by Paul Kropp
“Yeah, I do.”
She shook her head. “Here, email me,” she said, scribbling her address on a piece of paper. “I’ve got to run.”
The next day, I sent one email, which got a very quick reply.
From: amacklin@BU.edu
To: glthayer@cyberthorn.com
Thanks for the coffee. I really enjoyed seeing you this afternoon. Can we get together again sometime soon?
From: glthayer@cyberthorn.com
To: amacklin@BU.edu
Glutton for punishment? If you help me take the kids around for Halloween trick-or-treats, I’ll reward you with dinner. Let me know.
9
Trick and Treat
I WAS DOING UP my makeup when Kirk saw me in the bathroom. I had just finished turning my face a rather pukey green and was now adding some appropriate drips of blood to the corner of my mouth.
“Nice costume,” he quipped. “What are you?” “A ghoul.”
“That should really impress Gloria’s children,” he said. “Why couldn’t you go as a cowboy or a prince?”
“Those costumes weren’t on sale at Wal-Mart,” I replied, picking up the headband-knife that completed my look. “You don’t dress up for Halloween?”
“Halloween is a pagan holiday,” Kirk told me. It was his serious I’m-going-to-be-a-minister voice.
“So you’re going to a prayer meeting instead?” I asked.
“Don’t be sarcastic,” he said, before changing the subject. “Are you sure you’re ready for this woman? I mean, she’s almost old enough to be your mother.” Same serious, I’m-going-to-be-a-minister voice.
“I’ve been through the math on that, and it’s not true. Besides, this trick-or-treat thing could be fun. What’s the alternative? Head off to a pathetic Halloween Dance at Slavin? Play video games with Fuji? As Keats once wrote, ‘He ne’er is crowned with…’ uh, something or other…‘who fears to follow where his heart doth lead.’”
“Did he really write that?” Kirk knew that I tended to make up quotations.
“Something like that,” I replied. “Anyhow, my heart leadeth me to Gloria’s and perhaps some innocent gambol later in the evening. Pretty good word, gambol, eh? Anyhow, wish me luck.”
Kirk did not wish me luck. I think he had some deep feeling of disapproval for sin and people like me who are desperately trying to sin. If only I were more successful at sinning, perhaps I’d be worthy of his scorn.
I headed across campus in my outfit, dressed for Halloween a bit earlier in the evening than anyone else, garnering a few smiles as I went. Little kids go out trick-or-treating early these days for fear of the various evildoers who hit the streets at, say, seven o’clock. I had agreed to be at Gloria’s house at five-thirty, and that meant getting on a city bus at five o’clock. The various commuters on the number 13 bus gave this ghoul an amused look as I boarded, then returned to the vacant stares that are appropriate to bus travel. I had to stand most of the way, which is difficult for a man with a fake knife in his head, but I survived.
Following Gloria’s directions, I made my way into a set of winding subdivision streets until I reached her house. It was a pleasant bungalow done up in a fake-brick finish with a very large garage fronting on the street. It was basically identical to every third house in the subdivision, the other two-thirds boasting somewhat different fronts and even larger garages.
I rang the bell. I heard thudding footsteps from one of the kids, and then the front door flew open.
It was the three year old, a cute little blonde girl who was half-dressed in her fairy costume. She looked at me with wide eyes.
I smiled back.
And then she screamed “Mommy!” and burst into tears.
A fine start, I said to myself, removing the fake knife from my head.
Gloria’s son reached the door, a seven year old with an adolescent’s attitude. “Nice ghoul outfit, guy.”
“Thank you,” I replied, somewhat humbled.
Gloria finally appeared, holding the tear-filled child in one arm. “Alan, I’m so sorry. Lexy is so sensitive.”
“I’m just a person, see?” I said, smiling my very best human smile at the girl. “Just a guy.”
Little Lexy hid her face in her mother’s shoulder.
“I’m Brad,” said her brother. Then he looked up at his sister. “She cries all the time, for nothing.”
