Taking Chances

Examining himself in his wife’s bedroom mirror, Martin didn’t think he looked that bad for a man in his early 60s, which really meant he didn’t look as bad as a lot of people his age thanks to good genes inherited from his mother’s side of the family. “We die youthful looking,” his mother assured him once. “You’ll be glad for that when you die.”

“Anyway, no one can say I let myself go,” he said out loud. Being a retired widower for two years now and living alone in a big farmhouse just outside of Nashville, he’d decided he could talk out loud sometimes so long as he didn’t do it around people.

In his right hand, Martin held a letter, an invitation from the Department of Motor Vehicles to come down and see them about a new driver’s license photograph.

Some people might call that an imposition, one of those inconveniences in life that you can’t do anything about except stop what you are doing and submit. Martin didn’t see it that way. It was all a question of attitude. Maintaining a positive attitude wasn’t something he was going to go around preaching about; only a boor would do that, but he determined that he wasn’t going to be one of those people with a sour outlook on the world perhaps from being disillusioned vegetarians, disgruntled Baptists or the kind of people who don’t celebrate Halloween.

“This isn’t an inconvenience; it’s an opportunity,” he said. Here was a chance to do something different than he did the day before even if the DMV was a notorious haven for the state’s least ambitious public servants.

You take your wins where you get them, he thought. At his age, this would be the last license photograph state law would require him to have. Maybe the state is being merciful to old
 people, giving us a pass on future photographs as consolation for the ravages of age.

Martin could have easily slid into that kind of old age living where it no longer mattered to him what he looked like. There are road signs on this hazardous stretch of life’s highway: wearing white socks with anything other than tennis shoes, not shaving every morning or shining your shoes, forgetting to comb your hair. Nobody would ever accuse Martin Brooks of being a reckless driver on the highway of life, but he sometimes wondered, Does anybody really care what I look like anyway? That was a question he could never answer, and he set the thought aside.

“You could call this my Official Portrait,” he said out loud. The police will need a current photograph if he ever wandered dementia-crazed out into the nation’s streets or got himself kidnapped by a cult of sex fiends who lust after older men. His life might depend on it.

“Hey folks!” Jonnie Vee appeared on the television across the bedroom and began hawking yet another product aimed at the nation’s feeble senior population.

I’m going to take it personally if Jonnie Vee outlives me, Martin thought. He’d seen all he wanted to of white America’s answer to Little Richard in the 1950s. Mr. Sunshine must be in his
 90s…and in a different television commercial every week!

Dressed in his college letter sweaters and white tennis shoes, the ever-smiling singer crooned his way into the hearts of middle class Americans through the Eisenhower years with syrupy pop renditions of gutsy rock and R&B hits.

You almost destroyed rock ‘n roll, you rat bastard! I bet he’s wearing white socks right now.

Martin looked for the remote while the singer oozed out of the television from a golf course calling on his “friends” to purchase his favorite pain medication.

You don’t even spell your name right! Just last week the old fool was slamming tennis balls over a net and selling walk-in bath tubs. Does he really need the money? Why doesn’t his family intervene?

Just as the senior salesman drove a golf ball about a mile down the fairway, Martin punched the button on the remote.

There must have been magical flubber in that ball.

Returning to the mirror, Martin stood up straight, pulled his shoulders back and inhaled.

If I hold my breath, I can improve things a bit. He did it again. This might work.

Em’s mirror often surprised him. He’d walk by and catch himself as others must see him, not the self-image he’d fashioned from a lifetime of professional and personal achievements, but the retired lawyer with reading glasses, a slackening jaw line and more stoop in his shoulders than he had the day before.

If aging is sliding away from what you were by degrees until you no longer notice, the inverse must be true, he thought. You live your life by degrees. Little things like correcting one’s posture must count. You can’t deny biology, but you can make it wait.

So Martin polished his shoes every Friday night, rotated his clothes through his closet and kept his white socks in a separate drawer so he had to think about what he was doing before he got them out. It’s why he skipped elevators for the stairs, tortured himself with 50 pushups a day and push-mowed his lawn which took him an entire day.

Since he’d retired, Martin taught himself to appreciate the subtle social interactions that came his way even if it was just being noticed by the bartender at his favorite bar who began mixing his Old Fashioned when he walked in or the librarian who resumed their last conversation where they left off the week before.

Martin examined his driver’s license photograph and wondered why he ever bought eyeglasses worn by vice principals and men who sell insurance door to door. The lenses were the size of early computer screens, and the frames could have come from a child’s erector set.

