Late-Life Love Read online

  Vain of his “indestructible ivories,” of his heroic drinking capacity, and of his retro finery, Barrington flaunts his faith in his own exuberance: “Nobody can be depressed around me for long. I am the Great Mood Levitator. I am the Human Valium.” Since all his teachers in Antigua came “from the colonial mothership,” he can speak the Queen’s English, but “so what if me and my people choose to mash up the h-english linguish whenever we feel like it, drop our prepositions with our panties, piss in the pot of correct syntax and spelling, and mangle our grammar at random? Is this not our postmodern, postcolonial prerogative?” He has been taking evening classes for decades and likes nothing better than putting on display the linguistic gymnastics that make him such a boisterous and likable character.

  Because family considerations torment Barrington with “second thoughts about his second chance,” he is surprised when his younger daughter turns out to be pivotal in helping him come out of the closet. At a moment of great stress, Barrington tells Maxine “about me and Morris since way back in St. John’s and how we been carrying on ever since like agents in post-war West Berlin.” Her response—“Nothing gets past my gaydar, and you are beyond camp”—astonishes him.

  Maxine teases her father and Morris, but she also introduces them to a gay bar, where they touch each other in their “first public display of physical affection in sixty years.” I have some small inkling of their pain at not being touched in public, since Don has always been very private about displaying his affection. Bernadine Evaristo also reminds me how valiantly my girls—then seventeen and thirteen years old—supported my growing commitment to Don, even when the three of us felt dowdy at social events with his family. In photos of Susannah’s wedding, we look like shtetl denizens beamed into the beau monde.

  Like many late-life narratives, Mr. Loverman uses the flashback, in this case a series of interspersed chapters from the point of view of Barrington’s long-suffering wife. But she, too, gets a second chance in Evaristo’s generous tale, for in Mr. Loverman, older people have a better shot at love and happiness than do youngsters. Barrington’s daughters find that “the good guys are all taken and the rest are either commitment-phobic dogs . . . or too ugly, too old, too poor, too badly dressed, too unfit, too uneducated, too boring, too low-class, too gay, or too into white or nearly white women.” Although I have noticed commitment phobia in young white men as well, Barrington ascribes the problem to the ongoing legacy of slavery—“when we wasn’t allowed to be husbands and fathers.”

  Even while his girls browbeat him with the smug sense of superiority that apparently comes with young adulthood, Barrington continues to support them. He spends some of his time figuring out why by “contemplating how those Ancient Greek eggheads came up with four categories of love: agape is unconditional love; eros—intimate; philia—brotherly; and storge—a deep, familial affection.” The first three of these terms were familiar to me: agape associated with God’s unreserved love, spiritual devotion, or charity; eros with sexual desire; philia with friendship. But storge was new, a term that apparently pertains to relationships within the family, affectionate ties to parents or children that sometimes become strained, but that we struggle to maintain because of abiding loyalty.

  Storge had been the supreme pleasure in New York, when Susannah made a meal for my two British cousins, who were visiting from London. With the help of Jack, she served a tasty supper of coq au vin and (my favorite comfort food) mashed potatoes for our reunion. Watching my cousins getting to know Susannah, Jack, Simone, her husband, and boys—after the cataclysmic diaspora that our family had suffered—assured me that I would not be the taut, flimsy tightrope providing the sole connection to our common but shredded ancestry.

  Despite his misogyny, Barrington excels at storge with his daughters, at eros and philia with Morris, and at agape with a female friend of Maxine’s who came out of the closet but then wound up homeless. Since Barrington had made a good amount of money in real estate and Maxine’s friend exhibited the sort of courage that eludes him, he moved her into one of his flats. Fear motivated him to invest his money in broken houses, which he bought, repaired, and rented: “Any time this country starts Nazifying itself and another Shitler comes to power, I can relocate somewhere safe, émigré myself and my loved ones.” When Morris calls him paranoid, Barrington replies, “No man, I prepared. Look what happened in Germany in 1933.”

