Look of Love

A Short Story

Long retired, Norm sat reading the daily newspaper in his easy chair next to the window. It was sunny outside and Norm could hear the cacophony of birds singing in the trees that lined the street in front of his condo. He often listened to an oldies radio station streaming from his computer and stereo setup as he drank his mug of morning Joe and read.

As he listened, Dusty Springfield’s rendition of “The Look of Love” played on the radio and he thought of those wild times from his late teens to his forties and beyond. But most of all, he thought of Bette and how years later she never failed to tease him with the song whenever they were together.

He’d say to her, “What the hell is the look of love, anyway? Is it some insipid googly-eyed expression that’s supposed to signal “true love”?”

She’d laugh, then shrug. “How about a certain suggestive look and what it leads to?”

While thinking of Bette, Norm recollected what he called his “satyr years” from his late teens well into his forties and beyond, He slept with what may have seemed like an unending assortment of women. Like many men, he was restless and felt he needed sufficient time to “sow wild oats.” For Norm, that time never really ran out until his prostate and age intervened.

Norm never married. Like many men, he neither understood much about women nor about love, and like many men, he confused love with sex. As he grew older, so did the women. From his thirties onward, he dated women who were a decade younger to a decade older. Norm later claimed that time was as close to heaven on earth as he thought possible.

The closest he ever came to marriage was his version of cohabitation, but such ventures never endured more than a few months. Instead of actually living together, Norm preferred that he and the woman at the time “visit” each other on weekends or when convenient. He reasoned it was more sensible to maintain his place while his lady friend woman maintained hers.

Whether he visited the woman or she visited him, Norm never felt quite “at home” in the relationship. For example, he was a neat freak, so if the woman’s home or apartment looked like the inside of a dumpster, that was a no-go for him from the start. On the other hand, if the woman was an obsessive-compulsive neat freak, who constantly cleaned and picked up, even at his place, that was also a turnoff. Norm wasn’t any easy guy to be with, let alone love.

Before retiring, Norm worked as a freelance IT specialist, with more than 30 years experience as a programmer and IT troubleshooter, dating back to his stint with the navy, where he trained as a data systems technician.

Instead of going to college, as his a math professor and his mother, a librarian so desired, Norm joined the navy to see the world. The navy, like other branches of the armed services, puts a recruit where it needs one. At the time, they needed skilled data systems technicians to maintain and operate its huge mainframe computers. Norm had inherited his father’s mathematical and analytical skills, which the navy recognized when Norm scored near the top in the standard aptitude tests for recruits.

After basic and tech school training, Norm spent the rest of his USN tour in the operations center of a destroyer, servicing the Sperry-Rand UNIVAC mainframe computer. Once discharged from the navy, he worked in the corporate sector, troubleshooting both hardware and software issues of mainframe computers. Over time, minicomputers and microcomputers replaced mainframe systems, which were then replaced by the omnipresent desktop computer networks that evolved quickly from the 1970s and beyond.

By the 1980s, preferring to be his own boss, Norm worked as a freelance programmer and troubleshooter, and mastered whatever computer languages he needed for his work. When he retired, his repertoire included a range of programming languages from COBOL to Python, C, and C++, to name just a few. Norm could do it all and earned top dollar for his work accordingly. He marveled at how fast the intervening years disappeared.

As Norm sat in his chair reminiscing, he felt was never cut out for a more permanent relationship with a woman, yet he genuinely liked some women. There were a few he even cared for on a deeper level, but was it love? He was never sure.

The only woman he loved without realizing it was Bette, who her mother had named her after Bette Davis. But Bette was much prettier as a statuesque redhead with hypnotic hazel eyes and an alluring figure. When Bette asked Norm what he saw in her, he said she was a walking wet dream with an IQ off the charts. Bette doubled over and howled with laughter. Then he asked her what she saw in him. “The sex,” she said, and began to disrobe as she sauntered into his bedroom, dropping her clothes as she walked.

Bette was a psych grad student when Norm met her after he returned to civilian life from his stint with the navy. Bette, the future psychotherapist, viewed Norm not only as an occasional lover, but also as a potential test patient, whom she tried to psychoanalyze, beginning with the usual questions about his childhood and his relationship with his parents.

Norm’s father died while Norm was still in the navy. Bette theorized that Norm’s mother then tried to compensate for the loss, by indulging Norm’s every wish as he lived at home briefly after his discharge. Norm’s mother suggested he should return to school, become a professor like his father, meet a nice woman, get married, and begin a family. His mother’s plans weren’t his.

Yet Norm and Bette became best friends, albeit with benefits. She was in many ways his female counterpart. They commiserated with each other over failed relationships and comforted each other accordingly, usually in bed. Sometimes Norm would introduce Bette to a new woman friend as his sister, and ask her later what she thought of the new woman. Bette did the same with a new boyfriend, saying Norm was her big brother. Later they’d exchange stories and laugh.

Bette often teased Norm about his name. “You know,” she’d say, “you’re not a normal man, Norm. Clinically, I’d suggest you’re on the abnormal spectrum.”

“Perfect! I disdain ‘normal’ and even the suggestion of it. Meanwhile, please spare me the tedious psychobabble.”

“That’s what I love—I mean—LOVE—about you, Norm. You’re not only my best friend with bennies, but also the brother I never had.

“Ah, the long lost brother!” Norm exclaimed. “You know, given your tendency to have sex with me whenever you find it convenient, does that mean you’d fuck your own brother? I mean, that’s pretty kinky in a incestuous way, isn’t it?”

“Hmmm...theoretically, that sinful thought turns me on,” she said, smirking as she stared directly into his eyes.

Norm threw up his arms. “And you dare to call me abnormal!” he exclaimed.

Norm leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and smiled as he thought of Bette. She was without doubt the special woman in his life and he cared for her deeply. When the big C took her away from him a few years back, he was devastated.

Then he chuckled to himself as he remembered how they still “shacked up”on occasion after they had both retired. Bette would call him out of the blue. “How would you like to come to my place for dinner tonight? You bring a nice bottle of wine and, after dinner, I’ll provide you with your favorite dessert and the Viagra,” she’d purr with a deep sultry whisper.

Sometimes, she called him, humming and singing the first verse of “The Look of Love” to him in a husky, contralto voice over the phone, trying to sound as hard as she could like Diana Krall rather than Dusty:

The look of love is in your eyes
The look your heart can't disguise
The look of love
Is saying so much more than
Just words could ever say
And what my heart has heard
Well, it takes my breath away

How could he ever forget Bette? He then thought how many of the women he knew and slept with had already died or were living in an assisted living facility, some with dementia or Alzheimer’s. I’d rather be dead, he thought.