Late-Life Love Read online

  Their hurried meetings become unsatisfying when Dr. Urbino makes “panic-stricken love with his trousers down around his knees, with his jacket buttoned so that it would not get in his way, with his gold watch chain across his vest, with his shoes on, with everything on, and more concerned with leaving as soon as possible than with achieving pleasure.” Although the doctor remains fixated on “the mound of her dark bush under her madwoman’s skirt from Jamaica,” growing terror of his wife leads him to ditch Miss Lynch. Fermina Daza fumes at her humiliation: “And worst of all, damn it: with a black woman.” The doctor corrects her, “with a mulatta,” to which she declares, “Only now I understand: it was the smell of a black woman.”

  What are we to make of Dr. Urbino and Fermina Daza’s collaboration in racial fetishizing? The couple’s dehumanization of Barbara Lynch—their stereotyping her as a smelly, hypersexualized madwoman—brought back a shocking conversation Sandra and I once had with a prominent African American colleague back in the eighties, when we met him on the lecture circuit. We were presenting material that would find its way into the three-volume sequel of The Madwoman. In a fancy hotel ballroom filled with rows of chairs and much to our surprise, he confided that a number of white people in his audiences had a tendency, during after-lecture drinks, to inquire quite seriously into the genital endowments of black people.

  Using farcical and flagrantly racist details, García Márquez satirizes Fermina Daza as well as Dr. Juvenal Urbino, who elsewhere exhibits smug satisfaction in his civic reputation, his European education, his ornate carriage and livery, his modern ideas of progress, his complacent Catholicism, and even the smell of his own urine. Also guilty of racism, Florentino Ariza sees a woman on a trolley: “black, young, pretty, but a whore beyond the shadow of a doubt,” he assumes. Yet he soon discovers that she wants not money for sex but a job, which he obtains for her and which, because of her remarkable competence, enables him to rise in the River Company of the Caribbean.

  Why did so many reviewers of this novel dote over the longevity of passion in these characters and skip over their immorality? García Márquez makes me aware of the obvious: namely, that old lovers, like all people, internalize the misbegotten views of their society. Not only does love sequester us from disasters in which we are complicit, it serves all sorts of wretched needs and ends. In Love in the Time of Cholera, the main characters’ addictive, predatory desires block out the consequences of their depredations. No matter how tightly quarantined, lovers inside an epidemic cannot inoculate themselves against it; instead they embody and spread the contagion. Love in a time of cholera sickens.

  Throughout the novel’s many pages, the narrator informs us of the civil struggles that perpetually bloody his country. Through asides in the novel, as in the daily New York Times, we read about the violence of the slums, about political corruption, and about shocking class disparities. The aftereffects of the sieges of the Spanish, the atrocities of buccaneers and slave traders, the ravages of recurrent plagues and wars: while their country corrodes, all three characters in García Márquez’s triangle are found guilty of fiddling. Maybe love at any age is nothing but an infant pacifier, I thought, lulling us into the dreamland we crave as an escape from the waking nightmare of history.

  As I helped my housekeeper get the Inverness ready for a big party, I put away the letter I received from Fran in a desk drawer in my upstairs study. It distressed me as much as her disappearance had. There was something ominous about it. Better to clear the decks for the party and consider how Love in the Time of Cholera recasts Death in Venice.

  Prowling Florentino resembles Thomas Mann’s Aschenbach, who stalks a beautiful boy and endangers him by refraining from warning his family of a threatening epidemic. Unlike Mann, however, García Márquez links pederasty not to his hero’s homosexuality but to his heterosexuality. And age is not the culprit. Aschenbach, fixated on the youthful object of his desire, spruces up his attire, dyes his hair, and uses makeup to appear younger. In contrast, Florentino Ariza pursues his philandering throughout all the seasons of his life. He also accepts his own aging as well as Fermina Daza’s. And at their advanced stage of life, what can they possibly do, after all, about the mess the world has come to—even if its state was partly their fault?

