Noreen's Birthday Lunch

Glamour is in short supply in Noreen’s life. Her son had briefly been engaged to a French girl but after being brought up on Velveeta cheese he could already foresee problems in the marriage and called it off. Noreen and her husband took a Caribbean cruise when he retired, but he contracted food poisoning on the second day and had to be flown back home. She had kept the brochure and stuffed it guilty behind the sofa cushions if he ever came in while she was gazing at all the destinations and tours they had missed. It wasn’t his fault he was allergic to foreign food and the upsetting of routines. That was Howard, a man of routines.

But today is Noreen’s birthday. She did her research at the local AAA branch in Anaheim and came away with a purse stuffed with ideas that finally solidified around a restaurant in the upscale suburb of San Marino. It was an hour’s drive, but Howard had promised to take her anywhere she liked for lunch, except the Queen Mary because he still had bad associations with ships.

Following the hostess outside to the terrace, Noreen beamed with pleasure. It was just as she had imagined it – white tablecloths, elegant women, and wasn’t that the actress? The one in the commercial for… “Give me a minute and I’ll think of it,” she whispered conspiratorially over the table to Howard. “But she’s big. Chewing gum, I think.”

Howard feigned interest. He was hot and his polo shirt stuck to his back. He had been hoping Noreen would chose lunch at the beach when he’d offered – somewhere casual where he wouldn’t have to tuck in his shirt or wear polished shoes. However, he was a good husband and Noreen’s awed happiness couldn’t fail to affect him. Perhaps he would suggest a chocolaty dessert after lunch, knowing that she’d never order one if he didn’t pretend he was going to share it. Not that her weight watching was doing much good: The whole outing was nearly aborted when she discovered she couldn’t do up the waistband of her skirt. They were only saved because she found a black and pink two-piece she’d bought for the cruise. The large tropical print seemed a little over the top among the sedate diners, but Noreen always did have flair, he’d give her that.

At exactly the same moment, Noreen was also thinking about the tropical flowers, wondering if the famous actress had noticed her matching pink toenails. What a relief she hadn’t let the girl in the salon go for the orange. Famous actresses would probably pick up on details like clashing toenails – after all, it’s part of their job to look glamorous.

Noreen clasped her napkin more tightly in her lap. Isn’t this exactly what she’d dreamed of? Lunching with the jet set of San Marino? She was so happy that everything seemed to hum with her delight. The sprig of fresh mint in her ice tea, the crisp uniforms of the waiters, even her husband’s freshly shaven chin seemed to be reverberating with song. If I could only hold on to this moment, thought Noreen, stuff it in a glass jar and screw the lid on tight, then I would have somewhere to visit when the FedEx man passes my house and the neighbors pile suitcases into a taxi, something to inhale on days when the air conditioning whirrs and I feel like I’m in a terrapinium. But Noreen, despite her frequent flights of fantasy, is at heart a practical woman. She decided to steal a menu and frame it when she got back home. She couldn’t risk the famous actress seeing her steal one of the teaspoons.

Unreasonable Women

Rupert believes himself beset by unreasonable women. The last one pummeled him with her fists, shocking his old-school sensibilities by requiring him to use force to defend himself. Then there was the former girlfriend he visited in Los Angeles who swooped and shrieked, her pashmina extended like a pair of black wings, until he was more than glad to pack her off in his chauffeur-driven car, back to the ghetto she claimed was bohemian but in his eyes was just grotty.

She called him, still furious. “You are attracted to romantics, girls who want to believe the best of people, because they are the only ones who could overlook your behavior. But eventually your manipulation and deviousness show through and they realize they haven’t found a savior, someone to protect them from cruelty and ugliness, but that you embody, make a skill even, of the very cynicism and selfishness they detest. That’s why they leave amid tears and recriminations.”
“Preposterous!”
“You see a hard-headed girl, someone who’s a little more skeptical would immediately see you for who you are and give you a very wide berth. Or maybe they’d be willing to make a deal with the devil, but they’d certainly never LOVE you!”
“I’ve obviously upset you.” This line works well for him. Moral high-ground in the sense of sounding willing to take the blame but actually just accentuating the distance between his high place of moral certitude and the groveling emotional display at hand.

Really, he can’t understand all the fuss. A bottle of vintage champagne had caused the misjudgment of informing her about the women he had been rogering while she was living with him. One of whom was now the mother of his illegitimate child.
“You didn’t use condoms!”
Clearly.
“You might want to play Russian roulette with your life, but you had no right to do that with mine!”
“I had to do something! You were refusing to sleep with me.”
She seemed to consider this, then grabbed her pashmina from the back of the chair and proceeded to prance around in what appeared to be a Red Indian war dance.

