BEFORE FEMINISM

[Author’s note: I’ve been writing this story for what seems like forever. As a factual matter , it hasn’t been forever. I probably began it in 2007 or 2008. The first version was in the third person, as if it were fiction; the protagonist was named Sophie. It seemed easier to write it that way. Every time I revised it, I would make small changes, but left it Sophie’s story. It even went into this blog in September 2014 as Sophie’s story, a fiction. (It was called “Sophie Before Feminism.”) Ten readers “liked” it then and four or five commented, favorably. It’s had only sporadic readership over the years since then. But I’m a stubborn cuss and reluctant just to leave it like that, especially as Sophie is now the name of one of my cats. So I’ve put it into the first person, where it always belonged, to see if it reads better that way. What’s in it all happened a very long time ago, but it really happened. If any of you remember the first version, you can tell me if this is an improvement. Or not.]

BEFORE FEMINISM

[A true story. With one name changed.]

I was again living with my parents. This was customary back then, if you weren’t yet married. I did have a boyfriend. But Ed was divorced with four children, had alimony and child support obligations. His job as an instructor at USC paid nearly nothing. He was also thirty-one, nine years older than I was. He rented a furnished studio opposite the Paramount lot, drove a broken-down ’37 Plymouth coupe, spent his spare time writing unmarketable novels. The silent parental disapproval was palpable.

Initially, Ed’s tweed jacket and MFA from Yale had been considerable attractions in this cultural wasteland to which my parents had dragged me after college. He’d also taught me quite a lot in his pull-out Murphy bed about what men like. Still, my parents were right. There was no future in it. He worked the summer session to make ends meet and spent August in Texas, where his children lived with their mother. All he could provide were modest weekend suppers, which I cooked on his two-burner hotplate, and the diversions to be found in the Murphy, now becoming routine. He wasn’t even apologetic. “We’re made for each other,” he crowed. I could manage only a false smile. I hated scenes, fled from conflict, chose the easy way. Also, there was no one else on the horizon.

I had to admit he’d been useful in one important way. I was now a graduate student at no cost in the USC English Department, thanks to a teaching assistantship I probably owed to his recommendation. I was only a year or so older than some members of the English 101 section I taught; the front row consisted mainly of vets newly returned from Korea. But I made sure to wear elegant suits with narrow skirts, handkerchief linen blouses, nylons with seams marching smartly up the back of my calves, and neat low-heeled pumps from Bonwit Teller – so no one could mistake me for a coed. I also sometimes sat on the desk, legs crossed like Lauren Bacall on Harry Truman’s piano, to appear more sophisticated and at ease than I felt.

My own graduate studies included British History 340 (MWF 2:00-2:50), an unwelcome but necessary undergraduate survey course. No survey course, no graduate English degree. It was surprisingly hard. Moreover, the thirty other students fanned out towards the rear of the auditorium, although mostly male, seemed useless for horizon-broadening purposes. They almost all looked too young. A somewhat older fellow with bad skin, up front on the left, nodded hopefully in my direction each time I slid into my seat up front on the right. I always pretended not to see. Two other older ones, halfway back behind me, sat together on their spines. Returning GIs? Neither paid attention whenever I sailed past.

Last Friday in October: the professor slapped the graded blue books containing our five-week British History exam answers on the first seat in front of the podium. 25% of the final grade right there. Would a B jeopardize my assistantship? The class line snaked towards the diminishing pile. I took a deep breath, flipped through the top ones and recognized my name. On the cover, a large A-minus. New questions quickly trumped relief. Was grading on the curve? Had anyone done better?

A voice with a distinctive crack disputed a grade. The owner of the voice waved his blue book in the air. It was clearly marked with another large A minus. Indignation rose sour in my throat. A-minus wasn’t good enough? He was arguing? As I watched, the professor re-marked his booklet with an A and altered the record of the grade in his grade book. The owner of the new A turned to the room at large with a smile of triumph. I recognized him. The taller of the two who sat on their spines. His achievement clouded my weekend.

How fortunate he was expounding crap as I came down the aisle on Monday. “The Jansenists were right,” I heard. “The world is evil and damned. And I’m evil and damned too. There’s no hope for me. So what can I be but a Jansenist?”

Such an opportunity! Partially turning, the better to show a curved hip and the relative flatness of my girdled stomach, I sweetly inquired: “But why call yourself a Jansenist? This is the twentieth century! If you eliminate God from your Jansenism, you could say you’re an Existentialist. Haven’t you read Sartre?” Sometimes I impressed even myself with the nonsense that emerged from my mouth when needed. His dark eyes had a downward tilt at the outer corners. It gave him an amused look. “Hm,” he said. “I’ll think about it. Since you say so.”

“Do.” I felt much better about my A minus.

He was lounging against the stairwell banister when I came out after class. As faculty, I had an elevator key. The preliminary repartee was predictable. It got him into the elevator with me. Our trip to the lobby was brief and silent. He looked at me. I looked at him. He was tall, a tough guy – but with a full mouth, pale skin, dark crew cut, and those amused eyes. He needed a shave. He wore a heavy navy blue sweater with a large white ND on it. Too soon the elevator door opened. “Well, thanks,” he said. “It was a pleasure. See you Wednesday.” I so much didn’t want to forget any part of this encounter that I wrote it all down as soon as I got home.

Wednesday: He had shaved. He was very polite. He gestured to the empty seats next to me: “Anyone sitting here?” I smiled, shaking my head. He left one seat between us. The lecture began almost at once. We both took careful notes. I couldn’t have repeated a single thing I wrote.

We again rode the elevator in silence. Outside he asked if I’d like a cup of coffee. We walked on slabs of sidewalk between wide swaths of late autumn grass. The mid-afternoon sun was shining. It was like being in a movie. He offered to carry my books. No, no, I could manage. He insisted on taking them. No one had ever carried my books before. I knew we were talking about something, but the actual words didn’t count. Another something, very powerful, was pulsing between us. We reached Commons. The other teaching assistants from the English Department were sitting together at two tables and saw him holding my books as well as his own. I suggested we go sit with them but he said no, we should go downstairs. So the other teaching assistants also saw us go down to The Hole, where only undergraduates hung out. What did it matter? My real life was beginning at last.

We found an empty booth. He slid in opposite me. I ordered my coffee black, with saccharin. (I counted calories in those days, so as to look good naked.) He poured lots of cream and sugar in his and put away a big slice of blueberry pie while he told me about himself. I was so preoccupied with leaning my chin on my hand and hanging on every word I forgot to ask his name until he suddenly said he had to go. It was Yates. Like the poet’s, only spelled differently. And his first name was William, also like the poet’s. Will, he said. The middle name was Benedict, not Butler, but at least the initial was B. I loved it that someone who looked so tough had a poet’s name. Well, nearly a poet’s name.

When we went for our second coffee on Friday, a buddy of his caught up with us, so Will sat next to me. Maybe to show the buddy I was his. Although the buddy seemed to know about me already, whatever there was to know. He soon left for a date with a girl who was helping him with his German. After he was gone Will explained it wasn’t a date, exactly. The girl the buddy was meeting was a prostitute from Germany and he had to pay for the sex; only the help with German was free. The idea that I had just met someone who paid women to let him inside their bodies was so astonishing I couldn’t think of anything clever to say, so I just tried to look amused and knowing, and asked instead if he was a really good friend. Then Will hesitated a bit before saying they had only had a couple of classes together. But the buddy, casual acquaintance or no, brought us closer together. For our third and fourth coffees, on the following Monday and Wednesday, we went on sitting side by side. Although I did notice Will was still being very careful no part of him touched any part of me. I wasn’t sure why. Even though going slow was supposed to be a sign of respect, he must know, I thought, that I knew neither of us were playing games.

However, before the third coffee came a weekend. That Friday evening in the pull-out Murphy bed, Ed toiled between my thighs without success. His head conveniently out of sight, I could go on thinking about how Will had grown up in a place in Boston called Southie, which I understood to be a poor neighborhood or maybe even a slum because he’d said he used to hang out with street gangs. He’d enlisted at sixteen by lying about his age. (He was actually only two years older than I was. Perfect!) But the war in Europe was over by the time he’d finished basic training, so they’d shipped him to the Pacific. Fortunately, he missed the bad parts, like Iwo Jima, because MacArthur picked him to be in his Honor Guard instead. (The Honor Guard was all tall white guys, he explained.) After discharge he’d eventually gotten his high school diploma and gone to Notre Dame on the GI Bill. He’d also told me how once, during football practice, he scored the perfect touchdown. It didn’t count, he said, because he was only the third string quarterback, but he didn’t care, because he had done it and he knew he had done it.

Ed looked up at me over my stomach and asked how I was doing. I apologized for taking so long. Then I thought about how Will had finally walked out of Notre Dame one semester before graduation because he’d become disillusioned with the hypocrisy of the Church. (Which was the reason he was finishing up his last year out here; he’d started in February and now was nearly done.) That was so principled and brave of him there was no way I was going to be able to come, no matter how long poor Ed kept at it. It didn’t occur to me to fake it. (Expedient fakery would be an acquisition of my thirties.) I encouraged him to forget it and finish up for himself. “I must be catching something,” I explained. On Saturday night, I said my period had arrived unexpectedly. I put the diaphragm back in its case in his bathroom cabinet and we went to the movies instead. By then, I could hardly bear to hold his hand. I wondered if I ought to be feeling guilty, or at least selfish, but all I could feel was glorious anticipation.

Will was unhappy at our Monday coffee. He said he hated his life and especially hated having to work after class selling Hoover vacuum cleaners door-to-door to ladies who already had an okay vacuum cleaner and didn’t need a new one. He really wanted to stay longer in our booth in the Hole. He wished we could stay there forever. On Wednesday he even walked me from Commons to the faculty parking lot and seemed to have difficulty leaving. I considered this a promising development and wondered when he would ask me out. He was certainly taking his time. One thing I did know: absolutely no more weekends in the Murphy bed.

Ed had a late afternoon class on Wednesday. I drove to his studio immediately after leaving campus, let myself in with the key he’d given me, stealthily removed my diaphragm from his bathroom and tiptoed out, locking the door behind me. I’d have to keep the diaphragm case at the bottom of my purse because I couldn’t leave it at home, my mother looked everywhere. But it was a big purse, there was room.

On Friday Will was apologetic. He had to go right after class. He was sorry. So sorry. Coffee would have to wait until Monday. I telephoned Ed to say I was ill, had skipped history class and gone right home. Fever of 103. If I were better on Saturday, I’d let him know, but I felt awful and it didn’t look good. I was sorry. So sorry. I spent the weekend douching in the bathtub to clean every trace of him out of myself. My mother kept asking through the door if anything was wrong. Between baths, I studied British History. It reminded me of Will.

My first Freshman English section met at 9 a.m. on Monday. I was there five minutes early, in suit, pumps and makeup — looking pretty good, I thought. The students drifted in. Just as I was closing the classroom door to begin, Ed’s face, red-eyed and distraught, appeared through the glass panels. The students strained to see what was going on. “You’ve left me,” Ed sobbed, not quietly. I heard a suppressed giggle from somewhere behind me. “Ssh,” I hissed to Ed. “I’m teaching now.” Couldn’t he just slink away and lick his wounds by himself? “You took your diaphragm!” he exclaimed in strangled grief. A freshman football player trying to enter the room around him did a second take and smirked. “You’ve left me for someone else!”

“And?” I closed the door on him, turned to my class and shrugged. They laughed. I knew I should have handled it better, and managed to not smile back. Then I took attendance, chewing the inside of my mouth to keep the corners from turning up. Everyone was unusually attentive. It was a rewarding class.

I was afraid Ed would reappear at any moment during the rest of the day, but he kept his distance. Now and then I thought how awful he must be feeling, but that made me feel awful myself. I tried to reason myself out of it. Didn’t he understand that we couldn’t have gone on endlessly, with me just providing the sex in his financially constricted life but getting nothing else out of it? Didn’t he have any remorse for his exploitation of my youthful optimism, my good nature? It had to stop. I was entitled to a life, too.

Then I was at last in the Hole again, sitting side by side with Will. His bare right forearm lay on the formica table parallel to and no more than a quarter inch away from my bare left forearm. I looked at the two arms, so close together. The skin on his was paler than the skin on mine, as if he hadn’t been in the sun at all, even last summer. And it had fewer hairs on it than Ed’s or my father’s. It was foreign flesh. Pale muscular foreign flesh, sparsely dark-haired. So different. So exciting.

“I want to go to bed with you,” he said.

