Late-Life Love Read online

  Cupidity

  EVERY TWINGE SHOULD not conjure cancer. That’s how I was counseling myself when Don appeared on the ground floor, waving a black object in his hand like a trophy. I had driven him down the steep driveway so he could get to his basement study and return to work on Pride and Prejudice. Apparently going up steps was easier than going down. He caned his way to the blue couch, stretched over me, reached up to the torch lamp, and twisted a little knob onto the switch that had been bruising my fingers every day and every night.

  The knob, which he had taken off a broken lamp, reminded me of all the junk in the garage: straw baskets, clay flower pots, rusty hoes, snow shovels, a wheelbarrow, coolers, sleds, folding tables and chairs, watering cans. In the basement: not just yards of books on the planks Don had bracketed on two large walls, but my mother’s files and file cabinets, her two sofas and easy chair, and a cabinet holding some twenty of her heavy photograph albums. Then my younger daughter’s exercise equipment, sheet music, CDs, knitting projects, clothing, and shoes, left from when she inhabited the basement during her high school years.

  My older daughter’s books, stuffed animals, journals, and sewing projects were lodged in an upstairs bedroom, along with the paraphernalia her son Eli had needed for visits: a humidifier, bed rails, a stroller. Mary-Alice’s college luggage was stacked in a closet in the upstairs hallway. I had no idea what was inside the cartons belonging to Don’s daughters, moved some twenty years earlier from the storage area of his old house. Most of it would not be missed, but the thought of trashing all this detritus—how does one get rid of so much stuff?—made me ill. “A dumpster,” Julie enthused as she packed to return to her own house and I brooded over our wasteful materialism.

  Even as I started to purge in anticipation of a move—boxing extra sheets and towels for Julie to donate to the animal shelter—I worried that it was a drop in the bucket. And how could we move, if it meant relocating to a small place with no room for the kids and grandkids to stay over? Still, it was time to remind our real estate agent to show us more apartments and town houses. Zak—a young journalist-turned-realtor who prides himself on his karaoke performances—would give us sound advice on what needed to be done before we put the Inverness up for sale. There were patches of carpet torn up in the musty basement, next to the door leading to the garage: the late demented cat Perkins must have been desperate to get out.

  Real estate turns out to be a major issue in stories of later-life love. When Don and I obtained a mortgage for the Inverness, we had to remake our wills so that my half of the equity would go to my girls, his half to his. We needed to decide how long the survivor could remain in place before selling the property, though both of us felt we would be too lonely to stay on alone for very long. We owned no other property, but we have witnessed older couples tied up in knots over an apartment in Paris or a summer house in Maine: should it go to the surviving partner or to the children who expected to inherit it? Problems of inheritance become a rich theme especially in stories about aging characters dealing with avaricious adult children.

  I knew I should open the Louis Begley trilogy that I had read in February, when I was sleeping in my grandbaby’s hospital room, but I did not have the energy. In About Schmidt, which has nothing to do with the movie of the same title starring Jack Nicholson, a sixty-year-old retired lawyer inhabits a multimillion-dollar house in the Hamptons that had been bequeathed to his wife. Just thinking about the haggling that ensues after her death, over gift taxes and life estates, contributed to my wooziness.

  A lonely widower, Schmidt feels isolated by his retirement from a prestigious Manhattan law firm and by the apparent distaste with which his beloved daughter treats him whenever she appears to extract his money. Charlotte has nursed childhood grudges against his sleeping with her babysitter and his garden-variety anti-Semitism, which may have motivated her to marry a Jew. We are given many reasons to judge Schmidt and find him wanting, although he engages in this activity best himself.

  Most of Begley’s characters are guilty of cupidity—a word, like “Cupid,” that derives from the Latin cupere (to desire). Notwithstanding the anti-Semitism Schmidt himself worries about, he turns out to be less captivated by cupidity or greed, more entranced by Cupid than are his rapacious daughter and her equally mercenary husband. Some Jews can be avaricious and some anti-Semites capable of moral evolution, or so Louis Begley suggests. By buying out Charlotte’s share in the house, Schmidt manages to extricate himself from his daughter’s clutches.

