In Search of the Perfect Mate
A Cautionary Short Essay and Story on Nostalgia and Regret
[Statue of Pygmalion and Galatea]
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.—Fernando Pessoa
I have always been leery of nostalgia and try my best not to get caught up in regret, always reminding myself that one way of doing something isn’t necessarily “worse” or “better” than another way of doing something. Perhaps, then, the choices I have made are not better or worse than the choices I didn’t make. Perhaps they were just “different” from what I could have chosen. And yet still doubt creeps in at times, especially when I enter the stumble into the landscape of Nostalgia, wandering around like a toddler among memories that most likely never happened, or that have been distorted by time and by my inflated ego. Beware of Nostalgia, I say, and remember Marcel Proust’s statement that the “remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
The Sixties generation is especially prone to nostalgia, and baby boomers seem incapable of being happy with what they have. We were supposed to be the hip and idealistic generation, but I often think we should be called the Self-Absorbed or Insatiable Generation. We have always wanted it all, so much so that many of my liberal friends who went to Woodstock (though I don’t think I have ever met a guy over seventy who doesn’t swear he was there), sold out and voted for Ronald Reagan, whose rallying question was, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Inexplicably, that question dogged my fellow idealists when they went into the voting booth alone and didn’t have to pretend they were liberals.
As regards personal relationships, I know of few people who don’t fantasize about the “perfect” partner they should have had, instead of the one they’ve been living with for most of their adult life.
If I had just waited, he thinks, I could have gotten both the brains and the beauty.
If I hadn’t been depressed at the time, she thinks, I would have realized that I could have married most anyone, as long as he was rich and could give me the “good life”’ unlike my plumber husband.
I’m sure a lot of these regrets surfaced during the first horrible year of Covid when people had a lot of time to think and when they spent more time with their partners in than they had in the previous thirty or forty years.
This male fantasy reminds one of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea. If you recall, Pygmalion was a Greek sculptor who shunned women, until he created a statue of one who was so beautiful, he fell in love with her, and with the aid of Aphrodite, the statue/woman named Galatea (because her skin was so milky white) came to life. What a wonderful concept, you might think if you are a man. I mean, you’re almost like a god making your creation in your own image and likeness. But, in fact, this myth could easily replace the one on Narcissus because, in a weird way, by creating the “perfect woman” Pygmalion really fell in love with himself, since Galatea is the physical manifestation his his own superficial narcissistic idealization of women.
With this myth in mind, meet Jake, who thinks he has finally ended up with his dream girl, until . . . Well, I won’t spoil the ending of this very short story.
Grasshopper
Jake was thinking about nine-year-old Billy McMahon taping a grasshopper to a railroad track, and how he and his friends, as if afflicted with some communal brain fever, had hidden among the tall cattails waiting for the Delaware, Lackawanna Railroad cars to rumble by. He was close enough to see the tiny legs flailing, and he hoped the hot sun might fry the poor thing before the steel wheels did the job. It was cruel—he knew it—but he had said nothing. They were all afraid of Billy, mistaking his manic antics for a devilish wisdom he might at any moment unleash on them. Sometimes Jake felt as if his whole life should have been a make-up for that one event, not to mention his future displays of cowardice, of which there were many.
He had met her in the library. She was twenty years younger than him. An heiress. An avid hiker and equestrian. A vegan. He had never even been on a horse. He loved steak, rare. She had many papers scattered on the table in front of her. She was writing a book on the history of one particular whaling ship called the Commodore Goodman. Diagrams, photos of dark-skinned seamen from the Azores, and big fat old books, were strewn everywhere. He had come to do research on the blues singer Blind John Davis. That’s how he had made a living, playing bass guitar in a blues band called the Aviators, a local band with one Grammy nomination. She was impressed by that. She said she had always wanted to be a lead singer for a rock band. He was used to that kind of female fascination for all things rock and roll. That was how he had met his wife.
“Why the Aviators?” the equestrian had asked.
He had flashed a smile, so playful, so flirtatious, even at sixty-eight, that anyone would’ve thought he practiced it in a mirror. “Because we flew, man,” he said, extending his arms out, mimicking the flight of an airplane. “You dig it?”
