The Better Man

My brother is talking about the Phillies and how much he hates them. Of course, Bobby loves the Phillies, which is why he can muster such hate. “Get rid of all the overpaid assholes and start from scratch,” he’s saying, sipping his high gravity beer. At the other end of the table, Kip is shaking his head. He’s a Pirates fan. He doesn’t understand how Ron can hate a team that is five games ahead in their division, while the Pirates languish at the bottom of the NL Central division. 

Kelly, a massage therapist whose trade doesn’t allow for sufficient yakking, is talking Kip’s ear off, though, so he is unable to chip in with his opinion. The poor little guy looks at me helplessly, and I shrug and sip my IPA, glancing discreetly toward the table to my left, where my lover is having a very hushed exchange with a woman older than either of us. 

All of us are over fifty. Most of us are over sixty. My lover’s husband is almost seventy. What has happened to us?

When they find out about what we’ve done, people will say I was just trying to stay young. Well, of course I am. They aren’t? Look at the cars they drive! How often they visit the spa! They’re trying to elude Father Time just like anyone else. It just so happens I’m having a lot of sex while doing it.

My lover — let’s just call her Juanita, for now — is having a deep conversation. Her back to me, she and the older woman are hunched toward each other, their noses about a foot from each other. They’re either talking about an affair or some embarrassing deformity or bathroom habit. My lover is so close to me I’d be able to tap her shoulder if she wasn’t so bent toward her table mate.

It’s weird, and I have to get up and walk away, even though my glass is still a third full. I take care of that, guzzling the rest as I make my way to the counter. There, I look back, and see Juanita and the woman stealing glances at me. Hoo boy. I am the topic of their conversation.

Didn’t we have some sort of tacit agreement that we’d clear it with the other before spilling beans? You’d think that would be implicit — which is one of the hallmarks of tacitity. But then I remembered Juanita’s shock and embarrassment when I told her I had told my tennis partner, who knows a lot of people she knows, about us and our six-month-long affair. 

I should stop drinking beer while I play. I do it because it helps with the yips.

Yet, as I’ve since learned, yips can be helpful. It’s not always good to feel calm and comfortable. Discomfort happens for reasons, and one of them is to ensure one doesn’t go blabbing intimate details to someone who could take them and make things extremely uncomfortable to one. 

I chastised myself for blabbing, and then then calmed myself with the reminder people aren’t as obsessed with me as I am. But then Mike told someone, and that someone — who had heard of me — blabbed it to someone else, and before anyone could do anything my lover’s husband, Roy, found out about it. You would think that someone who presents as a peaceful man, a gentle giant, would abhor violence in any form. But no. Roy came over and punched me in the nose, adding that I should stay away from Juanita. 

And I did just that, mostly, but chance meetings in bars cannot be helped. So there I was, ordering my second beer and surreptitiously watching my lover spill beans on someone I didn’t even know. An old lady, at that. 

I saw her look at me, then swivel a bit to see someone entering, then fix a somewhat horrified gaze, which she directed back at me, who turned and realized it was Roy coming through the door. As for Juanita, she met Roy’s eyes, hers got big and looked at me, which directed Roy’s gaze to me before I had a chance to race to the side exit or bathroom.

Roy looked kind of like Roy Clark — hence the name, I guess — but far more hulking. Roy Clark, to my knowledge, never chased a man into a bathroom. Roy Axton did. Or almost did; I was able to shut and lock the door in time. Roy pounded on the door, shouting, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” I didn’t answer. It didn’t seem like a question.

I heard Juanita’s voice, and then it seemed Roy’s “Hey!”s were directed at her. But their intensity was subsiding, and then I heard nothing. Maybe a muffled sob. I drank my beer, half sitting on the sink. I hoped by the time I finished, all of this would have blown over. 

When I eased the door open, no one was there. I walked with some trepidation to the bar area. No one was talking. All were looking at me — except for the old lady Juanita had been talking to. Neither my likely former lover nor Roy were in sight. 

Bobby motioned me back to the table, and I went. “Who was that guy?” he asked. 

“Oh. You know. Someone who has it out for me, I guess.”

“I wonder why,” said the old lady to whom Juanita had been talking.

Everyone at our table turned to look at her. She didn’t look back, just kept sipping her beer and pretending to look at her phone. Maybe she was. 

“Nutcase,” I muttered, then issued an uncomfortable laugh.

“At least I don’t hide in bathrooms,” she muttered back.

“Koo-koo,” I muttered, tapping my temple. “Koo-koo.”

My table of friends and family took this in as if they were watching a ping pong match. Table tennis. 

“Do you two know each other?” interrupted Kelly, the garrulous massager. 

“Nope,” the woman replied, still staring at her phone.

“Don’t want to,” I retorted quietly.

“Well it seems like you do,” said Kelly. “You’re like an old married couple.” That broke everyone up. And got me a little mad.

“You’re like an old married couple,” was my attempt at a zinger.

The other patrons had lost interest by this point, and had returned to their meaningless banter. I ordered another beer, this time from a manager who eyed me with seeming contempt, and when I returned to our table, the old lady was in my seat, talking with Bobby. Not knowing what to do, I stood next to her, sipping from my glass and looking around as casually as I could. 

“So maybe that’s why he ‘has it out’ for your brother,” she was saying.

“Oh, as you can see,” I said sarcastically, “she knows everything about it.”

Fortunately Kelly had diverted everyone else’s attention toward a story about a massage client who had, during the course of a session, achieved a partial erection. Normalcy had returned to the table.

Bobby looked up at me, hurt in his eyes. “Well she sure knows more about it than I do.”

“No!” I cried. “Bob. Look. Can we get a table, just you and I?”

“I’ll leave,” said the woman, getting up. 

“Only five minutes late,” I said. “Thanks nevertheless.”

“Don’t talk to me, lover boy,” she sneered, and walked out. I noted her easy, strong stride and wondered if she was really old at all.

Perhaps just prematurely grey and self-righteous.

I sat down. “What did she tell you?” I asked Bobby.

“That you’re fooling around with a woman whose husband is partially retarded,” he replied.

“What? That’s ridiculous!”

“That she could be married to a retard?”

“No! Well…yeah.”

My mind was sent reeling. I thought about Juanita’s house, and the signs that had been there. The alphabet magnets on the refrigerator, and the childlike drawings around it. Their only child was in her twenties. Roy had…mental deficiencies?

“Sounds like you too have never met,” observed Bobby.

“No.” Not really. I helped him carry in some groceries one time.

There were bags of Funions and Uncrustables. A bottle of Yoohoo. At the time, it had made me wonder. 

“So,” deduced Bobby, “if you steal her away from the retard, won’t it be on you to take care of him, or at least find some kind of home for him?”

The thought of it — the messes, the folding of laundry (underwear!), the Funions, the Yoohoo — descended on me like bricks of rain. Brickdrops. 

“Surely he has someone who….”

“Who what? Will take him in? At his age?”

“Maybe their daughter.”

“Oh, nice thing to spring on a kid just starting out in life.”

I finished my beer and walked home. It’s funny how quickly things can change when one learns the truth. Or lets the obvious truth finally sink it.

I texted Juanita that we were done. I meant it.

I had lost my true love to a retarded man. A better man.