The Naked Truth

by Leslie Morgan

  Suddenly, I wasn’t sleepy.

  I read and worked on my iPad until we were about thirty minutes into the flight. I kept looking surreptitiously at his thigh muscles. They were very nice. I was wearing yet another pair of black leggings, my travel uniform. I felt uncomfortable in the cramped window seat, so I kept crossing and uncrossing my legs.

  Tall Shy and Handsome leaned back in his seat and sighed the first time I crossed my legs. As a test, I crossed my legs again. He closed his eyes and sank back, like he was in pain, gripping the armrest, exhaling as if he couldn’t take it any longer.

  What was going on? Was I turning this man on by moving my legs? I had to find out. I put my iPad in the mesh pocket in front of my seat.

  “So, are you from Philly?”

  So easy, these travel pickup lines. He looked grateful that I had initiated a conversation, his brown eyes liquid, like a puppy waiting for a treat.

  “I was visiting family in Charlotte, but I live in Philadelphia,” he said, meeting my gaze for a minute before looking away. His thick, dark lashes fluttered against his pale skin.

  “Me too,” I offered. “Been there long?”

  “A year.” He smiled. Gloriously white straight teeth. One slightly crooked front tooth. “I’m a soccer player.”

  Whoa. Another athlete? When had Philly gotten a professional soccer team? I could hear Timmy saying Mom, you are so clueless. But I did know, from my microscopic inspection of Dylan’s physique, that elite players had, naturally, elite bodies of hard muscle. This seemed like the more relevant data than the official list of Philly’s sports teams.

  I crossed my legs—again—and he let out another big sigh, looking at the circular air vents on the plane ceiling. It was like he was pantomiming Help me, God!

  It was clearly up to me to keep the conversation going.

  “So, how was your family?”

  “Oh, great. Nice to see everyone. Nice to be home. I actually went back to celebrate my . . . um . . . my birthday.”

  Such a sweet smile! How did I get so lucky? This was fun.

  “Was it a big birthday?”

  I was trying not to be too obvious. But the more personal information I could get, the better chance I had of connecting with him, of making it seem natural to give him my card and suggest coffee sometime as we were getting off the plane. Maybe I could offer him a ride home from the airport in the TT.

  “Yes,” Mr. Hot Thighs Soccer Player said. “Kind of a big one.”

  I smiled. He had nice knees, too. Would they taste good if I licked them?

  “Sounds fun.”

  He smiled back. This was getting good.

  I imagined kissing him. It wasn’t hard to do. Go girl. KC would be proud.

  “My twentieth.”

  His twentieth what? His twentieth birthday?

  Gulp. That meant that two days ago, he was nineteen. My facial muscles felt like a river in the act of freezing. This “man” was practically a teenager, three years older than my own son.

  I managed to survive the rest of the flight, chitchatting a bit about sports and college. Philadelphia did not, in fact, have a professional soccer team. He was a sophomore at Temple University, playing on an athletic scholarship, majoring in econ, starting to look for a summer internship in finance. Trying to recover from my shock, I blabbered about a few people I knew who might be able to help him network. In my own defense, I promise you, he looked more like thirty than twenty. But still.

  I did not give him my card. I did not tell him my name. I did not cross and uncross my legs again. Dylan being drawn to me, I understood. Sexually frustrated, married too young, a country boy curious about, and attracted to, an older city girl (who looked like she was from Manhattan despite being a Philadelphia matron). Marc had an established thing for older women. And he had no idea how old I really was.

  But a twenty-year-old? Attracted to me? Unable to breathe normally when I crossed my legs? And vice versa? Me attracted to a twenty-year-old?

  This was getting weird.

  * * *

  Girls’ Night Out. KC and Winnie met me at Monk’s Cafe, a Belgium brewpub around the corner with a shiny red door and a colorful chalkboard listing over twenty-five craft beers. Blind Pig? Pliny the Elder? I was hopelessly out of touch with artisanal brews and their funky monikers.

