Sputterpub's Blog

Meanwhile, Pamela dodged a bullet and missed a path. Her company was downsizing and she was terrified at the idea of being laid off. She dug in and began working extra hard, putting in long hours, showing her boss Ted just how dedicated she could be. She succeeded in keeping her position, but she also conditioned Ted to expect all that labor. If she had been laid off, she would have landed at e-Den.com, and she would have enjoyed their subsequent and famous success. She would have had time to write.

As it was, she worked harder and internalized more stress. Ted was smart but driven, and he demanded a lot from her. He was short – not more than an inch taller than her five foot six – and he had a Napoleonic way of compensating for his lack of height. He was divorced (four times so far), so he had plenty of time to work and expected it of those around him. Pamela’s neck was almost permanently stiff and her sleep became disturbed. She went to the spa as often as she could find any time, for one of Brian’s therapeutic massages, and she began to wonder about him. Even though he was a large man – six feet tall and big-boned – Pamela assumed he was gay. It wasn’t just where he worked; although the cosmetics/personal indulgence field has at least as high a gay percentage as the entertainment industry, straight people can certainly be found. It was Brian’s fastidious habits, his incisive observations about faces and bodies, his conversation about makeup and clothes. He crossed his legs at the knees. He sampled massage oils on his wrist and had a way of then sniffing them, a way even of checking his own pulse when he was exercising, that wasn’t very masculine.

Pamela told herself it didn’t matter what Brian’s orientation was; she only wanted to continue to be massaged by him. He was at least six or seven years younger than she, anyway. But she was lonely. It got to where she was considering the expense and confession of a dating service.

She arranged to get a facial as well as a massage from Brian. Then she threw hesitation to the wind and asked if she could get a full makeover. She booked appointments for massage, manicure, pedicure, facial, hair cut and color and styling, and makeup. It would be a full afternoon, and she intended to go to a formal opera reception and dinner dance, alone if she couldn’t find a date, afterwards.

Brian would perform all of the treatments. That was his idea; he took Pamela’s call and he arranged the calendar. He was simultaneously excited and apprehensive about the afternoon.

After his experience with the Black Widow, he said he didn’t like makeup and adornments. He often amused himself by visualizing everyone around him without their clothes and jewelry. This wasn’t a voyeuristic or pornographic hobby, and he received no sexual stimulation from it. It’s just that he was fascinated by the human form, no matter what its shape, and he only trusted clean nudity.

What drew him to Pamela was her wonderful clarity. Even though all of his spa clients came to him fresh from the pool or tub or shower, Pamela had an extra shine about her. Maybe it was her freckled skin or the glints in her curly brown hair, but it probably had more to do with her direct personality and open-featured face: Pamela acted clean. He liked that.

If it weren’t for the fact that she talked about men, Brian might have thought she was gay. She didn’t act mannish, but hers was a strong personality, she had perpetually clean fingernails, and there was nothing coquettish about her. He knew she’d never been of those shrieky-eeky females, squealing and jumping around when she saw a girlfriend, never going to a public bathroom alone. He knew without asking that she’d always been good at science. And she had a brusque, take-charge-and-fix-it attitude that he usually only saw in nurses and lesbians. But over time she talked enough that he knew she was straight, and once she booked the makeover appointment, he understood that she was getting serious about finding someone.

Most of the time Pamela didn’t think about Brian. She came to the day spa as often as her schedule permitted: about every three weeks. Brian gave the best massage she’d ever had, so she gratefully considered him immediately before, during and after a visit, but otherwise, she tended to be too busy to think of anything but items on her to-do list and an exhausted future of loneliness, and to be too full of those subjects to notice any opportunities around her. Just a week earlier, for example, she was barreling along on an afternoon walk to get exercise and bagels, striding fast and head forward as usual. She didn’t notice her surroundings or even the people she passed. She had just exchanged automatic greetings with a bearded man working in his garden when she tripped on an uneven bit of sidewalk. She didn’t fall (she didn’t have time to fall, she told herself as she recovered from her stumble and kept pacing). She walked on unknowing that if she had fallen, the bearded man would have come to her assistance, and they would have met, and her future would have been entirely more pleasant.

Brian generally knew all this about Pamela but it didn’t diminish his interest. He’d been at least theoretically attracted to her since he met her a year earlier when he took the job at the spa. She was smart. She was funny. She was complicated. She was safe. He even liked it that she was seven years his senior; that felt comfortable. But he hadn’t done anything about his attraction. He was still recovering.