  What happened in Germany explains why I feel so strongly about storge. On the day after Kristallnacht, November 11, 1938, my maternal grandparents escaped from Germany to Palestine. They evaded an arrest by the Gestapo when my grandfather displayed his uniform, revolver, and medals: he had served as a medical officer in the German army during the Great War. My mother and my brother (then a baby) fled from Hamburg to New York, also in 1938. Impoverished, she had to work as a live-in maid; she immediately weaned my brother and put him into what she called “a baby factory.” My father, who subsequently joined her, and his brother, who escaped to England, left behind their parents, who did not survive. In my paternal grandmother’s last letter, she wrote to her children, “May fate save you from such raw brutality.” Two decades later, my brother and I were distraught over our father’s suicide. Had the miseries of forced immigration contributed to his death?

  Unspoken grief bruised the air in the Brooklyn apartment. How to explain calamities that cannot be understood? A niece’s rape, cousins gone up in smoke through the chimneys. My parents vowed never to forget, but could not remember. Like Barrington, my father—whose accent marked him as an alien—feared another Hitler coming to power. During the McCarthy hearings, he thought the family might have to relocate again.

  Did he look gaunt in the photographs taken right before his death because he had cancer? (I probably inherited a genetic propensity for the disease—a BRCA mutation—from him.) Did worries about preserving the savings he had managed to squirrel away contribute to his refusal to consult physicians? At fifteen, I grieved. I did not question then if his suicide might have been the result of anxieties about health care expenses draining the family of the little bit of security he had managed to safeguard. Because my family suffered the toxicity of German culture in the thirties, I cannot judge Barrington paranoid.

  Also, all the Republican candidates currently campaigning for the presidency are homophobic, with the possible exception of the porcine Trump, who seems less like a bully, more like a fascist when he incites the crowds at his campaign rallies to shout “Build the wall.” There are plenty of preachers today delivering sermons like the one Barrington wife’s recounts: “All about philanderers, homosicksicals, and moral reprobates.” And the alarming number of unarmed black men shot in the past year more than justifies Barrington’s fear of enmity.

  When, a week or so before we left for New York, Don led a book conversation for the fans of To Kill a Mockingbird, the people attending were distressed by the racism of a folk hero: Atticus Finch in his first incarnation, in Go Set a Watchman, an early draft of Harper Lee’s classic that had just been published. I was stressing over how we would get out of the restaurant. Upon our arrival at Topo’s, a waitress pointed toward a steep staircase; there was no elevator in this restored Victorian house.

  Throughout the short lecture Don gave and then during the longer discussion he led with people from the community, I worried about the stairs and also about his vulnerable position. The organizer of the event, the publisher of Bloom magazine, had put a bar stool and a music stand in the door frame between two crowded rooms. Don had to swivel with a hand mike as he addressed first the people in one room and then the people in the adjoining room. It was a speaker’s nightmare. I could not hear the questioners from the other room and they probably could not hear the comments coming from mine.

  At the close of the event, Bloom’s publisher approached to ask if I would be willing to lead such a discussion in the future. “No way,” I blurted out, flustered at my discourtesy. I could not imagine having the adrenaline needed
to lecture and lead a productive conversation. Nor could I envision negotiating the impossible spatial configuration of two audiences, one to my right, the other to my left. Or a bar stool. Or a handheld mike. Or a rickety music stand. Don deserved the toasts he received after the talk. Raising bright blue cocktails, Tequila Mockingbirds, participants pronounced the event a smashing success, and so it was. With Julie at my side, I was relieved and happy for Don to have recovered this part of his life. How many book clubs and adult education courses had he conducted in the public libraries of small towns scattered across Indiana during the past half century?

  After the three of us negotiated the staircase and landed in a bar to celebrate, Don said that he’d do it again, if he were asked. As we rehashed the event, I told them that seeing Don at the music stand brought back many memories of our team teaching together. Once in London, when I relinquished the lectern to him, I sat down with our students and realized they were thoroughly wasted by their weekend jaunts to Paris or Dublin. I had a conniption during the break—something about my dissatisfaction with the number of undergraduates not actively participating and the need to change our pedagogic tactics.

