Never Too Late for Love

by Warren Adler

  "Now watch me." Gracefully, in a slow motion, he moved the disk across the court, knocking her disk aside.

  "You're fantastic," she said, noting his concentration.

  After they played for three-quarters of an hour and she was growing bored with the game and frustrated at his lack of recognition, she turned to him. "Maybe I should rest for a moment," she said. "I am absolutely the lousiest player here."

  He sat down beside her on the bench and pulled out a package of chewing gum.

  "No thanks," she said, thinking of her bridge.

  "I've done this for years. I've still got all my teeth."

  "Did you enjoy being a teacher?"

  "Yes, I did."

  "You didn't want to be anything else but a teacher?" she asked.

  "Not really." He paused. "My father wanted me to be a doctor." She felt her heart beat swiftly again, the memory and the pain washing back.

  "You didn't want to be a doctor?"

  "Not really."

  The anger of fifty years came rushing back.

  "It didn't cause you any trouble?"

  "Trouble?" He turned and looked at her, as if for the first time, almost as if the inquiry had offended him. She imagined she could hear old doors squeak open and smell the musty odor of her father's cellar.

  "I have a son that's a dentist," he said, still watching her, although his frame of reference seemed deflected.

  "Did you put pressure on him to be a dentist?"

  "Never," he said. He continued to look at her. She hoped that the floodlights weren't too revealing and that her make-up was clever. She felt her attraction to him, untrammeled by time, the old feelings of wonder and pleasure that she had when he was in her presence, close to her.

  "Do we know each other?" He seemed confused.

  "I don't know," she answered, feeling at last the tug on her line.

  "You lived in Flatbush, my wife said?"

  "Yes."

  "You were never a teacher?"

  "No. My husband was a cutter in the garment center."

  "I went to City College. Did you go to college?"

  "No."

  "We didn't meet at Rockaway, someplace at the beach. Maybe at the PTA. I used to teach in Brooklyn."

  "I never went."

  "Where did you grow up?"

  "Brooklyn."

  "Where?"

  "Crown Heights." She paused, watching his eyes for any sign. Then she said slowly, "And before that Brownsville."

  "Brownsville. That's where I grew up. Imagine that. What a mess that place is today. I went back once and cried like a baby."

  She felt him drifting again.

  "I lived on Douglass Street."

  "Douglass Street? I lived on Saratoga Avenue."

  "The next block."

  She could sense his agitation now. Thank God, she told herself. "What did you say your name was?"

  "Smith," she teased, knowing she was teasing, enjoying it, feeling the pleasure in her body, in her soul, feeling her womanliness and the wonder of this flirtation.

  "No. Your maiden name."

  "Goldberg."

  "My God! Frieda Goldberg."

  "Bingo."

  She saw his lips tremble and his eyes mist slightly and the remembered little tic at the base of his jawbone palpitate.

  "Frieda." He had trouble swallowing.

  She moved away from him on the bench, as if to study him.

  "You're not the Heshy Feinstein?" She brought her palms together and pushed them under her chin. "Heshy Feinstein. I can't believe it. I just can't believe it."

  "You can't?" He paused again, then grasped her hands in his. "How do you think I feel?"

  "Frieda Goldberg." He repeated her name over and over again.

  "It's Smith now," she said.

  "It's been lots of years." He moved his head up and down, surveying her, watching her, his face flushed quite visibly beneath the redness of his recent sunburn. She sat still, watching him, looking into his eyes, letting him drink her in, wondering what he was seeing.

  "It's a coincidence," Frieda said. A new group of players came to take their court and they got up from the bench and moved toward the exit.

  "Let's take a walk," he said.

  She seemed to be leading him. They walked along the path that skirted the clubhouse and snaked into the pool area. There were chairs there on which they could sit in the quiet darkness and watch the clubhouse lights play against the surface of the pool.

  "I've been counting the years in my head," he had said after they walked for a few moments in silence. "I'll be seventy in December," he said. "I was seventeen."

  "Fifty-two years," she said, moving close to him in the quiet night, hoping he would take her arm.

