Late-Life Love Read online

  Kepesh’s vanity brought home to me Don’s diffidence, especially while I sat with him in a room at the Trace equipped with a barber’s chair. No “pageboy of important hair” or “fancy foulard” for him. Except during a quick hair brushing at the start of the day, Don has always avoided mirrors. While the salt-and-pepper curls at the back of his head were being clipped, he kept his lids lowered and shed a few years right before my eyes. I was touched that he submitted to the woman’s hands moving his head back and forth, since he was used to the antiquated barbers who used to cut his hair in a hole-in-the-wall off Third Street.

  Don’s acquiescence, which surprised me, reminded me of the piano lessons he had taken a few years ago at Smith Holden, a musical instruments store in town. He had always wanted to learn how to play the piano. He told the youthful instructor he hoped to perform “Your Cheatin’ Heart” at the end-of-course recital, but she said it was too difficult. After a few sessions, he managed to plunk out the first half of “Ode to Joy” with his right hand. He was in the middle of doing that when, he later told me, the instructor took her hands and put them on both of his hands and moved them on the keyboard.

  Somehow the act stunned him into the conviction that it was too late for him to learn. None of my entreaties could prevail over his view that he would have to satisfy his abiding love of music through the headphones, the CDs, the tapes, the vinyl, his collection of three hundred 78 rpm records. Why not try to make the next haircutting appointment at his funky barbershop, I thought, as Don went to the gym and I found a lawn chair by the Trace’s entrance. And why should I be paying a pricey salon fifty dollars a pop for the little bit of scalping I need, when it could be done at Don’s barbershop for a measly fifteen dollars?

  In Roth’s novel, not the insults of Kepesh’s son but looming threats of mortality may finally undermine his hero’s allegiance to libertine principles. When on a New Year’s Eve Consuela returned to Kepesh, her cancer diagnosis put in crisis his commitment to detachment. Having suffered hair loss from chemotherapy, she returned because she needed him to love her body again before it was “ruined” by surgery. Taking charge of his touch, she had him feel the growths in her armpit—“two small stones, one bigger than the other, meaning that there is a metastasis originating in her breast”: “hers was no longer a sexual life. What was at stake was something else.” The thought brings to his mind Stanley Spencer’s 1937 painting Double Portrait, depicting the artist and his recumbent wife, both naked, and in the foreground an uncooked leg of lamb and a small chop. Consuela’s body will be butchered. Cancer has erased the age difference between them. “Consuela now knows the wound of age,” for she faces a future more foreshortened than his.

  Kepesh’s genuine sorrow over her fate renders indeterminate the final sentence of the novel and his destiny. Throughout his monologue, he has been talking to a mysterious someone, maybe his next student-mistress, until finally it becomes clear that he is expecting a phone call from Consuela. When it comes at 2 a.m., he returns to explain that he must go to her because she is terrified of the mastectomy and needs him, but the nameless companion says, “Don’t” and then says in the novel’s final words, “Because if you go, you’re finished.”

  The line can be read in a number of ways. If Kepesh goes to support Consuela in the hospital, his autonomy, independence, detachment are over, done for, kaput. Or if he goes to help her, the nameless companion with be finished with him. Or if he sees Consuela’s post-operative condition, he will be done with her. Or if he goes to help her, his love for another human being may finally be completed, accomplished, and fulfilled for the first time in his existence. He will have moved from lust into a deepening, responsible relationship.

  Once, when Don came to see me during a terrible stay in the Indianapolis hospital, he brought a portable CD player and a CD of the late Beethoven quartets. Inside the case, I found a note in his minute script: “I’ve got you under my skin.” With hope for Kepesh, I sing, “Lift up your leg, and be lifted up,” urging him to step “up with the good.” But it remains impossible for Don to stand in the shower—he still must sit on the plastic bench in the tub—so the Agewise Design consultants come and go, talking about plans they will draw up for the ground-floor bathroom: a walk-in shower, handrails and a seat within it.

