Candy at Last (23 page)

After Larry and I went to dinner a couple of times, my friend Nancy’s daughter, Whitney, sat me down. Whitney was twenty-seven years old. This wasn’t a friendly chat. It was “the talk.” Even my mother and I never had “the talk.” Whitney felt it was essential to bring me up to speed on the brave new world of dating. She explained that dating wasn’t the same as it was when I was dating Aaron and before I dated Aaron. I told her I had already figured that out. She told me bluntly she wasn’t talking about dinner and a movie versus
dinner and dancing. She bluntly said that before there was any sex, I really needed to ask my intended for a health report.

I suddenly felt like a dinosaur in a sex education class. A health report? I was supposed to ask a man I barely knew for a health report? Oh, and we were already talking about sex? I was still dealing with the notion of just
kissing
another man that wasn’t Aaron. This jogged my memory and brought to mind the days when people warned that you could get mononucleosis from kissing a boy.

How times had changed.

A kiss really is the most intimate thing. The other is just an act that anyone can do. For a woman, at least for me, intimacy in bed is not nearly as personal as a kiss. For women, it’s always the foreplay that’s more exciting. For men, it’s a whole different story.

When I did finally kiss Larry, it just wasn’t the same as what I recalled when I kissed Aaron for the first time and so many times after that. Now I’m not saying I didn’t feel a little “you know” … but it wasn’t the same kind of “you know,” and I wasn’t expecting the kiss to feel the same. To tell you the truth, I think I felt a little guilty that I was kissing somebody else at all.

Back to well-intentioned Whitney and her lecture on the birds and the bees and health reports. She really was so protective of me and clearly wanted to help me protect myself in more ways than one. She went on to say that not only did I need a full health report from my date, but even if I were presented with a clean bill of health, he also still needed to wear a condom. I was just appalled. I had only had sex with two men and I had been married to both of them. I mean, wasn’t it bad enough that I had to ask a man for a health report? Now and possibly worse, I was supposed to ask a man to wear a condom? At that point, any suspicions I had about the difference between old dating and new dating were confirmed.

Apparently in the world of middle-aged dating in the twenty-first century, if you have dinner or drinks twice, it’s almost expected that you jump into bed with one another. Oscar the Octopus measured progress by the drink, and he had a one-drink rule. Here’s the thing: I’m not naive and if memory serves me correctly, in my day, once you’d been dating for months, yes, the issue eventually came up. Romance sure had changed since the 1960s when love was free and not
getting pregnant was the only thing that a girl worried about. Larry and I had only gone to dinner a couple of times and seriously, was I supposed to ask him for his medical report and buy a supply of condoms? I listened to Whitney and took everything seriously, but it all seemed a bit premature at that point.

Well, after two months, the subject did come up with Larry. We were kissing one evening and it seemed clear that things might go further in the romance department. I took it upon myself to interrupt the session. I told him point-blank that I needed him to give me a health report.

Talk about a showstopper. Larry was a good sport, though. Maybe he was more aware of the new ways of the dating world than I was. He sat me down beside him like a child who was about to be lectured. I made sure to give him my full attention. In exchange, he gave me a kind and reassuring look.

“Oh, honey, you don’t need a health report from me. I had prostate cancer and my prostate was removed. And besides, I haven’t been sleeping around.”

That was not the answer I was expecting to hear. Suddenly I heard Whitney’s voice loud in my head. I asked him what the removal of his prostate had to do with sexually transmitted diseases. I reiterated that I still wanted a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

Larry got the picture, and within a few days, he had submitted his report to me. His marks were high. He had an A plus. It makes me laugh that although it really is a serious issue, nowadays having sex is like applying for a job. You require everything but the references. Despite Larry’s squeaky-clean health report, I still had to deal with the condom issue. I commended Larry for the squeaky-clean report but knew nothing was going to happen unless we used a condom.

I had only bought condoms once in my life, and it was just after Tori was born. The doctor instructed us to have protected sex for six weeks. I went into Aaron’s office to remind him.

“So you’re going to get the prophylactics, right?”

