Late-Life Love Read online

  After middle-aged Sappho was rejected by the beautiful ferryman Phaon, according to one prevalent myth, she threw herself into the sea. What did sixty-year-old George Eliot make of forty-year-old John Cross’s flinging himself out of the hotel window and into the Grand Canal during their Venice honeymoon? For centuries, people have assumed that older women “pay a good price” for a handsome Adonis. When the forty-year-old heroine of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God returns home, townspeople suppose that her youthful lover must have abandoned her and ask, “What he done wid all her money?”

  Billy Wilder’s grand movie Sunset Boulevard, about a has-been from the silent screen era, renders Gothic the bad rap on older women with younger men. It famously begins with a male corpse floating in a swimming pool. Then it progresses through a flashback to the meeting of the fifty-year-old fading star Norma Desmond and the youthful screenwriter Joe Gillis. Her failed suicide attempt prefaces a series of guilt trips that ensnare impoverished Joe in her clutches until she shoots him in the back as he tries to escape.

  A classic narcissist, Norma Desmond never stops smearing her face with makeup and downing drinks, as she pays a good price—for a gold cigarette case, a vicuna coat, and sixteen suits—to enlist the services of her youthful Adonis in coauthoring a Salomé script. She wants to use it to recover her lost stardom. Norma’s delusions of grandeur reach a climax when, at the end of the movie, she plays the temptress Salomé before a throng of news photographers and journalists who have arrived to report her arrest for the murder. Relishing the spotlight, convinced that her movie comeback has begun, she slowly descends the staircase toward the police, vamping all the way. Her neurotic attempts to retain her youthful allure have tipped her into insanity.

  Like predatory Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, Norma takes as her rival a girl young enough to be her daughter. But Billy Wilder provides a scene that explains a character grotesquely absorbed in her skin patches, chin guards, and face creams. On a movie set, Norma meets with Cecil B. DeMille, who has continued to work effectively in Hollywood. Not only his gender but also his job as a director explains his late-life productivity. After she leaves, he says, “A dozen press agents working overtime can do terrible things to the human spirit.” The celebrity industry—with its overvaluation of nubile beauty—has created the monster Norma has become. A similar point is made in the equally famous movie All about Eve.

  “Age still equals abandonment for women,” the sixty-year-old heroine of Erica Jong’s Fear of Dying believes as she considers a bevy of antiaging specialists: “from dermatologists who harvest and reuse your own fat to those who freeze your facial muscles with toxins. There are blasters and scrapers, injectors and fat-suckers. . . . There are plastic surgeons and acupuncturists and even hypnotists who regress you into false youth you dream is real.” At what age does a woman judge herself in need of such treatments? Two of my friends, although only a few years older than their partners, have been mistaken for their husbands’ mothers. According to Susan Sontag, women grow old “as soon as they are no longer very young.”

  When the crescendo of crickets and frogs, the chirps and croaks of courting, began drowning out my thoughts, I blew out the candles. Not once this summer had we eaten dinner at the round table under the skylight of the back porch—because of the four steps down to it. As I locked the porch door, it seemed to me that Sunset Boulevard could only imagine a younger man with an older woman if she paid him for his services. Maybe Harold and Maude changed all that, I thought, until I caught myself up. Decades before Sunset Boulevard, two revolutionary books—I had read them in City College—and what about Ben Franklin’s supercilious advice . . . But there was Julie at the door with her dogs, Hazel and Schnitzel, come to stay while her house underwent renovation.

  Schnitzel barks and snaps and threatens to attack, not realizing that he is a miniature dachshund who could fit in my purse; Hazel cowers and trembles and hides, not realizing she is a hefty bruiser for a miniature Schnauzer. Under Julie’s loving auspices, these rescue animals have escaped from hellish abuse to heavenly succor, though we sometimes have to cage the Schnitz, who would otherwise attack Don’s ankles in the walker. “Dogs don’t know what they look like,” Ursula Le Guin once explained in an essay on beauty. “Dogs don’t even know what size they are.” No matter how old they are, dogs do not appear to evaluate their own attractiveness. The power of physical attraction, tied to youth, presents the greatest challenge in representations of winter-spring relationships. If the older lover is a woman, reciprocity threatens to evaporate as youthful beauty fades.

