Twenty years later, he still had not gotten over the breakup: the chasm of his eternal misery, he called it. And so we, now the age of grandfathers, and sitting in my bachelor's apartment, picked up the interminable thread of our one and only topic of conversation in over a quarter century of friendship: women. We spoke of failed loves, forgettable lovers, and our loveless days spent in the embrace of solitude, and I told him that I held no rancor toward Laura, the wingless angel who without warning left me after two years of unworldly euphoria, many years ago (for I understood her departure to be a simple matter of abandoning me to my fate as a condemned bachelor). He sighed, humidifying the entire room with his acidic breath, and said:
"For me, old man, it's all the same: just another night of grief and memories."
And with that redundant line of his I snapped, finally, turning on the man whose tearless dejection I had provided an ear and a 12-pack of Guinness for ever since he split with the woman who ensnared his virginity two decades ago. "Shit, Hubert," I said, "get over it: She was just a whore!"
He had met her—Sarah Michelle Hensen—in one of the many taciturn bars proliferating around Las Vegas in 1993, full of men and women who would lament their congenital bad luck but persisted to feed the video poker machines with one twenty after another at any rate. She accosted him because he had made the neonative's mistake of leaving out his bankroll, much larger than it is now, in plain view. She put a hand on his shoulder and it set off a three o'clock alarm in his masculinity, for he had never been touched with the seductive fingers of a woman before. His mother's—yes; those of his best friend, Gina, a tomboy who went with him to clubs and coffee shops to search for the girls they both coveted but never approached—yes; but a woman with authentic and undormant sexual impulses running through the tips of her fingers—no. Never. This was the first time. And so his tongue failed him when he turned around, and he could feel a glacial drop of sweat trickle down from his armpit. Then she put her other hand in his hippie's hair, scratched his scalp, and smiled. "Your cute," she said. He nearly climaxed.
Later that night his soul was at ease, not only because he had purged his body clean of tension and longing, but also because he was convinced that he had obtained the better half of the deal. A man who had no moral quandaries with either premarital sex or paying for it, Hubert believed the soupy taste of her breath and the oceanic smell of her inner thighs, and above all the obsequious sounds of her pants and moans and screams (all of which would remain permanent and inexorable in his memory) to be well worth the $423 he handed her with exceeding gratitude as she lay next to him, opting not to redress herself and depart him without even a businesslike kiss, as she normally did with clients, but instead, remaining naked and tender in his bed, playing with his shaggy hair and whispering in his ear: "You know, cutie, for the right price I would just about marry you here and now."
Their matrimony did not in fact occur that unforgettable night, nor the next, but rather, two weeks later, after Hubert's twenty-fifth birthday passed in the delirium of Sarah Michelle's costly love. I knew him back then because his father and I, both construction workers, used to terrorize this city with our carousing between sleepless bars after work, sharing stories and family secrets with one another, five days of the week, every week. Up until Hubert's dad hit it big on a slot machine, that is. He won two million. The wise old man paid his taxes on the sum, gave to his wife and son a quarter of what remained, and then jetted town, never to be seen in Las Vegas again. I used to visit Hubert and his mom every now and then, to inquire about my old friend, and in this way I came to learn of Hubert's hasty marriage.
"Where's the fire," I would say, adding my grandfather's eternal advice: "Take it easy, my boy."
"You don't understand, Jeremy," was his typical response. "This woman is a professional when it comes to giving love."
I attended their wedding at the Little White Chapel on the Strip. It was an inglorious ceremony, attended by only Hubert's mother, myself, and a handful of Sarah Michelle's regulars, who objected when given the customary chance and who wept like little boys when no one paid attention. The bride and groom walked out, and from their postures—perky and robust, like all newlyweds—no one would have guessed that in two weeks they would be filing for divorce just down the street.
In reality Hubert did not want the divorce, resisted it evenr. Because, above all, he was scared—frightened to death that he would never again kiss a girl with such thick, lively lips, or speak to a girl with such enthusiasm for all of life's simplest pleasures, or lie with a girl with such sidereal breasts and hypnotic sex. (And the sad reality is, Hubert never would.) But she was indomitable, and in the end he gave her an uncontested divorce rather than provide refuge to the many clients she vowed to hustle on his very bed while he worked to maintain the mortgage, as well as her promised weekly allowance.
It was Sarah's good fortune that they had met and lived in Las Vegas, where quickie divorces had been born 62 years earlier, for it made the disconnection just as efficient as the matrimony. And for her it was painless too, because unlike Hubert, she did not have to go on living without the slightest idea as to the reason(s) behind the sudden and unforeseen split.
I knew that it panged him as much today—I could see in his anguished eyebrows as we sat with our backs reclined and our feet elevated, facing each other—as it did during those earth-shattering days, some 20 years ago.
