she was looking about for a table. The coffee house was full.
"Won't you sit down," I said. Okay, not a neurosurgeon, I was thinking.
"I'm sorry for your loss," I said. As she sipped her coffee. "That is tough."
"Well, it was three years ago so I am coping pretty well now. I'm mostly done with the lawyers and all of that rigmarole, think God."
"I understand. I have a meeting upstairs with my lawyer to review some papers relating to my wife's estate."
"Oh, I'm sorry. Have you been widowed long?"
