Fading into a Different Light

   When I read about old people in nursing homes falling in love, having affairs, and marrying, I’m always bewildered by the courage of their unflagging optimism. What remains in them that’s able to flare back into life with a glance, a touch, an excursion into someone else’s heart? Whatever it is, I don’t have it. My crushes are piercing, violent, and directed toward the inanimate: trees stripped down to bare, cold poetry at the end of autumn, a strip of wind-scoured rocky coastline, the valiant scarlet of geraniums that continue to bloom in November.

I have to force myself to think of the men who caused me to waste time and lose sleep in past years. Some come to mind when I least expect their arrival, drive-by ghosts, and when they do, I give them a full measure of the love that I once had for them. Others emerge in a flicker of memory and I look back at them with amusement and embarrassment: Oh yes, him.

  Sometimes I think men were invented for the convenience of tabula rasa girls, the ones who are still discovering their own voices, their own places in the world. “Fill me with your thoughts. Tell me what you’ve done,” they beg and the men oblige their wishes, over and over again, until they don’t know any other way to talk to women. Years later, they’re still happily talking nonstop to girls who have become women with thoughts and stories of their own. But the men, many of them, were never taught to ask, only to tell, so for conversation and comradeship among equals, women usually turn to their female friends.

  As we grow older, friendship outweighs passion. When I was young, I noticed that was the case among the elderly couples I knew. Husbands and wives had turned into jocular, bickering old buddies. Where the hell did the romance go, I used to wonder. Now I know. In our later years, biology is no longer our destiny. Companionship is.

  “If you haven’t married for love by the time you’re forty, marry a friend,” a young wife advised me when I was sixteen. At seventy I have friends and some of them are men, but it turned out I wasn’t, as people used to say of bachelors, the marrying kind.

  Recently a young policeman in full uniform stood behind me at Trader Joe’s, holding a bottle of kombucha.  This was in Seattle, where small courtesies are still part of the daily fabric, so I turned back and invited him to step in front of me. When he declined with a smile and thanks, I realized he was blazingly cute, and for a second or two I began to flirt. Then the cashier was ready for me, I stepped toward the counter, and promptly forgot about him. That’s a good thing too. Flirting with a man young enough to be my grandson is a playground slide slick with melted butter that could take me straight to a third-world beach and a flock of rent boys. As I remember, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone didn’t have a happy ending--and the doomed figure in that film was the legendary beauty, Vivien Leigh, for heaven’s sake.

  Instead I allow my heart to be stopped cold by sunlight glinting on pine needles, leaves in autumn colors forming a brilliant palette on the wet grey cement of a sidewalk, whitecaps dancing on the surface of an ocean. When I fantasize, I dream of airline tickets, and when I fall asleep at night, the warm body snuggled against me belongs to my cat.

  I’ve become the nightmare I dreaded in my forties.

  When I was living in Bangkok, I was invited to a dinner party given by my wealthy Dutch friend, Cees. I knew it was going to be an elaborate affair. I’d seen his maid polishing the silver and ironing table linens the week before it took place, so I dressed for the occasion in an ice-blue sleeveless silk cocktail dress and shoes that went beyond flirtatious into the realm of discreet pornography. As the token woman at a table filled with gay men, I felt it was important to hold up my end of the deal and as I walked into Cees’s house, his gaze held approval.

  When I took my seat at the dinner table, the man who had been placed beside me was young, good looking, and newly arrived from France. He was much more effervescent than other Frenchmen I’d met in the past and when I remarked upon that, he told me it was because he was a Celt from Brittany, a whole other species from the rest of his countrymen. Since I have a generous amount of Irish blood, I told him we might be related and with that, our conversation took on an absurd measure of animation.

  “Look at them,” Cees remarked thunderously during the meal, “They haven’t even touched their food. They’re only talking.” 

   But there was nothing “only” about it. Somehow Patrice and I had found a kinship, close enough that we began talking about what we feared most. It was to him, and only to him, a stranger I would never see again, that I confided my deepest terror, “I’m afraid I’ll grow old and ugly and nobody will want to fuck me again.” He stared at me with complete understanding and said, “Moi aussi.”