  We grabbed an empty couch by the jukebox, better for talking than the narrow, noisy bar or one of the tables on the sidewalk, which I did point out would be ideal for man watching. The girls were sampling a reddish beer called Damnation and a pale golden ale called Chimay, while I devoured salty pomme frites dipped in dijon mustard dressing.

  “By the way,” Winnie told me, her new aviator bifocal glasses—a fiftieth birthday gift from her husband—perched above her snub nose, which was still as cute as the day we met in fourth grade. “I ran into Jake Bryant at that alumni lunch in New York last week. He asked about you. He wanted to know if you were still living on Rittenhouse Square.”

  I shrugged, feeling sorry for Jake stuck with that petty girlfriend. Winnie popped one of my fries into her mouth as she went on talking. “So how many boyfriends are you up to now, Les? Five? Got any new pictures?”

  “As you know, I went without sex for three years. I’ve rediscovered that I actually like men. I like being treated as a sex object.”

  We all laughed.

  “I’m just jealous,” Winnie explained, although I knew she didn’t really mean it. Married women were always the most curious about my dating escapades, but it wasn’t that they wanted what I had. It was more that they couldn’t imagine what my life was like compared to theirs. Every one asked the same question, almost whispering the words: “What’s it like to be naked in front of someone new?” I told every one it was more fun than they could imagine.

  My phone hummed with a text. Winnie grabbed it off the low table in front of us. “Ooooh, Crazy Boy . . . that’s Chris Bailey, right? Wants to know if you’re watching hockey preseason—in China—with him tonight. Doesn’t he live in . . . North Carolina?”

  “Yeah, so we watch together and text the whole time.”

  “You know nothing about hockey,” Winnie pointed out. Winnie had a mustache of beer foam above her lips. She licked it off.

  KC cracked up. In honor of Girls’ Night Out, she’d thrown a leather jacket over her silk work shift.

  “Leave her alone. She’s gonna write a book about this and then start a franchise called MILF Boot Camp and we’re all going to be working for her. So you better be nice.”

  Winnie couldn’t stop teasing. “Is Chris the helicopter pilot, or the one who’s riding his motorcycle to Philly to visit you? These are the sexiest men I’ve ever heard of. A construction worker? A football player you met in fucking yoga class? A hot single thirty-year-old Marine on a bike in your backyard? You could sell tickets.”

  “Didn’t your mom always say it was important to have a few boyfriends you couldn’t explain?” I shot back. I told them about the email from the helicopter pilot’s girlfriend, and KC laughed so hard I could see her fillings.

  Winnie kept asking questions like she was writing a research paper on me. “Do they ever wonder about your kids? Do they even know you have them?”

  “Hmm.” I thought about this. “No. I don’t think anyone except Damon and Mishka ever asked about my kids. Marc is a kid himself, so it wouldn’t occur to him. And Dylan, well, the whole subject of kids made him squirm since he felt so guilty.”

  “Do you ever feel like you’re using them? Or they’re using you?”

  “Maybe. But not in a negative way.” I paused to figure out how to explain it. “What’s most astonishing is that there are so many men out there. I’m getting more sex at forty-nine than at nineteen. So that’s good. But sometimes I think men have studied how to torture us, and that the older men get, or really, the older we women get, the more they think it’s okay to treat us terribly. It’s not as easy as it looks, guys.”

  KC and Winnie loo
ked at me with zero sympathy.

  “Some days, it seems like your life is like Sex and the City: Pushing Fifty,” Winnie said. “When I’m driving carpool in my sweats I picture you walking down the street in ripped jeans, accompanied by a cheerful acoustic soundtrack warbling in the background, smoking-hot men of all ages falling at your feet.”

  I chomped on an ice shard before responding.

  “No one is more surprised by how many men are out there. I feel like a kid in a candy store. Actually, what I feel like is one of those men I used to make fun of, men who face divorce by buying a sports car, dressing younger, and dating people half their age. It’s actually a smart strategy. I feel much better about myself now. But it isn’t as if I waved a magic wand and every man likes me now. All that’s changed: I’m finally seeing the men who were there all along.”

