My patients on Friday came in with their usual complaints, but eagerly anticipating tonight's events, I found it easy to empathetically embrace each woman's concern: screening for infections in a sex worker, sharing the joy with a first-time mother in hearing her baby's heartbeat, providing birth control pills and comfort to a teenager in her grief over an unfaithful boyfriend.
At 6 PM, after my last patient had departed, and with my chart work completed, I returned home. I got the house ready, showered and dressed, took one last look around, then departed for the club and what was going to be the most unusual milonga evening of my life.
As was etiquette for an Argentine Tango milonga, I danced three dances with each tanguero, then, during the brief break before the next three-song set, marked by a short piece of music called a cortina, I cast my gaze about, locked eyes with another dancer, nodded, and waited his approach.
Seamus was one of my favored partners, but unlike previous nights where our movements matched perfectly, tonight's first of three dances betrayed our nervousness. By the third song, though, we were on track, portending good things for our evening to come.
The milonga went on, but I had danced enough. I left first. Seamus had one more tanguera he wanted to dance with. He promised to follow shortly.
I drove home, still not believing my good fortune, wondering how and why the Universe had been so good again to Autumn Reynes, a recently single, almost fifty-year old woman.
Actually, I'm forty-nine, but that's only my chronological age. Emotionally, I am somewhere in my late teens or early twenties, meaning that my moods are mostly controlled with an on/off switch, but I am forever intending to put in a rheostat.
Physically, I'm in my mid thirties. That's because I've done all the right things for myself: I eat really well; work at a job that I generally love and don't feel stressed by; regularly practice secular Buddhism; and--my true secret to youthfulness--I dance with abandon.
Which brings me to one of the great ironies in life. I'm spirited and attractive, I've been a good mother to our two children and a devoted wife to my husband, Finn, for twenty-nine years, and yet, three years ago, he walked out on me to be with another married woman who in turn walked out on her husband to be with him.
If you talk with Finn and get his version of our marriage, like a good journalist might do, you will find, like with all human relationships, there are complexities. Perhaps you might well appreciate his point of view. Maybe even like it better than mine. But no matter what you conclude, I still feel there was something very wrong in how this young-minded middle-aged woman was treated.
I did date someone a year after Finn left me, and while Liam could dance, he couldn't cook, clean, or, worst of all, carry on an intimate conversation. After almost a year together, we broke up. Which made me think, what do I really want, anyway? With my kids grown and gone, and being completely on my own, with no one to answer to but myself, I am in a really enviable state. With one exception: I miss a sexual connection with a man.
Which in turn brings me to Seamus, another of those Irishmen I seemed destined to fall for. I met Seamus dancing. He was the perfect leader for me: tall, thin, relatively good looking, with a little gray in his beard and a trifle thinning in his scalp. But best of all (there's a worst of all, too, unfortunately), he has this uncommon quality in a man of being able to converse sensitively with me about any subject. This I know because we had the opportunity to spend an afternoon together in my kitchen last fall making jalapeno jam, which we call "JJ."
That's the other thing I do well--garden and can. Without going into detail like most gardening fanatics do, I will spare you the litany of vegetables and fruits that I grow, and the bragging of how I either eat them fresh out of the ground and off the vine, bush, or tree or preserve everything for use throughout the winter like a Barbara Kingsolver locavore.
I will tell you, instead, that I gave a little jar of last year's JJ to Seamus one summer's night while we were dancing Salsa. Being the curious sort, he inquired as to how to make it, and I invited him over so that he could find out. (Or perhaps it was the other story I told him that piqued his interest more --of how Finn and I made JJ one year. I wore gloves to cut the jalapenos, but Finn did not, and later that afternoon, when we made love, I was hotter down there than I had ever been, and realized it was from Finn's peppered touch. Not even his cream could soothe the burning, though! Maybe I should have taken that as a sign that he wasn't able to care for me as I really needed him to.)
So, this past autumn, Seamus and I were standing side by side at the kitchen counter, the sun pouring in, how did Joni Mitchell say it, "like butterscotch," slicing open the shiny green peppers, extracting the seeds, and dicing them into little picante moieties for boiling in a broth of sugar and vinegar. As we worked, we talked. That's when I found out the worst thing--he was married.
At dances, where we usually saw each other, we didn't talk. We just danced and went home. But here in my kitchen, we did.
And in our conversation, he was completely frank about some of the conflicts he and his wife had had, which made it only natural for me to tell him about my marital saga.
With the heat of the stove and the fumes from the cooking peppers, it was logical for me to feel a little perspiration along my upper lip and forehead, maybe even in my axilla, but why, I wondered, were dew droplets also appearing in my nether regions.
And that's when it occurred to me. Building relationships, new ones especially, are a lot like making JJ. You think you know what you're doing. You have a recipe or a method that has brought you some measure of success in the past, and you follow it. But jalapenos are not always the same in size, color, or flavor. Same with the sweet bell peppers you cook with them. So you need to sample the pot while you're boiling, for hotness, sweetness, and body, to decide if there's a need to add more sugar or vinegar or peppers.
Similarly with men--and Seamus specifically. I had a fanciful notion come to me while making JJ. I was feeling an attraction for him. Maybe it was only an unconscious tugging back then. Perhaps it wasn't a conscious desire until a week or so later, when, upon returning from work one evening, I found Seamus' gift hanging in one of those plastic grocery bags by its handles on my back door.
I had mentioned to him on that JJ day that I had begun reading erotica (Why had I said that, to a relative stranger, I wondered afterward. How well was I sampling what was boiling in the pot?) I told him I wanted some well-written material, but there were obstacles. Because I lived in a small town, going to the local bookstore and buying erotica just wasn't going to happen. Plus, I like to hold the book that I'm reading, not use an e-reader. And I wanted to support my local mom and pop store rather than ordering online.