Several years ago, he switched to classical tortoise shell frames. He knew the look fit him because women he didn’t know complimented him on his glasses which always sent Em into one of her snits. She never appreciated his choices of eyewear, ties, shoes or haircuts, at least at first. When he came home with the glasses he asked her how she liked them.

“Fine, I guess.”

“You don’t like them?”

“No…not really.”

“I thought they stood out when I saw them,” he said, giving her another chance to pretend to like them.

“They’re okay, I guess.” And that was that until women he didn’t know began telling him they liked them.

This is why he never consulted Em about any fashion accessory he was considering. She always said no. He used to tell Em she was a “No it all.” He thought he meant it affectionately although after her death, he could see that it did not always come out that way; maybe it never did.

If you cringe at a memory is that evidence that you’ve grown as a person and improved in some way? Martin wondered. You can’t fix the past. You can only live with it and call that success.

* * *

Martin’s hairstylist Bonnie, a divorcee in her late 40s, liked his glasses. Talking to her was like being on a date although he was never the kind of guy you would expect to see with a woman wearing fishnet hose, short shorts and almost too much blue eyeliner. Still, he dressed up for his appointments, ditched his jeans for slacks, the tennis shoes for loafers, the biking t-shirt for something with a monogram on it. She reminded him of Eva Green if the French actress grew up in a trailer park and barely finished high school.

Bonnie was fun; she made him laugh. He couldn’t call his time with her a “date”, more of an occasion really, but he enjoyed the idea that he was misbehaving.

“You always look nice when you come to see me,” Bonnie said.

“I’m renewing my driver’s license, and I want you to make me look younger for my photograph.”

That was a silly thing to say, he chided himself. Maybe she didn’t notice.

Bonnie threw an apron around him like she was casting a fish net, stepped behind him and placed her hands on the top of his shoulders, gently squeezing the muscles there. “Relax.” She began combing his hair with her fingers, swirling it back and forth and lifting and sorting the hair over his forehead like she was picking through clothes in the bargain bin.

In the two years he’d been seeing her, Bonnie had grown comfortable reporting to him on the social lives of the other hairstylists and the doings of her three grown children who no longer had time for her.

“I can’t complain too much about the kids. It was me who raised ‘em independent,” Bonnie said. “Still, I didn’t think they’d grow up and run off like wild animals. They could call their mama once in a while.”

Her children, like his own, lived out of state. “None of them are in prison either. Fortunately, I stay busy cutting hair.”

Bonnie owned her own shop, Prime Cuts, and leased space to five other hairstylists. She drove a Lexus and told Martin she spent her Friday nights dating her books. “I don’t get out much. Just me and the books…and a glass of wine when the numbers add up. Two glasses if they don’t.” (Martin spent his own Friday nights on the back porch of his farmhouse drinking one too many Old Fashioneds and listening to music.)

Bonnie began her newscast. “My sister Lurline almost kicked her boyfriend out of the house a few weeks ago. Merle backed over her dog Pooh Bear. Broke his front legs.”

She brought her comb and scissors into play, and he closed his eyes and relaxed to the sound of her voice, feeling it flow around him which reminded him of the sensation he got the first time he stood at the edge of the surf on a beach in Florida and felt the sand under his feet being sucked away.

“Lurline exiled Merle to the guest room which I bet is fine with him because he has his own television. That man can watch sports non-stop. She says he turns the volume up just to annoy her.”

Martin only spoke up to let her know he was paying attention. He wanted to hear her talk, let the trill of her voice comfort him.

“Poor dog,” he said.

Because Pooh Bear had his front legs wrapped in casts he could not walk, so Lurline moved him into her bedroom where he slept at the foot of the bed so she could monitor his convalescence.

“She has to carry Pooh Bear outside to do his business,” Bonnie reported. Because of the dog’s lack of activity, “his innards” were not working properly.

“One day, I followed her outside and she put Pooh Bear down next to a bush and began stroking him along his stomach just behind his rib cage. ‘What on earth are you doing, Lurline?’ I asked. ‘Just helping him to work his bowels,’ she said. ‘Well, stop it,’ I said ‘you’re creepin’ me out.’ I myself wouldn’t do that to a dog if it was laying golden eggs.”

Martin laughed and wondered again if he ever laughed when he was not with Bonnie.

Bonnie talked; Martin listened. When he was with Em, he postured and blustered about things he thought he knew while she pretended to care. He could see that now. That’s what they’d settled into by the time he gave up on their lives being different than they were.

It worked; we were married for more than 35 years when the cancer came. That was his go to justification for a lot of things.

When Martin thought how pedantic he would have sounded to anyone listening to him, he felt embarrassed.

