Free A Certain Age by Beatriz Williams Page A

Wahls’ place? Fourth of July? I thought you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Everybody talked about you as if you were some kind of goddess. And then you came up to me.”
    â€œAnd you sent me away.”
    â€œBecause I knew what would happen if I didn’t.”
    â€œThis?”
    â€œThis.” He puts down the wine and reaches forward to lift me onto his lap so I’m straddling him at the waist. He buries his face between my breasts. “You know, the honest truth, I might have killed myself that summer, just back from France, if it weren’t for you.”
    The Boy’s hair is soft in my hands, and his breath is hot. His fingers wander along my hips. He smells of soap and sweat and New York winter air, of youth and vigor. I cradle the indestructible roundness of his skull in my palms and imagine him in the dining room of a modest New York brownstone, sitting next to a fair-haired young lady, talking about art. Her bosom is firm and buoyant, and her cheeks are as pink as his. On the backs of her smooth, white hands, the veins are still invisible. And yet the Boy doesn’t care. He doesn’t notice.
    â€œI saved you, darling Boyo,” I said. “Don’t forget that.”
    â€œAs if I could.”
    WHEN I FIRST CAME OUT, I couldn’t stand all the boys my own age. I thought they were silly and scrawny and impossibly callow, that they only wanted to talk about football and baseball, that they couldn’t dance and couldn’t dress and couldn’t pay you a proper compliment. Sylvo was thirty-six years old when we met, almost twenty years older than I was, and when he walked into my parents’ opera box that evening, I thought he was a god. He looked immaculate and fully grown, like a stag of mighty antlers, and he sat down next to me and discussed the first act of Lucia as if he actually cared about what I thought, as if he actually knew about music. He smelledof richly made shaving soap and cigars. By the end of the evening, I was in love with him.
    Does that surprise you? Yes, I was in love with Sylvo, and I expect he was in love with me, in the way that a thirty-six-year-old man loves a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl: covetously, self-indulgently. On the night of our wedding, he set about his matrimonial duty in the manner of a tutor instructing a favored pupil, and when he was finished he put on a dressing gown and smoked a cigar. We were quite happy, I think. We suited each other perfectly; we were each exactly what the other one required. When Tommy was born, ten months later, no man could possibly have been more delighted than Sylvo. Another cigar. (And I suppose he smoked yet another, soon afterward, when his mistress gave birth to their daughter.)
    The point is, in my early days, I looked at younger men with nothing but scorn, valuing neither their smooth skin nor their coltish vigor nor their single-minded simplicity. I preferred sophistication in those days, because I didn’t understand what sophistication really was, and how it was earned. I preferred wisdom and experience and polish, because I didn’t appreciate the sentiment behind a young man’s awkward eagerness to please. When I first went to bed with the Boy, he wanted not to instruct, but to be instructed. His flesh was firm under my hands. His skin sprang back from my fingertips. His strength was neverending. Afterward, we shared a cigarette, and then we repeated the exercise, again and again, until we were both half dead, until the sheets were an awful mess. At sunrise, he got up and made me breakfast.
    And I decided, right then, that there was something to be said for a young lover, after all.
    BUT WE DON’T HAVE ALL night this January evening, and anyway the Boy isn’t in the mood for limitless exercise. At eleven o’clock we dress each other sleepily and head downstairs and out onto the street, to the frosty corner of Seventh Avenue. The Boy