DIVERTIMENTO

DIVERTIMENTO

He found himself for the fourth time in as many years living alone.  He didn’t like it.  At his age, it was an ordeal.  “She,” he said to himself, “doesn’t know!  She just doesn’t know.”  What she didn’t know, he felt, was what he felt when he had to sit at an empty table and sleep alone in that king, which made him feel like a cork bobbing on the sea.  When she left, she had the grandkids and their daughter to fill her days. 

     Their daughter was a professional woman whose personal life was rocked by one disaster after another.  When the phone rang and it was her, he could always tell by the way she said, “Dad,” if he had been the one to pick up, that he was going to have to drift through another period of separation.  The problem was that when his wife left for Los Angeles, he could count on not seeing her again for at least two months.  The first time it lasted six months.  How could he complain?  She was needed.  The grandkids came first.  It was her duty.  He agreed.  But it didn’t make his interim bachelorhood any the easier. 

     It was a bachelorhood that didn’t find distraction in dining out or going to the movies with friends or going, in the evening, to one of the watering holes in town.  He did all those things.  They just didn’t make it any easier.  Weekends were the hardest.  He had a shop in the basement, which he descended somberly to on Saturday mornings, feeling like he was entering a tomb.  But once he got to work on whatever project he took up, the time passed swiftly, and he was as happy with what he was doing as he could be under the circumstances. 

     He had made risers for his monster bed, which, when it had been installed, both he and his wife were unhappy with because it was so low.  The old queen-sized head- and footboards didn’t fit, so, instead of buying new ones, he decided to make them.  But he had to get the bed to the height he wanted first.  He liked working the wood.  He liked everything about it—fingering the new wood in the local Menard’s, selecting just the right pieces, then the planning, the tooling up of his machines, the cutting, planing, routing, sanding, and, especially, after the pieces were assembled and the glue dried, he liked the finishing work.  He imaged in his mind what he wanted the finished pieces to look like.  Then he set to work making them.  This was his main distraction.  But when he climbed back up the dark stairs Saturday evening, even though the day had passed, his loneliness sat on him again like a strange lethargic creature.  It made him feel like he couldn’t breathe.

Maybe it was depression, maybe it was exasperation, maybe it was neither of these but something unnamable that made him feel he had to change the equations by which he was living his life.  When his daughter hit the rocks, he thought, why should he be the one to sink?

     He decided to put an ad in the personals in Monday’s newspaper.  He got a pen and notepad, sat at his kitchen table, and began to write.  He scratched out several attempts in the style typical of those ads.  He didn’t know how to word it.  After thinking and thinking, he realized, with a panging conscience, that he didn’t know how to word it because he didn’t know what he was looking for.  He wanted to stir something up, he wanted change, but he couldn’t put himself in any situation that would accomplish these things and that, being who he was, he could actually do and enjoy. 

     He decided finally, with an ironic smile, to let the readers decide for themselves—if there were readers out there who might respond; so he wrote: “Older man looking for diversion.  Willing to pay.”  He read the lines a couple of times, then crossed out the first one and with a grin wrote, “Good looking older man seeking diversion.”   But after thinking about it, he decided this version might give the wrong impression, so he crossed it out and wrote, “Older man in good shape looking for diversion.”  But even that might give the wrong impression, he thought.  What impression did he want to make? he asked himself.  He didn’t know.  He didn’t know how anybody might respond to such an ad.  So he crossed out the line and wrote the first one again, “Older man looking for diversion.”  Whatever that meant, he thought, it might just accomplish what he couldn’t imagine for himself.  On his way to work Monday morning, he stopped at the newspaper.

     Tuesday night, the phone rang.  An unfamiliar woman’s voice said, “Come to 223 2nd Street tomorrow night at seven.”  Without waiting for a reply, the caller hung up.  He looked at the phone in his hand, shook his head in puzzlement, and replaced the phone in its cradle.  At first, he had no idea what the call was about and had dismissed it as a misdial.  Eventually, however, it came to him.  It was a response to his ad!  How mysterious!  He was all a tingle with curiosity.  He didn’t know what to make of it.  He thought about it all night.  What could the caller have thought he meant by his “Looking for diversion”?  What did she have in mind if he came?  He couldn’t guess, he couldn’t guess because he didn’t know what he had meant by the ad and, so, couldn’t guess at what the caller had made of it.

