For Blood or Money
15. Dead or Dying
TWO YEARS IN THE NAVY and the best I could guarantee was that I could survive in a swimming pool if I had a life jacket. I was floating up through the murk and mud. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t cold. My lungs weren’t hurting particularly. I knew what had happened. I was dead. The murk was just the mess I’d made of my life. Maybe I would have eternity to clear it up. For some reason I remembered just when I’d lost Hope.
My mid-life crisis hit the day I realized thirty-three was half-way through my life expectancy. Of course, technically, having already survived Viet Nam, I should have had a much longer life expectancy than the sixty-six that was estimated in 1982, but apparently I had seriously over-estimated.
At thirty-three, I’d just been promoted to full partner and celebrated by buying a brand new bright yellow Mustang convertible. I moved to a new apartment in a trendy part of town where I could hold huge parties for young, equally trendy people. There was just one thing missing in my life, and I went hunting for a beautiful, young, and trendy girlfriend. Hope springs eternal.
Hope was her name.
We met at the top of Mt. Si on a Saturday afternoon, looking across the lowlands toward Puget Sound. We hiked back down the mountain together and shared a drink at a cozy North Bend watering hole. Much to my surprise and delight, we spent the night in my trendy, downtown apartment. Smart, funny, and beautiful, Hope was twelve years my junior; but we made each other happy and, clearly, that is what mattered. Within two months, Hope had moved in with me and I couldn’t have been more pleased.
Having eye-candy on my arm at company gatherings added to my status among my male coworkers. For her part, Hope liked the gatherings because she was drawn to power like a magnet. Power that comes from money, position, and oh, yes, did I mention money? Hope liked people who were powerful, they got her into doors and then she left them behind. She loved power. Did I mention that? Power that you get from wealth and position.
Power like my boss’s.
Damn.
It was a big hairy falling out. She said I never understood her. I’d always held her back. I was just plain mean.
Don’t turn me into a martyr. For my part I told her she was an incompetent gold-digger and a slut. Besides which, I’d been sleeping with a college girl who was in a class I taught and didn’t really care what she did.
Except that she backed a truck up to the apartment while I was working one day, emptied it of everything but my one painting and my recliner, and drove away.
And you know what? I was perfectly fine with that. She’d taken everything; she couldn’t possibly ask me for any more.
I bought a mattress and put it on the floor of my once cool apartment. I didn’t mind so much that she’d taken all my LPs. After a few weeks I began to slowly acquire the new CD format. I had a girl over occasionally, but no more big parties. I didn’t look at women the same way anymore. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them, but it didn’t seem they wanted the same things in life that I did.
The more I thought about my life, the more I hated it. When the lease expired, I moved out and found a small furnished apartment on Capitol Hill. I took my picture, my mattress, my clothes, and my chair and moved. I stuck my Mustang in a garage, and ignored it.
I painted the apartment black, grew a straggly beard at a time when most of the men in the office were shaving, and became an organic vegetarian. I even started wearing jeans to work. I didn’t see any clients anymore. I just lived with the machines. We were changing over from the big dedicated systems by ’86 to personal computers and networking. The job was changing and I was suddenly feeling very old.
That’s when I discovered what men want from young women.
They want to feel young.
They want to feel that they’ve cheated the clock and that they’ve retained their youth in the face of years. I wasn’t avoiding women, and I wasn’t doing without women in my life. I just discovered that I wasn’t expecting anything from them. It made life easier.
I discovered that there were women in the office that I made it a point to pass each day, just so I could feel my heart speed up a little—that feeling where it is beating up in your throat a little higher than it should. I would pass where a woman had just walked by and stop to inhale the fragrance she left behind. And when I did, I walked a little straighter.
I shaved (mostly—all but the mustache) and went back to wearing suits. I wasn’t mean. I was certainly not going to complicate women’s lives with mine any more. We’d deal with each other the way we were. Someday, someplace, I’d find the right one for me—maybe somebody my own age who knew who the Beatles were and what it was like to face the choice of being drafted or enlisting. I instituted the fifty percent rule. I wouldn’t go out with anyone who was less than half my age.
Of course, when I made the rule, it included everyone that it was legal to date.
I quit thinking about it. Hope was as gone then as it was now in my watery grave.
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