  Oh, I realized, here is the “trap” García Márquez set for readers. I get it. It gets me. Not only is love blind: our love of love stories blinds us so we can enjoy the consummation in which we want to revel. Like Florentino Ariza and Dr. Urbino, I became so engrossed with their mission to unite with Fermina Daza that I shelved my misgivings about their flagrant wrongdoings. García Márquez tricked me into conspiring with his delusional and destructive characters, whose lives, like our own, are inexorably shaped by a world going to hell in a handbasket.

  As a trapped reader, I become aware of my sins of omission. Omission, the erstwhile Catholic Don reminds me, is when you don’t do something you should be doing. García Márquez is spot on about the sins of omission in my late-life loving. When the perilous public sphere feels overwhelmingly frightful, as it often does, I retreat into my nest with Don and also into my reading of late-life love stories, even though I know that I am turning away from injustice and that this nesting is a privilege unavailable to those more vulnerable to the world’s violence. In fact, the older I get, the more I cocoon myself, hoping that younger people will find the means to fight the injustice and inequity that imperil us.

  But then García Márquez prods me to go on and ask: amid mounting fears of global warming, rising poverty rates, gun violence at home, terrorism overseas, how can we not love late-life love stories? Voilà: the thread running throughout his multiple narratives! There. It. Is. The genius of Love in the Time of Cholera consists in its entrancing us with the perseverance of desire in deeply flawed characters whose self-encapsulating obsessions captivate and encapsulate us. On the one hand, we recognize his lovers’ abundant moral failures; on the other, we marvel at the scandalous extravagance of their exploits. Like them, we cling to love and love stories as a shield against error and degeneration. In times of contagion, love is both a sickness and an anodyne.

  Along the ravaged way, García Márquez manages to represent what very few other authors do: namely, the many modes of nongenital eroticism in which older people engage. Through sex scenes that detach pleasure from potency, García Márquez suggests that eroticism without penetration may be the norm for aging heterosexuals . . . not only because procreation plays little or no role in late-life sexuality, not only because elderly men may be dealing with erectile dysfunction or elderly women with hormonal deficiencies.

  The novel’s portrayal of, for instance, voluptuous embracing or modeling and illicit palpations or auscultations stresses the delights of looking, touching, listening, kneading, massaging, squeezing, holding, stroking, fondling, patting, tasting. This list leads me to another new word: frottage means arousing physical contact in a way that does not involve penetration. It comes from the French (of course!) for rubbing or friction. It makes me think of the cuddling, cradling, and spooning that comfort Don and me during many long nights in bed together. Sometimes, just the weight of limb on limb solaces. Forms of pleasure like frottage must not be equated with so-called bed death or sexless relations. Sexual excitement comes in many forms. Late-life eroticism differs from youthful eroticism, though it may become just as complicated, compulsive, exciting, and destructive.

  On the afternoon that caterers started bringing trayful after trayful of hors d’oeuvres, depositing them on the dining room and kitchen tables, the hoopla seemed a celebration of my springing García Márquez’s trap. It was exhilarating: the euphoria of appreciating the genius of his novel—the networks of his labyrinthine plots falling into place. Nothing compares to this elation: gaining a bird’s-eye view of an author’s maze, perceiving the paths through the forest composed of all that foliage.

  And then there was the payoff for my project. García Márquez gives me permission to pond
er the manifold and sometimes nasty but nevertheless compelling motives of ripe loving. After all, there are zillions of stories about misguided, even reprehensible young lovers. Wasn’t Eros born out of Chaos? And doesn’t volatile eroticism promote excesses, disorders, voracious impulses, and outrageous acts—as in the adage “all’s fair in love and war”?

  The gathering seemed like old times, but not really, for it wasn’t of my doing. In the past, I had done the cooking and serving for parties myself. That would be impossible for the celebration we had determined to co-host in honor of Mary and her family, to say goodbye to them and good luck at Johns Hopkins. Alexandra and Jonathan ran the show. She ordered the food and he lugged in the cases of beer and wine and soda, despite an infected wasp bite that would send him to the ER as soon as the festivities got under way.

