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.