I went on looking at our arms. Well of course. Wasn’t that what I wanted, too? How honest he was! “You have to understand,” I said carefully. “I don’t just do that. With this person and then that person. When I go with someone, it has to mean that we’re together, really together.” I stopped short of mentioning love. I wanted him to say it first.

“I do understand,” he said solemnly.

Now I had to say yes or no. If I said no not yet, would that mean I wasn’t the sophisticated woman he took me for? I didn’t think I could say no. “All right then,” I agreed. “If you really mean it.”

“ I really mean it. Let’s go.” He started out of the booth.

“Wait! Go where?” This was all happening very fast.

“I’ll find somewhere.” Up the stairs he went, to the public phones on the street level.

His car was a green ’51 Pontiac. He put our books in the trunk, next to some spare Hoover vacuum cleaner parts, and we screeched out of the student parking lot. I asked where we were going. He said he’d called friends in Covina who were willing to take in an early movie. Their key would be under the mat. Then he didn’t say anything else. He just drove, both hands on the wheel, eyes fixed straight ahead — with focus and speed appropriate to the driver of a getaway car. Maybe I was making a mistake.

“Considering what we’re about to do,” I said after a while, “you might be a little friendlier.” The car lurched to the curb, I heard him jerk the hand brake, he grabbed me like a starving man, his mouth opened on mine, my heart dropped, we kissed and kissed, I dissolved next to a hydrant on North Puente, and long afterwards I could still tremble when I remembered.

The rest of the ride was better. Will found a Thrifty Drug, where I bought spermicidal jelly and he bought fortified port wine. After we got back into the car, he took my hand while he drove with the other. “Tell me,” he asked, “do you always carry your diaphragm around with you?”

It was nearly dark when we arrived. There were two rooms. We tiptoed through the first, which had bookshelves, but that’s all I could see, because of course I had my glasses off. The second was the bedroom. He was clumsy at finding my buttons and hooks so I quickly undressed myself while he pulled off his sweater, shirt and pants and kicked off his shoes. Next I went to the bathroom. Sitting on someone else’s toilet squeezing jelly into the rubber cap, I reflected this wasn’t as romantic as I might have liked. But after I emerged protected and we’d drunk some of the port out of the bottle (I took only a few sips because of the calories), the passionate kissing started up again and reflection disappeared. Then his erection got in the way so we went to bed, he climbed on top and came very soon. “That’s okay,” he said, putting his arm around me. “There’s lots more where that came from. Once I came seven times in one night.”

I did like the arm around me.

The second time I managed to get a pillow underneath myself before he mounted; it didn’t help much. I wondered if it was because his penis was rather slender compared to Ed’s, but decided that was probably not it, since it was long enough and hard enough, and certainly energetic enough. More likely, it was just that he seemed not to know what to do with it except come as quickly as possible. He didn’t even seem very concerned that I hadn’t. I would have to give lessons. Very delicately. I forgave him. For now. How could he have learned about lovemaking, given his rough and difficult life? He might have been mostly with whores, like his buddy. Maybe I was his first real girl.

The third time I suggested I get on top – which was apparently such a novelty to him that again he came almost at once. Instead of apologizing, he beamed. Finally, out of desperation, I offered to go down on him, to empty him out a bit. But just as he was about to come rapidly a fourth time, we heard a key in the lock. All I could remember after that is cowering naked and scared under the sheet while Will pulled on his pants and went to the front door for whispered negotiations. We had ten minutes to wipe up, make the bed and get out of there.

He was hungry. At a drive-in near the university he ordered a double cheeseburger, extra large fries and a malted. I held off, lit a cigarette and tenderly watched him put away his food. Men were really just little boys, weren’t they? But after he’d finished the last crumbs, he remarked only that we’d better be getting back to the faculty lot for my car. Was that all he had to say? I looked away through the side window, so he shouldn’t see my disappointment. He did ask for my phone number, though, and memorized it right there. He didn’t have a phone himself, he said, but he’d find a way to call. He nodded twice when he said it, for emphasis, and repeated the number out loud afterwards, to show that now he really knew it. He also leaned over and gave me a little kiss on the lips, when we reached my car. The next morning I slipped Ed’s key into an addressed envelope and dropped it in a mailbox on the way to school.

The phone rang Wednesday evening as I was finishing dinner with my parents. It was Will. He had some free time. Could I come out with him in about ten minutes? We did some fooling around in the green Pontiac before he explained that he hadn’t been able to find a place for us to go. Would it be all right if we just had a bite and wandered around? Silly boy. Did he really think it wouldn’t be? He drove to a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard where I watched him put away half a large roast chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy, a dish of cooked sliced carrots glazed with honey (he said he liked carrots very much) and two ice-cream-soda-sized glasses of chocolate milk. He spread a pat of butter on each of the two white rolls that came with the chicken and wolfed them both down for dessert. “How can you eat so much and not gain weight?” I asked. “I burn up a lot of energy,” he said. “Can’t you tell?” I guessed I was supposed to giggle at this, so I did.

We strolled out of the restaurant hand in hand and went to Pickwick’s, where we gazed at the shelves in the literature section and I talked about Proust, which I had read most of and he hadn’t, while my curled fingers slid up and down his thumb. His goodnight kiss at my front door seemed almost reverent. I felt we might be together forever.

On Thursday he sauntered into the English Department office and up to the open door of my cubicle unannounced while I was in conference with a Korean War vet from one of my sections who was seeking guidance (he said) with setting up his next semester’s courses. Will and the vet eyed each other suspiciously. It was wonderful. When the conference was over, Will and I went out into the late afternoon. I had a graduate seminar on Dryden and Pope in half-hour but didn’t mention it. We stopped to watch a football practice. The field was walled on the side near the sidewalk so that I couldn’t quite see over, even on tiptoe. Will noticed. He put down my books and lifted me so my head was level with his and we could look together. I had no idea what I was watching or what it meant, but for those few moments that his arms held me up with my feet off the ground, how could I not be happy?

He took me to a studio apartment much like Ed’s but closer to the university. “Whose place is this?” I asked. “Don’t worry,” he responded soothingly. “We can use it all afternoon.” That didn’t answer the question, but I didn’t press it. I had another problem. Now my period really was here. I told him as he was lowering the Murphy bed from the wall. He said it didn’t matter, he didn’t care.

He did care about not making a mess, though. With a thick layer of old newspaper crackling under my naked behind every time I moved, and toilet paper and my last unopened Tampax within reach on the floor next to my side of the bed, the afternoon began to seem more about keeping the bed clean than abandoning myself to the transports of love. Did I dare turn over? Was my ass covered with newsprint? Was now the time to pull the plug and let him in? I groped for the little white string with one hand; it was slippery and wet and impossible to yank. Then I wrapped a thick wad of toilet paper around it and gave mighty tugs with the thumbs and forefingers of both hands until finally out came the used and swollen tampon, hot from my body and soaked dark.

“Wait!” I cried, holding him off with elbow and knee while I wrapped the detritus of my innards in more and more toilet paper until I could see no more seepage. Predictably (and mercifully), he came fast, at which point I could push him off — lovingly, I hoped — in order to insert the last clean Tampax before there was damage to the sheets. That pretty much ended the promise of the afternoon. I wondered if I wouldn’t have been better off at the Pope and Dryden seminar.

His cleanup was thorough. Bed carefully remade and folded away. Roll of remaining toilet paper replaced in the bathroom. Stained newspaper, soiled toilet paper (with its contents), and my three cigarette butts into a garbage bag. Ashtray wiped down. And then out — holding the garbage bag, to dispose of elsewhere — after checking that nothing was left behind. As he locked the outside door, I peered at the name next to the bell. “Yates.”

“Then this is your apartment!”

“No, “ he replied. “But it used to be.” As if that were an answer. He hurried me into the car.

I thought I would see him the next day. But a teaching assistant meeting had been scheduled for two that afternoon, so I had to cut British History. Two cut classes in as many days; my life was going out of control. At the meeting, another teaching assistant who was my best friend in the Department whispered that Ed had called to ask for a date and she had said yes. As I’d broken up with him she thought it would be all right. They were going out Saturday night.

For sure he would try to get her into bed. Not because she was so gorgeous but to get even. Would she yield? On the first date? She was still a virgin. (Unless she was lying.) But he was very skillful. Should I warn her? Maybe she wanted to be deflowered. Maybe she’d been secretly jealous of me this whole semester. We never know the real truth about anyone, do we? The Department Head was discussing the last composition unit of the fall Freshman English semester. Did he actually believe you could teach anyone to write? Afterwards I walked over to Commons with the best friend to show no hard feelings, and we had coffee with the others who’d been at the meeting and were jabbering about what the Department Head had said. I kept my eyes on the door but never saw Will come in looking for me.

I didn’t hear from him all weekend. I tried not to think about the apartment with his name next to the bell or what he might be doing when he wasn’t in school or selling Hoovers door to door, and thought instead about what Ed and the so-called best friend might be up to.

On Monday, I cornered her. “So? How was it?”

“Fine.”

“Going to see him again?”

“Don’t know yet.” She didn’t look particularly glowing or fulfilled, but maybe she was simply distracted; she had a class in five minutes. What did ‘fulfilled’ look like anyway?

Two o’clock finally arrived. There was no time to ask Will about his weekend. After the lecture, he carried my books again, though. And the sun — I would always remember the sun was still shining and we sat on a bench for a while to enjoy it. “Thank goodness next Thursday is Thanksgiving,” I began. “A four-day break. We’ll have some real time together.” He looked uncomfortable. “Well, no,” he said. “We won’t. I can’t see you then. My mother’s here.”

He’d never mentioned a mother before. Should I suggest he introduce us to each other? No, the thought should come from him.

“You won’t have to spend all that time with her, will you? Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday, of course. But all four days?”

He nodded sadly.

“But Will, why? Doesn’t she understand you have a life? I mean, it’s not as if you were married!”

He took a deep breath. “Actually,” he said, “I am.”

His wife was seventeen. He’d knocked her up on the beach at Santa Monica the previous May. She’d been a virgin. Catholic, too. So how could he walk away? The wedding had been in August, before it really showed. Her family was helping them, until he got his degree. In fact he was living with them. I couldn’t process it fast enough. Seventeen? It was those cashmere sweaters, he said. All the coeds in their cashmere sweaters. After Notre Dame it drove him crazy. And she was pretty. Smart, too. She wanted to be an electrical engineer. So once he got her panties off.…

“But if you were married,” I cried, “what did you think you were doing with me?”

He looked down at the ground. After a while he said quietly, “I thought I could have a wife and mistress both.”

Mistress? What did he think this was? Some kind of Victorian novel?

“Can I still go on seeing you?” he asked.

I couldn’t give him up now, just like that. Temporize, I told myself. Play for time. Cry later.

He looked happier when I said yes.

We walked to Commons. His mother really had come for Thanksgiving. She was staying in the apartment with “Yates” on the doorbell; he’d kept it after the wedding as a place to escape to. She was also job-hunting, she might move out from the East, he was her only child. I nodded. And nodded. What could I say? He went on, suddenly a fountain of information. The new Mrs. Yates was called Mary, she’d had to give up school this year because of the baby, she was a good sport ….

Thigh by thigh we sat in the Hole. The buddy who was learning German from a prostitute passed and waved. He must have known all along. I felt dirty.

“I wish we could run away to Alaska together,” Will said.

“I wish it had been you I met last May,” he said.

“I wish I were a better person,” he said. That’s about as contrite as he got.

He called on Thanksgiving, around ten o’clock, from a phone booth on the corner near his in-laws. “I had to get out for some air,” he said. I was ready to meet him, but he had to go back.

We both got A on the History ten-week. I wondered how he’d managed, with so much going on in his life. I really had to study for mine. The week after Thanksgiving break he came to the house to pick me up. A theological student who was out of town had lent him a key to his room. It was a narrow sliver of space containing a single cot with black blanket, a metal desk piled high with religious texts, one folding chair, and a dark prie-dieu. On the disapproving walls were several crucifixes in various sizes. We sat on the austere black blanket and tried to kiss. Then we hung our clothing over the back of the single chair and did what we had come to do. It was all very sad, although Will seemed to be in good working order in spite of our situation.

Afterwards, we lay on top of the black blanket while he stroked my arm. I told him he would love the baby when it was born. It was going to be his baby, a part of him. I thought I ought to say these things to sound wise and warm, and to make him feel better, although I had no idea if they were true. He looked doubtful. “But I don’t want to be married,” he said. “The baby will make everything all right,” I murmured reassuringly, hating Little Miss Pure who couldn’t hang on to her underpants. I was dying for a cigarette. The theological student had no ashtray. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

We went to Milani’s French Dip on Santa Monica near Highland. Plenty of ashtrays there. Our booth had a little box on it labeled “Swami Says.” For a penny, inserted in the appropriate slot, you could ask Swami any question answerable with yes or no.

