Late-Life Love Page 3

  What ultimately divides the couple in the novel is the Major’s inability to defend Mrs. Ali’s difficult position at a club that would never offer membership to her or people like her. She leaves the party alone, determined that the Major should stay to receive his award and that she should relinquish the relationship by leaving town and giving her shop to her nephew, a sacrifice that will require her moving in with her husband’s uncongenial family. Apprehensions about retirement, bequest, and inheritance worry later-life lovers more than they do young lovers, for obvious reasons. And in a racist environment, uncongenial family ties can trump elective affinities.

  Advice from a friend with the appropriate name of Grace motivates the Major to ride out and rescue Mrs. Ali from her relatives. They consummate their late-life love in a cottage by a lake. Before he gratefully accepts her invitation to make love, the thought of sex predictably produces anxiety, but then it is accompanied by relief and joy. What follows when they return home, where they expect to be reviled by English and Pakistani neighbors, is an unexpected gun fight. I need to consider the significance of that ending, but now I am mulling over the impulses that overcome the couple’s long-held loyalties to conflicting national and family ties. People who meet late in their lives have had time to solidify such allegiances: the baggage, or armor, weighs heavily on them.

  Part of what pries us loose from the binding allegiances of the past, what lightens the load, is the unexpected and exhilarating sense of getting a second chance. Friendship encourages late-life lovers to put some of those bags, some of that armor, down. Physical attraction, a common awareness of the vulnerabilities and sorrows of aging, the wish to be released from loneliness, a devotion to books and landscapes and conversations about books and landscapes, and a shared sense of alienation from the vulgarities and deluded values of youth: both the Major and Mrs. Ali relish the sort of Old World courtesy I enjoyed when, to my surprise, Don would open the passenger car door so I could get in.

  However, not every late-life affair evolves out of friendship, I quickly reminded myself as I plucked another book off a shelf. And not every older person wants a second chance at love and marriage. Some, like Jane Juska back in the 1990s, want a second chance at sexual pleasure. After a bad marriage, divorce, single parenthood, and retirement, Jane Juska put an ad in the New York Review of Books: “Before I turn 67—next March—I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.” (Quite a few of her correspondents thought that “Trollope” was a code word for “trollop” and meant talking dirty.) Sex for this senior woman involved a number of partners, some of whom became good friends and many of whom star in her popular memoir about the enterprise, A Round-Heeled Woman.

  Jane Juska did not begin her adventure seeking a husband, but she got the idea of placing the advertisement from a romantic comedy, Eric Rohmer’s beautiful movie Autumn Tale. Its widowed heroine, Magdali (Marie Rivière), fears that she will never get a second chance at love. At her age, she believes, it is easier to find buried treasure than an available man. Her friend puts an ad in the newspaper and then auditions candidates, while her prospective daughter-in-law decides an older philosopher would be an ideal prospect. All kinds of misunderstandings result as Rohmer enlists our affection for the frizzy-haired Magdali, so we are delighted when the vaguely sleazy philosopher loses out to the quiet man who answered the ad.

  That Magdali looks so fetching with her uncontrollable hair makes me reassess the decades I spent straightening mine—with rollers, with all sorts of pastes and potions, with a blow-dryer—and how happy I would be to have any sort of pelt now. Like Simonson’s novel, Rohmer’s movie offers an autumnal happy ending without denying or diluting the difficulties and uncertainties of later love affairs.

  Did Don open the car door for me when we went to look at two prospective houses in town the other day? A house in town would mean nearby neighbors as well as street-side garbage and recycling removal. With a master bedroom and bathroom on the ground floor, both sounded promising. The first, a yellow bungalow built in the 1920s, sported a lovely front porch with a swing, but the rooms that would have been our studies were up a perilous, narrow staircase. The second, on a run-down block of student rentals, was as dark as a crypt inside.