He chortled at the memory. Women! Totally unreasonable. It’s the hormones. Nutcases every last one of ‘em.

Neither House nor Home

Bob doesn’t know how it happened. One day they were laughing down at the pub, the next screaming at each other. She got their daughter, he got their cat (but he, of course, pays for both of them.)

There hadn’t been much time to contemplate life, leaving college halfway through his degree to help his father with the house building company. “That’s what we are,” said his father, in his stout Nottingham accent, “Builders of houses – homes – not some swanky developer putting old ladies out on the street or buying up dockland to build yuppie penthouses. Nay, lad. Remember that we are house builders and you won’t go far wrong.” And then he died, leaving the business to his son, who would rather have continued with his English Lit. degree, but there you are. One moment you’re discussing the meaning of life in student digs, the next you are watching your mother dress a corpse in his favorite tie and walking down an allée of doffed hard hats.

Sybil, the cat, is a comfort to Bob. He can come home any hour he chooses, connected as he is to the office via Internet. Often he returns mid-afternoon, picking up Sybil and holding her close to his nose, the soft white fur tickling his nostrils and making him long for human hair, soft hands, a silk wrap…

He doesn’t know how it happened – the Bulgarian women. He misguidedly went on a site that offered, "Meet your ideal match," and instead met Eleonora, and Leila, and Mira, who insist on sending him virtual teddy bears and satin hearts on Facebook. Gemma now, she’s a bit of all right. Boobs like ripe summer fruit and legs up to her armpits, but he doesn’t know how that happened either – South African women posting pictures of themselves in jaunty sailor outfits or in scanty dresses. He supposes there are a billion women out there who consider a 46 year-old property developer (“House builder, lad, house builder”) a good catch. Never mind that he sometimes gets caught up in the mystery that we are the only animals that can contemplate our mortality, that biology has produced Shakespeare and tears and a propensity for sunsets…

He opens his laptop to find “Alexandrina has sent you a kinky gift.” The economy must have dropped another couple of points in Bulgaria. Naturally, a kinky gift warrants a second look, but Bob doesn’t really go for the plucked and oiled curves of pornography. It’s like looking at motorbikes – all sleek molded perfection but cold and hard underneath.

He doesn’t know how it happened, how he became the Master of Kittylitter and the object of affection for skinny Bulgarian women sitting in Soviet era apartments in sunglasses and jeans. “Have my own tool belt,” he types onto the website, wondering if he might snag an English girl if he baits his trap with irony.

A Lover of Beautiful but Unstable Women

“Daddy, you’ve got an email.”
“Hunh?” Michael glances at his laptop, but Tilly has swiveled it to face her at the table.
“Who’s ‘LA Lou’?”
“Oh, just some work thing, probably.” Or one more desperate middle-aged woman, Michael thinks, inexpertly dislodging French toast from the frying pan. I don’t know why I let my friends talk me into it; it’s not as if I’m really in a position to start a new relationship, what with the filming schedule and Tilly at the weekends…
“It says she’s a TV drama en-enthus-iast and would love to meet you when she comes to London.”
“Tilly, don’t you know it’s rude to read other people’s mail?”
Tilly pouts. “I was just practicing my reading,” she says disingenuously. Michael wonders if this is a learned behavior or if her mother has bequeathed her with the dissembling and manipulation gene.
“Okay, eat your breakfast now or you’ll be late for school.”
“Daddy?”
“Yes.”
“Why does she think your glasses are sexy?”