  With Julie going on numerous errands for us, I could settle down on the blue raft with Colette’s two linked novels in a new edition. In the first, Chéri, the title character is a pampered twenty-four-year-old man who has been adopted as a lover by his mother’s best friend, the forty-nine-year-old Léa. The novel opens as their erotic relationship is challenged by the news that Chéri’s mother has arranged a marriage of convenience for him with a young woman as wealthy as he is. Colette’s portrait contests the bad rap on older female–younger male relationships. Money has nothing to do with Léa and Chéri’s bond, though they both relish luxury. Intimate looking and being looked at furnish the greatest delights of this transgenerational couple.

  A courtesan, Léa enjoys gazing at her own body, “pink and white, endowed with the long legs and straight back of a naiad on an Italian fountain.” She also takes pleasure in remembering Chéri as a little boy, “a marvel of beauty with long curls,” and as a handsome young man, “naked in the morning on her ermine rug.” A “sort of doting godmother,” she lets him play with her jewelry, teaches him manners, feeds him, and corrects his speech, mentoring him as Norma Desmond does Joe. When Chéri walks down the street, they both know that “the eyes of women followed his progress with silent homage.” Both would agree with Mae West that “It is better to be looked over than overlooked.”

  Would Colette have taken umbrage at Benjamin Franklin’s “Advice to a Young Man on the Choice of a Mistress”? Back in 1745, one of America’s founding fathers encouraged a correspondent to prefer old women to younger ones: they are more knowledgeable, more discreet, will not produce children, and “lastly they are so grateful!!”

  After Chéri’s marital plans have been announced, looking at aging women becomes a source of torment for Léa. At one social event, she finds herself dismayed by a seventy-year-old acquaintance who “walked with difficulty on round swollen feet, tightly swaddled in high-heeled laced boots with paste buckles on the ankle straps”; “a silver fox fail[s] to conceal” a neck “the shape of a flower-pot and the size of a belly.” By embarking on a trip, Léa defends herself against being supplanted by Chéri’s future wife. However, Colette revises a Continental tradition in which the older courtesan inducts the younger man into the mysterious rites of eroticism so he can then marry a woman closer to his own age. Although Chéri takes a young woman as his wife, he never extricates himself from the allure of his older mistress.

  Léa’s powers derive from the maternal role she plays. Far from being merely instrumental, the maternal-filial bond in Chéri and its sequel inaugurates a blissful paradise. Once lost, it can never be regained. Colette seems to be thinking about the incest taboo: the alluring prohibition against a man taking a mother surrogate as his lover, the frisson of the illicit.

  When Chéri and Léa reunite, they collapse onto her bed. Their bodies “joined together like the two living halves of an animal that has been cut through,” while she anticipates “with a sort of terror the moment of her own undoing”—which arrives in the clear light of the next morning, when it falls on the “soft flabby skin” on her hands and wrists “like criss-crossings on a clay soil when heavy rain is followed by a dry spell.” Aware that her lover has returned to “find an old woman,” Léa determines that Chéri must free himself “from perverted mother love.” As she has done throughout the affair, Léa takes charge at its conclusion, relinquishing a
young man twenty-four years her junior.

  The great pleasure of reimmersing myself in Colette’s sensual descriptions of a hedonistic heroine was made possible not only by Julie but also by Don, who has started to resume many chores. On the walker, he has begun getting his own breakfast and then unloading the dishwasher and making our bed, as he had always done before. As in the old days, Don wakes up with a song in his head: “Is you is or is you ain’t my baby?” “Must be jelly ’cause jam don’t shake like that.” “I’ve been consulted by Franklin D. / Greta Garbo has asked me to tea.” He cannot hum the tunes, but he knows all the words. And he looks like his handsome self again.

  Exactly when did my rigorous efforts to look attractive decline into halfhearted attempts to pass as relatively normal? In midlife, I fussed over my frizzy hair, the shadows under my eyes, skinny appendages, crooked teeth, and that’s leaving aside tortured considerations of my nose and chin. Did the self-lacerating scrutiny come to a close at the weirdly elated moment of diagnosis, when I thought I finally knew what would cause my demise? Or was it after the debulking surgery, when I was plucked, trussed, carved, and gutted, and then chemotherapy took away my hair? Or was it after the seventeen days in the hospital that resulted in the ileostomy?