Eight years before, Brian had been an up-and-coming stock broker. Twenty-seven years old, good enough looking, moving around at light speed and making over a hundred thousand a year. He had a succession of girlfriends and he liked every one of them, but he never fell in love. Maybe he was overly fastidious, but something about each one of his girlfriends prevented even his infatuation: bad toes, a way of pursing her mouth that showed him how ugly her future wrinkles would be, a habit of sucking her teeth… Until Barbara.

They were introduced at a fundraiser for the symphony. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Glossy black hair, creamy skin, warm blue lash-fringed eyes, crimson mouth and nails, slender wrists and ankles, narrow hands, and a way about her, an elegant magnetism. Brian thought her perfect. He fell in love.

Barbara was from Texas, a young widowed mother with a nine-year old adorable daughter. The investigators hadn’t yet caught up with her.

She was so charming, lovely, and glamorous that she managed to get Brian to pay for her condominium and her daughter’s private school and feel that it was his idea, all in a year and a half when she only actually fucked him four times.

Brian’s friends became concerned about him. They noted his obsession and were helpless to alter his behavior, but they rallied round and tried to comfort him when Barbara suddenly left town. The men from Texas told them that the lovely widow had lost not one but two husbands, actually, both rich and both possibly poisoned, and at the very least, she had questions to answer. But by then Brian was close to filing for bankruptcy.

His heart was even more mangled than his net worth. He didn’t have the hustle to stay in the financial district. He thought he’d be a doctor and even enrolled in some pre-med courses, but he soon realized that he couldn’t afford the long course of study. He diverted himself into anatomy, physical therapy, yoga and cosmetology classes, while working as a masseur and facialist. He grew critical about glamor. But he argued with himself about that. Try as he might to lose it, Brian remained very susceptible to well-applied makeup, nail polish, and lingerie. Perfume got to him. He felt safest with women at his work, who came to his massage table clean and white-robed, without all the ornaments. But he couldn’t lose those fantasies.

Chris offered “Coffee? Tea? Water? Wine?” and I asked if there was any beer. There was. I had an Anchor Steam and hoped for analgesic effect. We discussed aging and the attraction to comfort. Agreed one had to resist that. One had to be willing to fall. The sun found the spots on the window glass while we talked.

After awhile I began to wonder what it would be like to have sex with Chris. The idea surprised me. It would be totally inappropriate. But still…watching Chris’s mouth instead of hearing the words…

“I have to get going,” I said as I set the empty beer bottle on the small glass-topped table to my right.

“Are you sure you’re up to walking? I can drive you down the hill…”

“I’ll be fine. I probably should walk. Keep this thing from stiffening up.” I shook my left leg. “Thanks for letting me recover here.”

“Will you let me know you got home all right?”

I smiled at the concern. I took Chris’s number with me. Headed down the hill to my own house, telling myself my knee would be okay.

I made it home and called. We agreed to get together again, but we weren’t specific. I filled the bathtub with very hot water. I rolled a big joint and got into the tub with a new magazine. I soaked my knee and back till the water cooled.

My knee seemed to be no worse than it ever was: stiff in the morning, stiff in the evening, stiff after sitting still. But my lower back grew tighter and more tentative with each hour, and by the afternoon of the next day I had trouble straightening up. I tried aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen. I tried brandy and mooched a Vicodin from a neighbor. I tried rest, but I lacked the patience. Eventually I even called the doctor.

That’s how I was sent to bed for New Year’s Eve. I told Chris, with whom I’d made some unorganized plan, that I was sorry but I didn’t even want to see anyone. I meant to stay down and be quiet.

I bought myself three quarters of a pound of tiger prawns and a bottle of good brut champagne. I ate early because I love prawns and couldn’t stand having them in the house without eating them. I love champagne too, but not by myself. I wasn’t in the mood for it when I ate the prawns, and I didn’t really want to wait till midnight. I opened the bottle shortly before 9, and I toasted the new year with New York.

My back hurt. While most computer-users shut their systems down, and the extremely cautious unplugged their machines and tallied their water bottles, I tried to get comfortable on my bed. While the Internet didn’t begin the anticipated usage interruption that would send ripples of glitch in and out of the network and make loggers-on evaluate their connect times, I glugged champagne and pushed pillows around my torso in a search for spinal support. I was quiet, perforce, but less contemplative than I intended. Even so, some ideas became clear.

“The most important thing is to feel better,” I thought, and I smiled as I committed myself to giving my 50 year-old frame more care. I lay on my side with one pillow beneath my right cheek and one against my lower back. I thought the words and subordinate goals fell into place like marbles percolating through holes in a plastic cube. Clarity like a map.