  Schmidt has grown in self-knowledge, presumably because a gorgeous, twenty-year-old, half–Puerto Rican waitress has shown up to fulfill his desires: “She grabbed his erection and squeezed hard.” But all the bickering over finances between Schmidt and Charlotte as well as the unlikelihood of a beautiful young woman falling for a man forty years her senior has intensified my queasiness. I am shivering in the heavy humidity and put on a second pair of socks.

  Neuropathy from long-ago chemotherapies ossifies my feet, but now rigor mortis sets in. I understand that Louis Begley, himself Jewish, intends to satirize his characters; however, the kitchen faucet has started dripping and Sandra grieves the loss of her partner of seven years. Our friend George writes anguished emails about his wife’s brain metastases, Mary was in her car when it was rammed by a driver who ran a stop light, and at the last lunch with my cancer support group Carrol sounded fatalistic, Ilka looked frail. The phone, when it rings, delivers a cheerful recording about a diabetes panacea or a preemptory voice ordering me to protect myself from identity theft by immediately verifying the numbers on my credit card. I am beginning to feel wobbly.

  Reclining on the blue couch beside Begley’s novels, which bristle with yellow stickers, I swaddle myself in a quilt. Despite the intense heat, I am frozen. Was I hyperventilating—like I did at a lectern once in DeKalb, or was it Urbana, when Sandra had to take over? Or way back when I was presenting a paper for her—she was too sick to travel—and my milk suddenly came down, coating the front of my dress? Regulating my breathing, I tried to consider how Begley’s self-congratulatory analysis of winter-spring relationships contrasts with Colette’s assessment of their damages.

  According to Begley, transgenerational relationships enable not-good-enough fathers to redefine themselves as good-enough fathers to the lovers they adopt, nurture, and then relinquish. Wealthy older men can offer financial security to young women, as Schmidt does to his girlfriend. (Somehow this is not seen as paying for her services.) Eventually, when his girlfriend becomes pregnant either by him or her young fiancé, Schmidt knows that his love for her “had become paternal”: paradoxically, she “would be a better daughter to him than Charlotte, just as he might be a better father to her.”

  But Begley seems self-conscious about this plot. He portrays an obnoxious novelist in Schmidt Delivered, all of whose books are about “this older guy who’s screwing a young girl. Ha! Ha! Ha! What we all want to do.” Phyllis Rose is right in her review: “One geriophilic young woman per novel might be credible. Not two.” Plenty of Begley’s codgers brandish amorous girls—eye candy—on their arms. Nor is this fantasy unusual in literature. Consider John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who created poems spoken by youthful girls adoring the “Ancient person of my heart,” whose phallus can be released from “age’s frozen grasp”: “soothed by my reviving hand, / In former warmth and vigour stand.”

  Suddenly, bilious waves send me rushing to the bathroom, where I heave again and again into the raised toilet seat set up for Don, paroxysm after paroxysm, and then the splattering, a burning throat, tearing eyes, a drippy nose. I somehow cleaned it up and he somehow made me tea, but I could not keep it down. Did I have the flu or was the cancer returning with a vengeance? Had the trial drug stopped working?

  Over the past few months, the blood marker had gone up and down, but only slightly. Maybe the marker has stopped being a reliable indicator. For two of the women in my support group, the CA125 blood test does not measure
tumor growth. But why assume the wretched retching means cancer? When my cancer recurred in the past—before I went on the trial drug—there were no symptoms at all. Part of what earns some sympathy for privileged, prejudiced Schmidt is his caregiving, as well as his grief over his wife’s painful demise from cancer.

  Though frozen, I am clammy all over. (It does not help that the word clammy inspires Don to mention Galway Kinnell’s poem “Oatmeal.”) There’s a bowl by my couch and a towel at hand. My body shudders through swell after swell of nausea with no comfortable position possible. This must be what Carrol and Ilka contend with as they deal with recurrences. Alone with poor Don as impotent witness, my oncologist hours away, I loathe the idea of the local emergency room. Except there is no I—only a battered container that quakes and curls up and then stands and then slides down the slurry slope, with nothing but breathing to get me through another surge of misery. Wet with sweat, my chest pounding, grasping the bowl, I feel my bladder or kidneys breaking down, and oh! I realize: I need to alert my guardian angel in Indianapolis, Alesha Arnold, Dr. Daniela Matei’s research nurse.