  No, I don’t think he does open the door for me these days, and yet I feel as if we both continue to show our courtesy to each other on countless occasions in small ways—especially by not forcing each other to do what feels uncongenial. The second chance of a later-life love affair affords an opportunity not to make all the mistakes made in the first love affairs of youth. When it became clear that a very sick grandchild needed help in New York—more precisely, that my younger daughter needed help helping her very sick baby—Don and I immediately made plans for me to travel alone so he would not have to endure the miseries of air travel. His tendency to be a stick-in-the-mud only intensified throughout his eighties, whereas my propensity to be a gadabout and flibbertigibbet abated after cancer. In this case, though, I was wanted and had to go.

  Agitated about the grandbaby, I welcomed a weekend visit from my friend Dyan, who drove down from Chicago with her guitar. Dyan’s presence felt like a godsend. Years ago, I had taught her hand quilting and now, to take my mind off my worries, she encouraged me to start a quilt for the baby, helped select fabrics from my stash, and sang folksongs of her own devising, some about her own late-life love affair with folk music: “But this could be / Last chance that I get / Reinvent me / With a new mind-set. . . .”

  The baby’s story is not mine to tell, nor is his mother’s, but it fueled my urgent need to be with them. In the polar extremity of the worst February I could remember, the giant firs drooped motionless, weighted down by their white mantle. I watched scarlet cardinals, backgrounded by heaps of snow fleecing and flocking and limning every branch of every tree at the Inverness, and prayed that LaGuardia would not shut down and that I could get the monthly blood tests and pills in the Indianapolis hospital before boarding the plane. Don knew I had to go; I knew he had to stay.

  Signs of Decline

  DESPITE FRIGID STORMS, the ten days spent shuttling between my daughter’s apartment and the hospital in which her darling baby received care, followed by the trip back home, had taken less of a toll on me than on my husband. Or perhaps I was seeing him through the clear pane of time spent apart. Don’s gait was slower and more tentative, but what distressed me was a startled look when I addressed him, a loss of hearing or comprehension that he attributed to massive congestion in his sinuses and then a band of pain around his forehead.

  In the midst of my worries about the baby, my fears about Don spiked when he tried to explain why he was packing up magazines and newspapers in the family room.

  “They might come,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “You know, the ones who come but maybe not with the snow.”

  We looked at each other—fast friends since 1973, loving mates since 1990—and knew something was wrong. Could it have been a stroke? Don has always been a master of words, spoken and written. We once attended a small dinner party for Seamus Heaney, who was in town to give a reading. When the name Louis MacNeice came up, I asked if anyone knew his verse. Don chanted, “Though you may break the bloody glass” and was thrilled when Seamus Heaney joined in on the next line: “you can’t hold up the weather.” I quickly realized that Don could not remember the names of the cleaners who arrive twice a month and who probably would not be able to negotiate the icy roads. The same sort of word loss occurred again in the early afternoon. He tried to nap, but the headache worsened. Finally, at 3 p.m. I Googled “Should I go to the ER with a headache and word loss?” and was told that I definitely should and we did.

  Ushered at 4 p.m. into an ER room with a big clock on the wall, we made a bet about when we would get out, in part to mask my dread that Don would be admitted. He guessed 7 p.m. and I guessed midnight. Then the scans began: blood and urine tests, cogn
itive and motion and balance tests, an EKG and a chest X-ray and a brain CT. As the drug administered through an IV eased his headache, he knew the day, the date, and the name of the president, and could touch the tip of his finger to the tip of the finger of the nurse practitioner. But his skin looked papery in the fluorescent light and his bulk—he was six feet tall and about 180 pounds—somehow contracted in the hospital bed.

  Don’s high blood pressure—which might have been raised by the ER itself—subsided and around 8 p.m. we were discharged, with orders to contact a neurologist the next day. He had won the bet, but had to submit to my driving us home on the dark, snowy roads. And we both had to acquiesce to a subtle recalibration of our relationship. He had taken care of me, especially during the past seven years of cancer-related surgeries, radiological interventions, and chemotherapies; now I would be taking care of him.

