Frenchie’s day began early. He took a shower, shaved, and got dressed with the help of Jean Daniel, his Haitian aide. He would make his way across the parking lot leaning on his cane, keeping an eye out for cyclists, and continue to the corner Starbucks for the first of his five daily cups of coffee. Divorced once and twice a widower, he had never lacked lady admirers, whom he seduced with his magical charms. On one recent occasion he had calculated he had fallen in love sixty-seven times. He wrote the number down in his notebook so that he wouldn’t forget it, as the faces and names of these lucky ladies were fading fast in his memory. He had several legitimate children, as well as one from a clandestine romance with someone whose name he couldn’t remember, and any number of nephews and nieces, all of them ungrateful wretches who were only counting the days for him to depart this world so that they could inherit. There was talk of a small fortune amassed boldly and with few scruples. He himself admitted without the slightest hint of remorse that he had spent time in prison, where he had obtained the pirate tattoos adorning his arms, although flabby muscles, age spots, and wrinkles had blurred the images. He had also won considerable amounts speculating with the guards’ savings.
Although the attentions of several Lark House ladies left him little room for any amorous adventures, Jacques was fascinated by Irina from the first moment he saw her going around with her clipboard and pert behind. She had not a drop of Caribbean blood, which made her voluptuous backside even more of a feat of nature, he would tell everyone after his first martini of the evening, astonished that no one else had noticed it. He had spent his prime doing business between Puerto Rico and Venezuela, and it was then that he had become so keen on appreciating women from the rear. The epic buttocks of those distant days had become fixed forever in his mind’s eye. He dreamed of them, and saw them every-where, even in such an unlikely spot as Lark House and in someone as skinny as Irina. His aimless final days were suddenly filled with this belated, all-encompassing love that wreaked havoc with his tranquil routines. Soon after they met, he showed how besotted he was with the gift of a topaz and diamond scarab, one of the few of his dead wives’ jewels that had escaped his descendants’ clutches. Irina refused to accept it, but her refusal sent his blood pressure shooting sky-high, so that she was forced to spend the whole night with him in the emergency ward. Hooked up to an IV drip, Jacques declared his undemanding, platonic love for her. Sighing and lamenting, he said he only wanted her company so that he could regale his eyes with her youth and beauty, hear her enchanting voice, and imagine that she loved him too, even if it was only like a father. Or even a great-grandfather.
The following evening, back at Lark House, while Jacques was enjoying his ritual martini, Irina, her eyes red rimmed and with dark circles beneath them from lack of sleep, went to find Lupita to confide the mess she was in.
“There’s nothing new about that, child. We’re always discovering the residents in someone else’s bed. And not just the grandpas; the old women too. With so few men around, they have to make do with whatever they can find. Everybody needs company.”
“With Mr. Devine it’s platonic love, Lupita.”
“I have no idea what that is, but if it’s what I think, then don’t you believe it. Frenchie has a penis implant, a plastic sausage that inflates with a pump hidden between his balls.”
“What on earth are you saying, Lupita?” said Irina, laughing out loud.
“You heard me. I swear it’s true. I haven’t seen it, but Frenchie demonstrated how it works to Jean Daniel. It’s amazing.”
The good woman told Irina what she had observed during the many years she had worked at Lark House: that in itself age doesn’t make anyone better or wiser, but only accentuates what they have always been.
“A person who is tightfisted won’t become generous with age, Irina; they only become more miserly. I’m sure Devine was a rake, and that’s why he’s a dirty old man now.”