  “And what’s your hit rate?” Winnie inquired. “Asking for a friend.”

  “Worse than you think,” I answered. “You know when I was in Alaska and I saw the double rainbows? On the hike down I met this amazing guy, Rob. Funny, handsome, from Portland. I gave him my number. We hugged good-bye. And trust me, it was a good hug. He never called.

  “Last month, I met a professor from Swarthmore on a flight home from California. He moved up to the empty seat next to me. We spent four hours talking. Cute, shy, no wedding ring. He bikes and runs and has two cats and a dog and he lives twenty-two miles from here. His mother’s name was Leslie! I was half in love by the time we said good-bye. Never heard from him, either.”

  “That’s ghosting, right?” Winnie asked, like she knew.

  “Sort of. It was technically too soon to be ghosted, because we weren’t actually dating, but it’s no fun to be rejected or ignored like that, and it happens all the time to me. Marty did it, too, in far worse ways, telling me I was unattractive and unlovable and emotional and insecure. There’s a lot of value in not giving a crap what a man thinks about you. Rejection is, actually, meaningless. Especially at the early stages, before you’ve let someone in.”

  “How many texts do you get from the ones who like you?” KC asked. “The only people who text me are you all and my boys and the CFO at work. I wish I got a few messages from hot twenty-nine-year-old men.”

  I did the math in my head.

  “Probably four or five texts from each one every day. So, twenty-five texts?”

  They both looked blankly at me.

  “A day?” Winnie asked. “How do you get anything done? How do you keep them all straight?”

  “Well, yeah. It’s easy—they’re all different. But you know, it doesn’t feel like enough,” I confessed with chagrin. “It’s like I’m dating several guys and no one at the same time. I wish I heard from them even more. I’d like to get at least one mushy text from each one every hour. Maybe every fifteen minutes.”

  Winnie looked into her beer. KC eyed me curiously. Had I said something offensive?

  “These guys are like Twinkies and Diet Coke, Les.” KC knew more details than Winnie did about the men in my life. She also knew that I’d spent Labor Day weekend alone, crying, because the kids were with Marty and all of my so-called boyfriends were with other women or their families. “Ever think you are overcorrecting here? How much can you down without feeling sick? Don’t you want to hold out for something a little more . . . nutritious?”

  She didn’t give me time to protest.

  “Ever ask yourself what you are really looking for, honey? Sometimes it seems like you’re willing to pay an awfully steep price in order to feel loved. That’s what you always say about your first marriage—that the definition of an abuse victim is someone who pays too high a ransom in exchange for love. With all these men, why are you still feeling lonely? What do you think would feel like ‘enough,’ Leslie?” she asked.

  Her words gave me pause.

  “I don’t know. Fifty messages? All of them madly in love with me at the same time?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Girl,” she muttered. “You ever think that’s too much?”

  Had I gone too far? I was getting exactly what KC and I had envisioned. But once again, maybe KC was right. The question now was simple: was I getting what I needed from my approach to men? My life today was far superior to being stuck in a dead marriage. But it was a crash diet, not a sustainable way to live. Whenever I checked my phone and there wasn’t a text from one of my “boyfriends,” I felt hollow inside. Maybe it was time to move on and stop this manic dating frenzy. But I had no clue what would come next. I blurted out what was running through my mind.

  “It’s not that it’s too much, KC. The problem is, it’s not enough.”

  Winnie and KC looked at me again, their eyes like marbles.

  “And I have no idea what to do next.”

  We all knew I was speaking the truth.

  THE NAKED TRUTH

  Mid-September. The kids woke up each morning to alarm clocks instead of ocean waves, complaining about life’s injustice over cereal. Pumpkins appeared on our neighbor’s stoops. The leaves on the oaks and maples in Rittenhouse Square turned the park red and golden yellow. Soon they’d flutter down to fill the fountain, the city would drain it, and winter would officially arrive.

  No more Coopers Beach until Thanksgiving. By then, the sand would be cold, the waves cobalt and choppy with whitecaps. The kids and I would have the beach to ourselves, along with the seals, an off-season oasis that felt exclusively ours.

