Fiction: The Final Woman

By Michael Fowler

My race was almost run. At seventy I was inching toward the finish, with nothing but a cheap health plan to stop me. Yet ever since my wife died by accident a year ago (icy road, oncoming semi) I needed to solve the problem of the Final Woman. 

Why this problem? My working theory had been that when the sex drive finally ended, so too could I end. The flaw in this idea was that the sex drive never ended, or not timely. It kept right on, at a reduced intensity perhaps, but straight on. After only six months of mourning I desired another female. Following my evening shower I would gaze down at my little gentleman, shrunken and disheveled below my relaxed paunch, and wonder, Will I nevermore introduce him to a willing female? 

So I was more or less constantly on the prowl. Or if that sounds too hot and bothered for a biped of my maturity, let me say that sometimes I permitted myself to become lonely and aroused. A Final Woman, therefore, was if not a necessity at least a consuming notion.

At first glance, though, my predicament looked tough, maybe insoluble. I wasn’t popular with the ladies—my wife herself hadn’t cared for me much—and yet a moment’s concentrated thought pinpointed exactly the right woman. 

Her name was Charmane, and I had already met her years ago. With luck, I only needed to go out and collect her. I had encountered her for the first time when I was employed at Sleep Studies downtown, where for thirty years I palmed off placebos on insomniacs, tricking them into falling asleep. She was employed in the Outpatient Clinic right next door, or next door except for DeeDee’s Sandwich Shop that occupied a small space between our two institutions. 

Charmane came outdoors for smoke breaks at the huge sand-filled ashtray in front of Clinic, while I took my own nonsmoker’s breaks with a fire-breathing friend or two at the dune-sized ashtray in front of Sleep, about a hundred feet away from her. The lady and I came to recognize each other this way, despite the clouds of smoke between us…Yes, Charmane was the answer, of course!

How clearly I remembered her. Like all smokers everywhere, Charmane stepped abroad in any weather, sleet, snow, pouring rain, and hurricane winds, to flick her ashes, at least once an hour I surmised. I, as truthfully reported, did not smoke, but still liked my breath of air, no matter how damp or frigid or violently gusting. Or I would go to DeeDee’s, halfway to Charmane, for almost strong, almost hot coffee. Gradually, distant nods and smiles turned into waves of the hand and then spoken hellos that on blustery days one had almost to bellow to push them across to her.

But I never walked the hundred feet to her and introduced myself, and why would I? My wife had not yet died, for one thing. Still, I might have had a conversation with her. It was an everyday matter for employed people to talk together, to be sure. Employed people could never talk to the unemployed—there was no bridge over the gulf of joblessness, snobbish as that sounds—but we could talk to other employed without difficulty, and in complete innocence. But I had never tried with Charmane.

Fortune smiled on me! After driving downtown I found Charmane smoking in her old spot, as if she’d been waiting for me all this time without moving one step away. I found I really could talk to her, too. Of course she recognized me, and muttered some pleasantry about missing me for…what was it now, two years since she’d last seen me?

That interval sounded right to me too, I concurred with delight, and I took a good long look at the woman. Before now I had only guessed at her age from a hundred feet away, going by her most visible attributes: the stooped shoulders, trim white uniform, and mouse-colored hair. Women could be deceptive, though. You could approach a woman indoors or out who by her long brown hair and svelte figure and sparkling eyes appeared to be in her twenties, only to find when you were face-to-face that the hair was dyed, the skin wrinkled like an old cantaloupe, and the mouth puckered over ill-fitting dentures—a walking corpse with the final flicker of life in her eyes, in short.

But that never worked the other way around. A woman who from afar appeared to have a measure of the sagging, bent, discolored, and withered about her, invariably possessed all that and worse close up. I was taking my chances with Charmane, and since I must be fair, she was risking hers with me. 

So then, how did she look? Close up to her at last, I found that in her white medical garb Charmane looked sixty or sixty-five. Her posture was stiff, bordering on brittle, and a slight forward tilt of her axis indicated either a bent spine or an absorbing interest in others. Not as robust as I preferred, but she smiled readily, and was natural enough not to have succumbed to the fads of orthodontia and tooth bleaching. Her dark eyes emitted sparkles that I later determined were reflections of light from the lenses implanted in cataract surgery.

All in all it suited me that she was older. A few winters older was appropriate, as this aged boy harbored no Alice in Wonderland or Lolita tendencies toward juveniles, nor was he adopting a later-life alter ego who demanded a trophy mate. What the codger desired was a suitable old bag. 