     She left him no clue in what she said, and from her voice itself he could tell very little—in fact, he could tell nothing, not even whether the woman was young or old.  Late in the evening, he rested back in the old stuffed chair in the living room and wondered what would befall if he went to the address mentioned.  He had only one light on in the whole house, the one by the chair in which he sat.  It beamed down over his shoulder, but he had no newspaper in his lap.  He just sat quietly in the light, thinking.  What was he ready for?  Infidelity?  Older man looking for diversion?  Willing to pay?  Did he delude himself into thinking this was indefinite, open-ended, that it was not necessarily asking for a sexual encounter? 

     Thinking back, he couldn’t put himself in the frame of mind he was in when he wrote it.  But now, after the call, he was quite certain about it.  Was sex what he was reaching for with the ad?  Was that what the woman had in mind?  Could he interpret her call any other way?  Unlike his other evenings, this one was filled with a growing sense of anticipation and unease.  He asked himself over and over, “Am I ready for this?  Has it really come to this?  Do I want to go?  Should I go?  What if…?”

     He went to bed with that last interrogative looming large in his conscience.

     Of course, the next night, he made sure he had friends with him all evening.  He invited to his place just about everyone he knew could get away.  He had something of a party—beer, wine, cheese and crackers, he even broke out his fifteen-year-old Scotch.  It was midnight when the last one left.  He sighed, stood at the door looking into the dark, and felt his loneliness close in on him, as it always did, when he went upstairs and prepared for bed. 

     He surveyed the huge, comforter-covered thing that nearly filled the wall it was stationed against.  It was like sleeping in a meadow, he thought.  Alone.  He tried to imagine an unknown woman, someone his own age, lying bare legged slantways across the mattress, blue veins popping from her calves and thighs, lifting her arm ever so beckoningly, the flabby skin hanging down and swaying.  He put his hands over his eyes, then looked at himself in the mirror.  But what he saw was in pretty good shape.  “I’m fit,” he said aloud.  “Actually, I’m not bad looking, yet.  Gray.  But so what?”  He was strong and well muscled and flexible. 

     “I just couldn’t do it,” he said out loud.  He felt a little sick to his stomach.  “God,” he said again, “why can’t she just come home?”

     On Thursday evening, the phone rang.  He had just finished washing the dishes from his evening meal and was standing by the phone on the wall by the door to the basement rolling down the sleeves of his shirt.  He reached for it on its third ring. 

“You didn’t come,” the voice said. 

He immediately recognized it.  He became all alert. 

     “No, I didn’t.”

     “Why?  Were you afraid?”

     “Afraid?”

     “Yes.  You didn’t come.  That has to mean something.  You placed the ad.  Why did you put it in the newspaper?”

     “I meant to come.  I would have come, but other things got in the way,” he lied.

     “You should come,” she said.  Her voice sounded husky, as though she had lowered it to sound sensual and sexy.

     He was fascinated.  It was like some kind of sport.  She had made a move, and now it was his turn.  “My God,” he thought, going all rigid, “people really do these things!”  A sense of the fantastic had taken hold of him, and he didn’t know what to say.

     She filled the moment of silence by repeating the address and time, “223 2nd Street tomorrow at seven.”  But then she added, “I will look for you,” and hung up.  It was that last, “I will look for you,” that made the strongest impression.  He detected in it a forlornness and worry that made a picture of her in his mind, made him able to think of her as a person.  It made him feel like a heel.   

     “What am I going to do now?” he thought.  He had put the whole episode out of mind during the day and had completely forgotten about it when the phone rang. 

     Tomorrow at seven.  Again, he felt anticipation and unease.  Would he go?  He tried to imagine the woman, the place, and his being there, what they would say to each other.  He was not known for his repartee.  He was a good conversationalist, especially at the dinner table with friends.  But it wasn’t conversation that his ad was about.  The rest of the night passed slowly.  Tomorrow was Friday.  Then would come the weekend.  He hated most those long empty days. 

