Greg stood before the bathroom vanity fiddling with the light panel attempting to determine
the source of the issue. Why were the lights flickering, on, off, on, off, dim, bright, off? He
separated the wires, red and blue, and poked and prodded. He was determined not to call an
electrician. Those jokers charged a fortune he couldn’t afford. He winced as he attempted to
straighten his back, that pinched nerve rioting again, and he felt his age in his gnarled hands, his
arthritic knees, his trick shoulder that never fully recovered from a spill in the driveway two
winters ago while taking out the garbage on an icing morning. Then a jolt shot up his arm, a
tingle metastasized throughout his body so powerful he fell back onto his ass. The world flashed
all fuzzy then brilliant white then morphed black. He heard a ringing in his ears. “Jesus Christ!”
he exclaimed. He sat in a daze then pouted for a moment and decided he would rather pay the
electrician than the funeral director.
As he pulled himself up, grasping the vanity for support, grunting a bit for good measure, he
realized the shock had left a quite unexpected, lingering side effect. A little stunned, a bit
embarrassed, he abandoned his tool kit and moseyed into the kitchen where Lisa was bent over
the dishwasher. When she rose, a saucepan in her hands, she felt his body pressed up against her
back. “What are you doing, Greg?” she sniped. But before he could answer, she sensed his
midsection poking up against her, his hands cupped over her hips, his lips trailing down her neck
and she suddenly felt warm like when Audrey placed hot stones on her during her weekly
massage, the heat erupting then seeping to her extremities like a shot of espresso.
“Did you take a little blue pill by mistake?” she inquired.
“I did not,” he whispered, seemingly ignoring her insult. “I’m just hot for teacher,” he
moaned as he began to sway in a slow, seductive dance. He freed a hand and closed the
dishwasher then backed Lisa up to the counter. He tugged as if to lift her but failed, so he tried a
second time and she attempted to assist. After a moment of struggle, she sat with her legs
dangling down and he pushed himself between them. He gathered up her lips and thrust his
tongue into her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she spoke through his kiss, “but what brought this on? Not that it isn’t nice, but
I’m confused.”
“Can’t a man spontaneously jump his wife’s bones from time to time?”
“Actually, no. It’s more complicated than that. I’ll need a moment,” and she slipped out from
his embrace. “If this is happening, I’ll need the cream. I’ll need to meet you in the bedroom in a
couple minutes.”
Greg sighed and climbed the stairs as if trudging up the side of a Himalayan Mountain,
feeling each tendon, each ligament groaning to do its best but also feeling aroused and a bit
randy. In the bathroom, the lights flickering like a disco, Lisa prepped her hinterland, dabbed on
some deodorant, spritzed some perfume, and looked in the mirror wondering “What the hell is he
thinking? I’m so old.” When she entered the bedroom they had shared for forty years and saw the
bed where they had conceived two children, tended to each other in sickness, where he held her
when her father died unexpectedly, she found Greg buck naked lying on his stomach, his legs in
the air, socks on his feet, his hands on his chin like some kind of geriatric 1970s porn star.
“I’ve been bad,” he smiled. “I might need to be spanked.”
Lisa sat down on the edge of the bed and laughed. She liked this crazy old coot, whoever he
was. This wasn’t her husband even though he looked like him with his long, muscular legs and meaty arms. The baritone voice sounded like him, the strong hands felt like him. He grabbed her
overly large tee shirt. She wore them baggy because she felt fat and unattractive. He pulled her
toward him, caressed her bosom, slipped off her shirt and bra, proud of his muscle memory
maneuvering those tiny hooks.
“Do you remember our first time?” she spoke as he covered her with wet kisses, his hands
sliding like sleds across her heavily moisturized skin. “On the fire escape at Barb’s old apartment
downtown? She was having a party and you were so horny. You invited me outside for a
cigarette even though neither of us smoked.”
“Oh, yeah, and that policeman busted us. He yelled up three floors, “Stop fucking on the fire
escape, somebody could get hurt.” They laughed like teenagers experiencing their first joint. She
rubbed her face against his chest, which she discovered was still broad and strong. It always
made her feel safe. She had forgotten.
