Late-Life Love Read online

  Like Don and me, Ovid’s couple—setting the table in their cottage and then tending the temple—felt their own and each other’s hearts pounding beneath the rind, the sap flowing behind the hide. Aging prepared them for their ultimate transformation into inseparably mingled limbs. Through their spoken wish to be taken together and their metamorphosis, Ovid hints at the release of exchanging the burdens of human form and consciousness for gnarled and mossy branches, enmeshed roots. Decades-long partnerships, according to one British academic, involve two people in “a process of growing into one another, of growing together like plants, of intertwining without entirely interlocking, and certainly without submerging.” When the film critic Molly Haskell considered her long marriage—“Over the years we had grown together like two trees”—she worried about losing “our distinctness of outline” and determined to prune in order “to sprout new growth.”

  It is a comfort that I can continue to comprehend the thickening, stiffening, intertwining, and sprouting through a succession of characters undergoing similar alterations. In defiance of an overwhelming representational history that decries the deficits of aging and of a powerful culture addicted to eternal youthfulness, the trick will be to find gains in the quite evident losses of these inexorable permutations.

  “People recover from tendon tears,” my treasured oncologist remarked upon hearing about Don’s second operation. Dr. Matei was undoubtedly acknowledging how depressing it was for her to deal with cancers from which many people never recover. I will miss her if she takes another job, but she deserves the excellent offers she is receiving. Tormented by the decision making, she is nevertheless pleased that if she goes, she will leave me at a juncture when the scans and the blood marker indicate a stay or pause we had never dared to hope for. At our last consultation, her use of the word “remission” startled me. Since I continue to take powerful medications daily, I had thought only in terms of a more modest word: “maintenance.”

  To be able to remain with the books, I will follow the advice that Fran would have given me—namely, to get more help. It was Fran who looked at all the weeds the previous summer and sent a gardener, whose coreopsis and cosmos now bloom between the short mounds of green grasses on each side of the brick walkway leading to the front door of the Inverness. I will ask one of the cleaners if she could serve once a week as a housekeeper to do whatever has to be done: not just vacuuming but also laundry and forwarding Project Divest by lugging unused but usable stuff from the basement to Goodwill, for surely needier people could benefit from some of the things that have amassed. I have to recognize my own limitations.

  Just the other day, I received an email from a student who had read one of my essays in the Times. Now a physician, he remembered seeing me at the podium and wondering what he could possibly learn from “an old white lady.” He must have attended one of the large freshmen lectures I used to teach regularly, introducing first-year students to a college experience most of their parents never had. They received “extra credit” if they recited a poem by heart. The last week of the semester, they lined the auditorium’s aisles: once a boy grieving his ailing father brought the house down with a fervent recitation of “Do Not Go Gentle”; once a girl dressed as a shepherdess recited “Little Lamb who made thee?”—or was that in one of the courses for majors that Don and I team taught? I knew the freshmen had never been to either Boston or New York when they commented on my “great Boston accent.” If I was old when I was still teaching, I must be ancient now.

  The night I decided to get housekeeping help, I took a clue from Baucis and Philemon and made a rustic dinner of Ps—prosciutto, peas, parmesan, and pasta—with lemon zest that made it as bright as the coreopsis and cosmos at the ramshackle front door. I am not mixing my wine with water, but I have a new way of thinking about the pattern of the quilt I am making for the baby: flying geese. I had supplemented fabrics my friend Dyan mailed to me with patterned cottons in every conceivable shade of green. The baby does not look well in the daily photographs his parents send, but he has returned home where he can benefit from their vigilant care. My geese are flying, I whisper over bits of cotton. They are not going to be caught or cooked. They augur health and recovery.

  Later that night, I fell asleep thinking of fore-edge paintings. Don had explained the term to me—I had seen images on the Internet while seeking cover ideas for the cancer book I had completed—and they intrigued me. A fore-edge painting is a scene painted on the edges of the pages of a book. In some cases, it can be seen when the volume is closed, but in others only if it is open. In the last sustained image before sleep, an ancient tome fanned open to reveal a colorful picture of an old man and an old woman chasing a goose on a meadow bordered by entwined trees.

  Lovesickness

  AFTER A NIGHT of galloping thunderstorms, we were awakened at the ungodly hour of 9 a.m. by the phone ringing. I listened to the start of a recording selling funeral insurance, and then lurched back to fulminate.

  “Very timely,” Don said.

  Our days are now chopped up by twice-weekly visits to the Trace for physical therapy at 1 p.m. The surgeon had used an electric saw to remove the cast, which he replaced with the same sort of black Velcro brace supplied after the first operation—except this one has a dial at the side of the knee, so it can bend. We will keep it locked except during therapy, when Tyrone’s peers teach Don a series of exercises. Some he must repeat daily at home: marching in place in the walker, up on his toes, then down on his heels, sidestepping, ankle pumps, straight leg lifts on the bed, wheelchair pushups. They measure his progress with a sort of protractor. He can bend his knee only 30 degrees.

