Shotgun Betrothal

Mr. Pinter only meant to go for a walk to keep his joints nimble. Well, as nimble as 75-year-old, Mr. Pinter’s joints might be. But this walk really got away on him. It became much more than a simple walk.

Herman Pinter was a retired, high-school, math teacher living in Van Nuys, California. He’d lived in the same house since 1970. He had upgraded everything in the house at least twice as the years passed. He even had the unused rooms repainted to add freshness. For some reason, principally a concern for investment value, he had always felt that it was best to keep his major investment up to par. In recent years, his home passed the value of any other single investment he had, so his money seemed to have been well-spent. But this is all digression. The fact that he was not destitute played into the story.

He often walked a route that took him by the corner of Martha Street and Varna Avenue. As he passed by that house, he had to admit to himself that he’d kept a look out for a former student he’d taught who once lived there. Gabriella Russell was a slightly stout, dark-haired beauty who insisted that people call her Gabi, rather than by her full, four-syllable name, Ga-brie-ell-ah. Herman was 50 years-old when he’d called her name from the roll on that first day of school. He’d heard a faint, “Here” in response but couldn’t identify who had said it, so he asked that she please stand so that he could connect a face to the name.

As soon as fifteen-year-old Gabi stood, he looked again at his list for her last name and remarked, “Has anyone ever told you that you have a striking resemblance to Jane Russell, the old-time movie actress?” Gabi replied, “My mother says that we’re related to Jane Russell but my mom thinks it’s one of those second-grand-niece twice-removed kinds of things.” Then she sat down and her girlfriends giggled and poked her from both sides.

Math class proceeded as it did each year. Gabi was a nice, well-behaved girl, easy on the eyes of the aging but professional and respectful man. She blended in well with her classmates.

Then came parents’ night, also known as, ‘meet-the-creature’ night by the students. Herman Pinter thought it was an apt name because of its ambiguity. Who’s the creature? In some cases, it really was the teacher because there were some bizarre teachers. In other cases, the creature was the parents. Pinter remembered having an interchange with a religiously-frocked father of a boy who’d had minor behavior problems in school. The father put his finger out as if to scold Pinter but instead he’d said, “If my boy gives you any trouble, any trouble at all, I want you to walk right up to him and slap him right across the face!” Pinter replied, “He has not given me any serious trouble so far, and I don’t expect he will.” But in Pinter’s mind, he was thinking, “No wonder the boy acts the way he does. He lives under the oppressive demands of this creature.”

Sorry, that was another digression, but it gives some sense of his career environment.

Then came Gabi’s mom.

When Gabi’s mom walked into Herman’s classroom that “meet the creature” night, he knew immediately that she was Gabi’s mom because she was so close in resemblance to The Jane Russell, that he found it disconcerting. He said, “I can see how it is that Gabi has come to resemble Jane Russell, the actress. You have an even stronger resemblance to her. I hope you don’t mind me saying so.”

Mrs. Russell sloughed it off. She’d heard it all through her life. The most striking thing about Mrs. Russell was (of all things) her posture. She had a remarkably erect posture. She was not military-erect, nor affected-erect, but just casually, comfortably erect, and it suited her well. She was what many would call a “handsome woman.” She asked about Gabi’s progress and her prospects. Pinter told her the truth. Gabi was an average student who found it hard to grasp the more abstract aspects of math. Mrs. Russell said, “A parent always hopes for gifted exceptionality, but average will do too.” He couldn’t have agreed more. Their meeting was brief and easy going. Neither of them had a sense of what would become of Gabi.

As he saw Gabi progress through high school, she seemed to put on more weight every year, but she still retained that semi-exotic beauty that he supposed everyone could see in Jane Russell. But her high-school boy classmates knew nothing of Jane Russell, nor apparently of essential beauty, and Gabi became a total wallflower. He saw her once when he was chaperoning a dance. She was talking and giggling with a group of girls when a small group of boys, bolstering each other’s courage, approached, and every girl was asked to dance except Gabi who stayed in place and swayed alone to the music.