It was almost against his will that he found himself on 2nd Street near seven Friday evening.  He didn’t often drive in this area and was not familiar with the buildings and the businesses and shops on the street.  He was trying to read the numbers in the dimming light of dusk and was having difficulty finding them.  He found 221 at the end of one block and on the block after next he found 225.  There seemed to be no address numbered 223 in between.  Wasn’t that the way it always was?  The block between was odd.  The only two buildings on it faced the intersecting streets and took up the whole block with their sides.  The only thing between them was a heavy brown door over which a raggedy awning hung.  He stopped in front of it on the street and strained through the car window to see if there was a number on the door or near it, but he could see nothing.  The door seemed more like a side exit for one or both of the buildings than like an address of its own,  except for the raggedy awning.  Finally, exasperated, he pulled to the curb, got out, and walked up to the door.  There was a number and it was 223, but it was placed on the glass of the transom above the door and was concealed by the awning.  One had to walk under the awning to see it. 

     He tried the door but it was locked.  He looked for a button and mic, which he found on the inset wall adjacent to the door.  He pushed the button and waited.

     After a few seconds, the speaker reverberated tinnily, “I’ve been expecting you.  Come up,” and with the sound of a buzzer, the door popped open.  He stepped in.  It was not the voice, and it had uttered the words it spoke in a tone he could not decipher.  He recalled the voice yesterday evening and what it said, “I will be looking for you.”  It was the tone in which those words were spoken, more than anything else, that persuaded him to come.  “Humph,” he muttered to himself, unsettled.

     Once inside, he felt more unsettled.  It was strange, as these kinds of places are likely to be, he noted.  For one thing, it was dim almost to darkness.  Only two paces from the door a long shallow staircase began to rise.  On the left of the stairs was a wall, on the right a banister.  There was another wall about three feet from the banister, indicating a long narrow hallway which led into complete darkness.  The only light was at the top of the stairs.  It was a lamp like the kind one sees above the front doors of suburban houses.  Its glass lenses were amber colored, which cast an eerie and dim light down the stairs.  These were sloped up at about the incline of an escalator, which made for many steps, and which seemed to carry the staircase all the way to the other side of the building.

     He stood on the bottom step, looking up and trying to see what he could of the dark hall, sniffing the air, wondering if he dared to go up.  Then, slowly, he began to take the steps, noticing his heart beating.  He put out of mind what he would find at the top and concentrated on the steps.  He kept his right hand on the banister as he climbed, as though with each step he contemplated pivoting and fleeing down.  At the top, the landing in front of the door on the right was small, only a few feet wide.  The door was closed.  Again, the words, “I will be looking for you” came to him, and he felt cranky and abused, and decided to say something about it, but then thought better of it, not wanting to begin this acquaintance in that mood.  Finally, he knocked.  He heard someone stir inside, and the door was pulled ajar.

     An old woman, perhaps eighty, peeked out.  She opened the door wide when she saw him and told him to come in.  He paused, not understanding, the woman so much not what he had expected.  But she urged him in, offering her hand, saying, “She was called away, but I expect she’ll be back in a few moments.  Come, come,” she continued urging and reached for his hand, which he had raised to take hers, but which he had failed to do.

     “I’m supposed to make you comfortable until she comes back, the woman you spoke on the phone with.  I know all about it.  Would you like coffee or tea?”

     “Yes, coffee, thank you,” he said, looking around, for the apartment was dim, lit only by light filtering through the curtains from the waning evening.  He had entered into the dining room and noticed, when he stepped in beyond the door, there was a picture of Jesus on the wall just to the left of it.  The frame and picture looked like the kind one buys in the drug store, the Jesus with long blond hair and beard and blue eyes, his red heart visible in his chest wrapped in a gold ribbon.  Across the top of the frame was pinned a palm frond that had been looped back and forth, the loops neatly held by the pin.  The woman gestured to the next room and told him to sit and be comfortable and she would come right back.  As she walked away, she asked over her shoulder whether he preferred decaf or regular.  He replied decaf, since he decided he wasn’t going to be here long and would want to go home and sleep by himself in his enormous bed.

