Late-Life Love Read online

  In Love, Again, the journalist Eve Pell interweaves interviews of fifteen gay and straight couples—who met and mated after they were sixty or older—with her own experience; she argues that “the process of coupling is as intoxicating at 70 as it was at 16.” Pell calls late-in-life romances “a lagniappe,” a bonus or extra gift. Such romances have played a prominent role in a number of television shows, such as Last Tango in Halifax, River, Transparent, Grace and Frankie, and Downton Abbey. Millions of viewers trusted that Mrs. Hughes and Carson might make a lasting match. Hope springs eternal for older people trying to find partners.

  A dating site called Our Time, serving fifty-plus men and women, is “the third largest paid dating site in America.” Roger Angell, a longtime editor at the New Yorker, believes that seniors “throng Match.com and OKCupid” because “We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night.” However, “these feelings in old folks are widely treated like a raunchy secret.” Angell clings to few life precepts in his old age, “except perhaps to Walter Cronkite’s rules for old men, which he did not deliver over the air: Never trust a fart. Never pass up a drink. Never ignore an erection.”

  Like Angell’s essay, literature and film will provide me not an idealized view but a multifaceted series of perspectives: a sense not of what late-life love should be, but of what it actually entails in a host of quite different circumstances—and a vocabulary to comprehend its distinctive features. Books and movies may establish a tradition that is minor, but living in the slower tempo of later life often evokes a muted, minor key.

  Literature has always served me as a guide; however, I do not want to assemble an exhaustive or exhausting archive. Instead, I will look for honest portraits that clarify the tensions, tussles, and triumphs of my own later-life love affair. And since I am unwilling to limit myself to contemporary fiction and film, I will need to consider the fact that life expectancy varies over historical epochs. At the start of the twentieth century, average life expectancy in the West was not quite fifty years, while at the start of the twenty-first century it reached the late seventies. Stories and novels, poems and plays, memoirs and movies will help guide my efforts to nurture and cherish a partnership that has enriched my existence, and illuminate it as well.

  This, then, would become my quest as Don and I decided whether, when, where, or how to move from the Inverness: to see if I could locate works of art that help me draw a multidimensional picture of later-life love—with all its blemishes and disabilities, loyalties and glories. Bibliomemoir: that’s the coinage Joyce Carol Oates created to describe the genre I have in mind, the sort of book that combines “criticism and biography and the intimately confessional tone of autobiography.” I revere Joyce Carol Oates for her wonderful words, but also because she and her late husband, Raymond Smith, were two of the few people who invited Don and me out to dinner during a lonely year we spent at Princeton. Still, her term does not sound euphonious to my ears, so I am thinking about stories—Don’s stories and mine and those spun by creative writers and filmmakers about imagined characters.

  The eminent literary historian Harold Bloom, often a curmudgeon about newfangled approaches, believes that the best interpretive reading always involves personal confession: “True criticism recognizes itself as a mode of memoir.” He never invited me to dinner when I lectured in New York or New Haven, but then again I never invited him either—though he did come to Indiana half a century ago. Don met him at the tiny airport then in service and Harold said, “They left me alone in Iowa. Don’t leave me alone.”

  When we sat down to eat the turkey noodle soup, I gave Don one end of the wishbone. I cannot remember who cracked the longer prong, but I will never forget the words that followed my request that we reveal our silent wishes to each other.

  “I always wish that I will die before you,” I confessed.

  After a pause Don said, “I always wish that you will get your wish.” That made us both laugh.

  The next day we went to Argentum, where the jeweler explained that the ring could not be exchanged. It was one of a kind. She would attach a tiny bead on the inside of the band to keep it secure on my finger. But surely we ourselves are not one of a kind.

