a somewhat unusual evening…with 3 men

For many people, a two-glasses-of-wine evening is akin to teetotaling.

For me, it was a high old time. Last night was the first time I’d had two glasses of wine in a single evening since 1982.

It’s not that I was deliberately or medically off the sauce all that time, but that 20+ years of pregnancies and child-rearing didn’t give me the time or the inclination.

But that’s another story for another day.

* * *

Here’s Monday night’s story.

* * *

So I went on the date with the man described near the end of the previous post, whom for reasons of caution I’ll just call S. S was definitely s: I’m 5′3.5″, and I was wearing my lowest presentable shoes, very flat sandals, and he seemed just a tad shorter than I; I have a feeling he might be 5′3″. I took that fact in quickly as he arrived and suppressed my knowledge of it throughout the meal.

Dinner was lovely, at a restaurant near my apt that I’d been wanting to try: the delicious trout entree I had was only $14.95. Conversation was a model of what first-date conversation should be: I forgot even to think about who was talking more or was I flirting, because talk was so easy, relaxed, and absorbing. There was no artificial ‘tell me about your marriage’ or ‘and after graduate school, what did you do?’ or the most tiresome question of all, ‘how are you finding match.com?’

None of that, because we seemed to have plenty to talk about, all of it very interesting to both of us, and the more we talked, the more easily we talked; and the more we returned to subjects when we had more to say on them, and the more new subjects emerged. And — to use one of the online dating cliches — we laughed a lot.

And the restaurant was dark and candle-lit, quietish, with a really good staff.

We were there for three hours.

* * *

And then we stood up to go.

* * *

And I saw again how s. he was, and I also observed (as I had before, but I had suppressed this also) that it wasn’t just that he was s’er than I, but that — well, there was something not quite even or balanced about his frame. To say that he didn’t have a good physique wouldn’t get it quite right, but there was a problem I couldn’t define and, out of caution, will not attempt to describe.

To do “the naked test” on him would have been cruel and was certainly unnecessary. I knew the answer already. I walked him to his bus, and he gave me a very good, satisfying, sensual but on-the-lips-only kiss goodnight.

* * *

I strolled home in the lovely spring air, meditating on the evening. I knew I had a problem.

He had alluded to seeing me again; none of this ‘I’ll call you’ nonsense. No response had been required. I was pondering what I should do when he asked me out again, because it was undeniable that we’d had a very good time, and his kiss was nice, but I knew I would never want to sleep with him.

When I got to my building, the quirky, funny, likable night doorman was on duty, and we engaged in talk about the weather that was just a way of enjoying one another’s company.

* * *

And then suddenly, there was George.

* * *

An elderly man came out of the elevator, and before I knew it he was at my elbow, in fact quite close to me. The doorman introduced us, and before I knew it George (a long-time resident of my building whom I’d never met) had me by the elbow and was insisting I go out drinking with him.

He was meeting a friend at a bar one block away, a bar I had just walked by, and he was very firm in his insistence that I join them. At some pre-articulate level my brain was saying ’should i shouldn’t i — i have work to do still wide awake could get one hour more work in tonight –hey you wanted to be out and about more and to meet more people in your building here’s your chance why not take it what can you lose’ . I knew I still looked nice from my date, though wearing the not-so-wonderful sandals, and I thought, WTF, I’ll go for it.

* * *

So five minutes after I had come in from date with S, I was going out with George. He kept a tight grip on my arm, and was actually closer to me, as we walked, than S had been, though I’d had three hours warm & friendly conversation with S, and I had never known of George’s existence till 90 seconds earlier.

Later I learned that although George was 80 (a divorced grandfather), he really liked younger women, and had had a 27-year-old woman living with him for a year (but not any more). Not that I noticed it consciously at the time — I was too surprised by the sudden turn of events — but George had an old man’s face, a good-looking one, though a spry body and good posture. He was a fast walker.

* * *
He was also stoned.

It relaxed him, he said, and he was certainly relaxed, and then had two martinis on top of the grass.

* * *

I think he was so eager to introduce me to Nick because, five years earlier, he had introduced Nick to a woman also named Mimi who then became Nick’s girlfriend for several years. They were still close, though, Nick told me, they hadn’t had sex for a year (needless to say, I learned a lot of intimate facts about people whose existence had been hitherto completely unknown to me).