“Do we have a future together?” I asked. Swami said no.

I fished another penny from my change purse. “Will we at least see each other until the baby comes?” Swami said no.

I counted out more pennies. “Will we go on being friends?” Swami said no.

“Is there anything we can do to change your mind?” Swami said no.

“All it can say is no!”

Will dropped my last penny into the slot. “Will the baby be a girl?” he asked. Swami said yes. Will smiled.

Then it unraveled. Will began to look for another job for when his classes would be over and had to hurry away after British History to go on interviews. The week before Christmas break, we went a last time to the Hole. He seemed resigned to what would be. I tried to memorize his face. “Time was out of joint for us from the beginning,” I began. “I guess,” he said. The buddy who was learning German from a prostitute came by; Will invited him to sit with us. They talked about the baby coming, and the job market, and it was almost as if I weren’t there at all. At the end of the last History class, Will said he had to go. He was still wearing his navy blue sweater. I was getting fond of it, now that I would never see it again. He put his hand out half way, then took it back and gave a little wave goodbye. I nodded and turned quickly, before he did. I wasn’t going to stand there and watch him walk away from me.

He must have taken the final with a different proctor because I didn’t see him in the exam room to which I was assigned. I got an A in the course and assumed he did too. Although what difference did it make, now that he was out of school and about to become a father?

Ed soon re-insinuated himself in my life. The business with the best friend had never gotten off the ground. He forgave me my trespasses. (Although he didn’t forget them.) All was (almost) as before. Except I did hear from Will once more. He phoned from a booth in the hospital one evening in February. The baby was a girl. He was naming her Cordelia, after Lear’s third daughter, so she should always tell the truth. “I had to call,” he said, “to say you were right. As soon as I saw her, I loved her. I wanted you to know.”

The following Christmas he also sent a card without a return address, wishing me the joys of the season and enclosing a snapshot of a ten-month baby girl with dark curls clinging to the bars of a playpen. The line drawing on the front of the card showed a naked showgirl sitting in a giant champagne glass full of bubbly with her legs and arms in the air. I looked at it for a long time, trying to make it feel less hurtful. I couldn’t. At last I tucked it in a file folder discreetly marked WBY, together with my notes of our first meeting and the Thrifty Drug sales slip for spermicidal jelly and port wine from that time we’d driven to Covina.

Eventually Ed’s ex-wife found a new husband, the alimony payments slipped from his shoulders, and he proposed. He should have known better, but didn’t. I was by now nearly twenty-four, only a year from old-maidhood. Fate had already dealt me what I thought of as a tragic blow in the true love department. So it seemed best to put away lingering thoughts of William Benedict Yates and accept what was offered.

Maybe it would work out.

SEX AT NINETY-ONE

Going to high school on the subway by myself at twelve and a half, I sometimes eyed women who looked to be about thirty and wondered if they could possibly still be doing “it.” Life disabused me of such naivete. By the time I myself neared thirty, I was newly separated from a three-times-a-week husband and found myself dying for it (no longer in quotation marks) after just a couple of weeks of abstinence.

The psychotherapist I was then seeing assured me these cravings were normal and that human sexual appetite continued practically into the grave. One of his patients was a ninety-year-old widower who had a weekly appointment with a prostitute he particularly liked. Once a week at ninety! Of course, the therapist didn’t specifically discuss what they were doing together. Nor did I care; at twenty-nine I had neither hands-on experience nor theoretical knowledge concerning the various kinds of disappointments and failures with which aging equipment too often needs to contend. Nonetheless, if in fact the therapist’s report was accurate –and why shouldn’t it have been? – these paid encounters must have produced positive results or the ninety-year-old patient wouldn’t have continued them.

Avid readers should of course recognize that such piggyback hearsay, from elderly client to psychotherapist to me to you, is not admissible evidence in a court of law. But as I myself grew older, which meant the applicant pool in which I could go fishing when unpartnered began to shrink for various reasons none of which need exploration here, I occasionally thought back to the ninety-year-old. Aging ladies, if you too are beginning to feel opportunity-challenged, take heart. The next part of my narrative has nothing piggyback about it. It’s cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die true, and happened not so long ago either.

But first, some back story. The separation from the three-times-a-week husband occurred early in November 1960, at which time I was working on Madison Avenue as a copywriter. A client invited me to a masked New Year’s Eve ball. We were to come as our favorite eighteenth century characters. How romantic! Sure enough, as I was wandering around in my rented empire white dress (from the Napoleonic part of the century) with a white silk mask covering my eyes, there came a loud rapping at the door. A tall Venetian doge with dark hair, black cape, black mask and black staff burst in, cased the room, and found me. As explained above, I was ripe for the picking. At midnight, the masks came off. The doge, transformed into a most attractive thirty-six-year-old Harvard graduate, kissed me and took me home to my nearly bare new one-room apartment, where we danced till three in the morning to Frank Sinatra exhorting us from my portable victrola to take it nice and easy. The next day (after I had reported back to the psychotherapist, who gave provisional approval), we crossed “Go” and 1961 was off to a great start.

He had the same first name as my first husband, but that name by then brought up such odious associations that I thought and spoke of the desirable masked man only by his family name, which also made me feel quite sophisticated. (I was a very young twenty-nine.) McDonnell (let’s call him) was a terrific lover. He cared as much about giving pleasure as getting it. “I am a good cocksman,” he crowed one night, explaining how he had learned four or five years before to hold it for a long time.

He was also extremely poor husband material. Not that I was looking to marry again just yet; it would be a while before I had fully and legally untangled myself from the first husband, not to mention the time needed to recover from the emotional battering of that first marriage. But taking the long view, it must be said that McDonnell had already been married and divorced twice, and was trying to survive in Manhattan on the $6,000 a year left to him after deductions from his salary for alimony and support of the three young children of his first marriage. A philosophy major in college, he hated his job as Personnel Director of a large insurance company. He occupied a single room in a residential hotel with a good address and wore (in rotation) three gently used Brooks Brothers suits from Gentlemen’s Resale. When we went out, we often ate $3 suppers at Original Joe’s, off Third Avenue. He liked Gibsons, which were extremely dry martinis with cocktail onions instead of olives at the bottom of the glass. He probably liked them rather too much. However, he didn’t start drinking till 5 o’clock and the Gibsons never interfered with what went on in bed, so I was probably less judgmental than I ought to have been. I even kept gin and cocktail onions in the one-room apartment for him.

About a week after we met, he also sent me the most beautiful and poetic love letter I have ever received. It was written in his office when he was supposed to be working, blue ink on three pages of closely lined yellow legal paper. All I remember of it now is that we were in the Garden of Eden, and God didn’t know about us yet, and the writer of the letter was going to chase and chase me until I could run no more and fell down. It ended, “I am your you, you are my me. I love, love, love, love, love you.”

But did he ever become my me? I think not. I was certainly somewhat in awe of him, with his haut-Wasp inflections and what I thought of as his deep knowledge of the world. And especially at the beginning, I was extremely pleased and happy he was in my life. He made me feel like a desirable woman again. However, he also caused distress and then pain, probably unintentionally, by keeping me always at arm’s length, with the result that throughout the year we spent together we really led separate lives. He didn’t want to socialize as a couple (except with a few of my friends, when it was convenient for him), or to meet my parents when they came east to visit me, or to talk seriously about anything. We never spoke on the phone, except to arrange meetings. Nor do I think he ever really loved me, despite his facility with the written word. By fall, it was clear he was developing a roving eye. He began to drift off. He called less regularly. We saw each other only every other week. When I finally worked up courage to ask what was going on, he confessed he was trying to maintain two relationships at once, the newer being with a married lady. (She eventually gave him crabs.) That was it for essentially old-fashioned me. Four months later (and crab-free), he tried to come back, but the psychotherapist helped stiffen my spine. It was time to move on.

Afterwards, I spotted him on the streets of Manhattan only once, in the late 1970’s. I was now again a wife, mother of two young boys, and walking our golden retriever along the curb of West 86^th Street on a Friday evening when suddenly a tall man strode swiftly towards me out of the dusk. My heart jumped with recognition. McDonnell. He looked just the same. By contrast, I looked awful – ten pounds heavier, bad hair, disheveled and damp from having made and cleared away dinner, with a stained apron still on under my unbuttoned coat. I swiveled to the side, hoping he wouldn’t see me, and he went right by, intent on his destination, which turned out to be an apartment house near Central Park. I was pretty sure there must have been a lady friend in that building. He had the eager look on his face I associated with Gibson-lubricated anticipation of a romantic interlude.

In the fall of 1995, my older son moved back to New York for a job after graduate school and I came down to visit from Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was then living. I would be arriving before he got off work, so I needed to fill a couple of hours until we could have dinner together. Almost all my former friends had moved away, but I found McDonnell in the Manhattan phone book and called a few days before my shuttle flight. We arranged to meet for a drink at a well-known watering hole in the East 20’s. He didn’t sound especially enthusiastic, but that may be because my call came out of the blue, after (for him) about thirty-four years. However, he certainly knew my name and voice.

I was now sixty-four, he was seventy-one, and I wasn’t at all sure I would recognize him. But I knew I looked pretty good this time. I had become a well-paid lawyer, and money buys gym membership, a good hairdresser, nice clothes, tasteful makeup. I was also at liberty. Truth be told, if circumstances had been favorable I might have considered a reprise. Old friend and all that. I waited across the nearly deserted street from the appointed place until someone came along on the other side. I knew his purposeful walk at once.

Although still trim and despite his years looking otherwise not much changed except for a few grey streaks in his dark hair, he sounded petulant over our glasses of Pinot Grigio. He was living in Brooklyn Heights with a patent lawyer of Scandinavian origins about whom he couldn’t stop complaining; she had got fat during their five years together, she was sloppy, she bought too many clothes, she had no interest in art or literature, she didn’t understand boundaries. Afterwards he filled me in on what else had been going on with him during the previous thirty-four years: a third marriage, fourth child, third divorce, grungy jobs (including night word-processing at a law firm) that permitted him to write a failed novel, and then a modest family inheritance which freed him from the necessity of supporting himself, bought him a tiny studio apartment in the East 90’s just below Spanish Harlem (then being occupied by the fourth child, now grown), and permitted him to travel a bit. He had almost no curiosity about me. We each paid for our own wine and parted with pecks on the cheek and obligatory murmurs about keeping in touch.

Although often privately critical, I am almost always loyal. Now that we had, as it were, reconnected, I began to send McDonnell seasons’ greetings most years. Each was politely but minimally answered, sometimes two months late, in a familiar handwriting which had become mysteriously tiny and crabbed. In 2000, we met for another drink, at the same place, when my son became engaged and I came to New York for a lunch given by the bride’s mother for the bridesmaids, the bride and me. His “drink” was now coffee. He’d gone on the wagon when he finally left the Scandinavian and moved back into his studio apartment. I was sixty-nine, he was seventy-six. On inquiry, he declared himself to be quite fit and well. He had also become spiritual, he said. He had a Maharishi with whom he spent summers in the Berkshires. He did yoga twice a day, took a marvelous powder every morning called Green Magma, then walked around the reservoir, rain or shine. In the afternoons, he looked after his investments and meditated. Gone were the Brooks Brothers suits and cotton oxford button-down shirts; he looked a trifle shabby in a worn pullover sweater under a tweed jacket out at the elbow. But he did have a (new) lady friend in White Plains with whom he spent every weekend. Cocksman to the end, I thought. God bless.

The following year I met Bill and we began living together. We also regaled each other with tales of our respective pasts. At seventy and seventy-three, why be coy? Eventually, we came to McDonnell. “Have him to lunch if you want,” said Bill. “If he’s ever up here to see his guru.” (Neither of us are guru-minded.) And so it came to pass that McDonnell did indeed have lunch with us in Cambridge in 2004 on his way to a summer of spirituality in the western part of Massachusetts. He was still without a perceptible stoop, and retained a full head of hair, although it had become entirely grey. (Hey, he was eighty.) He also displayed excellent company manners. It was as if there had never been anything between us. We three discussed castles in the south of France, good places to stay in Tuscany, a charming little guidebook written in French in the eighteenth century he told us about, the name of which now escapes me. There was also some chat about minstrelsy. On leaving, he pronounced the meal delightful. “Come again,” we urged. “Mmmm,” he agreed noncommitally.