I see that now; why didn’t I realize it back then? I could have improved myself.

He couldn’t attribute that to being a lawyer.

That was the real me, a character failing. If a recollection makes you cringe that means you recognize a fault and have improved your thinking. Am I a better person now?

“Merle has let every one of his teeth go bad,” Bonnie announced. “Some flat fell out of the man’s head.” Snip! Snip! “He whistles when he talks.” Snip! Snip! “It’s all I can do to keep from staring at him when I’m a-talkin’ to him.” Snip! Snip!

Martin started to volunteer that ‘some people are terrified of the dentist’, but he smiled and shut up instead.

Bonnie bent down, looked Martin straight in the face and placed her pointer fingers at his sideburns while he concentrated on the bridge of her nose to keep his eyes from wandering to the forbidden zone of her ample cleavage. He blushed, and she smiled without looking at his eyes.

“So she’s having a party. A ‘summer cook-out’, she calls it, but I know exactly what she’s up to. Merle got his teeth fixed, and she wants to show his dentures off.”

Bonnie twirled him around toward the mirror.

“I wish you would go with me, so I would have someone to talk to,” Bonnie said.

Me going out with a woman? Another opportunity?

He’d been approached by a parade of widows armed with casseroles since Em died. They brought him food, invited him to their church outings or social events and called him about “senior only” trips involving chartered busses. He’d never taken off his wedding ring. Wearing it was a means of making amends perhaps for something he could not define.

On his farm, he’d gotten comfortable doing the things he needed to do. Now this. If he told Bonnie no, how could he ever come back for a haircut?

“Yes…I’d love to go.”

When Bonnie didn’t say anything, he added, “…I have not been out…since everything.”

“After my divorce, I did go out once with a man from church, but only once. He got run over by a bus in Nashville and had to go live with his sister in Chattanooga. I doubt we would have dated long anyway. He kept calling me ‘Mother.’”

There was an appropriate remark to make. Somewhere in the universe the right words existed, all lined up and waiting to be employed if Martin was clearheaded enough to use them, but he could only grope for them like an actor who has just forgotten his lines.

Bonnie walked him to the front door, swept her hand over his chest and brushed at hair clippings that were not there.

“For goodness sakes, think of something nice that we can say about Merle’s new teeth without us being obvious.” Bonnie laughed. “It will sound extra good to my sister coming from my date.”

In the car, he let the words “my date” roll around in his mind. He liked the idea of being somebody’s date even if only for a Saturday afternoon on a patio full of strangers behind another stranger’s house. He took off his wedding ring and slid it into his pocket.

* * *

The DMV lady keeps calling him “professor” which is his fault. Since this is his last driver’s license photograph he thought he would add a cavalier element to the production, an American flag bowtie with his blue pin stripe suit.

I look like I teach economics to finance majors at a private college for arrogant, rich kids.

She ignores him when he says things like “You all sure are busy today…” and “Beautiful day today.” This is part of his strategy for dealing with bureaucrats like the public servants at the DMV: obsequiousness. It helps if you smile a lot and look attentive while being obsequious.

“Okay professor you’re next.” The DMV lady motions Martin to her camera. She is taking him ahead of two people who arrived before him, a woman on her telephone discussing tonight’s dinner menu with her mother and an oafish looking man in a soiled t-shirt who looks like he’s no stranger to stomach ailments.

My strategy is working. Martin beams at her.

Standing against a gray poster board under a bright light bulb, Martin smiles.

“Step back,” the lady says.

He steps back.

“Step forward.”

He steps forward.

Before he can steady his feet in place, she snaps her camera, and a flash of light hits him like a lightning bolt between the eyes, leaving him with searing white softballs on his retinas which won’t disappear no matter how many times he blinks.

“Over here, professor.”

Martin stumbles toward the voice, extending his arms mummy-like toward the counter.

“This will do,” she announces, an observation he did not consider reassuring. “Guess this is your last photo, professor.”

The DMV lady thrusts a card into his hand and shouts “Next!” like she is selling fish down on the wharf.

Blinking his eyes like the flashing lights at a construction site, Martin wobbles to his car. His photograph is as bad as he feared. She’d blown up his face until it filled the frame, cutting off his bowtie and ears.

I look 40 pounds heavier than when I went into the place, he says to himself.

His worries over any puffiness under his eyes are unfounded. The camera’s atomic bomb flash caused his eyes to leap open in a look of surprise so that his eyebrows appeared an inch higher on his forehead than they should have. Any wrinkles or age spots did not matter because the flash burned away all of the details in his skin.

This DMV lady makes the policeman who snaps mug shots of drunks in the middle of a Tuesday night in downtown Nashville look like Edward Steichen.