     The living room was furnished with old, worn furniture and had a musty smell, an old people’s smell, he thought.  The woman was frail and thin, her body barely visible through the housedress, a thing as old as she was.  She had straight, coarse, grayed hair cut short and combed back on both sides.  He saw a newspaper on a lamp table beside the chair across from the sofa on which he had sat.  The lamp was turned off, as though the old woman had been sitting in the semi-dark.  There was no television, and only one item on the walls—another drug store picture, this one of the Virgin, mantled in blue, her body appearing to ascend, since her two bare feet peeped from beneath her robe.  While he gazed at the picture, he heard a kettle whistle, and a minute later, the woman came carrying a tray with the kettle, two cups, sugar bowl and creamer, and a jar of instant decaffeinated coffee, which she set on the low table in front of the sofa. 

     He wanted to be polite, most of all polite, as he extricated himself from her hospitality.  He felt suffocated and oppressed and didn’t know how to begin.

     “My name is Sister Mary Mercer,” she said, “What’s your name?”

     Before she poured for him, she lit the lamp on the table by the chair.  He told her his name as he dropped a spoon of granules into his cup.  She bent over and poured and he added sugar and stirred.

     “I didn’t always live here,” she said, waving her thin arm at the room.  “We had our own building, a convent of sorts.  One could call it that because we were all nuns.  But, of course, it wasn’t a convent.  Some of us worked at the hospital, some were teachers, some did as they could.  I’m all that’s left,” she said, rather cheerfully.  His heart sank.  He wanted to do it politely, so he raised the cup to her and took a sip and put it back in its saucer.  Just as he was about to rise, the door opened and the one who was called away returned. 

     She came into the living room with a big smile on her face, all business like.  Sister Mary introduced them.  She was about forty, not as thin as the other, and dressed for the street or for work.  Her hair was black.

     “I’m glad you came,” she said, still smiling.

     He didn’t respond but merely looked at her.  He wanted to say, “Sorry, but this has all been a mistake, so sorry,” and leave, just walk away and put it all behind him.  But he didn’t have a chance.

     “You are a Godsend,” the younger woman said.  He recognized the voice and wondered how he could have imagined inflections in it, and imagined meanings in those inflections, and how, from those imaginings, he should find himself now bound by politeness and reluctance to be unkind.

     Sister Mary had brought another cup, and as the woman served herself, she chuckled and then laughed.

     “This is not what you were expecting, is it?” the woman said.  “I guess not,” she added, laughing.  “But look, your personal said you were looking for diversion and were willing to pay!  Oh, don’t look like that,” she said, laughing again.  “It’s not your money I want.”

     “Money I could give.  A little anyway.  I’m not rich.  I don’t know what else I can do.”  He was feeling more and more uncomfortable and guessed he was showing it.

     “I don’t want money, I want help.  You still work, don’t you?  You don’t look like a retiree.”

“Still work,” he responded.

“That’s OK.  I will need you on weekends.  Will that work?  Are you free on weekends?”

“That depends,” he said.  “I’m usually occupied.  It’s just that my wife is away, you know, helping our daughter.  She’ll be back soon.  Our weekends are usually full.”

He inwardly cringed at the impression this had to make on someone like her.  He could never explain.

“It’s not a problem.  Are you free this weekend?  Any help would be a blessing.  You’re here, even that’s a help, though you might not be able to tell why.”

He looked at Sister Mary and thought he could guess.  She had sat in the chair by the lamp and was smiling and tending with interest to their conversation.

“Oh, don’t pull such a long face.  You reached out in that personal because you needed to.  You need me as much as I need you.  Don’t say no.”

The woman then described half a dozen projects that needed doing and assured him that he had no obligations.  He should do what he could when he could and that was all.  And if he decided to do nothing, that was OK, too.  Others would come.  It was like that. 

He looked at his watch, rose, and said he would think about it.  She told him to come back in the morning if he wanted to.  He left.  Driving home, he didn’t know what to think.  It had gotten dark, so he thought about Saturday.  He would normally do any number of things on Saturday, chosen to stave off the emptiness.  He might work some more, he thought, on the headboard he had half finished in the basement.  Or he might….  Whatever he did, it wouldn’t change the night.  The night would be the same.