experience?” I laughed out loud in a staged way, hoping to temporarily pull the conversation away from its gravitas and push it toward something more familiar. “A girl had to have more tolerance than Nelson Mandela while she waited for you to move from first smile to first kiss, let alone anything that might happen beyond that. How many times did one of them ask you out before you got around to asking them?”
Adams laughed. “Some of them gave up and moved on, I suspect.”
“I was an important instrument in the first stage of your ritual,” I reminded him. “How many cafeteria tables and hallway lockers did you dispatch me to?”
It had been my job to leak news to a girl or her friends that Adams was interested. I was trained to assess reactions and report comments when his name was mentioned or after a staged walk-by. I’d marveled at the amount of information Adams had to assemble and carefully analyze before he moved from thought to action—a process that almost always led his object of interest to eventually approach him and introduce herself.
“You’re right. I guess that’s the way it usually happened.” Adams’s face grew serious, his voice soft but firm: “But I’m not talking about arranging a first date here. I’m talking about making a commitment.”
At the word “commitment” his expression resembled a baby tasting Gerber’s creamed asparagus for the first time.
Adams stopped for a moment and stared out the window again, carefully assembling what he was about to say next. “I’ve always done badly with women over forty. Until now, I never shared their sense of urgency to stake out a committed relationship.”
A line from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice came into my head: “A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.” My photographic memory often spilled over from the backs of baseball cards to books. I was pleasantly surprised that I had retained some of that ability in my old age.
“That’s one of the reasons why I’ve preferred relationships with younger women. Nothing’s forced when you’re involved with them. It is what it is—a moment to be enjoyed. You try to string as many of those moments together as you can before she finally realizes you’re her father’s age and you’ve run out of things to talk about.”
Adams was animated, tottering precariously on the edge of his chair’s leather cushion. I was making a substantial effort to follow his tortuous train of thought.
I didn’t interrupt him to ask questions. He eventually got back on subject.
“The rush-to-matrimony phenomenon didn’t seem to affect Christina. All that dating-women-over-forty stuff was absent from what we were talking about and what we were doing before I left for Iraq. We were as spontaneous as twenty-year-olds. She’d pass the newspaper to me on Sunday morning and say, ‘Let’s go there Wednesday night.’ She’d call me on a cold December day and say, ‘Drive me to the Como Park Conservatory. I’ve got to see green, tropical plants.’ We did a dozen things like that. I enjoyed all of them. And I marked each one of them by pushing myself closer to her and letting her into places that had been off-limits for a long, long time.”
Adams paused for a few seconds and stared at the carpet. “During my flight from Istanbul to Amman, the first leg of my trip home, I decided to go all-in with Christina. I had two days to debrief and decompress in Amman.”
Adams dropped down from his chair and onto the carpet, sitting cross-legged now, at my eye level, on the other side of the coffee table. “The day before I headed home, I took a taxi to the old marketplace in Amman. There are two streets in the bazaar filled with jewelry shops. I found a beautiful green amber stone, a silver antique ring setting, and a jeweler who mounted the stone in the ring—all in one afternoon. I called Christina from the hotel to tell her
Adams laughed. “Some of them gave up and moved on, I suspect.”
“I was an important instrument in the first stage of your ritual,” I reminded him. “How many cafeteria tables and hallway lockers did you dispatch me to?”
It had been my job to leak news to a girl or her friends that Adams was interested. I was trained to assess reactions and report comments when his name was mentioned or after a staged walk-by. I’d marveled at the amount of information Adams had to assemble and carefully analyze before he moved from thought to action—a process that almost always led his object of interest to eventually approach him and introduce herself.
“You’re right. I guess that’s the way it usually happened.” Adams’s face grew serious, his voice soft but firm: “But I’m not talking about arranging a first date here. I’m talking about making a commitment.”
At the word “commitment” his expression resembled a baby tasting Gerber’s creamed asparagus for the first time.
Adams stopped for a moment and stared out the window again, carefully assembling what he was about to say next. “I’ve always done badly with women over forty. Until now, I never shared their sense of urgency to stake out a committed relationship.”
A line from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice came into my head: “A lady’s imagination is very rapid; it jumps from admiration to love, from love to matrimony, in a moment.” My photographic memory often spilled over from the backs of baseball cards to books. I was pleasantly surprised that I had retained some of that ability in my old age.
“That’s one of the reasons why I’ve preferred relationships with younger women. Nothing’s forced when you’re involved with them. It is what it is—a moment to be enjoyed. You try to string as many of those moments together as you can before she finally realizes you’re her father’s age and you’ve run out of things to talk about.”
Adams was animated, tottering precariously on the edge of his chair’s leather cushion. I was making a substantial effort to follow his tortuous train of thought.
I didn’t interrupt him to ask questions. He eventually got back on subject.
“The rush-to-matrimony phenomenon didn’t seem to affect Christina. All that dating-women-over-forty stuff was absent from what we were talking about and what we were doing before I left for Iraq. We were as spontaneous as twenty-year-olds. She’d pass the newspaper to me on Sunday morning and say, ‘Let’s go there Wednesday night.’ She’d call me on a cold December day and say, ‘Drive me to the Como Park Conservatory. I’ve got to see green, tropical plants.’ We did a dozen things like that. I enjoyed all of them. And I marked each one of them by pushing myself closer to her and letting her into places that had been off-limits for a long, long time.”
Adams paused for a few seconds and stared at the carpet. “During my flight from Istanbul to Amman, the first leg of my trip home, I decided to go all-in with Christina. I had two days to debrief and decompress in Amman.”
Adams dropped down from his chair and onto the carpet, sitting cross-legged now, at my eye level, on the other side of the coffee table. “The day before I headed home, I took a taxi to the old marketplace in Amman. There are two streets in the bazaar filled with jewelry shops. I found a beautiful green amber stone, a silver antique ring setting, and a jeweler who mounted the stone in the ring—all in one afternoon. I called Christina from the hotel to tell her
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