Nick was sitting at the bar — the only person sitting at the bar, because 11 pm on Monday is not a very lively hour — as we walked in together — very much together, because I was still clutched at the arm by George — and Nick gave me a long, interested, and curious look.

My first assumption (wrong, as it turned out; quite wrong) was that Nick was gay: he was tall, slender, and bronzed, with dyed-blond hair and blue eyes, and he was introduced to me as a dancer and actor. He wasn’t gay, but he was the kind of man a certain kind of gay man might hit on.

George and Nick wouldn’t let me order a perrier, my first choice (I still had this bizarre notion that I might ‘get some work done tonight’ when I ‘got home’, ha ha), so I ordered another glass of wine.

Soon, quite soon, we were all chums, laughing (them) and giggling (me), because the situation struck me as so funny. Within minutes Nick and I discovered that we were both on match.com, and our conversation never strayed far from that subject for the rest of the night (a long one).

Dating and our dates became an absorbing topic, so absorbing that George insisted on leaving us together, though he came in and out of the bar at various times.

Nick, it turned out, was heterosexual and 58. He dated women in their 60s, he said, as well as women in their 40s and 50s. Suddenly it was in the air that I was a possible date for him. I said pretty soon that I liked to date men in their 60s, but he and George were insistent that I could ‘pass for 48′ and should ‘try for’ younger men. They thought I’d have more fun that way, and I could certainly use more fun, though I was having fun with them at the very pleasant, attractive bar of a lively corner restaurant (but not too lively at 12:30 a.m., when they closed the place down and we had to leave).

At one point George returned with a really cute man who seemed to me to be in his 60s, a man a few inches taller than I with an unobtrusively good build and very nice curly greyish-white hair. Straight or gay? divorced or married or partnered? I had no idea, so I didn’t make a play for him. Nick told me later that Curly had a girlfriend but was looking for another so he could have a fling.

Just as well I didn’t waste energy flirting with him…

* * *

When the bar closed, George went home (my building, only one block away) to smoke some more, and by then Nick and I were engaged in intense conversation about his recent dates. He had had a kind of romantic trauma last week: a woman had broken up with him after their third date, and he was very upset.

We sat on a bench half way between the bar and my building and talked about love and romance till 2 a.m.

The spring breezes floated around us, and people walked by occasionally, and the air was lovely. As we sat facing one another, though at opposite ends of the bench, with about two feet between us, phrases like “had sex together” and “her house” and “fall in love” and “use protection” wafted into the air (from Nick), and passers-by must have thought we were a couple breaking up, or at least doing a heavy-duty analysis of our relationship.

At first I tried to offer little bits of wisdom or entertaining stories, such as they were, from my dates of the past year, but I noticed that whenever I did, Nick yawned…! So I gave up and decided to give myself over to listening to his stories, his many stories of meeting women and going to bed with them.

What a life these New York men have!

Several times in the evening, both earlier at the bar and later on the bench, I couldn’t help but notice Nick looking me over and checking me out. He made it clear he thought I was attractive, and he felt something must be wrong with my online profile if I wasn’t having lots of romances. I realized I needed to make a decision about whether or not to flirt with him, and it was fairly easy to decide not to: he was nice-looking, but I wasn’t really attracted to him, so I let my quasi-sisterly interest in his romances come to the fore, and I was fairly definitive about being interested in sexagenarian men.

* * *

After I had heard the traumatic story of the end of last week’s romance for the fifth or sixth time (in addition to many other sexual adventures, mostly interesting to me, because it’s illuminating to hear the story of a fling’s or a relationship’s progression from the man’s POV), I looked at my watch and saw it was 2 a.m.

OMG, look what time it is! I said and stood up. Nick walked me the half-block to my building’s awning and turned to go home.

* * *

The doorman was a bit surprised…he had introduced me to George three hours earlier; we had instantly disappeared together out the door, and then George had returned without me! He was happy to see me.

* * *

That was my 3-man evening: dinner with one; invitation to drinks with another; and most of the evening spent with a third, who walked me home.

So last night had everything……….except, of course, sex, romance, and the beginning of a long-term relationship; in short, everything except what I’m looking for.

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