She laughed at his archaic diction, as he knew she would. She said he was “refreshingly odd, a brilliant and disorderly bad boy,” and he couldn’t imagine his wife ever saying that.
He had always preferred blondes. She was a brunette with short hair. A nice figure. Strong calves, and a firm, pouty ass, hardened from her three-times-a-week workouts with a personal trainer named Marco. He felt an overwhelming attraction to her, an irresponsible excitement, like seeing how long you could hold your hand over a flame. But he was much older than her. And then there was his wife. But still, still . . . that kind of chemistry rarely happened, even with the middle-aged groupies who followed his band before he was married. And he was bored, so very, very bored, as if the last few years had vaccinated him against wonder.
Perhaps, then, this woman was the antidote to his boredom, though he could only guess at how she’d respond to his seven-pill-a-day regimen, his chronic phlegmatic coughing fits, his frequent sinus infections, and his pot belly, not to mention the four trips he took to the bathroom every night. Still, what harm to spend time with her in the library? Then a coffee at Flamingos, a smoothie at Dave’s. A few guitar lessons on her back porch. Sometimes he imagined himself traveling abroad with her and her money. Fancy restaurants, waterfront bars. And if there was live music playing, he could sit in, get that kind of attention again. Who was that guy? they’d say.
But then the virus arrived, trampling any hope for adventure. “Better not to text anymore,” he had texted. “Why?” “Wouldn’t want my wife to get the wrong idea?” “How could she?” Though eventually she agreed with the need for secrecy, and her acceptance of complicity excited him even more than the hope of seeing her again.
He could’ve stopped by her house or tailed her and “coincidentally” pulled into the grocery store parking lot when she did, but he could no longer face the horrified bloodshot eyes of old shoppers, exaggerated because of their masks. Did he look like that? And he wondered how much time an old bluesman with arthritic fingers had left until the virus tracked him down. Still, still, he felt something extraordinary might be waiting for him. Something risky and unnecessary, like swan-diving from a bridge, knowing it was your decision, and worth it for those thirty free-falling seconds before you hit the pavement.
One day, exhausted from hours of TV and gathering twigs in the backyard, he decided to take a walk on the beach. That’s where he ran into her. Very little was said. They strolled separately for a while, then got closer and held hands like two love-sick teenagers, which was the first time he had actually touched her. She reached over and removed his mask, then hers. She began to kiss him, not knowing she was the first woman, excluding his wife, he had kissed open-mouth in over forty years. There were a few couples on the beach, and a chiropractor he knew from the Y, and a woman his wife had organized a church pancake breakfast with. But he couldn’t have cared less.
So how did it go so wrong, he thought, as she snored loudly next to him. He stared at his crumpled chinos and boxer shorts that were draped over a rocking chair like the skin of some extinct animal, and he thought about Billy McMahon. The last time he had seen Billy was when they were twelve. They were swigging Scotch from a bottle Billy had stolen from home. Billy was chattering, as he was wont to. He was describing how he had dived into the gorge, and how the cold water had paralyzed him. He couldn’t make it back up, he had said, but then a heavenly whiteness flooded his eyes and he saw the face of God, whose huge hand dragged him to shore. “That’s when I knew I was being saved for something special,” Billy had said. And he was right. Two years later, high from sniffing glue and being chased by the local cops, he ran into the path of a tractor trailer’s metal grill.
And now here was he—an old man under an unfamiliar comforter, naked except for a black Vineyard Vines T-shirt. There had been no heart-thumping explosions. No souls mating above in some baby-boomer Never Never Land. Yes, she had a smooth hard body and was inventive in bed, but, much to his surprise, a whiff of something sour came off her when she had broken into a sweat, a smell so intense and repulsive that he had almost lost his erection.
She was a “student of sex,” she had said, and then explained, no, demanded, how she had wanted her clitoris stroked, as if she were an astronomer who had just discovered a new star. The best he could say afterwards was that he had survived the afternoon, and he was sure she probably felt the same. Perhaps Billy’s grasshopper had survived too, he thought. Perhaps, so distracted by his own crazy thoughts, Billy hadn’t secured the tape. Jake imagined the creature hopping through the tall grass that bordered the tracks, the ground rumbling under its tiny legs. Surely, if there was any justice to life, any logic, the poor creature had deserved another chance.