  Shaken by that unvarnished truth, I managed to knock over my glass of red wine. There was a sudden flurry of salt poured over the flood of scarlet before it could stain the white linen tablecloth and that was the end of our chat. But when I said my goodbyes at the end of the night, Patrice took me in his arms and kissed me more thoroughly than any male acquaintance ever had before. We clung to each other until Cees announced, “Janet, really. I know he’s cute but,” and I realized I’d committed the most deadly faux pas that any woman possibly could manage when attending a gay dinner party.

  Soon after I left, Patrice was found rummaging through a medicine cabinet in an upstairs bathroom, searching for useful pharmaceuticals. Cees told him to get out and I never saw him again.

  At seventy, I haven’t slept with a man for twenty years, by choice, and to my horrified surprise, I like it that way. What excites me is the thought of getting off a plane in Bangkok, spending a month in Queens, exploring empty beaches in Korea. In my wildest fantasies I see myself living for a year in Shenzhen while struggling to learn Chinese or watching the light change while standing on a balcony in Mexico City or walking along the river in Battambang’s early morning coolness. Now that’s romance.

Death by Peonies

 I am very fond of peonies, perhaps because I once inherited a small bush of them in Fairbanks, planted by a former owner of our house. They bloomed every year, in spite of the long and frigid winters, and when we sold the house, I wanted to bring them with me.

Instead I’ve found them in the Market,stretching down the aisles in a narrow field of gentle colors, and once a year or so, I bring some home with me. This year I was captivated by a bouquet with peonies in a richer shade of pink, brazen beside their pale counterparts. When I put them in a vase, I was delighted to find seven peonies, white, pale pink, and two of the dramatic ones. 

Since I usually have no more than two in a bouquet, the lavishness of this purchase was a surprise and I felt drenched in luxury. Glancing up from my book throughout the evening and seeing those flowers was pleasure of the best kind. 

A smell that carried a cloying sweetness was the only flaw of my night and it became stronger as the hours progressed. Someone had told me that one of the apartments was being sprayed for bedbugs and apparently the scent reached my place. I avoid almost every scent in existence so this was annoying. Taking a benadryl, I went to bed.

The scent was still in place the next morning and I was surprised that I couldn’t smell it when I went down the hallway to the garbage chute. My eyes watered and sneezing was almost as regular as breathing. I sniffed at my bouquet and found it was emitting a fragrance. Then I looked up peony allergy.

Yes. This is a thing, especially from what are called “red peonies.” What used to be the flower of choice for allergy sufferers because the blossoms contain no pollen has become something to avoid. Apparently growers have fostered the concept of scent in their peony crops. Reluctantly I put my flowers on a table outside. 

I suppose if I had to develop an allergy, peonies are the best triggers since their season is brief. So was the lifespan of the showstopping blossoms which didn’t survive a day of full sunlight. The pink and white ones are more intrepid and still look quite lovely, poised against the water and sky. 

Next year I’ll wait for the dahlias to arrive. Meanwhile I woke up with the perfect murder in mind, bouquets of bright peonies delivered to someone who hasn’t discovered that she’s allergic to them. 

I’m grateful that I can still tolerate lavender, unlike a friend who would die if placed in a field of those flowers, and I have a true understanding of the springtime misery that hits my sons every year--nature striking back.

Traveling Alone

 Dazed after a night away from home, spent in comfort and surrounded by the ocean, its smell, its dunes, and its sound of waves, I can’t assimilate it yet. Drinking coffee that’s not instant from a paper cup and watching a ferry crawl across the lake that calls itself saltwater, feeling Mulrooney’s reproachful stare burning into my back, all of my routine has been jostled into a foreign cast. My addiction. Only money and Mulrooney keep me from indulging it every week.

This feels as if it was s the best trip I’ve ever made, even better than my stay at the Incheon beach. This time I had almost twenty-four hours and the sort of beach time that I used to have when I was little, staying with the Murto girls, where rocks and waves were our playground. 

