Late-Life Love Page 15

  At their reunion, Schmidt and Alice must cope with how their earlier affair ended. When Schmidt learned that Alice was concealing a longtime sexual relationship with a colleague, he punished her with a furious “night in the sack”: “he made love to her without uttering a loving word, without tenderness, transforming each caress into an assault.” His violent attempt to claim or shame her triggered Alice’s fury, his contrition, and the long rupture. During a few of those years, Schmidt whiled away his time in “friendly, unalloyed carnality” with the wife of a podiatrist whose ad in the New York Review of Books he had answered: “If I see you again, and if you’re still nice, we’ll do anal,” she promises at their first meeting in the Carlyle. (My estimation of the New York Review of Books, which continues to arrive periodically in Don’s office mailbox, has undergone a sea-change.)

  The epigraph of Schmidt Steps Back comes from Yeats: “nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.” Presumably, Begley’s main character becomes sole and whole because he has been rent by paternal grief. Eventually, as Schmidt withstands his daughter’s irrational hostility, she makes a slow recovery and embarks on a new life. Schmidt has mellowed in kindness, even if his author has not, for Begley finds a particularly gruesome way of killing Charlotte off. Upon hearing news of the death of Alice’s colleague, Schmidt makes his modest proposal. That he accedes to Alice’s terms and timing manifests his maturation. But Begley’s decision to decapitate Charlotte in a car crash testifies to his authorial anger at the ungrateful, mercenary daughter. Shakespeare would have called her a pelican daughter (for the pelican was believed to feed on its parents’ blood).

  Don and I were discussing selfish adult kids in the movie we had watched the night before, Elsa and Fred, when I brimmed with pleasure at his being able to get into the passenger seat of the car for our first expedition together to Kroger’s in half a year. Late-life grocery shopping used to mean that we would divide up the aisles so neither one of us had to cover the entirety of the massive building. However, he was only strong enough to shamble into the supermarket, sit at the Starbuck’s café, and sip a cup of coffee while I did the marketing. But again, after we managed to locate my car in the parking lot, he bent his knee sufficiently for him to be sitting beside me.

  “Christopher Plummer got a second chance,” I said. I was thinking about Fred’s decision not to give his money to his shrewish daughter, to use it instead to take antique Elsa (Shirley MacLaine) to the fountain of La Dolce Vita, though the comparison with Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg was jarring.

  “If we had to choose between our kids and each other,” Don said, “we would choose our kids.” He was examining the glue he had asked me to buy; it would keep the knob affixed to the torch lamp.

  The remark, though true, smarted. But happily our daughters do not resemble Schmidt’s or Christopher Plummer’s. Although Schmidt managed to stand by Charlotte even while she exploited and reviled him, at the moment she castigates him for the loss of her baby he “wasn’t sure he had heard of any father having been addressed by a child with such bile. Goneril? Regan?” He has nurtured her, but she repays him in venom. As a Renaissance adage puts it, “Love doth descend, but not ascend.” The viperous offspring of King Lear, who strip him of all vestiges of power, stand as a warning to aging people, telling them not to relinquish their property too soon or else they will surrender their autonomy and possibly their lives.

  Wrinkled in Time

  MY STEPDAUGHTER SUSANNAH had been to the post office, the donut shop, the grocery store, and the farmer’s market. She had cleaned the vegetables and put away the groceries and started planning the meals she would cook and either serve or stock in the freezer, when she looked up from her iPad to declare, “Hey, there’s an apartment house that is going to go up downtown, just one block west of the square. High-end condos.”

  As she reached for her phone to call our real estate agent, I plunked down another playing card and considered the energy of people in midlife. What would have taken me a day or two, she had accomplished in an hour or two. My daughters evince the same strength. Was it adrenaline, drive, will, sheer physical stamina? Their speed and vigor underscored my more tentative pace as I slowed down in older age. How does that need to decelerate distinguish later from young loving?

  On our way to the Trace, just the other day, I had noticed the vitality of the parents unloading huge SUVs at the dormitories. Don and I had rented a van to take first my older and then my younger daughter to college, a grueling experience for any parent who dreads crowds in Target (which my kids pronounced as if the word were French). Teaching is a profession that accentuates aging because the freshmen stay the same age, whereas their teacher does not. When I began as an associate instructor, I was a few years older than my undergraduates. As a professor, I was old enough to be their mother. Now I am old enough to be the grandmother of the kids sweating in the crowded driveways over their computer equipment, mini refrigerators, and bedding.

  The brash dynamism of people who can take for granted the robust resilience of the body: there should be a word for it. Directly after cancer surgery in 2008, I lost that vitality, though I suppose other aging people feel it draining away less dramatically. The early twentieth-century author Vita Sackville-West describes how a healthy woman of eighty-eight, endowed with a mind alert to make the most of the time she has left, experiences the sensation of age: “the body was a little shaky, not very certain of its reliability, not quite certain even of its sense of direction, afraid of stumbling over a step, of spilling a cup of tea; nervous, tremulous; aware that it must not be jostled, or hurried, for fear of betraying its frail inadequacy.” Is this a body capable of desire, sex, or frottage?