  When they reached the chairs, he wiped off the moisture with his handkerchief. Other couples sat in the distance. She could hear their voices.

  "I've thought about us many, many times," Heshy said, his voice suddenly hoarse. He cleared his throat.

  "We were something," she said, patting his hand, then moving her fingers up his bare arm.

  "It took a long time for that to go away," he said.

  She wanted to say it never went away. She remembered Herman again, feeling sorry. Poor Herman!

  "You've had a good life?"

  "Fair," he said after a long pause. "And you?"

  "The same."

  "Tell me."

  She shrugged. "As I said, I married a man named Herman Smith. He was a cutter in the garment center, made a decent living. We lived in two apartments. One in Crown Heights. One in Flatbush. Then he died of a heart attack. Quick. No pain. I have a daughter named Helen, who got married and moved to Chicago. Now I'm a widow and live in Sunset Village with the rest of the widows." She had said it all quickly, marveling as to how swiftly it all could be said, her life. Some life. Surely there was more to it, she told herself. Was she deliberately trying to draw out his sympathy? Of course she was.

  "And you?" she asked. He had placed his hand on hers, which still rested on his bare arm.

  "My father drove me crazy about that doctor business. But he died a year or two after you moved away, and I had to help my mother in the grocery store. Then I went to City College and took my teaching tests. I taught for more than forty years. My two children are doing fine. Ida you met. We've been married forty-two years. Now I'm retired."

  They sat silently again, his hand kneading hers now, the pool water shimmering and the din from the clubhouse washing over the air like distant thunder.

  "We were something," he said. He is recalling me, she thought, wondering if he was frightened. "We never could get enough of each other."

  She wanted to tell him then and there what it had meant to her, how much of it she had protected and treasured, but she held off.

  "We were very close," she said. Did it seem to him that they were talking about different people? she wondered.

  "Unbelievable," he said. "It was never the same again."

  She felt her joy now, the validation, the thing that was alive inside of her after all those years. He bent over to catch a ray of light on the face of his watch.

  "I better pick up Ida now," he said, standing up, but not letting go of her hand.

  They walked toward the clubhouse through a clump of young trees. He directed her off the path and looked around him quickly. Then he enveloped her in his arms, kissing her on the lips, his tongue darting in. She felt her body turn to jelly, lurch, and she caressed his back, running her hands down to his buttocks. He pressed close to her with his pelvis, then disengaged his mouth and whispered in her ear, "It's a dream."

  She felt a tingle begin in her, somewhere deep, a tremor of pleasure, something she had not felt for decades.

  She wondered if he was still alive there, still needed her, and she brought her hand down to his crotch, stroking gently. She felt the beginning of hardness and knew she was giving him pleasure, but he moved away swiftly. They heard footsteps coming on the ceme
nt path.

  "Are you going to mention this to Ida?" she asked as they reached another dark spot on the path. This time they paused but did not touch.

  "No," he said.

  "Good."

  They started to move toward the clubhouse, but she hesitated.

  "I'm going home from here."

  "Will I see you again?"

  "Of course."

  She was so agitated she could not sleep, tossing and turning in her bed. The restraints of more than fifty years had simply crumbled against the force of this mysterious attraction. She did allow herself the use of the word mystery, because it was something that defied all logic--at least from her experience.

  In the morning, she was tempted to call her daughter, because she dared not confide in any of her friends, especially Dotty, who would have the information all over Sunset Village as if on a streamer carried by an airplane. She was uneasy, too, about their having been seen in public together. Did someone see them last night? It was not exactly the norm to see two people embracing in the shadow of the Sunset Village Clubhouse. What she felt unmistakably was something that Herman Smith, for all his kindness and faithfulness and decency, could not produce in her and for this inability had suffered a lifetime of deprivation and frustration.

  When she got out of bed that morning, she took off her nightgown and viewed herself again in the full-length mirror, inspecting every fold of her aging body, wondering whether, when compared to that image in his mind of a sixteen-year-old, it would disgust him, turn him away from her. If I close my eyes, she reasoned, I feel sixteen. Perhaps he will close his. And I will close mine, she agreed, although she had noticed that men's bodies did not seem to shatter so terribly with age.