Martin threw his coat into the back seat. Next went the bowtie. The car was hot; he felt the creases in his pants and shirt wilt away. He’d forgotten how uncomfortable a suit could be on a July afternoon in Tennessee.

None of his preparations made the least difference in his photograph. What bothered him most was the futile effort he’d made for such an insignificant event as a license photograph. He was embarrassed that Bonnie knew that.

He wished he’d said no to Bonnie’s invitation. He rubbed the place where he wore his wedding ring.

If I need proof of my age, my dithering over this photograph is it.

He’d told Bonnie he would go. There was no acceptable way out of it. He would go.

He drove away a wiser man, possibly improved upon.

* * *

Martin almost stepped back off the porch when Bonnie appeared in the glass of her storm door like a nymph in the water of a magic well. The shorts, the bandanas restraining her hair, the careless blouse, the things he’d seen her in so often were gone. She wore a spaghetti-strap summer dress, yellow and blue with red splashes like tropical flowers in an impressionist painting by a drunken painter. The contrast of the gold chain around her neck and the gold strap around her left ankle blended with her skin so finely that there were no visible edges as if the jewelry had been painted on her.

Bonnie’s black hair draped down her shoulders, and just before she opened the door she ran her fingers through it like she was putting it in place, her red nails appearing and disappearing all the way down its length.

What got to Martin most were Bonnie’s gold hoop earrings, big and round, oversized, dangling from her ears. Hoop earrings were a personal fetish of Martin’s going back to his college days when he dated a girl who wore them.

When Martin first got married, he asked Em to wear hoops. She would do so for a week, and then they would disappear. He’d ask again later, and she’d oblige but never for long. She never wore them in the last 20 years of their marriage, and he stopped asking.

“You look wonderful…ravishing.” The thrill of complimenting a woman made his blood warm and his skin tingle.

“Thanks.” Bonnie smiled. “That was the plan.”

When they got in the car he dove in for another compliment: “I would like to just drive around to places and let everybody see you…and me beside you.”

“You’re sweet, but that wasn’t enough to keep my husband at home.”

Martin knew that the man had run off with a woman half his age and was remarried in another state.

“He was a fool.”

“Well, thank you, Martin…that was my own assessment of the situation.”

While shaving, Martin had thought of several things that he might talk about. He searched for one of his ideas now like he was trying to decide which club to draw out of a golf bag. Bonnie helped him out.

“So…don’t you have a photograph to show me?” she asked. “Your new driver’s license.”

Martin passed his wallet to her. “I asked for copies to use for my Christmas cards this year, but they ignored me.”

“At least you have a good haircut.” She didn’t look for long. “Well, you won’t have to show it to anybody else.” That meant he was not someone who does anything that would get him questioned by the police, and he was definitely too old to be carded by anyone for anything.

“Now, for goodness sake, let’s not say anything about Pooh Bear,” Bonnie warned. “That’s still a sensitive subject and I’d start laughing.”

On Lurline’s front porch, Bonnie said, almost under breath. “Merle has some kind of pronunciation issue with his new teeth. We have to pretend we don’t notice it.”

“Merle! How the heck are you?!” Bonnie shouted when he opened the front door.

Merle smiled and before he could say anything Lurline appeared and shouted, “Howdy, people!” at them. Merle held his smile throughout the introductions.

“Merle, you look so young,” Bonnie announced. “Have you been coloring your hair? You look like a new man.”

No, he said, he’d not been coloring his hair. “Living with your sister is my secret to youthfulness.” Merle had a lisp. He couldn’t pronounce the syllable “er” or the letter “s”. Instead of saying “sister”, he said “thith-tah” and “secret” became “thee-cret”.

“Hanging around with my sister seems to be good for you considering that happy smile.”

Merle smiled even more, so did Lurline who beamed at him.

On their way through the house to the patio, they encountered Pooh Bear, the source of so much recent contention. “Nice doggie,” Martin said and looked at Bonnie who crossed her eyes at him.

On the patio, Martin socialized; he even knew a couple of the people there, but he could not stop watching Bonnie. She was dazzling. Her black hair shimmered in the late afternoon sun, and he wondered if she might have some American Indian ancestry.

Something stirred down there that he had not felt in a long time.

He was like a seventh grader with his first girlfriend. He watched for Bonnie over people’s shoulders and around their heads and past faces with moving lips which made no sound to him. Sometimes he realized that people were talking at him, and at other times, he thought he was smothering in the sound of voices. But when he caught Bonnie looking at him from across the room, it thrilled him, and he watched for her even more just to enjoy that feeling again. Occasionally, she swam through the crowd to him.