  Now when a workman is scheduled to check the inoperative garage door, Don reminds me to put on my wig. I do it to save the workman and me the tsuris of having to deal with his reactions. Surviving beyond my prognosis—some two years beyond my expiration date—has brought me the welcome relief of not caring so much how I look. Gladdened that Don found the garage repairman himself—apparently the door should be replaced, not just fixed—I wondered how long it would take Don to get used to the cane we had just picked out. He still has to recline in the back seat of the car, but the knee has reached a 60-degree angle. It amuses him that Julie attributes his increased mobility to one feisty and one fearful dog, who are the least therapeutic creatures anyone could possibly imagine.

  Whereas Chéri is primarily told from the point of view of Léa, The Last of Chéri is narrated from Chéri’s perspective. He has been poisoned by too much mother’s milk and cannot become his own man in the sequel, which occurs six years later, after World War I. Repulsed by the public roles his mother and wife play after the Great War, Chéri resembles many disillusioned veterans. His mother therefore arranges a visit to Léa, who has morphed into a sight revolting to Chéri: “She was not monstrous, but huge, and loaded with exuberant buttresses of fat in every part of her body.” Shocked, he longs to tell her, “Throw off your disguise! You must be somewhere behind it, since it’s your voice I hear.” But while he hopes for a flash of her real self, he suspects that she has made peace with her aging: “when she stopped smiling or laughing, she ceased to belong to any assignable sex. Despite her enormous breasts and crushing backside, she seemed by virtue of age altogether virile and happy in that state.”

  The person who suffers the horrors of aging is he, not she. He is the one who subsequently commits suicide. “Unsexed” in old age, Léa would nevertheless dispute Montaigne’s caution that “The shorter the possession we give to Love, the better off we are.” Granting Cupid an injudiciously long possession, Léa does not degenerate into a grotesque character. In the first novel, she achieves insight into Chéri’s miserable fate and takes responsibility for it: “I should have made a man of you, and not thought only of the pleasures of your body, and my own happiness,” she admits. “I am to blame for everything you lack.”

  How to measure the pleasure accrued against the damage done? In their final scene together in the sequel, Léa insists that she is neither ashamed nor regretful, for she had been in love. Léa has relinquished erotic desire and femininity, but she has gained virility and moral clarity.

  Doris Lessing, in a novella called “The Grandmothers,” depicts older women inducting young men into sex and then not thinking only of their own happiness but instead taking the initiative in renouncing the youths. Each of Lessing’s maternal lovers realizes that she must surrender her Adonis for his own good, even though she wishes, like the Marschallin in Der Rosenkavalier, to tarry in the present of desire. Should such idyllic retreats in the rapturous Eden of maternal sufficiency be labeled pathological? Colette and Lessing ask.

  On the surface at least, the difference between women writers (thinking about older women and boys) and male writers (thinking about older men and girls) is striking: the women estimate the damages done, while the men do not. (García Márquez is the exception.) Based on a tiny sample, this judgment cannot possibly be considered judicious, especially because it accords with my prejudices. But once, while I was writing my doctoral dissertation at the Newberry Library, when my first marriage had crashed and we had separated for a semester, before the first pregnancy and the move to Indiana, I had a brief fling with an undergraduate. OK, he was not “my” undergraduate, but still he was an undergraduate. He gave me my first and last acid trip; I worried then and later about the deleterious effect of the relationship on him.

  Colette, who posed in her youth for publicity stills in costumes redolent of Salomé, went on to take her sixteen-year-old stepson as her lover after she published Chéri, thereby proving Oscar Wilde’s point—that life imitates art. As her biographer Judith Thurman explains, “By impersonating Léa . . . Colette accepts maternity for the first time, however perversely, and graduates from being the slave of love to the master, and from the child to the parent.” Through Léa, she studied what Thurman calls “a cruel trick of fate”: namely, “that the state of erotic exigence—the last few years before a woman begins menopause—also coincides with the diminishment of her sexual allure.” What a miserable combination for maturing women: heightened erotic desire and decreased sexual appeal.

