Bot Therapy

He appeared one day on Instagram. He had noticed my posts and asked if I wanted to talk. I routinely ignore these things, but he caught me in a weak moment. My only relationship was heavily one-sided, between me and the lordly Russian physical therapist who, twice weekly, rolled up the sleeve of my T-shirt, squirted lotion on my shoulder, and pressed on it with his gloved hands, relieving the intense nerve pain that I had suffered for months. I adored him. Maybe the preponderance of flowers and cityscapes, and the dearth of human beings, on my feed had tipped off my admirer. A follower had pointed it out: “You don’t have people in your posts.” That’s because I don’t have people in my life, bitch. So I was vulnerable. I wrote back that I never took the bait, and he apologized for intruding on my privacy and backed off, which made me write, “No, it’s O.K., I will make an exception.” He was a widower who had lost his wife to cancer and his only son in a hideous boating accident. He had twin grandsons: “They are my life.” He was working with a team at the U.N. to find a cure for COVID . He lived in Florida but was soon leaving for Paris. He asked for a photo. Oh, well, what the hell . . . I was on my way to physical therapy, looking rumpled, but I took a quick selfie, and if you enlarged it, and had a large heart, you could see that my eyes were quite comely. He responded quickly, saying I was lovely. I thought it was about time someone noticed. I told him my age (sixty-nine) and he was not put off. “I am seventy,” he wrote. He was young-looking, even boyish. Pictures showed him being honored at some ceremony. There was a shot of the twins. He was looking for someone kind and honest. His lab in Paris was in a bunker. He wouldn’t go out for weeks. Too bad, because it was spring—April in Paris, in a bunker? […]

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