Pinter wondered whether he had been so callous in his youth as to leave a girl alone like that. On this night, he would have liked to have provided her with some comfort, but he couldn’t think of a way to do that without it being unseemly or worse, misunderstood. Gabi remained alone until her girlfriends returned.

Years later, he met Gabi as she was serving him a hotdog at Costco. Four or five years out of high school, serving at the ready-to-eat bar at Costco had become her career of sorts. She certainly had more on the ball than that, he thought. But he smiled at her and they briefly acknowledged their acquaintance.

Again, years passed. He was just walking by her parents’ house when he saw her cleaning out a car in their driveway. He called, “Hello” to her and identified himself to her, in case she couldn’t recognize him. She had gained even more weight. She still had the same pretty face but she was presenting a very robust image of femininity. He asked how she was doing. She smiled, shrugged and said, “Okay.” He decided not to ask the next few questions commonly asked of a young adult about marriage and children. He let it go with ‘okay’ as an answer. He waved and walked on.

As he walked by that house year after year, he often saw that same car in the driveway. It was getting older, just as he was getting older. He wondered if it was Gabi’s car and she still lived with her parents, or was it the parents’ car that Gabi had been cleaning that day. He imagined that Gabi was about 40 years old, now that he was 75, because she had been 15 when he was 50. That was a 35-year age gap.

So, here’s what happened.

Again, he was just innocently walking by, trying to keep his joints limber, when he saw Gabi outside the house. He called to her, “Hi Gabi! How are you doing?”

She looked closely at him, recognized him, and replied, “Oh! Hi Mr. Pinter! How nice to see you again!” There was a pause, then she continued, “Oh, Mr. Pinter, could I speak with you for a moment?”

After insignificant small-talk banter, it turned out that he could be useful to her, if he had the time. She needed him to stay with her mom, whose health was failing, so that she could run to the drug store for needed meds. He agreed to help her out and entered the Russell home.

Inside, the home was like it had been caught in a time trap – a very kitschy time trap at that. Dirty lace curtains hung in a bay window behind a large assortment of ceramic figurines. There were kittens posed with balls of yarn, many statuettes of puppies doing puppy things, a rearing horse, angelic boys in church robes singing before open hymnal books, tiny rustic houses, just a little bit of everything.

The open dining room had been converted to a hospital room with a raised, back-adjustable bed and nearby were telescoping stands for hanging intravenous, drip-type medical administration. Gray-haired Mrs. Russell, who sat slumped and shrunken in a wheelchair, was younger than he was, but her health had failed in some way, perhaps even in many ways. She looked up at Herman as Gabi re-introduced him to her and told her mother what she intended to do before she left him alone with her.

He noticed that they still had a tube-style TV and a VCR! He had to get over his shock so that he didn’t appear to be judgmental. He didn’t know whether Mrs. Russell was still speaking well or not, so he didn’t immediately try to engage her in conversation. He just sat and smiled. He tried not to appear threatening to her.

“You were Gabi’s math teacher in high school.” The comment was used to identify him, not to accuse him. He agreed that he’d had Gabi as a student in one class.

“Gabi always told us how nice you were. How you were patient and polite. A real gentleman.”

Herman smiled and thanked her for her nice comment.

“Gabi’s father died many years ago. I took ill about five years ago now. We always liked having Gabi around but we knew that it wasn’t good for her, you know, to stay with her parents her whole life like this. What’s going to happen to her when I pass away a few months from now?”

Herman asked, “Do you know that it will be a few months from now?”

“Yes. Yes, I do know that, young man.”

He didn’t correct her about her age misjudgment in calling him ‘young man.’ Instead, he said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

But Mrs. Russell persisted in her quest. “Who’s going to take care of Gabi now?”

He replied, “It seems to me that she is taking care of you.”

“Oh yes, that’s true, but I don’t mean that Gabi needs that kind of care. I mean who will love her like she deserves to be loved? She’s made no friends. All her girlfriends got married, had children, moved away. She never met a boy who treated her right. She always said that she preferred just coming home to mama and papa. But sir, I can tell you for certain that everyone needs love, and Gabi seems to be headed for no love, no love at all!”

