Oh, thought Druff, let it begin, not just the touchy-feely but the philosophy parts too, all the shared sentimentals they sought to hook you with in the love classifieds. He’d been hooked years, reconstructing hypothetical dreamgirls from the tiny bytes of smuggled, implied tastes revealed there, played out like line to kidnappers. Oh, he thought, let it! Wanting to trade on special theories — that you’d make a killing, if you bet the professional wrestling, as fixed, everyone knew, as the stars. That all you had to do was to be willing to offer high odds and depend upon turnover, or find out when the champion agreed to stand down and the belt was about to change hands. You bet, he meant, the practicals in life, only first determining which these were. Only then did you stand to gain. (Was this too poetic? Not for his dreamgirl! She, no matter what she said about the love of a good fire after a walk in the woods on a drizzly, overcast day, would take such things in like aphrodisiac, or what did one talk about around those fires?)
Oh, thought Druff, surprised to be made to feel so male — those ponies and percentages, his cryptic dreamgirls in those classifieds — pleased by what he felt, some ballsy, weighted swagger of a vain regard, his discrete maleness urgent as mercury, forceful as magnetism, like some phantom erection paraded in a bath towel, seduced by his hankerings for all the tutorials of love, the thought of those shared pensées of a street commish.
On the other hand…
His hopes that afternoon were hedged all around by what he would tell Rose Helen.
It wasn’t that he was stuck for things to say. What, an old campaigner like him? Trippingly on the tongue. He’d qualms, but he didn’t doubt his ability to lie, even his ability to lie to Rose Helen. He just didn’t want to be caught out in a campaign promise. He rarely made them. (Because he knew he was a goner. For whatever reason, what he’d said to her, to Margaret Glorio, was true. He’d thrown his hat into the ring. He would pursue her, had already started.) It was what he would tell Rose Helen if his suit was successful.
They’d been married thirty-six years, after all. What was he, twenty- two when he married her? Just a kid. And Rose Helen, sixty now — sixty, Jesus! — had been twenty-four. Jesus! too, as far as that was concerned. Because hadn’t a deep part of her attraction been, as, God help him, it was something of an aversion now, those two extra years she had on him, as if she lived in a distant, telling time zone, coming to him, it could be, from alien geography, bringing alien geography, the covered flesh she’d not permitted him to see until their wedding night and teased him with — only it was nothing near so playful as teasing — denying him its light even then, granting him access to her only beneath the sheet and thin cover in the darkened room? The mysterious functions of her moving parts as much mysterious. Allowed to bring away with his eyes, like some impinged victor of guarded rewards, only what he could make out in that hobbled, weighted light. Only what he felt on his lips, the moistened tips of her powdered, perfumed nipples in licked conjunction with his moving, frantic tongue, a thick, yielded chemistry of a clayey, bridal milk. The source of her sweet and sour odors protected as the upper reaches of some under Nile. And what Druff was able to take away with him on his fingers, lifted like fingerprint from that dark and solemn scene.
Things were different then. At least for Druff. Well, give him credit, for others too. This was the earliest fifties. A time of girdled sexuality. (Poodle skirts were a sort of Su’ad’s veil.) If you knocked someone up you married her as much to make an honest man of yourself as an honest woman of the girl. Guilt was champ. He hadn’t thought the belt would ever change hands.
Now he knew, too late, it had all been just so much magic, the superstitious flimflam of conspired, agreeable fears. There’d been no especial power in her, he’d fallen through the net was all, squeezed through the cracks by his times, assigned, like others of his generation, high-flown attributes to what was mere rumor, the prose of innocence, guilt, the hype of “upbringing.” It was as if — truly — he’d lived by almanacs, “fun facts,” lore, raised in weathers controlled by swallows punctually returned to Capistrano or Puxatawney Phil frightened of his own shadow. He’d bought into such notions. It was like someone deciding to flesh out his portfolio because the NFL had won the Super Bowl that year, or someone pushed into buying or selling off because hems were high or low. (He didn’t remember the formula and reminded himself he would have to ask Margaret about that one when they were around the fire.) Well, why should he chastise himself, they all did. For who gave blowjobs then, who took it up the ass? Poor Druff, Druff thought, who was new to self-pity, a man who’d missed his season, who’d — you can imagine how he felt, you can just imagine — wasted ripeness and mourned girls — dreamgirls, indeed — he not only had never had but had never even dreamed about in dreams.
Sixty, his wife was sixty. Rose Helen was a golden-ager. Who’d dyed her hair since the first gray appeared in it in her late twenties, and had begun to let it go gray on her fifty-fifth birthday, and allowed the gray to go white, gradually turning the color of house salt. His golden-ager, his silver citizen.
And now recalled how he’d met her, how it had been on just such an almanac occasion as those he’d lived by years. On a pseudo-holiday, Sadie Hawkins Day, named for a character in a comic strip, a day of suspended decorums, when the girls chased the boys, were permitted to ask them on dates, make first moves. (Only even that didn’t happen, or happened only timidly, some vouchsafed mistletoe indulgence which would never stand up in court, all of them playing a Mardi Gras in the head.)
In some gymnasium now forgotten. (Who’d forgotten so many details, his life chewed by remoteness and Druff left standing there holding on to a big bag of first impressions which hadn’t lasted, just some gray overview, and him a guy, this latent pol, whose stock-in-trade it was to recall everything, everybody’s facts and figures, who seemed, here at least, to have misplaced his own.) But, though this may only have been his politicals speaking, instincts of the retrograde enhanced, he seemed to remember bunting. (Perhaps it was a function only quasi-Sadie Hawkins, some student council thing, or even a do where Republicans asked Democrats to dance.) Well, it was gone. But in a gym at the state university. And Rose Helen, already twenty-two, already at her roots’ roots the melanin fading, a chromosome snapping in her aging hair. Sure, he remembered now. The only Sadie Hawkins part to it — for them, he meant; it really had been Sadie Hawkins Day — was that both of them had agreed to be there. A friend of his from her graduating class in high school had given him her name, had given her his, who’d never mentioned either to the other before, was not fixing them up but only supplying on some mutual demand (though he couldn’t, in truth, conceive of Rose Helen’s ever having asked for it) this unwritten letter of introduction, the names like a sort of reference — To whom it may concern, say.
His friend had told him Rose Helen was a cripple.
“She’s crippled?”
“What are you, Druff, planning to enter her in a footrace? She has this minor deformity. Some hip thing you can’t even notice. It’s no big deal, don’t be so narrow. She’s very insecure. I think she has an inferiority complex. My mother plays cards with her mother. She’s very self-conscious, that’s why she started college late. If I were you, I’d call her, Druff. It’s the crippled-up girls with the inferiority complexes who are hot to trot.”
“How come you never took her out?”