  It had been one year since Marty moved out. The kids seemed okay so far. As for me, I was closing a chapter and opening a new one, but I didn’t know what the future held or even what I wanted from it. All I knew was I’d proved what I set out to: I still liked men, men still liked me, and there were plenty of them out there. Had women all drunk the same Kool-Aid, the patriarchal message that we must cling to whichever man we had, because we all thought there were no good men who wanted women my age? It was as if an unconscious conspiracy pressured us to stay in miserable relationships, even if our husbands were cheating on us and making us feel worthless and sexually repulsive. We should feel lucky! We should feel grateful! To have nailed down one man through matrimony, no matter how awfully that man treated us, because he was our only chance.

  What the hell were we thinking? The subliminal beliefs I’d held for years about men and women, especially older women, were entirely, blatantly, obscenely incorrect. But Winnie and KC had raised a question I couldn’t ignore: What did I want from men over time? What could they teach me? As nice as it was to have men spinning around me like cotton candy, I was hungering for more than spun sugar. How to get more protein in my diet, I had no idea.

  * * *

  If the reminder hadn’t popped up on the calendar on my phone, I would have missed Jake’s documentary screening. I’d gotten the paperless invitation before Damon, Mishka, Chris, and Marc—a lifetime ago. Now the screening was finally happening and I was going to be late. I dropped Bella at seven o’clock volleyball practice in Marion, then turned the TT straight back toward our high school friends’ Jim and Penny’s luxe condo overlooking the Schuylkill River. The apartment door was half-cracked and I tiptoed in. Fortunately, the beige wall-to-wall carpeting was about three inches thick, so no one witnessed my surreptitious arrival.

  The rooms buzzed with men’s and women’s party voices, amped laughter, and the clink of wineglasses. I stopped for a moment inside the front door next to a squat Diptyque Roses candle flickering on the antique hall table. I took a deep sniff and smoothed my blouse, my favorite black silk camisole with three silver opals sewn along the scoop neck. My pantyhose already felt like a corset around my waist. Going to a high-profile party where I knew so few people always felt like marching onto a battlefield.

  Through a frosted-glass doorway leading to the crowded living room, the only man I recognized was an elegantly dressed thirtyish photographer from the Star’s style section, bending over to snap his camera at shutter speed, his navy bow tie crooked, moving frantically from s
ocialite to socialite as if he was afraid the A-list couples would leave before he got enough pictures to appease the gossip column editor. I greeted Jim and Penny, secured a club soda with lime from the tuxedoed bartender, and dodged clusters of couples to make my way to a small knot of high school alumni in a corner.

  I didn’t know anyone else. Every person looked like a New York celebrity sent down via town car for the night. Maybe Jake’s publicist had invited Katie Couric, too. The overall effect was that I felt like the hometown hick, itchy with paranoid suspicion that half the guests were talking about the fact that I’d been invited only because I knew Jake from high school, and the other half were whispering Those wrinkles on her forehead make her look older than fifty and that skirt is awfully short. There was nothing I could do about my wrinkles or my fiftieth birthday next month, but fortunately, the skirt was cute and black, with a sassy vertical leather stripe across the tush. Of course, no one was actually talking about me. But still.

  Jake stood holding a beer, looming half a foot taller than the small mob asking film questions. It had been two years since I’d seen him anywhere but on Facebook. If anything, he looked younger today, scruffily handsome and happy, albeit frazzled by being the night’s star attraction. I went over and touched his forearm. He smiled fleetingly, his gray-blue eyes bright, and leaned down to kiss my cheek. He squeezed my hand, then turned back to his fans. I stood there for a minute, before stepping toward the bar for another club soda. More awkwardness.

  Chairs and a screen had been set up in the large dining room for the preview. The film was wry, wise, and irreverent, like Jake had been even at sixteen. During the Q&A, I snuck out to pick up Bella and drop her at Marty’s. With any luck, I’d be out of my pantyhose and naked between my sheets by ten.