Latex Lessons

I'm sixty-four years old and I don't apologize for anything anymore. That took practice. Thirty years of marriage, two kids, a divorce that was actually civil, and then a boyfriend named Pete who was nice in every way except the ones that mattered. Retired yoga instructor. I can still touch my toes and I still don't apologize.

Tuesday nights I teach a memoir class at The Inkwell & Ivy. It's a used bookstore in a college town, the kind with sagging shelves and a cat named Dewey who sleeps in the window. The owner lets me use the back room for free if I buy coffee from her counter. Fair trade. I get there early every week to sit in the reading nook and collect my thoughts before eight students show up to tell me about their mothers.

The nook has two overstuffed chairs and a poster of the Amalfi Coast from 1962. I like that poster. Everybody in it is dressed up. Nobody's in gym clothes.

So there I was, drinking coffee and thinking about my single life, which is fine, by the way. People ask. It's fine. I have friends, I have a garden, I have a standing Thursday game of canasta. What I don't have is a man, and after Pete I told myself that was a choice and not a wound. Some days I believe it.

Pete and I broke up a year ago. He was sixty-seven then, retired librarian, sweet as pie, dull as a butter knife. We dated eight months. The sex was fine. The conversation was fine. Everything was fine and that was the problem, if you want the truth. Fine doesn't keep a woman up at night.

The breakup itself was amicable. We shook hands like closing a library account. But I said one thing at the end that I've thought about a hundred times since. I said, "Pete, you never once surprised me. You never even tried to surprise me. If you'd shown up at my door in something ridiculous, something wild, I might have stayed."

It was a joke. Mostly a joke. He laughed and said that wasn't really his department, and we shook hands again, and the matter was closed.

I hear the bell over the door and I don't look up. Dewey doesn't either, so I know it's not the mailman. Then I hear footsteps I know, careful steps, a man who spent forty years around quiet rooms. I look up and there's Pete Dickson, sixty-eight now, gray beard trimmed short, holding a paperback like a shield.

"Of all the bookstores in all the towns," he says.

"It's one bookstore, Pete. In one town."

"Small town." He stands there shifting his weight. "Maya said there was a memoir class here Tuesdays. I was just, uh. Browsing."

Maya owns the vintage shop two doors down. She's twenty-nine and we met through book club five years ago when she argued so hard about Mrs. Dalloway that I decided I liked her. She is the only person I've told the Pete joke to, because I tell Maya everything, and now this is what you need to know about Maya: she never lets anything die.

Pete sits in the other chair. Not too close. Dewey relocates to his lap like they planned it.

"So what are you reading?" I ask.

He holds up the paperback like it's evidence and not a book. It's some thick thing with a black cover.

"Research," he says.

"On what?"

And he goes red. Sixty-eight years old and he goes red from the collar up. "Materials," he says. "Properties of materials."

"Pete."

"It's a real field. There are journals."

I put my coffee down. "You read books about latex because of one joke I made a year ago."

"It wasn't one joke. It was a diagnosis. You said I never surprised you and you were right, and I've been thinking about it for a year, and I did some reading, and it turns out latex is a whole world. There's care instructions. There's a shining compound. Did you know there's a shining compound?"

"I did know that, Maya owns six things that need it."

He blinks. "Maya owns latex?"

"Maya owns a vintage shop. Of course Maya owns latex." I stare at him. "You've been talking to Maya about this?"

"No! No. She mentioned the class. I came for the class. The class is public, the flyer is in her window." He pets Dewey like the cat can bail him out. "I thought maybe I'd sit in the back. Learn something about memoirs."

"About latex. You came to learn about latex."

"About surprising people," he says, quiet. "The latex was just where I started because it was where you started."

Here's what I felt, in order. Annoyed. Then amused. Then a third thing I'm not proud of, which was the urge to win. Because Pete sitting there with his research journal and his cat had done the thing I said he never did, a year late, and I'd be damned if he'd get credit for it now without earning it.

"Pete," I say. "I'm going to offer you something."

He straightens up. Dewey slides off his lap.

"An experiment. One evening. My terms, my rules, my outfit. You follow instructions. If you break a rule, we're done and you leave through the kitchen door so the students don't see you cry."

"What kind of rules?"

