Lena was at least correct in believing that Sammy was entirely heterosexual. Indefatigably and energetically so, in fact. What she did not know was that Sammy’s quite conventional tastes ran to pretty foreign blondes under 30 years old. These were his requirements. For most men, this would be the stuff of fantasy, but Sammy was blessed with wealth, a honed physique and a fractional share in a smallish, but nevertheless private, plane. Add to that the antler-filled condo in Aspen, and you had an attractive package. Aspen provided rich pickings for men like Sammy. There were several nightclubs in which one could easily meet gorgeous young women from overseas, all of them primed to hook up with a real live sugar daddy and among the legions of hopeful sugar daddies, Sammy held his own – maybe not the richest, probably not the tallest, nevertheless he had his own teeth and had avoided the delusional comb-over hairdo. Sammy Goldfarb had a subscription to GQ magazine, a healthy sense of his own immortality and beautiful young girlfriends from around the world with soon-to-expire work permits.
None of these women was ever going to be part of his life for more than a fleeting few months and this was exactly how Sammy liked it. Quite apart from the fact that Sammy was content with his bachelor lifestyle and didn’t encourage them to hang around, they tended to disappear, often tearfully, to their own countries. It was all rather ideal – the only fly in this blissful ointment was the inevitable one that they were never Jewish. He wouldn’t have minded taking some of the more intelligent ones home to meet Lena, but he was sure that their not being Jewish made that impossible. He was not an entirely insensitive man and didn’t enjoy being a disappointment to his mother in the marital department. A shiksa would surely kill her, kinahora.
This was why, at 45, Sammy had decided to delve into the world of Jewish dating and came up with a plan to appease his guilty conscience. It was simple. He combed JDate to find women of suitable age took them out to lunch at a nice restaurant and then afterwards, would engineer a surprise stop at Lena’s apartment for tea. Despite his academic achievements, Sammy was an uncomplicated man and he thought that by bringing home a steady drip of women, he’d buy himself some time with his mother, show her how hard he was trying to find a mate, while maintaining his playboy lifestyle far away in the Rocky Mountains.
Fortunately for Sammy’s strategy there was a seemingly endless supply of JDates. Things always unfolded the same way. After lunch, the date found herself both flattered and panicked by the precipitate invitation to meet Sammy’s mother for tea that same afternoon. Lena played her part perfectly, was polite to a fault and carefully hid her feelings of disappointment and dismay. Second slices of cake were never offered, and the tea ended as soon as good manners allowed. Generally speaking, the dates recognized their failure to impress – many of them had been around that block on a number of occasions.
“What can I do?” Sammy would say disingenuously, “My mother knows what she wants for me.” He then got his secretary to send the JDate a modest gift of flowers, not roses (too encouraging) but something neutral, mums perhaps, carrying the subliminal reminder that the recipient had not passed the all-important potential mother-in-law test. And then he disappeared back to Colorado. The women, he tended not to hear from again.
Things changed however on Sammy’s 55th birthday, celebrated at his favorite nightclub. It was hard to pinpoint the moment, but sitting on an expansive leather couch cradling a large Scotch, two pretty but vacuous Australian ski teachers chatting and preening next to him, Sammy felt bored. And tired. And even – it was hard to admit – somewhat lonely. Very lonely actually. Not prone to introspection, Sammy was startled by these feelings, and claiming a headache, excused himself to ribald jokes from his pals.
It was at the coat check that Sammy received his second revelation of the night in the form of love at first sight. The object, a new employee, Anežka, fresh off the plane. A statuesque – you might say zaftig – young woman, with bright blue eyes, blonde hair and a sweet, trusting demeanor. She wore far too much make-up in Eastern European style and a cheap, shiny dress that did not entirely cover her comfortable frame. Anežka, though he did not know this yet, was an unsophisticated country girl who, tired of drunk Czech men and a life of milking and mucking out cows, had followed a cousin to Aspen and her coat-check job. Even without pay and only a few words of English, she was doing well on tips. This was her very first evening at the Club and finding herself the recipient of Sammy’s phone number, she felt quite pleased with herself.
Their first dinner took place the following evening at an expensively muted restaurant. Sammy did not like to waste time and this girl made him feel strangely urgent. Anežka turned up wearing a different shiny dress, looking awkward but delighted. It soon became clear that conversation was not going to be the highlight of the relationship but suddenly none of that seemed important. Sammy was completely smitten, suffused with an unnatural (to him) sense of well-being simply from being in Anežka’s presence. Anežka was similarly content. Most of the men she had ever met were uncouth brutes, including her father and brothers. The fact that Sammy sat there gazing into her eyes, holding her hand chastely, was to her mind quite sophisticated and in any case she was used to dealing with livestock and didn’t require much by way of conversation. When Sammy took her back to her cousin’s apartment without first trying to wrestle her clothes off in the back of the car, her heart swelled – Anežka had experienced the respect of a man for the first time in her 25 years. As for Sammy, he was in a state of shock, thrust back into the ecstatic agony of teenage longing, stripped of the cynicism that had characterized his decades of dating life. As time went on he found himself day-dreaming, downloading Dvorak on itunes and most surprisingly of all, skipping workouts and bike rides with the guys, none of whom seemed to mind much, since they’d mainly regarded Sammy as unwelcome competition.
The frequency of the dinners continued, the intensity of the encounters increased, and soon the two of them weren’t going out at all, but instead staying in at Sammy’s condo, which to Anežka’s eyes was nothing short of a palace. It did not take long for the full physical passion of the relationship to flower, but Sammy could not think of his love-making with Anežka as being as tawdry as ‘sex’. These were couplings more profound than anything he had ever known, reaching back in some elemental way to his Czech bloodlines, touching a Middle European soul he hadn’t even known he possessed. And then there were the dumplings. Ah, those dumplings! One thing Anežka knew was how to cook and her ability to produce endless quantities of these fluffy, doughy marvels was nothing short of miraculous. Sammy didn’t know it was possible to find anything so delicious and to feel such total, unequivocal passion for someone he couldn’t exchange more than a few words with. None of that mattered, he adored her! And so they ate, and ate and gazed and loved. And then they moved on to dessert.
