Our Time
Nina Lichtenstein
The author and partner
Word Count 888
I face his feet, my sweaty torso slumped over his legs. We lie like this for some time, quiet, our breaths slowing. I look up and notice his toenails. Too long, ogre-like. In need of a trim. I offer. “Sure,” he says, skootching to the edge of the bed. I kneel in front of him. The light is soft from the bedside lamp; the room is warm from our lovemaking. Small wedges of hard nail fall to the floor, my free hand holding his octogenarian foot gently in place. The skin is soft and there are no callouses, and I think this part of him seems young, almost innocent. A deep sense of purpose and privilege overwhelms me. I’m overcome with intimacy and I choke up.
I have never cut a man’s toenails before, and realize it probably won’t be the last time.
There will likely be many situations when Ted will need my help, since I’m twenty-seven years his junior. Today, he’s my lover and life partner, but it wasn’t always like that.
Once, over thirty years ago, when he was younger than I am now, he stood in front of the blackboard at the university where I was an undergraduate. His left hand, which I had noticed looked disfigured, was habitually hidden in his pant pocket, jiggling keys or change. I sat at a desk in the front row and wondered if he realized he had this tic. Sitting close to the professor helped me stay focused, but the clinking sounds distracted me. In French, he’d explain the semiotics of Roland Barthes’s S/Z, or the existential meaning of Michel de Montaigne’s essay “Philospoher, c’est apprendre à mourir.” I was enamored by his brilliant mind, but we were both in love with our spouses. I, twenty-three and just married; he, mid-life with a brood of kids. Aside from French literature, we shared something else that felt existentially meaningful: we were both converts to Judaism.
Life happened and I, after a bachelor’s and master’s degrees, had three kids of my own. When I went back for my PhD he had moved on to teach elsewhere, but his signature was on my thesis, and he returned to campus for my defense and threw a cocktail reception in my honor. My husband, mom, and kids flanked my side, and he ordered Veuve Cliquot for everyone. “L’chaim!” he exclaimed and pinched the cheeks of my boys. “Wow, you’re really smart,” my husband said in the car going home. My mom beamed. The boys dozed. I felt fulfilled.
A year later when I was forty-six, my husband put his hands on my hips, squeezed the flesh above the waistline of my pants and said I should try harder to lose weight. He suggested I grow my fingernails longer and paint them red. Then he gave me a perfume that made my throat scratch. It turned out he had smelled and liked it on another woman who had long, red fingernails. One morning soon after, he sat on the edge of our king size bed pulling on his socks, his jerky movements rocked the bed. With each squeak, I seethed, pretending to be asleep. I hated how he put his socks on. Suddenly, in a most fitting metaphoric spectacle, our marital bed collapsed onto the floor. That’s when I knew it was over.
A few years ago, when I met up with Ted for dinner to catch up on work and life, our hands casually—accidentally?— touched across the restaurant table. We both noticed the spark. It was impossible to ignore. Something had shifted in our over two decades-long platonic relationship. I had never seen his scarred hand so close up before. In the place of the thumb and ring finger there were bony nubs, a deformity caused when he was a boy and he blew up his hand playing with dynamite caps he had found. Now, we were both broken but in different ways: our marriages had failed and we were both vulnerable. We sat there like chicks fallen from the nest, calling out to be heard and saved; to recover the nurturing that had been lost to us. A chance to thrive again.
Ted and I have had to be creative in the bedroom. With age, my post-menopause decreased libido and his prostate cancer, come certain limitations—inconveniences. We’ve discovered new levels of intimacy that are both humbling and life-affirming. Who knew anticipation could be made into something so erotic? In our dalliances, often planned rather than impromptu, there’s generosity, tenderness, a sense of humor, and patience. Lots of patience. Sometimes, on Saturdays, there’s even champagne. We’ll sip from delicate vintage glasses as tiny bubbles whiz upwards like shooting stars, taking us with them. Up, up and away in a wave of delicious effervescence. Then, release.
As much as we enjoy our often lofty conversations about literature, philosophy and religion, or our goofy banter and wordplays, it’s in the physical intimacies of our bodies that I have discovered a grounding that softens any fears about what our age difference might mean. Rather than worry about how what remains of our shared life could play out, I stay focused on what we have today. We are hyper aware that us, today, is a true blessing, and who knows what tomorrow will bring, anyway?
Nina holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast program, and is working on a memoir in parts titled "My Body Remembers." She and her partner divide their time between midcoast Maine, Israel and Norway.