by Ed Gorman
Not for a long time.
THE END OF IT ALL
“Sometimes the only thing worse than losing the woman is winning the woman.”
—French saying
“Embrace your fate.”
—French saying
For Nathaniel Gutman
I guess the first thing I should tell you about is the plastic surgery. I mean, I didn’t always look this good. In fact, if you saw me in my college yearbook, you wouldn’t even recognize me. I was thirty pounds heavier for one thing. And for another my hair had enough grease on it to irrigate a few acres of droughted farm land. And the glasses I wore could easily have substituted for the viewing instruments they use at Mt. Palomar. I wanted to lose my virginity back in second grade, on the very first day I ever saw Amy Towers. But I didn’t lose my virginity until I was twenty-three years old and even then it was no easy task. She was a prostitute and just as I was guiding my sex into her she said, “I’m sorry, I must be coming down with the flu or something. I’ve got to puke.” And puke she did.
This was how I lived my life until I was forty-two years old—as the kind of guy cruel people smirk at and decent people feel sorry for. I was the uncle nobody ever wanted to claim. I was the blind date women discussed for years after. I was the guy in the record shop the cute girl at the cash register always rolls her eyes at. But despite all that, I somehow managed to marry an attractive woman whose husband had been killed in Viet Nam, and I inherited a stepson who always whispered about me behind my back to his friends. They snickered mysteriously whenever they were around me. The marriage lasted eleven years, ending on a rainy Tuesday night several weeks after we’d moved into our elegant new Tudor in the city’s most attractive yuppie enclave. After dinner, David up in his room smoking dope and listening to his Prince CDs, Annette said, “Would you take it personally if I told you I’d fallen in love with somebody?” Shortly thereafter we were divorced, and shortly after that I moved to Southern California where I supposed there was plenty of room for one more misfit. At least, more room than there had been in an Ohio city of 150,000.
By profession I was a stockbroker and at this particular time there were plenty of opportunities in California for somebody who’d managed his own shop as I had. Problem was, I was tired of trying to motivate eight other brokers into making their monthly goals. I found an old and prestigious firm in Beverly Hills and went to work there as a simple and un-hassled broker. It took me several months but I finally got over being dazzled by having movie stars as clients. It helped that most of them were jerks. It helped even more that several of them rarely bathed, and that several more were into sexual practices that made Jeffery Dahmer seem laid back and normal. Nothing like a little hard-core perversion to take somebody down a peg or two in your estimation.
I tried to improve my own sex life by touring all the singles bars that my better-looking friends recommended, and by circumspectly scanning many of the Personals columns in the numerous newspapers that infest LA. But I found nothing to my taste. None of the women who described themselves as straight and in good shape ever mentioned the word that interested me most—romance. They spoke of hiking and biking and surfing; they spoke of symphonies and movies and art galleries; they spoke of equality and empowerment and liberation. But never romance and it was romance I most devoutly desired. There were other options of course. But while I felt sorry for homosexuals and bi-sexuals and hated people who persecuted them, I didn’t want to be one of them; and try as I might to be understanding of sado-masochism and cross-dressing and transexualism, there was about it something—for all its sadness—comic and incomprehensible. Fear of disease kept me from whores. The women I met in ordinary circumstances—at the office, supermarket, laundry facilities in my expensive apartment house—treated me as women usually did, with tireless sisterly kindness. I seemed to spend half my income on girlie magazines, even though they inspired in me a midwesternly shame when I went into the XXX stores to buy them. The alternative was sub-scribing, at which point the publisher would gleefully sell my name to hundreds of mail order companies that would besiege me with catalogs of films featuring men who liked to hump squirrels or glossy brochures depicting various sexual appliances, most of which looked not only obscene but vaguely painful. The word I want here is miserable. I had trekked 1900 miles, coiffed my thinning hair, taken to spending $1000 on suits—and my dates still mostly consisted of my right hand.
Then some crazy bastards had a gunfight on the San Diego freeway and my life changed utterly.
This was on a smoggy Friday afternoon. I was returning home from work, tired, facing a long lonely weekend when I suddenly saw two cars pull up on either side of me. They were, it seemed, exchanging gunfire. This was no doubt because of their deprived childhoods. They continued to fire at each other, not seeming to notice that I was caught in their crossfire. My windshield shattered. My two back tires blew out. I careened off the freeway and went halfway up a hill where I smashed into the base of a stout scrub pine. That was the last thing I remember about the episode.
My recuperation took five months. It would have been much shorter but one sunny day a plastic surgeon came into my room and explained what he’d need to do to put my face back to normal and I said, “I don’t want it back to normal.”
“Pardon me?”
“I don’t want it back to normal. I want to be handsome. Movie-star handsome.”
“Ah.” He said this as if I’d just told him that I wanted to fly. “Perhaps we need to talk to Dr. Schlatter.”
Dr. Schlatter too said “Ah” when I told him what I wanted but it was not quite the “Ah” of the original doctor. In Dr. Schlatter’s “Ah” there was at least a little vague hope.