  Before or after those sessions, we drive to the pharmacy for drugs or salves to deal with congestion, swollen feet, fungal infection, urine output, allergies. It seems urgent to escape into fiction, to choose a substantial, engrossing book. While Don works out in the Trace gym, I find an empty room down the corridor and start a novel that absorbs me for weeks. Gabriel García Márquez’s sprawling Love in the Time of Cholera reads like the pièce de résistance, the grand slam of the late-life love tradition. I am transported because this book is like no other I have ever encountered—riveting, rollicking, and yet, in some way I could not quite figure, deadly serious about the unique sexuality of seniors.

  Love in the Time of Cholera depicts the longevity of passion through a triangle of two septuagenarians and an octogenarian—a woman and two men living in a Caribbean seaport town at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth. At least it seems to be celebrating the heart of aging in a ribald, outrageous, and then startlingly ironic narrative. García Márquez has taken up exactly the themes that fascinate me: why, then, do I have the uneasy sense that he questions whether we should love later-life love stories?

  At the opening, a corpse dramatizes the lethal power of the fear of old age that has many in its grip, a lonely dread that is contrasted with the contentment of an aging couple. The dead man had made an irrevocable decision not to grow old and therefore killed himself at the age of sixty. Eighty-one-year-old Dr. Juvenal Urbino pronounces the cause of death “gerontophobia,” after he returns to the domestic and civic routines he shares with his handsome seventy-two-year-old wife, Fermina Daza: “they were not capable of living for even an instant without the other, or without thinking about the other, and that capacity diminished as their age increased.”

  In the brief introductory section of this long novel, García Márquez wryly celebrates the intimacies of a mature marriage. The doctor remains committed to his medical obligations and his cultural enterprises; however, along with his wife he plays the perverse games of collaborative domesticity. So, for instance, Dr. Urbino leaves their opulent house and starts sleeping at the hospital, outraged that he has been forced to bathe without soap for a week; Fermina Daza, furious that she had forgotten to replace the soap, protests that the soap has always been there. For three months, they “inflamed their feelings”: “He was
not ready to come back as long as she refused to admit there had been no soap in the bathroom, and she was not prepared to have him back until he recognized that he had consciously lied to torment her.”

  There is a whiff of ritual in this quarrel, as in my skirmishes with Don about his insistence that he alone knows the proper way to load the dishwasher. Dr. Urbino returns to their bed when he realizes that his wife wants him there, and he does so by saying, “There was soap.” When they recall this episode, “neither could believe the astonishing truth that this had been the most serious argument in fifty years of living together.”

  The intimate details of García Márquez’s descriptions touch me. A memory of Dr. Urbino’s “stallion’s stream” on their wedding night returns to Fermina Daza when “years weakened the stream, for she could never resign herself to his wetting the rim of the toilet bowl each time he used it.” Dr. Urbino copes with his oblique stream by wiping the rim of the bowl with toilet paper and later by urinating sitting down. Refusing to retire, he realizes that “even the oldest people were younger than he was and that he had become the only survivor of his generation’s legendary group portraits.” This must have been Don’s thought, too, when he attended luncheons at the Tudor Room in the Union, though some of the men with whom he helped to found Victorian Studies, the journal and the program, are still alive. Dr. Urbino explains his fidelity to Fermina Daza in exactly the terms in which Don explained his fidelity to his first wife and then to me: “he would say, it was more work than the pleasure of daytime love was worth to take off one’s clothes and put them back on again.”

  Only much later in Love in the Time of Cholera do we learn that neither Dr. Urbino nor Fermina Daza married for love. He, an eligible bachelor, had been struck by her haughty ferocity; she, alone and impoverished at twenty-one, had reached a stage at which he seemed the suitable mate. Yet her love deepens with compassion for her husband as he suffers “the disadvantage of being ten years ahead of her as he stumbled alone through the mists of old age”:

  In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts without intending to, or the ridiculous accident of one of them anticipating in public what the other was going to say. Together they had overcome the daily incomprehension, the instantaneous hatred, the reciprocal nastiness and fabulous flashes of glory in the conjugal conspiracy. It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity.

  Don and I married only a handful of years ago—at the county law building that also serves as a jail. We had to pass through a metal detector, and the officiator, with the grand name of Noble Bush, wore a red Indiana University basketball sweater. But we often feel “like a single divided being,” guessing each other’s thoughts and anticipating each other’s reactions. I had experienced enough “reciprocal nastiness” in earlier relationships to be grateful that it rarely mars the “fabulous flashes of glory” in our “conjugal conspiracy.” Still, I have found myself overcome by “instantaneous hatred,” when in a noisy restaurant Don mumbles words that I cannot decipher by lip-reading since he puts his clasped hands in front of his mouth. Only as I note their elegance do I say, “I must be going deaf.”

  At the end of the first section of Love in the Time of Cholera, Dr. Urbino falls from a ladder and his wife comes running. With “unrepeatable sorrow at dying without her,” he speaks his last words of love. Because he had pioneered new methods of warding off cholera epidemics, his funeral becomes a public event that infuriates Fermina Daza, who explodes in a blind rage filling her “with the control and the courage to face her solitude alone.” Without him, she feels like an amputee suffering pains and cramps in the limb no longer there.