Aaron was on the phone, as usual, engrossed in conversation. It was clear the task was up to me. I was in a room outside of Aaron’s office and I picked up the phone and just called the drugstore. I didn’t have the nerve to go in and buy them, so I figured I would just order them over the phone and then someone, or
even I, could pick them up in a well-disguised brown paper bag. There I was on the phone with the drugstore when Aaron’s assistant came in and sat down next to me. I had to whisper into the receiver with my hand cupped over the mouthpiece so he wouldn’t hear me.

“This is Mrs. Spelling. I’d like to order some prophylactics please.”

It was all very cloak and dagger, and my whispering was so muffled that the man at the drugstore couldn’t hear me. He kept saying, “What? Who is this? What is it you want? Can you speak up?” Finally it was just hopeless, so I just spoke up.

“This is Mrs. Spelling, and I need to buy prophylactics.”

Aaron’s assistant got a little bit squirmy and looked the other way. You can imagine how mortifying it was for me to buy condoms as newly single woman when I couldn’t buy them forty years earlier as a married woman who had just had a child.

Times have changed in more ways than one. Now that we need the condoms on dates almost in the same way we need breath mints, it’s harder to buy them anonymously. You can’t just pick up the phone and call your neighborhood drugstore anymore. You can order them online, but I worry about what kind of spam would start filtering into my inbox the instant I place an order for condoms.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought it might be time for me to take charge of my life and walk into a drugstore and buy them. I mean, I had learned to use a computer, an iPhone, and an iPad. Maybe this was just part of being a modern woman?

To say I was in a panic as I walked into a mega-pharmacy on La Cienega Boulevard doesn’t quite capture it. I wanted to be far enough away from home that nobody I knew would see me. I also hoped this wouldn’t be on those moments where somebody walked up to me and asked, “Aren’t you …” Maybe I should have worn the trench coat, fedora, and sunglasses with the fake nose after all.

I waited until there was no one else around me and finally found my way to the condom section. I was absolutely stunned that there was what seemed like an entire aisle dedicated to condoms and other male and female intimacy products. It was overwhelming. It was no different than buying shampoo.
Shampoos for normal hair, dry hair, oily hair, normal to dry hair, normal to oily hair, straight, curly, more volume, taming, color guard, even shampoos that make your hair grow.

As far as I could tell, it was the same thing with the condoms. There were so many varieties that my head was spinning. Latex, lambskin, polyurethane. Different strengths, sizes, textures, shapes, and I won’t even go into the novelty choices and colors. I was a “Breck girl,” so I had no idea what to buy. I suppose I could have called Whitney since she was my advisor, but I felt that I needed to ask a man. I dialed my son from my cell phone. It all came pouring out in one long, breathless sentence.

“Okay, Randy, you’ve got to be a big boy about this. I’m about to tell you something and it’s going to sound a little scary but I need to buy condoms and I don’t know what kind to buy but I’m in the condom aisle at the drugstore and I can read you the labels and you tell me what I should get.”

I can’t even begin to tell you how uncomfortable Randy was. I wasn’t even sure he was still on the phone until I heard him take a very deep breath and sigh. He agreed to help me. I could tell he was implementing the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule. With my cell phone cupped in my hand, I started at one end of the aisle and began to work my way through all the packages. I read all the descriptions to Randy out loud while he listened in silence on his end of the phone. Reading the descriptions for the condoms was as tough as reading a contract or blueprints. I can read contracts and line drawings and understand them easily at this point in my life, but all those different condoms were another story. When you consider I was reviewing them with my son, it added another dimension to what was happening on that aisle of the drugstore.

I tried to be clinical as I moved across the shelf. Randy was quiet until I got to the ones that said something like “Magnum Large Size.”

“No, Mom. That’s not good. Not good at all. That’s not what you want to buy. You could make a guy feel really bad if you bought those.”

I can’t remember exactly what kind Randy told me to buy. I waited until the line cleared at the register and when I handed them to the clerk, I tried to act very casual and matter of fact about the whole thing as though I bought
condoms every day. Then I skulked through the parking lot and got in the car. I was exhausted. Getting ready for a date sure wasn’t just setting your hair in rollers like it used to be.