“Well, maybe my costume is too scary.”
He gave me an appraising look. “You’re not scary. Besides, I saw the costume at Wal-Mart last week. It was in the cheap bin.”
Should have gone for the cowboy outfit, I said to myself.
“Bradley, that’s quite enough,” Gloria told him sternly. Then she turned to me. “Just give us a little time to get ready, and off we go.”
The three of them went off upstairs to where I suspected the bedrooms were. That left me alone, with a chance to look around the house. The furniture was very much like that at my parents’ house, but a bit more stained from various colours of baby food. The fireplace looked like it hadn’t been used for a while, the windows had little fingerprints at the Lexy level. There were pictures on various side tables: baby photos, Brad in a baseball outfit looking displeased, Lexy in a little dress looking adorable, the three of them together on a picnic, probably taken by the now-absent dad.
I wandered out to the kitchen and found the fridge entirely covered with shopping lists (Cheerios figured prominently), reminders of hockey practices and dental appointments, magnets with various logos and designs (“Bill Starr can sell your house. Remember, he’s a star!”), magnetic letters spelling out “Brad is way cool” and still more photos. Some of these were ripped photographs that must have once contained the ex-husband. Now his image was gone and only Gloria and the kids were shown. Mr. Thayer, if that was his name, apparently had not left under amicable circumstances.
“We’re ready,” Gloria announced from the front hall.
Indeed they were. Gloria was dressed as a princess, complete with a crown. Little Lexy was a fairy of some sort, with a gossamer outfit and a sparkling magic wand. Bradley was dressed in the cowboy outfit I was too cheap to buy. He looked angry.
“I don’t want to be a cowboy,” he whined. “I want to be a gangsta.”
“No gangstas in this house,” Gloria told him. “You can be a cowboy or you can be a kid stuck in his room all Halloween. Got it?”
This tough choice managed to stop the whining. The kids grabbed their trick-or-treat bags and led us out the door.
“I’m sorry about Bradley,” Gloria whispered to me when the kids were safely ahead of us. “He’s been pretty awful lately.”
“He’s not that bad,” I lied. “And it must be tough to be a single mom, or should I say a single princess?”
She laughed, very princess-like, as the kids ran up to their first house. This trick-or-treat proved to be quite a success, with a decent-sized Snickers bar plopped in each of their bags.
So we traipsed from house to house, collecting whatever goodies were offered, admiring the carved pumpkins and the occasional elaborate Halloween display of ghouls, goblins, and flashing lights. Somebody once calculated that people spend more money on Halloween than on any holiday except Christmas, and Halloween isn’t even a holiday! Go figure.
The hour we spent on the streets went reasonably well, I thought. Little Lexy fell down only once and burst into frightened tears no more than five times during our walk through the neighbourhood. Boisterous Brad began sneak-eating his candies about halfway along, but we pretended not to notice. He was mostly cheerful, with only the occasional grousing when someone would give him something healthy to eat. “Raisins! What kind of person gives a kid raisins?”
When we returned to the house, Gloria had the kids select five candies each and then gave them permission to plop in front of the TV to watch a video until seven-thirty. I washed off my makeup and returned, as best I could, to my usual Alan Macklin look. Gloria to
ok off her princess costume and emerged in a jeans and T-shirt outfit that fit her very well indeed. Then the two of us went off to the kitchen to prepare dinner.
“I hope spaghetti and a salad is okay,” she said. “I’m not much of a cook, really.”
“It’ll be great. Anything beats the food at Slavin. And it’ll go with the red wine I brought.”
“The corkscrew is in the drawer,” she said. “How about you pour and I’ll begin the lengthy preparation of authentic Italian spaghetti sauce.”
She got out a jar of Ragu while I fished for a wine opener, finding only some stainless steel device that looked vaguely like a rabbit. It occurred to me, then, that I had never actually opened a bottle of wine before, even with a regular corkscrew. I picked the rabbit-thing up, stared at it, flipped it in several directions, but didn’t have a clue where to start. It seemed to me that this might be an omen of the evening to come.
