The Other Persuasion
THINK FOR YOURSELF- ALT-MEDIA
Robert always thought he liked women.
That perhaps they liked him because of that.
Fooling himself that he was well brought up by his mother, a Fifth Avenue hippie who had shared a tent with Joan Baez at Woodstock and talked “Tantric Sex” over the breakfast muesli.
There was that awkward talk at fifteen, just before camp, about “Respect”. The dangers of being his father, “A Ladies Man”, whatever that was.
He didn’t hit upon women. Could see what it was to be “attractive”. Always a target. A challenge. Judged and judging yourself from a little girl. From before a time, you could remember any other way of being “Just a Girl”.
He felt caught, somewhere in some Pinky, No Woman’s Land. Between liking being liked and wanting to be “your new Bro”. Just good friends. With benefits. Sometimes he just wanted to be someone, anyone else but a “good looking man”. To scream silently, as women so often did. More often than men would ever know.
Prodded and pawed visually every day. By the filing cabinet as a new Intern. Asked once too often on a date by the Office Stud in the elevator from the third floor. Stalked from the morning jog, where that guy always managed to be at the park gates, pulling his Lycra shorts up tight as she passed 4310 steps in her sports bra. A Mamil- “Middle-Aged Man in Lycra”.
Or “Mucho-Macho-Man”, a girlfriend whispered, who was senior management accountant at her firm. That’s why he was always sweaty in the elevator after lunch. If she had been his daughter, who also ran the same circuit.
Men like boys, by the river, in the past of their hometown. Watching The Bounce. Waiting for Peggy-Sue and her friend to swim in the splash. Fifth floor, name on the door. Wannabe Steve McQueen at the weekends in his restored Mustang. Chasing dreams half his daughter’s age. The DNA made him do it. “For who can bear to feel himself forgotten”. Erased. No one.
So Robert surprised himself when he took advantage. The second look at the Head of HR’s Rear of the Year. The kiss stolen with that girl in the conference hotel corridor. She plied with cocktails on expenses by one of the Partners, notorious for lech-ing. Robert walked her to her floor. Still feeling young enough to know better. But going cold at the door as he swiped her key-card for her, like a gentleman he was tired of being. FOMA nearly caught him out, as another man’s eyes seemed to follow the line of her bra under her Little Black Dress.
He dreaded overhearing his team rating the new intake of Interns- Blondes and Brunettes. Cheerleader and Country Club Locker Room. He didn’t want to seem like a Seventh Day Adventist Pastor from Iowa, denying himself by denying others. As some old High School friend asked him once when he went back East, how he did he get so screwed up about not getting screwed.
He had been married. Who knew? A ten month lack of judgment, inside a disaster, within a mutual tragedy. The Ex- Jacinda- said they were never really married. “Vaginitis”, or whatever it was called, by specialists and analysts with an alphabet of letters after their name. Robert left alone, reading the Princeton PhD certificates framed on the consulting room wall. Doctor after doctor sanitising already clean, fatherly hands after an intrusive examination. Manicured fingers thumbing test results on a too tidy desk as their future was decided.
Failed because he wasn’t “domesticated”. Because he forgot how to load the dishwasher. He fell in love with the idea of her. Her bob-haired, symmetrical beauty, and impeccable taste, in sunglasses to choosing underwear for him. Because she told him when his jokes weren’t funny, but both laughed- at themselves. At their vanity. He thought, or made himself think, he had fallen. As she told her bubbling friends he was The One. Until another One, a German architect came along.
Now he wondered if he made himself love her. Because she wasn’t his mother. He had been set to fall. She knew things about things, like some eau de cologne he had never heard of; and had a way of letting him down without letting him down. Was she too intoxicated by the image. By mother’s Upper East Side apartment, with the Matisse sketch and the mini-grand, Cole Porter had once played on when Mother was a girl her age. Mother told all her new visitors, positive vetting “Potentials” by their reaction, or in Jacinda’s case her studied lack of gushing praise. Was she dazzled by the Manhattan sun setting in the sitting room; lighting the silver framed photos of the beach house. Even if his would-be fiancée noted silently, it was on the cheaper side of the Hamptons.
All of the above was, he supposed now, a kind of love. Somehow more than sum of its parts. It was a deal. An exchange. Of mirror images of ourselves, reflecting endlessly down a hall. Love, in the subtle wording of the announcement in the New York Times: “Jacinda, only daughter, neice of Mrs Henry Newbold II”. So everyone would know they were from the steel family without saying so.
Had they been ten years younger or older, Robert often wondered, it might have lasted. But all love is timing. Season. Nothing more, or less, than a piano note fading from the moment it is played.