by Karen Gilbert

Created on: July 02, 2009   Last Updated: July 03, 2009

Love is Wonderful the Second Time Around

Help. You have to come over right now, Dar bellowed to me. He's in there, she whispered as she pointed at the kitchen.

Who? What was she talking about?

Shhh, she warned me. Russ, the guy who'd be perfect for you.

Had I been looking? Was I on Match.com?

Isn't he perfect? she giggled.

Perfect? All I saw to make that call were sweaty legs extended below raggedy cut-off jeans sticking out from under the cabinet. My friend Dar had called her neighbor Russ to come and dismantle her kitchen sink so we could install the new wood counter she and I had crafted. Almost as soon as I arrived, Dar maneuvered for Russ and me to be alone; she sent us off on an errand to Home Depot.

It was an awkward afternoon. I felt strange. For the first time since I had met my ex-husband, Patrick, thirty-three years earlier, I felt a twinge in my stomach and tingling in the nether regions. I wasn't sure if it was interest or lust having been without a man for the last year. Did he feel anything? Why would he? Patrick didn't (I had caught him with another woman). Why would any man find me desirable? I was fifty-one years old; grey-haired. I may be living in the north, but everything on my body had moved south.

We compared divorce notes and then calendars. We arranged to use my season tickets to Hartford Theaterworks and go together to the next show in the series. He asked me to dinner for the week before the show. A date? The first in over thirty years. How does this work? Do we split the check? Does he pay? Do we kiss hello or goodnight? Is he expecting to go to bed? Sex?

I surfed the net for all the books I could find on sex. There was no way I was going to go to Borders and stand there for all to see. Did Borders even carry the kinds of books in which I was interested? Did it change in the last thirty years? I prayed the books would arrive in brown wrappers. I lived in a small town. The postal workers and I were on a first name basis.

Russ picked me up in his little red sports car. I don't remember the title of the play, but the cast was naked. Great! I kept wondering what he thought of my body. Was I too fat? Too flat? He joked about how the women on his street were referred to by all the neighbors as the Bentwood Babes. All of them were well endowed. I was bankrupt.

By the third week, third date I knew we were going to have sex. My young friends had assured me that having sex on the third date did not make me a whore.

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