The Age of Denial

I watch movies for the sex and porn for the story—no wonder I’m always on the wrong side of my own life.

Next to me was Claire from Philadelphia. I was annoyed to realize even girls like her, ridiculous at twenty-eight in braids and leg warmers, considered me old. She sat up and posed, arms folded on legs splayed, more mawkish than a kitten. I couldn’t help but think she looked better over cocktails in the dark than in the flat Hong Kong afternoon light. I had been fooling her about my age all along. Too much truth at the beginning of anything is tedious.

She thought I had visited Tokyo to visit her; we met in the lobby of the least impressive Hyatt in the city. I couldn’t be bothered to tell her it was a glitch in my ticket back from corporate headquarters in Italy. I was supposed to be in Hong Kong already. Smelling premature ideas about our future, I remembered my promise to myself. I’d sworn to give up girls for a while. Too many leftover dramas were still chasing me, and I was sick of the constant hangover. My New Year resolved to cancel my line before the bank called it in. Girls have always been my poison. For me, a drink is a drink; cards are just cards, but girls are something else. Like any addiction, the high is heady while the action unfolds, but when the stage show is over… Well, you know how those stories go. Don’t think it’s just the sex. I’m no dreary sex addict, but even that would be simpler. If I could get the same high every time I look a woman straight in the eyes and make her stare back, at something else, I’d be a different man.

But I wasn’t playing a hand that night I met Claire in Tokyo, just a quick go at the slot machine on the way out the door. Or, that’s what I thought.

“You don’t even know how old I am?” I challenged, three drinks into our “relationship,” as she was to call it. The first two drinks had been the month before on a Bali beach at a New Year’s party after an accidental midnight kiss.

“Twenty-eight,” I said with a straight face to relieve the tension of her trying to guess. Her eyes were too brown. I couldn’t stand their scrutiny. I recanted in a hurry. “I’m joking. Forty-two.” I tried to quell the lurking question mark before she heard it, but there was no need. She was already complimenting me.

“You could pass for mid-thirties. You do, you look good for your age.” Her compliment meant nothing, I was sure she was lying and considered forty-two slightly old, but her intention to please pleased me. The fifty-two-year-old inside me resolved to be even more careful with my diet. No sauce ever again, I’d order my chicken sans salt.

And my plastic surgeon deserved a reward. I contemplated bringing the number down a bit more but stopped at forty-two. It didn’t occur to me that I was lying. It was nothing personal. I was just passing the time. A lie has a future and I never planned one with her. But I was back in the game for a minute, it’s true, and I do look my best on the prowl. She was mine that February night in Tokyo. The thrill, when she dispensed with the usual hard-to-get artifice of first dates, was new. She was part sweet, part diva like a modern Grace Kelly. If they were anything alike, no wonder Hitchcock tried to remake other actresses into her image. If I was him, I’d have done the same. That day of the ‘old man’ comment though I wouldn’t have dared cast her. Soon she’d be losing her charm. They always do. They say everything changes in three months. It’s the gestation period for a relationship. Three months in and you can tell if you’ll want out. I don’t set the rules, but I never make it that long, so I believe it.

Her remark was fresh in the air, I stole a quick look in the mirror. It was a dull late spring Sunday in my practical apartment hotel overlooking the racetrack in Happy Valley. Hong Kong has the worst light, I always look better in Italy. My dyed brown hair was starting to show through gray and my strict diet was in danger of aging my

newly rejuvenated face. Whoever said it falls only to women to choose between svelte figures or youthful faces? However, the necessity of manufacturing our fashion label in China gave me little choice in my locale. And I was developing a taste for this unabashed man’s world where I felt something of a king.

I had enjoyed cultivating its ‘pleasures’ until Claire followed me back here from Tokyo. I’ve never let a woman stay the night until she asked if she could. It’s a trick of mine, an idea borrowed from a line of Paul Newman’s in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” But it didn’t occur to me with Claire. She never thought to ask, just

stayed. I couldn’t decide if I was harboring a stray kitten or a time bomb, but I never asked her to leave. She was such a gypsy, an affluent nomad with no visible profession, that I flattered myself to think I had tamed her. I forgot to fear my own domestication.

“Such an old grouch abandoning me like that” she whined, before springing into motion. Seconds later, she was on her way out wearing micro shorts and a t-shirt, borrowed without asking from my drawer.

“Later meanie,” she said, running out the door. “I’ll be at the track.”