“Oh, here, I’ll do it,” Gloria said when she had the sauce on the stove. With a quick zip, flip and pull, she had the cork out and sitting in her fingertips. “Would you like to sniff the cork, monsieur?” she asked.
“Certainement,” I said, remembering one word from high school French. Then I went on in my best Pepé Le Pew accent. “It smells—’ow you zay in Eenglish?—like cork.”
Gloria laughed and poured. We toasted and sipped. Then she started some water boiling and opened a package of salad. “Let me just get the kids to bed. I’ll need a couple minutes to read them a story.”
“I’ll stir the sauce,” I said, pouring myself a little more wine.
I sat on a bar stool in the kitchen, sipping wine and stirring the spaghetti sauce, feeling warm and pleased and very mature. This was so, so domestic. Maybe this older woman thing really worked for me; maybe I was just too mature for young university girls in their pink dorm rooms. Maybe I was destined to be with older women in their taupe-coloured suburban homes, sipping their wine, waiting for them to be ready for me…the younger man.
Finally Gloria returned. She looked more beautiful than ever to my wine-addled eyes.
“Did you leave any for me?” she asked, looking at the wine bottle.
“Oh, I, uh…” I replied.
She laughed and pulled another bottle from a shelf over the countertop. Then she threw in the spaghetti, and in a few minutes we were sitting down for dinner in the kitchen. Overhead, I could hear Brad—pumped up on Halloween candy—running back and forth. In front of me, however, was a very, very beautiful woman. I thought about that word, woman. I had been out with girls before this, with a half dozen different kinds of girls, but Gloria was my first woman. Or might be my first woman, if it all worked out.
“You know the funny thing,” she said after dinner, when we were halfway into that second bottle of wine, “I was nervous about tonight.”
“You’re kidding,” I said. “I’m the one who should be terrified.”
“Yeah, right,” she replied, the words coming out yeahrright. All our words were slurred now. Wine does that. “I haven’t been out with a guy since I dated Geoff.”
“The jerk,” I said.
“Yeah, that guy. And here’s my first date as an almost single person, and it’s with a guy who’s half my age. I think I blushed.
Gloria reached out and touched my hand. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that. It’s just so strange, this whole thing. But you’re a good guy, Al, really you are.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And you’re wonderful.”
I won’t go on with more of this dialogue. Two people, wine sodden, sexually frustrated, vaguely interested…it just doesn’t lead to literary talk. We probably sounded more like a snippet from Days of Our Lives, to tell the truth.
But I did get my first kiss in that kitchen, as part of that dialogue, and it was wonderful. I think older women are better at kissing: they know how to give a kiss just the right touch, just the right brush of lip against lip, just the right hint of more to come.
Then we went off to the family room to watch a DVD. Gloria offered me a choice of Night of the Living Dead or some movie with Richard Gere, so I decided to “pass on the gore and go for the Gere.” Gloria laughed. After two bottles of wine, she found me funny and sweet and sexy. That’s what she said—her exact words, almost.
We started making out after ten minutes of the movie. This was just like being in a real theatre, except that we were alone in the family room with no one to stare at us with disapproval, and only the vague anxiety that Lexy or Brad should wander down the stairs and interrupt us.
I can now report that older women also make out better than college girls. They know lots of different ways to kiss, lots of ways to get a guy excited, lots of ways to stretch out that excitement. They can even do all this with all their clothes on.
“So you’re probably thinking that you’re going to get some, aren’t you?” Gloria said, pulling her lips back from mine.
I had heard this line only a month before, and that context was none too pleasant. “Well, I, uh…”
“Well, don’t get your hopes up too soon. We’ve got to go slow on this,” she said.
“Right.”
“Slow means get your hand out from under my shirt.” “Uh, right.”
“And slow means kiss me a lot.” “That works for me.”
“And if you can count to three, Alan, you might just get what you really want.”