We decided on a date for that very evening. Since I was already downtown, and I adored reasonably priced almost tasteless hospital-style food, I insisted we go to dinner at the 24-hour Clinic cafeteria that I’d heard about. Charmane agreed, saying that after twenty-six years of working and eating at Clinic, there were probably one or two things on the menu she hadn’t tried yet. Besides, her workday was about to conclude, and she was free to do anything, even eat there. 

Within minutes we stood in line. Smiling, I piled my green plastic tray with steamed salmon and boiled rice, and Charmane loaded hers with broiled chicken and salad and a sinful slab of chocolate cake. She said she was starving. We both chose iced tea, mine unsweetened, hers polluted with sugar substitute. 

When it came time to talk about what had brought us together at last, we became characters in a Jane Austen novel. I mentioned that I had never forgotten her, paused for the pianoforte to stop playing, then added that I’d long wanted to become better acquainted, and would have sought her out before now, but that after my wife’s untimely death many vicissitudes and setbacks conspired to delay my approach, resulting in a tardiness that I now found unpardonable.

She, for her part, told me she had regretted my abrupt fading away following my retirement, and had my disappearance not occurred, she would surely have told me, through an appropriate intermediary, that her husband was well out of the way with dementia in a home somewhere. 

To contrast myself with her unfortunate hubby, I steered the conversation to my rugged health. “It’s all about diet and exercise,” I said, throwing out my puny chest and pointedly not looking at her cake and sweetened tea. “Stick to a food and aerobic regimen, and you’ll live far longer than all your friends, should you want to.”

“There’s something about a fish-oil taking man,” she said, in what I took to be agreement.

“Pass the low-dose aspirin, babe,” I said. 

We giggled like psych patients. Around us white-coated Indians, Asians, Hispanics, African-Americans, and Serbo-Croatians for all I knew, together with a few standard Drs. Smith and Jones, ate hasty meals or grabbed coffees before returning to the lab or ward.

After dinner we headed to her place. Normally she was in bed alone before ten to recharge for her eight a.m. shift, but tonight was special. We made the ardent dash, still familiar from our hormone-bolstered youth, to her front door, a race that was, however, more slowly run on my part than in times past. And yet she made me hotter than a match. We kissed on her bed and a bit of my molar came apart in our conjoined mouths. Or a bit of her molar. It was unclear whose dentition was crumbing, locked as we were in a feverish, dry, elderly embrace. It didn’t matter. We both spat out a bit of yellowed enamel and metallic filling, and got right back to business. 

I wanted to make love to her with the cock of a rock star, but that didn’t happen. She showed me her small penis and I showed her my large clitoris, and after that everything went into slow motion. Her thin, bent body resembled a twisted wire coat hanger, and mine god knows what. 

Penetration was delayed because with her arthritis she couldn’t hold her legs up. She also apprised me of a wide assortment of aches and pains that I endeavored to accommodate. For instance, I willingly resigned myself to the loud wheezing she had acquired from her reeking cigarettes. At last we adopted a lazy method that worked, and I grew firm if not penciled out, and before I lost interest she emitted a few strangled moans in completion. 

During the afterglow, I noticed I could see her entire scalp through her frizzy, thin hair. Her mammal parts hung down like deflated balloons in a way I liked. Cuddling on the sofa in front of her enormous TV, we played at being infants, a game I taught her. The rules were simple. I told her in babytalk how to serve me. “Wa-wa” I would say, and she lifted a glass of water to my lips. “Scro-scro” I said, and she held my scrotum like an apple. I warned her to take no bites. This deepened our newfound relationship.

During commercials I talked old comics to her. “Do you know The Phantom? Alley Oop? The Powerful Katrinka?”

“No, I don’t think so. Maybe. Alley Oop I do.”

“What about Mad Magazine? Potrzebie? Furshlugginer? Thundermelvin?”

“No,” she said. “I don’t understand that. I never read that.”

“Okay, but what about Red Skelton? Brother Theodore?”

“Red Skelton, sure. Not the other one.”

“How about discontinued candy bars? I persisted. “Payday, Clark, Chunky?”

“Sure, I’ve eaten those. And Necco Wafers. Are those still around?”

Here and there I inserted a word of 60s slang into our conversation, so that Charmaine and I could relive the groovy Age of Aquarius together, but spending the night together wasn’t an option. I told Charmane I couldn’t stay, and left after a few hours of joy.

