Today’s Tom Sawyer

One of the best dates I ever had was not a date at all, or at least that was the way Evan reacted to it when I described my experience to him a few weeks after the fact. “Sounds like he was a cock tease,” Evan said.

“No,” I answered. “He was very sweet about everything.”

The truth of the matter was that I had experienced a bad buildup before the great-date-that-was-not-really-a-date happened, which may have exaggerated my rating of it into the stratosphere. I had spent the prior year watching my love life turn me, literally, into one of the Great Walking Wounded. After breaking up with Tony I fought off a case of shingles; I went through two root canals while I was trying to decide whether or not to continue seeing Bernie after three months; and when the six-week relationship with Hal failed to go any further so did I, stumbling down a flight of steps and tearing a ligament in my foot, which required me to use a set of crutches in order to be mobile.

That was when Evan suggested I get out of town and do some healing. “Use the cabin,” he said, referring to a small rural property he owned with his significant other. “We’re not going up there again till next month.”

It sounded like a plausible idea, even with crutches—to be isolated in the upstate woods without a guy anywhere in sight whom I could conceivably want to date, with no TV to watch and a bag of books to read—so Evan came to my apartment to drop off the cabin keys and I crawled aboard a bus and slept through the ride to the country. A few hours later, I was standing in a small, rural village wondering what I could possibly have been thinking by leaving behind my brand new air conditioner and round-the-clock support structure in the city. The taxicab I had called was not really a taxi nor a cab when it stopped in front of me to take me the next seven miles to the cabin, but the passenger seat in the front of an old red pickup truck, and the driver was not a fully licensed or registered or official or professional taxi driver either, but a boy, a late-teenaged boy with floppy golden hair, ice-blue eyes, an impossibly thin waist and the most beautiful set of arms that a slender young man could possess.

“My uncle’s tied up at Mrs. Smith’s farm,” the young one said to me when he announced that he could be the only way I would get to my final destination. “You don’t mind, do you? I can get you there in this.”

Of course I was immediately suspicious—that was my urban reflex system cracking into high gear—and just as I was about to ask his age, I felt too old and vulnerable to move my mouth, standing there with my crutches and my suitcase of books, not able to take my eyes off of young Tom Sawyer’s impossibly beautiful physique, and I was aware that I was having one of those awful motion-picture moments when the spinster realizes her tour guide is someone generations younger than she is. Or worse, finding myself in a country music version of Death in Venice.

(Did I mention that young Tom’s shirt was sleeveless and unbuttoned in the front and that the jeans he wore were cutoffs because it was summer and it was hot? Should I mention that he had a baseball cap stuck in the back of the cutoffs and that even the slight bulge in the pocket that the hat created was unable to ruin the bubble shape of his ass? Would you believe me if I said the young man’s complexion was pale and creamy except where it was red at the cheeks and slightly washed with freckles across the bridge of his nose and that his teeth were remarkably even and white, or is that taking the image too far?)

So hobble and humble myself I did, right into the front seat of his truck.