"Rules like you don't touch until I say. Rules like you ask before anything. Rules like you do what you're told, which will be a novel for you."

He swallows. "And the outfit would be."

"Latex, Pete. Obviously latex. Maya will supply it and Maya will be there to make sure you behave, because she's wanted to watch you squirm since I told her about the joke."

"Maya would be there? In the room?"

"Would that be a problem?"

"No," he says, too fast, then slower. "No. That's fine. That's, um." He clears his throat. "When?"

"Not tonight. Friday. You'll get the details the day of. You'll bring nothing and you'll say nothing to anyone, especially not your book club, because those four men gossip worse than my sister."

He laughs at that, and something in his face opens up, and I hate that I remember how much I liked his face. "Sylvia. Why?"

"Because you did your research and I did mine," I say, which is a lie, I did no research. "And because you're going to follow my rules this time or we stop. That is the entire lesson, Pete. Surprise has to be earned."

He stands up. He puts the research book down on the table between the chairs like leaving a deposit. "Friday," he says. "I'll be there."

"Seven o'clock. Eat first. Don't wear cologne."

"Okay. Okay." At the door he turns around. "Sylvia? Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet."

The bell rings and he's gone and I sit there with Dewey climbing back into my lap and my heart doing a pace I haven't felt in years.

* * *

I walk straight to Maya's shop. She's at the counter cutting tags off a leather jacket, and she reads my face before I say a word.

"He came in, didn't he," she says.

"How did you."

"Because I put the flyer in the window yesterday and told him the class was Tuesdays, and I did it on purpose, because you've been moping about that man for a year and I'm tired of it." She drops the jacket. "What happened?"

I sit on the arm of a mannequin stand, which is not made for sitting, and tell her all of it. The research book. The shining compound. The invitation.

When I get to the part about rules, Maya grins so wide I can count her fillings.

"You're going to dominate that man," she says. "In my latex. In front of me."

"You don't have to be in the room."

"Oh, I'm absolutely going to be in the room. Sylvia. Sylvia. I have a red catsuit in the back that's been waiting for someone with your posture." She comes around the counter and takes my hands. "One question. One real question. Is this revenge or is this a second chance?"

I think about it longer than I want to.

"Yes," I say.

"Which one?"

"Both. It can be both, Maya. He gets the experiment. I get the win. And if the win feels good enough, maybe everybody gets a second chance. That's the deal."

Maya squeezes my hands. "Then we need to talk sizing, because latex doesn't forgive and neither should you."

She drags me into the back room and starts pulling garment bags off a rack, and I stand there in a vintage shop at my age, sixty-four years old, about to be measured for a second skin, and I feel like the poster in the reading nook. Dressed up. Going somewhere.

* * *

Friday comes and I arrive at the back room of The Inkwell & Ivy at six, an hour before Pete, because a general never arrives at the same time as the troops.

Maya is already there. She has turned the reading nook into something. The two overstuffed chairs are pushed against the wall. The Amalfi Coast poster from 1962 hangs over them like a chaperone who's seen things. There's a folding screen. There's a small table with a bottle of the shining compound and a cloth.

"Behold," Maya says, and holds up a garment bag.

She unzips it and pulls out a dress. Red. Latex. It looks small enough to fit a wire hanger and no woman.

"That is not going to fit me," I say.

"It's going to fit you like paint," she says. "That's the point of latex. It doesn't fit, it becomes."

"Good," I say. "Hang it on the chair. He's going to be the one to dress me. That's lesson one."

"Evil," Maya says, delighted. She lays the dress over the arm of one chair and the elbow-length red gloves beside it, powder already in the fingers, and I change behind the folding screen into a silk camisole and a robe, which is as far as I'm willing to go without supervision.

Maya holds up a second garment bag, black this time, with a pair of gloves for him.

"Does he get latex too?" I ask.

"He gets gloves," she says. "He hasn't earned a catsuit."

At seven sharp there's a knock on the kitchen door, because I told him kitchen door, and I make him wait a full thirty seconds before I let him in. Pete stands there in a clean shirt and his good jacket and he looks like a man reporting for a physical exam he's afraid he'll fail.

"Hi," he says. "You look."

"I look what?"

"I was going to say incredible but the dress is sitting on the chair, so I haven't seen it on you yet."

The dress is on the chair. Maya planned that. Little