Every time I let down my guard and let myself exist without fear, without worry, I pay dearly. So I already know that I cannot afford sleep tonight. Seawind does what she can to calm me, placidly floating in the impersonal harbor without a care for my destiny.
The temperature drops 20 degrees when the sun goes down. I slide the hatchboard into place to keep the night air out and rummage around in the galley cupboards for a saucepan to heat a can of Italian wedding soup.
Between hot flashes, self-justifications and the need to figure out what’s next, you’d think my monkey mind would be satisfied. But my ego’s admittedly sick obsession with lusty adoration sinks me into the fleeting pleasures and lingering shame of my four lovers: the Cynic, the Carpenter, the Chef and the Contractor. I can amuse or horrify myself for hours with rewinds and replays of car accidents and carnal couplings.
My lovers comfort me. It’s twisted, but I have continued to run away with them in my mind long after our brief encounters.
A quartet of lovers. Not all at once, and not currently. What do you take me for?
Judge harshly if you will. But each affair was spaced out roughly four years apart, each preceded by the supreme flirtation of deep conversation, each proceeded by car repairs and volleys of self-recrimination. There was a long, righteous dry spell before the Cynic in which I even outlawed masturbation just to see if I could go without touching and orgasms. I lasted two months. At any sexually active age, it is important to remember that the clitoris has more nerve endings than the penis. Doctor Oz recommends sex at least once per week to cut heart attacks and strokes by up to 50 percent. I need not apologize for my libido. It’s healthy to have sex. If you are not having sex you are shortening your life span. And when I’m not having sex I am very unhappy.
They were all younger than me and I am still trying to figure out what that means.
Lover number one, the Cynic, was homely and shaggy, with leathery, scaly skin and small, rodent-like yellow teeth. His brown hair, brown eyes and muddy complexion didn’t matter. In the looks department I’m no prize myself, especially on the cusp of a half-century. Zits and wrinkles are a vexing combination. My periods are gone but I still get the pre-menstrual pimple between my eyebrows each month. Yoga mavens take heed: it looks like I’ve succeeded in opening my third eye and it isn’t pretty.
The Cynic, a humor columnist with an acid tongue and liberal sensibilities, worked for the local newspaper. I worked as an Information Specialist at the tourism bureau office. The first time he came in, I remember thinking that he resembled Alfred Einstein on methamphetamines. His wicked humor seduced me. It didn’t hurt that he considered me brilliant, powerful and attractive.
What woman isn’t a sucker for such comments as: “You’re gorgeous and you don’t even know it, which is doubly attractive,” or later on, “I know you would probably like it to be smaller, but from a man’s perspective your butt is perfect…”?
The Cynic welcomed verbal sparring matches, produced a string of witty comments for every occasion, had a flair for caricatures of various important personages on the political and social scene and an unerring instinct for whatever behavior our too-infrequent encounters called for, from circumspect admiring comments murmured in my ear at a Kiwanis Club awards banquet, to a full-blown feel-up in the car under cover of darkness in a restaurant parking lot.
Sometime after my fleeting affair with the eccentric Cynic tapered off, due to progressively building guilt, impossible scheduling and his idiocy with motor vehicles — I prefer a man who can fix things, or at least not constantly break them — the Cynic came knocking on my hotel room door after a day-long marketing seminar at Marquette University in Milwaukee. I shut myself in the bathroom and stood under the blast of a hot shower as he pounded away at the cheap, purple-painted metal door. All I could think of was how he’d ground the brake pads on my Chevy Cutlass down to nubbins when I’d had the bad judgment to lend him the vehicle while the family and I were off on vacation in the Wisconsin Dells.
In the ethics seminar the next morning he asked me if I had been in. “I saw a light under the door,” he said. “I knocked and knocked.”
“I went to bed early,” I said. “Wow, I must have been out like a light.”
We both knew differently. Wincing at the dandruff on the shoulders of his rumpled black Salvation Army sports jacket, the dead-skin flakes crusting at the corners of his bushy unibrow — and those squirrel teeth! — I’d progressed to the “what-did-I-ever-see-in-him” phase.
I last heard through a mutual acquaintance that the Cynic is living in obscurity on a goat farm in a small, affluent Minnesota community, the pet of a rich divorcee. I will always carry fond memories of his long, slim penis, really the only beautiful part of him, and how fulfilling it felt inside of me in those marvelous pre-AIDS awareness days when sexually transmitted diseases were not an acronym but merely an occupational hazard for ghetto hookers, heroin addicts and gay men riding bareback.
In my defense, I only took lovers when I feared my pussy was going to close up like a pierced ear gone too long without an earring in the opening.
Have I mentioned that Doctor Oz, and Doctor Ruth before him, said that sex is good for you at any age? Just look at those miraculous Blue Zones around the world, where the long-lived joyfully engage in sexual intimacy well into their 90s.
The soup is bubbling. Standing in the galley I eat it straight from the saucepan, spooning broth and slurping bead pasta as I progress to Lover Two, the Carpenter.