Pinter meekly offered, “There are dating services, even for older singles these days.”

Mrs. Russell waved her hand in disgust, turned her head away and said, “Bah! She tried those. All she found were shysters, con-artists, crazy men, short men with ‘little man’ complexes. Broken people! All of them! More broken than I am now!”

Then Mrs. Russell got down to business with him. She looked at him intently, she said, “I met you one night at the school. I’ve seen you walk by, alone, many times over the years. Gabi always liked you. I think you always liked Gabi. Before I die, could you tell me that you could promise to love her? To keep her company? To be with her sometime, you know, the way a man can be with a woman?”

Herman was dumbfounded. He found himself unable to say anything. The situation seemed preposterous. He had no doubt it would seem preposterous to Gabi too, that her mother was trying to pimp her out.

Then Mrs. Russell said, “Please sir, I need to know that my daughter will be loved, truly loved, sometime in her life. I need to know this so that I can die in peace.”

He replied that Gabi was a fine, lovely woman and that he would do his best to see that Gabi was well and properly loved.

Mrs. Russell took that as his assent to meet her hopes and she relaxed.

Gabi walked in.

Mrs. Russell pointed at him with a crooked, arthritic finger and said to Gabi, “This man says he will love you after I die.”

Gabi evidently knew of her mother’s concerns about her love life. She also knew that it would be better to upset Pinter than to upset her mother. Gabi smiled her astoundingly pretty smile, nodded briefly to him and said, “That will be fine, Mr. Pinter. I would like that very much.”

He didn’t think that the vague promise would amount to much, but knowing Gabi’s situation, he also felt that at 75-years-old, a new, possibly exciting chapter was opening in his life.

Because of their interaction that day, Pinter made a point of stopping into their home rather than simply walking by it on his daily walks. After many such visits, he came to be expected in the Russell home. He was offered many cookies and cups of tea. One day Gabi and he even secretly and mischievously took a couple of tequila shots over the kitchen sink. Gabi’s mom did die within a few months and there was much consolation that needed to be administered. Much hugging and holding and yes, he even ventured a lingering kiss on her tender lips.

His head was dizzy with confusion. He had made what he’d considered to be a preposterous promise. He didn’t mind guiding Gabi to find a good man or woman close to her own age so that they could do age-appropriate things together. But the whole thing was such a toss-up. Gabi didn’t want to seek companionship. She’d been burnt too many times and she was through with it. She seemed to want him! He was still in good shape for an old guy. He could walk. He could joke. He had a full head of mostly dark hair. He was not wrinkled with age. He’d been told that he could pass for 50. But the truth was that, like her mother had done, he too would pass from Gabi’s life in fairly short order.

He shouldn’t have tried to fulfill Mrs. Russell’s wishes. But inertia set in, they were enjoying each other’s company. Gabi did not seem overly concerned about knowing that she’d be seeing off another senior. They stayed together. They laid together. He did what he could do for her sexually, and she seemed to enjoy it. The hardest part was enduring the condescending judgement of outsiders who couldn’t abide the thought of a romantic pairing of a couple with a 35-year age gap. Gossipers must have shared too, that he had once been her teacher, but they both thought that after 25 years, there’d be a time limit on that particular taboo.

By the time he reached 78 years old, still going remarkably strong, he had given up both surfing and downhill skiing. He credited his young feeling to being kept young at heart by his lovely, young paramour. She continued to live in her own home. He guided her through a complete makeover of the home, step-by-step, using contractors, painters, landscapers. Her parents had left her a bundle of investments which she used to fund the renovations.

They lived within easy walking distance of each other, so they saw each other daily and if it got too late or the weather was bad, they simply stayed the night at each other’s homes.

He’d been told by many of his young students from foreign lands that arranged marriages did just as well as love marriages. Gabi and Pinter weren’t married, but yes, their close relationship had a high degree of ‘arrangement’ to it.

All he could say about it was, “Thank you Mrs. Russell, wherever you may be!”