I’m alone on the road, a travelling business man far from home.
Picture me in my gray suit and briefcase driving from town to town, rushing to keep appointments, pressured to make a sale, trying to keep my chin and my spirits up day after day. Imagine the tired, weary executive who doesn’t get to go home at the end of his work day.
No, instead I’m eating dinner each night in a different diner, a faceless nobody at the counter or a solitary customer in some oversized booth with my newspaper and my meal. I’m sleeping in a strange bed in some anonymous inn. Then the next morning I move on, hitting the road again and heading down the highway to my next destination. It gets old real quick.
I am a gypsy, a tumbleweed, a loner, a rolling stone. The only friends I have are the ones I make at the bar; other travelers like me; bartenders, or maybe that woman sitting by herself, waiting for a blind date that never showed up.
I’m just trying to keep good company. It’s only the two of us after all, along with the bartender. I crack a few jokes, by her a drink. She makes it clear that she’s not alone and she’s spoken for. “No problem,” I say. I’m just passing the time, looking for a little human interaction before I crawl back to my motel room for the night.
Her name is Dawn. In all her 42 years, she has never been more than a hundred miles from this place. It could be anywhere in America. An Applebees or Chili’s in some ubiquitous strip mall just off the Interstate. There’s a frontage road and a Walmart in the distance, along with a service station and a fast food restaurant on the corner. She’s a single mother of two boys with a so-so job that barely allows her to make ends meet. I’m guessing she was once a real head-turner, and she’s still got those haute couture high cheekbones and a nice figure, but you can see the years or her ex old man have been hard on her. They show in the lines across her forehead and the circles around her eyes.
Dawn looks tired, but she also looks pretty to me. I’m flattered to be the man by her side, if only temporarily; I’m happy for a little company and some light conversation. She’s waiting for a man she met online. Match.com, she tells me with a hint of embarrassment or shame. She only met him on Monday. He lives in the same county, about three communities down the freeway. He works for the State Police, and according to her, seems like an honest, hard-working man.
As the minutes tick by and the evening grows later, I buy Dawn another glass of wine and we both continue to wait for the mystery man to appear. Funny, but the more we talk, the more I realize how apprehensive she is. Finally, she confesses to me that she thinks her date is probably married and looking for “some action on the side.” She’s slightly sad about the prospect of being “disappointed again,” but seems to be someone stoic about it.
Dawn talks to me about marrying her high school sweetheart and giving up on her dreams as a pregnant teenager just out of high school. She confesses a life of continual let-downs and shortages, curses her children’s father for his weakness for liquor and other women, then guzzles down the rest of her wine in despair.
There’s a sad Keith Urban song that seems to frame the moment and define so much of emotional middle America. I sense a tear coming on, but I’m surprised by a smile and plucky display of optimism. “It’s probably better that my cop didn’t show,” she laments. “Just more of the same, I guess.”
She gradually turns her focus to me and asks about my job. I don’t want to talk about work. For one thing, it’s boring. For another thing, I’ve been focused on it all week. Non-stop. No escaping it. I’m surrounded by it, immersed in it. I would rather discuss where I want to be: back home in sunny Southern California.
We move to a booth, and some hot food comes. It changes the mood. We’re on to our third glass of wine now, and we’re both feeling a bit light-headed and a whole lot better. I’m describing a fall afternoon in La Jolla, when the tide is low and the Santa Ana winds are blowing. I explain the dryness of the desert air and the refreshing feel of that salty ocean spray. So far away. It’s like a dream to her, a Shangri-la that doesn’t really exist.
I tell Dawn my story, describing the perfect cookie-cutter house in the tracts that I bought with my new bride way back then, and how we were going to raise the perfect family out in the suburbs and realize all of our teen-age dreams. I went on to explain the tedium, the monotony of a working class family man, and how I eventually felt trapped like a hamster on a treadmill in a cage. I told her how my wife and I grew apart, then grew estranged, how my heart went cold and what a failure I thought I was when the divorce papers came.
Just when things seemed real sad and dreary, I perked up and testified to the joys of being free. I boasted about my middle-aged renaissance and how I found my second wind; I made her smile with my speech about enthusiasm, celebrating each day and grabbing the gusto in life. Our evening together at the diner ended seeming like a date. Like two dates really. I had totally opened up and so had she. We felt like we knew each other, like we understood what one another had gone through and how we were feeling inside.