  My email prompted Alesha to prescribe Compazine, which Jayne rushed to pick up. It takes time to die with cancer. Maybe we should move into a Trace cottage like the one Jayne’s mother has; Jayne was spending most of her evenings there. The idea of yet another operation and more chemotherapies seems palpably idiotic. What would be the point? They would only escalate and then prolong the agony.

  Who will take care of Don, as he took care of me? Instantly, I picture us seven years ago, after interventional radiologists had stuck a thick tube, attached to an output bag, into my right buttock: I am prone on my stomach on our bed upstairs. Don unwraps the bandages, pats soothing ointment around the wound, drains the bag of fluid, measures and records it, and applies clean bandages on my bottom. I can neither see nor reach the area that aches no matter how many pain medications I swallow.

  Waiting on the blue couch to see if the Compazine would work, I mourned the watershed summer coming to a close. Don, who used to run marathons, hobbled. The grandbaby in New York incapacitated by eating and sleeping disorders. In California, Sandra’s devoted daughters were helping her adjust to a single life, but it was not easy. Mary and Andrew, their children, and my oncologist were leaving. Ilka, looking skeletal, attempts last-ditch medical interventions, but Carrol has begun considering hospice. And Fran has left a hole in my heart.

  The trembling ceased while Jayne took her leave and I checked that the ostomy bag was securely attached, emailed assurances to Alesha, and wrapped the quilt under my numb feet. (How can I thank them for being so instantly available?) Maybe Fran had been trying to distance herself from me for longer than I realized. Was she envious of my publications or jealous of my family? No, I thought as the nausea receded and I could wiggle my toes. Fran has always made it abundantly clear that she prided herself on her successful career and cherished her single life.

  Her books had established a scholarly field and in retirement she found inventive outlets for her energies. Though living alone could be difficult, she acknowledged, she relished meeting that challenge creatively. She could come and go as she pleased, she could dress as she liked and mess up the house and eat beans out of a can, she could listen to music as loud as she wanted whenever she wanted or putter over a jigsaw puzzle and not speak for a week. If I found her recounting of her exercise regime boring, she probably found my absorption in my writing boring. Our conversations had devolved into reports on her nephews and my kids or reiterations of our past. She had reasonably not wanted to go on performing a façade of friendship. I dozed through that afternoon and then through the night. By the next morning, what must have been an infection or food poisoning had passed.

  “I guess it wasn’t a recurrence,” I told Don. “I’m becoming a cancerchondriac. But there is no bodily function I loathe more than throwing up. Even the words are revolting. Vomiting. Retching. Heaving. Hurling. Puking. Spewing. Barfing. Upchucking. Remember how I would start gagging whenever Perkins or Sam threw up?”

  Don’s response—“ ‘Lord, Lord, where’s his little cap?’ ”—made me laugh.

  It was the punchline of Sandra and Elliot’s joke about the old woman who took her grandson in his Saturday finery for a picnic at the beach, where a huge wave came up and swept him into the sea. “Lord, Lord,” she says. “He’s my treasure; please, please give him back.” Instantly, a huge wave rose up, depositing the little boy safe and sound—in his playsuit—right next to her on the beach blanket. “But Lord, Lord,” she says, “where’s his little cap?”

  Trying to cultivate gratitude that I was not at the moment dying of cancer, I remembered the casualties of our fused families when we moved into the Inverness. Perkins, Mary-Alice’s orange cat, had never made peace with Sam, my younger daughter’s Siamese, and vice versa. We had tried to give them each their own spaces, but while Perkins tore up the basement, caterwauling Sam peed in the dining room. Even feline Valium did not solve their territoriality. Eventually Perkins lit off into the ravine and Sam spent her declining years as a pampered geriatric guest at a nearby veterinary clinic.

  At least Don’s kids get along with me and mine with him, though at the start of our families’ fusion all of them must have had their doubts. We were hardly the Brady bunch. My girls were mortified at an early Thanksgiving get-together when decorous Don and his daughters witnessed my antics. To a blaring trumpet fanfare, I had insisted on our usual ritual of parading the roasted bird on a rolling cart, but it fell off—not once but twice. At his house, my kids knew, the furniture, dishes, silverware, and towels matched. His family did not scoop turkeys off the floor. Why did we have to be so bohemian? Yet over time his oldest and my youngest, his youngest and my oldest have become friends. And all of them support our union . . . in stark contrast to the merciless offspring in a story Sandra had just composed.