  Although the adrenaline seeped out of Don in New York, after our return he accompanied me and Julie to the Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft store; I needed their eyes to choose the border panels for the baby’s flying geese quilt. Between rummages, Julie hauled bolts of cotton over to the table on which we had laid the quilt top and finally she chose a solid green—somewhere between kelly and parakeet green—that I would never have considered and that we all agreed set off the patterned geese perfectly. As I washed, dried, ironed, and cut the solid green panels, I reflected on Don’s skills at Topo’s and the hilarious fashion designs described in Mr. Loverman.

  Maxine creates the costumes for a commercial venture in the hope her father will finance it: an evening gown made of leather strips that can be deconstructed into a stool, with edible buttons and lace, the material of the bodice composed of family photographs. In her sales pitch, she explains, “Basically, what I have is the idea that food, family, and friends equal sustenance, along with the idea that people wear their loved ones, dead or alive, when they go out, or can even sit on them?” Maxine’s follow-up plan for the “House of (Maxine) Walker” asks for thousands of pounds for marketing, models, and seamstresses, to which Barrington responds, “I will be sole investor in the House of Walker (no Maxine about it), which makes me the sole proprietor. Your role will be that of (mad genius) creative director. Take it or leave it.” She will fleece him, but only to a degree he can control.

  Aided by the resolute strength of his wife, who dumps him, and of his partner, who sticks by him, the hero of Mr. Loverman eventually comes out as a septuagenarian “Barrysexual—correction, homosexual (la-di-dah)—grandfather.” Aging heightens his relief at shedding the lies, secrets, and silences that encumbered him for decades as he marvels over a young man making a pass at Morris: “What is he, a gerontophile?” Morris matches his partner’s verbal hijinks when he terms Barrington’s love of his 1970 Buick Coupe convertible a case of “motorphilia” and then defines “dendrophilia”: “People turned on by trees.” Philia has a supple linguistic longevity superior to that of agape, eros, or storge.

  But philia continues to bedevil me since I have not seen Fran since before the spring falls, more than half a year ago . . . it seems inconceivable. I kept on combing through memories to understand how things could have gone so wrong. One moment in particular puzzled me: a scene in early December, maybe two or three years ago, when she came into the house, saw several bouquets of flowers, and asked about the occasion. “I feel bad about forgetting your birthday,” she said, “but not as bad as you would have felt, if you had forgotten mine.” What could that bizarre remark possibly have meant, I wondered. Should it have alerted me, delivered a warning signal?

  The doorknob fell off the front door when I opened it to Hazel and the Schnitz, who showed up dressed in the Halloween costumes that Julie had chosen in Jo-Ann’s: motorcycle gang leather jackets (fake leather, Julie assured me). As the Schnitz raced around and Hazel cowered, I savored my memory of the high point of the high point of the New York trip. Don and I, Susannah and Jack were lounging around her apartment when the doorbell rang and there were the monkey and the fox in strollers propelled by Simone and her husband.

  The tan and brown monkey, who was holding a monkey, immediately scrambled out and lurched around the hall; it took longer to release the red fox, who crawled after his brother. Since the mountain could not come to Muhammad, Simone and Jeff had decided to bring the boys to Don. Their Halloween costumes, purchased early, served as perfect protection in the chilly air.

  Julie’s visit and that memory inspired me to do what Jack had forgotten to do. I got up determined to heave the wheelchair down into the basement. It clattered at the base of the stairs, its wheels spinning. Then I threw down the plastic tube with strings, the grabber, the security belts, the colorful rubber bands, and the toilet seat raiser. We eyed the remaining walker and cane with a genuine sense of release and relief.

  “I’m tempted to buy a book I found on Amazon,” I told Don as I privately acknowledged that my resolve not to acquire books had broken down. I wanted to find out how to make the Lime of the Ancient Mariner, the Last of the Mojitos, Rye and Prejudice, and the Yellow Wallbanger.

