A Round-Heeled Woman Read Online Free PDF Page A

Jane, he’s married.
    I would answer all the letters in the
maybe
pile, explaining that, while I appreciated their efforts, I lived too far away to suggest a next step. “Alas”—I made sure to include the word
alas
in all the letters, confirming the portrait I had painted of myself as a well-read, articulate, essentially old-fashioned lady. Okay, so maybe not “lady,” not with an ad like that. “Woman”—that’s what I wanted to be and what I wasn’t. My idea of being a woman required a man. I could be a person all by myself, I could be an adult, I could be a mother, and I was all of those. And I suppose I could claim to have been a woman once upon a time since I had, after all, been married, though my marriage had not been one to enhance my womanliness. Finally, I am not a man so I must be a woman. Weak, very weak. I wanted to be a woman for real now. To be that, I needed a man who would fuck me.
    Once, way back, when I was in my twenties, I sat in the No Name Bar in Sausalito drinking beer on a Saturday afternoon. Out of nowhere, a man neither young nor old passed by our table and said to me, “You’re a beautiful woman.” And he left. No one ever said that to me again, and never, but for that brief moment, would I ever feel it. The men I would know as my life continued might think I was beautiful or a woman or even both, but none of them would ever say it. And so I wasn’t. But now, now, I was on my way to becoming a woman. It was too late for me to be beautiful, but, well, look at all these letters! All these men! One of them was sure to make me a woman. I squirmed into the cushions of my futon.
    Here is a fragment of a poem by Ted Kooser called “Daddy Longlegs”:
    . . . If mine,
it would be the secret dream
of walking alone across the floor of my life
with an easy grace, and with love enough
to live on at the center of myself.
    Sometimes, I have been able to do this: to walk alone . . .
“with
love enough/to live on at the center of myself.”
I will say that walking alone and living at the center of myself is my desire, my goal, if you will. So what, exactly, was I doing sending messages in bottles to hundreds of men?
    I wanted to be the woman I was never able to be, a woman who delights in intimacy with a man, not fears it. I wanted to be touched physically and emotionally. I wanted to be rich—I was greedy—in the ways of the flesh. I wanted to get fat on the bounty of men. I wanted to unleash (honest, I did) my passion. These guys had no idea who they were going to get. And all the while, I knew that, in reaching out for a full life, I could not choose, would not get, only the good parts. A full life was just that, pleasure and pain, joy and despair. I knew that from the beginning. I just didn’t know the form they would take.
    The
yes
pile was the biggest. I was enchanted. These men knew how to write. They even knew how to spell, and I had no trouble tossing onto the big pile letters with sentences like
“There is a chance you live in Tupelo and su fer from a wasting disease. So
please tell me.”
Yes! And
“I have written poetry, built stone walls, edited
books, dealt with ministers of government . . . am a free man, and reasonably comfortable financially.”
Yes! I was tempted to say yes to Brad,
“. . . a retired surgeon, working as a consultant in the city,”
but I couldn’t imagine myself undressed in front of a forty-something man, no matter that he was
“looking for a connection
(
of several sorts
)
with
an older woman.”
I wrote Brad, declining on the basis of geography, a decision I would come to regret when not so many months hence I found myself in New York City, on a street not far from Brad’s, crying into my mitten over a man whose letter had been a
yes
and to whom I had become a
no.
    The letter I answered first came from a woman.
“I’m a woman
too, just turned 60 and