  A Second Chance

  PERHAPS I SHOULD have hired a driver to negotiate the snowstorm that beset us on our monthly trip to my oncologist in Indianapolis. With or without glasses, Don and I found our vision blurry and the trip perilous. We chanced it so as not to be inhibited by a stranger, so as to enjoy the quiet intimacy of five hours alone with each other: one and a half hours there, two hours in the hospital, then the return. “Heroic driving,” I said, as I always do, when he returned us safely, and then “East west, home’s best.” After the research nurse emailed to say the blood marker had gone up two points—not a good sign, but it was still well within the normal range—I determined not to tell the kids and instead to use the miserably cold weeks as an excuse to expedite Project Divest. Too much stuff had piled up and much of it had to be discarded, if we wanted to move.

  Three or four cartons of books stood stacked on my study floor, filled with sundry novels and Holocaust studies material, but more categories had to be created to cull the huge number of volumes that had accumulated. I would be ruthless and box three shelves devoted to African American studies and four full of the history and literary criticism of feminism. Been there, done that, I thought as I determined to donate them to various centers at Indiana University, for we were still ensconced in the community of the English department from which we had both retired quite a while ago. I would leave some shelves beautifully bare—maybe decorated with photos of grandchildren—and others would house the books accumulating on late-life love.

  At one end of a newly emptied shelf, I found Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, a library paperback since I was determined not to keep the physical form of what I read, but I still craved the heft of a real book in my hands, type on a page, not pixels on a screen. As in any new venture, I needed to make my way tentatively with whatever was at hand, while I searched for more ambitious and perhaps transcendent works on later-life love. Did they exist . . . would I discover them? I hoped so, but the conventionality of Helen Simonson’s novel would be a boon, providing me a glimpse of the traits of the later-life love tradition.

  My friend Fran had recommended Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand and for good reason. Not likely to become a classic, Helen Simonson’s light and bright and sparkling comedy of manners nevertheless charms by sounding all the expected chords on a late-life romance involving two or three families in a country village. Because her novel visits many of the issues older couples confront, the interaction of her characters—less abused and abusive than Jenny Diski’s—can supply a blueprint of the impediments facing aging lovers as well as some of the tactics they have devised to overcome them.

  From the moment Mrs. Ali arrives for the newspaper money and offers the fainting Major Pettigrew a glass of water in a tumbler he had used to soak his partial bridgework, awkward tenderness characterizes their evolving relationship. The sixty-eight-year-old Major—a starchy Englishman devoted to maintaining his dignity and the two Churchill hunting guns handed down by his father—has been weakened by recent news of his brother’s death, which reminds him of his wife’s death six years earlier. His embarrassment at being seen by Mrs. Ali in his deceased wife’s housecoat leads to her confession that she used to wear her dead husband’s tweed jacket.

  Later-life relationships are born of loss, Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand suggests: grief at being home alone for both the central characters as well as the added isolation of retirement for him. Mrs. Ali continues in her fifties to keep the grocery shop her husband owned, where she mixes the Major special blends of tea. Widower and widow commiserate over each other’s losses at their second meeting outside the shop when, again faint, the Major accepts Mrs. Ali’s offe
r of ginger ale and a lift to his brother’s funeral, despite his aversion to being driven by a woman.

  Their budding relationship reminds me that it was amid a smog of grief over the dissolution of first marriages that my decades-long friendship with Don blossomed into something else. I periodically ground up meats in a Cuisinart to make a pâté for his ailing wife that I would deliver to his front door. When he had to pick up one of his daughters at the airport, I stayed at his house with Mary-Alice, who looked tiny in her hospital bed and never awakened from what appeared to be more a coma than a sleep. At this same time, in the late 1980s, I had engaged the services of a kindly therapist to help me puzzle over the sorrowful breakup of my marriage. In the midst of one tearful session, she had asked me with some exasperation, “Can’t you imagine being with anyone else?” Blowing my nose and wiping my eyes, I paused for a second. “Yes,” I admitted, “but he’s married.”