10
Counting to Three
To: amacklin@BU.edu
From: maggiemac@sl.edu
What are these questions about older women? I am no longer your dating advisor, Al. If you feel like going out with the school secretaries, that’s up to you. I promise you, I will not be jealous. I can understand your thinking, though. Frankly, I find older men a bit more attractive than my fellow first-years. I’ve got an invitation to go skiing in New Hampshire at Christmas with this grad student, and I’m toying with it. In the meanwhile, there’s a book by Vizinczey called In Praise of Older Women. I haven’t read it, but you might find the advice you need. Ciao.
I thought I detected a little jealousy in Maggie’s email, and that gave me an ego boost. Maybe she still cared about me, just a little, or maybe she had always cared about me, but not enough. Still, I had to stay focused. My current goal was here, not on the other side of the continent, and for her I was counting to three. My second date with Gloria had consisted of cheering at Brad’s hockey game, dinner at McDonald’s, and some serious making out on the family room couch. Now I had reached the evening of date three, the end of the count, and I had to get ready. I selected a condom from the dozen left for me by my father, then thought briefly and took another. Who knew what kind of great lover I might prove to be under the expert guidance of Gloria Thayer?
Our third date actually involved going out, like a real date. Gloria got a babysitter, a girl named Donna who was roughly my age, and arranged for the two of us to have all of Saturday evening together. We went out for dinner at a fusion Thai–German restaurant (the sauerkraut had ginger in it and the sausages were made of duck), then off to a European film so serious that it made the syllabus of my film course look like fluff. We were still able to make out a little in the theatre, at least until the Nazi storm troopers arrived on screen. Nazi storm troopers, I have found, put a damper on romance.
What had I learned about Gloria Thayer from our three dates? I’d learned that her ex-husband had been an actor during his university days, appearing in bit parts in such epics as Scream 2 (look for the guy in the clown mask) and The Horror, parts 3, 4, and 5 (look for the masked guy with the scary machete). When the big break into the majors did not appear, he abandoned acting and went into construction, something that apparently suited his threatening physique.
Gloria had begun working at the university to support her ex’s film career, then kept on working even as he became quite successful in construction. Sadly, working with brick, concrete, and two-by-fours led to a personality change: the ex lost that art
istic quality that first drew Gloria to him, and they began to wrangle. Wrangling turned to fighting and then more fighting, until one day Gloria walked out, taking the kids with her.
Apparently young Brad responded poorly to the split, acting out in various unpleasant ways. Little Lexy seemed outwardly unaware of the changes, but she frequently wet her bed after biweekly visits to dad. So the split had been a mess, as they often are; “But at least I got the house,” as Gloria put it.
“Which leads to us,” I said after the movie.
“Are we an ‘us’?” she asked.
“Well, in a way,” I replied. “And this is date number three. I’ve been counting. It’s not hard to count to three.”
She gave me a look that I couldn’t interpret. Then she kissed me. It was one of those wonderful, sexy, older-woman kisses.
I responded in an obvious physical way.
“Slow down,” she told me. “Wait until we get home.”
Ah, such sweet words! John Keats wrote poetry about the joys of the romantic chase, about the perfection of a romance where the love never gets to the point of sex.
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
But that was almost two hundred years ago. The world had spun around many times since, and I preferred the promise of “Wait until we get home” to the yearning of unrequited love.
We got home about ten, and Gloria paid off the babysitter along with a ten-buck bonus. The girl left abruptly, giving me a nasty look as she went out the door. Perhaps she suspected what was to follow. Perhaps she was jealous that an attractive older woman like Gloria had snapped up a potential stud such as myself.
The children were asleep, or so Gloria announced after checking upstairs. Then she offered me a Scotch, since there was no other alcohol in the house. I smiled a yes, then had to deal with confusing questions about rocks and water. Nonetheless, the drink she created hit my throat with a bitter, burning sensation that tingled from my hair to my knees. It also left me coughing, so I surreptitiously poured it on a small potted palm plant. I could almost see the plant shrivel as the Scotch hit the roots.