Then we moved to Princeton, which is much closer to New York than Cambridge. As old friends became ill and began to die, I would occasionally mentally calculate McDonnell’s age. The year he turned eighty-four, I suggested we have lunch together the next time I came to the city to visit my new grandchildren. We settled on a day, he named a favorite place in his neighborhood, and then got a cold so the lunch never came off. I abandoned desultory efforts to stay in touch. Even stopped sending holiday cards. Time marched on. Four years after that, which was three years ago, when he was eighty-eight, he inquired by email: “Weren’t we supposed to have lunch a while ago?” I reminded him about his having had a cold and added that I didn’t come in much any more, but was going to an opera matinee in the near future and if he wanted to meet at Lincoln Center for a quick lunch at the restaurant inside Avery Fisher Hall before the curtain went up at the Met, that would be fine. It was the first time he had ever initiated a get-together. In retrospect, the fact that it was three years ago was significant.

I hadn’t seen him since the Cambridge lunch eight years before, but assumed I would still be able to spot him when he showed up. I was wrong. I waited alone in the deserted lobby of Avery Fisher for some time. Then a strange figure came up an internal staircase from the basement level. He wore a clownish red knit cap with a pompom on top, a dull grey cotton padded coat, and a green wooly scarf tied clumsily around his neck. The figure wandered about uncertainly. He was tall. Although he looked nothing like any version of McDonnell I could remember, the height decided me. Who else could it be? I rose and addressed him. The responsive voice was somewhat shaky, but the haut-Wasp inflections were impeccably in place. It was indeed he.

As soon as I identified myself, he gave me a warm and intimate smile. Of course he recognized me! He had such wonderful memories of me! Wonderful memories! He leaned forward very close, as if it were 1962. I pulled a few steps back, involuntarily. I was eighty-one. I tried to picture my twenty-nine-year-old self naked and spread-eagled on her back. “I’ll bet you do,” I said, perhaps more acidly than he deserved.

He had in the past eight years become a stranger with no recognizable similarities to any of the prior McDonnells I could recollect. When we entered the restaurant, he seemed so unsure of himself I felt I shouldn’t have brought him there. He pulled off the silly knit cap to reveal a shock of thick snow white hair. His once dark eyebrows were sparse, and he had a black mole on his neck I didn’t remember. When he slipped out of his unusual coat, I noticed a large moth hole near the neckline of the old yellow merino wool sweater he had on underneath. He didn’t know what to order. I suspected most of the offerings might be too expensive for him in his currently threadbare condition and suggested the frittata, which was the most reasonably priced. He didn’t know what a frittata was, but agreed it would be all right when he heard it was essentially Italian fried eggs. When it came, he asked me how to eat it.

I tried to bring up pleasant memories. In February 1961 he had bought me a copy of John Updike’s Rabbit Run for Valentine’s Day the week it came out and written a wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if inscription on the flyleaf: “For darling Nina, from the author.” He didn’t remember. For my thirtieth birthday, his gift had been the collected poems of Cavafy, of whom I had not yet heard. “Did I do that? Marvelous poet,” he said, accepting my Parker roll after he had consumed his own. And he had no recollection whatsoever of having hand-written the three-page love letter about the Garden of Eden. He said only one thing about our mutual past: “We were so happy. Why did it end?” I told him he had left me for a married woman who gave him crabs. The crabs he did remember. “Oh yes,” he said, wrinkling his nose in disgust. Then he shook his head a few times, presumably at himself.

I paid for my own share of the lunch; he didn’t argue or resist. At my request, he walked me across Lincoln Center to the opera house. There was another opera in my matinee subscription a month later, but when I suggested we might meet again before that performance, he gave a vague smile without agreeing. I didn’t press it. He assured me he’d be fine going home on the subway by himself. It was the last time I saw him.

But not the last time I heard from him. (Yes, we have arrived at the climax of my story!) Last December he suddenly popped up in my email box, without a subject line. By now, he was 91. I quote the email in its entirety:

Woke up thinking about you! How are you? Fondly, E__.

“What do you suppose he wants?” I asked Bill.

Bill thought McDonnell must be lonely, living alone in a grim little rear room on the third floor of a brownstone in a New York City very much changed from the years of his prime. Bill is getting up in years himself, and because he doesn’t go out much anymore he welcomes company. He had pleasant memories of the Cambridge lunch and the talk about the south of France. He suggested I invite McDonnell to Princeton for another visit. So I did.

I have reviewed the email I sent this aged man who Bill and I agreed must be lonely. In light of what followed, I was clearly too warm. I said his email was synchronicity, because I had been thinking of him too. (Not entirely a falsehood; I do occasionally check the internet to learn whether those whom I know or knew continue alive.) I inquired as to whether he could still get himself to Penn Station, issued the invitation (with instructions as to how to reach us), offered my two phone numbers, and ended unwisely: “Your little email opened the door to many memories safely tucked away in the basement of my consciousness, beginning with that masked ball on December 31, 1960. Fifty-five years ago. Ball is now in your court. I’m dancing back and forth on the service line waiting for a return.” (An instance of extending a metaphor too far.) Moreover, and much to my subsequent chagrin, I signed it, “Hugs.”

His immediate response was captioned “Fire!”

(Fire?)

Thanks for your ready response. It instantly lights a fire. I’d love to be with you and will reply more fully later tonight. E___.

Another email came two hours later, captioned “Hot!”

(Hot?)

I just left word on the two phone numbers you gave me and am dying to hear from you. E___.

So I had to call him back. It was 10:30 in the evening, rather later than people of our generation are used to calling, but if he was “dying to hear from me,” so be it. The conversation was extremely peculiar. Sounding both happy and hesitant, he said he would be glad to make the trip to Princeton but had no experience with the protocol. Protocol? I explained again where to buy a round-trip ticket, which train(s) to take, and that I’d pick him up at the station. If it was a nice day, we could have a little tour of Princeton and then come back to the house for lunch with Bill. He had met Bill in Cambridge, remember? McDonnell didn’t remember. Then he inquired into my feelings about the visit. Feelings? He pressed on: “Yes, how do you feel about me?”

“Well, I feel friendly,” I began. “What did you think?”

“No, I mean what is your mood? Is it warm?”

Oh God. “My mood? What do you want me to say, E_____? I have fond memories of you. But we haven’t known each other for more than half a century.”

“Do you want us to know each other again?”

This back and forth went on for what felt like an eternity. He assured me he hadn’t been in a relationship for three years. (Which explained his getting in touch prior to our Lincoln Center meeting three years before.) He also made reference again to our supposed past happiness together. Don’t ask how I finally managed to extricate myself.

Five minutes after we hung up, a third email arrived.

Dear Nina,

What I was hoping was that you might be in the mood for having sex with me, either chez-vous in Princeton, or here on 96th Street. I hope this directness doesn’t offend you.

That’s what I meant when I asked about the “protocol” — the having of sex with another man’s wife, in the husband’s presence (or at least knowledge), which is what I suppose a visit to Princeton might entail. (Please excuse the expression.) I’ve never done that before.

Anyway what I’d like to propose for openers is: on any day you feel like it, come to town for luncheon with me where I usually have dinner when I eat out at the Corner Cafe (they serve wine) on Third Avenue and 92nd (or so) at, 1 p.m., followed by letting me show you my apartment and so forth, and then putting you in a taxi for Penn Station.

What about it? E______.

You want to know what happened next, don’t you? Although to be desired at eighty-four is nothing to sneeze at, even if the desirer has become unappealing and the suggestion is nuts, I’ve always been serially monogamous and it’s too late to teach me new tricks now, even if I had wanted to learn them, which in this instance I definitely didn’t.

E_____,

I understood perfectly what you meant on the telephone, and thought I had disabused you of your fantasies. Apparently not.

What you propose is out of the question. I am eighty-four and have no desire to “have sex” with a nearly ninety-two year old man, whatever our relatively brief relationship may have been fifty-five years ago. Nor do I have any desire to see your apartment “and so forth.” If my email suggested anything to the contrary, you misread it.

In light of your hopes, which are entirely unrealistic and disconnected from life as I know it, I must also withdraw the invitation to Princeton.

Good luck in your quest.

Nina

At two in the morning, he replied:

I’m sorry I jumped to too many conclusions, Nina. All the best. E_____.

And thus, dear readers, I cannot provide more specifics about what this ancient lover from my long-ago past might have meant by “having sex.” Was it Clintonian sex (excluding vaginal intromission)? Would it have required assiduous oral or manual assistance from me? He was certainly hot to trot, and seemed confident all would be well, assuming my assent. I conclude from this extraordinary and entirely unexpected episode in my very late life that there must be some truth in old saws. Practice does make perfect. Sow and you shall reap. You don’t lose it if you keep using it.

Also, piggyback hearsay or no, my psychotherapist told the truth.

SOME DISCONTINUOUS OBSERVATIONS ABOUT LOVE

Thanks to the give-and-take most book groups require of their members, I recently found myself obliged to read a novel by Penelope Lively called Moon Tiger. I didn’t like it, despite the promise of its early chapters. (A woman in her seventies, dying of cancer, looks back on her life and the important people in it.) But there was one aspect of the story that really held me — so much so I would gladly, and with excitement, have read more and more, and never mind the rest.

The heroine has a brother one year older. They grow up together and in late adolescence become lovers. No one suspects. After a few years, the physical expression of their feeling for each other fades, but not the feeling. No one she meets subsequently, except for a British captain with whom she has a brief (and unconvincing) love affair during World War II, can compare with the brother. Throughout the rest of their lives, this feeling between brother and sister seems to trump any emotions either of them can experience for other potential love partners. When he is about to die, she rides with him and his wife in a taxi to some last meeting he insists on attending:

He goes on talking and she goes on talking and interrupting and beneath what is said they tell each other something entirely different.

I love you, she thinks. Always have. More than I’ve loved anyone, bar one. That word is overstretched; it cannot be made to do service for so many different things — love of children, love of friends, love of God, carnal love and cupidity and saintliness. I do not need to tell you, any more than you need to tell me. I have seldom even thought it. You have been my alter ego, and I have been yours. And soon there will only be me, and I shall not know what to do.

Sylvia [the wife], she sees, is weeping again. Not quite silently enough. If you don’t stop that, thinks Claudia [the protagonist], I may simply push you out of this taxi.

I was an only child. I yearned for a slightly older brother when I was growing up. But I did understand early on that as a first-born, I could never have an older sibling, except by adoption, which I felt wouldn’t have been the same. Lacking this much desired older brother, I made one up. [See “Fairy Tale,” an account of my childhood fantasy, its development as I grew older, and how it looks to me now.]

This is not to say I truly believe I could have fallen in love with a male version of me who I had known all my life. Lively’s heroine believes that brother-sister incest requires narcissism in both parties. As I didn’t love myself enough for much of my life, narcissism does not seem to have been my problem. What I yearned for was an alter ego, someone who would accept me as I was, knowing everything about me. Someone who was my other half.

Diana Athill, last mentioned in this blog for having at the age of 89 written “Somewhere Before the End,” a trail-blazing account of old old age — has come up with a sequel of sorts now that she’s 97; it’s called “Alive, Alive Oh! And Other Things That Matter.” In her introduction to this new book, she observes that persons in retirement homes spend a good deal of time just sitting and thinking. In her case, it’s been thinking about events in the past which were enjoyable.

Until about two months ago, those events included people, usually men. I talked about it the other day with someone who is also in her nineties, though not so far into them as I am, and she said, “Yes, of course, men. What I do when I’m waiting to fall asleep is run through all the men I ever went to bed with,” whereupon we both laughed in a ribald way, because that is exactly what I did too. It cheered me up to learn that I had not been alone in indulging in this foolishness.

Athill has now moved on from thinking about men to thinking of pleasurable scenes in nature. But let’s do a rewind for a moment: How is putting oneself to sleep by reviewing past bedmates “indulging in foolishness?” As the saying goes: Those who can, do; those who can’t, talk, write, or think about it. I do have some years left before my nineties, but I too have sometimes counted “sheep” in somewhat the same way as Athill and her acquaintance; I review the sexual particulars of those relatively few men I have biblically known, with emphasis on the memorable ones.

However, and getting back to the theme of this piece, I don’t do that very often. More frequently, I make up erotic stories. They’re short on variety. I provide only two or three mises-en-scene; the two principal characters are always in their late teens or early twenties, and two or three years apart in age; I play both parts, moving in my mind from the point of view of the young man, then the young woman. But irrespective of the details of the flimsy “plot,” the underlying theme is always the same: these two grow up together, a tragic separation tears them apart, they cannot find each other, some time later, quite by accident, they do. Then nothing, nothing at all, can keep them from each other. Yes, they make love, occasionally in satisfying detail. But what is most exciting and rewarding about these pre-sleep lullabies, of which the physical “coming together” is just an expression, is the emotional coming together after having been so painfully separated.

