“Kiss me,” she repeated, “and then you can follow me to my place. We’ll shower together. You already told me how nice I smell. Well, wait until we get up close and personal after we shower. Guaranteed to please.”
Guaranteed to please. I had no doubt. She was incredibly persuasive to say the least. And when she put her lips to mine, I could picture us showering together and the way her clean, fresh body would smell and feel like afterward. And I could picture also the energy and passion she’d no doubt put into our love-making. Some people are all talk, but I didn’t think that Phyllis was one of them. Wickedly sincere, that girl.
But I could also anticipate the way I’d feel afterward. I’d hate myself for doing it. Facing Amanda again would be near impossible. Hell, looking at myself in the mirror wouldn’t be so easy either. The self-recrimination and loss of self-respect would send me into a tailspin. Not worth it. You always hurt the people you love, as they say, but Amanda wasn’t going to be one of those people.
Primed for takeoff. All systems go. Well, not quite. Houston, we had a problem.
Stepping back, I said, “Look, I can’t do this, Phyllis. As much as I want to on some level, I can’t do it. My love and loyalty to Amanda isn’t so-called. It’s real and it’s happening. She’s my main squeeze, my only squeeze.”
Phyllis blew out a fast breath and shook her head. “Your main squeeze. How quaint. How lovely. Well, Nathan, if that’s the way you feel, so be it. In my not so humble opinion, I think I have more to offer than that secretary. But, if you can’t see that, then maybe you two belong together. Good luck.”
I watched her storm away, jump into her car and drive off. Her not so subtle digs at Amanda’s job status didn’t bother me. In fact, they told me that I had made the right decision.
*****
Hard to believe it’s been twenty-two years since that summer of ’95. Lots of water under more bridges than I can count. Lots of change in twenty-two years. I’m still cycling, both solo and with a few members of the original group. In fact, I ride even more, now that I’m recently retired.
Phyllis continued to show up for group rides. In time, we became cordial after weeks without speaking. Not long after I refused her advances, she met a guy, another cyclist, and married him less than a year later. Apparently, she the marrying kind after all.
And Amanda? We’re still together. We got married in June 1997, two years to the day we met at that Corn Husk mixer. Two of Amanda’s siblings moved nearby to take care of her aging mom. Like any marriage, we’ve had our good times and not so good times, our proverbial ups and downs. It’s been mostly good, though, smooth sailing through a few rough squalls.
Amanda
Nathan–I still sometimes call him Nathan Detroit–never gave me reason not to trust him after he told me about Phyllis. Trust has kept our marriage together, as well as a shared sense of humor and nostalgia. For our twentieth wedding anniversary, two weeks into June, we returned to the place we met. The Corn Husk dances were still going on. “Only singles here,” the woman at the door said when we told them we were married. But then, when Nathan explained the circumstances, she gave in. “I think that’s so cute, so romantic,” she said. “Have fun.” She even joked about it. “Now remember, kids, you’ve got to dance at least once when asked.”
We were hardly kids. This was in 2017. I was almost sixty, Nathan sixty-four. Although a few pounds heavier, I had managed to squeeze into my red dress. Of course, it didn’t fit me nearly as well as it did two decades before, but Nathan talked me into wearing it. He had no trouble fitting into the same size slacks and sports shirt he wore then, thanks to all those miles on the bike. But his white hair was a dead giveaway that he had left his youth far behind. Me? Wrinkles, yes. White hair, no. My mom had kept her natural blond into late middle-age and so did I. Against the normal trend, I had let it grow longer, just below my shoulders. Nathan loved it. “When you’ve still got it, flaunt it,” he said.
They still served wine at those things. We each got a cup and took a seat at one of the tables. Nathan, incurable romantic that he was, wanted to recreate what happened that night. He walked up to the DJ and asked if he had the record, Crazy. He did, on a CD of Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits. So then, he got up, stepped away from the table and then proceeded to stand there, looking around, just as he did when I first saw him.
Then the record came on and I had tears in my eyes. When I got up and asked him to dance, he said, “You weren’t crying twenty-two years ago.”
“I didn’t love you then,” I said, resting my head against his chest. When he turned to kiss me, I could see his eyes misting up as well.
‘Crazy, I’m crazy for feeling so lonely,
I’m crazy, crazy for feeling so blue…’
“I WAS feeling blue that night,” I said. “Well, until I met you.”
“I remember. It was obvious you didn’t want to be here. Your looked bored as could be, frowning and squirming in your seat.”
“I was squirming?”
“You were. I can see it now, as if it happened, well, just tonight.”
‘I knew you’d love me as long as you wanted,
And then someday, you’d leave me for somebody new…’
“Ohmygod, Nathan, that line reminds me of Phyllis Denu. I really thought you were going to leave me for her.”
“Nah, not a chance. I loved you too much.”
We kept dancing, holding each other and kissing while listening to the rest of song. Then we sang the last two lines together: “‘I’m crazy for trying and crazy for crying, and I’m crazy for loving you.'”
When we sat down, I remembered how wet Nathan made me when we kissed on the parking lot. And then that episode in the bathroom with Cindy, my first and last lesbian experience. Cindy’s, too, or so she said, because she did me so good, I sometimes wondered if in fact it WAS her first time. Nathan thought it was “sizzling hot” after I told him years later.
We stayed another hour or so. We slow danced a couple more times, drank and talked, laughed and teased each other. Mostly, we watched the younger couples out there, wondering if any of them would hookup, fall in love and then make a life together as we had.