  When the telephone rang, she knew it was him and answered quickly.

  "Frieda?"

  "Yes."

  "Heshy."

  "I know."

  "You knew I would call?"

  "I felt it."

  "I didn't sleep all night. Ida got up twice to get me an Alka Seltzer. Frieda, I can't believe it. What I feel. What I felt last night."

  "Yes," she said. She knew, of course,why he had called and pondered the question. They must be very careful. Surely, this onetime, she told herself.

  "You can come over. Walk in the back." She gave him her address.

  "I can stay till two-thirty. Ida is at the pool."

  "Yes," she said.

  When he had hung up, she called Dotty.

  "I don't know what's wrong. I feel terrible. I'm going to nap."

  "Should I come over later?"

  "No. I'll be fine. Just let me sleep."

  "Your friend Ida Feinstein is terrific," Dotty said. "She fits in most beautifully with our group. Her husband sounds like a big schlepp."

  "At least he's alive." It was an expected reference, a wisecrack. "That's something."

  She put on a brassiere to take away the sag of her breasts and she searched her drawer for a fresh pair of pink panties, the older kind. She found a pair lying on the bottom of her lingerie drawer and drew it on. Then she slipped into a flowered dressing gown. She went into the kitchen, made a tuna-fish salad, enough for two, and set it out on the cocktail table in front of the couch. For a moment, she wondered if she should put out her half bottle of Manischewitz Concord, but remembering its cloying sweetness she rejected the idea.

  The rattling on the screen door came sooner than she expected, and she was annoyed with herself for not having lifted the latch because someone might see him knocking on the door. Walking swiftly to the door, she let him in. He was wearing a flowered short-sleeved shirt, white cotton slacks, and white loafers. She led him through the apartment to the living room and they sat on the couch together.

  "I can't think of anything else since I met you last night, Frieda. I've been going over in my head all the things we did together. What we meant to each other. I never thought I would see you again, never."

  "Neither did I," she responded. She moved closer to him and he put a hand on her knee.

  "You think we're a joke?" he asked suddenly. It had been troubling him, she saw, but the feeling between them was beyond his stopping it. It had always been beyond that.

  "I was going to call my daughter this morning and tell her."

  "She knows about us?"

  "Not really. Once I mentioned it when Herman died. But if I called her up and said, 'Helen, I met an old boyfriend and he still excites me,' she would plotz right then and there."

  "How could I even tell my children? Certainly not Ida. I've never been unfaithful to Ida. Not once. What about you?"

  "Not only was I not unfaithful. I wasn't even faithful."

  He threw his head back and laughed, rubbing his hand up and down her inner thigh.

  "I made some tuna-fish salad," she said stupidly, feeling the blood surge in her veins, the joy tickling her groin.

  "There is only one salad I want," he said.

  She felt her breath coming in hot gasps as she moved her head back on his shoulder, knowing her mouth was open as she made gurgling sounds. She recovered herself somewhat to begin unzipping his pants.

  "You haven't got a bad heart, have you, Heshy?"

  He looked down at her confused, then smiled as he helped her remove his white slacks and undershorts.

  "You want to go into the bedroom?" she asked, hoping he would say no, since they had never, ever been together in a bedroom.

  He shook his head.

  "I'm older now," he said, surveying his still not-up-to-par member, "I need more help than I used to." He seemed to be pleading. She stood up and unfastened her brassiere. She let his hands play with her nipples while she stroked his manhood, feeling the response come, the hardness begin.

  "You're marvelous, Frieda," he said. "It's been a long, long time."

  "Close your eyes," she said. He did as instructed and she removed her panties and dressing gown and lay under him, bringing his member into her body. She also kept her eyes closed. "I am sixteen," she said, moving under him, her fingers instructive, feathery. Poor Herman, she thought, not to have known this. The pleasure began at the roots of her hair and moved downward until she twitched inside. It was like warm honey rolling over her in wave upon wave. She shuddered and felt him shudder and when the feeling passed, she remembered how it had been and how they had worried about her becoming pregnant.