  Alexandra had put balloons on the mailbox and a stone gnome at the center of the start of the driveway so people would recognize the Inverness and park on the road, instead of around the circle of beauty, where they would block each other’s departure. Since these guests were invited by Mary and her family, many would be unknown to Don and me, just as they were decades ago when Mary and Andrew celebrated their wedding with a big tent set up in the meadow between the circle of beauty and the road. It had poured that afternoon.

  But this afternoon was bright and hot, as incandescent as the day we had a tent up for my older daughter’s wedding: its white sails flapped on a sea of green. She had wanted her father and me to walk her down the aisle, a grassy space between the folding chairs assembled on the meadow. So Don escorted my mother before my former husband and I accompanied the beautiful bride out the front door and through the guests, many gussied up in startling hats since it was a garden party.

  “There’s a German word for the comfort of well-fitting trousers,” Don said.

  I reached for my laptop, triumphant that we had managed to get Don into long pants and the Velcro sneakers Julie had purchased months ago. And we had fixed on a gift for our departing friends, actually the re-gifting of a gift: a sign inside a wooden frame spelling out “BLOOMINGTON.” While Alexandra and Jonathan set up glasses and napkins for the seventy or so people we expected, Don and I sat together in the sun-drenched living room. The chartreuse finches at the birdfeeder, the fat robins chirping on the grass, and the cooing mourning doves said “Not you, not you.” Our friend George had emailed me his favorite July poem: “It’s hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,” Charles Wright’s poem begins. “How quickly all that we’ve done / Is unremembered and unforgiven. . . .”

  “Sick people are not moral failures, but moral failures may be sick and sickening,” I said to Don, who took my birdbrained pronouncements in stride. I was pondering kindly grandfathers luring young girls into their secret slaughterhouses.

  “Physical dissolution, moral dissipation . . . late-life lechery.”

  Delighted by an assignment, I rose to greet the first guests, determining not to stoop, to lengthen my torso, to keep my spine as straight as possible, especially when I stood to propose a toast to our dearly cherished but soon-to-be-departed friends. The threads connecting them to us would be stretched, maybe thinned, but they would not snap.

  Late-Life Lechery

  TWO MANTRAS RESOUNDED during the remainder of that muggy month. At home nightly, I sang to a Handel tune, “Lift up your leg, and be lifted up,” while massaging Palmer’s coconut butter into the scar tissue on Don’s left knee. Out of the house daily, I chanted, “Up with the good, down with the bad” so he would remember which leg to use with the walker at a curb or a step. The first was of my devising, the second came from Tyrone’s female successors as they walked with Don up and down the halls of the Trace.

  While I sat in an empty room, waiting to take Don home, it began to dawn on me that most of the late-life love stories I have recounted occur in all sorts of settings except here in the United States, where, as Leslie Fiedler proved a long time ago, romance often entails two buddies lighting out for the territories. Does America’s commitment to and sense of its own youthfulness explain why?

  In stories about late-life lechery, however, our nation reigns supreme; and no one creates the lechers we love to hate better than Philip Roth, though John Updike comes in a close second. Both consider alter kackers who hit on girls young enough to be their daughters.

  During more than half a century in the academy, I have seen my fair share of sleazy faculty—sometimes nearing retirement—who avoid sexual harassment charges by waiting till the close of the semester to seduce a student who has completed one of their seminars. Roth’s and Updike’s tomes had been a godsend when Don was interned in the Trace; I returned to them now either there or back in the Inverness, where I began cooking in preparation for a visit from my grandson Eli and his parents. Late-life cooking for guests requires early preparations: refrigerating or even freezing sauces and doughs before they will be defrosted, reheated or baked, and served. Otherwise I become too exhausted to enjoy meals with visitors.

  A number of novels by Philip Roth would have suited my purposes. I fixed on The Dying Animal because its main character is an aging academic describing an electrifying affair with a student who subsequently confronted a cancer diagnosis. I can relate to both of these characters. I am an aging academic, but I am young enough to have been my husband’s student (though I was not), and I also deal with cancer (though not breast cancer). Needless to say, I wanted to avoid a prudish or priggish response to seventy-year-old David Kepesh’s spoken account of his affair eight years earlier with twenty-four-year-old Consuela Castillo.

