On Dating and Dying

My wife’s death left me numb, sexually as well as emotionally.  Once she started chemotherapy, physical intimacy ended; she had said the chemo left her feeling like there were fire ants under her skin.  Occasionally, she let me massage her feet.  That was almost our only bodily contact in the not-quite three years the treatments gave her.

To be honest, we hadn’t actually had sex for quite a while before that.  I don’t know; maybe it was the cancer, silently spreading from what had been her breast before the mastectomy. Or maybe it was just that we were two middle-aged people with teenage children and a tendency to give in to long silences rather than pick over issues that might take us to places both of us were scared to go.

In any event, once the metastasis was confirmed, our sex life was over. I knew it, as I’m sure she did as well, but it seemed like a minor issue compared with the question of how, or whether, she would simply survive. And as her looks slowly metamorphosed from matronly to cadaverous, my desire faded as well.  Sometimes I lay beside her and tried to conjure up the lust of our early years together, but it wasn’t much use. My cock was a soft lump, sending no rays of pleasure to my tired limbs.

The last weeks were horrible, but then it was over. The bed was empty, the medical supplies thrown out, the doctors and nurses and aides gone. The stillness in the house was neither consoling nor depressing. It was simply quiet.

Somewhere, however, the lizard brain was stirring. Not that I had ever totally stopped thinking about women, but for all those years they seemed like abstractions, distant images from magazines. I could look, but there was no possibility of an encounter. Plus, I had a ring on – a ring that now sat in a tiny box in a bedroom drawer.

She’d been gone three months when I had my first date.  The online network I plugged into was a revelation: All these women, looking for love! And not the least bit shy about it. I was a kid in a candy store, looking at profile after profile, finally selecting one that looked promising. She had style, she sounded smart, she looked good. We met for a pizza.

The awkwardness quickly faded, and three dates later I found myself on her couch, drinking wine and having a conversation that was interrupted abruptly when she leaned over and kissed me hard. Twenty minutes later we were in her bed, pulling off jeans and intertwining limbs.  At last, I thought. But that was just with the front part of my brain. The back part was apparently going through some perverse calculation that I still can’t rationalize, because whatever node or gland it is that’s supposed to send “get hard!” instructions to the cock was preoccupied with something else. I kissed her breasts, I ran my hands over her ass, I went down and licked her clit until she moaned and motioned me to come in. But I couldn’t.  The part that was supposed to be a marble shaft just crumpled.

I left apologetically, wondering if I’d lost it permanently. I tried to imagine what it would be like going through the rest of my life as a kind of eunuch, the kind of burned out creature that turns up in bawdy folk songs and cabaret routines.  Would I find enough pleasure in music, booze, or art to compensate? Would I even remember what sex felt like?

Such thoughts stayed with me for a couple of months – a time in which I was also cleaning out my wife’s clothes, putting things in boxes and rearranging parts of the house that had been exclusively her domain. But I was also still browsing the online candy store, wondering if there were someone I hadn’t yet met who could reawaken my dormant libido.

There was. She was divorced, a bit younger than me, well dressed, with dark hair and big eyes. We were supposed to meet for just a drink, but the bar was crowded so they put us at a table. The waiter then told us it was half-price night for wine in bottles, so we ordered a pinot noir, then got dinner because you can’t just split a bottle of wine on an empty stomach. As we neared the bottom, the conversation turned erotic. I asked if she thought about sex much. She said she thought about little else. At least once a day, she said, she fantasized about making it with someone.

We parted with slightly more than a first-date kiss. On the third date, we made out in her car. On the fourth we made out on her living room couch. She said she wouldn’t sleep with me but asked me to imagine what it might be like if she put her mouth on my cock. I went home and did so.

Finally, about 4 weeks after our first meeting, we were in bed. I offered to put on a condom. “Only if you want to,” she said. “I don’t care.” I didn’t, and quickly stopped thinking about safe-sex warnings. She was amazing. Hands, tongues, sitting, standing, upside-down, things I hadn’t done for decades, and it seemed to last hours.

She came seismically, loudly, and I followed with a star-burst, giggling not only because it was great sex, but because I knew I wasn’t dead yet.