Lust

Hey!” he calls to me every morning when I go by his house, where he sits on his front porch in a wooden rocking chair. His iron gray hair is clipped close to his head. Retired military, I think as I salute and walk on. He’s lived just a block from me for years, but I’ve never met him. Keep moving, I tell myself. Exercise is good for the heart. But in spite of myself I feel warmth spreading between my thighs, a physical triumph over excess rationality. My heart needs more than exercise, and maybe he’ll know enough to keep his mouth shut about the army.

Dream: I wake to the pine scent of freshly sawn wood in a house under construction. I crawl out of my sleeping bag on a bare pine subfloor and wander around, looking at the posts that mark where walls will stand, while wondering what sort of house this will be. I look through the skeletons of what might become bay windows at the oak trees outside. Sawdust coats the bottoms of my feet as I carefully step over loose nails that have fallen on the floor. Outside it’s raining but the roof is already completed, so I’m safe and dry.

Every night I walk through this house, sometimes in bright sunshine, sometimes in moonlight, sometimes when it’s so dark I can’t see a thing and have only the wood scent to tell me where I am. Occasionally the house is finished, either in Victorian style with porches and gingerbread trim, or in smooth modern stucco, but the next time I dream, it has reverted to its wooden frame. Once I lifted a trapdoor to find a basement too dark to explore, and another time I looked up to see the beams of unreachable rooms upstairs. I never notice any workers in this house that seems to be constantly constructing and deconstructing itself.

Reality: I wake up in a modern house designed by my former husband, a partner in the architectural firm where I managed the office for thirty years. I walk every day, too, but outside, exploring the neighborhood where I’ve lived half my life. I never set foot on these sidewalks until I retired, but I drove past them on my way to and from the office where my actual life took place; where I met my husband, had baby showers for my two children, and had an affair with a young intern. I told my husband I was leaving him in the lunchroom, and divorced him with the help of the lawyer whose office was upstairs. The intern left the firm, and so did my husband. I stayed. There were other interns, other partners. Time passed. My sons grew up and left, my lovers disappeared. Now I can explore.

The houses in this neighborhood are all different, many designed by my ex-husband in the contemporary style of the one he built for us, with its roof that looks like a bird trying to escape the slate walls. There are still some older homes left, like the military man’s, wood and shingle, surrounded by flowers and trees. I’m drawn to his porch, but I’m so sure we won’t like each other, I try to keep him out of my thoughts as I walk.

Since I was out of condition after all those years of driving, I began slowly, picking my way along the unfamiliar sidewalks. My feet were tender, so I saw an orthopedist, who prescribed shoes suitable for either walking or running.

“You should work up to a gentle jog,” he told me. “Just enough to condition the muscles without jarring the bones of the foot. We want your feet to conform to a healthy position.”

When I forced my nonconforming feet into the shoes, I was surprised to find they had a bounce to them that encouraged me to lift my legs and reenact the history of locomotion. Soon I was swinging my arms and hips 1940s style until, without my noticing when, my feet were leaving the ground in a 1970s jog, which hurt my knees so I slowed to the race-walking of the l980s and ’90s, lifting each foot high, crooked arms pumping. What happened to the l950s and ’60s? That was when people began driving everywhere. Before exercising for health became popular, someone walking or, god forbid, running, might warrant a call to the police for suspicious behavior.

People haven’t walked as a means of transportation since I was a child watching from our second-floor apartment as they passed, men in suits and hats, women in high heels with purses dangling from their shoulders, everyone’s arms swinging freely on his or her way forward to buses, stores, jobs, the future. I wonder if that man on his porch has these memories. Does he notice how people these days move to stay in shape (and in place) rather than to get somewhere?

It’s a warm May morning, but not at all hot. The wisteria along his porch railing is starting to bloom, and I’m quite comfortable in my jeans and T-shirt. He takes a sip of what looks like iced tea but could be rum and coke or whiskey and soda for all I know. He points to his foot, which I notice is in a cast.

“Pickle himself, he means,” I mutter as I jog away, then slow to a walk because my throbbing feet are having a nonconforming day and seem to want to go back to rest on his porch, a luxury I forbid them.

The next morning, so early there’s still a bit of fog, he’s already sitting in his rocker. I pass by swinging my arms, wearing a skirt with my walking shoes.

“You’ve arrived,” he says as I climb the steps to his porch, where I sit in a creaking wicker chair while he hobbles into the kitchen on his short walking cast to get me a glass of whatever it is he’s drinking, which turns out to be iced tea with honey and lemon. The fog is lifting. Anything is possible.

Since I don’t understand what he means, I nod and sip my tea. The ice rattles in our glasses as two older women race-walk by, their muscular legs moving in rhythm as if they’re dancing to the same music.

“How would you know?” I snap. “They could be on their way to their lovers. They could be lovers. Anyway, they’ve left us in the dust.” I watch them continue down the road, kicking their heels high to their private music.