The last time I read Plato’s Symposium in its entirety, somewhat unwillingly, was in the fall of 1949, when I was a sophomore in college. However, one section of it made a sufficient impression on me that I have revisited it on several later occasions. For those of you who haven’t read it, or read about it, the Symposium is a disquisition on love as the ancient Greeks viewed it. Since Plato wrote it, we may assume that in its entirety it represents the Platonic ideal. Briefly, six or seven of Socrates’ disciples gather with him at a dinner where they will all speak, in turn, about each one’s view of this important emotion. The fourth in order is Aristophanes, who attempts to describe the feeling of love in “historic” terms he fears will be laughed at.

Mankind, he [Aristophanes] said, judging by their neglect of him, have never, as I think, at all understood the power of Love. For if they had understood him they would surely have built noble temples and altars, and offered solemn sacrifices in his honor; but this is not done, and most certainly ought to be done: since of all the gods he is the best friend of men, the helper and the healer of the ills which are the great impediment to the happiness of the race….

In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different…. The primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast….Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods;….

Doubt reigned in the celestial councils. Should they kill them and annihilate the race with thunderbolts…. then there would be an end of the sacrifices and worship which men offered to them; but, on the other hand, the gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained. At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: “Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg.”

He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson in humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last;….

After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them — being the sections of entire men or women — and clung to that. They were being destroyed, when Zeus in pity of them invented a new plan: he turned the parts of generation round to the front, for this had not been always their position, and they sowed the seed no longer as hitherto like grasshoppers in the ground, but in one another; and after the transposition the male generated in the female in order that by the mutual embraces of man and woman they mighty breed, and the race might continue; or if man came to man they might be satisfied, and rest, and go their ways to the business of life: so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half….And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself….the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment….And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love. [Italics mine.]

After my second husband and I separated, I sequentially looked up (and in my older son’s words, recycled) the two significant boyfriends of my premarital life. You may see where, perhaps not entirely consciously, I was trying to go with this coming together after painful separation. I showed each of them the Aristophanes riff on love. The first was both tactful and rueful as he turned its pages in bed: “Here I am,” he said, “thirty-odd years later: same bathrobe, same book.” At least he didn’t laugh. The second did laugh; halfway through his reading, the phone rang. “Hi,” he said, “I’m reading about these funny round people with four arms, four legs and two heads….”

As you may surmise, neither effort to rejoin what had come apart worked out. There’s a reason the Platonic ideal is called an ideal. Real life just isn’t like that. Romantic love, youthful passion, may feel so compelling nothing can get in its way. But if satisfied, it begins to dilute itself into something else which we also call love. However, that’s a different love: warm, safe, familiar, comfortable, with cranky moments, boring times, tough passages, and also good ones. A love that leaves time and space for the speculations in this piece. A love to be explored in some other post. I invite you to do that.

MY MOUTH

My parents spoke a very clean, if accented, English. (It was their second language.) No questionable word ever passed their lips. My mother referred to pee as “little wee wee” and shit as “big wee wee” well into her eighties. When she decided it was time I understood where babies came from she went to the librarian in the children’s section of the public library; that lady, after inspecting me, solemnly unlocked a special cabinet behind the checkout desk and handed over a boring book that began with bees and flowers and relieved my mother of embarrassing explanations.

The book managed not to contain the words “penis” and “vagina.” I picked those up several years later from permitted perusal, in her bedroom, of her much less boring copy of Sane Sex Life and Sane Sex Living. (No question-and-answer period afterwards, though.) She did, however, have lifelong and frequently reported problems with “moving her bowels” and until my adolescence inquired daily if I had had success with moving mine.

My father never in my presence discussed anything pertaining to human execratory or sexual functions in so many words, The one time I accidentally opened the bathroom door at the age of three while he was peeing, he roared so loudly I ran away crying without quite understanding what it was I saw that I shouldn’t have seen. When the human need to vent became overpowering, my parents fell back on Russian. By dint of living with them long enough I picked up the Russian words for “My God!” (bozh moy), “shit” (govnoh) and prostitute (“bladz”). This was apparently okay for me to know because nobody else would understand it.

It should therefore come as no surprise that upon emerging from this nest of conformists, I flew free. No euphemisms for me. I never called a shovel a spade, a breast a bosom. After the age of thirteen, I gave up darn for damn, heck for hell. I use gosh and golly (pious replacements for god) only facetiously in replies to blog comments, to express feigned surprise. Gee whiz, jeez and jiminy (cricket) have never been in my vocabulary, although jesus! is, especially at peak intimate moments. Speaking of such moments, as a very young woman I preferred to refer to them as “making love” but after discovering in a graduate school Chaucer course that the Wyf of Bathe (Wife of Bath), who had had five husbands, talked quite freely about liking to fuck (she spelled it “focke”), I adopted her language as a linguistically purer way of denoting the act.

In other words, whatever you may have deduced from my blog and its title, I have what anyone who’s even residually a prude would call a dirty mouth. I also gesture. Bill thought about breaking up with me two weeks after we met when he saw me give a driver — who had cut in front of me to make a sudden left turn — the finger! Instead he became like a blotter, soaking up everything he’d deprived himself of all his long life, so that now we have to ration the “fuck”s and “shit”s coming from his mouth when he’s in a bad mood about anything.

I don’t insult, and I don’t call anyone names. I would never say of a real person that he’s a “stupid fuck” (pace other blogs), even if I wildly disagreed with that person’s views. In the presence of the pious, I do not take the name of the Lord (who in any event is not my Lord) in vain. In the presence of the proper, I am seemingly “proper” myself. I wrote academic papers in academic language. I wrote briefs in more-or-less legal language. I wrote newspaper articles in socially acceptable language. I write posts for this blog in language I hope won’t drive anyone away. But if you lived with me, you’d hear a lot that never shows up on this screen.

I raised my children in Manhattan. When he was four, my younger son asked me, “Mommy, what’s a motherfucker?” He had heard the word from a truck driver on West 86th Street. Once, when visiting East Hampton, we took both children to a movie recommended by the mother of one of my older son’s friends. (Older son and friend were eleven at the time.) The movie was Saturday Night Fever and my older son’s friend’s mother was wrong. Halfway through, younger son, then eight and a half, whispered, “Mommy, what’s a blow job?” Still, what can you do? You can’t shield children from the spoken language forever. You can only teach them the difference between the vernacular (i.e. slang) and generally accepted English, and when use of each is appropriate.

Fast-forward twenty years. I was spending Thanksgiving in northern Maine at the invitation of the mother of my older son’s girlfriend (later to be wife). The only entertainment on the only channel available was a rerun of Sex and the City, in which the episode’s plot revolved around the bad taste of the semen of a boyfriend of one of the four main characters. The language was equally salty. I later heard that my future daughter-in-law had whispered to my son she was so embarrassed I had to see it. What would I think of her? My son reassured her: “My mother? You’ve got to be kidding!”

The foregoing may be one of the reasons this same older son gave me, as one of two presents on my birthday last July, a copy of Mary Norris’s new book, Between You and Me. Mary Norris is the copy editor of The New Yorker, a publication of extreme correctness about written style, punctuation, word usage, and her book is an amusing meander through the do’s and (mostly) don’t’s of New Yorker style. Chapter Nine is entitled F*CK THIS SH*T. I’m sure my older son thought I’d enjoy it. It begins: “Has the casual use of profanity in English reached a high tide? That’s a rhetorical question, but I’m going to answer it anyway: Fuck yeah.”

(Note: If anyone is interested in reading a very truncated version of this chapter, I would be happy to oblige in the next post. Just make your wishes known in the comment section below. Or you could indicate the converse: “Enough already!”)

Interestingly, my two sons have developed late-blooming modesty since they left the nest. Do inclinations skip a generation in this regard? The three-year-old who walked down West 86th Street with me, joyously pointing at strange ladies and calling out, “She has a vagina!” is now a forty-six year-old father who references that area of the female anatomy, rather embarrassedly, as “private parts.” His brother doesn’t mention such things at all.

Their grandparents would be so proud!

WRITING SHORT: 46/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

A charming Hungarian once told me that men and women grow more alike as they get old. I was in therapy with him at the time and the transference was positive, so I never thought to question him. It didn’t seem relevant anyway, as he was forty-six when he said it and I was thirty-five.

In any event, he was never able personally to verify his observation. He died of a massive stroke at the age of 71 while walking vigorously along the shore at Clearwater Beach, Florida, to which he had retired about eighteen months before. When I met with his small wren of a widow fifteen years later, she declared him a fine figure of a man to the end, still virile and erect as he strode over the sand, nodding at attractive passing ladies.

Bill and I now both qualify as “old.” Have we grown more alike since the salad days before we met? Well, yes. I tell him all the time we would have been entirely incompatible had we come across each other thirty, forty, or fifty years earlier – when he was always thinking nooky, wherever he might find it, whereas I was always thinking nest-building and settling on the nest. I would have called him a swine; he would (eventually) have called me a bore.

On the other hand, the hunky Hungarian was perhaps not quite right. The body’s fires, whether wandering or domestic, may indeed be banking after eighty — bringing both sexes to the living-room couch after dinner, two versions of the same generic old person, slightly different in appearance thanks to bone structure and haircut, but who both hold hands (or not) while surfing channels till it’s okay to go to sleep.

However, our minds remain differently hard-wired. No matter how impossible a favorable outcome, even philosophical old men still covertly eye hot young things who flaunt their this and that, the urge to propagate their genes undying. Even bookish old women still secretly covet well-muscled bodies of shirtless young men seen ripping up streets with the brute physical strength required to protect a nest against marauders.

I bet you think I’m making all this up. Give it some time. Getting old doesn’t happen overnight. Sooner or later, you’ll see.

WRITING SHORT: 34/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

I want to eat everything. The whole carton of chocolate ice-cream. The whole cheesecake. The whole box of blueberry muffins. The whole family-size bag of potato chips. All the candy the kids collected in their hollowed-out pumpkin on Halloween and couldn’t finish. It doesn’t matter that it will make me sick, and later fat.

I want to buy everything I like in Vogue or at Pret-a-Porter — coats, dresses, sweaters, pants, boots, shoes, sandals, bags, scarves, hats. It doesn’t matter that I don’t need, can’t afford, wouldn’t know where or when to wear any of it.

I want to live in France, Italy, Spain, Greece — without moving away from home. I also want to see Scandinavia, Germany, Japan, South America — without moving away from France, Italy, Spain, Greece. It doesn’t matter that unless someone figures out how to access multiple parallel universes before I die, this is impossible.

I want to be young, adventurous, and sexually attractive to all men I find attractive, while retaining everything I now know about youth, adventure and sexual shenanigans and without relinquishing Bill, social security, or the privileges of age. It doesn’t matter that this would make me a dirty old lady who can work miracles.

I want to take piano lessons, relearn French, enroll in a Shakespeare course, lead a meditation workshop, tutor English as a Second Language, do Pilates, participate in two reading groups favoring long books because I like the women in them, play Scrabble once a month, pet the cats, and go to New York once in a while without giving up my blog and long luxurious afternoon naps on our new bed. It doesn’t matter that there aren’t enough hours in the day for all this or enough energy in me, doesn’t matter that I’d collapse, despite the naps.

I suppose you could say I want to be God. (God can have everything.) But I’m still asking “Is there a God?” and coming up with “No.” So it looks like I can’t have it all. Bummer.

WRITING SHORT: 32/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

What if I’d been less timid in days gone by? Such as when teaching Freshman English at USC. Aged twenty-two, I would sit cross-legged on the front desk in pencil skirt and white linen blouse, imparting my view of life to a group of sorority and fraternity pledges, a few Korean War vets, and several members of the Freshman football team who sat slouched against the back wall, exchanging sotto voce opinions about my ankles and other anatomical parts.

The weekly writing assignments generally resulted in compositions mediocre to bad. (I was not an easy grader.) However, one stood out. The writer had a strong sense of what was wrong with the world and no hesitation about putting it on paper. Despite his technical mistakes, I gave him an A minus and a “See me.”

He was eighteen, and not frat material. Not a jock either. Strongly built, tall and suspicious, he was racking up D’s and F’s in all his other courses. They were basically crap, he said. He’d pretty much stopped going. How come the A minus? I told him how come. I encouraged him. He wrote more. He never missed a class. He hung around afterwards, wanting to talk. Intrigued, I listened.

