Letters from the Front Row

I am fifty-two years old and I let a forty-five year old woman talk me into emailing a total stranger. That is how this starts. Rekha Chalmers has been my friend since she was twenty-two and I was twenty-nine and we were both dumb in the army, and she has never once respected my boundaries. I mean that with love. Sort of.

I got divorced two years ago. Twenty-two years married, done at fifty. My ex took the good cast iron pan and the dog, and I took an apartment in Tucson with one lawn chair in it. Rekha watched me mope through two barbecues and a birthday and decided she was done with it. She works festival logistics for Desert Solstice, the big three-day music thing out at the old airfield, and she has been bugging me to volunteer security for years. I finally said yes this spring.

Here is what she told me in June, over carne asada at her place. She said Mina Fox, the volunteer coordinator, had a crush on me. Mina is one of her festival people. I had never met the woman. Then, I found out later, she told Mina the same thing about me. Both lies. She also handed each of us the other's email address and said it was for coordination, which was also a lie, since neither of us needed to coordinate anything.

But I sat at my kitchen table that night with a laptop and a plate of leftover rice and beans, and I typed the first email. I had not written anything that long since retirement paperwork. I looked at it for twenty minutes before I hit send.

Subject line: Festival coordination (Rekha's idea)

Ms. Fox, Rico Gomez here, security, checkpoint six near the main stage. Rekha gave me your address. Full disclosure, she also told me you have some feelings about me, which was news, since we have never met. She is forty-five and up to something, and I am pretty sure the something is us planning a fake romantic gesture for her birthday, which is during the festival. I say we give her one. She has been messing with our heads, so we mess back. I was thinking a staged serenade during the sunset set on Saturday. She hates being the center of attention. It would be perfect. Think about it. Rico.

That is more or less what I wrote. Then I closed the laptop and did not check it for four hours, which is a lie, I checked it every twenty minutes.

Her reply came that night. I read it standing up in the kitchen.

Subject: Re: Festival coordination

Mr. Gomez. So you got the same phone call I did. She told me you had been carrying a torch since the volunteer mixer, and I informed her I have never seen your face in my life. She said absence makes the heart grow fonder, which is the kind of thing that should be illegal. I am forty-seven, I run three hundred volunteers, and I do not have time for a fake serenade. That said, I am listening. If we are going to fool a woman who has lied to both of us with a straight face, we need a good cover story. Trade embarrassing Rekha stories. I have six years of them and one involves a golf cart in a drainage ditch. Mina.

I laughed out loud alone in my kitchen, which had not happened in a while. I made a list of Rekha stories from the army years. There were a lot. I picked the two cleanest ones and sent them back, and that ended it, we were emailing.

* * *

It went on for two weeks like that. A story a night, sometimes two. The golf cart one cost Rekha a boot. Mine involved her trying to salute with a plate of birthday cake in her hand and choosing the cake. Mina's writing was dry and fast and funnier than she probably is in person, and I found myself reading her emails twice. Then a third time. I am fifty-two, I know what that feeling is, and I did not do anything about it, because what would I even do.

The Thursday after that she asked me a direct question. Had I actually dated since the divorce. Honest answer, so I gave it.

Subject: Re: the golf cart incident

Mina. Since you asked. No, not really dating. I tried twice. The first was a woman Rekha set me up with, a year ago last spring. Nice enough, a nurse, my age. I got nervous and called her sergeant twice in one dinner. She did not serve under me. She had never been in the military. The second time I took a woman from my gym to a farmers market and talked about irrigation for forty minutes. She said she had to go water something, and I did not hear from her again. I was married a long time. Turns out I only know how to flirt like it is 1998. Rico.

Her answer came in the morning and it was shorter than usual.

Rico. Three years for me. I ended a ten-year relationship when I was forty-four and I have not been out once since, which sounds worse written down than it feels living it. My ex used to say I was too organized for romance. He said it a lot, near the end, like it was a diagnosis. I color-code my volunteer schedules and I keep a laminated list on my refrigerator, so maybe he had a point, but I do not think romance and spreadsheets cancel each other out. I think he just wanted an excuse. Anyway. Your sergeant story made me snort coffee. Mina.

I read that one four times. I made coffee and read it again. Too organized for romance. Some man had this woman, forty-seven years old, funny as hell on a keyboard, and he told her she was too organized for it, and she believed him for three years. I sat there at my table getting mad at a guy I would never meet. That was probably the moment, looking back. That was when the emails stopped being about Rekha's birthday for me. They had probably already stopped for her. I was slow. I am always slow.

* * *

That weekend I wrote what I called the mission briefing. I had spent an hour on it at the table with the lawn chair and the failing window unit, and I was kind of proud of it. It was the most fun I had put into a piece of paper in years, and it was for a woman I had never seen, over a fake serenade, for a fake crush, to prank a real friend. None of it made sense and all of it made my week.

Subject: OPERATION DESERT SERENADE, briefing 1 of 1

Mina. Attached, the plan. Diagram included, drawn badly in paint, do not judge me. Saturday, sunset set, Rekha will be at the sound booth with Curtis Briggs, who is my old squad mate and a sound engineer and a terrible liar, so he is already recruited. You approach from the volunteer side at 1900. Stand where the X is, twenty feet from her, facing the stage, so it looks accidental. I come up the other side with the guitar. Curtis cues the spotlight, which he says he can do and I believe him for reasons I cannot explain. The song is the one Rekha played each of us over the phone in June, she will know it. You say the line about the golf cart boot. I handle the rest. Abort code is the word tortilla. Dress comfortable. Signed, your wingman. Rico.

I sent it Sunday night and got her reply Monday at 6:40 in the morning, which told me she had been up since before five, like me. Old habits.

Subject: Re: OPERATION DESERT SERENADE

Rico. The diagram is terrible. The X looks like a bird. Abort code accepted, though I want it on the page that I will not be saying tortilla in front of three hundred volunteers unless it is a real emergency, and a real emergency is not Rekha making a face at me. One change: when Curtis hits the spotlight, I think you should be the one who says the line about the boot. I have heard your army voice in these emails. Use it. See you Saturday, I guess. Nineteen days. Mina.

Nineteen days. She had counted. I had counted too, but I had not told her that. I put the laptop down and went and stood in my kitchen for a minute like an idiot, fifty-two years old, grinning at a window unit that only sort of worked.

Her next email had a script in it. An actual script, typed out in a document with the title "MINA'S SURPRISED FACE, TECHNICAL RIDER." Stage