  However, such renovations can neither widen the bathroom nor change its relation to the bed, where Don lies on my left, me on his right. I consider the commotion it would entail while making the foods that nine-year-old Eli will enjoy, but I have reread Fran’s letter many times and the distress it gave me upon its arrival somehow seems underscored by the decision facing licentious Kepesh at the end of Roth’s novel. Which, on the face of it, is absurd. Fran has nothing at all in common with Kepesh. In values and habits, she is more like his antitype. Why had her letter confounded me and how could Kepesh have anything to do with it?

  Fran’s letter elaborated on our “different wavelengths” by describing her challenges over the past twenty years: a series of familial and professional struggles, all of which enriched her interior life. What I found bizarre about this lengthy account was that I had lived through each and every one of these events with her and discussed each and every one in detailed, recurrent conversations. Had she forgotten those talks, or was she simply reiterating, over and over again, what she knew I knew? And if so, why? She designated her effort in the letter-writing “compassionate listening”; however, the substance of the writing had nothing to do with me. It was all about her until the final line in which she concluded that whereas I was seeking “more engagement,” she, for her part, needed less.

  There is the link to Kepesh: attachment as the enemy. We are used to thinking of promiscuity as a defense against emotional engagement, as Roth does. But Fran’s letter made me consider spirituality another defense against personal commitment. While I reflected on my own and Don’s impairments, Fran’s spiritual goals seemed to sanction her decision not to reach out to me when I really needed her—not so much with an offer of help, I realized, but with the gift of her steadying presence. Like Kepesh, Fran resisted attending to the other according to the needs of the other. No, I will not respond. Anything I wrote would read like a foreign alphabet to her.

  It is a source of sadness to recall that Fran had always fostered my attachment to Don when he was becoming more than a friend. Decades ago, the three of us embarked on an eating club, much to the amusement of my daughters. Once a week, one of us would cook a meal for the three of us to enjoy together, and afterward I composed parodic “Club Notes” to record our wacky conversations. Fran had seen me through the divorce, a more effective ballast than any lover could have been . . . a ludicrous comparison since friendship so intensely involves love between caring cronies.

  In one of those club reports, I began kidding Don about his decision not to hire me. We had met at a Modern Language Association convention in 1971, when he was the chair of the English department and I was a job seeker. But he offered the one available position to another candidate . . . worse: a man. After we started living together, I teased Don by introducing him as “my partner who once, long ago, refused to hire me.” He would privately protest that he had alerted his successor in the chairmanship to seek me out the next year and in any case he preferred to be called “the mister.” (Sometimes I think we finally married to simplify nomenclature for the grandkids.) That we were a May-December match indubitably contributed to my passionate regard. His quiet dependability reminded me of my father, while his steadfast commitment to life assured me that he would never do what my father had done.

  The year after Don didn’t hire me, he finagled an interview for me on campus. In midflight to Indiana, I stared in horror at an advice handbook’s prohibition against traveling while pregnant in an unpressurized cabin. The faculty, mostly male, would be no help. They ignored my belly (or, I later learned, argued that I shouldn’t be hired because of it). But the wives, including Mary-Alice, commiserated, and Don drove me to t
he Greyhound bus station so I could return home without putting in jeopardy the well-being of the unborn. We chatted throughout the car trip about the French theorists just coming out in translation. Friendship and then partnership effaced the age difference between us, and then cancer erased it as I faced a future more foreshortened than his.

  The last line of Roth’s novel holds out the possibility that Kepesh may attach himself to Consuela in her time of great need. Engagement with the living, especially the needy living, is, after all, a surpassing Jewish virtue, just as important as prayer. By giving over all but the last line to Kepesh’s voice, Roth seems munificent in his willingness to suggest that he identifies with his reprobate—unlike John Updike, who remains aloof from his lecher, a paradigmatic loser. Updike’s protagonist loses his car business, his house, his wife, his cocaine-addicted son, his healthy heart, and eventually his life, while Updike, like Roth, skillfully re-creates the social milieu of a slice of American life at the end of the twentieth century.