The Carpenter came along a few years later, when I just couldn’t take Derek’s rejection and my self-imposed celibacy any longer. By then I’d found a waitressing job to supplement my piddling income and take my mind off my abysmal home life. It was clear that the things Derek most loved about me were my medical insurance and 401K; my barely-above-minimum-wage salary was an easy target for ridicule. And then the tourism bureau was forced to cut back on staff. Seniority ruled, and despite a satisfactory job performance for four years, as the newest hire I was out.
“You’re nothing but a second-class clerk who couldn’t cut it and has no future because you didn’t have the gumption to finish college,” he shouted in my face, spittle hitting my cheeks, when I asked for an extra $20 to go to the grocery store. “Just wait and we’ll go together. I know what we need; you’ll just buy stupid shit.”
I was a sad case for quite some time after I lost my day job, dragging around the house in a limp, flowered-flannel nightgown, fighting the impulse (and not always winning) to pop a beer at 10 a.m. while watching Regis & Kathy Lee followed by Oprah, Judge Judy and The Price is Right. Thankfully the agoraphobia was short-lived, but for a couple of months even going to the grocery store was painful. My 401k was spent on COBRA health insurance payments; the unemployment checks barely covered the beer and cigarettes I couldn’t seem to do without.
The job that got my paddle back into life’s mainstream turned out to be waitressing, bartending and cooking at a dive called the Elbow Room Resort. My Knight-in-Shining-Armor-seeking friend, Elise — going through yet another crisis after a string of not-so-charming princes failed to rescue her and carry her off to Sugar Daddy Land — got me in. Elise didn’t want to run away, she yearned to be swept away, preferably on a white steed. The chances of this happening at the Elbow Room were about as likely as Donald Trump shaving his head. But delusion, as well as hope, springs eternal.
Fall had turned to winter. Three hundred inches of snow descended on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. “Larry needs servers to get him through snowmobile season,” Elise said. She called to let me know I’d been hired sight unseen on her recommendation. “If you want the job.” It seemed like divine timing. At the time.
The “resort,” a dive by any standard, no matter how many boxes of frozen crab legs were collecting frost in the walk-in freezer, was situated on the main trailhead at a juncture convenient to sledders from Lower Michigan, the eastern Upper Peninsula, Wisconsin and Chicago. The affluent seemed to enjoy slumming with the mostly motley crew of Elbow Room regulars swilling cans of Old Milwaukee. Tips were surprisingly good.
By the time the Carpenter had dazzled me with his wide, white grin with a teasing, “Are you married? Please, tell me you’re not married!”, I’d recovered a measure of self-respect and spunk and had grown to embrace the Elbow Room, dark vibe and all, as a welcomed respite from my troubled and troublesome family. Derek had just quit smoking cigarettes by taking up pot, a crop of which was flourishing in our attic and stinking up the house. Whenever visitors commented on the smell I blamed it on the skunks in the woods across the street. Then Derek decided to downsize his boat repair and delivery business, claiming that by cutting overhead and letting his four employees go he could actually make more money with less effort. It was all about “less effort” and “getting out there” on the sailboat when summer finally came again.
My son Joey had embarked on his long and impressive string of petty criminal activities and car wrecks. I didn’t know where my sweet baby boy had gone. From age 16 to 18, his favorite expression was “Don’t worry about it,” the most useless and maddening phrase in the world. Of course I worried, all the time. Joey’s indifferent academic performance was depressing. He shrugged off D grades, doing only enough work to get by. I’d been raised to follow the rules and respect my elders; a “B” on the grade card did not make my parents happy.
My daughter Lisa, the older by only 18 months, was also tanking in the grades department and resented the self-defined role of “good” child. She launched an aggressive campaign of rebellion involving tattoos, piercings, and an outlandish rainbow of hair colors favored by her group of friends (appropriately known as the Skittles). Lisa had run out of private schools willing to accommodate her in our neck of the woods. She’d been kicked out of public high school after being spotted in a sinister black trench coat in the faculty parking lot, where she was writing down teacher license plate numbers in a small black notebook.
All this mayhem and sacrilege was of course my fault. It is always the mother’s fault, or at least women are conditioned to feel that way. Actually, I thought her boxing nun puppet Sister Mary Margaret Tyson was funny.
About that time I first heard the calling to run away. When I clocked out of work at the Elbow, I occasionally gave in to the strong impulse to drive for miles down US-41 along the shores of Lake Superior toward the Mackinac Bridge, a female Chuck Berry with no particular place to go. On one run I made it all the way to the bridge that links Upper and Lower Michigan, some five hours distant from my Upper Peninsula hamlet, before I snapped to and reluctantly turned around. The irrational dreams that dawn sustained could not survive the bright light of morning. Derek called me crazy and he was correct. Neither one of us connected the quick tears and sudden, drenching bouts of sweat, the night rambles and constant depression with that normal phase of a woman’s life known as menopause.
