The Feline Scale

by Lisa P. Sutton

I’m hiding in my car thinking about Demi Moore again.

I’m supposed to be on a date. For an hour now, I’ve been parked right outside his condo but I can’t make myself go inside. I don’t even know what to call him. Saying boyfriend or lover at my age embarrasses me. What did Demi call Ashton Kutcher? When they started dating, she was forty and he was twenty-five. I’m sixty-two. And the man I don’t know what to call? I can’t bare to ask. He’s got the good elastic skin and sharp jawline of someone still in their late thirties, maybe forties.

We met at a farmer’s market. I was wandering among overpriced fruit for something to do and he was eating grapes straight from a bag. Juice dripped down his chin and onto his white t-shirt. I’d forgotten that feeling–being truly hungry–since my husband died last year. I must have been staring.

He turned to me and said, “Well, aren’t you a Jaguar.”

A Jaguar is like a Cougar but older. I googled it as soon as he wandered away from the market with my number. I’d scribbled it on a piece of cardboard from the eggs I’d just bought while he smirked and said it was refreshing that I wasn’t tied to my phone. I also googled Cougar and Demi came right up. That’s how it started. My obsession with her. I hadn’t seen her movies in years and I knew it was absurd, yet when that man looked at me over his grapes, with his bright open face and boyish smile, I felt a connection with her.

There’s no equivalent word for men who date Cougars or Jaguars, and I can’t stop thinking this might all be easier if I could call him some kind of cub. Privately, just for me, I’ve resorted to calling him the Professor because he teaches literature at UCLA. He thinks I’m a mystery writer under a pen name I’m too shy to share.

I was really a lawyer for thirty-five years, until the hospital called to tell me about my husband. I walked out of my office, drove straight to Cedars, and never went back. My old friend the Governor wants me to become a judge, but after a serious career my whole life, I’m tired. I’m done with the law. And I’m having fun pretending to write legal thrillers. I carry a little notebook for show and drop bits of plot for the Professor that I lift from John Grisham and spin with Harry Potter.

Tonight the Professor is cooking dinner for me, and I’ve brought very good wine funneled into an empty Trader Joes bottle I had my housekeeper recork. I don’t want to offend the Professor, but I’ve had booze that costs as much as his Prius. On our first date, he took me to a neighborhood in LA I’d never seen and we stood in the street eating skewers of things I didn’t recognize. I’d have liked to sit down, with cutlery and a nice filet, but I smiled and told him I loved everything.

Demi said, of being with Ashton and having broken 20 years of sobriety, that she felt like a teenager just hoping someone liked her. I’m sure she lied to Ashton in ways she never lied to Bruce Willis when they were married. I never really lied with my husband. We’d been together since college and he knew everything about me. What would’ve been the point? But my daughter warned me on the phone this morning that everything’s changed since I last dated her father in the 80s. “This man asked you over to have sex, Mom.”

I was shocked. I’m not a prude but when I was younger and dating, I went to my girlfriends for this kind of talk. I wasn’t expecting to have it with my daughter. “It’s just dinner,” I said. It came out more sharply than I’d meant but I wanted to end the conversation. With her father gone, my daughter paid more attention to me. It was comforting in those early days when I wanted to scream in the quiet house. Now I resented being watched so much.

“Mom,” she said, a little sharp now too. “You do not believe it’s just dinner.”

“Honey?” I said. “Shut up.”

Then she apologized and I apologized and we both sat on the phone just breathing and feeling terrible for a minute. My daughter and I have a good relationship but my husband’s death, her father’s death, has turned everything upside down. Plus, there’s the other little factor we don’t discuss–that the Professor would be a more age-appropriate date for my 30-year-old daughter than for me.

Finally, she said, “It’s just that you’re the smartest woman I know.”

“Thank you.” I was relieved to feel us moving back toward more peaceful territory. I had to give her credit. She got her stubbornness from me but she was quicker to take accountability
for things.

“So,” she said, “since you’re so smart, you can’t be this deluded with this guy.”

And there went peace. I hurried off the phone. I’d had enough. But my daughter’s words stuck in my head. The truth was, I was too nervous to think too clearly. What if I’d forgotten how to have sex? With other people. Alone, everything still worked. All I could think to do then was get naked before the full-length mirror in my closet to take inventory. It was something I hadn’t really done since I was pregnant with each of our children. I’d been amazed then at the changes to my body. Now I hated to look. Though I was still reasonably slim and healthy from tennis and swimming, most things were lower and looser. I thought of Demi at home alone in her own closet as Ashton moved on to Mila Kunis.

And I’m still thinking of Demi that evening when I’m sitting in my parked car and hear the screech of brakes, the helpless sound of tires skidding on the pavement. A thud into the backside of my Mercedes.

The crash isn’t enough to trigger the airbags, but I took off my seatbelt an hour earlier when I shut off the engine, and now I’ve been jolted forward. I have to peel myself from the steering wheel.

“Oh my god,” someone says. “Oh. My. God.”

I make my way out of the car to find a teenager surveying her Kia. She looks unhurt but the Kia’s front end is a dropped soup can. The left rear of my Mercedes isn’t much better.

That’s when I also see the Professor, running from his condo toward the curb. “Ellie,” he says, breathy and anxious. “I heard the crash from upstairs.” He holds me, right in front of the teenager, and I think this is a good sign. He is not ashamed to be seen with me.