His father had thrown him out a year before, for unacceptable behaviors he didn’t itemize. He was living on his own and paying for college by running drugs into California from Mexico on a boat belonging to his uncle. (Whether the uncle knew was not made clear.) He’d had girls, but never a keeper. Soon he was wishing for someone like me.

I had a steady boyfriend. Tony was my student, and four years younger. But I’d never before met a strong, angry drug runner who wanted someone like me. I let him buy me a beer.

We had the beer at an out-of-the-way bar where no one would see. Then his eyes asked the question. I chickened out. The next semester, he left school. He’d knocked up a girl and was marrying her. He said It was the right thing to do.

All the same, I sometimes wonder. Suppose I’d gone down the road less traveled. Would my life have been different? Would his?

WRITING SHORT: 27/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

The difference between Bill and me in what you might call our erotic dotage is that he comforts himself for having got old by reviewing, often aloud, how attractive he was to women in days gone by, whereas I comfort myself by reviewing — usually to myself but if retaliation is in order, not always — the things men have said to me about what was in their hearts.

Thus, I’ve heard from him about L., who kept staring at him from the bar as he sat, age 40, having dinner at the Casablanca in Cambridge, until he had to ask if they knew each other, which they didn’t, but which led that very night to the biblical kind of knowing. I’ve heard about S., briefly a patient, who said to him, age 50, “You’re not hard to look at, Dr. Bill.” And I’ve heard, more times than you can count, about the wealthy woman at a Swiss hospital where he was doing his residency at the age of 32, who passed him the address of her hotel when the medical part of her visit was done, with the smiling remark: “Je suis a votre disposition, M. le Docteur.” (“I’m at your disposition, Mr. Doctor.”)

By contrast, I don’t really care about who came on to me and who didn’t. I count the words that came from deep inside: “You were my heart’s desire.” While having dinner with an old beau: “You’re an enchantress.” From a letter two years after a breakup, telling me of an impending marriage to another: “But old loves never die, and I still think of you very tenderly.”

Is this just the quantity versus quality thing continuing to resonate in aging bodies? Or does it mean that despite all the therapy we each have had, we’ve both stayed insecure and neurotic?

WRITING SHORT: 22/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

I met my second husband on the right-hand side of East Hampton Main Beach, facing the ocean, early in July 1963. This was before summer rentals soared to $20,000 a month and up. A girlfriend and I found a one-bedroom cottage that cost $1200 for the whole season.

The left-hand side was attached to the Maidstone Club, allegedly only for white Christians. You could buy a drink at the Maidstone bar, and even walk across the Maidstone part of the beach, but no one I knew had ever put down a towel or blanket on it. Who would you talk to? All the marriageable Jews were on the other side.

I was there in my pink modified bikini, on the right-hand side, because I was nearly 32 and my Hungarian therapist kept saying, “I don’t mean to insult you, honeybunch, but you’re not getting any younger.” He meant I’d been divorced long enough and if I wanted a baby, I’d best get off my ass and start working on it. The first husband had been a white Christian who would have fitted right in on the left-hand side. I thought I’d do things differently this time.

Future second husband was there, on the right-hand side, to get out of the city. (He said.) He stayed at a bed and breakfast. The sun went down, the right-hand side was emptying, but I sat on, conveniently alone. (My house-mate was in New York with a cold.) Future second husband, on a towel not too far away and still a stranger, needed a match.

Yes I did have a match. He moved his towel closer. We smoked and chatted together. Then came a drink at the nearby Maidstone bar. He asked what brought me to East Hampton.

I said I was looking for a father for my unborn children.

He said that sounded like a good idea and how would it be if we saw each other till I found him.

Is the point of this story that it always pays to tell the truth? Or that the part of themselves men think with isn’t always the head?

July 1963. (Not wearing modified pink bikini)

WRITING SHORT: 17/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

I attended a special city high school for smart girls in Manhattan. To get there, I took the E or F subway train from the Union Turnpike station in Queens. I was just twelve and a half but went by myself; parents didn’t helicopter back then. Those weekday trips were my earliest exposure to lives quite different than mine.

Only two other students took the E or F train home. Marjorie, who lived at the end of the line, was about my age. She was the youngest of five or six, some still living at home but working at jobs (as were her parents), so she had three hours to herself after school in an empty house. She said that every afternoon she baked a cake and ate it all before beginning her own job, which was making dinner for the rest of the family. I didn’t know how to bake. My mother was always there when I got home. I longed to eat a whole cake like Marjorie did. I never thought she might be lonely.

Jacqueline was a grade ahead of me. We connected only in my third year, which was her last. She was a serious student of French; her parents had even paid for extra tutoring from a French lady who lived nearby. As we clung to the central pole of the lurching train car, she told me of her summer love affair with the Mexican ward of her tutor. It was 1946. She was just sixteen. He was already twenty — tall, handsome and smart, but very poor — and had a full scholarship to Harvard. They made love under a tree in the park after dark, and sometimes in the tutor’s car. They made love! As I listened, my eyes consumed her curly dark hair, blue eyes, white skin lightly dusted with freckles. She had small breasts — which he had fondled? — modestly concealed beneath white blouses tucked into dark pleated skirts. Why couldn’t I be more like Jacqueline? Why couldn’t I meet someone tall, handsome, smart, foreign and poor? After she got out at the Jackson Heights stop, I would think of her and her lover all the way home. I still remember his name.

WRITING SHORT: 8/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

It’s generally not a good idea to share details of one’s romantic and sexual history with one’s current partner. But when you’re getting old, it seems less imprudent. Thus Bill and I have indeed told each other such tales. I can then enjoy scolding him for bad behavior with some women he knew in days gone by, while he can enjoy cutting down with wry nicknames some of his predecessors and near-predecessors.

One such near-predecessor was a cyclist with thighs of phenomenal power: at the gym he cycled in black spandex shorts for two hours daily at 120 revolutions per minute while doing complicated higher mathematics in his head. (He was a software designer for an international Japanese company.) I know the speed because I used to cycle behind him, although not for two hours. They were truly thighs of steel.

Eventually we got into conversation after the cycling, which led to his asking if I liked to eat, which led to me unwisely exclaiming it was my second most favorite thing in the world, which led to an immediate dinner invitation, which led after the dinner to a long passionate kiss in my living-room during which what was happening below his waist pressed hard against a responsive area below my own waist, which was certainly pleasing but led to my suggesting it was late and perhaps we could continue another time. My suggestion was not driven by false modesty but by the thought that he was no more than forty-five whereas I was sixty-nine and the alarming realization there was no way I could lie only on my back in the pitch dark once we reached the bedroom and shed our clothes.

We both became more sensible over the next few days; there was never “another time.” And soon afterwards I met age-appropriate Bill, who now always refers to this near-predecessor with the phenomenal thighs as “cock of steel.” (An assumption for which I was never able to make hands-on verification.) But that’s not his most creative nickname. There’s someone else he’s named “tongue like a drill.” I’m not telling you that story. You’ll have to imagine it for yourself.

DON’T READ IF YOU’RE FROM MINSK!

[In connection with media coverage and trending blog posts (here’s a particularly good one) about the new Viagra-like pill for women designed to arouse where no arousal was — I submit the following. It arrived at our house via email from a lively ninety-year old acquaintance of Bill’s (male, naturally), as a joke between two old guys. Apologies to any aggressively feminist readers who may be offended. Actually, Bill found it less funny than I did. But then he alleges his second wife was from Minsk. I myself never heard of the place.]

WISE RABBI

The only cow in a small village in Poland stopped giving milk. The villagers did some research and found they could buy a cow from Moscow for 2,000 rubles or one from Minsk for 500 rubles. Being frugal, they purchased the cow from Minsk.

The cow proved wonderful. She produced lots of milk all the time. The villagers were so happy they decided to acquire a bull to mate with her, so that she would give birth to more cows just like herself and they would never have to worry about their milk supply again.

They bought a handsome virile bull and put it to pasture with their beloved cow. He was certainly willing. However, whenever he came close to the cow, she moved away. No matter what approach the bull tried, he could not succeed in his quest to effect closure. Very upset, the villagers sought input from their wise Rabbi.

They explained it all to him in detail: “Whenever the bull approaches, our cow moves away. If he approaches from the back, she moves forward. If he approaches from the front, she backs off. An approach from the side? She just walks away to the other side.”

The Rabbi pondered this for a while. Then he asked,
“Did you buy this cow from Minsk ?”

The villagers were dumbfounded at the question since they had never once mentioned where the cow had come from.

“You’re truly a wise Rabbi,” they said. “How did you know we got the cow from Minsk ?”

The Rabbi answered sadly, “My wife is from Minsk .”

SOME THOUGHTS (IF YOU CAN CALL THEM THAT) ABOUT SEX

With all the hard-to-miss whoop-de-do about Christian Grey (“Fifty Shades Of”) and his compliant Ana in the tittering press, in movie box offices (where multi-millions are rolling in) and even in the feminist blogosphere, it perhaps behooves me to deliver a few expurgated observations on the matter from my own demographic. (Female, hetero-, old.) I speak of course only for myself, as I have not yet discovered another woman well over eighty blogging away on WordPress or anywhere else. (There are two who are seventy-seven and seventy-six respectively, but whatever they’re doing privately, neither “do” sex in print.)

It’s not true that women over seventy have fantasies about sex zero percent of the time. This canard was apparently reported in AARP about four years ago and then picked up to be made sport of by “Life in the Boomer Lane,” written by Renee Fisher, a mere sixty-seven herself. I can personally vouch for the falsehood of such piggy-back hearsay, and know of at least two other non-blogging women in the demographic who would emphatically agree with me. Since I don’t know many women in the demographic anyway (most of my acquaintances are younger), two plus me seems sufficient rebuttal on this point. I draw a veil over why these women plus me are having fantasies instead of, or in addition to, real sex.

There’s a huge disconnect between what’s desirable (or even acceptable) in real life from a real man and what’s desirable in one’s fantasy life from a fantasy man. I’ve read quite a bit of heated discourse in the past couple of days about how terrible it is to glorify a movie that glorifies female submission and bondage (i.e. “rape”) — this despite the fact that audiences, currently comprised of 68% women in North America, are apparently rushing to see it like lemmings to the sea. The disconnect may not be so true of the young or youngish — although I suspect that even for them if the line between what they see in movies and what they do in bed begins to blur, they can still distinguish between (a) playful bondage by a trusted loved one who lashes them to the bedposts with their own nylons while they both giggle and (b) the really painful stuff with whipcords and duct tape.

But for those of us raised in a faraway time when the proper response to going “too far” was always “No!” even when all your senses were begging “Yes!” — fantasy rape had, and may still have, a certain initial appeal. When I first came upon Candide in college and read of pure sweet Cunegonde, Candide’s lady love, being raped by Bulgarians, my first thought wasn’t horror but “Hmmmm, what do Bulgarians look like?” However the problem was that you’d have to decide which Bulgarians, and how many, would be allowed to have their way with you (even in a fantasy), and that didn’t seem likely (even in a fantasy). In fact, it’s always a given in fantasy rape that you have to secretly want to be raped by that particular man — whose hunger for you (and your unavowed hunger for him) is so overpowering that it cannot be gainsaid, despite your feeble struggles.

[Note to militant feminists: The preceding paragraph most certainly does not mean I agree with those Yale students who were suspended for marching through campus with a banner proclaiming, “No Means Yes!” Read more carefully. The Bulgarians are fantasy. Yale is real. As a Yale parent several times over, well aware of the tuition involved in even being on that campus, I can assure you Yale is very real, and no most definitely means no.]

Admittedly, “Fifty Shades” is only “soft” porn. Even so, what’s so exciting about a former Calvin Klein male underwear model pouring wine into the belly-button of the daughter of Melanie Griffith and Don Johnson while she bites her underlip apprehensively? That’s right, ladies and gentlemen not yet in my demographic. If your memory is long enough, you may recall those first ads (in classy magazines no less) for Calvin’s teensy-weensy BVDs with the CK logo-embossed elastic band that barely cleared the groin area. Well, the guy in those ads was Mr. Christian Grey himself (shorn or retouched of all chest hair) — a scrap of pristine white cotton between us and his, ah, member — posed in a full frontal come-hither slouch that must have turned on at least 95% of the gay community who saw it but didn’t do much for me. Yes, Jamie Dornan has a four-year-old daughter now and probably hopes that when at some time in the future she sees her daddy’s comely rear cheeks beautifully photographed above a naked lady who’s not mommy, she won’t ask questions. (I know, I know, it’s my age talking. Young Miss Dornan probably just won’t care.) But he still doesn’t do much for me, even with wisps of chest hair.

