“Why not?”
“I don’t have my bathing suit.”
“You can swim naked,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, you’re welcome to come here anytime you want and swim,” he said, with what seemed to be a generous smile that was yet completely oblivious to my raging discomfort.
“Arnold.” I sighed. “I’m never going to come here and swim in your pool.”
“Why not?” he asked.
“It’s too small. I like to swim laps. I’m sorry but your pool is basically a bath tub.”
Arnold laughed suggestively. The good thing about men like Arnold is that you can say pretty much anything you want to them and they won’t be insulted. They’re so arrogant and sure of themselves it never crosses their mind that a woman could be insulting them.
* * *
* * *
We strolled, slowly, to the restaurant.
“You look young and spry,” Arnold said. “You must exercise. How old are you?”
“I’m nearly sixty.”
Arnold looked taken aback.
Apparently Ron had lied not just about Arnold’s age to me but also about my age to Arnold. The difference was, I knew enough to google, and Arnold did not.
“Well that’s terrific,” he said. “So we’re in the same place. We’re both looking for companionship.”
Of all the micro- and macroaggressions of aging, the worst one is when you discover you’ve crossed the bridge from wanting a relationship, with all that entails, to having to settle for its lesser cousin: companionship.
A relationship implies a dynamic partnership where people are g
oing to get something done. Companionship implies the opposite: people are going to keep each other company while they mostly just sit there.
Of course, men like Arnold don’t have to settle for anything.
After years of having hot young girlfriends—he could still get girls as young as twenty-five if he wanted he explained—he had an epiphany. He was with a woman who was thirty-five and it was all going great when it hit him: he didn’t have anything to say to her. It turned out this wasn’t a fluke. He no longer had anything to say to any woman who was under thirty-five. They were just too young. And so, reluctantly, he’d had to rethink his requirements and decided to up his age group. He would now consider dating women who were thirty-five to possibly fifty.
I took a good, long look at Arnold. Some men do look younger than their years, and there are plenty of attractive seventy-five-year-old guys, but Arnold was not one of them. His glory days on the Ivy League football fields were long gone. It was impossible to imagine him as any kind of a sexual draw. On the other hand, society colludes to tell men they’re a little bit better than they actually are while it tells women they’re a little bit worse.
I, however, was not society.
“Listen Arnold,” I said. “You cannot believe that these twenty-five- and thirty-five- and even forty-five-year-old women with whom you are supposedly having sex are actually attracted to you.”
Arnold considered this, and then, strangely, he agreed. Even if the women weren’t per se attracted to him, he explained, the system still worked in his favor. And the reason for it was that women were greedy.
Arnold explained it like this: The world was filled with women with okay jobs like real estate broker or hair stylist or yoga instructor and a lot of them had kids and ex-husbands who didn’t pay child support or were alcoholics—the whole panoply of human suffering—and while these women had enough to get by, they wanted a much bigger lifestyle. They wanted the lifestyle. A lifestyle they couldn’t afford.
They wanted expensive handbags!
And that’s where Arnold and his ilk came in.
You’d think that after all his accomplishments in the world, Arnold would have had some broader empathy for these women in difficult situations but nope. When Arnold thought about women, when he described women, about as much depth as he could grant them was as handbag hoarders who used sex to fuel their addiction.