The Carpenter was gorgeous in that aw-shucks-ma’am way, with a dimpled smile, abundant, curly, collar-length soft brown hair that reminded me of Jeff, my first high school boyfriend. The Carpenter was buff and he knew it, although he endearingly deflected compliments with long, downcast eyelashes as women cooed over his small waist, wide shoulders, tight buns and perfectly sculpted biceps. His past career in the Coast Guard fed our mutual interest in plying the high seas and possibly each other.
The Carpenter had a gorgeous penis. I wanted it at my constant beck and call.
Twice divorced with young children whom his wife had custody of, he was deeply into his own guilt trip and desire for isolation. He lived in a rented house trailer on a gravel road down by the Snake River. The mementoes of his family life with two elementary-aged children and his ex-wives were stored in cardboard boxes in the cheaply paneled living room that also featured an outdated console TV, a beat-up floral-print sofa and a Lazy Boy recliner that had seen better days.
I was mainly into the kissing. It annoyed me that he needed to talk and talk and talk until he had exhausted every facet of possible conversation before reaching for me, his palpable reluctance followed by hunger. The kissing satiated me on every level. Derek never enjoyed kissing and when he did deign to pucker up, it wasn’t at all pleasant-all clumsy tongue and sticky saliva as if he was unwilling to devote more than a few seconds to such an unsanitary and boring activity. The Carpenter’s leisurely, varied kisses, nibbling, slow-paced, then faster, shallow, then deeper, rendered me 14-years-old again, when making out was better than going all the way. The Carpenter could touch my elbow or my jawline and make me shudder. When we finally kissed our way around to it, the eyes-wide-open sex was a revelation.
Astride his brawny body on his bachelor bed, I tossed my hair back, gorgeous, invincible, and irresistible. “Let me look at you — you’re so beautiful,” he would say, his hands clasping my butt, his brown eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiled that perfect smile. Now I think, gawd, what a cliché. “You look so beautiful.” What a pile of hooey. Word to the not-so-wise: “You look so beautiful,” and derivations thereof, comprise the oldest line in the world. Men throughout time have said this to women when they are trying, as my mother crudely but accurately puts it, “to get into their pants.” If a guy says it to you, he’s said it to someone — possibly several someones-before, with the same tone of wonderment. Ouch.
To my shame, the Carpenter with the perfect penis became an obsession. I bought underwear, the sexiest I’d ever owned, for him. My midnight drives shifted to afternoon rambles down his country road on my days off, cruising past the rinky-dink trailers looking for his rusted burgundy Nissan pick-up truck. Once I walked in when he wasn’t home and left a scented candle and sexy note.
I looked for that truck everywhere. Every time the lounge door swung open at the Elbow Room, I held my breath, waiting for him to walk in. Then I’d hide my infatuation, “Oh, hey, how’s it’s going” all casual, pretending not to notice him, as if I’d never agonized over what to wear for him at work that night. I’d taken to wearing tighter pants and shorter tops that showed a hint of my belly when I chose to raise my arms and stretch a certain way. The space behind the bar was a stage for my strutting ego drunk on libido. The butterflies whipped around in my gut every time I saw him or even thought I saw him. Ridiculous. Unrealistic. Debasing.
On one gray, snow-blasted afternoon I showed up at the trailer looking for his arms, his kisses, that delectable member. He was curled up inert on the couch, covered by a knitted afghan. I was the last person he expected or wanted to see. We conversed politely, like strangers. He complimented me on my gray-and-tan Sorel boots. Then he showed me a videotape on the console TV about his crossing of the equator and the shellback initiation that newbie coast guard members are forced to endure. We did not touch. Apparently there was a never-before-midnight rule that I had violated. He had said “come over any time,” but he didn’t mean it and never expected that I would be pushy enough to take him up on it. Pulling out from his driveway in my hockey mom van I got stuck in a snowdrift. The tow truck bill was $50; I was late picking my son up from hockey practice.
The Carpenter visited the bar less often as winter gave way to the muddy, still snowy, viciously deceitful ugliness that typifies schizoid Michigan Upper Peninsula spring. When he did come in he did not linger waiting for me to go off-duty. Brave in public, insensate in private, I lowered myself even further, writing him a five-page letter explaining that I did not want to leave my family but wanted him anytime, anywhere and “can we make arrangements when I leave for my new job in the summer?” How trite and desperate can a woman get?
I had decided to upscale my culinary labors by taking a waitress job at a gourmet restaurant 60 miles away on the Lake Superior waterfront. Actually, Derek had decided that he didn’t want me working at “that sleazy bar” and delivered an ultimatum, complete with foot-stomping (his) and hair yanking (mine).
Because of the two-hour commute down a scenic, curving highway I was able to convince Derek that it would be cheaper and safer to stay in employee housing in the Harbor all week, coming home to the sailboat on weekends for trips to new and familiar harbors.
I never found out how the Carpenter reacted to my ludicrous offer to pencil him in on my schedule. Two weeks after I began working in the harbor Joey, then 18, was convicted of criminal sexual misconduct and my focus was cruelly snapped back to the people I should have been thinking about in the first place.