That’s when I leaned in, gave her an intimate, lingering kiss on the cheek and invited her back to spend the night with me. “I don’t want to spend another night alone,” I confided. “I would love your warm body next to me. I would love to keep your company all night long and wake up next to your beautiful face.”
She smiled, put her hand on mine and told me she was flattered. She said she thought I was sweet, sexy and sincere, but… There’s always that “but.” It’s just a small, three-letter word, but sometimes it seems like 16-foot brick wall, a huge impenetrable wall that keeps men and women from getting what they really want.
Dawn would have loved to come back to my hotel room and fucked me, but she had been down that road so many times before, and it never seemed to take her anywhere. She had made a promise to herself recently to make some big changes in her life. It was time to get serious; she was ready for a relationship, and swore that there would be no more one-night stands.
Before I could even begin to convince her that what we had between us was more than a cheap, temporary fling, she interrupted. “Look! You’re not even from these parts. Tomorrow you’ll be long gone and you probably won’t even remember my name. I would love to sleep with you tonight, but can’t you see that it would just be wrong for me?”
“No,” I said without hesitation. “I don’t see anything wrong with it at all.”
“I couldn’t do that,” she insisted, adding that it would be too damned hard to invest any emotion or hold out for any hope of any kind of relationship with me.
“Is that it then?” I asked. “It’s your fear of falling for me?”
Dawn explained how that’s never a woman’s intention. Nevertheless, she said, whenever she gets real close and intimate with a guy, she just can’t help it. Those feelings start to come. Things get sticky; things get complicated.
“I wish I was capable of keeping it real simple,” she told me. “I wish it could be just like any other transaction. Just a simple exchange. You get what you need, I get what I need. Both of us are happy. No expectations. No unfulfilled promises. Maybe then, if it was cut and dried like that, I might sleep with you.”
I thought about those words for a minute in awkward silence, pondering Dawn’s life, contemplating what she wanted and where she aimed to go with her new resolution to find a permanent man. I weighed everything she told me, and then suddenly it came to me: an “A ha!” moment.
“Listen,” I said. “What if I just pay you for sex tonight?”
“Huh?” she replied with a shocked look on her face. “Do you think I’m a whore?”
No, no! Not at all. It was tricky, but I tried to justify my thinking. If we reduced what we both wanted down to a simple business transaction, it served to remove all romantic and unrealistic expectations. It seemed like a perfect solution - unless I had just insulted and humiliated her.
Dawn thought about it for a moment, then surprised me with her two word reply: “How much?” I knew she needed the money. I knew she wanted to be with me that night. What amount would it take to make my proposition irresistibly appealing?
“Two hundred dollars,” I replied. Her eyes widened like saucers and her jaw nearly dropped open. She repeated the figure in disbelief, then said “No, no! I couldn’t take that much. Absolutely not!”
I wasn’t going to argue with her. I pulled two crisp $100 bills out of my wallet and slipped them neatly into her hand. She tried to give it back immediately, but I shook my head and refused the money. “It’s yours,” I insisted. She succumbed. I paid the bill for dinner and drinks and lead her by the hand outside into the parking lot.
As she followed me back to my room, I noticed that one of her headlights was out. I mentioned it later, and she said that she was waiting until payday to fix it. Dawn was living hand-to-mouth. The $200 I gave her was a welcomed gift, a total godsend. We had incredible, passionate sex that night. It seemed both of us were starving for it. The next day, it was really hard for me to say goodbye. I got her phone number and her e-mail, and continued to stay in touch with her over the course of my business trip. Each night after dinner I would go back to my hotel, look her up on my laptop and engage in about an hour of chat with her on Yahoo Instant Messenger.
I invited Dawn to come visit me California, but she never did. She told me she went back on Match.com and met an insurance broker who lived in her community, “a real nice guy with a brand new car,” she said. Eventually I lost contact with my whore of convenience, my Midwest one night stand. That’s not what I wanted to be, that’s not how I really saw it. I couldn’t thank her enough, even if I tried to with money. It was a beautiful gift and a powerful connection. Everything seemed so perfect, so right for that night. I don’t have any regrets about what happened, but every so often I think about Dawn and wonder if she found the happiness she was seeking too.