Something he was sure wouldn’t be given to him.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss+
View draft history
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
—Fernando Pessoa
I have always been leery of nostalgia and and try my best not to get caught up in regret, always reminding myself that one way of doing something isn’t necessarily “worse” or “better” than another way of doing something. Perhaps. then. the choices I have made are not better or worse than the choices I didn’t make. Perhaps they were just “different” from what I could have chosen. And yet still doubt creeps in at times, especially when I enter the landscape called Nostalgia, wandering around like a toddler among memories that most likely never happened, because they have been distorted by time and by my inflated ego. Beware of nostalgia, I say, and remember Marcel Proust’s statement that the “remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
The Sixties generation is especially prone to nostalgia, and seem incapable of being happy with what they have. We were supposed to be the hip and idealistic generation, but I often think we should be called the Self-Absorbed Generation or the Insatiable Generation. We have always wanted it all, so much so that many of my liberal friends who went to Woodstock (though I don’t think I have ever met a guy over seventy who doesn’t swear he was there), sold out and voted for Ronald Reagan, whose rallying question was, “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Inexplicably, that question dogged my fellow idealists when they went into the voting booth alone.
As regards personal relationships, I know of few people who don’t fantasize about the “perfect” partner they should have had, instead of the one they’ve been ling with for most of their adult life.
If I had just waited, he thinks, I could have gotten the brains and the beauty.
If I hadn’t been depressed at the time, she thinks, I would have realized that I could have married most anyone, as long as he was rich and could make me money, unlike my plumber husband.
I’m sure a lot of these regrets surfaced during the first horrible year of Covid when people had a lot of time to think and spent more time with their partner in a year than they had in the previous thirty or forty.
With this thought in mind, meet Jake, who thinks he has finally ended up with his dream girl, until . . . Well, I won’t spoil the ending of this very short story.
Grasshopper
Jake was thinking about nine-year-old Billy McMahon taping a grasshopper to a railroad track, and how he and his friends, as if afflicted with some communal brain fever, had hidden among the tall cattails waiting for the Delaware, Lackawanna Railroad cars to rumble by. He was close enough to see the tiny legs flailing, and he hoped the hot sun might fry the poor thing before the steel wheels did the job. It was cruel—he knew it—but he had said nothing. They were all afraid of Billy, mistaking his manic antics for a devilish wisdom he might at any moment unleash on them. Sometimes Jake felt as if his whole life should have been a make-up for that one event, not to mention his future displays of cowardice, of which there were many.
He had met her in the library. She was twenty years younger than him. An heiress. An avid hiker and equestrian. A vegan. He had never even been on a horse. He loved steak, rare. She had many papers scattered on the table in front of her. She was writing a book on the history of one particular whaling ship called the Commodore Goodman. Diagrams, photos of dark-skinned seamen from the Azores, and big fat old books, were strewn everywhere. He had come to do research on the blues singer Blind John Davis. That’s how he had made a living, playing bass guitar in a blues band called the Aviators, a local band with one Grammy nomination. She was impressed by that. She said she had always wanted to be a lead singer for a rock band. He was used to that kind of female fascination for all things rock and roll. That was how he had met his wife.
“Why the Aviators?” the equestrian had asked.
He had flashed a smile, so playful, so flirtatious, even at sixty-eight, that anyone would’ve thought he practiced it in a mirror. “Because we flew, man,” he said, extending his arms out, mimicking the flight of an airplane. “You dig it?”
She laughed at his archaic diction, as he knew she would. She said he was “refreshingly odd, a brilliant and disorderly bad boy,” and he couldn’t imagine his wife ever saying that.
He had always preferred blondes. She was a brunette with short hair. A nice figure. Strong calves, and a firm, pouty ass, hardened from her three-times-a-week workouts with a personal trainer named Marco. He felt an overwhelming attraction to her, an irresponsible excitement, like seeing how long you could hold your hand over a flame. But he was much older than her. And then there was his wife. But still, still . . . that kind of chemistry rarely happened, even with the middle-aged groupies who followed his band before he was married. And he was bored, so very, very bored, as if the last few years had vaccinated him against wonder.