  “When you and Jack finish that game,” Susannah said as she got off the phone with Zak, “I’m taking him to buy a skateboard and some Hoosier wear and then out to lunch with Julie and maybe a meeting with Zak. Not to worry. We’ll be back in plenty of time to make supper.”

  I was beating my fifteen-year-old grandson at gin rummy, but he had trounced me the night before at presidents and beggars, an insane card game in which the rich get richer and the poor poorer. So we finished our hand and they were out the door. I admired their ebullience—“restless modern youth,” Mary-Alice used to say—just as Sackville-West’s Lady Slane contrasts her children’s striving ambition with her own wish to sit still and savor and simply be.

  My copy of All Passion Spent came from Judith, who was surprised by its sophisticated insight into the newly widowed Lady Slane. We agreed: it’s as if the novel lets us imagine what might have happened in To the Lighthouse if Mr. Ramsay had died in the night and Mrs. Ramsay had survived him. Like me, I suppose, Judith had been misled by Virginia Woolf into undervaluing Sackville-West’s literary talents. Now her novel remains sadly out of print.

  Judith, who sometimes stops by at the end of the workday, had come across a term she applied to All Passion Spent: Altersroman, a novel about age or the aged. Lady Slane finds that younger people display “a slight irritability, dawdling rather too markedly in order to keep pace with the hesitant footsteps” of the elderly, which is one reason why she thoroughly dislikes the company of her adult children. Another is their patronizing attitude toward her, for they simply assume, after their father’s death, that “Mother had no will of her own”: “she had not enough brain to be self-assertive.”

  “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.” Adult children in stories of late-life love display their fangs by mocking or obstructing their parents or by exploiting them financially. King Lear’s lamentation resounds throughout the opening pages of Vita Sackville-West’s unexpectedly delightful novel, whose title would seem to rule it out of any study of later-life love and whose heroine evades Lear’s miserable fate. Would King Lear—who seeks attestations of love from his daughters—have escaped his terrible destiny if he had lived with a wise partner? Would he have heeded such a companion? Sackville-West does
not pose these questions, since her heroine is a widow.

  Instead, she considers the need of older people to separate from their children. All Passion Spent explores the temporality of the aged, which alienates them from their families while transmuting hectic romantic love into the sedate pleasures of the sociable companionship that Don and I enjoy daily.

  The novel begins with Lady Slane’s covetous children expecting her to live out her widowhood by residing with each of them in turn for a two-week period and compensating them financially for the privilege of doing so. Much to their surprise, this previously dutiful mother and wife refuses a proposal similar to the one made by Lear’s pelican daughters. She determines to move to a rental house that had entranced her thirty years earlier. “If one is not to please oneself in old age, when is one to please oneself? There is so little time left!” With all her passion spent, she wants to be visited only by those who “are nearer to their death than to their birth.”

  But is all her passion really spent? Judith had warned me that the only passion Lady Slane sustains revolves around the Hampstead rental, which represents her release from the domestic duties she had shouldered with Victorian rectitude for a politically prominent husband and a gaggle of demanding kids. Emancipated by her husband’s death and her children’s adulthood, she greets old age: “Those days were gone when feeling burst its bounds and poured hot from the foundry, when the heart seemed likely to split with complex and contradictory desires; now there was nothing left but a landscape in monochrome, the features identical but all the colours gone from them, and nothing but a gesture left in the place of speech.”

  More predictable than the novel’s opening, the middle section of All Passion Spent emphasizes the need for retrospection that arises in old age. Inside the renovated Hampstead house, present time slows down during Lady Slane’s remembrances of things past: her reflections on her long marriage to a man who became viceroy of India. Being a proper wife and a mother—becoming Lady Slane—had effectively slain her identity by forcing her to renounce her early dreams of becoming a painter. She considers the marital and domestic projects that consumed her attention as well as the ways they foreclosed other, less traveled roads that might have been taken.

  The habit of recollection in later life, which certainly has me in its grip, was a subject Montaigne addressed: “Let childhood look forward, old age backward; was not that the signification of Janus’s double face?” With a past far longer than the future she can expect, Lady Slane appears to agree with Montaigne’s proposition about the Roman god of gates and doors. Looking backward enriches her existence: “to be able to enjoy one’s past is to live twice,” Montaigne believed.

  In the final section of the novel, Lady Slane finds herself visited by a man who had fallen in love with her many years ago, and perhaps neither his nor her passion has been entirely spent. The narrative reminds me of our friend Ken who, after being widowed, reunited with his college sweetheart. The appearance in Hampstead of Mr. FitzGeorge, whom Lady Slane had met in Calcutta, surprises her with an unanticipated crackle or lick of desire: “She was eighty-eight, but the man-to-woman mainspring still coiled like a cobra between them. Innumerable years had elapsed since she had felt that stimulus; it came as an unexpected revival, a flicker, a farewell, stirring her strangely and awaking some echo whose melody she could not quite recapture.”

