The Widower, by Barbara Rose
THE WIDOWER
“Clit?”
“Clint. Like Eastwood! Can you hear?” he snaps on the phone. He has an Australian accent. “Sure. Clint.”
He sighs. “People say I look like him.”
“Uh huh. Do you want to Skype?”
“I like surprises. I never put up my picture. I saw your picture on your column. We’ll do just fine.”
His profile says he’s a sixty-nine-year old widower and venture capitalist. We decide to meet at Nick’s Jazz Club on Fillmore Street.
It’s dark in the restaurant. Louis Armstrong music plays from a juke bpx.
A tall lanky man taps me on the shoulder. He has this extra long thin neck and very long thin arms and hands and legs. He looks like Gumby. His pompadour style tan hair is puffed high. Black Matters is printed on the front of his snug white t-shirt. His too snug jeans accentuate his bony body.
I extend my hand.
He smiles eagerly, revealing too white veneer teeth. “I know you’ll write a great story about me. I liked Did You Take Your Pill? Laughed my head off. Those poor schlebs. I don’t need high blood pressure ‘pills, and Viagra. I have a lot to say.”
“Sounds like it.’’
When our drinks come he raises his glass as if toasting us. “Cheers,” I say, gulping the vodka shot.
“I googled you,” he says, popping cashew nuts into his small pursed mouth. “I read The Viagra Diaries. You write about jerks. Maybe it’s time to write about non jerks?”
Close up, his tan looks sprayed on. He orders another round.
“I haven’t had a real drink like this in years. Or been with a hottie like you. I can’t believe you’re seventy-eight.” He shrugs his narrow shoulders. “Most women your age have breasts that go South, and faces so lined you can stick a card in the cracks.”
“I know women who have all that and they’re beautiful. That’s the trouble with age stigma. A lot of men think that unless a woman looks like Pamela Anderson they’re a throw-a-way.”
He guzzles the rest of his drink and raises his hand to the waitress, and orders another. “When did your wife die?” I ask after a long silence.
“Two days ago.” He shrugs. He chews another nut.
“And you were on line the next day?”
“She wouldn’t have wanted me to grieve.”
He blinks, watching the young waitress with the low cut blouse, lean over the table. “How did she die?”
He shrugs. “On her way to the beauty parlor. She tripped in the street and broke her hip and then died from complications.”
“Shame,” I murmur.
He shrugs again. “My Viagra and me are good to go. I put in my 35 years.” Then the louse talks smack about his poor dead wife. They hadn’t had sex in years. She never “understood” him. She was a “klutz” a “dope, had too much cellulite, and “ was a lousy cook. “She developed a strange smell.”
“Well, I have to get going. Gotta go. Deadlines.”
“I can’t wait to read what you write about me,” he says.
*
ON THE PHONE AN HOUR LATER
“Their wives are barely cold and they’re posting their body parts on face book,” I tell Janet. “Women are used to dumbing down for these men. He’s joined Black Matters, and a rape organization just to meet women.”
“At our age the women settle,” Janet says. “Marian Hoffman’s new guy, a failed sixty-year-old painter is going through her money. Once in a while he takes her to Ming’s for dinner and then expects a blowjob.”
“Freak.”
“The widowers are good prey. One blow on their teeny weenies, and they’ll marry you. They all complain their wives were bad in the feathers. Just give them a donut and they’ll fuck it. Any hole will do.”