He told me everything in advance, Dr. Schlatter did, even making it interesting, how plastic surgery actually dated back to the ancient Egyptians, and Italians as early as the 1400s were performing quite impressive transformations. He showed me sketches of how he hoped I’d look, he acquainted me with some of the tools so I wouldn’t be intimidated when I saw them—scalpel and retractor and chisel—and he told me how to prepare myself for my new face.
Sixteen days later, I looked at myself in the mirror and was happy to see that I no longer existed. Not the former me anyway. Surgery, diet, liposuction and hair dye had produced somebody who should appeal to a wide variety of women—not that I cared, of course. Only one woman mattered to me, only one woman had ever mattered to me, and during my time in the hospital she was all I thought about, all I planned for. I was not going to waste my physical beauty on dalliances. I was going to use it to win the hand and heart of Amy Towers Carson, the woman I’d loved since second grade.
It was five weeks before I saw her. I’d spent that time getting established in a brokerage firm, setting up some contacts and learning how to use a new live phone hook-up that gave me continuous stock analysis. Impressive, for a small Ohio city such as this one, the one where I’d grown up and first fallen in love with Amy.
I had some fun meeting former acquaintances. Most of them didn’t believe me when I said I was Roger Daye. A few of them even laughed, implying that Roger Daye, no matter what had happened to him, could never look this good.
My parents living in Florida retirement, I had the old homestead— a nice white Colonial in an Ozzie and Harriet section of the city—to myself where I invited a few ladies to hone my skills. Amazing how much self-confidence the new me gave the old me. I just took it for granted that we’d end up in bed, and so we did, virtually every single time. One woman whispered that she’d even fallen in love with me. I wanted to ask her to repeat that on tape. Not even my wife had ever told me she loved me, not exactly anyway.
Amy came into my life again at a country club dance two nights before Thanksgiving. There were four country clubs in the city but this was the only one that mattered—old money and sound Eastern connections and even an occasional Jewish name to show how liberated all the old farts running the place had become. I wore a
midnight blue dinner jacket and a black dress tie and a white shirt that shone like a winter moon and a smile that was a bit of a sneer, a smile I’d practiced in front of the mirror for several hours that afternoon.
I sat at a table watching couples of all ages box-step around the dance floor. Lots of evening gowns. Lots of tuxedos. And lots of saxophone music from the eight-piece band, the bandstand being the only light, everybody on the floor in intimate boozy shadow. She was still beautiful, Amy was, not as young looking, true, but with that regal obstinate beauty nonetheless and that small, trim body that had inspired ten—or twenty—thousand of my youthful melancholy erections. I felt that old giddy high school thrill that was in equal parts shyness, lust and a romantic love that only F. Scott Fitzgerald—my favorite writer—would ever have understood. In her arms I would find the purpose of my entire existence. I had felt this since I’d first walked home with her through the smoky autumn afternoons of third and fourth and fifth grade. I felt it still.
Randy was with her. There had long been rumors that they had a troubled marriage that would inevitably disintegrate. Randy, former Big Ten wide receiver and Rose Bowl star, had been one of the star entrepreneurs of the local eighties—building condos had been his specialty—but his success waned with the end of the decade and word was he’d taken up the harsh solace of whiskey and whores.
They still looked like everybody’s dream of the perfect romantic couple and more than one person on the dance floor nodded to them as the band swung into a Bobby Vinton medley at which point Randy began dancing Amy around with Technicolor theatrics. Lots of on-looker grins and even a bit of applause. Amy and Randy would be the king and queen of every prom they ever attended. Their dentures might clack when they spoke, Randy’s prostate might make him wince every thirty seconds, but by God the spotlight would always find its ineluctable way to them. And they’d be rich—Randy came from a long line of steel money and was one of the wealthiest men in the state.
When Randy went to the john—walking right meant the bar; walking left meant the john—I went over to her.
She sat alone at a table, pert and gorgeous and pre-occupied. She didn’t notice me at first but when her eyes met mine, she smiled.
“Hi.”
“Hi,” I said.
“Are you a friend of Randy’s?”
I shook my head. “No, I’m a friend of yours. From high school.”
She looked baffled a moment and then said, “Oh, my God, Betty Anne said she saw you and—Oh, my God.”
“Roger Daye.”
She fled her seat and came to me and stood on her tiptoes and took my warm face in her cold hands and kissed me and said, “You’re so handsome.”
I smiled. “Quite a change, huh?”
“Well, you weren’t that—”
“Of course I was—a dip, a dweeb—”
“But not a nerd.”
“Of course a nerd.”
“Well, not a complete nerd.”
“At least 95%,” I said.
“80% maybe but—” She exulted over me again, bare shoulders in her wine red evening gown shiny and sexy in the shadow. “The boy who used to walk me home—”
“All the way up to tenth grade when you met—”
“Randy.”
“Right. Randy.”
“He really is sorry about beating you up that time. Did your arm heal all right? I guess we sort of lost track of each other, didn’t we?”
“My arm healed just fine. Would you care to dance?”
“Would I care to? God, I’d love to.”
We danced. I tried not to think of all the times I’d dreamed about this moment, Amy in my arms so beautiful and—
“You’re in great shape, too,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“Weights?”