  In “Shiksa,” elderly Abe and slightly younger Marina attend a Passover seder at which his adult children rise up in righteous wrath, ostensibly over Marina’s religious difference: like his kids, Abe is an observant Jew, Marina a lapsed Catholic. Actually, the children want to divide the couple in order to gain control of the old man and his possessions. Sandra’s story was grim about “the most good-for-nothing bunch of kids that were ever raised.” This memorable phrase, spoken by one of the good-for-nothings, comes from a classic Depression film that Orson Welles said “would make a stone cry.” In Make Way for Tomorrow, which certainly made me cry, an old, happily married couple must split up to live with their crummy kids, and we are left wondering if they will ever lay eyes on each other again.

  The devolution of Schmidt’s relationship with his daughter Charlotte in the third volume of Louis Begley’s trilogy hinges on filial antipathy, even wrath. After an accident causes Charlotte’s miscarriage and hysterectomy, she blames Schmidt for the loss of her baby and her reproductive future. Although “the temptation to disinherit can be powerful,” Schmidt pays all the bills for a long hospitalization to deal with her depression and obtains legal services to extricate Charlotte from her unhappy marriage.

  As I recuperated, I knew that I should consider the main plot in the conclusion of the Schmidt trilogy, where Begley’s hero finally embarks on a serious partnership not with a chicklet but with a woman closer to his age. Unmoored by the purposelessness of retirement, he also finds a second vocation. However, I needed prose more restorative, like the warming baths I continue to crave. The title of Kent Haruf’s Our Souls at Night promised just that. I read it in a few hours, tranquilized by its tenderness for two widowed characters who find late-life intimacy in the simplest of ways.

  Seventy-year-old Addie Moore visits her contemporary and neighbor Louis Waters one evening to say, “I wonder if you would consider coming to my house sometimes to sleep with me.” Lonely in her house, she imagines him lonely in his and therefore proposes that they get through the nights by talking and sleeping together. In a small town in Colorad
o, the widow and widower converse during a succession of luminous evenings in which they disclose the tragedies and disappointments of their previous marriages. Exultant that they are “not finished with changes and excitements. And not all dried up in body and spirit,” they eventually “tried to do what the town thought all along they’d been doing but hadn’t.”

  Even in this quiet paean to the boon of companionship, however, the precious connection between Addie and Louis is broken by an adult offspring. “I want you to stay away from my mother,” Addie’s son tells Louis. “And forget about my mother’s money.” With their small-town rootedness, Addie and Louis are worlds apart from Begley’s elite, East Coast characters. Yet Begley also emphasizes the long backstory that late-life lovers must convey in order to connect with each other while keeping adult children at bay.

  In the last book of Begley’s trilogy, Schmidt embarks on a relationship with an equal and on a new vocation. He has profited from the advice of a multimillionaire who gives him a job managing an overseas foundation. With his private jets and hotel suites, the millionaire—outrageously imperious, ridiculously boastful, astonishingly tactless—melds in my mind with the bullying blowhard Donald Trump, who has begun appearing on television: extravagant egos plumped and pumped by colossal affluence. That this friend and Schmidt’s love interest are Jewish, however, dispels his earlier anti-Semitism.

  At seventy-eight, Schmidt fusses: is his “late-onset puppy love” for sixty-three-year-old Alice Verplanck a reasonable basis for cohabitation on “a satisfaction-guaranteed trial basis, with assurances he would creep away quietly if she found him wanting”? Between the first chapter, in which Schmidt awaits his reunion with Alice in the Hampton house, and the last, when they pledge their bond, we are given a flashback of their affair thirteen years earlier. In this case, the flashback underscores the commitments we have in later life—to people, to countries, to networks of professional obligations and settled habits that make it difficult for an older person like Alice to move in with a prospective partner. Plus, she has understandable reservations about Schmidt’s character, specifically his capacity for aggression.