Anyone Got a Match? by Max Shulman

Author:Max Shulman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

Chapter 13

When a man passes the age of forty, the incursions of time are too evident to be denied. The joints stiffen, the wind dwindles, the belly skids, the psyche churns turgidly, and the crankcase needs oil. There are, however, certain measures a man can employ to stem the melancholy tide: he can take up calisthenics and massage; he can eat moderately and sleep immoderately; he can go on frequent vacations; he can interest himself in hobbies; he can enroll in adult education classes.… Or, most efficacious af all, he can fall in love.

Ira Shapian, in the weeks following his reunion with Boo, became as young as Romeo and as unlikely. Often and loud he cried the tonic words “I love you!” and as the phrase came rushing from his lips and sweetly reverberated in his ears, his heart would soar and his every corpuscle would shimmer.

And there were words from Boo too, protestations so rhapsodic that Ira’s toes would curl and his respiration loiter. “My beloved,” she would say, “you are a cello become tympani; a flute swollen to sounding brass.” Or, in another idiom, “My dear one, you are a river at flood, a mist-bound crystal cataract.”

Ira listened, stroking, the while, Boo’s tawny flanks before the driftwood fire, or looking into her tranquil eyes grown stormy with desire, or nuzzling her throat, or running a palm along the high, graceful arch of her foot, and as he listened and felt, the erosions of time were magically repaired, and winged youth was his.

Guilt came later. Returning to his room at the Stonewall Jackson Hotel after each tryst with Boo, Ira always felt an irresistible compulsion to phone Polly in California. His hands trembled on the telephone, but his voice was steady—steady and breezy and amiably matter-of-fact. He asked Polly about her health, about the house and the twins. When Polly recounted the boys’ latest achievements in mindlessness, he replied with indulgent laughter. Then, seeking to hear Polly laugh, he told her how things were going in Owens Mill, inventing anecdotes when there were none to report.

And all the time the fox of guilt slashed at his liver. How rotten I am, he thought, how stinkingly corrupt, to summon up such glibness—such purulent, slimy glibness!

Only once in each conversation did the glibness desert him. When, at the end of their talk, he said, “Well, good night, Polly,” and she answered, “I love you, Ira,” a cold, iron silence would seize him. Struggle as he did, he could find no words. “Did you hear me?” she would ask at last. “I just told you I loved you.” Still fighting for an answer, he would listen to Polly’s patient, regular breathing and finally the tiny sigh just before she hung up the telephone.

Then Ira would castigate himself in earnest, threshing and wallowing in his guilt, grinding his face in the much of it. But eventually—sometimes late, sometimes soon—a radiance would appear, a tall, slender, ethereal princess, with hair of pale gold, and

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