Yesterday’s waves had washed up bundles of kelp and rockweed with its little balloon bubbles, all of it edible and all of it ignored. Its sharp, salty smell was familiar and nostalgic and it glistened in heaps on the sand, brown and shiny. Families worked on sea castles and one baby broke free, crawling rapidly toward the waves, again and again, like a little sea turtle. A girl wearing a bikini and a baseball glove played catch with her boyfriend while surfers slid down waves that were small but emphatic.

This beach is a democracy, in a community that has gone to the dogs in the best possible way. Humans coexist in a canine fashion here, unified by joy. On the other side of a jetty the sand belongs to dogs. People are there only as accessories, watching huskies play with corgis, puppies the size of tiny cats making friends with rottweilers. The dogs dance through waves in exuberant packs, silhouetted against the sky and as they leave, they’re still happy.

They always make me happy and when I remember them, I’m always smiling. They’re what make me come here instead of any other San Diego beach, a place where the eccentric time capsule of their human community is an appropriate counterpoint. “It takes a different sort of person to like Ocean Beach,” a staid-looking matron told me, “It’s not for everybody.”

Among the shops selling souvenirs and smoke-related accessories is a Mexican American diner with a dog who regularly shows up for breakfast and a Bank of America branch that first began as the Bank of Italy. It has hoboes who gather in parking lots and near the seawall, friendly, not feral, the way Bowery bums used to be.

The balcony of my room brought the ocean to me when I stopped walking and I watched the sun, half yellow and half orange, sink toward the horizon, touching it, disappearing in segments, and ending in a thin yellow line before it all vanished. Someday I’ll see the green flash, but for now I relish a sunset that’s not blocked by mountains.

Apprehensive about my sheets after the scratchy horror of the Aqua del Mar bed months ago, I was reassured by the smooth pillowcases and went to sleep happy. I woke up to fog that was as cozy as a pashmina and sat outside with a little bag of Cheezits from 7-Eleven and camp coffee cobbled together from Via and hot water. Downmarket all the way, with a hamburger and a beer for supper at the Northshore Tavern and more food than I could handle at the diner where Taco, dog in residence, and I became friends the next morning. I stopped at the tavern before I left, where the bartender remembered my Modelo order from the night before. 

I always come here in a convoluted, inefficient way, taking the airport bus to the fringes of downtown and then waiting for the one that will wind me through miles of hillside bungalows to Voltaire Street. It takes more time than is necessity but I love that view of the bay, the art deco building across from my bus stop, and then the ride through an old neighborhood with its streets named after classical authors, Macaulay, Bacon, Voltaire.

I fantasize about living in Ocean Beach even though I’ve yet to find a bookstore there. Then I remember advice that a friend received from his therapist, “Don’t make your oasis your daily life,” and I feel grateful that it’s only three hours away. I can live in this stodgy, self-congratulatory city just so long as I have Tucson and Ocean Beach, and the gift of flight.

Mary, Mary

 Mary Wesley is on my mind as I wake up, nine books in a rapid row and then she said she had nothing more. She used her own life cannibalistically, but shrouded it in plot and character. Her life was her material.

I’m approaching the age when she began to write as a serious business. Her children were grown, many of the men she had loved were dead, so were her parents. She was estranged from her sister, and her good female friends were not the sort to care if they found their scandals revealed in a novel.

She was knitting sweaters to keep herself alive until she found that books would do that and much more lavishly too. She had learned to be frugal, and her children were provided for by her first husband’s estate so she became generous toward people of straitened circumstances, whether she was close to them or not. Her papers were filled with letters of gratitude, waiting for her biographer to find after she died.

She was beautiful to the last, more and more as she aged. She was described as small and finely drawn when she grew old and she indulged herself with cashmere and silk and good shoes, as soon as she was able to afford them. She loved a broad brim on a black hat and was photographed frequently in profile, displaying a firm little chin well into her old age.

Robert Bolt loved her enough to leave Sarah Miles for her, until he found that Mary was no longer the marrying kind but a woman who refused to submerge her own talents in the more demanding ones of a husband, a state that she knew far too well. He was twelve years younger than she but that wasn’t the problem. In her eighties, Mary flirted outrageously with a lover of a woman who was her age; the man was twenty years younger than either of them. She pouted later that she wanted a young man too.