“Ith my dress okay…or ith it my hair?” she asked.

“I can’t take my eyesth off you,” Martin said. “You’re thunning.”

“Keep thinking that,” she said and greeted someone else.

To himself Martin said: “I’m on a date with a beautiful woman.”

On the side of her left calf just above the ankle was a tattoo, a miniature vine of roses.

“I’ve always admired your tattoo,” he said. “Do you have any others?”

She didn’t answer at once, looking at him over her wine glass, the eyes of a predator peering through a leafy bough at her lunch. “A single rose. I’ll give you a million dollars if you can guess where, but you only get one guess.”

He could think of five likely places. “I need to think about that a while.”

“I’m counting on you doing that.”

* * *

Martin wasn’t going to bring up the tattoo again, but Bonnie did on the drive back to her house.

“Ready to guess about my tattoo?”

He squirmed.

“So you’ve been thinking about it. Kinda’ kinky…I like it.”

He laughed.

“…C’mon…let’s hear it.”

“…thigh…” Martin just threw that out.

“Inner or outer thigh?”

“I…”

“We are way too old to be modest,” Bonnie said. Placing her right foot on the dashboard, she pulled up the hem of her skirt.

He swerved the car.

“Whoa hot dog. I’ll show it to you when we get home.”

Bonnie led him into her house by his hand. “Let’s sit on the couch for a minute.”

A minute? He repeated to himself.

She patted the cushion beside her.

“Did you enjoy yourself?”

“Very much. I was wondering if you might like to go out again…” he said. “…with me.”

“Absolutely. Being older, you and me…we don’t have to act like teenagers. We’ve learned something haven’t we?”

“I…” Again, he knew he was supposed to say something but couldn’t find the right words.

“We kind of have a two-year relationship already don’t we?” Bonnie began removing her earrings. “We’re not strangers.”

“I feel very comfortable with you,” he said. “My age though…”

“Age only matters if you’re raising children.”

She twirled the earrings around in her fingers like an afterthought. “When something feels right to you age doesn’t seem that important.”

Bonnie rested her head on the back of the couch. “I think this is the part where you kiss me.”

He did.

Everything that happened after that came in a torrent of flailing arms and legs, grasping hands, gasping mouths and flying articles of clothing culminating in their crashing off the couch onto the carpet.

When it was time she led him to the bedroom where he passed the night doing things he’d not done in forever.

There’s something religious about waking up in the night and finding a woman curled up under your arm, her head on your chest, her breath spreading over your skin like sunshine when clouds part on a summer day. Martin thought he woke up twice just for that feeling.

It was still dark when they awoke. Bonnie drew her leg up over him and rubbed her right hand across his chin. “I’ve forgotten how it feels to live like the moment counts and the next moment is going to be better. It’s too easy to just put your time in like living’s your job and everything that’s important to you has already happened.”

“Purpose is what I miss…having purpose.” He kissed her forehead. “Having something to think about and value.”

“That’s all I want,” Bonnie said. “That’s enough for me.”

Later that morning, sitting on the edge of the bathtub in his boxers, Martin tried not to watch Bonnie’s breasts peek out of her kimono as she bobbed for position, daubing mercurochrome on the scratches her fingernails had left on his back.

“I’m sorry, tiger,” she said. “But you caused your own wounds when you think about it.”

The scarlet sash of Bonnie’s metallic blue kimono looped around her waist like an afterthought so that the black lapels flapped open every time she moved. She was naked underneath the robe.

“You like my robe?”

He was not looking at the robe.

A gold fire breathing dragon chased its tail on the back of her kimono. There was a smaller version like a school badge where the breast pocket would be if there had been one. “Randall Air Force Base Tokyo” was stenciled in gold thread over and under the dragon like the rockers on the back of a motorcycle gang’s jackets.

“I haven’t been to Tokyo,” she said when she saw him looking at it which was not hard to do since the dragon and her left breast were less than ten inches from his face. “A girlfriend gave it to me when she divorced her husband. He’d brought it home from overseas.”

Bonnie pulled his head down and examined the back of his neck. She was wearing open-toed slippers topped with fluffy pink puff balls. Her ankle bracelet was gone. He’d almost choked to death on it during one of his more ambitious undertakings in the night.

Straddling his knee, Bonnie twisted the applicator into the bottle. Martin felt words pile up in his throat like an interstate accident. He wanted to tell her: “Everything is going to be okay. This is good and right.” Instead, he took her hand, kissed it and pressed her palm to his cheek.

“I know baby. I know,” is all that Bonnie said.