May-September Love

It is humorous, when I think about it, the things that strangers will tell me without much prompting. I had just met a May-September couple from Palm Beach. The woman, Nicole, was many years younger than her companion Robert, and they were an attractive match. Her jet-black hair tied tight back like a Spanish aristocrat’s was in sharp contrast to Robert’s gray hair and salt-and-pepper beard. They looked like movie stars: he, Cary Grant with a beard and she an equally elegant Audrey Hepburn.

“Nice day,” I remarked, and that’s all it took. Like old friends, their story spilled out as if the little Dutch boy had removed his finger from the dike. First a trickle, and then a deluge.
Both, it unfolds, had experienced loveless and dissolving marriages. They had discovered each other when Robert was shopping in a Palm Beach department store, where Nicole worked.

“I walked into this store and looked at the most gorgeous woman that I had ever seen,” he told me. His guileless smile spoke as much about his feelings as his words. She smiled and the air rippled, they exchanged electricity and I think I saw the spark.

Some of their lovers’ tale was sketchy and incomplete but they both had children and Robert quipped that, “One of us has grandkids, too.”
He told me that his mother had called him earlier in the week to tell him that his wife and her boyfriend were in Israel on vacation, then he added that Nicole’s husband was in Nevada doing his own thing.
He and Nicole had traveled, first to Little Palm Island for a couple of days, and then found themselves on the “Afterdeck” at Louie’s Backyard, the ultimate Key West rendezvous for romantics.

Robert did most of the talking, while Nicole smiled agreeably, although I think that she might have been ready to place a strategically place kick if necessary. Then Robert mentioned that “she has a thing for older men.
“Lucky me,” he added.
More electricity sizzled.
“And the one time that she was involved with someone nearer her age, it ended badly.”

My thoughts ran through the spectrum of ways that relationships end, and naively, I lightly danced into a minefield.
“I went out with a younger man for three months and when I told him that it wasn’t working out…,” she paused and took a deep breath before continuing, then told me the rest of her story. The details are not pleasant, and suffice it to say that it did end badly, extremely so, the young man causing himself grave physical harm, in her presence.
No one smiled. A hand was squeezed.

They had a plane to catch and after we parted company I thought about how in the space of fifteen minutes I had traveled from stranger to confidante. I had shared in the joy, the sadness, the expectations and the hopes of this couple. I always hope to hear joyful endings to love stories, but in the real world that’s not always how it happens.

Some time later, an elderly couple sat down next to me at a table overlooking the ocean. The man was wearing a pale yellow bow tie, the real McCoy, not a clip-on. The woman’s crisp white hair was nearly silver against the blue horizon. They held hands and looked as if they truly appreciated each other’s company. When their eyes met, the ozone shifted. I could see another love story.
They looked in my direction. “Nice day,” I commented.