He walked out of the elevator and into my life. His legs went on forever in those designer jeans. The grin, the hair, the body — sigh, the body.
I had answered his ad to rent his storage space. Our meeting should have taken five minutes. Instead, we spent the next eight hours together. Actually, we spent the next eight months together.
This was in Toronto, where I am a writer and journalist. He was a medical student from Iran. He was Muslim, and he was much younger than me, outrageously so, almost the age difference between Hugh Hefner and his girlfriends, with me as Hugh. I was in my late 50s, and he was in his early 20s. My husband had died long before; my two sons were grown.
I couldn’t believe he was interested in me. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he saw me as a friend, a supporter. Maybe he wanted money.
In any case, I was interested in him. I wondered: How can I turn this into something romantic? I was usually good at that kind of thing. But he said that he really respected me — a bad start, not the way I wanted it to go.
He asked if I wanted to work out with him, and I said yes, not mentioning that the last and only time I had worked out was in 1992. We went to the gym, where he lifted weights while I lay on a bench watching him as he rippled.
“Sharon Dunn,” he said. “I thought you wanted to work out?”
“No,” I said. “I just want to be with you.”
His face softened.
We got closer. He went through my cupboards, pulling out my sugared cereal boxes and saying, “Sharon Dunn, you can’t eat this junk anymore — it’s bad for you. I’m throwing it all away.”
“No, not my Sugar Crisps!”
“Only one teaspoon of sugar a day, if you must,” he said. “You’re getting old — like my parents.”
True. But for the record, even his parents were younger than I was.
He kept looking out for me in sweet ways, but where were the romantic overtures? I was screaming inside, desiring him, doing everything I could to get what I wanted, with nothing working.
Until one day he said, “Do you want to go underwear shopping together?”
Bingo.
We headed to Calvin Klein but on the way passed La Senza, a Canadian chain that sells lingerie.
“Let’s pop in here,” I said. We stood in front of a counter as he started rifling through the women’s panties. I was so hot for him that I started to blush and stammer and giggle like a schoolgirl. And I couldn’t stop.
“Shh,” he said. “You have to stop.”
But it was too late. Embarrassed but unable to control myself, I kept going.
“I’m waiting outside,” he said.
When I went out and found him, he said, “That was awful. You’re an older woman. I thought you would be all blasé modeling the underwear for me and everything.” Then he added: “Anyway, I thought you were cute.”
Whew, I hadn’t ruined everything — yet. We headed to Calvin Klein, where we each had our own salesperson and took our try-ons into separate dressing rooms. I was buying a bagful of things whether they fit or not. At the counter, when the woman handed us our bags and said, “Enjoy,” we both burst out laughing.
With the new purchases, I knew that a physical relationship was imminent. “But first,” he said, “do you mind if we have an unofficial marriage?”
“Huh?”
“It wouldn’t be legal. It’s just a temporary agreement that allows for physical intimacy. It just makes sex acceptable, and it would make me feel better.” I hadn’t heard of it before — it is a type of Muslim marriage that joins a couple for a fixed period of time.
“I have no problem with that,” I said.
We set our wedding day. For the first time, I wore a long white dress. He wore jeans. There was only the two of us, so I suggested that we take our vows in front of the mirror to double the attendance to four.
“Five — God too,” he said.
“I respect that,” I told him.
We said our vows. The ceremony was sincere and beautiful.
Afterward, I said, “I read that you can get married four times, but you have to treat all of your wives the same. I’m the first wife. So it’s a good thing you’re going into med school because you’ll be able to take care of all of us.”
“I don’t want any more wives,” he said with a laugh, then added: “And don’t worry, I’ll pay for your old folks’ home expenses when the time comes.” He told me that I was the woman his mother had glowingly told him about. I promised him that I was definitely not who she had in mind. I wasn’t Muslim, and I wasn’t even near his age. But the emotion, the magic we shared, was maybe what made him think of his mother’s words.
He was fiercely protective of me. Once when he was trying on a jacket in a men’s shop, the salesperson referred to me as his mother. In a fury he threw the coat on the floor and stalked out. I ran after him. “What are you doing?” I asked.
“She insulted you by calling you my mother.”
“Don’t you know that’s a compliment to me?” I said. “I could really be your grandmother.”
“So I’m with a G.I.L.F., not a M.I.L.F.,” he said with a laugh.
Now we were in the swing of things.
“This is the time of our lives,” he said.
I couldn’t have agreed more. I cooked all his healthy food for him (he ate every four hours). We were in bed a lot. He worked at the computer and gave me games to entertain myself so he could work in peace.
I played Crazy Birds for hours, and when I got stuck on a level, he would get me through. But around 1 a.m. we would go out on the balcony, breathe in the night air and then run down several flights of stairs, laughing, and take off in his sports car. We would end up on a wharf at a lake somewhere talking and snoozing until about 5 a.m., when the world would wake us with its gentle breath and chirping sounds.
We’d go to Fran’s Restaurant for breakfast and then around 8 a.m. head home to bed. My place was for sale, and we would hear real estate agents pounding on the door trying to get in with their clients, but I had chains and locks on, so we would laugh from the bedroom and ignore them. Heady, lustful days.
He mentioned taking me to Iran to meet his parents. Iran? His parents?
“In my faith, age is irrelevant,” he said. “A woman can be a lot older than a man. And I can marry Christians and Jews, a real marriage.”
“I can’t go to Iran,” I said. “I’ll be kissing you publicly and end up in jail. Plus, I’m a journalist. I’m mouthy.”
“My country is beautiful,” he said. “I’ll take you to the mountains.” But he said he was concerned about the extreme political situation there.
With the invite to meet his parents, reality finally kicked in. Our age difference was way too extreme. What was I thinking? This young man wanted to take me home.
“My parents will love you,” he said.
“No, they won’t,” I replied. “They’ll be appalled, and I don’t blame them.”
Later, after completing his second year of medical school, he came to visit me in the Bahamas, where I was selling real estate. But after a month, I told him he had to leave, find a younger woman and get on with his life, before I ruined everything for him. I had to be the mature one, and I hated it.
After we were done and living in different parts of the world, I emailed him and asked, “In the end, what did I mean to you?”
He wrote back one word: “Nothing.”
My heart sank. Nothing? I had felt so much for him. I was hurt, devastated. Over the weeks, I kept looking at that email. Then one day I noticed that after “Nothing,” he had added periods going straight down the page. I scrolled until I finally saw another word: “Everything!”
And I remembered. We had watched Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” together. At the end, when Orlando Bloom’s character asks Saladin, a character based on the former Sultan of Egypt, “What is Jerusalem worth?” Saladin answers “nothing,” and walks away. But then he stops, looks back and says, “everything.”
I had meant everything to this brilliant young man from another world who had rocked my world. And for a while, he had meant everything to me.
The post Even His Parents Were Younger Than I Was appeared first on New York Times.
