Squirrel

A True Story

Aging but mad, Irish, and domineering, a former Green Beret wanted a squirrel to eat from his hand.

“Rocky is in MY tree, therefore, he’s MY squirrel.”

Rocky disagreed because he was his own squirrel. He approached the Irishman but stopped on the sidewalk about eight feet away, flicked his tail, cocked his head left and right, and scurried off. The Irishman had a violent fit while he swore about and at the squirrel. It was as if Irisher had taken the squirrel out for a dinner but had gotten no sex.

One solution: Put the food eight feet away, let Rocky eat several times, and then every couple of days, move closer in small steps.

A faster solution: shoot Rocky.

A Mostly True Story

I went to a convention for parents of hyperactive kids. A crowd flowed past the displays and a redhead tried one of the gadgets that were on sale, a computerized measure of concentration. I was fascinated by her doing the test while she talked nonstop with the six people around her. I was also fascinated by the restless jiggle of her breasts.

She finished the test. The clerk was busy but I had used the test many times for my patients and it was easy to open the scoring page. Red’s numbers were beyond the 99th percentile, all in bad directions.

“How did I do?”

“If this is typical, you should have been put on Ritalin thirty-five years ago—just to keep your underwear in place—and never allowed in public without the medication. How about lunch?”

My brass got me a smile, stereo jiggles, and “My sister is visiting with me here, I can’t.”

Damn.

I opened her huge leather purse and dropped in my card so that she would have it even if she never found it.

“Call me if you ever come to New York.”

Several months passed. The phone message was breathy but clear: “I don’t know if you remember me, but I was the one . . .”

I remembered.

She flew into town for a business meeting but wanted my company for the evening. I picked her up at Kennedy, gave her a yellow rose, and took her to dinner in a yuppie restaurant that was once a schooner.

Candlelight darkened her red hair, her eyes became more lustrous and never left mine, and two glasses of wine slowed her speech and softened her voice. There were no jiggles and I discovered someone very smart and very warm and only sometimes a slut.

Her other assets included a $100,000 executive position with a publishing company in St. Louis, an upscale Tudor home, a sports car almost as quick as my own, and an often cranky, absent husband who earned less than she did, jogged too often, and drank too much beer.

I should have taken her to bed that evening but I decided to be honorable.

Our first dinner led to another on our second night, I was still honorable, and she flew back home.

I Forgot about Her

She called me every night for at least an hour and often for more than two. This went on for two months. We talked about her mad Irish husband, wild upbringing in New Jersey, sales job, and the poetry that she wrote. She claimed to have an orgasm whenever I quoted Tom Eliot so I moved a copy of his verses to my headboard. She also shared my quirky fascination with human evolution, especially about the fundamental attractions between men and women. Squirrel decided that we should get together again. I agreed just to be nice.

She Visited

Squirrel came for a weekend to visit her parents and looped me in for an evening with two of her friends.

Her best friend, X, was a hair dresser and a psychopath with flat blue eyes, equally flat long blonde hair, and flat white skin that received fourteen facial operations but had no scars. She was a tall, stunning, provocative, very cool, bored Michael Jackson dressed as an unsmiling Swede. Her brother, O, had AIDS and I wasn’t sure about X.

Squirrel and X met me in a bar in a tourist town where even the acorns knew their written histories. The bar was twelve-feet- wide, sixty-feet-long, and three-hundred-years old. I sipped on a Chivas and told bawdy jokes, the ladies drank tequila and giggled at bawdy jokes.

X hinted that Squirrel and I could leave but Squirrel would have none of it, shouting to the crowd: “Should two people have an affair if one of them is married?” The instant of silence ended with my shout, “Especially if they’re both women!”

We left that bar and drove across the river to a different one that was in the loft of a barn.

X deposited us and left to find her brother, visit other friends, and probably talk about Squirrel. She and I, meanwhile, shared old beams, old scotch, old bad paintings, high prices, and a table with another couple. The woman was very pregnant and Squirrel, standing out more than a Halloween moon, drew several nods from dad-to-be. Pregnant soon hauled his ass out of there. I told her good night but was glad that she left with him instead of me.

I decided to pull out my biggest, juiciest nut, offer it to Squirrel, and see what she did with it.

“I love you.”

She said nothing but ordered a double vodka, chugged it, and ordered another that she also chugged. She then glowed in the special pink that comes from orgasms and alcohol and the increases in hormones they produce. She also changed the subject. I stayed five feet distant, neither repeating my gambit nor hearing a rejection. She stayed pink.