  For this reason, I kept my distance from Don as Mary-Alice began dying. I attended the funeral, but ducked out of the reception afterward as quickly as possible, using the intense heat as an excuse. The thought of the funeral meats furnishing a wedding feast sickened me. Then I concealed our deepening relationship, ashamed that it started so soon after Mary-Alice’s death, though she had been incapacitated for years.

  Both the Major and Mrs. Ali exhibit the hesitation and embarrassment that Don and I began to feel as we sensed that we might—could it really be happening at our advanced ages?—be wanting to become more than colleagues and friends. The Major especially finds himself tongue-tied. Mrs. Ali relies on their common love of the classics to ask if she could consult him about an author they both admire. When the two manage a tea at his cottage, their affection for Kipling is filtered through very different perspectives: his nostalgia for the patriotic ideals of England and Empire, her wistfulness that her immigrant father’s belief in British inclusiveness would not earn him an invitation to the local pub. Coming from such different backgrounds, they nevertheless share an esteem of literature and of Sussex—its gardens, flowers, herbs, and unchanging views.

  The stops and starts of cautious late-life lovers distinguish the beginning of such relationships from the opening of the customary story of young lovers who fall for each other instantly. In A Lover’s Discourse, the French thinker Roland Barthes discusses impulsive young lovers: the “suddenness” of “love at first sight,” he explains, “makes me irresponsible, subject to fatality, swept away, ravished.” The tempo of later-life love seems less ferocious, more measured. Even in the warmth of conversations assuring the Major and Mrs. Ali that they are becoming more than friends, he stops himself from uttering the word intimacy, and instead expresses his satisfaction at their progressing to a “level above mere pleasant acquaintance.”

  Similarly, when Don was driving me home from a dinner party months after Mary-Alice’s death—we were invited together because we were known to be widowed (him), divorced (me), and also good friends—I searched one night for a way to express my delight in his company. It helped to be staring straight ahead into the darkness when I came up with a lame remark—“I like being with you”—which, once spoken, felt astonishingly bold. And it must have been heard that way, too, because it emboldened Don to propose that instead of dropping me off at my house, we stop at a bar off the highway for an after-dinner drink. In the grungy Office Lounge—dark, seedy, empty—I quickened with excitement. He, leaning forward over a sticky table, dapper, alight in the neon signs with soft-spoken interest, but never prying; me, determined not to put coins in the cigarette machine. We talked and talked into the night—about Dickens’s best novels, where to get a good bagel, our griefs. The rest is not history but an often derailed romance as we shied away from disclosures that might presume more than they ought.

  Fearing ridicule, we guarded ourselves from becoming figures of fun in each other’s eyes and in the eyes of our kids or community. The constitutionally decorous Major in Helen Simonson’s novel also avoids speaking about personal matters to protect his dignity. Yet he finds himself blurting out words of help to Mrs. Ali in potentially embarrassing circumstances. When a group of church women organize an annual dance around the theme of the Mughal Empire, for example, they snub Mrs. Ali by asking her to stand as “a welcoming goddess” because she is “so quintessentially Indian, or at least quintessentially Pakistani.” The Major intervenes by saying that she cannot serve in this capacity since he has asked her to be his guest. It’s news to her.

  At this point in Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, the particular impediments to late-life love pertain to the long history that trails behind each one of us as we age, drawing me into a world unlike my own, which is precisely what we want from fiction. Of course Don and I come from quite different backgrounds. He was raised Catholic in Chicago, I Jewish in New York; he was drafted into the Army just after World War II, whereas I was born at the war’s close. But the Major and Mrs. Ali have to deal with nasty cultural stereotypes as well as uncongenial offspring who oppose their alliance when they have the wit to imagine it: the Major’s social-climbing son and Mrs. Ali’s orthodox nephew.