  That would be harder on him, because he prided himself on his independence and also on his caregiving. That night in bed, with this acknowledgment of an altered future, we embraced throughout intermittent periods of wakefulness. Intermittent wakefulness during the night accompanies our aging, along with tender pats and reassuring caresses that remind us that, yes, the other is here: he on my right, me on his left. At the start of sleep, Don always curls away from me, but by the morning he’s always curled toward me.

  The next day we would have to make an appointment with the recommended neurologist. The next few weeks would be taken up with more tests, I suspected. I nudged aside my worries about a stroke—paralysis, memory lapses, speech loss—by planning the orange meal I would prepare for supper: red pepper soup, grilled salmon, spicy sweet potato wedges. But I was also thinking that ripe love—in life and in Helen Simonson’s novel—involves a diminution in masculine privilege.

  When men age, after all, they get less bristly around the chin, softer in their muscles, shorter, aware of their own possibly waning sexual desires and of frailties and failures as they retreat from the public sphere. Sigmund Freud and his followers, who always upped the linguistic ante, consistently associated loss of teeth and hair with castration. A more diffident proposition teases me. Can it be that aging equalizes the sexes, that it produces men and women able to see each other as similarly challenged by the physical signs of decline?

  Positing just such a proposal, the ending of Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand contains breathtaking scenery, a shootout, and the start of a wedding that will unite the aging couple as well as the town they love. In Simonson’s bracing conclusion, the Major must save Mrs. Ali’s nephew from throwing himself over a cliff favored by the suicidal: Abdul Wahid’s religious orthodoxy has flooded him with shame. The Major realizes that if he fails to save the young man’s life, he will lose the love of his life. His “last stand” also involves saving himself from the bankrupt ideals of Empire and England that have threatened to divide him from Mrs. Ali.

  The Major addresses the issue that consumes Abdul Wahid by displaying his Churchill guns and talking about his own shame—that at the golf club party he valued them more than he had Jasmina Ali: “For the sake of these guns, I let down the woman I love in front of a whole community of people, most of whom I can barely tolerate. I let her leave, and I will never get rid of that sense of shame.” After his efforts fail, the Major loads his gun, situates himself between the distraught man and the cliff, and pushes the weapon into Abdul Wahid’s hands. He will have to shoot the Major, if he wants to die. As Abdul Wahid throws the gun away, the discharge hits the Major, whose legs slip over the chalky edge.

  Every aspect of Simonson’s ending emphasizes a decline in the wounded Major’s power. The novel closes right before a May wedding on the ancestral grounds of Lord Dagenham, which have been rented by the Pakistani caterers as a country house hotel. We are given a capsule history of the future of great aristocratic estates and also a tidy image—through the lost gun—of patriarchal power’s fortunate fall. As the Major morphs into—of course!—Ernest Pettigrew, he does not feel as upset as he believes he should be at relinquishing the symbol of his preeminence.

  When I consider the process of aging as an equalizer, I realize that Mrs. Ali takes the initiative in many of the smaller and larger steps that lead to the couple’s betrothal. Though she is younger than the Major—no, because she is younger—she understands the insecurity that hounds him: the fear that he may be too old to attract her, or that his future may be compromised by physical disabilities or, worse yet, might be too brief.

  Helen Simonson inherits this theme of male anxiety about aging from nineteenth-century fiction. In two of Anthony Trollope’s novels, The Way We Live Now and An Old Man’s Love, forty- and fifty-year-old male characters find themselves brooding that younger men would be more eligible grooms for the women they love. Both therefore relinquish their attempts to marry and turn themselves into kindly guardians. They have lost more than the cultural capital of masculinity, as the last name of one of these characters makes clear: William Whittlestaff.