I feel a trail of sweat start down my back, which could be a hot flash though I’m past that, or could mean the day is warming up. I let his hand continue massaging my head.

“Congratulations on not coloring your hair,” he says. “I hate those bottle colors, all the same. I like real hair, where each strand is different.” He pulls out a red hair, a white one, a black one.

He holds my hairs to the light. “Beautiful,” he whispers as he blows them off his fingers, watching them float to catch on the bark of the maple tree next to the porch.

I wonder what he means by left. Moved on to her eternal reward, or left for New York? Away for a month, or for good? He gives me a tour of the house, built in 1910, the oldest in the area. Three bedrooms upstairs, one with a queen-sized bed, two with single beds. I’m afraid he’s going to lead me into the marriage bed, but instead we settle on a leather couch downstairs in his study, glasses of tea in hand.

“I don’t know what I’m doing with all this space,” he says. “I keep thinking someone in the family will need a place to stay, but that’s not likely anymore. The kids have their own lives, their own homes. It’s time to move.”

His tea-tasting mouth finds mine and we lock tongues while carefully setting our glasses down on matching end tables. I let him pull my T-shirt over my head, unhook my bra, take off my shorts. Protests are for kids; no is what you say to children. I unzip his pants. At our age it’s yes all the way, my hand on his cock, his tongue on my clit, his saliva lubricating both of us. We are more limber than I’d imagined, juices flowing everywhere, even in our joints.

“See how easy it is when you stop trying so hard?” he whispers in my ear. He gets up and opens his desk drawer, pulling out a package of condoms in all colors. I gently finger them: red, yellow, blue, black. I choose green, for spring. My legs dodge his cast, but can’t escape a small bruise or two as he climbs on top of me, his green shaft pumping slowly inside me, sliding against the back of my clit until I open and come. Then he, like a gentleman, follows.

My visits with Bob become part of my exercise routine, but instead of beginning on his block, I go the other direction so I’ll end up there in the early afternoon. He likes to lick the salty sweat from the small of my back, and nuzzle my damp armpits, saying he enjoys the scent of work he doesn’t do. If my walking and running can be considered work, the results are obvious: my legs and hips are growing trim and muscular, and my feet no longer get sore. He’s in good shape for a porch-sitter, with a firm stomach and muscular arms. When he gets his cast off, he shows me his secret: a book of Air Force exercises he’s done for years, though he was never in the military.

“Too nearsighted,” he explains. “I’m wearing contacts now so you wouldn’t guess that without my glasses I couldn’t find my way out of my dreams in the morning. Not to mention I can’t stand the idea of the government telling me what to think.”

He tells me to extend my leg, showing me how to tense and release each muscle group while he licks his way from my toes to my cleft, then positions himself over me with his powerful arms, lowering and raising his body with his cock inside me, unusually hard this afternoon, which I sometimes don’t like now that my cunt is as delicate as fine silk, but he squirts in Astroglide until I’m swimming along with him.

While he pushes down, I pull myself up with my stomach muscles; when he pulls up, I push down; in and out we go on, tantalizing each other, neither of us in any hurry to finish this jazzy ballet.

I could pump him for information about his wife and kids, but I decide to stick to the physical as I guide him onto his back and move up and down on him until I’m at an edge I can’t seem to slide off. I roll him on top of me and whisper, “Push down, deeper,” and then I hold his hips between my thighs until my pulsing cunt sucks him dry.

We trade medical notes: he sometimes takes Viagra in the afternoon. Mornings he can do without. I tell him about the hormone cream I’ve started using in my cunt to bring back its raw silk texture.

“See how easy life can be if you relax?” he says, licking his thumb and pressing it to my forehead. “Forgetting is a critical comment. I’d give you a gold star if I could remember where I put them.”

Now I run my whole route to Bob’s place, arriving breathless and sweaty, stretching my strong legs on his front steps while he watches at the screen door. One day I notice the windows are bare and clean, stripped of their floaty curtains. When I go inside, I see that most of the living room furniture is gone, except for two armchairs.

“The Salvation Army came for the old furniture early this morning,” he says. “Next, I’ll paint, then maybe rent out the rooms. No one’s coming home.” He winks at me. “Want a room?”

“I have a house,” I remind him. “I don’t know if I want to give it up.” But I’ve never liked that house, and what has all this walking and running been for if not to leave it behind?

“Then visit.” He puts his nose to my head and inhales the scent of my hair. “Stay the night sometimes,” he whispers in my ear. “The couch in my study folds out, or we could get a new bed for one of these rooms. Life can be easy if you don’t try to hold on to the past.”

In my dream, the walls of the house are forming. This time there’s steady progress: Sheetrock one night, plaster the next. The rough floors are covered with smooth cherrywood planks. I wander through, touching the door frames, painted and ready for doors. One night glass appears in the curved bay windows. There’s a front porch, too, with a white wicker couch on it. It’s an old fashioned gabled house made new, a house I know I’ll find if I haven’t already. It’s time to move to another life.