  The effrontery of these young men backfires, persuading the Major and Mrs. Ali not to be pushed around by relatives. Here resides another distinction between early and later-life love stories. While young lovers must often contend with antagonistic parents, later-life lovers may have to deal with hostile or incredulous adult children who see the match as an outrage, a joke, a threat to prospects of inheritance, or an act of disloyalty to a biological parent. Oldsters look obstinate in stories of young love, but youngsters appear clueless in stories of later-life love. Alongside the officious interventions of relatives, the couple must continue to deal with their own inhibitions. When the Major escorts Mrs. Ali to the annual golf club dance, his kindled desire is dampened by consciousness of his age: “A boy could be forgiven a clumsy attempt to launch a kiss but not, he feared, a man of thinning hair and faded vigor.”

  Cultural differences come to a crisis at the dance organized around a pageant that disastrously mixes the Mughal Empire (a dynasty that ended in the middle of the eighteenth century) with the service of the Major’s father during the genocidal period of Partition in 1947. At this crowded costume party, a circus of outlandish stereotypes greets the couple, to which Mrs. Ali responds first with amusement, then with sarcasm, and finally with a sort of dazed stupor at the inanity of British orientalism. The Major gets a taste of the racism of his neighbors when Mrs. Ali in a Western gown is not recognized by people who have frequented her convenience store for years.

  Late-life lovers, according to Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand, carry the baggage of deeply entrenched loyalties rooted in family histories that can impede a new union. In Simonson’s novel, such family histories reflect national hostilities that continue to inflect the ways those conflicts are represented. The party’s grotesque travesty of history reaches its peak with a dramatization: a skit about the Major’s father, who held off a train of thugs to rescue the wife of a local maharajah. At its climax, the Major’s son, playing his grandfather, receives the maharajah’s gift of the two Churchill guns. Outraged, the elderly father of the Pakistani caterers begins denouncing the theatrical as an insult to the suffering of his people. In the free-for-all that follows, Mrs. Ali knows that the grievous atrocities of Partition should not be reduced to a dinner show. However, she also sympathizes with the Major’s pride in his father’s past.

  It seems to me that Simonson’s lovers are thwarted not only by conflicting national allegiances but also by the absence of intimate friends. My best friend, Fran, had encouraged me during my secret love affair with Don, as did colleagues when they found out about it. We would need a new vocabulary for all the younger people who now install Spotify for one of us or join the other in a walk or escort us to a concert. And by phone, I could always count on my lifelong collaborator Sandra in California: a vital force through thick and thin, more like a sister than a friend. The Major and Mrs.
Ali do not benefit from a comparable group, for which Don and I credit our decades spent teaching in the same department and my decades of friendship with the parents of my children’s friends.

  Though we had decided not to go through the hassles of having a Christmas tree, our friends Judith and Aidan made our Chanukah get-together the occasion for a tree trimming. They encouraged us to pick out a tree, hauled it into the house and onto its stand, brought the broken boxes of decorations up from the basement, and strung the lights while I celebrated by composing four dinner plates of three circles: potato pancakes, sliced roasted beets, rounds of broiled eggplant.

  After supper, we played The Messiah and put on the ornaments: tiny wooden ducks painted by my girls as a tribute to Donald, Mexican straw figures from his sister, Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum as well as Alice herself, red velvet musical instruments, birds with wires on their claws to twist around branches. The little teddy bear wearing a sweater with a Jewish star was placed on the mantle; the menorah already stood on the kitchen counter along with Latke Larry—a chubby cook who sings a doleful song when his foot is squeezed. Plush Santa dogs and penguins that could sing and dance at the push of a paw or a flipper sat in front of the big fireplace in the family room, treasures acquired on Don’s trips to the drugstore.

  The tree was magical for me, since neither my kids nor I grew up with a living tree in the house. I pleaded to keep it up, but Don had his traditions, one of which was to take it down on New Year’s Day. Throughout the subsequent weeks, the place it had occupied looked so empty that I resisted the lure of the blue couch and went upstairs, where a space heater under my desk and a blanket from Fran kept my numb feet from freezing. The comforter and the heater made the study feel like a cozy haven, as did Simonson’s novel, for even in its analysis of racism Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand holds out hope.