My Affair with the Telephone

Last year I had an affair with a telephone. It was one of those old-fashioned rotary ones, with a huge heavy receiver that straddled and dwarfed its squat body and a massive analog bell that rang like Sunday whenever anyone called. It was made of marble and mahogany, and it smelled like old leather.

Besides bringing a whole new meaning to phone sex, my brief interlude with Belle taught me a valuable lesson about the continuing relevance of the old way of doing things. Sure, I could have taken up with one of those cheap plastic little GE floozies, with illuminated buttons and fifteen different kinds of rings; or a state of the art Nokia, smaller than my pinky, smarter than my computer, able to get a serviceable dial tone from an oubliette buried in the basement of one of Saddam’s deepest bunkers.

In her clunky, outdated way, though, Belle outshone all of those hot new upstarts. Sure, I could never fit her in my pocket, or use her to enter my account number when I called the bank. But she had a weight and heft and a permanence that the others could never have offered, much less understood.

Ultimately, though, she left me. She couldn’t fail to notice the gleam in my eye whenever we passed one of those sexy cell phone kiosks at the mall, or ignore the way my breath quickened whenever anyone mentioned internet telephony. I was inconstant and unfaithful, and she was too good for me. I woke one day to find her side of the bed empty, a note tucked under her pillow. “Don’t call me,” it said.

I never have.