Page 54 of The Late Bloomer’s Playlist

Joe Cocker

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS

I was facing off against the living-room mirror, trying to edge my lipstick into something that made me look less a clown and more a respectable older woman. I rolled my eyes. Respectable older woman, going on a date with her husband’s love interest… When my mouth was neat, I stared at David through the mirror’s reflection. He was standing behind me, checking the time – for the umpteenth time – and tapping away with his heeled boot, somehow making a deafening noise with the smallest of gestures.

‘David, run this by me again?’

He sighed. ‘How many times, Patti?’

‘Once more,’ I promised, and capped the light rouge lip liner I’d been playing with.

‘Eudora thought I was interested in her–’

‘Which you are, still?’

‘Which I am, still. But she’s heard things about me, indecent things.’ He rolled his eyes, though I couldn’t help but think that whatever Eudora had heard was likely true. ‘And it’s made her wary, because she thinks of herself as a challenge now, which–’

‘She is.’

‘She is not, and stop interrupting. Anyway, I tell her about you, my doting and loving wife, and suddenly she’s more comfortable around me. So now–’

‘Now we’re going to dinner with her.’

‘I told you to stop interrupting,’ he snapped.

I turned to face him directly. ‘I’ve never seen you quite so rattled about a date.’

‘Well I’ve never taken my wife on a date before. It’s a little unsettling.’

‘But it’s part of a master plan?’ I’d crossed the room and started to straighten his collar. He’d ironed his shirt and everything, which I took to be a sign of serious interest. ‘Because she’ll definitely think you aren’t interested in her, if you ask her for a friendly evening meal out with your wife in tow.’

He batted my hands away from his neck. ‘So you do understand!’

‘I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t know how I feel about being a third wheel in all of this either, it has to be said.’

Of course, as many times as David had explained this masterplan, he’d also explained that I wasn’t a third wheel because Eudora was bringing a friend. It had catapulted me back to our days as twenty-somethings, when he would meet a woman and ask if she had a friend for his friend, and vice versa. In our strange and dysfunctional way, I thought of those memories as our earliest acts of caregiving for each other. Though these days, acts of caregiving had been replaced by David asking whether I’d taken my blood pressure medication and me asking whether he’d got a doctor to look at that mole on his back yet. Our love language had changed over the years, but this felt like a homage to greater times.

‘It’s not like you’ll be forced out, Patti. She’s bringing…’ He petered out and I laughed.

‘You still can’t remember her name.’

‘No.’ He scratched his temple. ‘It would seem that way. I want to say… Sarah? No, Suzanne… S-s-s…’

‘Someone, she’s bringing someone.’ I turned off the lights in the living room and ushered him out the door, into the hallway. ‘Come on, then, let’s go and meet my someone for the evening and you can go and meet your girlfriend.’

‘She isn’t my girlfriend,’ he snapped.

‘Yet!’

‘Patti, please, don’t be ridiculous.’ David grabbed his house keys from the bowl on the hallway table. ‘I haven’t had a girlfriend since 2002.’

* * *

If the venue for a first date (that isn’t really a first date) was any indication for how much an individual cared for the person they were courting, then David was holding nothing back when it came to his feelings for Eudora. He name-dropped the restaurant on the drive there and the fact that it was somewhere I’d never even heard of was the first giveaway that my husband had done his research. The fact that David pulled a pressed blazer out of the back of the car when we arrived there was the second tip-off. It has to be said that my husband looked handsome. At home, he’d dressed in dark mustard chinos with a pressed white shirt, and now he paired a dark navy-blue blazer with it all to complete the look. If it hadn’t been for the deep red lipstick I was wearing, I would have been tempted to give him a kiss on the cheek.

David held his arm out for me to take on the walk into the restaurant, and I caught sight of us both in the tall glass doors on our approach. My own confidence had – soared? Sky-rocketed? Boomed? – crept up ever so slightly since I’d started seeing Sheila: the new comfort in my own body; the guts to wear dresses that I mightn’t have done before. For our first date with Eudora, I was wearing a deep-red wraparound dress with black heels that my feet would punish me for the next day, and my reflection coupled with David’s left me feeling pretty bloody pleased with the pair of us.

Before David could yank the door open, I paused and gave his arm a quick squeeze. ‘We scrub up all right for a pair of old’uns, don’t we?’