The Admiral

Sunday afternoon at the Sarasota Symphony Orchestra performance I was reminded of my second wife’s father, whom I met when he had just retired from the Navy in his late fifties, separated from the service early because of serious physical disability, but with the title of Rear Admiral bestowed upon him.  His daughter and I were planning to marry, young people in our mid twenties, graduate students at Harvard, myself a recent widower.  That made me suspect in his book, as well as, I am sure, my obsessive intellectuality, tendency to argue points for the hell of it, and a certain pansy manner. I thought of him because I always remember early on in our relationship while a house guest in their New Hampshire home, when I had coughed (as I thought, innocuously) several times during the cocktail hour, he had said to me quietly, firmly, and pleasantly sternly “Don’t cough.”  When I remonstrated with “Sir, I can’t help it.,” he replied “Of course, you can; so stop it.”  Thereupon he explained how a navy officer was not allowed to cough, and it was something any man, gentleman, you name  it, could learn to suppress.  He taught me that afternoon--almost sixty years ago--and I have never coughed since, unless I had something serious stuck in my throat.  I thought of this during the exquisite piano solo portions of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto #1 in B-flat minor as the women in front of me barked out like terriers throughout.  I guess it has to do with age, but I am sensitive to so many sounds, whispers between members of the audience, the constant zipping and unzipping of purses (Jesus God, what are they after, those women?), although I have to say in this very large concert hall in three years I have only once heard a cellphone ring out.  Go, Sarasota!
The admiral was unusually handsome, and very shy; I thought he despised me but I later realized my verbal agility and mental acrobatics terrified him, and my instinct for insubordination, the product of a fatherless home, bewildered him.  i was sexually much attracted to him which mitigated the fear and aversion he otherwise aroused in me.  Later on we became I guess you could call friends when I realized that he had a very hard time reading.  He wanted to do miracle reforms of government in the little town where he and his wife retired, and this required reading and digesting journal articles and books on urban renewal.  The idea was crazy; this town was not going to be reborn, its inhabitants were blood descendants of seventeenth century settlers and nothing was going to change.  He just couldn’t read all that material, and so I went along with the game, read them myself, and sat to discuss them with him as though we were equals in our comprehension whereas in fact I had the material read and assimilated for his easy digestion.  Our moment of intimacy was when he asked me to accompany him to scout out several hundred blueberry bushes for transplanting at the farm.  On our way there, he stopped the car by the roadside to take a pee, and somehow I sensed that the moment called for me to perform as well.  We went over to a kind of gully, and all the way he leaned on me, because one of his legs was artificial and he had never really mastered walking on it on uneven ground.  I was terrified by this physical proximity and his dependence, this good looking man, so much an admiral and the father of my fiancée.  Then he fumbled with his flies, brought himself out and began to piss.  I realized i was to do the same, side by side two streams of urine pouring down into the same stream.  We were bonding.