What concerned me was her bed, primarily, or more particularly her mattress, a gelatinous affair that sucked me in like a great marshmallow. We continued to see each other in the days and nights that followed, mostly nights, but she refused to sleep on anything other than this bottomless bog, and never expressed the least interest in trying out the supportive and springy rectangle I had at my place—a single-room apartment I had acquired shortly after the death of my wife and the swift sale of our former home. Not once, in fact, did Charmane acquiesce to set foot there, whether during the day or evening, though I enthralled her with descriptions of the tidy and luxurious abode. What was she afraid of? I never knew.

Even worse, her house itself annoyed me, more so with each visit. This was an older building in a rundown section of the city, hers alone ever since her husband had been institutionalized. She had converted it into a two-family dwelling by the simple expedient of renting out the lower story to a twenty-something female with a young son, and herself occupying the upper story. 

That was all well and good, but the lower floor contained the sole bathroom, an arrangement I found awkward during my lengthier visits. In theory one could descend the central staircase and pop into the toilet when the mother and boy were not occupying it, but it seemed one or the other always was. 

Nor would Charmane hear of having a plumber install another bath on her level, which would have been time-consuming in any case. She actually micturated in a cat litter box, and extended the same amenity to me, so that I became a spraying old Tom. She seemed sincere about wanting me as her Final Man, just as I cherished her as my Final Woman, though neither of us said that explicitly, and yet she was unwilling to make any serious change in her lifestyle to accommodate me. Her refusal to even once cross the threshold of my place, but to insist that I always be confined to hers, grated on my nerves all along.

One night we had a terrible row about a movie—I call it a row though we never raised our voices, but it seemed to me the disagreement meant the pinnacle of our relationship had already passed, and that we trended downhill from here on. On learning that she had a DVD player hooked up to her TV, I brought over my Robert Ryan Retrospective 24-Disc Boxed Set.

What a great actor Ryan had been, I informed her. Whether playing an antisemite in Crossfire, an anti-Asian in Bad Day at Black Rock, a white supremacist in Odds Against Tomorrow, a brutal cop in On Dangerous Ground, a bloodthirsty sadist in Billy Budd, a fey gangster in The Racket, an immoral homewrecker in Clash by Night, a cynical misogynist in Lonely-hearts, or a lunatic murderer in Beware, My Lovely, he was utterly convincing in each and every role. No one glowered or grit his teeth as menacingly as Robert Ryan. They say he never turned in a bad performance, and here in my hand was his 24-DVD set to prove it.

In case she preferred comedies, I bragged that I also owned the Danny Kaye 5-Movie Collection and the Don Knotts 4-Movie Set, and would bring them next time. They were sure to tickle the funny bone of any baby boomer, I added.

But she wouldn’t hear of any of this wholesome and riveting fare. Tonight one of the TV channels she subscribed to was showing a Burt Reynolds film, and I was stuck watching the mustachioed, slack-jawed, urban cowboy drawling wisecracks while steering his Pontiac Trans Am. It amounted to two hours of torture. 

In a forgiving mood, I offered Charmane a final chance to save our relationship, before another debacle like Smokey and the Bandit sundered us forever. She would quit her job as a nurse aid or whatever she did at Clinic—she had never described it to me in any detail, any more than I outlined for her what I did with boring old placebos at Sleep—and we’d travel around the country side-by-side. 

“We’ll get an RV,” I said. “Who doesn’t want to be on the open road during their sunset years? We’ll visit every scenic site from coast to coast, the more touristy the better, and pick up souvenirs. These we’ll assemble into a giant Kitch Museum right inside the RV, where we’ll also be living from now on.”

She stared at me in stony silence, and I elaborated. “Think of it: a refrigerator magnet from Four Corners, commemorating that spot in New Mexico where four states come together; a model of the Corn Palace, that building made of corn cobs in South Dakota; a replica of the famous twelve-foot concrete prairie dog in Kansas. I’ve looked forward to this trip for years.” 

But Charmane wouldn’t hear of the itinerary I so eagerly anticipated. Defiantly, she refused to abandon her employment, saying her job was her whole life, elderly though she may be, and I began to see at last that she was not my Final Woman but a Placebo Woman: a woman who you thought loved you, but in reality didn’t love you one bit—she was only a trickster. That was my excuse for leaving my Final Woman, who was not so final after all.