The Middlesteins(19)

“I can’t,” he said. “It’s been so long. I feel like I don’t even know how anymore.” Better to admit an alternate insecurity, he thought. The truth seemed much more humiliating. And anyway it was not a lie.

“You came all this way to stop now?” she said. That challenge might have worked on a younger man, but not him. The fire in his loins was a particular kind. He was desperate, but he would not be rushed. He had not lived this long in life to be pushed around by a stranger.

“No, I think it’s enough,” he said.

“What about if I give you a hand?” said Tracy quietly.

He nodded, and she swept herself up and away, down the hall to the bathroom, returning shortly with two hand towels and a large pump bottle of lotion. She put the bottle of lotion next to the picture of her and Mitzi, one towel on her lap, and one towel on his. She kissed him again.

“Do you like to kiss?” she said. He nodded. She put her hand on his face and then ran it down his chest—quicker than he would have liked, and he could have said that and she would have listened, but he felt completely out of control and unable to speak—and straight to his crotch, where she rustled around softly—It’s right there. Good God, woman, how can you miss it?—until she found what she was looking for. She petted him on the outside of his pants, and then quickly unbuttoned his pants, unzipped his fly, and then released his penis from his boxer shorts. She stroked it, and then stopped and leaned over to where the bottle of lotion sat. She pumped the bottle a few times. It was an anticellulite lotion, Middlestein noticed. She rubbed it on him.

“Do you like it this way?” she said. Her voice was girlish and flirty, and her eyes were direct. “I bet you like it this way.” She didn’t wait for a response, she surrounded him quickly—Listen, can you blame her? Ten-thirty on a Tuesday? Let’s get a move on already, buddy—and it took not long until he came.



*

Middlestein felt great! He drove home fast. No traffic! Fantastic! He was thrilled, if only because he knew he was going to sleep like a rock that night. But for now he was still all jazzed up. He felt ten years younger. God, she was good. He was pretty sure he was never going to see her again—one hundred bucks for a handy?—but it was nice to have that number in his back pocket in case of an emotional emergency. She was clean and local, and he felt safe with her. Still he didn’t know how comfortable he felt supporting, even in the smallest of ways, a woman who had more square footage than he did.

But it had been luxurious to be reminded of the pleasures of a woman’s touch, the delicate thrill of its softness, the tension of trusting her to touch him the right way, the tiny death and rebirth that came with an orgasm. It wasn’t soulful, necessarily, but it felt deep to Middlestein. He would renew his search for a woman.

He sat at his desk, white, long, clean, with a slight chip where he had banged the IKEA package against the wall of the lobby on his way in the door, turned on his computer, and selected the bookmark for the dating site for Jews. Forty was too young, he knew that now, he had known it all along, but now it had been confirmed. He wanted to take his clothes off with someone, but he needed to feel like the two of them were closer to equal. He changed his search parameters; now he was looking for women from fifty to sixty years of age.

And suddenly there were two hundred new results in the queue; a whole new world had opened up because Middlestein had decided to date age-appropriately. He clicked through a dozen of them until he found a picture of a dark, curly-haired woman, ample, smiling, appearing much younger than sixty, so familiar-looking that he was immediately attracted to her simply because he found familiarity, rare these days, so comforting. He opened her ad and realized he was staring at a picture of his wife, Edie, from ten years earlier, before they had fallen out of love with each other, before they had drifted so far apart it was as if they were on opposite ends of the world.

He knew when that photo was taken: It was on their trip to Italy. It was their first vacation together after Robin had gone away to college and then there was nothing left but the two of them. They were fifty years old. They had been raising children for the past twenty-five years. They should have been ready for their Part Two. He read about Part Two in magazines, he had heard about it from his friends. He wanted his Part Two.

But instead they had fought over everything, every detail. Or rather, she had fought with him, derided every suggestion he made. What did he know about Rome? She was the one who had studied Italian in college and spent two weeks in Italy after graduation. She was the one who had once been basically fluent in the language and would surely be again after a day or two there. Why would they go on a tour when they could walk the streets just fine on their own? Why would they stay at a hotel near the Vatican when it was so far away from everything else? Why, when they finally arrived there, had it not occurred to him to bring better shoes? (This was when his knees were just starting to go, he remembered, and that mile-long walk through the Vatican crushed him, and the minute he complained just once, she had snapped, so by the time they got to the Sistine Chapel, she was practically shrieking, and only the repeated shushing of the security guards had quieted her.) Why was he still jet-lagged? Why was he being so weird about taking the bus if he was complaining about walking? Why did he order the same thing every night? Why didn’t he have an open mind? Why couldn’t he just enjoy himself? That might have been the vacation that killed them, or it might have been the beginning of the end. It was hard to pinpoint it. He wondered if he was having a delayed reaction, by a decade. Here he was thinking it was everything, but instead maybe it was just that one moment in time.