After the initial shock, a death sentence grants a curious sense of freedom. All of the things previously denied -- or at least curtailed -- were now seen in a new light because consequences didn't matter so much anymore. Red meat, no problem. Pre- and post-prandial cigars, whatever. Alcohol, weed, sweets, things deep-fried and salty, go right ahead.
Similarly, the stuff of fantasy and dire consequence could be recast as unrealized possibility and intriguing promise.
You could throw caution to the wind. You understood that caution frequently denied pleasure and the wind could push you into unexpected directions.
When you knew life's best before date, there was little point in delay. Pleasure denied was a missed opportunity.
Hazel in 3C had been flirting with me off and on for years. Whenever our paths crossed. In front of the building, collecting mail, doing laundry. Flirting was as easy for her as breathing and I was mostly harmless. To my mind at least, I didn't particularly merit even this incidental level of attention. Middling attractiveness. Unhealthy girth. Nearing the summit of the hill but not quite over it. Normally not the object of a younger woman's directed and conscious innuendo.
Flirtatiousness seemed to be her default modus operandi. I'd seen her bestow her attentions and double-entendres on others. The letter carrier. Random delivery guys. The guy from 2C who seemed to be the building's unofficial handyman. I marveled at how she could embrace suggestiveness without causing offense or triggering those predisposed to that kind of thing. It was an art in this day and age -- navigating the rocky shoals of myriad sensitivities and the shifting sands of propriety, where potential offense lurked beneath every word, every image, every gesture. I wondered if she flirted with women too. Probably. She didn't seem to have the kind of hangup that would deprive her from any return on investment, whatever the source.
I considered her flirting with me as some kind of booby prize, a token gold star for participating in humanity. I didn't mind it, perhaps even warmed to it as she no doubt intended, but I also knew that it signified nothing. No one her age fantasized about older, pear-shaped men with receding hairlines.
I hadn't seen her for at least six months. A lot had happened in that time and I'd become something of a recluse after the diagnosis, licking my wounds in private, feeling sorry for myself.
I'd lost weight and enough hair for me to shave the rest of it off. Now I boasted an enviable body mass index and a shiny bald head. Circumstance had made me interesting.
"You look great, John," she said.
I got that a lot these days and wasn't sure how I felt about it. It was at best a silver lining on one big, shitty cloud. Disease, or at least the outward manifestation of it, had changed me. While my reflection revealed to me someone who was gaunt and haunted, I somehow presented as rugged and edgy.
I shrugged at her compliment and looked at her blankly, hoping it was enough. I never rewarded such superficiality with much of a response and certainly no explanation. Pity was the last thing I wanted.
"Have you been working out?"
"Not more than usual," I said. Not a lie.
"Huh." She regarded me appraisingly. "We should get together. You can fill me in on whatever you've done."
"Sure."
"Why not tonight? My place. I'll make you dinner. It'll be like a date."
"Like a date", not "a date". I wondered at the difference. "Sure," I said again. I supposed that someone more evolved than I might have felt objectified as I'd never rated an invitation before. But I didn't have the time or energy for that. Especially the time. "I'd like that," I added.
And I was curious.
She squeezed my hand when we parted.
I knocked gently at the door. In my hands I held a bottle of wine and a bouquet of flowers because I wasn't sure about the etiquette and figured it was better to not arrive empty handed, even for something like a date.
"Sweet," she exclaimed when she opened the door. "But you really shouldn't have."
She wore a blouse and skirt. The three top buttons of the first were undone, revealing a tantalizing expanse of skin, as if drawn by gravity to the high hem of the second. Cleavage and leg, both displayed unabashedly. She wore a chain with an ankh that sat cushioned between the lush pillows of her breasts. I wondered if she'd inherited the ankh from someone older, a former hippie maybe. You didn't see them so much anymore.
I kissed her cheek.
I'd replayed our meeting in my mind all afternoon, wondering if I recollected the conversation wrong. It wouldn't have been the first time. I was functionally illiterate when it came to reading signals. Anything short of an emphatic semaphore was likely to be missed.
"What?" she exclaimed. "None of that. I want a real kiss."
So I gave her a real kiss and she gave me her tongue. I tasted wine. My libido went from zero to sixty in no time at all. And the kiss certainly defined what "like a date" meant. And the signal was certainly emphatic.
"Better," she said.
I'd spent the last several months cocooned in a state of abject bewilderment, so I should have been used to being hopelessly off-balanced by now. Turned out I wasn't.
Hazel stepped back and smiled. She was of medium height and solid in a way that spoke of either great genes or a lot of time in the gym. She wore her brown hair down to her shoulders and a constellation of freckles dotted her nose and upper cheeks. I wondered whether the color of her eyes, large and wide and currently framed with eye liner and mascara, had informed her parents' choice of name. A Myrna Loy nose and lips that shone with gloss. A chin with a hint of a cleft. She was cute rather than ravishing, which made her all the more appealing to me. Beauty frightened me in its otherworldliness. Cuteness was comfort.
Before the diagnosis, I would have allowed myself to be governed by certain unwritten rules. Hazel was, after all, half my age, perhaps a little less. Young enough to have been my daughter if I'd sown wild oats early on. Before the diagnosis, I would have fretted and worried about this pseudo-date and ultimately would have declined her invitation. Because decency. And insecurity. Now, though, I wasn't about to be denied an experience by the attitudes of others. Age was only a number, or so they said. If her thoughts and mine coincided by some fluke, well, that was good enough.
Still, I felt as thought I'd stepped into a twilight zone where an older fart like me could be of interest to a younger waif like her.
She stepped back and invited me in.
Like my place, her apartment featured a small entryway, a galley kitchen to the right, and a living room further on. The bedrooms were off to the left, accessed by a short hallway.
On one wall of the living room hung a series of photographs. While she dealt with the flowers, I wandered around, looking at them. Hazel in her graduate gown and mortarboard, smiling along with her sisters, who were equally cute, and with her parents, who were roughly my age, perhaps a little older. I looked at another. Hazel, tanned and smiling on some pyramid in Mexico. No pictures of Hazel with a guy her age. No evidence of a boyfriend, current or past.
"It's always interesting to see what others do with their units," I said.
"I'd like to see what you can do with yours." She gasped. "God, I'm sorry. I'm such an idiot. The wine..."
It was clear that she'd been fortifying herself before my arrival. Reassuring that I wasn't the only one with a case of nerves. "That's alright."
"But I know what you mean."
"Yeah, same layout but so different."
"I bet your place is completely masculine."
"Pretty much." I'd taken pains to make it so after my partner beat a hasty retreat after my diagnosis. I couldn't blame her. She'd seen her parents wither away and probably didn't want to go through the experience again.
Flowers dealt with and now presented on the coffee table in a crystal vase, Hazel and I spent some time chatting about this and that while dinner heated in the oven. It smelled good.
Then, out of the blue, she asked, "Do you have any fantasies I could help you with?"
I almost choked on the wine. The question rendered me momentarily mute. She blinked at me. She was serious, not flirting. Hazel seemingly represented a different evolutionary branch from the women I'd been with and I was woefully unprepared for her openness. I foundered. "That question alone encapsulates one of them."
She laughed.