  Soon after, they dressed and had lunch, then she watched him become drowsy.

  "You want to take a nap?"

  He nodded and she led him to the bedroom, where they hung their clothes on a chair like an old married couple and got in between the sheets. She set the alarm clock and cuddled close to him. In a moment, he was asleep, snoring softly.

  Watching his eyes twitch and the little hairs in his nose, she softly lifted the covers and looked at his seventy-year-old body, soft and bulgy. His penis, however, looked as she had remembered it, although, below, the bags seemed older, more wrinkled. She crawled down and gently kissed the head of this instrument of her pleasure. He stirred for a moment, then continued to snore.

  It had not mattered after all, she thought, her going away. He never did become a doctor and all his father's dreams went into the grave with him. She would not allow herself to imagine how it might have been if they had married and had children and spent the last fifty-two years together. That would be self-pity something that she had warned her daughter to beware of. Never feel sorry for yourself. For a moment while she was on the couch, feeling her pleasure coming, her eyes tightly shut, she could imagine herself sixteen again, with all its possibilities. It was the one memory that never withered, had withstood time, been able to be recalled at will and now, by some miracle, relived.

  The alarm crackled in the room. She clicked it off and the hum of the air-conditioning unit resumed. He opened his eyes, smiled, and burrowed his head between her large breasts.

  "Heshy," she sighed. He put his lips on her nipples and sucked them.

  "A nosh," he mum
bled.

  "Want a cookie?"

  They laughed and she reached down and felt him again.

  "Your age again, mister?"

  "Seventeen."

  "I thought so."

  She bent down and sucked him erect, waiting patiently, feeling the pleasure of the process. Herman had begged her to do this and she had steadfastly refused, although she had done it many times with Heshy. Then, when he was ready, she put him into her sideways and they spent a long time together and she felt pleasure, different kinds, and rhythms, many times. Then he pulled away, satisfied.

  "I can't believe this is happening," he said, sitting on the edge of the bed, putting on his white socks.

  "You'll never leave Ida," Frieda said suddenly, without anger, gently, a statement of fact. She knew that from the beginning.

  "How could I, after all these years?"

  "But, Frieda, I swear to you. It has never been like us. Never like us. I can't remember the last time..." His voice trailed off.

  "Don't be embarrassed," she said.

  "I'll see you again?" he said, standing up and putting on his pants.

  "Can we stay away?"

  "Maybe once a week," he said.

  "Of course." It would be impossible any other way. She remembered how furtive they had been, the smell of the cellar, the back porch, all of that repeated now. It was all part of it, she thought. When he was dressed, she straightened his shirt and kissed him on the cheek.

  "Watch out for the yentas," she said, letting him out the back door, seeing his flowered shirt fade into the distance as he walked toward the clubhouse. He seemed to move away very fast, as if he were seventeen again....

  Poor Herman, she thought, puffing up the pillows of the couch.

  POKER WITH THE BOYS

  The game began in earnest a month after Hymie Cohen got married. He was still living in his father-in-law's house, on the corner of Strauss Street and Dumont in Brownsville. His father-in-law worked for Silverstein's Movers, and there was always a huge moving van parked in the oversized garage at the rear of the house. There was plenty of room in the garage for a table, so they could make noise and play cards in peace without disturbing the rest of the house.

  There had been games there before Hymie was married, but not on a regular basis; the routine had not yet been established. Hymie's marriage settled that. He and Muriel had agreed that Hymie would be allowed a weekly "night with the boys", though the controls were rather rigid. The "boys" were made up of the crowd that used to "hang out" around Hoffman's Candy Store on the corner of Dumont and Blake. They had all gone through public school together, played on the same team in the Betsy Head Park baseball tournaments, and shared their most profound adolescent experiences, especially after the traditional Saturday night dates. After they took the girls home, they would gather at Hoffman's for a report about the evening's events.