As for young Miss Johnson, I suppose what she does is her own business. But as I remember her mom in “Working Girl” before she did that ill-advised thing to make her lips fuller and they came out much too much fuller, and also recall her dad was the one in “Miami Vice” who made wearing only a white tee shirt under a jacket look really cool — seeing her naked underneath naked young Mr. Dornan would be like watching one of the neighbors’ kids put out for a vacant-faced muscled guy with impossibly huge scads of money and power, plus really gorgeous clothes (before he takes them off). I mean, come on. Who’re we kidding here? If we’re talking soft SMBD porn, Mickey Rourke with his ice cube in “Six Weeks” was much more like it; at least he looked the part. (Except look at him now.)

I do admit that typing the word “naked” twice just now was somewhat exciting. But that’s probably a demographic thing too.

Drinking wine out of belly buttons is not new. Trust me on this one. Back in 1948, Charlotte P. read aloud a story in Creative Writing I that had seventeen-year-old me writhing with jealousy, envy and lust; it was about her previous summer on an Israeli kibbutz where it was apparently not unusual to sip wine from the mouth of another and then have the other lap more wine from one’s belly button. (I believe they kept their jeans on, though.) Oh God! I immediately filed this away as something to try at the first opportunity. (And you see? I still remember, after all these years.) Of course, you would have had to be an innie and not an outie. I’m not sure how outies took to Charlotte P.’s story. What would Christian G. have done if Miss Steele had turned out to be an outie when her clothes came off? Torn up the contract? Or improvised with some other declivity? (That should keep you thinking for a bit.)

Since we’re talking about porn, in my demographic “hard” porn is for men. Sometimes we ladies do sit through their kind of thing to be accommodating (or in some cases because it’s easier than working them up ourselves). Yes, we sit patiently all the way to the money shot, with mess sprayed here and there over the other party, which to me has always been the erotic equivalent of a cold shower. But candidly, I could go on quite happily for two or three more lifetimes without seeing any more. Men get excited by shapely female breasts (or unshapely ones, swollen monstrously by silicone), lovely rounded buttocks gently parted, spread-eagled vulvas, luscious lips slurping eagerly, close-ups of piston-like activity, the camera eye right in there like a third participant. Why would a heterosexual woman want to look at any of that? It’s not part of our sexual experience, even without eyes shut. As for threesomes — apparently another real stiffener — forget it. I never did like sharing and just can’t multitask.

So what is erotic for women? I won’t deny my demographic still appreciates a nicely built unclothed male torso (although it’s not essential for powerful attraction). However, speaking only for me and not for the other two known members of this demographic, I far prefer the sight of work-made muscle to the barbell-crafted kind. Attractive construction workers, not gym rats. Just to check myself (and also, of course, in the interests of thorough research), I typed “naked straight men” into Bing. (It seems Apple is at war with Google and switched search engines when I wasn’t looking.) Did I get brought up to date fast!

Tattoos all over the place! I mean with no inch of skin except the face untatted! Yuck! (Demographically speaking, of course.) And photos of bare men of every ethnicity enjoying each other in every which way you can imagine. (Is this what Bing thinks is “straight?”) And photos of other bare men smirking or scowling at the camera with a “Look what I have for you!” expression on their faces. (I once had a husband, now dead — although not at my hand — who actually pronounced those very words. It did him no good whatsoever.)

And I’ve got to tell you what some of those bare men had for us couldn’t possibly have been for us at all. It’s true my experience has been quite limited, but I know — I just know, and to hell with the demographic — there isn’t a woman alive, of any age, who wouldn’t flee at the thought. These were appendages of such extraordinary length as must have been attached to the unfortunate straight fellow a therapist once told me about: he had to wear a very thick rubber donut before any woman would even consider — I’m looking for a nice clean word here — congress. And then the faces of those guys on the Bing-sourced websites! What could you talk about with them before you began? Can they talk? I know, I shouldn’t be mean. (I do think though that Apple could reconsider its position on Google.)

I might also add before leaving this possibly controversial section (in which I may have recklessly destroyed all the good will I’ve slowly built over the past year) that there’s a color photograph of a nicely built unclothed male torso, with pleasantly smiling face attached, that’s practically perfect. It’s cropped just above the pelvis so it’s also perfectly decent, and it’s right here on WordPress. It belongs to the nephew of one of the Australian ladies who occasionally drops by this blog. I remember admiring it when she posted it and wishing I were at least sixty years younger. But I’m not and probably you’re not either, so I’m not looking up the URL and you’ll just have to wonder forever.

Well, if not photos, then what? I’ve actually considered that question quite a bit before embarking on this post. What really turns on my demographic? (And maybe other female demographics too?) I think it’s faces, voices, words. Words above all. A well turned phrase — even on the screen — and you’ve got me interested. My demographic, and perhaps also yours, wants a story; we want to hear things and see things that maybe promise and maybe don’t, we want hope and uncertainty, and lots of hide and seek, until it’s just about all we think about. Imagination is a big part of it, too. (And who needs photos with a good imagination? After a certain age, eyes shut and imagination trumps photos every time.)

One of the more erotic things I’ve read recently turned up in a first novel published about thirty years ago which I discovered at a used bookseller. Near the end of the book the protagonist, a thirteen year old boy, and a somewhat flat-chested girl his age, who are both staying in the same house that summer weekend, play a game together that’s rather like strip poker. Round after round, the garments very slowly come off each of them, one by one. They look at each other. She offers to do one more thing for him since he won, but he can’t think of anything. So she goes off to bed. Still naked, and now erect, he thinks about her and thinks about her in his own bed, and then gets up and creeps down the hall to her room. She is sleeping, in a nightdress. He slides under her sheet from the bottom and lies there naked and erect with his head between her legs.

That made me breathe faster than the dreary plod through the three free chapters of “Fifty Shades” you can get from Amazon Kindle.

Someone I’ve never met in real life who writes extremely well recently suggested via email that there was probably a big commercial market for “elderly erotic stories” and how would it be if a woman writer and a man writer collaborated to write such stories. That’s pretty much how he put it (very politely), together with a possible opening paragraph and the caveat that the stories be about people of at least sixty. In my view nothing about people sixty or older would be erotic reading to the elderly because the elderly are turned on by the same stimuli as the young. That is, elderly men probably want to picture young nubile beauties in their dreams and even elderly women fantasize about firm male bodies, not old ones. I didn’t write that though, but merely objected to his opening paragraph for other reasons, and suggested another opening. He wrote back. And then I became uncomfortable, because of course I was the “woman writer” and he was the “man writer” we were writing about and I am twenty-three years older than he is and he’s not safely far away in Australia but about fifty-two miles from Princeton, and it was becoming exciting even though I don’t really know what he looks like. It was crossing the line from fantasy to real, at least for me if not for him. And therefore time to stop.

Words, you see. Words do it every time. And now that I myself have written 2,314 words on this stimulating topic it’s time to go do something else. What that might be I leave to your imagination.

SEX IN THE OFFICE

Anyone who works in a professional capacity — that is, without expectations of a nine-to-five day — probably long ago realized the major part of his or her life was now being spent in an office. [For those who toil equally long hours at home the temptations to be discussed below will necessarily be different. The refrigerator? The nap? The laundry? Here I have no experience to share, and can only imagine.]

Especially where it is men and women who are collegially spending these major parts of their lives together, having frequent one-on-one conferences and meetings on this and that early and late, passing each other in the sometimes narrow hallways, occasionally needing to order working suppers sent in — what thoughts, and other nouns, do you suppose might occasionally arise?

Of course, we’ve all heard the friendly advice: “Don’t mess around in the office.” [A more gender-specific version of this counsel, inapplicable to half of us: “Don’t stick your pen in the company inkwell.”] And we all know nothing good can come of whatever we’re contemplating, irrespective of the immediate pleasure. Not in the long run. Or even the short run, if one party seriously misreads the signals coming from the other party. Nonetheless, to err is human, especially under conditions imposed by the American economy on those who want to put their children at least through college, if not graduate school, and have enough left over to retire before being overtaken by death.

That said, I never did find out much about what went on in the two law firm offices in which I sweated out my last nineteen years of paid employment. By then I was rather too long in the tooth to appeal to any but a highly specialized taste, which did not timely present itself; I therefore acquired no first-hand information to impart to you. As for piggyback hearsay, unless inebriated at firm parties lawyers tend to be discreet. However, the woman who ran the night Word Processing Department was another story. “Oh honey,” she would say at 10 p.m., as you gave her a marked-up brief that had to be ready to file the next morning: “What I could tell you about lawyers in love!”

If no one was behind me waiting for her services, I could then hear of a dainty Chinese-Australian first-year associate found sitting on a large partner’s lap behind his closed office door after hours (both parties married to others), and about a Supreme Court Chief Justice’s son — also married, and breeding legitimate babies like a rabbit — who could not resist openly pinching secretarial bottoms, and perhaps in a few instances reaching under and up the rear hemlines. (Admittedly, this last hardly qualifies as “love,” but does cross some kind of bright line for seemly office deportment.)

There were also two other male partners, both splendid chaps and wonderful conversationists when not discussing the law, who in the past had traded in their wives (with multiple attached children) to marry the younger, more comely secretaries who were their office wives already. One of them — not having learned anything from experience — later repeated the process with a subsequent secretary who had replaced the new Mrs. Partner as soon as new Mrs. P. got the ring on her finger. He was then burdened with two monthly alimony payments and two packages of child support. [He also paid for one new wife to go to art school.] Fortunately, he was a lucrative rainmaker, so that his domestic expenses remained manageable.

In that very large firm with the voluble night Word Processing manager were two more partners — both married, although not to each other, and both professed Catholics — who comported themselves with utter propriety even when no one seemed to be looking but were given to leaving warm, bordering on openly affectionate, messages on yellow stickies affixed to each other’s desks, easily legible if somebody else were to walk in while one or the other of them were away in the bathroom, for instance, or doing a deposition in a conference room. Once when late at night I was leaving the building, which occupied a square block, I saw them halfway down the steps together in the near dark, under the dim light of a faraway street lamp. They were face to face and no more than an inch apart, bidding each other goodnight in whispers too soft for me to hear. But no part of either touched any part of the other. It must have been exquisite agony. He later died of prostate cancer and she became visibly distraught at the funeral, more so than any of his other partners. However, she later went on the state bench and managed to insert herself between another state court judge and his wife, who sat on the federal bench. The two married judges were not Catholic, so their marriage unravelled more easily than had that of the recently deceased male partner. Apparently the lady partner turned judge who had previously communicated her feelings to her male partner via yellow stickies had not been so Catholic after all. Are you still following me in all this?

Moving right along, some people (although not lawyers, as far as I know) have tried to bring the desired one home as a congenial colleague, in the apparent hope of incorporating more time with her or him into married social life. In the one case I personally know of — because it took place two floors below the apartment second husband and I occupied while our children were small –this strategy boomeranged big time. The young and good-looking male neighbor, who worked in public television and had two small children himself, introduced his pretty wife to an extremely attractive young woman with whom he worked and who he thought felt about him the way he felt about her. Was he ever wrong! The pretty wife and the extremely attractive young woman fell in love, and our young and good-looking male neighbor had to move out. He later found employment at another public television station in San Diego, and another wife as well, so you could say it all worked out okay, but as you may well imagine, there were many hard feelings along the way.

And now we come to the feature attraction of this piece: my very own story of office temptation. Let us roll back the years to 1962, when I was 31 — just a year older than the Balzac ideal woman, la femme de trente ans, old enough to know what’s what, still young enough to be desirable. We find me recently divorced from first husband (and therefore theoretically and also actually “dying for it”), looking about as good as I ever would, and writing advertising copy for things women wear in a small ad agency run by two aging brothers, one of whom I never saw in the two and a half years I worked there. There was a “creative” staff of five: senior art director (male), junior art director (male), two copywriters (both female), and a Creative Director (male) who had been an art director but had worked his way up. He was married; however, the wife and three children were tucked away in Long Island somewhere, a one-hour commute from us. There were also several account executives, a bookkeeping department, and an art department of persons perched on art stools who did layouts and paste-ups and technical stuff for print ads you don’t need to know about. Also an unmarried receptionist/switchboard operator of about twenty-four, slender but with badly colored brassy red hair that was really black, as were her eyebrows (she was of Italian descent), skin that showed the ravages of teen-age acne, flashy taste in clothes and poor diction.

