“I haven’t seen anything this hot since I threw my panties at Tom Jones in Vegas.” Esther grabs my leg. “Give me your panties, Barry. I can’t throw my Depends.”
We cover our mouths and laugh.
When we look up again, the man walks toward us and begins to stretch.
He is tan and fit. A fountain of thick hair falls in his face as he bends.
“He doesn’t even schvitz,” I whisper. “He shimmers.”
“Go talk to him,” Esther says. “Ask him out.”
“Do you have eyes?” I ask, hand covering my mouth, as if the man might be able to lip-read. “He’s out of my league. I mean, there isn’t even a league.” I glance quickly at him and lower my voice even more. “I mean, he can touch the ground and get back up without a medevac.”
Esther giggles in her throaty way, as if she’s just smoked a pack of Pall Malls.
“Stop it!” she says. “You know nothing about him.”
“He may not even be gay,” I add.
“No man that pretty is straight in Palm Springs.”
“He may not even be Jewish.”
“Really, Sid?” Esther says. “You’re going to be picky at eighty-one? You need to get laid before you die. You already have three husbands at home.”
“And what exactly is my pickup line to a man who looks like that?” I ask. “‘I see we have so much in common! You have plantar fasciitis, too?’”
“Stop it,” she says, taking a big drink from her water bottle.
“Or what about, ‘Didn’t I see you at PT?’” I ask. “Oh, and this always turns the boys on: ‘New knee?’”
Esther spits like a geyser, her water spraying onto the man’s leg.
“Consider it a mikvah,” she yells.
The man laughs.
“This is Sid,” Esther continues. “He’s nice. He’s Jewish. Attorney. Single. Very successful. Very lonely.” Esther stands and claps her hands together. “My work here is done.”
I feel my eyes grow absurdly large and my face turn the color of borscht. I look at the man and smile as if to say,I don’t know her.
Esther heads toward the parking lot just beyond the track. “I’m meeting Talia Goldfarb at Sherman’s for lunch. I’ve earned a pastrami on rye. Go get laid, Sid!”
I want to crawl under the bleachers.
The man watches all five feet of Esther crawl into her mammoth Mercedes SUV, pull on a pair of sunglasses that engulfs her head and pull onto busy Sunrise Way without slowing to look for oncoming traffic.
“She reminds me of my bubbe,” the man finally says. He walks over and extends his hand. “I’m Leo. Leo Levy.”
“How alliterative.”
Why did I say that? I’m an idiot.
Leo laughs.
I shake his hand. “Sid,” I say.
“I gathered that from your friend. Do you have a last name, Sid?”