Body (kids) painting (kids) work (kids) friends (kids). My children are no longer dependently young enough to be first. And friends (sex?) are admittedly last. Adrift in modulated discomfort on my king-size bed, I didn’t reach for a tether. Coming to rest against my own pillows, I understood myself to want, for then, attention to my body, and noticed joy.

The phone rang. I would have had to twist around and almost sit up to answer. The machine was downstairs and I could hear Chris’s voice, checking up on me and wishing me well. I wasn’t sure what Chris and I wanted of each other, but I knew it could wait. I settled my face into my pillow, aimed my eyes at the television, and paid attention to myself.

I walked up Spruce Street that Saturday, inadvertently stressing my lower back and wondering about the fault. It runs beneath Spruce or Euclid or the Arlington in my part of Berkeley, and I figured I was pacing along on top of it, near the end of an arbitrary millennium.

It would have been too weird if the earth had chosen one of those moments to quake. If a week before the big party the plates of Hayward ground against one another, epicentered.

It would have been so weird it was corny.

It didn’t happen. There was no quake, big or little, while I took my long Christmas walk. There were strange windstorms in Paris the following week, but no cataclysm or apocalypse as the cultural world rotated into its two thousands. Not even an Internet implosion.

Those non-events wouldn’t occur after the news of show cancellations and empty airline flights, when it began to be clear that most people simply didn’t want the pressure of trying to have a party-of-the-millennium, and therefore opted to just stay home. All the Y2K attention diluted the festivity and created a tsunami of anticlimax.

No, those wouldn’t not happen till the following week. On Christmas day I took a long hilly walk. I tried to forget all my tasks. I strode with my customary ground-eating gait, and the force from my heels’ impact on the sidewalk sailed up my skeleton and dislodged my lower back a little. As I wondered what it would be like to have the street wrench and yawn, the disks in my own spine grated against surrounding tissue, slipped to ease intolerable pressure, commenced an inflammation that would soon more than irk. And while that spinal event occurred there was an insistence coiling around my heart as well. I was alone and walking to try to hear myself, sensing nothing yet, but within my moods were eddying into a cyclone. There was a lot going on in me that day.

I tripped on uneven pavement. Berkeley is old enough to have charming small-block sidewalks, gardened enough to have mature tree roots that dislodge those small blocks, seismic enough to shift the sidewalk blocks like miniature tectonic plates. There are many cracks and misalignments. Usually the pedestrian just stumbles (gracelessly) and recovers to walk on (embarrassed), turning back with an accusing glare at the sidewalk. But sometimes the stumbler falls. I tripped on Christmas day when I bumped the toes of my right foot against the edge of an uptilted sidewalk block. I tried to catch myself, running forward to get my feet under my shoulders, jarring my 50 year-old self with each thudding step. I went down with dread. What flashed before my eyes as the ground rushed to meet me was the certainty that I was about to get injured.

“Oh shit,” were the thoughts that can be articulated. “This is going to hurt. This is going to shake up my insides. I won’t even know the full extent of the damage for days. Oh shit.”

I fell forward and took the impact on my left knee and the heels of both palms. I ripped my jeans and the skin on my hands, and I wrenched my left elbow. The next morning I would discover I had badly jarred my spine.

Instead of standing immediately and walking on, I rolled from my fall to sit on the sidewalk, knees up, examining damage. The tear in my pants. Blood beginning to seep along the whorls of exposed dermis. Flecks of sycamore twigs on flayed palms. Deep quivering.

“Are you okay?” The question came from above. I looked up and wondered how I had missed seeing this pedestrian: a bit above medium height, dark-haired, not inconspicuous.

“Sure,” I said, embarrassed, trying to get up before I was ready. Wishing I could just be alone, to nurse my knee with it raised to my face, to press my tender palms against my thighs.

“Let me help you,” and there was a hand extended, so I took it and rose a little shakily to my feet. “Thanks.”

“Really: are you okay? Would you like to sit for a minute? I live right here,” with a gesture down the slope from the sidewalk, toward the view.

“No. No,” I said and said again. “I’ll be all right. Really. I’m fine. Thanks for the assist,” and I looked into blue eyes below dark hair. “I tripped on the bad old sidewalk,” I explained, trying to laugh it off. “I feel incredibly clumsy.”

“Oh, we’ve all done it.” Reassuring smile. “I love it when the person doesn’t actually fall, when they just stumble and do that running forward deal, you know? And then they always look back as if blaming the sidewalk…”

I smiled. “Yeah. Look: maybe I will take you up on that seat. I’m a little shook up.”

“Good. Come in. My name’s Chris,” holding out that hand again, leading me down the brick walkway to the windowed front door, into a small living room and an upholstered armchair. There was a large window at the back of the room, looking out over the clear cold afternoon.