"She wasn't a whore!" he said, nonetheless. "Not to me. I mean, if only you could have known...I mean, those lips..." Hubert paused. "You're a real son of a bitch," he said. "What would you know about love?"
Not much. It was true. Like I had told anyone who had ears to hear, it was not in my blood to love a woman. My father, following the inevitable trend of his father, and his father's father, divorced the only woman to whom he pledged his unconditional loyalty and lifelong love, in the historical year of 1931, when the state of Nevada liberalized its divorce laws. My father tried to make the marriage work, if for nothing else than the pity he felt for the woman he had married, who was still as breathtaking as the endless Central California orchids at sunrise, but who was an absolute pain in the balls to live with. She nagged, she bitched, and then she would cry like a fiend when he reproached her. They lived in a house in Fresno much too small for their explosive quarrels, and despite her vast experience she gave him sex but once a week, and that was only so that he could maintain his honor as a man, which both she and my father deemed paramount to maintaining his sanity.
It didn't work, however. Not according to the official divorce papers I was able to retrieve several years later. They had listed, as the permissible reason for the divorce, that my father was clinically insane. (I later discovered that his best drinking buddy in Las Vegas was a doctor whose signature was trusted in every medical field known back then, and that my father obtained it after seven shots of whiskey.) They also had to move to Las Vegas for six weeks—to fulfill Clark County's lenient residency requirement—in order to obtain a quickie divorce, and in the end nothing came out of that ephemeral marriage but an enormous bill from the dude ranch at which they waited in the same bed (but he now as a paying customer) for the six weeks to elapse, and a little baby boy, whose custody would not be decided in the courts, but rather, over a series of roshambo, because neither my father nor my mother wanted me. My father lost.
"Now, Jeremy, boy, listen to me now," he said one day when I was 12. "I should tell you that finding a good woman—you know, one worth settling down with—is like winning one them poker tournaments: you gotta have alotta skill, and you gotta have alotta luck too. And, my son, we Stupens don't have either."
Which was the very reason I had been delaying marriage—or even the proposal of marriage—with Jacqueline for the past seven years. Hubert, no doubt, was thinking of her when he said "What would you know about love?" because I had told him, quite frankly, that I did not love my girlfriend, and that if possible, I would like to postpone talks of marriage until the grass on my grave was withering brown. She, as ever, had just asked me that morning exactly when it was that I planned to drop to one knee and fulfill the last of her girlhood dreams.
"Damn woman: don't you know we're married by this town's standards."
"It's not the same," she said. "Until I have a ring, it's not the same."
"You know, Jacky," I said, cool and facetious. "We'll be married by common law in just a few more years."
"Eat shit and die, you old fart."
"You cooking breakfast again?"
"Your problem, young friend," I told Hubert, pouring myself another rum and Diet Coke, "is that you choose not to see the truth, which is, like my daddy used to say:
"Love in this town ain't nothin' but a desert mirage."
Hubert was impregnable. "Only for doomed old men like you."
If that spear he aimed at my heart wasn't so true it might have hurt, but the fact of the matter is that he couldn't have been more dead on. At the age of 82, I was a man of no vocations and, in all certainty, no fortune. All I ever had in this world with which to work was my good looks and burro's tool.
Nevertheless, Jacqueline, for reasons mysterious to me, came to adore me in that unforgettable winter of 2006, when through the ruthlessness of her sex--forsaking all rules of convention and, and even those compassionate delicacies which separate humans from animals--she managed to reduce me to my essence: a scared little boy.
The phone rang.
I hit the talk button on my phone, said "Yes, good-lookin'?" and then surrendered to her silence. Without greetings she said:
"It's now or never, old man."
She didn't need to say anymore. We both knew what she meant. I thought: I am 82 years old; I've slept in the saltine sheets of exactly 39 women, living with none of them; and only once have I ever felt that warm, irrepressible swelling in my chest I assume is love. Certainly not with Jacqueline. My father, when I asked him why he divorced mama, said, "Hell, I don't know, boy. I mean, when we got hitched, it felt right at that time, but. I don't know." The same reason, more or less, Sarah Michelle had just, after two decades of silence, e-mailed Hubert 15 minutes before he came pounding on my apartment door.
And so I told Jacqueline, my voice sangfroid and impervious: "Never. It will be never, then. Jacky."
Her heart cracked, I know, because her voice was deep and fissured. She said: "In that case, this will be the last time you ever hear from me."
"It's a shame," I said. And then she hung up.
Yet, I can now say, without a quiver in my octogenarian's voice, that I do not feel even an ounce of guilt over the whole matter. For it was fated.
Hubert, of course, asked me what the phone call was all about, and after I recounted everything to him, he asked: "Why, you foolish old man, why?"
I've never been more truthful in my response: "Because, my young friend, I do not want to spend the remaining 18 years of my life suffering your despair."