The teenager starts listing all the different ways her parents will murder her. I let go of the Professor and try to reassure her. He starts to examine the damage.

The Professor calls out over the hood of my car. “Were you parked?”

“What?” I say. I pretend I’m so enthralled with talking to the teenager that I haven’t heard him clearly. I don’t want him knowing how long I’ve been in front of his home, unable to go in.

“She was,” the teenager says. “She was parked. I’m so stupid.”

“No, I wasn’t– She’s–”

But the teenager goes on, crying now, unable to stop. “My parents are always telling me not to text while driving.”

I’m trying to catch the Professor’s eye. “I just got here,” I say. “I was parking and just on my way up.”

But the Professor won’t look at me. He presses his palms against the hood of my Mercedes. “It’s cold,” he says, upset. “The engine’s been off for a while.”

Before I can explain, the teenager’s phone rings and she wails. “Oh god, it’s my mom!”

“Okay, okay,” I say, but the kid is a wreck.

“We don’t have to tell her, right? You can just say you hit me.”

“Absolutely not,” I say.

She offers to pay me back for the repairs. “I’ll babysit for you,” she says but then pivots as she takes in my face. “No. You can’t have little kids. How about dogs? Do you have dogs? I can dog sit?”

“No.”

“Dog walks? Grooming?”

I feel for her. At her age, this probably feels like the worst thing that could ever happen. But I have to level with her. “I’m calling my insurance company,” I say. I explain that there will be forms to fill out, legal documents to sign. “You don’t want to lie on these things. I know, I’m a lawyer.” The word comes out before I can think to take it back.

“Oh god,” the teenager starts all over again. “Oh god, oh god. I hit a lawyer. A parked lawyer. They’ll never let me drive again.”

The Professor eyes me strangely now. But I have to finish up with the teenager. I exchange insurance information with her as quickly as possible and then convince her to drive straight home where she’ll at least get points with her parents for being honest and responsible.

As she drives away, the Professor says, “You’re a lawyer. Interesting.”

“It’s really not,” I say, hoping a little levity will save me.

But he’s angry. “Is anything you told me true?”

I try to smile up at him. I don’t know what else to do. “My name is truly Ellie,” I say.

He doesn’t smile back. I offer to take him out somewhere, somewhere nice, where he won’t have to fuss over whatever he’s cooked that’s probably ruined by now. But the spark’s gone. We both know it.

“Maybe just call your insurance company now,” he says.

I laugh. I surprise myself and don’t know where it comes from, but that’s what happens. I laugh and laugh.

“What’s funny?” he says.

But I’m laughing too hard to answer. Maybe it’s the relief now of knowing I’ve fucked everything up and it can’t get any worse. Or maybe it’s the particular absurdity of my downfall. I have been at my wit’s end worrying over sex and dating and the fact that my belt now can nearly double as a bra, or worse, that I will spend what’s left of my life alone, but I never thought to fear my romantic prospects being undone like this.

“I was afraid to have sex with you,” I finally say, gulping for air. “Because of a 16-year-old– in a Kia–” I can’t get my thoughts out. I’m still laughing, hysterical now. “Because of her– I– I don’t have to.”

He rubs his temples. Thinking it over, I guess. Or I’m giving him a migraine.

I’m still laughing. I wait for him to laugh too. Or maybe just get angry. He could call me an idiot and a liar and he wouldn’t exactly be wrong. But he doesn’t do any of those things. What he does is pull me toward him. What he does is kiss me.

I stop laughing. I kiss him back. We keep kissing and it feels nice. Really nice. He paws at my shirt and I reach for him too. “Let’s go inside,” he says.

My daughter was right. I panic. I think of Demi, what it would’ve felt like to let go that first time with Ashton, but it doesn’t help. I don’t feel old. I feel exactly as I’ve always felt. But I know other people see me as old now, and until the Professor ages too, he won’t understand what this is like. I don’t think I’m as brave as Demi. I don’t think I’ll ever be brave enough in another man’s home again.

“I can’t,” I say. The simple truth.

The Professor steps away from me and I know this is the end. There’s no one to blame but me. I am going to lose him and go back to my quiet house. To a sad single pork chop cooked in the toaster oven and endless reruns of Law & Order.

But he walks to the curb instead.

“Where are you going?” I say.

He doesn’t answer. He just opens the back door to my Mercedes. He stands there, looking at me now, the door open wide behind him.

I am frozen. I don’t move or speak.

He does a little flourish with his hand, inviting me inside. “It’ll be just like when we were young,” he says, the right words.

Now I don’t think of Demi. I don’t think of Cougars or Jaguars or their unnamed cubs. I don’t even think about my husband. I pretend the Professor and I are both decades younger, brand new to this at the same time. I take a deep breath and walk over to the car. And then I crawl into the backseat and wait for him to follow me.

 

Lisa P. Sutton is a writer from Los Angeles who accidentally became a celebrity divorce lawyer. In addition to drafting pleadings for high-profile clients including Johnny Depp and Angelina Jolie, she has published stories in The New York Times, The Saturday Evening Post, The Rumpus, PEN America, North American Review, and others. She earned her law degree at Boston University and her MFA at UC Irvine where she was Editor-in-Chief of the international literary journal Faultline.