  In some contexts, however, acknowledgment of male insufficiency need not signify impotence or castration, as one of my favorite of Don’s stories makes abundantly clear. He was chosen by the nuns in his high school to enter a citywide competition. He had to write an essay and then give a speech on what to do about Germany—it was April 1945—after the war. He did his best, but a girl won the All-American Catholic Boy contest that year; Don came in second or (he cannot remember) maybe third. At the time, he did not mind. He was worried that he would be going to war. But I have always believed it was the beginning of his magnanimity about competing with and maybe losing to smart girls. Our friend Judith calls this story “The Girl Who Became Best Boy, or How I Came in Third.” It never harmed Don’s confident sense of adequacy in adulthood, as far as I could tell.

  The anxiety of an aging man about his chances at love percolates throughout a wonderful film directed by Ritesh Batra and edited by one of my sons-in-law. In a haunting scene of The Lunchbox, the aging hero shaves before a mirror, worrying that the woman with whom he has fallen in love does not deserve to marry a man who looks and smells like his own grandfather. A mistaken series of deliveries in Mumbai’s ingenious lunchbox delivery system sparked this romance. The widower begins relishing the food he receives from an unhappily married woman and then warms to the epistolary friendship that evolves, though he must consistently battle his insecurities that he is too old to be an eligible suitor. At one point, he feels so handicapped by his age that he arrives at a planned meeting in a café, notes how attractive she looks, and withdraws without revealing himself.

  This same dynamic surfaces in a novel by Fay Weldon that centers on the love affair of the eighty-something grandmother Felicity and her seventy-something suitor William in the hilariously spoofed Golden Bowl Complex for Creative Retirement. Rhode Island Blues depicts William’s hesitancy about lying down in bed with Felicity during a series of conversations in which they disclose parts of their quite different but complicated pasts: “You don’t know how anxious I am,” William says when Felicity proposes that they talk in bed. “I’ll only disappoint you. I think I’d better go now.”

  Felicity realizes that falling in love with William—an idea that her relatives scorn as “an indignity and an absurdity”—might be “compulsive, a strategy for postponing thoughts of death and the physical and mental decline that led up to it.” However, she overcomes her own and William’s doubts because the other people at the retirement home “only have pasts,” whereas she and William “have a present.” Indeed, they hurry their courtship because “there was so little time left.” More financially secure than the many seniors who must take on part-time jobs to survive, Felicity and William—like most characters in fiction and like me and Don—have been freed by economic security from having to retool themselves for the workforce.

  While Don and I began meeting for a lunch or a walk as more than friends, I feared that his seventeen-year seniority would inhibit him. But I had been so obnoxiously pushy
in my first marriage that I determined not to take more initiatives—after, that is, the bold sentence “I like being with you.” The word for late learning, I just discovered, is opsimathy: the process of acquiring a later-life education. My father used to say, “A wise man learns from experience, a wiser man still from the experience of others.” Embarking on a second chance, some of us have to learn from experience, being unable to learn from the experience of others, though until now I could not conceive of using the word opsimathy in a sentence, and probably never will again.

  My father looked depleted in the photographs taken a few weeks before his death, though he was fourteen years younger than I am now. When older men become sick, I thought, remembering a novel I read a while ago, they can become petulant about their dependency. In Jane Smiley’s novel At Paradise Gate, a bedridden seventy-seven-year-old husband keeps calling for “Mother” when he wants his wife to help him to the bathroom. Although throughout fifty-two years of marriage she chaffed at her submission to his demands, as his heart gives out she is struck by her strength, his weakness: “When had she gotten so much bigger than he? Was there a moment that passed unnoticed, when she could have ceased feeling overtopped, surrounded, invaded, muscled here and there, when the balance changed and she could have stepped back, sat down, eased away?”

  The idea of Don having to relinquish his privilege and strength upsets me, since throughout his professional life he used both judiciously. His career in academia had been based on tireless activism for diversity and the democratization of higher education: to connect white with black colleges, to link high school teachers with university faculty, to join the local community to the college, to promote faculty governance and represent faculty grievances. This sort of service was rare back then and unthinkable now, when research alone counts for promotion.