X found O and came back for us.

X drove with O in the passenger seat, Squirrel and I sat in the rear, my right arm around her neck. What the hell. I slid my hand down her neckline and stroked the nipple that snuggled inside her right D cup.

A first dumb statement in a husky whisper: “Your hand is on my breast.”

A second dumb statement in a husky whisper: “I know.”

I moistened my index finger and rubbed the appreciative nipple some more. It stood up boldly and said “Thank you.”

X’s flat blue eyes watched us in the rear-view mirror, O was oblivious.

Hell, this is fun.

X parked and Squirrel insisted on walking me to my car and saying good night. She kissed open and tender and did not pull away her stomach but neither did she press it into my own. I should have folded her into the front seat and disappeared with her, but I—a coward masquerading as an idealist—sent Squirrel away with X and O.

NYE

Squirrel invited me to a New Year’s Eve party and sent me a map to her friend’s house, an upscale split in the north woods. Her friend was a divorced, gracious blonde who sensibly replaced her husband with two huge retrievers. She also had a paunchy drunken male friend who leered at Squirrel until I arrived.

I took off my jacket, shook hands with three people who happened to be in the kitchen and pulled a cork and poured myself a glass of the wine that I brought.

Squirrel: “Let’s get out of here.”

I put down my wine, put on my jacket, shook hands with the same three people, and apologized to Squirrel’s tearful next-best friend who, either from losing her own marriage or siding with Mr. Squirrel, “really needed to talk to her.”

Squirrel wanted to leave without the talk. The dogs got out with Squirrel and me. Her six school chums chased the dogs and perhaps would have chased her instead of watching me drive her away. I down-shifted the Z and spun gravel towards the pack of them.

I took her to dinner rather than to a motel or back to my place—so much for bravado.

Maybe I wasn’t completely lying when I said “I love you.” I certainly wanted to be in love but was sure that she didn’t; or if she did, it wasn’t with me. She would commit for one juicy hour but not a lifetime of them that ended when my wallet was flat and I shot more dust than sperm into her belly. We eventually turned each other down one more time.

We drove for hours and visited the places for her high school adventures. I heard about her streaking in the moonlit park, her motel hopping with X—”Come in here and look at this, he’s really huge!”—her talented parents, and her very expensive, perfect wedding.

The same people who followed us out of the house had also watched her marry, and rather than whisper failure to her buddies separately, she probably used me to announce it to all of them at once. My spinning the gravel possibly supplied the exclamation point. And her little buddy who wanted “to talk” may have been talking every evening to Mr. Squirrel.

We found a place to dance and trade New Year’s kisses and, at two in the morning, I dropped her off at her parents’ house where she had never expected to be. I was sure that I wouldn’t see her again.

I had done an honorable thing or a stupid thing—depending on which voice I heard—gambling with a short term player for a long term outcome, a tactic that I had abandoned in my thirties and forties but one that returned unwelcome to spook me through my fifties and sixties. And Squirrel knew from my wrinkles that I wasn’t long term material but she would have given me a friendly roll, perhaps to reach closure in her own script. After all, she had put a lot of time into me but hadn’t gotten laid.

Getting Smart

She flew back to her large house, large job, and large, besotted husband and called me that same evening.

I opened: “So, when are you going to leave him?”

She said: “When I was younger, my parents told me to ‘be smart.’”

I heard: “You’re not rich enough.” And she was right even if her line about her parents was rehearsed.

I told her about Rocky and she had a complete change of opinion about squirrels. They became soul mates to eat at her table rather than nuisances that chewed her Tudor eaves. “Nice squirrel! Cute little squirrel!”

I pressed her for a different decision.

She countered: “If this is how it’s going to be, there’s no point talking.”

“You’re right” and I hung up.

Several days later, a squirrel got into my sun room. I trapped it against the glass with a plastic trash can, carried it outside, and turned it loose. It bounded in a long straight line for my back property line.

I would not change one of these memories. And I miss that crazy redhead although I could neither keep up with nor trust her. I, ignoring all her high school stories, still want to believe that she could fuck as sweetly as she could kiss and that she would do it with just me. I sometimes glance at my phone in the late evening and know that twenty years later, she is also near one, still talking nonstop at midnight. I pretend there is some chance of her punching my number and imagine our touching through the wires, just the once that leads to a hundred more times.

There is still no point.