They chatted in the frozen food aisle. Pointedly, they said nothing about their respective late spouses. They asked each other what they’d been doing with themselves, and he was playing a lot of golf and she was in three bridge clubs.
But then she said, “Do you know what I miss?”
“No.”
“Going out to eat. Seeing shows. Movies. Plays. Just... getting out.”
So they’d been to the movies twice — The Spy Who Loved Me and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. They shared popcorn. He kissed her after the second date, and realized he’d sort of forgotten how.
That evening they went to Oh, God! Which, coincidentally, is what she said, seeing he’d worn a denim leisure suit that accidentally matched her pant suit.
After, she invited him in for wine and they sat on her couch in a condo not unlike his, only no antique furniture. They kissed and petted a little, like the teenagers they’d been long ago, though not together at the time. Yet they were of similar enough ages to have shared the past. Finally she took him into her bedroom, where a photo had been turned face down, and she undressed. She gave him a low-lighting look at her at sixty-five and he undressed.
It hadn’t taken more than maybe ten minutes, from soup to nuts, and was wholly unremarkable as sexual experiences go, but he hadn’t felt this happy for a long time. When he started to cry, she just held him and patted him like the child he’d been even longer ago.
“You can stay the night,” she told him, when he finally swung around to sit on the edge of the bed.
“Not quite ready for that,” he said.
“Okay.” Her smile was small but he sensed she was relieved, not hurt. They’d gone from sharing popcorn to sharing her bed awfully fast, after all. They might have to back up now before moving forward.
In a robe, she walked him across her living room to her door as if they were outside and he was walking her to hers.
“That was wonderful,” he told her.
“It was.” She was smiling that same not-quite-sad smile.
They hugged.
With some spring in his step, guilt and elation wrestling to a draw, he strode to his car, a 1975 Ford Granada he’d bought from her late husband. They waved to each other and then he was driving away, feeling as if he’d been struck by a pleasant piano falling from a window.
In the condo, he took a shower this time and thought about how so many days just slid by blurring into the next, but this one, wow, this was a keeper. If God let him live one day over, out of these last six months, this would be it.
He got into some black silk pajamas Jean had bought him and didn’t even feel sheepish doing so. In his bare feet, he padded out to the kitchen, got himself a glass of Chardonnay and settled into his recliner to watch Johnny Carson. He didn’t always make it through Johnny, and if it was a guest host never, and often would wind up half-way through the night sleeping in the La-Z-Boy.
Not this time. He even watched some of the late news. And when he crawled into the queen-size bed, feeling only a twinge of guilt from his wife’s absence under these familiar sheets and covers, he had to read more Sidney Sheldon for half an hour before the euphoria of being with a woman again had worn off enough for him to set his reading glasses on the bedside stand, hit the light and drift off.
Then something woke him.
It felt immediate, but it wasn’t. The clock said 3:35, so he’d been asleep well over an hour, almost two. But a noise had interrupted a dream already forgotten, both the specific dream and specific noise, gone — leaving just the sensation of being jerked from somewhere else.
He leaned on an elbow and listened.
Nothing.
But he remained in a sitting position. He was not a light sleeper. It really took something to wake him. Of course, it might have been outside, an animal disturbing a garbage can, a car backfiring, drunken kids partying, any damn thing, if it was loud enough.
Only now... nothing.
He patted his pillow and drew the sheet and blankets up around him. Turning on his side, he willed thoughts away, other than a general sense that he wouldn’t mind returning to the pleasant dream whose specifics he’d lost...
This time he was not quite asleep when a noise sat him up straight in bed.
It sounded like a chair had been bumped in the kitchen!
What was it — had a damn raccoon gotten into the place or some damn thing? Or perhaps some unwanted company on two legs...
He threw the blankets off, and stared into the darkness for a few moments, enough moonlight from the windows on the river to give him more or less immediate night vision. Yet that wasn’t enough, so he clicked on the bedside lamp and swung around to sit on the edge of the bed. Frowning, he thrust his feet into his slippers.
For a long time he’d kept a gun, a Colt .38 revolver, in his bedside drawer. But he’d moved it to the bottom of the dresser, under a bunch of clothes, after he’d almost used the gun on himself a few weeks after Jean’s passing. He believed in having a gun in the house, of being able to defend oneself in one’s home. And drug addicts from time to time broke into doctors’ homes looking for supplies — that was common, though it had never happened to him.
So he’d shifted the .38 to the bottom dresser drawer to give himself fairly close access but at least the cooling off period of crossing the room before blowing his brains out in misery over his late wife’s absence.
For a while he just sat there, on the bed but with his feet on the wood floor in the slippers, looking through the yellowish glow of the bedside lamp, staring at the wall beyond which was the kitchen where the noises had seemed to come from.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing.
Goddamnit, he thought, and stepped out of his slippers and slid under the covers again, got comfy, and a scraping sound, like a chair being pushed back, sat him up again. Then he was in his slippers and across the room and digging that .38 out from under some of his Jean’s clothes that he hadn’t been able to bring himself yet to get rid of.
He prowled the condo.
Slow, methodical, turning on lights as he went. Gun gripped in his right hand, like a cop in black silk pajamas and slippers, Vernon checked everywhere, even the stupid places — under tables, in closets, in back of the couch, behind the recliner. Periodically he would stand and listen and hear nothing but his heartbeat and the hum of kitchen appliances.
And in the kitchen, he found something that disturbed him — the double glass doors onto the deck weren’t locked. He didn’t remember locking them, but he also didn’t remember not locking them. Someone could have had got in.
But no one was here now. He was sure of that. He’d checked the premises as thoroughly as a security guard at a nuclear power plant.
Maybe someone had got in, realized Vernon was there and been scared away. But why wouldn’t a thief expect the condo owner to be home? And if the guy had done any casing of the joint, as they said in the movies, wouldn’t it be obvious an old guy lived here? Seventy-five-the-hell-years old? Or had a home invader gotten in while Vernon was away, at the movie, and at Jessica’s apartment cheating on his dead wife? (That was exactly how his brain told it to him and it made him laugh, bitterly.) And then after Vernon got home, the invader slipped out and bumped into something doing so? Maybe?
Well, he had searched the place thoroughly and no one was here. If a burglar had been here and gone, and looted him in any way, he would conduct an inventory tomorrow and see what was missing and call the police. What the hell — he was well-insured, wasn’t he?
Of course, he immediately locked the glass doors to the deck, and took one last, lingering pass around the condo just to make sure, shutting the lights back off as he went. In the bedroom, he compromised on the .38, leaving it atop the dresser but not tucking it away in a bunch of Jean’s clothes. By the time he was out of his slippers and under the covers, he felt confident. A little unsettled, sure.