Two weeks later, Brad began moving his stuff in.
Marilyn and I went to a party at Rebecca’s new house to celebrate Brad, the house, and the new vistas that middle age were opening up. All you had to do was to look around at the guests to believe it. Everyone was attractive and gleefully admitted to being older than they appeared. The men had biceps and the women had those tight glutes and quads that look good in exercise pants. Everyone was doing something somewhat important and meaningful with their lives and that was what counted. The room was filled with platitudes, happy clichés, and laughter.
“It’s all about beautiful, healthy people coming together,” Rebecca declared. “Age is irrelevant now and we’re all in new territory. There are no rules. Relationships can be anything.”
Except when they can’t.
At some point, after Marilyn and I left the party to go home to get a good super middle’s night’s sleep, Brad went “crazy” and started dancing and doing his Elvis Presley imitation. Perhaps this would have been okay, but Rebecca’s twenty-two-year-old daughter came home in the middle of it and declared Brad’s impersonation a sight she could never unsee and ran into her room and locked the door. Rebecca tried to soothe her daughter but gave up and instead spent three hours cleaning up the party mess while Brad lay on the couch watching TV.
And while Brad was merely behaving like a typical man in a typical heterosexual relationship, Rebecca decided this wasn’t okay after all.
She broke up with him the next morning.
Brad was devastated. Marilyn saw him at a meeting and he started crying when he talked about Rebecca and how much he’d cared for her. That’s how sensitive and wonderful these new middle-aged men were, and Marilyn said Rebecca was a real fool to break up with him. He was a great guy and he had everything.
A couple of months later, Rebecca was dating someone else. I wondered if middle-aged dating was not going to end up being some beautiful new experience, as Rebecca had hoped, but instead just another version of the serial dating we did back in our twenties and thirties.
What would that be like?
I got some idea when a couple of super middles came to stay at Kitty’s.
Like many super middles, they were in their sixties. This makes sense, considering that MAM can eat up more years than you think. By the time you get it together, you’ve clocked another decade. But that might be the only thing that’s older about these super middles.
Kimberly, sixty-one, and Steven, sixty-seven, were a good example. Kimberly was once an actress, but she’d given it up when she had kids. Steven, who used to be an Olympic skier, was now a ski instructor in Aspen. We weren’t sure what their relationship was. Steven was an old friend of Kitty’s, and when he asked if he could come and stay, she said yes. She thought maybe he would turn out to be interested in her, but then he called and asked if he could bring a friend.
“Is she his girlfriend?” I asked. “Why is he bringing her?”
“I have no idea,” Kitty said.
They arrived with several bags, which they put in the same room. Like so many super middles, they were obsessed with their health. After unpacking their bags, they brought down containers of special vitamins and tinctures that needed to be stored in the refrigerator.
They went back upstairs, put on their bathing suits, and went outside.
They had typical super middle bodies. Meaning, due to the ten or twelve or so hours they put into exercise every week, they were in far better shape than most people of any age. And they knew it. They were not the least bit afraid to strut around in their sixtysomething bodies clad in just small scraps of fabric.
They did that for a while and then they spotted the paddleboards. When a super middle sees any kind of board, they’re compelled to get on it. Sure enough, the two dove into the water, swam around the paddleboards, and vaulted on top. When I saw them paddling back thirty minutes later, I made Kitty go outside with me.
“I hate them,” Kitty said.
“I do, too. But we have to be friendly. Otherwise we’ll look like the weird ones.”
When they got back to land, I tried to make conversation by asking Kimberly about how the paddle had gone. “It was beautiful. It was so Zen.” She looked me up and down. “You should try it.”
I smiled. I have, I wanted to say, and I didn’t find it at all Zen. And neither did Kitty.
I suddenly realized that it might be difficult to communicate with these super middles. They were all about vitamins, exercises, and Zenness, a language Kitty and I didn’t speak.
But then I found something Kimberly and I could talk about. She had an invention!
She wasn’t the first super middle woman I’d met who’d recently invented something. One had invented a filter for a phone screen. Another had come up with a formula for a new kind of fabric. Kimberly had invented a machine that could destroy cellulite. A lot of people were clamoring for it and now she had to figure out how to manufacture the machine. She’d just gotten back from a trip to China.
On the first night at the hotel, she cried. She was afraid she couldn’t do it. Afraid she was a fraud. She called her son.
“You can do it, Mom,” he said. “We know you can do it. We believe in you.”
She hung up and she did it. She was there for ten days. It was her company and she was working all the time, trying to get it right.
Now she finally had a free weekend and she wanted to relax.