I watched her leave. My ‘flagging interest’ revived as she carelessly slammed the door. I tortured myself imagining the muscular young men she’d see jogging by her on the track, without their shirts, sweating in the ninety-degree heat and hundred percent humidity. The instant she was gone I wanted her back. I turned to my phone for diversion.

Eva had been calling since I left Italy six months ago. The same age as Claire she had the advantage of knowing my age and my work number. I speed-dialed her.

“Pronto” she answered, breathless and wide awake. I checked my watch and realized it was five am her time. I couldn’t flatter myself she was up thinking about me.

“Ciao Roberto, darling. Call me later, yeah? Ciao. Ciao.” She hung up the phone before I could speak. There were always the local girls’ numbers I could search for in the bottom of my drawer, the ones looking for an expat boyfriend as keenly as they stalked the latest in Vuitton bags. Instead, I stayed in bed in the middle of the day for a nap.

I hate napping. I have no guilt about sleeping in the daytime, but I hate waking up in semi-darkness, not knowing if it is another day, or, the same one to be faced all over. But I went to sleep, comforted to think Claire would come banging back in and save me from not knowing.

When I woke up the lights were still off and the curtains, though drawn, revealed no cracks of daylight. Resenting the effort it took to remember, I knew something was missing. The Thelma Houston CD was still skipping quietly on the same track I had been too lazy to change before sleeping. Its repetition had locked my dreams into a jail of the same song, impossibly never-ending but never moving forward. My dreams were circles that took me nowhere, and waking up to emptiness, I knew I was alone. The harping lyrics, “Baby, don’t leave me this way,” brought to mind our conversation that morning about the same song.

“My Dad listens to this stuff,” she said.

“Change it,” I countered, hoping she would. I feared a conversation about my taste in music.

“How old were you when you listened to this anyway?” she asked.

“Do the math” I snapped, wondering how old a forty-two-year-old would have been when it came out, wishing I wasn’t so nostalgic.

“But you must have been such a kid?” She didn’t know when to stop and I pitied her gullibility, before wondering if she was on to me.

“Damn it all to--. Merde!” I was even starting to curse in Claire’s American twang. I jumped out of bed to turn off the stereo and turn on the lights. There was nothing I wanted to listen to. Nothing that would not remind me of the ridiculous position I’d put myself in. Her music would be grating, reminding me of her youth, mine a reminder of my age, my lie.

You’ll say I should have just told her before. Maybe so. But I was counting on the three-month rule to take effect. I’d soon be wanting out anyway and meant to forgo the embarrassment.

Just when I thought I couldn’t stand listening to the sound of the elevator any longer, she came bounding back in, her usually pale face glowing pinkly.

“Where were you?” I demanded before I could think. I know she’s unstoppable when she wants sex and couldn’t believe she had been out jogging for hours.

“I met an old friend at the track and he took me to lunch after running.” She was grinning, her hair a mess. Now she looked like a teenager up to something. I needed to know what she was hiding. I had been so blinded by my own secrets that, when I considered how many secrets of hers might be lurking, I panicked.

Hoping to tease the truth out with the truth, I started blurting my way toward disclosure. “I have to tell you something. I have, you see, I have a problem. I’ve told so many lies.”

Her grin dissolved. No more teenage comedy, she was more stately than Grace, the star had nothing on her. “I’m not asking,” she said quietly.

I considered stopping there. But the thought that she wasn’t asking, so as not to tell, made me continue. “My age. I’m not as young as you think.”

“I don’t think you’re young.”

“I lied. I’m turning fifty-three this year.”

“What else?”

I powered on. “I’ve been talking to an ex. It’s not important, just a bad habit.” I said it, wondering how I would explain I had never planned any of this and, not planning it, was not as guilty as I sounded. “It’s been the fastest three months of my life. I didn’t want to ruin it by telling you.

I drew in my breath to continue. I felt the need to keep talking and force a confession from her if one was to be had. In the pause, she grabbed her small bag and started stuffing her clothes into it at random. She packed as she did everything, in a whirlwind. Spinning around she was at the door again, leaving for the second time that day. I knew she’d never call me again.

“Don’t go like that. Say something please.” I couldn’t help begging. She looked over her shoulder at me, clenching her jaw perceptibly. Just when I thought she’d leave without a word, she spoke. “You know, it’s been four months, not three, old man,” and she was gone.