She and her best friend were predators when they were young. “They hunted in pairs,” a man who had lived to tell the tale observed, and a photo of the two of them, sprawled full-length on a lawn surrounded by men and looking triumphant, bears witness to that statement.

She was often photographed in a two-piece bathing suit that bore little resemblance to a bikini but was ragingly daring in the 30s, with its bared midriff. Her figure looks almost statuesque with long legs; although Mary was a tiny woman, she had great presence and style. A photo of her after a court presentation, dressed in the robes of a peeress and holding a cigarette, her husband clipped out of the picture, just about sums her up.

It never occurred to her not to be a householder, in true British fashion. She was rooted in England and having her life flower under two world wars certainly did a lot to keep her that way. At least twice her second husband was given good jobs in Europe, and once Mary joined him there, in Berlin. But his mad first wife destroyed his career and that was the beginning of near-poverty and the death of travel.

She was desperately poor after that husband committed suicide. She had been keeping the household going until his death and then she fell ill. She had put her Dartmoor cottage up for sale and a prospective buyer found her there in bed, a sixty-nine-year-old woman who was too ill to speak, alone in a perishingly cold house. Unable to speak, she waved him on in his exploration. Instead he stopped and saved her life. “Double pneumonia” a doctor diagnosed and she was helpless with it for three weeks.

That improbable rescue was only one event in an eventful life that had to be tempered into credibility if it were to be put into fiction. Ten novels, all wicked fun except for the last which was dark and vicious. Then she stopped writing, having perhaps found layers that she no longer wanted to publicly explore, and died a woman who entered a whole new phase of being alive in her seventies, one that was of her choosing and that used her talent to the hilt.

Shopping, Twentieth Century Style

 Here is how far my world has sunk. I went shopping at Bellevue Square and survived. Not only that, but I almost enjoyed it.

My kind of shopping is more like hunting for food. It’s focused and purposeful. The last time I did it was when I was on a quest for shoes, which took me on a fruitless tour of downtown stores and finally to Anderson Shoes, a venerable institution that's surrounded by hospitals and caters to nurses who need useful footwear. Eureka--I came home with the ugliest and most comfortable sandals that have ever been on my feet.

This time was an even more utilitarian search--all-cotton underpants. I usually buy these in Bangkok but my last trip was too emotionally fraught to accomplish this. The synthetic fibers in the underwear I found in a Hong Kong street market finally did exactly what had made me turn from them many years ago and I needed granny panties.

What I found in the handful of stores still left in downtown Seattle were polyester and spandex, occasionally blended with cotton. A more upscale alternative was cotton and bamboo--after all, if bamboo works for toilet paper why not underwear? There were alluring little scraps of what was supposed to look like silk and used to be found only in Victoria’s Secret, and many derivatives of Spanx that looked like a slightly tweaked version of the panty girdle that we all wore in the days before pantyhose were invented. 

I came home drenched in gloom and went online, purely for investigative purposes, in search of stores that would have what I wanted. The internet produced several possibilities, all in stores that had abandoned downtown and were now only found in malls.

In Seattle malls are gone, except for one that’s a depressingly long bus ride away. However Bellevue, once a bedroom community for people of means that’s now becoming a city for tech workers, has a stunning assortment of them and was only a swift bus trip away. It’s a weird place where malls are staples and buildings look as if they’d just survived a neutron bomb, pristine and apparently without human life. The streets are quellingly empty and on my few forays into this place, I’ve come home feeling very tired, all of my energy drained away.

This time I wasn’t a tourist. I had a good reason to be there so I entered the closest mall with a strong sense of purpose. Ignoring everything that usually set my teeth on edge, I began my trudge toward the stores that supposedly had what I needed. Unfortunately this place was too upscale for them and I knew I didn’t have the strength to search for where they might be hiding. Instead I plunged into stores I usually never enter, ones that left Seattle in 2020, apparently never to return.

None of them had what I was looking for and I began to think of buying men’s shorts and be done with it. But on every floor of this mall was a place that I thought was dead and buried. In separate pieces but still attracting shoppers was Macy’s.