Perhaps, then, this woman was the antidote to his boredom, though he could only guess at how she’d respond to his seven-pill-a-day regimen, his chronic phlegmatic coughing fits, his frequent sinus infections, and his pot belly, not to mention the four trips he took to the bathroom every night. Still, what harm to spend time with her in the library? Then a coffee at Flamingos, a smoothie at Dave’s. A few guitar lessons on her back porch. Sometimes he imagined himself traveling abroad with her and her money. Fancy restaurants, waterfront bars. And if there was live music playing, he could sit in, get that kind of attention again. Who was that guy? they’d say.
But then the virus arrived, trampling any hope for adventure. “Better not to text anymore,” he had texted. “Why?” “Wouldn’t want my wife to get the wrong idea?” “How could she?” Though eventually she agreed with the need for secrecy, and her acceptance of complicity excited him even more than the hope of seeing her again.
He could’ve stopped by her house or tailed her and “coincidentally” pulled into the grocery store parking lot when she did, but he could no longer face the horrified bloodshot eyes of old shoppers, exaggerated because of their masks. Did he look like that? And he wondered how much time an old bluesman with arthritic fingers had left until the virus tracked him down. Still, still, he felt something extraordinary might be waiting for him. Something risky and unnecessary, like swan-diving from a bridge, knowing it was your decision, and worth it for those thirty free-falling seconds before you hit the pavement.
One day, exhausted from hours of TV and gathering twigs in the backyard, he decided to take a walk on the beach. That’s where he ran into her. Very little was said. They strolled separately for a while, then got closer and held hands like two love-sick teenagers, which was the first time he had actually touched her. She reached over and removed his mask, then hers. She began to kiss him, not knowing she was the first woman, excluding his wife, he had kissed open-mouth in over forty years. There were a few couples on the beach, and a chiropractor he knew from the Y, and a woman his wife had organized a church pancake breakfast with. But he couldn’t have cared less.
So how did it go so wrong, he thought, as she snored loudly next to him. He stared at his crumpled chinos and boxer shorts that were draped over a rocking chair like the skin of some extinct animal, and he thought about Billy McMahon. The last time he had seen Billy was when they were twelve. They were swigging Scotch from a bottle Billy had stolen from home. Billy was chattering, as he was wont to. He was describing how he had dived into the gorge, and how the cold water had paralyzed him. He couldn’t make it back up, he had said, but then a heavenly whiteness flooded his eyes and he saw the face of God, whose huge hand dragged him to shore. “That’s when I knew I was being saved for something special,” Billy had said. And he was right. Two years later, high from sniffing glue and being chased by the local cops, he ran into the path of a tractor trailer’s metal grill.
And now here was he—an old man under an unfamiliar comforter, naked except for a black Vineyard Vines T-shirt. There had been no heart-thumping explosions. No souls mating above in some baby-boomer Never Never Land. Yes, she had a smooth hard body and was inventive in bed, but, much to his surprise, a whiff of something sour came off her when she had broken into a sweat, a smell so intense and repulsive that he had almost lost his erection.
She was a “student of sex,” she had said, and then explained, no, demanded, how she had wanted her clitoris stroked, as if she were an astronomer who had just discovered a new star. The best he could say afterwards was that he had survived the afternoon, and he was sure she probably felt the same. Perhaps Billy’s grasshopper had survived too, he thought. Perhaps, so distracted by his own crazy thoughts, Billy hadn’t secured the tape. Jake imagined the creature hopping through the tall grass that bordered the tracks, the ground rumbling under its tiny legs. Surely, if there was any justice to life, any logic, the poor creature had deserved another chance.
Something he was sure wouldn’t be given to him.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss+
I met my wife 48 years ago today. I was my brother’s date at his senior prom and met her there. We’ve been together ever since.
I can’t imagine looking for someone else. I met a girl in junior college and thought she was the one. She wasn’t and couldn’t run away fast enough. I later dated a ballet dancer. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she inhabited her space with such poise and moved so delicately that I felt I was floating beside her. She disappeared in a puff of air. Then I got involved with two married women. One was young and bored and toyed with me; the other was a mother of three teenagers and liked my writing. I got the sense she was rewarding me for good behavior.
There were others, but the night I met my future wife, the planets were correctly aligned, the moon was full, and the stars winked, “This is the one.” They were right.