ALTHOUGH LUCIA WAS SOMEWHAT SAD that she had broken off her affair with Julian, she never regretted it. She wanted stability, but even though he was seventy years old he was still flitting from one relationship to another, like a hummingbird. Despite the advice of her daughter, who advocated the advantages of free love, for Lucia intimacy was impossible with a man distracted by other women. “What is it you’re after, Mom? To get married?” Daniela had laughed when she learned her mother was finished with Julian. No, but Lucia wanted to make love in a loving way, for the pleasure of her body as well as the tranquility of her spirit. She wanted to make love with someone who felt as she did. She wanted to be accepted without concealing or pretending anything, to get to know the other person deeply and to accept him in the same way. She wanted somebody she could spend Sunday mornings in bed with reading the newspapers, somebody to hold hands with at movies, to laugh with at nonsense, to discuss ideas with. She had gotten beyond any enthusiasm for fleeting adventures.
However, now that Lucia had grown accustomed to her space, her silence, and her solitude, she had concluded it would be a high price to pay to share her bed, bathroom, and closet, and that no man would be able to satisfy all her needs. In her youth she had thought she was incomplete without being in a loving couple, that something essential was missing. In her maturity she was thankful for the cornucopia of her existence, although she had vaguely thought of turning to an Internet dating site simply out of curiosity. She gave this up at once, because Daniela was sure to find out from Miami. Besides, Lucia did not know how to describe herself so that she seemed more attractive without lying. She guessed that the same thing happened with others; everyone lied.
Men around her age wanted women who were twenty or thirty years younger, which was understandable since she herself would not want to get together with an ailing old man and preferred a younger Romeo. According to Daniela, it was a waste she was heterosexual. There were more than enough single women with rich inner lives and in good physical and emotional condition who were far more interesting than the widowed or divorced men of sixty or seventy out there. Lucia admitted her limitations in this respect but thought it was too late to change. Since her divorce she had had a few brief intimate encounters with one friend or another after a few drinks at a disco, or with strangers on her travels, or at a party. These were nothing to write home about, but they helped her overcome the embarrassment of taking her clothes off in front of a male witness. The scars on her chest were visible, and her virginal breasts belonged to a young bride. Having nothing to do with the rest of her body, they mocked her current anatomy.
Her fantasy of seducing Richard, which had seemed so enticing when she received his invitation to teach at the university, had evaporated barely a week after she moved into the basement apartment. Rather than bringing them closer, their relative proximity—meeting regularly at work, in the street, on the subway, or at the front door to the house—had quickly distanced them. The once warm camaraderie of international meetings and electronic communication had frozen when put to the test of physical closeness. No, there would definitely be no romance with Richard Bowmaster, which was a shame because he was the kind of tranquil, reliable man she would not have minded being bored with. Lucia was only a year and eight months older than him. As she often told herself, this was a negligible difference, although in secret she admitted that she was at a disadvantage. She felt heavy and was shrinking steadily as her spine contracted, but she could no longer wear very high heels without falling flat on her face. Around her, everyone else seemed to be growing taller. Her students towered over her, as gangly and aloof as giraffes. She was fed up with seeing all the nose hairs of the rest of humanity from down below. Richard on the other hand wore his years with the awkward charm of a professor absorbed in his studies.
As Lucia described him to Daniela, Richard Bowmaster was of medium height, still with enough hair and good teeth, and with eyes somewhere between gray and green depending on the reflection of light on his glasses and the state of his ulcer. He seldom smiled without a real reason, but his permanent dimples and tousled hair gave him a youthful look, even though he walked along staring at the ground, loaded down with books and bent under the weight of all his concerns. Lucia could not imagine what they could be, because he looked healthy, had reached the pinnacle of his academic career, and would be able to retire with the means to ensure a comfortable old age. The only financial burden he had was his father, Joseph Bowmaster, who lived in a senior residence fifteen minutes away, and whom Richard phoned every day and visited a couple of times a week. Although Joseph was ninety-six and confined to a wheelchair, he had more fire in his belly and mental lucidity than many half his age. He spent his time writing letters of advice to Barack Obama.