  In John Updike’s final Rabbit novel, the portrait of Harry Angstrom suggests that late-life lechery remains a futile protest against the wounds of aging—less a revenge on death than an inadequate defense against thinking about it. David Foster Wallace once castigated both Updike and Roth for using sex as a cure-all for their heroes’ ontological despair, but surely Roth and Updike fully recognize the absurdity of this venture. In Rabbit at Rest, sex resembles the junk food Harry gobbles to stuff the empty void that recurrently threatens to hollow out his being and then be filled up with premonitions of death.

  Toward the end of the novel, Harry consumes fried eggs and bacon, french fries and a hamburger and apple pie, deep-fried shrimp and onion rings with white bread fried on one side, a hot pastrami sandwich, fried catfish and candied yams and pecan pie, french toast and link sausages—and that’s just on one road trip. Fifty-five-year-old Harry is fleeing his wife’s judgment that he has done “the worst thing you’ve ever done, ever, ever,” and that includes his running away with her best friend, “and that poor hippie girl, and Thelma—don’t think for one moment I didn’t know about Thelma—but now you’ve done something truly unforgiveable.” “The worst thing” Harry did was sleeping with his son’s wife, an event that occurred after an angioplasty: “I can’t run, I can’t fuck, I can’t eat anything I like, I know damn well they’re going to talk me into a bypass.”

  Before sex, when his daughter-in-law Pru produced a condom, Harry had “been afraid he couldn’t keep up his own pressure against it,” especially when his shaved pubic hair got caught at the base in the unrolling. As she “jiggled in pursuit of the second orgasm, he near to fainting with worry over joggling his defective heart,” Harry felt put off by Pru’s “matter-of-fact shamelessness” about pursuing her own pleasure: “To keep his prick up he kept telling himself, This is the first time I’ve ever fucked a left-handed woman.” Fornication and junk food help Harry forget what he always fears, that he “is falling, helplessly falling, toward death,” that it “is truly there under him, vast as a planet at night, gigantic and totally his. His death. His purely own.”

  One of the epigraphs of Rabbit at Rest comes from the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: “Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.” The same may be true of sex. Late-life promiscuity—pursued to recover an unrecoverable youth, one’s own unrecoverable youth—remains a doomed affair. Although Roth at the end of his novel offers Kepesh a way out of the snare of lechery and of the hectic first person as futile defenses against decline and death, Updike, steady in the third person, watches Harry flail in the increasingly grim pleasures of the flesh.

  Of course America cannot claim a monopoly on stories of late-life lechery. The Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki’s novel Diary of a Mad Old Man is narrated by a seventy-seven-year-old whose only relief from aches and pains derives from washing the feet and sucking the toes of his flashy daughter-in-law. Tanizaki’s protagonist understands that “even if you’re impotent you have a kind of sex life.” The pleasures of his nongenital sex life—his frottage with his daughter-in-law—provide him a reason to live, while her cheerful willfulness assures them both that she can set the limits she deems appropriate. She simply disappears from the ailing invalid whenever his needs become tiresome.

  How come neither Roth nor Updike imagines old men as a turnoff rather than a turn-on? When I did my PhD training in Iowa, I was so enervated by the ancients pontificating at the front of classrooms that I had my then husband drive me to a cornfield, where I could mock them to ears that would keep the secret not of my erotic thralldom but of my profound boredom. But graduate school, with all the insecurity it instills, probably remains an alienating experience, I thought, as I considered the grueling seminars I have led: trying to convince apprehensive graduate students—they felt like imposters—that they did not need to pretend to know what they did not know.

  Happily, Eli is an avid questioner, a curious pupil, and a good eater not just of pizza and meatballs and spaghetti but of every conceivable form of fruit, though it is cars (he recognizes every make and model) that he dreams about. Or maybe, like me, he dreams of characters, since he loves books.