I have to give Randy a lot of credit. He really was terrific about the whole episode. A few days later, he even called and asked how everything “went.” That was a big deal for Randy, especially because I’m convinced that my two children believe that I had only had sex twice in my life. I guess your kids are just your kids regardless of how old they are.

Larry was way more ready than I was to hop into bed. I kept trying to put him off. “No, it’s too soon. I need more time.”

It was a good two months before I was ready. I realized that I was with a decent guy (with a clean health report). I was ready to take the plunge and I was armed with condoms.

Despite the fact that Larry passed the health report, he had one caveat he wanted to explain. As it turned out, it wasn’t just that Larry had his prostate removed. Larry also had a penile implant. I learned that sometimes when a man has his prostate removed as Larry had, he can’t perform the way he did prior to the surgery. I also learned that there are different kinds of implants. Larry’s penile implant was the inflatable kind. He explained the mechanism to me, but I still didn’t quite understand it. Even though I searched the Web afterwards, I still couldn’t figure it out exactly how it was going to work. Honestly, the best way to explain it was “pump and dump.” Once I told my girlfriends about his condition, “Pump and Dump” became his nickname.

Larry didn’t really talk about the situation too much, but he did say it was very expensive and he was glad he could afford it. I have to admit, it was rather strange. Here I was having sex for the first time since I had become a widow, and I was with a bionic man of sorts. The penile implant may have been great for Larry, but it was horrible for me. My bionic man could go on for five or six hours and there is no woman, middle-aged or otherwise, who wants to have sex for that long. It was like running a marathon. I can’t believe it took six months, but there finally came a time when I decided that I didn’t want to date Larry anymore. Actually, it wasn’t because of the implant but simply because he was getting too attached, and I didn’t want to feel attached to anyone.

Another reason that I broke up with Larry was that sex was such a big deal for him. He was insatiable and I just couldn’t take those six-hour romps anymore. Larry was a kind, sweet man, so I felt badly when I broke up with him. While we were dating, I had had surgery for carpal tunnel syndrome, and he came to visit me while I was recovering. He brought me candy and flowers. He was a really good guy.

I was right on our first date when I felt that he was looking for a wife. Larry ended up getting married a couple of years after we broke up. I’m glad he found someone and I hope she’s not too exhausted.

I moved on from Larry and wound up having a brief relationship with “Not-Curious George.” George and I did not get off to the best start. It seemed promising at first when he drove to my house, picked me up in his nice car, and then drove me to a cozy little restaurant on Doheny Drive. When we got to the restaurant, George did something I had never seen done before. He brought his own bottle of wine in a little drawstring sack and handed it to the maître d'. I had no idea that people could bring their own special bottle of wine and pay a corkage fee for having the server open the wine. I’ve learned that sometimes the corkage fee is more expensive than the wine, and sometimes it’s less expensive. I wondered, was George a wine snob or was he too cheap to buy a bottle of wine from the restaurant’s wine list? Neither scenario was particularly appealing to me.

It also struck me as a bit controlling. What if I had wanted to order a glass of wine off the list or what if I didn’t enjoy wine? George’s wine turned out to be a red wine. I wondered if I should act more appreciative of the wine since he had gone to so much trouble.

A million questions ran through my head that evening. I am almost certain that no questions ran through George’s head at all. George was nearly silent as we sat at our table and the server opened his wine and poured it for us. I found myself making all of the conversation, maybe overtalking to compensate for his lack of talking. Because it was our first date, I thought George might be feeling shy. I thought for sure he’d comment on his wine or ask me what I thought of the wine, but that was not the case. I refused to give up and kept asking him questions. After a while I realized he hadn’t asked me even one question about myself. By the time we left the restaurant, I knew quite a bit
about George: the ages of his children, why his marriage had ended, that he had served in the military, and also what made him choose the profession he was in. I also knew he wasn’t the least bit curious about me.