Back to the “creative” staff. Our offices ran along the side of one hall, together with the office of one account executive. The senior art director, about my age, was reputed to have been “wild” in his youth. “Wild” as in sometimes ripping off all his clothes except his BVDs and running around the agency barefoot to let off steam. He didn’t do that any more. He was married, and a father, and grumpy because this was the Doyle, Dane Bernbach era when the visual ruled in print advertising. We, on the other hand, often ran a lot of copy to go with the photo of the product because the manufacturer wanted it that way, which meant our ads had no chance of winning art director awards.

The junior art director was simpatico, competent and gay. (But in the closet. We were sort of friends, I sort of guessed, he never said.)

The other copywriter was married, a mother, and with a husband who didn’t earn enough. She worked a three day week, and on those three days worked through lunch so she could leave at four. She hardly had time to talk, even in the john. So I carried the copy load for the big accounts.

The account executive whose office came between the senior art director and the Creative Director had been a secretary who found favor with the client that really kept the agency going. Now she was liaison between that client and the agency. (It was copy for that client’s account I was principally responsible for.) She was also the sort of person who couldn’t bear seeing you idle for a moment if you could be doing something to improve service for “her” client. One such afternoon she set me the challenging assignment of finding “fresh” ways to say “Prices slightly higher in the West.” Go ahead: you try it. “Prices rise with the Rockies” was about as good as I could do and, as you can see, it wasn’t very.

Under these lonely and unhappy working conditions, you may well understand that a nice-looking Creative Director — tall, dark, and with a warm, friendly smile just for you each time he passed your doorway — could begin to occupy the thoughts of a 31-year-old copywriter who was “dying for it,” even though he was married. We sat in many meetings together — Creative Director, senior art director, account executive and me. As the senior art director and the account executive droned on, about ruffles on a blouse, tucks that didn’t photograph well, I would examine the Creative Director’s features — his nose, his mouth, his chin. Suddenly, his eyes met mine and saw desire. For one electric moment, our eyes touched. Then, embarrassed, I looked away.

Too late. The fat was in the fire. Now there were many mutual looks. Much stopping in doorways. Little chats about the weather that weren’t about the weather. Unnecessary excuses to check out a piece of copy. One day, he came into my office dangling a sheer flesh-colored something from a finger. It was a probable design reject from a brassiere manufacturer we represented: a bra without an underwire or any built-in support and no extra appliqués of cloth covering the nipple area. The client thought it wouldn’t sell.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Can we do anything with this?” I took it from his finger, our hands briefly touching. An hour later, I was in his office with the bra and a piece of paper pulled from my typewriter clearly revealing what was on my mind: “BARELY THERE: the bra to feel you’re not wearing a bra in.” Now his smile was huge. The next morning, he was back with a line drawing of a lovely odalisque: a reclining woman wearing the bra and apparently nothing else. (The drawing stopped at her hip.) My headline was lettered in below. He had done it himself, at home, imagining me. Well, that’s what he said.

It was seven years before Woodstock, but “Barely There” sold and sold! We had a hit! We also had a dilemma. Where did “we” go from here? At the next boring meeting with the account executive and the senior art director about ruffles, tucks, pleats and retouching an unattractive pimple on the model, the Creative Director began with a little anecdote he thought was funny. (Although what it had to do with ruffles, tucks and pleats he never said.) “A lady comes into a psychoanalyst’s office. Before she can say anything, the psychoanalyst directs her to take off all her clothes and lie down on the couch, whereupon he has sexual intercourse with her. When he’s done and buttoned up again, he says, ‘Well, that’s the solution. Now, what’s the problem?'” The Creative Director then turned to me and asked, “Is that the solution?”

Quel drama! In a public forum! Did the other two suspect what was going on? The silence was thunderous. Reluctantly, I answered, “It’s a solution that creates more problems.” For a moment he seemed startled. Then he replied, “That’s a very good answer.”

And on that prudent note, dear readers, my story ends. Soon the Creative Director was taking extremely long lunches out with the red-haired receptionist/switchboard operator, who tried not to talk about what they were doing during those long lunches but occasionally failed. As the weather got warmer, and the Creative Director began walking up and down the corridor past my door with his jacket off, I also noticed he had a very big ass, quite out of proportion to the rest of him. It was an ass that might possibly be acceptable in a husband, because whether you were on top or on the bottom you didn’t have to see it, but certainly not what you would want in a married lover in the office, where you saw him walking up and down the corridors before the two of you went out for the quickies which were all you’d ever get because he was homeward bound every night to his wife and three children.

About a year later, I was let go; the account executive felt she needed someone “fresh.” This was not an unmitigated tragedy. I did find another job writing copy, and then I met someone who would become my second husband and the father of my children. Just to wind this up on an even more positive note, I was walking through JFK several years after that with my six-month-old first-born on my shoulder, having returned from showing him off to my parents in California. The Creative Director, also in the airport but several groups of other people away, nevertheless spotted me, waved and mouthed a question about the baby: “Yours?”

I nodded. He gave me a thumbs up, and we smiled at each other one last time.

LUST, REVISITED

[By the time you read this, I shall have spent the afternoon just past in Manhattan, attending a cello concert in his other grandmother’s apartment by my now-eight-year-old grandson. (She has a piano for the accompanist; that’s why it takes place there.) Those of you who’ve been hanging around TGOB for a while, say ten months or so, may recall I did the same thing last year, when he was seven. The concert last year was to commemorate his having finished the pieces in Book One of the Suzuki Method and being able to play them all by heart. Now he has mastered the pieces in Book Two. Given the amount of money his loving parents have poured into this lengthy learning process, I anticipate at least better finger skills and perhaps more interesting “music.” Anyway, what are grandmas for, if not to fill seats at Sunday afternoon musicales by their progeny?

Not being one who is able to tap out posts on an i-Phone while riding New Jersey Transit into Penn Station, I thought it might therefore not be inappropriate to keep the blog going tonight by re-running the piece that appeared here last March after his first concert, which was not really about the concert at all. Nothing much has changed. Same crappy weather; same black down coat; same handbag and water bottle; same glasses on a chain. (Different book and different scarf, but those are mere details.) Most important: the same feelings. Now if only the rest of the ride home were unchanged! Well, we can’t have everything, can we?]

******

LUST

Last Sunday, I went in to New York by train to attend a cello concert given by my seven-year old grandson for his parents, grandparents and a few young friends from school who are also studying an instrument. He had finished Book One of the Suzuki method of instruction, and part of the Suzuki method is the requirement that the student play all of the pieces in the book from memory for an informal gathering of family or friends.The concert was a happy event, carried off with aplomb by its sole performer (who loves applause) — with plenty of tasty refreshments afterwards.

The trip in and out of the city, however, was a less happy event, as it always is, something realtors invariably neglect to mention when you are looking to buy in Princeton. Except for the politicos among us, Princetonians generally try to forget that Princeton is in New Jersey. When someone asked me over the post-concert refreshments if I was from New Jersey, I instinctively answered, “Well, yes, but not really. I live in Princeton.” To which he replied, “Ah yes. That is a separate place.”

The train to New York City from Princeton is the New Jersey Transit Northeast Line. It should come as no surprise to anyone who rides it to hear me call it a third-world train. It is slow, with antiquated cars, and passes through some of the most run-down parts of a state generally acknowledged to be blighted (despite the proud claims of its portly and vindictive governor). When it finally arrives, it pulls into the belly of hideously overcrowded Penn Station, itself located beneath Madison Square Garden in an unpleasant, highly commercial part of the city packed with human bodies pushing every which way against you as you try to fight your way out of the exits.

That said, the Northeast Line does boast a few — very few — newer cars, designed to carry more passengers per car length by being double decker (with one station-level section at each end of each car), and colored blue (in contrast to the dingy turd-brown color of the older cars). So it was my good fortune that the 4:34 to Trenton last Sunday afternoon (passing Secaucus, Newark Airport, Newark Penn Station, Metropark, Linden, Edison, New Brunswick and Princeton Junction on its way) was one of the so-called “new” ones. And it wasn’t even crowded.

In fact, by the time I had phoned Bill to alert him to when I’d be home, reviewed the photos and two videos of the concert on my i-Phone, taken a swig of water from the water bottle I carry in my purse on trips, nodded off for three or four stops, and then pulled myself back into consciousness to check where we were on the itinerary, I found I was due to get off at the next stop and there were just two other people left in the lower level of the car I was sitting in. One of them was across the aisle from me and in the row ahead, so I had only a partial view of his profile from the rear, but something about it attracted my attention.

Was it the line of his jaw? The muscle outlining the side of his mouth? The slightly olive complexion? The contrast between his bookish eyeglasses and the knit cap with a hole in the back that nearly covered his dark brown hair? Except for the knit cap, he strongly resembled — in one-third rear profile — my first serious boyfriend as he had been in 1948 and 1949. But he looked taller. And the hands were larger — more like my first husband’s, only with less pronounced knuckles. They were deftly manipulating photos on a smartphone over which he leaned — with what? Interest? Longing?

The leaning posture showed me the shape of his muscular shoulders, tapered back and narrow waist beneath a short jacket of some thinsulate material that clung. Safe from his view, I further examined with growing interest the lean strong thighs pressing against his narrow jeans. I even noted his footwear: tan laced-up ankle boots collared in dark brown leather. He was what? Twenty-eight? Thirty at most?

You could say I gobbled him up with my eyes. Then I was stripping him naked in my mind and sliding my hands against his skin. Yes, I was aware of who I was and what I looked like (had anyone been looking, but no one was): an eighty-two year old grandma in a black down full length coat, with a wavy grey wool scarf around her neck and glasses hanging on a chain over them, with a book by Louis Begley and a water bottle sticking out of her dark red leather handbag. But I was nevertheless flooded with what had rapidly transformed itself into unabashed and ravenous lust — for a man easily young enough to be my grandson (had I begun reproducing somewhat earlier than I did) and with whom I almost certainly had absolutely nothing in common. And yet, in some other fantasy world where he was blind (and therefore willing) — I might have dropped to my knees between his legs and reached for the zipper, right there on the New Jersey Transit between New Brunswick and Princeton Junction. Not that I’ve ever actually done anything like that in my real life. But the older you get, the freer the thoughts.

Just then he leaped to his feet, snatched up his khaki backpack and moved fast to the stairs leading up to the station-level part of the car. This section had a few fold-up seats lining the sides, where passengers are supposed to park their heavy baggage, strollers, carriages and bikes. Without a second thought as to what I was doing, I too stood and followed him down the aisle and up the stairs, where I sat down again on one side. Against the other, he was re-assembling a large green racing bicycle, his back to me. When he was done, he turned to hold the bike steady just as the train pulled in to Princeton Junction, and then rolled it out towards the door. Full face, he looked somewhat different than I would have thought, but not unattractive. The eyes were dark, the nose was strong, the mouth….(Believe it or not, I’ve run out of affirmative adjectives.) As he passed me, the only other passenger in that part of the car, our eyes met. Just for a moment he saw me. But he didn’t see me. What he saw was of no interest to him, and I hadn’t thought it would be, nor would I have wanted it to be. (Whatever I am, I’m no fool.) I had no time to be embarrassed. He looked away, was out of the car, on his bike and into the cold drizzle, pedaling towards his real life, whatever it was, before I stepped onto the platform.

Young people don’t know this stuff about old people. They feel it all belongs to them, because their bodies are gorgeous (even if they think they aren’t), and their skin is taut, and they move so easily, so quickly, so gracefully. But it doesn’t belong just to them, and they’ll find out, if they live long enough. Some older women may claim I’m wrong, and good riddance, but that’s sour grapes, I think. (What do you suppose hormone replacement therapy is for?) And I bet there isn’t an older man alive who believes desire is only for the young.

I could have just written about the cello concert and kept all the rest of it to myself, but the cello concert was only one part of my Sunday. And if I had to choose between the two parts, I ‘m not sure which I’d pick. It doesn’t matter that the object of my desire will never know, or want to reciprocate. It may be sad that I’m old, but it’s great that I feel.

I’m still alive! And who wouldn’t choose that?

ON BEING OLD

(Formerly "The Getting Old Blog")

sex

BEFORE FEMINISM

SEX AT NINETY-ONE

SOME DISCONTINUOUS OBSERVATIONS ABOUT LOVE

MY MOUTH

WRITING SHORT: 46/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 34/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 32/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 27/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 22/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 17/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

WRITING SHORT: 8/50

[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

DON’T READ IF YOU’RE FROM MINSK!

SOME THOUGHTS (IF YOU CAN CALL THEM THAT) ABOUT SEX

SEX IN THE OFFICE

LUST, REVISITED

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[Come summer heat, much of my blogging momentum melts away. Hence an experiment until Labor Day: fifty minimalist posts about whatever.]

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