  After Eli arrives tomorrow, I will take him to a local hobby shop, where he can pick out a present and I can find a party tiara for my oncologist, who will soon accept the Diana, Princess of Wales, professorship at Northwestern University, and then I will compose a blog posting in praise of her. I will scheme with Eli’s mother to find an online site that will send weekly ingredients for a month of suppers to her sister in New York. Since my poor vision makes piecing the flying geese quilt difficult even with “Easy Threading” needles, I will settle for a crib-size quilt. I will devise a way to resume meeting with my cancer support group. I will accept Mary’s offer to stay with Don and Jan’s offer to drive me to the Indianapolis hospital. I will keep myself and Don from helplessly tumbling at the next curb or step.

  Thinking of the torn tendon now healing, I know that detachment is my enemy.

  Sunsets

  THE SUN RISES out of the ravine in the back of the Inverness, but it sets behind the red barn. It became so spectacular with its diffused pinks and oranges and bands of yellow or blue that after dinner we stood outside the front door to watch its magnificence deepen. I can see the sun dropping into Lake Michigan while Don and I nuzzle, bundled under a beach blanket, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip on the warm sand. I can see lowering rays glinting on the Mediterranean, turning Don’s eyes bluer, as we bobble on the lapping waves and laugh over a customs officer who had asked each of us why we had traveled to Israel: “Don’t you know business and pleasure don’t mix?” he joked.

  Actually, Don stood with his walker and I sat on the baked bricks by his feet, near the cosmos, which had put out delicate magenta and fuchsia blooms on fragile, straying stalks. Maybe the deer hadn’t eaten them because they had been planted close to the front door. Or maybe they were one of the few flowers deer do not eat. I would have to look them up in my gardening book, Not Tonight, Deer.

  “Would you rather sleep with Jonathan or Alexandra?” I asked Don.

  “I have always disliked that Procrustean bed.”

  “Why are you impersonating an old man?”

  “I am an old man.”

  “Yesterday Jonathan was bemoaning having two jobs and no wife,” I tell him. “The commuting must be demoralizing them.”

  “Better than two wives and no job,” Don said as I held the screen door open so he could go back inside and settle down to a Ken Burns documentary on PBS.

  But the evening air was unusually dry and inviting. I lit several candles on the back porch and sat down in a rocking chair to listen to the crickets and the frogs while mulling: why are older men with girls socially acceptable, whereas older women with boys are not? When I was a student in Erasmus Hall High School, I had no idea that Erasmus, the so-called Prince of the Humanists, inveighed against “old women, so ancient that they might as well be dead”:
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  They are as hot as bitches in heat, or (as the Greeks say) they rut like goats. They pay a good price for the services of some handsome young Adonis. They never cease smearing their faces with makeup. They can’t tear themselves away from the mirror. They pluck and thin their pubic bush. They show off their withered and flabby breasts. They whip up their languid lust with quavering whines and whimpers. They drink a lot.

  Older women, made to feel the punishing shame of age, have had a bad rap.

  Is the man supposed to be senior because girls—traditionally “given” by their fathers to their husbands—renounce their fathers’ name to take their husbands’ . . . or they used to? My younger daughter evaded conflicting loyalties to her father and stepfather by walking herself down the aisle in all her radiant splendor. Don and I sashayed arm in arm before her, for the very first time. One of my daughters married a younger man, one an older; one kept her maiden name, the other did not. On both occasions I was fussing about my costume. In flyover country, Mary said, they dump all the clothes that people on the coasts would never buy. Mothers of the bride could find only pastels of chiffon and satin flounces that would have made me feel like a transvestite. There was no dignified garb for the aging woman.

  Probably the ridiculed or scorned older woman is related to the phenomenon Susan Sontag called “the double standard of aging”: the unfortunate fact that maturation consolidates the authority of men while devaluing the worth of women. On TV and in movies, men get better with age (like full-bodied wine), but women become lumpy, rank, and sour (like spoilt milk). When Jane Juska, the author of A Round-Heeled Woman, took a male lover thirty-three years her junior, even those relatives who approved of her sex ad in the New York Review of Books judged her or her youthful lover sick. She was facing a prejudice with a long history.