A Treetops Tryst Goes Bad - Better To Have Loved And Lost, Etc., Lessons Of Longevity

Potterton Adams was straying into old age - straying because, unlike his more centered peers, he had no direction. Was he destined to live out the rest of his life in a chaise longue in Florida? Move closer to the grandchildren? Muddle through his elder years waiting for the end? 

This was the awful thought that arrived every morning.  As he dressed - the same shirt, pants, sweater, and shoes as the day before - adjusted his belt, ran his fingers through his hair, and headed for the bathroom, he felt like going back to bed. The whole endless, pointless routine was not worth the effort, better to crawl back under the covers and recover bits of the last dream of the night, walking down a forest path with Nancy Blythe, his childhood sweetheart now grown up, a delectable morsel who had not aged. 

 

'Where is Nancy now?' he rhetorically asked, knowing full well that she had died at an early age, and all his hopes of meeting her gone with the wind.  

He looked at himself in the mirror for signs of hope.  He was old but not that old, past his prime but not his pull-by date, still vigorous and sexually ambitious.  Yet the Black Dog pursued him every morning, coaxing him back to bed, an enervating resignation. 

But one day the veil of tears lifted in the unlikely person of Annette from Accounting, an ordinary working girl from Gaithersburg, clean, forty, and hopelessly single, obvious prey.  

Now, Potterton had always been a faithful husband, dutiful, respectful, and honest. There was nothing wrong with his marriage, no Sturm und Drang, no Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf savagery, just the usual bits of nastiness; so it wasn't frustration or dissatisfaction that drove him to approach the available Annette, but his pull-by date.  If he didn't hurry, he, like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich, would too soon be consigned to the cold hard ground of the steppes for eternity. 

Coffee at the mid-morning break, martinis and oysters at the Grill Room of the Mayflower, steak and Cabernet at McCormick and Schmick's, and the night at her basement apartment in Adams Morgan. 

A done deal, the Grim Reaper delayed, a magical mystery tour before the coming of the steppes.  He was as happy as could be. A door had been opened, the bedcovers had been thrown aside, and he was a new man. 

'Do not go gentle into that good night', wrote Dylan Thomas, and Potterton was not about to. Come what may, this would be the defining moment of his life - or more correctly the end of his life. The affair was an Einsteinian phenomenon - the slowing of time, giving him a few extra years. 

Of course this was not to be taken literally.  The excitement of sexual abandon did not add years, but made those remaining so alive that they counted for more than fifty dull, predictable, routine ones.  'A new algorithm', he said. 

'Come away with me', she said to him after they had been together for a few months. She was to check the company's books in the Dar-Es-Salaam office, and they could take a long weekend at the Treetops Lodge, a five-star pension in the banyan trees, take a week on Zanzibar, and fly home from there. 

Potterton at first jumped at the proposition.  What could be more romantic than a forest idyll, days and uninterrupted nights together, a tryst turned Arabian Nights.  Yet there would be no five o'clock curfew, that alarm that broke the romance of their Adams Morgan retreat but was also an airlock - a punctuation, an escape. In Africa there would be no such exit.  If things went wrong, they would be hopelessly entangled, tied up, forced company.  

'Why not?', he said and finagled an excuse for the trip - he too needed a trip to check the bank accounts in Dar.  The ease of the deception, the curious coincidence of both lovers actually having business in the same remote place at the same time should have set alarm bells a-ringing. Such omens were common in illicit affairs - guilt is never far away and the troubled mind wanders - but he paid no attention, arranged for his passage, packed, said goodbye, and headed East.  

The first night was delirious - a drunken meal of manioc and boa on the balcony, the sounds of the jungle - mysterious, strange, but exciting - came and went in crescendos, the moon was bright, the stars clear, and their lovemaking was more passionate and unrestrained than ever. 

'What shall we do today?', Annette asked the next morning; but Potterton was not prepared for the question.  Neither did he have any real interest in wild animals, nor had he considered long hours spent by her side.  What was he thinking?  This late burst of sexual energy - a kind of surprising volcanic eruption that comes to most older men - was all that he had considered.  

He had not thought through the rest; and so it was that they banged and jolted their way on safari, spotted a few wildebeests and an elephant, had tiffin under an acacia tree, and returned back to the lodge by dusk. A boring, forgettable day, made worse by Annette's wonder and amazement.  Old age might confer wisdom, but it also produces a been-there anomie that is hard to shake. 

After a few sundowners on the balcony, Potterton felt better and more himself, but the strange African goulash soured him.  He looked at the fourposter, bedding turned down and mosquito net in place, as an adversary.  The long day and Annette's puerile questions of the guide had emptied him of enthusiasm.  Yes, sex was always an anodyne for depression, but not this time. No Exit. 

He soldiered through - that was the least he could do for a girl who had spent most of her savings on the trip, had real affection for him, doted on him in fact, admiring his intelligence, savoir faire, good breeding and above all sexual patience. 

'One and done', he callously thought as they finally boarded the flight home.  Now his sexual resume was complete, bookended, the coda to a youth well spent. It was a good thing he was getting irritated with Annette.  Breaking up would be much easier, tearful certainly, but out the airlock he would go, the last notch in his belt carved, back to home, retirement, and a condo in Tampa.