  “We’ll have to stock up on liquor,” he said.

  “Onward to Mucky’s!”

  At fifteen, Don had a job at Thrifty Liquors. He had loaded a truck with Black Gold whiskey for two men who were found shot dead the next day. It was during the war, and liquor was hard to get. In one of their pockets was a piece of paper with the address of Mucky Glasser’s store. The FBI turned up to investigate and questioned Don, though not about his working illegally. After they left, Don went down to the basement: the FBI guys had stolen twelve bottles of scotch. Being upstanding citizens, however, they had taken the serial number off the box, as was required by law.

  PART III

  vacating the premises

  Wintering

  YOUNG LOVERS CANNOT imagine the people they will become, but old lovers remember who they have been, or so I thought as I glanced down at the copy of The Winter’s Tale in my lap and our conversation about moving petered out. Especially if youthful or midlife passion inflicts shocking damages, late-life love can right grievous wrongs. Suffused in the light streaming into the family room, Don stood by the window, recalling a college class.

  The hunt for a habitable apartment was intensifying. We had traipsed to condos as far out in the country as the Inverness. On a circular lane of identical brick cottages, a unit for sale included—in addition to a kitchen, bathroom, and bedrooms on the first floor—a bedroom, bathroom, and galley kitchen in the basement. The place seemed too big and too remote. Zak had also taken us downtown to a building where the available apartment looked out on nothing but the concrete and asphalt of a busy thoroughfare: no green space in sight.

  Don began reciting the first poem that taught him how poetry worked and what verse would mean to him for the rest of his life. Decades ago, a professor at Loyola had explained to him how Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 moves from the end of a year to the close of an evening and then to a dying fire.

  That time of year thou mayest in me behold

  When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

  Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

  Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

  In me thou see’st the twilight of such day

  As after sunset fadeth in the west;

  Which by and by black night doth take away,

  Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.

  In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,

  That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

  As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

  Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

  This thou perceiv’st, wh
ich makes thy love more strong,

  To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

  A fine poem for late fall: just a few crisp leaves clinging to shaken boughs. Its late-life speaker asks to be viewed as a testament to time’s passing. The first eight lines evoke autumn and the setting sun as well as the dark night of sleep that captures in miniature the eternal obliteration of consciousness. The final image of embers glowing on the ash bed that will put them out portends the speaker’s death. Intimations of mortality strengthen or ought to strengthen the bonds of love for those who realize they will soon be left alone.

  “That’s a good one,” Don said, and then he grasped his cane and poked off to struggle with his socks.

  While warming stews or soups simmered on the stove and no-knead bread rose on the counter, I recalled Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, who knows herself to be “wrinkled deep in time.” Her passion intensified after she left behind her youthful “salad days,” when she was “green in judgment: cold in blood” (1.5.30, 77–78).

  Midlife can also become a stage inimical to love, if manic fixations pervert passion. In The Winter’s Tale, after a midlife obsession murders love, Shakespeare considers how an older and wiser husband and wife, miserably separated for sixteen years, reunite to reconstitute their family. More, this late play portrays an older couple, divided by the death of the wife, reuniting. What? How can that be? One of Shakespeare’s strangest works depicts the labors of midlife love lost and then the labors of later-life love found and resurrected in the flesh by means of the dexterity of friends.

  The fault of the separation lies squarely on the shoulders of the paranoid Leontes, king of Sicilia, who embodies Shakespeare’s most stringent criticism of masculine insecurity. Leontes’ anxiety about his inability to control women and therefore his lineage issues in irrational cruelty. Implacable but groundless jealousy convinces him that his pregnant wife Hermione has been unfaithful with his best friend. Obsessed with his paternity, Leontes accepts his existing son as a rightful heir, but decides that the baby in Hermione’s womb proves him a cuckold. He judges the queen a whore at the very start of the play, when his entreaties to persuade his friend to remain in Sicilia fail and hers—undertaken at his urging—succeed. Unlike Othello, truculent Leontes needs no Iago. He’s quite simply a mental case.