Cornell Rodgers was eighty-four. He’d been a widower for almost fifteen years. Cornell had become comfortably inured to all that went along with living alone, had come to accept the fact that he would probably be forever after a “me” and never again a “we.” He came to forget a lot of what it had been like to be married, to be in love — not the kind of love that comes with fireworks or overwhelms every other aspect of life, but that category of love that settles in for the long haul and feels comfortable and secure and just right.
Cornell had forgotten, as well, what it was like to share his life with another person as the norm and not the exception. His daughter Stephanie was the exception. She flew in from Ann Arbor to see her father dutifully once, sometimes twice a year. And sometimes his grown granddaughters — Stephanie’s two girls — dropped in for visits (with or without their husbands), when they could be conveniently appended to New England ski trips. And there were friends and neighbors who came by to see Cornell in his musty Victorian on South Willard, and whom he went to see, including one family in particular — the Ludviks — who lived a few blocks away and had been having him over for Sunday dinner every week for nearly a year.
Cornell liked his life in Burlington. It was cold in the winter, and that was okay. (“As my blood gets thinner, I don’t touch the thermostat; I just throw on a heavier sweater.”) He liked walking along the lake. He even liked the radical politics of the town and happily stuffed envelopes for Bernie Sanders. More recently, he’d marched with the anti-Gulf War protesters, carrying a sign that said “No War for Oil,” when the one first handed to him, the overly prolix “Kuwait: Give Your Women the Vote and Maybe We’ll Feel Better About Saving Your Ass!” didn’t quite seem to hit the mark.
A former high school principal, Cornell had been in retirement mode for almost two decades, the comfortable pace of his life needing very little adjustment as he aged. Retirement suited him. Burlington suited him. What he missed, even as his libido had waned, was sex.
The power and passion of male/female coupling — it had long stopped being a component of his sensual life. Cornell’s sensual life was in his tastebuds now. It manifested in the goose bumps he sometimes got when he listened to Mozart’s symphonies and Bach’s Brandenburg concertos. It beheld the rutilant sky of twilight, set against the shimmering turquoise of Lake Champlain, with feelings of warmth and peace and quiet joy. Everything was sensory and above the waist now, none of it seated in the gonads.
And yet sexual longing in Cornell Rodgers, voiceless now and largely rudderless, still maintained a pulse.
How to channel it, give expression to it? Cornell couldn’t bring himself to buy adult magazines. Nor did he wish to visit one of the city’s adult movie houses. The potential appellation of “dirty old man” unnerved him. He had met women close to his own age — women whom he thought might be open to his advances — but in the end, though companionable, they had not proved all that physically compatible.
Cal was a teenage boy whom Cornell knew. Cal had a girlfriend named Kieran. Cornell knew the boy’s family from his long tenure as high school administrator (both of Cal’s parents were teachers) and he knew of the girl’s family (the father had a job with the town’s big restaurant equipment company, G.S. Blodgett). The boy was into old motorcycles and so was Cornell, and for a time he had thought of giving Cal his antique 1936 Harley Davidson 61EL — the one with the first “Knucklehead” OHV engine — which had been gathering dust in his garage.
Cornell shared aspects of his long life with the teenagers during their visits to a favorite city park. Kieran was especially interested in hearing how high schools had changed over the years, since she now felt that she wanted to be a teacher. With Cornell, the kids shared the empirical evidence of their young love — or rather lust, because Cal found it hard, even in a public park, to keep his hands off Kieran, who was plump-lipped and New England creamy-skinned and hungry for Cal’s every touch.
Cornell sometimes felt like a voyeur, even as the kids sat and talked to him, or when occasionally the three would enjoy a late lunch together. But he needn’t have; Kieran had, quite early on, designated Cornell guardian angel of Cal and Kieran’s love, and Cal was just fine with that. (“The man knows motorcycles. How could he possibly be a perv?”)
In time, Cal and Kieran came to learn that Cornell spent his Sunday afternoons with the Ludviks, several blocks from Cornell’s house on Cliff Street. In time, Cal and Kieran, acting on Cornell’s toss-away admission that he hardly ever kept his doors locked, began to spend a couple of hours every Sunday afternoon sneaking into the old man’s house through his wooded backyard so that they could have sex on the bed in his spare bedroom. Kieran usually brought a blanket in a backpack so that after their departure there would be no evidence that they had been using this otherwise rarely occupied room as a trysting place, or, as Cal sometimes referred to it when alone with his beloved, “the place we go to fuck each other’s brains out.”
Kieran loved this about her boyfriend: his sensitive, romantic nature.
One September Sunday, Cornell came home from the Ludviks’, sated on Cornish game hen and mushroom stuffing and a third, shamefully prodigal glass of Zinfandel, and discovered that his back door had been left ajar. Thinking that his home had been broken into, he moved cautiously from room to room, brandishing an old fireplace popcorn popper. Finding no burglar or prowler about, nor even evidence of there having ever been one on the premises, Cornell deducted with some relief that he had apparently left the door open on his last visit to his backyard, whenever that may have been.
It was not until later in the evening that Cornell, having wandered into the spare bedroom to look for a particular missing title from his collection of John le Carré first editions, noticed a certain sloppiness in the way that the bed had been made up. Rumples which bunched up the duvet in the vicinity of the pillows betrayed the bed-making hand of someone even more careless than himself. What’s more, when he pulled the duvet and underlying blanket away, there were moist spots upon the sheet. Unknown to Cornell, this was the only Sunday afternoon in their string of secret weekly home invasions that Kieran had been unable to bring along her blanket. The lusty teenagers had first considered copulating on the floor but had grown accustomed to the bounce and plushy give of the bed’s mattress. So they took their afternoon delight upon the bed without their protective full-sized blanket condom, and hoped that its only marginally observant octogenarian owner would have no cause to put two and two together and get four-nication.
But he did. In fact, given all his years of forensic experience as the chief investigator of campus infractions, a.k.a. high school principal, he figured it out fairly quickly. Had his eyes failed to glean the evidence, Cornell’s sense of smell, still keen at his advanced age, would have told the story, for the room smelled both rankly and fragrantly of the sweat and musk and love liquids of adolescent carnality.
Cornell became lightheaded. Suddenly, the wrong of it became excised from the equation. All that was left was the want and need for it. To be young again, to be young and lubricious and driven by hormonal impertinence to feral acts in strangers’ beds, and goddamn the consequences. For the first time in several weeks (the last during a rerun of Baywatch) Cornell got an erection — one that did not go away for quite some time.
Through the early part of that week, Cornell found himself returning to the room and staring at the turned-down comforter and blanket. He sat in the armchair in the corner and pictured what went on in the room, from the first hungry kiss to the final bucking, writhing, toe-tingling orgasm. By the middle of the week, Cornell had talked himself out of saying anything to the young couple, even though he knew that he would see them inline skating at the park with other teenagers, or catch Cal playing Hacky Sack with his buddies while Kieran looked on adoringly.