“Weights and running and swimming.”
“God, that’s so great. You’ll break every heart at our next class reunion.”
I held her closer. Her breasts touched my chest. A stout and stern erection filled my pants. I was dizzy. I wanted to take her over into a corner and do it on the spot. She was the sweet smell of clean wonderful woman flesh; and the even sweeter sight of dazzling white smile against tanned taut cheeks.
“That bitch.”
I’d been so far gone into my fantasies that I wasn’t sure I’d heard her properly.
“Pardon?”
“Her. Over there. That bitch.”
I saw Randy before I saw the woman. Hard to forget a guy who’d once broken your arm—he’d had considerable expertise with hammer-locks—right in front of the girl you loved.
Then I saw the woman and I forgot all about Randy.
I didn’t think anybody could ever make Amy seem drab but the woman presently dancing with Randy did just that. There was a radiance about her that was more important than her good looks, a mixture of pluck and intelligence that made me vulnerable to her even from here. In her white strapless gown, she was so fetching that men simply stood and stared at her, the way they would at a low-flying UFO or some other extraordinary phenomenon.
Randy started to twirl her as he had Amy but this young woman—she couldn’t have been much more than twenty—was a far better dancer. She was so smooth, in fact, I wondered if she’d had ballet training.
Randy kept her captive in his muscular embrace for the next three dances.
Because the girl so obviously upset Amy, I tried not to look at her— not even a stolen glance—but it wasn’t easy.
“Bitch,” Amy said.
And for the first time in my life, I felt sorry for her. She’d always been my goddess and here she was feeling something as ungoddess-like as jealousy.
“I need a drink.”
“So do I.”
“Would you be a darling and get us one then?”
“Of course,” I said.
“Black and White, please. Straight up.”
She was at her table smoking a cigarette when I brought the drinks back. She exhaled in long ragged plumes.
Randy and his princess were still on the dance floor.
“She thinks she’s so god damned beautiful,” Amy said.
“Who is she?”
But before Amy could tell me, Randy and the young woman deserted the floor and came over to the table.
Randy didn’t look especially happy to see me. He glanced first at Amy and then at me and said, “I suppose there’s a perfectly good reason for you to be sitting at our table.”
Here he was flaunting his latest girlfriend in front of his wife, and he was angry that she had a friend sitting with her.
Amy smirked. “I didn’t recognize him, either.”
“Recognize who?” Randy snapped.
“Him. The handsome one.”
By now, I wasn’t looking at either of them. I was staring at the young woman. She was even more lovely up close. She seemed amused by us older folks.
“Remember a boy named Roger Daye?” Amy said.
“That candy-ass who used to walk you home?”
“Randy. Meet Roger Daye.”
“No way,” Randy said, “this is Roger Daye.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but he is.”
I knew better than to put my hand out. He wouldn’t have shaken it.
“Where’s a god damned waiter?” Randy said. Only now did I realize he was drunk.
He bellowed even above the din of the crowd.
He and the young woman sat down just as a waiter appeared.
“It’s about god damned time,” Randy said to the older man with the tray.
“Sorry, we’re just very busy tonight, sir.”
“Is that supposed to be my problem or something?”
“Please, Randy,” Amy said.
“Yes, please, Dad,” the gorgeous young woman said.
At first, I thought she might be joking, making a reference to Randy’s age. But she didn’t smile, nor did Roger, nor did Amy.
I guess I just kind of sat there and though
t about why Randy would squire his own daughter around as if she were his new belle, and why Amy would be so jealous.
Six drinks and many tales of Southern California later—Midwesterners dote on Southern California tales, the way people will someday dote on tales of Jupiter and Pluto—Randy said, “Didn’t I break your arm one time?” He was the only guy I’d ever met who could swagger while sitting down.
“I’m afraid you did.”
“You had it coming. Sniffing around Amy that way.”
“Randy,” Amy said.
“Daddy,” Kendra said.
“Well, it’s true, right, Roger? You had the hots for Amy and you probably still god damned do.”
“Randy,” Amy said.
“Daddy,” Kendra said.
But I didn’t want him to stop. He was jealous of me and it made me feel great. Randy Carson, Rose Bowl star, was jealous of me.
“Would you like to dance, Mr. Daye?”
I’d tried hard not to pay any attention to her because I knew if I paid her a little I’d pay her a lot. Wouldn’t be able to wrench my eyes or my heart away. She was pure meltdown, the young lady was.
“I’d love to,” I said.
I was just standing up when Amy looked at Kendra and said, “He already promised me this one, dear.”
And before I knew what to do, Amy took my hand and guided me to the floor.
Neither of us said anything for a long time. Just danced. The good old box step. Same as in seventh grade.
“I know you wanted to dance with her,” Amy said. “She’s very attractive.”
“Oh, Jesus. That’s all I need.”
“Did I say something wrong?”
“No—it’s just that nobody notices me any more. I know that’s a shitty thing to say about my own daughter but it’s true.”
“You’re a very beautiful woman.”
“For my age.”
“Oh, come on now.”
“But not vibrant, not fresh the way Kendra is.”