Jill read a memorable magazine article years ago, about a strange little father-daughter family. The father was mentally retarded or developmentally disabled or otherwise just marginally capable of caring for himself. He’d somehow managed to marry a functional woman, and she had run away sometime after the birth of their daughter. At the time the article was written the little girl was about ten years old. The reporter commented on how miraculous the situation was, with the bright little girl loving and caring for the father. But the reporter also quoted some experts as saying that, while a situation like this little girl’s might be expected to promote autism or at least dysfunction in the child, sometimes (rarely but observably) the child rises to the occasion, and acts like a responsible adult.

Jill knows that. And she’d be the first to declare that the child doesn’t just act like a responsible adult. The child becomes a responsible adult. Short but analytical. Inexperienced but determined. Absorptive and retentive and adventurous. Some of them even take notes.

(Jill crossed over to adulthood herself at five and a half. That’s the primary reason she gets this. She also knows that she views life at least two ways – from the perspective of five and a half as well as from now – but she’s starting to suspect that happens to each of us. Whatever age we look from when we mature, we retain as we proceed.)

So it’s memory but also journals that tell the story. When Anita introduced Jill to Kevin and his friends, back in 1978, the guys were all in their mid-thirties, all married and unfaithful to varying degrees, all surprised devoted fathers. They were lawyers or business people, they wore suits, and they all liked cocktails after work, in bars where the single young women went after their office jobs, alone or in sauntering groups, to sip at vodka or wine until the frustrating edges of their day melted and they became receptive, maybe, to the men’s looks.

At the time, these men seemed harmless and friendly. Now perspective shows that they – far more than any high school boys – were exactly the sexual predators they said they feared when they contemplated their own daughters. Kevin and Bruce and those suited old boys were systematically hunting for what they called “talent” and then comparing war tales, simultaneously eliminating the possibility of intimacy with their own wives while they also betrayed the already low confidence of their single girlfriends. For they talked. They talked out of school like crazy. Kevin betrayed Jill once by announcing to the others that he was going where he knew he had a “sure thing,” and then heading unmistakably for a meeting with her. And she felt a little flattered but mostly exposed when he told his friends he came once just by eating her.

Eddie was the worst. He is an Irish Catholic alcoholic depressive, self-medicated back then with cocaine and gossip. He could be completely charming in his manic phase, and he made up some fantastic stories. He would have had his way with Jill except the night he tried he was far too soused to perform. He did end up with Anita for awhile, and that’s where the problem began. Eddie circulated a nasty fiction about her, with repercussions.

Anita began her tour of that group by having an affair with Kevin. He was accomplished at sniffing out needy females, and he zeroed in on her shortly after she started working and not long after she broke up with her college boyfriend. Flush with the thrills of work and legal drinking, she’d had a number of quick liaisons before settling into some habits with Kevin. He visited her once or twice a week for nearly a year before they both moved on, he to the new secretary in his friend Bruce’s office, and she to Kevin’s friends Pete and Tim and Eddie, and then to Bruce.

She actually feel in love with Bruce. She loves him even now. But he was married of course, and he was more conservative than Kevin. One evening Eddie told the guys that Anita had to have surgery to repair her rectum after he had been too forceful in bed. There was no truth to it, but Bruce stopped calling her. Kevin hadn’t been their deal breaker but it didn’t help when he joked that Allen was the only guy in their group whom Anita had rejected.

Bruce is nice but he’s conventional. It’s easy for Jill to imagine Eddie made enough of a joke of Anita that Bruce decided to discontinue the most important affair of her life. That’s how Jill interprets what happened, based on occasional conversations with Kevin. But Jill couldn’t talk about Kevin to Anita, and Anita wouldn’t talk to Jill about sex. There was no way Jill could tell her about it.

Jill’s going to have to break up with Kevin soon. Except soon can whip by so fast at their age … she could temporarily do nothing and then find months have passed. It’s not like there’s anything so wrong. Mostly it’s that she can see the writing on the wall: they’re old now, and already he’s needing more care and coaxing than she’s likely to want to provide. They’re looking for different things.

And she has to face it: she’s embarrassed by him. This surprises her. She’s spent so much energy not being embarrassed by her weird friends, learning to overcome the humiliation of her mother’s loud opinions, she never thought she’d be embarrassed by conventionality. The fact is, he’s just too suburban, too pot-bellied, too jowly, too white for Jill. She doesn’t like what she senses is assumed about her, when she appears in public as his mate.

Jill hopes to keep him as a friend. She always hopes that. She’s known Kevin so long and they’ve had a lot of practice at it; it may work. Then again, she’s puzzled lately about what friendship is, and her conversation with Kevin, about Anita, hasn’t helped.

If nothing else, Jill wants to see what happens next, to Kevin and his buddies. Because now they are on the cusp of retirement, and suddenly they’re wondering what’s next. For forty years they’ve been married to women who bore them, and mostly they’ve said they stayed married so they’ll have someone to grow old with. Now here they are, about to do that old-growing, and they don’t want to enter this phase with the person they thought all along would be their partner for it.

What will they do?

Kevin has already left his wife and once he accepts the idea that Jill won’t marry him, he’ll look elsewhere. Bruce is probably wobbling in his bad marriage. At least that’s what Kevin figures, but Bruce isn’t talking to him (as usual) and Anita isn’t talking to Jill (as tragic). The only act Kevin and she have ever taken as a couple was the lunch they organized that reunited Anita and Bruce. Kevin had watched their early affair fold in the face of the mean gossip and he felt some responsibility. He told Jill he wanted to make it up to them. She went along with the idea. Three months ago they arranged the reunion lunch.

Anita and Bruce fell right back into sex and love. Anita was ecstatic. Jill thought she was secure. A few weeks after that lunch Anita asked Jill when/why, her face gleaming across a restaurant table with the heat of fresh infatuation, and maybe Jill should have sensed it was no time for heavy truth. Maybe she should have found a way to giggle and coo. But Jill was relieved to finally be able to talk; she told Anita about those long ago libels.

She didn’t expect Anita’s response. “You just can’t stand me being happy, can you?” was the accusation. “You never have taken responsibility for what you did,” Anita blazed. They stayed at that table of pain for at least an hour, alternating between attempts at reconciliation and spears of long-suppressed resentment. In Jill’s opinion, Anita was forgetting how malicious the now-reformed gossiper, fast Eddie, had been. Anita had rewritten the history so that Eddie was always honorable and Anita had never been promiscuous. As far as Anita was concerned, Jill had a warped perspective about sex, always had, and still couldn’t be trusted near the subject.

Anita is incorrect. Jill’s sexuality is no more warped than the next person’s. And it’s waning as she ages. It’s not that she’s uninterested. She hopes she isn’t finished. But the perspective is different.

She saw Kevin last night, and she thinks it may have been for the last time. What pleasure his company provides is getting overrun by his banality. Jill feels tired when she thinks of him. Weary when she contemplates the situation with Anita. Ready for some hibernation time.

She can feel herself retreating, but she understands it’s a temporary condition. She’s pretty sure she’ll come out of it, and then she’ll be ready to re-up with Anita. There’s too much love there to forsake.