  Precisely this irony casts its shadow on fiction about the later-life loves of older women. The urgency of desire surprises the heroine of a grisly work by Doris Lessing, Love, Again, who at sixty-five believed that she had thrown Cupid out. When she falls passionately in love with two younger men, she feels as unlovable “as the innumerable people of the world who are ugly, deformed, or crippled.” Insane with desire, sodden with grief at unconsummated longing, by the end of the novel Lessing’s central character has acquired “grey bands” of hair and “that slow cautious look of the elderly, as if afraid of what they will see around the next corner.” Her double in the novel is a man who has fallen in love with a dead woman: that is how inconceivable it is for Lessing to imagine a younger man reciprocating the desire of an older woman. (I would not recommend this punitive novel to the faint-hearted.)

  Is the randy aging woman, like the single woman, feared as a kind of witch who must be punished? Was it 1980 or 1981 when a scorch mark appeared on my office door? Someone had used a lighter or a match to torch a poster announcing a program on lesbian studies. I was touched when Don quickly organized a workshop on free speech.

  The only recent rebuttal I can find to the tragically desirous older woman is Olivier Assayas’s movie Clouds of Sils Maria, which provides a gorgeous reinvention of Sunset Boulevard and also of All about Eve in a winter-spring story about two women. All of our sympathy goes to the forty-year-old internationally celebrated actress Maria Enders, who twenty years earlier played the role of a young temptress, but must now take on the part of the siren’s dumped older lover. (Forty is old in the movies.) In the play within the movie, Maria Enders has to submit to the inevitability of being usurped by youth. Yet as she walks through the set to arrive at her stage spot on opening night, she has the look of a person who will give a powerful performance. It does not hurt that Juliette Binoche appears ravishing in the butch role.

  Like Erica Jong’s heroine, Assayas’s may find herself at risk for spending her “sunset years without sex.” For the older woman–younger lover story continues to resist happy endings. Is this because it invokes the mother-lover taboo, as Colette suggests: the recovery of a pre-Oedipal delight that is supposed to be thoroughly repressed? When Marge Pi
ercy imagines an adult male without any prejudices against older women, he is a cyborg. An intelligent machine “is not breaking any Oedipal taboos, for he was not born of woman.”

  The heroine of Lessing’s Love, Again hypothesizes that heterosexual desire pertains to mother hunger. “Am I really to believe that the awful, crushing anguish, the longing so terrible it seems one’s heart is being squeezed by cruel fingers—all that is only what a baby feels when it is hungry and wants its mother?” Lessing also proposes a practical reason for the sad conclusions of some later-life love stories: “When Cupid aims arrows (not flowers or kisses) at the elderly and old, and brings them to grief, is this one way of hustling people who are in danger of living too long off the stage, to make way for the new?”

  The thump, thump, thump of the cane as Don cleaned the kitchen brought to mind the Sphinx’s riddle. What creature walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? Making a shopping list for the vegan meals I would concoct for Julie, I resisted the idea of reducing all amorous relationships to the family romance. After all, Kepesh is nothing like Consuela’s Cuban father, and Léa hardly resembles Chéri’s sarcastic mother. But if Roth and Colette are right, eroticism is imbued by special urgency and poignancy for those aware that Eros has one foot out the door.

  In the poem “Last Love,” the Russian author Fyodor Tyutchev describes love at the closing of the day glowing “brighter, brighter, farewell rays / of one last love in its evening splendor,” for “The blood runs thinner, yet the heart / remains as ever deep and tender.” Does the multicolored intensity of fading light infuse sundown symptoms of agitation, apprehension, and confusion in sunset lovers, I wondered in somewhat of a muddle. If the thumping of the cane, not to mention the barking of the Schnitz, was derailing my concentration, there was no way I would be able to live with the incessant banging of contractors, plumbers, tilers, and electricians. And since we were not using half the space of the Inverness and clearly the upkeep was beyond us, I nixed Agewise Design, determining to turn my thoughts toward real estate. We shouldn’t renovate . . . the rundown house, too big for us, was pushing us out. We needed to move.