  For a number of people, late-life love involves reinventing earlier infatuations. Mr. FitzGeorge is an eccentric millionaire: a bachelor who collects art treasures, a miser who buys cheap and hoards his finds. Lady Slane nevertheless decides to continue receiving him, for they were “so old that they were all the time age-conscious, and being so old it was agreeable to sit like two cats on either side of the fire warming their bodies, stretching out hands so transparent as to let the pink light of the flames through them, while their conversation without effort rose or fell.” He admires her face and her tranquility: “Youth could never sit as still as that, in absolute repose, as though all haste, all movement, were over and done with, and nothing left but waiting and acquiescence.”

  Together they remember an intense moment they shared decades before while visiting a deserted city in India. One glance from him “had exploded a charge of dynamite in her most secret cellar. Someone by a look had discovered the way into a chamber she kept hidden even from herself. He had committed the supreme audacity of looking into her soul.” The youthful Mr. FitzGeorge was saved from the indiscretion of confessing his love (to a married woman with children) by the intoxication he experienced while going about the business of collecting art treasures. Since the two agree that this long-ago passion cannot be revived, they become friends.

  Companionability in later life was extolled to me by both my grandmother and my mentor. My grandma cherished a very dear “gentleman friend” whom she met in their retirement facility; they ate all their dinners together until he died. Carolyn Heilbrun advised the elderly to “leave romance to the young, and welcome friendship.”

  But youthful thinkers about love sometimes judge sexless relationships to be failures. The scholar Laura Kipnis, for example, assumes that “a ‘good relationship’ would probably include having—and wanting to have—sex with your spouse or spouse-equivalent on something more than a quarterly basis.” Reflecting on the affection that kicks in when desire flags, she likens it to “denture adhesive. Yes, it’s supposed to hold things in place; yes, it’s awkward for everyone when it doesn’t; but unfortunately there are some things that glue just won’t glue, no matter how much you apply.”

  Yet reverie and conviviality are adhesives, powerful glues that can meld later-life partners. Like my grandma and her gentleman friend, Lady Slane and Mr. FitzGeorge neither marry nor move in together. Either action would be too complicated and, anyway, beside the point. For some older couples, neither sex nor frottage plays a part in successful unions. For others, cohabitation is not in the cards. LAT is the current term for people living apart together: partners with separate addresses who maintain a close relationship with each other. Vita Sackville-West envisions the companionability of seniors who are tame, humble, and wait upon judgment. She implicitly disagrees with the assumption that love must be wildly impetuous and intensely erotic. Perhaps she was able to do so because she relished a succession of passionate affairs with women while remaining deeply devoted to her husband of many decades.

  Divorcing gratification from sexuality, All Passion Spent portrays two characters sharing recurrent, quotidian activities. They have relinquished goal-driven projects (“telic” is a word my philosopher son-in-law uses) for aimless but enjoyable routines (my son-in-law calls these “atelic”). Lady Slane and Mr. FitzGeorge have nothing left to achieve, accomplish, finish. Instead, they want to float on a sea of silence stippled with schmoozing. When not warming themselves like two cats before the fire, Lady Slane and Mr. FitzGeorge enjoy strolling on Hampstead Heath, wandering over to Keats’s house, “that little white box of strain and tragedy marooned among the dark green laurels”:

  Like ghosts themselves, they murmured of the ghost of Fanny Brawne and of the passion which had wrecked Keats; and all the while, just out of reach, round the corner, lurked the passion for Lady Slane which might have wrecked Mr. FitzGeorge, had he not been so wary an egoist (unlike poor Keats), just too wise to let himself float away on a hopeless love for the young Vicereine, just unwise enough to remain remotely faithful for fifty years.

  The slam of a car door and the rumble of skateboard wheels informed me that Susannah had returned and Jack was speeding down the driveway, so I grabbed my iPhone, determined to take a little movie. He dutifully started again at the walnut tree, which had already begun to lose its leaves. I was relieved that he did not attempt to skateboard down the steep driveway to the garage, but instead veered at the beech tree around the circle of beauty. Then it was time for us both to become sous-chefs for the complicated ratatouille Susannah was constructing, to set the table and welcome Julie, the Schni
tz, and Hazel.

  “Have you girls ever heard Don’s story about W. H. Auden?” I asked as we settled around the kitchen table. After I explained to Jack what a famous poet Auden was, I asked Don, “Why was he in Indiana?”

  “He had been asked by people in Columbus to stay for a week to bring cultural energy to the town. They had it all planned out, but he wanted a break so they phoned and asked if we could entertain him in Bloomington. I rounded up some people for lunch, including Bill Cagle, the director of the Lilly Library, and after a really stimulating conversation—Auden in his prime, talking about Continental philosophy—Bill and I asked him if he would like to visit the rare book library. He had a car and a driver so he was driven to the Lilly while Bill and I walked over.”

  “What did he look like then?”

  “He was in his sixties, with his famously seamed face. He got out of the car and entered the library and Bill asked him if he wanted to see the most precious treasures of the Lilly, which were kept in a windowless, basement vault. We rode down in a small elevator and Bill showed him the Gutenberg, a copy of the Declaration of Independence autographed by all the signers, and John Keats’s letter to Fanny Brawne, telling her he was dying. Auden began shaking and turned red. He said, ‘This is obscene . . . that other people should read this letter and that you should have it in your library.’