#

“Michael!” The very gorgeous Hazel is leaning over his desk.
“Haze! Sorry, I was miles away.” Actually, with a Vietnamese girl he’d met at Bar Italia. He was buying his breakfast bagel when he’d seen her reflection in the mirror behind the counter dipping a finger into cappuccino foam and licking off the chocolate flecks. I can’t help it, thinks Michael, I am essentially a painter, “Very visual,” then realizes he’s spoken out loud. He jabs at the set designs spread before him. “Very, erm, visually interesting.”
Hazel looks at him quizzically and shifts one hip to perch on his desk. “I don’t think you’ve heard a single word I’ve said. What’s the matter? Is it Nadja? Is she being difficult about Tilly again?”
Nadja is Michael’s ex-wife. A beautiful but unstable actress. I am a lover of beautiful but unstable women, thinks Michael, noting the exquisite landscape of flesh down the back of Hazel’s jeans. God, a black lace thong. Too bad she’s much too together to be his type.
“Ahem! I’m not your type, Michael.”
He refocuses guiltily on her face. Is she a mind reader?
Smiling, she shakes her head. “You men are so predictable.”
“Sadly, we are at the mercy of our hormones. But I’ve sworn off women, remember?”
“What about that Chinese girl I saw you with this morning?”
“Vietnamese, actually. Nice girl. A dancer.”
Hazel raises both eyebrows. “What she do? Give you a card with her number and a discount on a lap dance?”
“How d’you know?”
“About the discount?”
“About what kind of dancer she was.”
“Because this is Soho, Michael! You really are a disaster when it comes to women.”
“I thought she looked vulnerable.”
“That’s the trouble with you – you romanticize women. You have to learn that we’re just the same as you only without, you know, that thing.” She gestures towards his crotch. He crosses his legs protectively. “What you need is to meet a nice woman, an equal. Someone who can be a real partner.”
Michael thinks about all the unanswered emails from nice women on the dating website. I’m just too much of a romantic, he thinks. There’s something so prosaic about hanging out your shingle and matching yourself to someone else’s religion, hobbies, retirement plans…
Especially as he never plans to retire.

#

The soccer match is on full blast, Michael sprawled on the couch in a dirty T-shirt and sweat pants that have seen better days. At first when the doorbell rings he doesn’t hear it, the shrill sound indistinguishable from the whistles and the roars of the football crowd. Now in a lull he hears the insistent buzzing and jumps up, spilling the packet of pretzels. Damn! Who can it be? He runs a hand through his hair which only succeeds in making it stand more on end. Pulling the drawstring tighter around his belly, he staggers to the door. A female shape stands behind the rippled glass.
“Good afternoon. I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’m with the South Downs Flora Defense Fund. I wonder if you will join us in the fight to protect native species by banning the planting of non-native flora,” she says, proffering a clipboard of soggy signatures.
She is young, perhaps late twenties, her long black hair weighted by the misting rain and sticking in strands to her face. Tiny drops of moisture bead her eyebrows, her eyelashes, her lips, and he has a sudden impulse to kiss them away. He checks out the long, rain-darkened legs of her jeans, which are stuffed into clumsy Eskimo boots. She’s staring up at him with a rapt expression.
“You’re Michael Bessinger, aren’t you? I was a film student at Brighton and Hove College before I left to work for SDFDF. You came to lecture us on TV drama?”
“Yes, come on in! You’re getting soaked,” he says, realizing now why he recognizes her. Another beautiful but unstable woman.

Must Have Own Canoe

Peter shifts the newspaper off the small dining table. Right! No good putting off the evil hour. He opens the laptop, catching his reflection in the screen. Not bad, really, for fifty-seven. His wife had hated the cropped hair – said it made him look like a thug – but the woman had run off with a bloody property developer who dresses in open-neck shirts and loafers: So much for her taste!

He angles the computer screen to get rid of irritating reflections. Nothing really feels right in this flat. He keeps banging his head on kitchen cupboards and striking his elbow on the shower walls. But no use moping around. Better get down to business.

“Seeking woman not afraid to get her hair wet,” he writes. Clarissa never understood his wanderlust, was more the sort of hotel-with-a-beach kind of girl, whereas he wanted to trek the Himalayas. Nothing to stop him now! He types energetically, trying to put the image out of his head of Clarissa and her tanned Lothario sipping gin and tonics on a sun-baked terrace. After paying off a mortgage and putting the kids through uni Peter couldn’t compete with a villa in Ibiza and a thirty-foot yacht.

“Someone for the weekends – a ‘cupboard girlfriend’,” he writes, wondering if that looks odd. It’s what he said to his daughter Gemma when there was that unfortunate business with the married man. Clarissa was all for having a first grandchild but, “You can’t just put a child in the cupboard when you’re tired of it,” he warned Gemma. Turns out Nature knew best in that instance; not that Clarissa didn’t get her grandchildren eventually. He smiles remembering the holiday cottage in Cornwall, all three grandchildren jumping on their bed in the morning. He doesn’t realize it, but a tear is rolling down his cheek. How do you fit a girlfriend into that scenario? How do you repair a life torn down the middle? “Buck up, old chap!” he says aloud. Getting maudlin. Life’s an adventure, carpe diem!