My experience with Macy’s has always been on West 34th Street and I accepted no substitutes--until now. In the segment that held women’s clothing, I headed for what Macy’s calls Intimate Apparel. In the company of two other women who looked as though they might be older than I am, I searched through racks of underwear and then--at last--I found packages of Jockey underpants that proudly asserted what they held was made only of cotton.

Imbued with a sense of victory, I clutched my quarry and began to hunt for the closest exit. When this took me to Macy’s Housewares section, I saw a little blender at a price I could afford and in a burst of serendipity I bought that too. When I began to look at pillows, sanity prevailed and I went off to find the bus that would take me home.

I’ll never be a mall walker, although I certainly covered a lot of ground when I was in this one. I’ll never wander through one as a window-shopper. But if I have to make a choice between buying online or going to Bellevue, there’s no question. I’ll vote with my feet.

The Morning After

 

Nobody has solid figures on how many people filled the Seattle Center’s 74 acres yesterday. The Seattle Times, with its usual arrow-sharp reporting, says “thousands.” The organizers of the rally said 7,000 people had registered for it. I was there half an hour before it was scheduled to begin and the grounds were already packed solid. 

It invigorated some. It depressed me. The signs made it clear how many parts of our democracy have been violated since January 20th and the massive crowd pointed out our impotence. Half of the country could mobilize the same numbers on the opposite side with the same passionate fervor--and they’re the ones who control our government. 

Our numbers yesterday accomplished nothing. Milling around in a city park, carrying signs--it was Protest Lite. We could have shut down the city if we’d marched through downtown. Instead we showed off our clever signs and tried to hear the speakers who were kneecapped by a lousy sound system. 

At best this felt like going to church. At worst it seemed like performance art. Do you feel better than you did on April 4th? Not me.

Maybe I’m a jaundiced old woman and maybe I’m still reeling from the effects of a wild case of claustrophobia. Maybe I’m pierced by the fear that even when our economy goes into the garbage disposal and Russia is our only ally in the world, the other side will cling to the lies that they’re fed every day and blame it all on Biden.

This morning’s headlines from the BBC and the New York Times report that a federal judge’s order to return a man who was deported without cause is being ignored by the White House and that a third Presidential term is gaining plausibility. What might have been millions of people across our country who turned out against these issues and far too many others is only a sideshow.

To cry or to vomit? That is the question.

Cherry Blossom Revival

 “It’s a cliche,” I kept telling myself, “the cherry blossom viewing at UW doesn’t even belong to this country. We stole it from Japan.” Yes, I went there with my family on our trips from Alaska, but that was when we were tourists. It’s the equivalent to going to the top of the Empire State Building.

But here’s where social media comes into its reason to live. There are few non-political posts on my pages and I’m hungry for splashes of joy, wherever they may be found. When cherry blossom photos began to appear, I was glad to see them and when a sunny day appeared, I set off to look at blossoms.

The University of Washington campus apparently isn’t confusing only to me and reassuring signs giving directions to the trees had been placed along the way. Suddenly a cloud of pale pink appeared and soon I was immersed in flowering trees.

There were many of them, forming avenues along narrow paths that were filled with people, with their babies, with their dogs, and everyone with some sort of camera. One girl wore a full-skirted pink dress, looking like a human cherry blossom, while others wore kimono and variants that looked more like cosplay than Japan. 

What struck me and went straight into my spirit was that all of us were there for only one purpose, to revel in beauty. We weren’t only soaking up the perfection that came from thousands of petals, we were being saturated with happiness.

I came home feeling as if I’d gone through detox and that feeling is still with me this morning. After being under the trees, I stopped at the University Book Store and had a brief and delightful conversation with Brad Craft, in which politics never arose. I came home with two books that I hadn’t expected to find and my dreams last night were full of a chaotic sense of excitement and discovery.

I’ve been killing off my vagus nerve, that integral part of the body that’s nourished by communion with living beings. After being fed yesterday, it’s clamoring for more today--and damn it all, if it finds sustenance in tourist experiences, then I say bring them on. 

Discovery and random moments with strangers--these may be small adventures but without them I was beginning to shrivel. Ferry rides, festivals, farmers’ markets--whatever it takes to bring joy back as a staple, sign me up. I've been mourning the lack of a revolution when what I really needed was a revival.