Free Unrequited by Lisa A. Phillips Page B

One night she met Johnny. He spent the evening following her from one bar to the next. They started dating. He was good-looking, and he couldn’t take his eyes off of her. He was also loud and boisterous. He smoked pot. He got around by hitchhiking. It was 1969, and plenty of young people were doing the same things. She shrugged off any doubts she may have had. Johnny had chosen her. She was ready to be chosen, and that was that.
    She would spend most of their thirty-five years together trying to get him to, as she put it, “be good.” She attended mass regularly and kept a strict workout schedule. She urged him to be more religious and take better care of himself. He shunned church, brought junk food into the house, and rarely exercised. He kept smoking pot. He got arrested for shoplifting. He was devoted to their son and loved his part-time work as a bus driver, even though it didn’t bring in a lot of money. Maria’s steady government job made her the family breadwinner. She was mad at him most of the time. Sex—which he seemed to want all the time—lost its appeal. She often endured it by fantasizing about other men.
    When Maria was fifty-nine, Johnny died after a long bout withcancer. Several months after she was widowed, she struck up a conversation with Scott, a clerk she knew at a sporting-goods store she frequented. She found out that they went to the same church. “I thought, ‘I could really get along with this guy,’” she said. “He seemed so nice, and I wouldn’t have to worry about how to convince him to be different.”
    After a few more chats, she got up the nerve to ask Scott to go to Barnes & Noble with her. They browsed and talked. He told her that after he’d had a heart attack twelve years earlier, he’d changed his life completely. He stopped drinking and lost weight. He became so devout that he decided to be celibate until he found the right woman and married her. He’d been a bachelor all his life. All this made him thrillingly appropriate as a mate, though she worried that he might be holding out for a younger woman he could have children with. She was a decade older than he was. “The chances of me at this age finding somebody unmarried who is Catholic, interested in working out, and I’m attracted to him on top of it all? The chances of getting somebody better than that? Forget about it. I didn’t think I would find anybody else who would be such a great match,” she said.
    For six months, they saw each other regularly. She usually initiated their outings. “I thought I had to be doubly aggressive because this guy was so passive and shy,” she said. “I called him up. I thought, ‘This is great.’ It was a new experience for me to ask someone out. I was having the time of my life.”
    Their physical relationship was limited to hugs. She didn’t want to have intercourse, but she wanted to be intimate with him. She mailed him a copy of a passage from one of her religious books about how it was morally wrong to have sex unless it was meant for procreation. It was her way of letting him know that she supported his decision to abstain, and that she planned to draw the line in the same place. He replied with a brief note: Thanks for the material. Ihope you find what you’re looking for. “In other words, a kiss-off,” Maria said.
    She couldn’t accept it. She started to court him more ardently. “I thought, I never pursued a guy before in my life! And maybe that’s why I never got the guy I wanted.”
    They continued to spend time together. She schemed about how she might make a pass at him. At home, she felt surrounded by memories of her late husband. It didn’t feel right to be with another man in the same space where she’d lived for so long with her husband. Eventually, she got up the nerve to take Scott down to the basement, where the presence of her husband didn’t loom as large. They fooled around. She felt aroused in a way she hadn’t since the beginning of her