Weekdays he doesn’t have much use for company. When he finally looks up from his accounting clients there’s usually only time to rush down to the little Thai place before they close and order something from the sweet-smiling waitress. Other chaps might ask her out, but Peter would say an English girl is more reliable. “Decent and loyal,” he types. Someone with blond hair called ‘Ginny’ or ‘Sarah,’ who reads the Guardian and knows how to fix a Pimm’s.

Trouble is, even with a weekend-only partner it’s going to be difficult bringing anyone back to the flat. The sitting room’s all right, furnished with a few odds and ends from the house, and Emily came to help her dad hang curtains, but the bedroom’s a bloody disaster. “I suppose he’s got his canoe in there with him,” Clarissa is reported to have said, which is a typical exaggeration but the limited space around the bed is jammed with a sleeping bag, rolled-up tent and two backpacks.

He uploads a picture of himself in a furry hat among a group of smiling Sherpas. That should give a girl the right idea. He hears his wife’s brittle laughter. “I could be better at expressing my emotions and saying what I am feeling,” he adds, in the interest of full disclosure; “Can worry about unimportant stuff.” Like the roses he’d tended for twenty-five years. Would the new owners of the house know to cut them back before winter? “Divorced eighteen months ago,” he finishes up. “Hurt very much at the time, but over it now.”

The Philosopher

Milky light bathes the bookshelves. It is late afternoon and the French windows opening onto the garden are drafty with birdsong. The vapors of varnished floorboards have not yet been displaced by the plump sap of summer. Philip smoothes the page of a book, words hopping like fleas around his fingers. He should get up and close the windows, pour himself a Scotch, but the peace is too precious. Poets and philosophers circle him, waiting for him to surrender into their ashen arms but something tick, tick, ticks inside of him. Is it his wind-blown heart or is it the hope that standing on illustrious shoulders he will finally see over the wall of random living to enlightenment? He shivers and closes the book, wishing that tonight he could be a lover of women, not wisdom.

Lonely Heart

Billy Braithwaite tucks his scarf into his coat. Bloody parky waiting for the bus on this street corner! The wind whips round the chip shop and carries with it the snow on the moors, salt ‘n vinegar crisp packets, a sniff of something curried.

He wouldn’t normally be going to the shopping centre in this weather if he could help it, but the website says it will ‘increase his chances’ of being selected. Billy finds it hard to imagine that his image will inspire passion. He thinks of blond secretaries in London or ‘fit bits’ who frequent the local pubs and can’t believe that his unruly hair and Yorkshire wind stippled complexion will inspire love, but he’s doing it for Her - the one who will see through the black and white photos of design consultants and the heavy spectacle frames of the arty types and rest on him, an honest man, “Because I'm a warm, caring sensitive soul who will give everything to the right person.” He worked hard on that line. Surely she will see. He is willing to give his everything. No games. Surely that means something.

Life is not a dress rehearsal, he mutters, once he positions himself in the photo booth. Momentarily, he wonders if he should undo his scarf. No, he thinks, leave it as it is. This is no rehearsal, this is the take.

(Photo used with permission www.photo-zen.com)

The Honorary Jew

“Goldberg? Ms. Goldberg?”
“Er, my name’s Godbold. Are you calling me?”
“Right this way, Ms. Goldberg. Now if you’d just take a seat I’ll pull up your medical record.”
“God-bold. My name’s Godbold.”
“Now let me see, Goldstein, Goldsmith, we don’t have a 'Goldberg, Louise.'”
“That’s because my name isn’t Goldberg.”
“I’m sorry, I just glanced at it briefly. Let’s see, Goldbold.”
“Actually, it’s God, Godbold.” I attempt a smile, “Can’t confuse God with gold,” (at least, not if you’ve been listening to the series on idolatry at my church.)
“Uh-huh.” She doesn’t look convinced. Perhaps she’s set up an altar to a golden calf in the staff lounge.
“The name means, ‘good and brave.’”
“Oh, you’ve done that genial-ology thing?”
“Er, no.”
“Your family told you?” she asks suspiciously, perhaps thinking they’d got it wrong and it was Goldberg all along.
“Yes. My family has lived in Britain since about the year five hundred.”
“Ah, they went through the Holocaust and all that?”
“No, we’re Anglo-Saxon!”
“Oh, sorry, I thought you said you were Jewish. So, Ms. Goldbold, what is the reason for your visit today?”
“Regular check up.”
“Okay.” She types something into the computer. “And what is your first language?”