It won’t do, he coldly informed his mirror, growing old together with his reflection simply wasn’t an option. He would not let that happen to him! Yes, he had seen others bald, toothless, drooling, defecating in beds. The droop and the drip of them. But he was going to fool Father Time, whose withered scrotum had surely fallen off by now. And he would do this in broad daylight. Not for him wigs and vitamin supplements and crotchfit pants. He just quietly continued to do what he always had, hoping to catch no one’s attention; drank, smoked, and debauched himself beyond limits. He ignored the rubbery lung, the sluggish heart, slippery memory, enlarged prostate and giddy spells first thing in the morning. All parties in that posh part of the world began on his terrace, where a restored confession booth of wood from an old ransacked church in Rome served as both blasphemy and bar.
Every morning he woke up with a new woman and there was a reason for that. There was no dearth of beautiful young girls poor enough to prostitute themselves for five-star scraps. No girl, however, wanted to return to the bed of so genial a man who asked nothing of them. They were not made to piss on him, call a friend to join in, stand upside down. They couldn’t even just go to sleep. Instead, they had to watch him cry.
In the middle of the night, after all that trotting about on heels and uncomfortable thongs that rubbed them raw, they were treated to the sight of a grown man who reminded them of their daddy – or a daddy in a movie they watched as a child, the daddy they searched for in every customer – weep like a baby.
Oh, they knew, had they gone about it the regular way, he would arrange for their abortions or send money orders for their little illicit mites back home, but the price he asked of them was too high. They were simply not trained to hold someone’s hand in dementia. Nymphs they were, not nurses. Now if he had kept them up at night chatting about who had violated them and how, they’d cheerily have stayed, but this scavenging he tried to do down their soul, no sir! One by one they flew back into the night with their perfectly plucked eyebrows.
The drinking went on but the dancing ceased. It was getting more and more difficult to get a companion for the night. Floozies and tarts and sirens and harlots with hearts of gold, the town had run out of them all. He sat, in his silk dressing gown imported all the way from Italy, entire nights alone on his terrace, a thoroughly ineligible bachelor. He had been married once but… that’s a story for another time. A rustle below. Was there someone in his house? Curious but not too steady, he began his slow descent, one step at a time.
He had thrown up earlier – livers were such party poopers – and a drop of something regurgitated clung to his lower lip in a rare shade of brown. As he moved far from nimble towards his room the susurration of tiny bells reached his ear, the right one (the left had long given up). There was someone waiting for him! His entire life flashed before him in a single scene. There were so many, so many memories he wanted to recount, and surprisingly none of them from his stud days. The women he bedded were a blur. His dear mother, he wanted to begin with her, and then that aunt who beat the crap out of him whenever he was scared, whenever he wet the bed, whenever…How he missed the good women in his life!
It felt nice to make his way slow and steady like this, with such spectacular hope in heart, sure that The One had finally come to him.
He well knew how lucky he had been when it came to women. (He thought of them as a heap of feathered things in his backyard, chirping away, their baubles and beads catching the light now and then.) He had only to wish for one and she would be granted to him in a way that suited him best. Everything about women pleased him. Their little ears, their big fat love, startled necks with ostrich napes, their moans and gasping cries, the words that escaped them in anger and amour. That look in their eyes when they first realised they loved you, only you. Which only intensified when they knew you didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t love them back.
He was beginning to realise that he may not be able to reach the room after all; his shin was sciatic and hip numb. Don’t ask him about his legs, like losing two of your most patriotic soldiers below the waist. This was tiresome, he complained to himself. He would have so liked to invite a new companion into his life. He tried to call out but his lower denture was still in the ashtray upstairs; without teeth, his words were just plops. Plus, he was afraid he was going to soil himself.
A flurry of footsteps and there, at last, stood the guest. In anklets, bracelets, the shortest dress you ever saw and the reddest lips you never kissed. A boy-girl, or a birl as he called them, these little chappies who were the most luscious girlie-girl on the inside but still boy o’ boy on the outside.
You know what, he said, I love you.
The birl twirled closer, not having bargained for a slithering host. I love you too, he/she said, for that seemed an apt thing to say in the middle of robbing a house.
“Will you hug me just a little?”
The birl twirled yet closer, his/her hand hovering on the man’s chest. Then he/she bent and scooped the older man into his muscular arms, carried him to his bed and tucked him into it. He/she sat by the bedside, head cocked to one side in a classic listening pose. Two wings, one pink and one blue, undulated off his/ her shoulder blades.
They sat like that, holding hands, swapping reminiscences, turtle to tiger/tigress. The frock did not come off, no stains on sheet, but something happened that night. Just before the old man fell asleep, he fell in love for the nth time.
When he woke up no one was in the room. A faint memory came to him, of other-worldly beings in inappropriate clothing, of unconditional love sans genitalia and the outpouring of every regret, every remorse in his heart. He had an idea then that this was going to be his grand-finale love; unlike first loves, last loves were usually tricky to identify simply because hope, blind as fuck, goes on waiting and hoping and praying and wishing till the very end, fingers crossed, legs uncrossed. But his time was up, and he knew this in a contented, satiated way.
He liked the liquid identity of his new love, the face now woman, now man, so in sync with the universe. Gods and genies are assigned gender by men…That glow on the birdie-birl’s face last night, the milk of human kindness in its breast! He had met with an angel, that’s who.
He was happy, happy, happy. Most of all he was happy his new love had left him mid-love so he could for the first time in his life love on and on. Some may call it too late but to him, it was a dream come true not a moment too soon.
To be loved was magic enough, but to love was to turn the wand on oneself.
Excerpted with permission from Can’t: A Novel, Shinie Antony, Speaking Tiger Books.
