The Real Sleeper: A Love Story - Hardcover

Theodore Roosevelt Gardner II

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0962729787 ISBN 13: 9780962729782

Publisher: Allen a Knoll Pubs, 1996

Synopsis

I'll never forget when Doctor laid the facts of life on me. He did it with such exuberance, such panache. None of this handing me a book with crude drawings, none of this, "You know it all already," none of this drunken slurring veiled mystery about "privates." No, the Doc went right for the jugular. "It's the greatest thing in the world, son, if you do it right. It's more than a mingling of genitalia, it's simply the greatest thing in life - a mystical thrill beyond anything else you will ever experience. You find a girl who turns up her nose at it, you head for the hills without her as fast as you can.

"You'll find plenty who pooh-pooh it, son, and all I can say when you run up against one of those thin-lipped virgins with a stone heart that pumps ice water, is run for your life. Don't under any circumstances saddle yourself with one, no matter how nice she seems, no matter how beautiful she is, no matter how rich, nothing else will matter if you don't have that mystical connection - that greatest of all natural forces. You know what the man said: 'It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.' And by God, that's right on the money."

I can still see him standing over me at the kitchen table. The Doc was a man of commanding flamboyance. He was not a word mincer. But I also sensed, even at twelve, that he was hopelessly enslaved to hyperbole. All his admonitions about the superiority of sex left me feeling that he was denigrating my mother, whom I not only loved, but pitied.

For the great ebullient Doc didn't spend a lot of time at home with Mother. I became the substitute husband, squiring her to this charity event and that picnic; all obligatory affairs attended while the Doc was conducting his own affairs.

So I ignored his advice. And, of course, I regret it.

There were unspoken undercurrents there. Even at my tender age, I felt the Doc was telling me my mother didn't "do it right" and his dental assistants did, or they moved on to chaster pastures. And the women patients with the past-due bills that were never sent out for collection, they surely did it right.

I have never given up trying to "do it right." But up until now, one of the overriding ironies of my life has been while I aspired to be like my father, I wound up more like my mother. While I longed for his libidinous flamboyance, his aura of command, I became repressed and mildly subjugated to a major breadwinner.

Perhaps it was because of my sympathy for my mother, perhaps not, but I was severely retarded in my interaction with the complementary sex.

Until, as I said, I met Kelly.

About this title

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

The following is the first chapter, "EDGAR", in its entirety.

I used to flatter myself that I was a late bloomer. Now that I am on a collision course with eternity, I have come to realize it is entirely possible that I have not bloomed at all. Maybe I'm one of those plants that blooms then dies, but whose blooms are spectacular, ten- to fifteen-feet tall and bursting with color. I think the bloom would be worth it.

What I thought would never fail me had failed me. The mechanisms of my hyperactive passion were flagging. I was developing a real fear of the "I" word: Impotence!

My father liked to recite a poem in this regard:

From twenty to thirty, if a man lives right, It's once in the morning and once at night. From thirty to forty, if he still lives right, He gives up the morning, but keeps the night. From forty to fifty he's at his peak, But that other stuff is once a week. From fifty to sixty he still has a yen, But statistics show it's now and then. From sixty to seventy he will find Whatever he does is all in his mind.

Sixty was staring me in the face like an avenging angel, and I thought if I didn't do something about it, God would turn me into a pillar of saltpeter.

Then a miracle happened.

And I don't believe in miracles.

I met the most gorgeous woman, young woman, I had ever seen. And no sooner had we met than she took her clothes off, whereupon we chatted away like we were the best of friends. Lovers even.

We weren't lovers, of course, but afterwards I couldn't get Kelly O'Leary out of my mind. It was a pleasant obsession at first, then, before I knew what happened, my passion became debilitating.

From Publishers Weekly:

The tongue-in-cheek title tips off the subtle charms of this captivating and bittersweet novel about an unlikely love affair between a bumbling and repressed book editor a few months shy of 60 and a breezy but big-hearted 23-year-old model who specializes in taking it all off for the camera. For 35 years, Edgar Wellington has been stuck in a passionless marriage with Penelope, chair of the Zoology Department at USC. Viewing Edgar as something of a cipher and relating to him more as co-owner of their Southern California ranch house than as a friend or lover, Penelope sneers when her husband tumbles for the beautiful, waif-like Kelly O'Leary after he observes her posing nude for a dust jacket. Edgar summons his courage to call the young woman; the two fall in love, sharing a perfect symbiosis of idyllic romance and flaming passion. The course of their affair propels Penelope toward her own meaningful epiphany as well; so it's with gratitude rather than despair that each of the characters considers the impending death that concludes the novel (which is told from multiple points of view). While May-December romance may be a tired theme, Gardner handles his variant of it with skill, compassion and whimsy.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Allen a Knoll Pubs
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0962729787
• ISBN 13: 9780962729782
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 229