  Moral outrage, after all, is exhaustively aired inside the book by David Kepesh’s alienated son, who gives prudish priggishness a bad name. In The Dying Animal, as in so many of Roth’s novels, the genius resides in the voice of the main character, whose hyperbolic monologue, mainly in the past tense, aggressively tries to justify his outrageous sexual license even while inadvertently mourning its futility. An aging roué, a Casanova, a Don Giovanni, a libertine, a rake, a sensualist, David Kepesh savors above all else “the delightful imbecility of lust.”

  Passionately dedicated to his erotic independence, determined after a miserable marriage never to return to the sexless matrimonial “cage,” Kepesh preaches the boons of the sixties’ sexual revolution, when American girls became “fully implicated in their own desire.” A protestor against Puritanism, he believes in the power of sex: “Only when you fuck is everything that you dislike in life and everything by which you are defeated in life purely, if momentarily, revenged.” Kepesh—who terms sex a formidable “revenge on death”—ignites my prejudice against Jewish men: the boys I grew up with in Brooklyn pampered as God’s gift to the world; the Orthodox men rising at dawn to pray on our plane trip to Israel, waking every screaming baby on board—though I am beginning to realize how tormented Roth’s protagonist is by his supposedly libertarian creed.

  In his account of his affair with Consuela, Kepesh analyzes the sexual politics of May-December mating. Of course, masculine December begins by controlling feminine May, like a father directing his daughter, as he has in fiction from Pamela to Jane Eyre. A public intellectual, Kepesh attained some media exposure through an expertise in art, music, and literature that enchanted the naive Consuela. Because of her gorgeous, D-cup breasts and her “sleek pubic hair,” he “pronounced her a great work of art,” while weirdly designating his own consciousness her “awareness of herself.” Like Pygmalion and Professor Henry Higgins, Kepesh became the artist, she the object of his gaze. At their start, his experience and knowledge lent him pedagogic power and gave Consuela the “license to surrender.”

  But according to Kepesh’s retrospective recounting (which constitutes all but the last sentences in this novel), the vast difference in their ages soon fueled her dominance over him. Consuela must have realized that “the force of her youth and her beauty” overpowered a lover aware of body parts “doomed to dwindle” and therefore of “the woun
d of age.” After she performed fellatio with “a relentless rat-a-tat-tat rapidity” and he pulled her hair, Consuela “snapped her teeth” and that “was the true beginning of her mastery—the mastery into which my mastery had initiated her. I am the author of her mastery of me.”

  Despite his smug claim of authority, Consuela’s mastery means that throughout the affair Kepesh suffered mightily from jealousy, as aging libertines have been informed they should since Chaucer composed his Merchant’s Tale about a youthful May who uses the back of her old and blind husband to climb a tree, where she cuckolds him.

  Kepesh explains how obsessed he became about losing Consuela to a younger man, with the result that “the pornography of jealousy” ran constantly through his head. Naturally, he cast his younger self as his rival, although he also tortured himself with thoughts of her earlier boyfriends. Anguished at being turned into a supplicant, drained of confidence, he was surprised when Consuela ended their relationship. “She didn’t desire me, never desired me,” he decides: “she experimented with me, really, to see how overwhelming her breasts could be.”

  During the years he perseverated on Consuela’s rejection, Kepesh had to remind himself that “attachment is my enemy.” His pledge of allegiance to his rights as a sovereign, sexual agent led him to drown his sorrow in masturbation and in piano lessons to perfect his playing of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas. It also issued in the furious tirades of his son, who lambasts the seventy-year-old “as the very picture of a pathetic old fool”: “ ‘The long white pageboy of important hair, the turkey wattle half hidden behind the fancy foulard—when will you begin to rouge your cheeks, Herr von Aschenbach? . . . Manning the aesthetic barricades on Channel Thirteen. The singlehanded battle to maintain cultural standards in a mass society. But what about observing ordinary standards of decency?’ ”