A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska Page A

you get what you’re looking for. You deserve it.”
    I wish I could quote a witty rejoinder here, something like “Fuck you.” But I can’t. I was too angry, too confused, too humiliated, to put anything into words. What was I looking for?
    Back home, I call the hotel and release some of my anger onto housekeeping. Where the hell were those flutes? I want to know. When the woman assures me they have looked everywhere to no avail, I say, “I would like to be paid for those flutes. I would like you to replace them.”
    The rest of the day passes like molasses on cement. Exhausted, I thank whatever it is that brings eight P.M. around. Thank goodness I can go to sleep and tomorrow everything will be, will be . . . I open my bag and throw everything into the laundry basket: my red nightshirt, my pajama pants. Wait a minute, where are my pajama pants? I plow through my underwear, my socks, throw my shoes on the floor. No pants. Where on earth? Probably tangled at the bottom of the bed. I call housekeeping. No pants, no red-white-and-blue shorties.
    And then it hits me. Housekeeping hadn’t taken the flutes. Jonah had. And he had taken my pajama pants. No one else could have, no one else would have. I race for my purse— money is all there. What could he have wanted, this liar, this thief, this eighty-two-year-old man who had brought me back to life, sort of? Eventually, certainly not then, I would feel flattered. In his way, he wanted to remember his adventure to the other side of the country, to a woman he had courted across the ether, in a place too rich for his blood. I hope that’s right.
    A long time later, months later, when I was able to think about Jonah and me without cringing, without crying, I considered the matter of age and passion and desire. Jonah, I’d bet anything, wondered if he still could; I was a way of finding out. More than that, like me, he was looking for a place for his passion. The world has little use for us: we are old, what business have we with passion? So we found each other and who would know? Who would care? Old people, they should be dry. But we weren’t.
    Not at all philosophical that first night, I sit on my futon swathed in my big old pajamas and think about my ad: So, is it answered? Did I have a lot of sex with a man I like? Kind of, sort of, maybe. But I got rejected. No matter what he stole, he didn’t want me. I got dry, I got ugly, I got whatever I got to make him not desire me. “I don’t desire you,” he said. Oh god, I hurt. It would take me a long time before I could imagine that Jonah, too, hurt. What Jonah was saying, I believe, was just that: he no longer desired me. I hadn’t done wrong; neither had he. For more than two whole days, he had desired me and done wonderfully well by me. I suspect that is why, despite my imperious demands for his sexual history, my insistence on being in control, he flew three thousand miles—he wanted to find out about himself. Sexual partners for older men are no doubt as scarce as they are for older women. And here was my ad, blatantly, boldly calling for sex. If he had told me by e-mail of his real age, would I have urged him to come all this way? Would I have met his plane if he had? No, I would not have. I am ashamed.
    But I would not get philosophical for a long time. That night, I think only of myself. I open the bottle of wine I bought in the week before Jonah’s arrival. Perhaps, I had hoped, we would get along so well we might spend an hour or so in my very own cottage. He might like me not so rich as the Claremont suggested I was. Face facts. He doesn’t desire me.
    I drink the whole bottle.

SEVEN
    Back to the Couch
    You’d think I would have quit. Heavy losses in the first two rounds. Low test scores. Injuries painful though not fatal. I am, however, an equal opportunity woman. One Catholic, one Jew, how about an Episcopalian or a Muslim or—now, this