  How odd, then, that this hymn to “the conjugal conspiracy” concludes with the appearance of a former lover from her youth, seventy-six-year-old Florentino Ariza, who informs Fermina Daza that he has waited “for more than half a century, to repeat to you once again my vow of eternal fidelity and everlasting love.” Odder still, after a night sobbing in her sleep, Fermina Daza awakens to the realization that she “had thought more about Florentino Ariza than about her dead husband.”

  The next sections of Love in the Time of Cholera, the bulk of the novel, consist of lengthy flashbacks, a structure that strikes me as a formally significant aspect of late-life love stories. Lovers in their seventies—even those who had a relationship with each other in their youth—need to process their complicated backstories. Those convoluted backstories make the flashback an especially important technique, enabling us to comprehend the burdens of history: here the breakup of the young lovers’ engagement and then the courtship, honeymoon, and marriage of Fermina Daza and Dr. Urbino as well as the evolution of the lovelorn Florentino Ariza.

  In the case of Florentino Ariza, García Márquez asks an intriguing question: is it possible to recover an early romance much later in life or, more difficult still, sustain a romance for half a century? Most of the pages of Love in the Time of Cholera tell the story of Florentino Ariza, who adores Fermina Daza for “fifty-one years, nine months, and four days” until he makes his second proposal of marriage. García Márquez enlists my affections for this quintessential romantic. But if the aged Florentino Ariza personifies the invincible powers of love, why—as I read—do my reservations about him mount?

  Everything about illegitimate, impoverished Florentino Ariza reeks of sentiment. As a youth, he falls in love with Fermina Daza at first sight and begins writing her perfumed letters. After two years of “frenetic correspondence,” he makes a formal proposal to which she agrees “if you promise not to make me eat eggplant.” Her thieving father, opposing the match on materialistic grounds, divides the couple by taking her on a “demented trip.” Upon her return, the eighteen-year-old Fermina Daza experiences “an abyss of disenchantments” and breaks off the engagement. When her cousin subsequently sees Florentino Ariza, he looks like an “invisible clerk with his air of a whipped dog, whose clothing, worthy of a rabbi in disgrace, and whose solemn manner could not perturb anyone’s heart”—and yet she says of him, “he is all love.”

  Throughout his life, Florentino Ariza remains enamored of Fermina Daza, though he hides his passion from her. After her marriage, he escapes first into serialized love novels, then into a series of affairs and flings, recording them in a coded book titled “Women.” After fifty years, “he had some twenty-five notebooks, with six hundred twenty-two entries of long-term liaisons, apart from the countless fleeting adventures that did not even deserve a charitable note.” In these sexual escapades, he revels in the game of love, specifically the game of hunting. A hunter of willing widows and adventurous wives and young girls, Florentino Ariza nevertheless “behaved as if he were the eternal husband of Fermina Daza, an unfaithful husband but a tenacious one.” At the same time, motivated by a fierce determination to deserve her, he begins working for the River Company of the Caribbean.

  The elderly Florentino Ariza, who finally gets his chance to court the widowed Fermina Daza, hardly resembles his younger self. While he aged, he battled baldness with “one hundred and seventy-two infallible cures,” until “a barber’s razor left everything as smooth as a baby’s bottom.” The need for false teeth, however, he welcomed “with an orthopedic smile.” He endures the complaints of old age, like repeated crises of constipation, better than most “because he had known them since his youth.” When he enrages the widowed Fermina Daza by returning as a moth-eaten wreck, she cannot imagine him as the boy she had known and writes him an insulting letter. Within a year, he wins her over with an extensive literary meditation on “love as a state of grace: not the means to anything but the alpha and omega, an end in itself.”

  García Márquez concludes his novel by exploring the treachery of the body and of family
ties that people in their seventies must overcome to attain a sexual relationship. When they first meet again, Florentino Ariza flees his beloved’s house because his “intestines suddenly filled in an explosion of painful foam” and he is terrified that she might hear his bowels “bubbling.” Adult children also serve as a challenge. Paradoxically, anger that her children judge late-life love revolting leads Fermina Daza to determine, “If we widows have any advantage, it is that there is no one left to give us orders.” She decides to take her first river expedition, which Florentino Ariza arranges on one of his company’s ships, the New Fidelity. Despite her children’s conviction that “there was an age at which love began to be indecent,” the two begin their voyage out.

  On shipboard, the lovers cope with inhibitions that often accompany lovemaking in older age. Florentino Ariza reaches with “two icy fingers,” and the clasped hands of Fermina Daza make them both realize that “the hands made of old bones were not the hands they had imagined before touching.” As they kiss, Florentino Ariza shudders because she “had the sour smell of old age,” but then considers that “he must give off the same odor.” The days pass, the river narrows, she loses her hearing, and they spend hours embracing, with him exploring “her withered neck with his fingertips, her bosom armored in metal stays, her hips with their decaying bones, her thighs with their aging veins.” “If we’re going to do it, let’s do it,” she says, taking the initiative, “but let’s do it like grownups.” He sees her wrinkled shoulders, sagging breasts, ribs covered by flappy skin “as pale and cold as a frog’s,” and undresses to her laughter.