Olga Dies Dreaming(15)
He was traveling at the time and had woken up thinking of her, with an erection. Normally had this happened, he would have simply tried to see her, to physically touch her and hold his hands on her ample hips. But on this day, the day of the first selfie, they were apart. They were apart and he wanted her badly, a longing that made him feel so young again that he’d come to think of Olga as his own personal fountain of youth. His need for her left him feeling vulnerable, exposed. He needed her to want him in that moment as badly as he wanted her. He took the photo of himself, naked on the hotel terrace, his body reflected in the suite’s large mirror, and sent it to her, then waited, eagerly. For nothing. He went about the business of the morning—a conference call with their factory manager in China, getting an in-room massage—and as he was coming out of the shower, he caught a glimpse of himself again. Not bad for fifty-four, he remembered thinking. He massaged himself to hardness and, grabbing his phone, snapped another photo and sent it Olga’s way before heading to whatever meeting it was that he had. Hours later a reply: Be mindful. This is my business line. Thank you.
He took her at her word and, given that at the time (a) he was still married and (b) she was planning his daughter’s wedding, saw some wisdom in her words. This was careless behavior, for both him the sender and her, the receiver. Which was why he had his assistant go out and buy them each new phones. Hers, he promptly messengered to her office with a handwritten note that had simply said, Our private line, to which he added a wink and his new number. An hour or so later, the new line rang. He had saved her new number in his phone, but she called from her old one.
“Dick, that was cute. The phones thing. But seriously, I don’t have the patience to be one of these two-phone types.”
“Oh, but Cherry!” (Cherry was his pet name for her. He loved everything about her, except for her name: Olga sounded far too serious for such a sexual creature.) “Now we can send each other the kind of messages you don’t think are appropriate for a work phone.”
“Or maybe we just don’t need to send each other those kinds of messages.”
Dick was not dissuaded. He kept his phone. She never used hers. The dick pics persisted. Eventually, she addressed it with him, explaining that while she enjoyed seeing his naked person in real life, no one needed mounting photo evidence of their affair. He conceded her point. Particularly since by then he had done the unthinkable and asked Sheila for a divorce, a move that felt liberating, exhilarating, and expensive all at once. Olga wisely pointed out that if it felt expensive now, imagine how much costlier it would be should Sheila find out that he’d been fucking the wedding planner this whole time. So, he let up for a while. A time when he was lonelier and sadder than he had imagined himself being.
That had nothing to do with the pics, of course. Not really. His sense of loneliness was caused by the vast disparity between the realities of his newfound bachelordom and his predivorce imaginings of it. For starters, at the advice of his lawyers, in an effort to not lose or sell the estate on the Vineyard—the one that had been in his family for generations—he had camped out there to establish it as his primary residence. A lonely place to be in the early spring. Then, there were the kids: Victoria, at the time twenty-four and newly married, Richard, twenty, and Sam, seventeen. He had not factored in the defensive and, frankly, accusatory stance that his daughter would take. He had also not calculated how much of his time with his sons, as they danced on the periphery of adulthood, had been casually accrued around their penthouse in Manhattan, moments gathered in their comings and goings. As busy as his own work kept him, it was equally hard to get on their schedule, the allure and excitement of their own nascent adult lives proving more seductive than time with Dad. A sentiment he himself remembered and understood, but still, he missed them. Their absence and growth made him aware of his own mortality in a way that he hadn’t felt before, and cast a dark shadow on his generally optimistic worldview.
His greatest miscalculation, though, was with Olga.
While Dick had not technically left Sheila for Olga—their marriage had long been strained—it had simply never occurred to him that when he moved out, Olga might not move in. His assumption of this outcome had been so total, so complete, it was only after his departure, during his early days on the Vineyard, that he found himself blindsided by reality. He had tired of his wife’s company but had no desire to be alone. He FaceTimed Olga, offering to send movers to pack up her place, and she looked at him quizzically. He realized he had never even told her he was calling it quits with Sheila, never spoken his other assumptions out loud. He felt a bit foolish; he couldn’t expect her to be a mind reader (something Sheila had repeatedly chided him over year after year). Yet, when he did finally ask her, back in New York, over a room service dinner at his suite at the Carlyle, he was shocked by her reply. He’d said that he wanted them to be together, officially, and for her to come and live with him and she had laughed and said, “No, Dick, you don’t.” But he assured her that he did. He didn’t just want it, he needed it. He needed her.
“You only think that you need that, Dick. Right now. In time, you’ll be happy that it’s like this.”
“But don’t you want to live with me?” he asked. Then, and he revisited this sometimes on his runs, she didn’t hesitate for a second before saying that she liked things exactly as they were. Enjoying each other when they could because they wanted to at that time. Without the pressure of commitment.