He ran his tongue along her abdomen then looked up and into her eyes with those amazing
lashes as he peeled off her shorts and panties, “Or that time when the kids were young and we
couldn’t take it anymore, so we hired a babysitter with money we found in our coat pockets and
the sofa cushions and drove to the Ramada Inn out by the interstate.” He started to snort
mirthfully. “They declined our debit card and we had to use our emergency Visa to pay for a
room we used for less than two hours,” she joined his delight.
“We were so wild we broke a lamp and had to pay for it,” she chortled.
She flipped him over and straddled him like a horse, then called out, “Oh, crap, my knee, I
have a cramp in my knee, sorry,” and flopped back over. He climbed atop her, grimacing at the
stabbing pain in his back. She sat up and they tangled their arms and legs and simply sat still for
several minutes.
“This is nice,” she cooed. The air conditioning kicked on. They could hear school bus brakes
down the street as it dropped off neighborhood children and she reminisced briefly about her
days as a working mom, dividing her time among a hundred tasks simultaneously. She couldn’t
decide if she missed those days. Maybe a little. She breathed in his scent, his ocean mist body
wash, the linger of garlic from his lunch. She fiddled with the few surviving strands of hair on
his head, the little gray forest growing down his neck. He was a good man, she told herself. Yes,
he was a jerk sometimes. But he was a good father, had once been an attentive lover and
remembered to send flowers on their anniversary, except for the year they were separated, that
god-awful time when he moved into a studio apartment. Had he cheated on her? Or had she
simply imagined it because it was easier to wrap her head around infidelity, around a specific,
concrete sin than the mysterious disconnect between them, the unspoken, unmanageable
possibility that their love had run its course, that they were not meant to last into old age? He
swore he had always been faithful. But he had thought about cheating, had confessed it in a
heated therapy session. He had needs, he claimed, and she wasn’t fulfilling them, so maybe
someone else would. How had she gone from victim to villain in that struggle? And how did they
survive that dark time? There had been no grand reconciliation, no defined reboot, no Greg and
Lisa 2.0. They simply kept going.
“Was I worth it?” she broke the placid silence of their bedroom.
“Say what?” he needed context.
“Marrying me. Was it worth the sacrifices you made?”
“I didn’t sacrifice anything. You were the goal. You were always the win.”
“Oh, Greg, you could have had any girl you wanted. You were the Sultan of Sullivan’s. You
owned every girl in that bar.”
“Lisa, I love that you have such lousy vision. That you think, that you ever thought, I was
such a stud. I’m the one who married up in this relationship. You’re the one who settled. There
was a line of guys waiting for me to mess up, for you to kick me to the curb.”
“I was never the kind of person who “settled”, Buster. I always swing for the fences to borrow
one of your beloved baseball metaphors.”
He pressed her breasts to his chest and squeezed, savoring their warmth, their softness. He
took her arms alongside his and raised them into the air like eagle’s wings and he felt young and
virile. “So, let’s review. I think you’re too good for me and you think I’m too good for you and
we’re arguing about the state of our fragile marriage as we sit here naked, bound up like
something out of the Kama Sutra, in our marriage bed in the middle of the afternoon. Is that
correct?”
“It would seem so, yes,” she placed her chin on his shoulder. “And I have lost all feeling in
my legs. If we don’t finish what you started very soon, I’ll have to take a rain check on this
unscheduled afternoon delight, nice as it is.”
“Very well,” he announced. “Be prepared to have the orgasm of your life,” and he awkwardly
maneuvered himself into a horizontal position, his bones creaking, his legs quivering, his face
beet red with determination. She spun herself around slowly, pausing halfway for a quick rest,
tossed her hair behind her shoulder, and let his kind works melt like chocolate coating her heart.
She lay her head down, her face nearly touching his, longing for him like she had not in a long,
long time, content that, yes, he was her partner for the length of the journey and realized he had
fallen asleep. And so she snuggled up beside him and fell into the best sleep of her life.
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