Gentle Readers: Instead of a blog, this is a flash fiction offering… My first! While the female in the flash fiction does yoga, that’s about where the resemblance to the Blogger you know (and hopefully love) begins and ends…
“I think it’s a terrible idea, really I do.” And she did. He was 34 and she, though she didn’t like to say it, or allude to it, and could pass in some circles for ten years younger, was 60. In four years she’d be the song. “Do you really want to do it with someone my age?”
He did. He really did, so eventually, she succumbed. One afternoon, they met at one of the big hotels on the beach where his company had rooms. She had wondered when the idea came up if she would pay for it. She had cash, she had miles, and she had everything a proper 60-year-old could want–to a degree. She even had a husband and grown up children, one a year older than her new boyfriend. She had everything, except her seamless legs back, or her old face, not the one with the injectables at discreet creases. She didn’t even want to think about hair. Every three weeks on top. And if she wasn’t exactly grey down there, she didn’t do any of the stuff the girls did. That wasn’t her generation, or if it was, she had not participated, other than what they called the “Alaskan” at the waxing parlor where she paid a visit a few days before the first tryst.
A la recherché de la temp perdu.
She remembered all right. She longed for her old face and body. Remembered, especially, the easy slide without lube, she and her husband didn’t even try anymore. He could get it up, but couldn’t get it in, and felt insulted by the lube suggestion. She supposed he watched porno. And that’s how he got off. She decided he did it before coming to bed several times a week. His bathroom was downstairs, their bedroom up the stairs. She could sail through her rituals: shower or bath, the steps of her face wash, her teeth cleaning, the moisturizing of face and body in less than twelve. His, whatever he did down there could take up to an hour. Surely he was doing porn down there–nobody, not even her sedulous husband of several decades, could floss for forty minutes. Didn’t they all watch porno? She supposed her new boyfriend watched porno. Maybe she would ask him; he was remarkably easy to talk to. Isn’t that how they’d gotten into it, into it, and out of it and now it was over…
A la recherché de la temp perdu.
Proust, of course was gay. She thought her new lover was gay when they first met. He had the easy gay way with women, the excellent bantering skills, the genuine interest in her. What straight man had that?
She had thought it was a shipboard romance, or to be more specific, a yoga retreat romance, though nothing but a hug had happened, and a hug at a yoga retreat is nothing out of the ordinary, though maybe the squeeze had been longer than necessary. Even if her lip hit his soft neck during the hug. So what?
He started it by texting her three days later.
Then the next week, she found herself in a parking structure several blocks from the hotel. Ahead of time, she decided, if she ran into anyone she could say, “I’m on my way to such and such.” There were literally dozens of such and such places by the beach in Santa Monica where the tryst took place.
She took the stairs, because no one takes the stairs, and when she knocked at the door, he answered it with a smile.
She had never seen him dressed before, just in yoga clothes; and the wide black pants, the bright white shirt, the psychedelic bow tie startled her. With his young unlined face and the shock of blond hair that stuck up like straw, the head looked like it was sitting on a mountain painted white black and red.
He’s enormous, she thought, he’s Moby the Dick.
They didn’t kiss, they went straight to the big king, and she took off the germy looking bedspread, which is what she always did when entering a hotel room. They smoked a joint.
And then room service knocked with a bottle of wine and some snacks.
“How’s Lloyd?” he asked presently. By now they were stoned. Lloyd was her Bernese, she had shown him pictures at the yoga retreat. None of them asked for pictures of the children or the husband. But they all wanted to see Lloyd who was a minor hit on Instagram.
I was having love affairs before the invention of Instagram, she also felt like saying. In fact I was married with children before social media.
“What do you weigh?”
“I don’t know, one fifteen, something like that.”
“We’d never be able to borrow each other’s clothes!” he laughed and finally kissed her. And she kissed him back, and they rolled around on the king giggling for what seemed like a long time.
“For obvious reasons, you better get on top,” he smiled, a little later.
And with her own crepe and his rolls of fat and all the dope, it was a surprisingly sweet coming together, one that happened a few more times, and then never happened again.
She carried the memory of it lightly, the deep pleasure of those hours, the strange rooms, because the room changed every time, a different bottle of wine, a different strength of dope.
Some years later, the year she was 64, like the song, she bumped into her former lover on the Third Street promenade holding hands with a man. Their eyes met and simultaneously they blew one another a kiss. She was instantly elated. And stayed that way for some time.
She was with her husband, and daughter who asked, “Who was that?”
“Yoga?” replied her husband and she smiled.
Illustration by the fabulous Aimee Levy
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