Late-Life Love

by Susan Gubar

  The paradox here: Williams expresses his longing to confess his marital failings, but he never does, and yet he concludes by rejoicing in the forgiveness he claims to have received. “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” records the aged poet’s effort to renew his marriage vows after decades of infidelities. In descending triadic lines (for thirty pages), Williams grapples with what he wishes to say yet cannot drag out. He thereby puts on display the evasions and accommodations compounded by the profound need to sustain a long partnership fissured by grudges that have amassed over decades. But the renewal of marital promises after infidelity—and worse than infidelity—reminded me of a more moving rendition of a long marriage fractured by the horrific consequences of history. I closed my William Carlos Williams and opened my Toni Morrison.

  The end of Morrison’s Jazz reads like a prose poem to “old-time love.” From the beginning of the novel, we know the enmities of Morrison’s aging Manhattan couple. At the start of 1926, Joe Trace shot and killed his teenage lover Dorcas and at the funeral Joe’s wife Violet cut the dead girl’s face. In the aftermath of slavery and Reconstruction, the figures in Morrison’s triangle associate passion with claiming someone as their own, choosing the person they have “picked out and determined to have and hold on to.” Certainly, Joe Trace—not a young “rooster” but one of the “old cocks”—chose his teen sweetheart: “I didn’t fall in love, I rose in it. I saw you and made up my mind.” Morrison explores the intense possessiveness of the dispossessed, even as she debunks the idea that young girls reciprocate old men’s desires.

  Although aging Joe Trace wants “the one thing everybody loses—young loving,” teenage Dorcas swaps her old cock for a young rooster, triggering the shooting and the cutting. All three of Morrison’s characters—the killed, the killer, and the slasher—know that choosing means risking, loving means losing. The final scene of Jazz imagines the “undercover whispers” of “old-time” spouses in bed, after they have mourned the havoc their violence spawned. Unlike the immovable conjugal bed of Ulysses and Penelope, the bed Joe and Violet chose together they kept together, “nevermind one leg was propped on a 1916 dictionary.”

  After murder and revenge—and all the depredations that led up to the violence and all the sorrow afterward—Morrison suggests that in later life “ecstasy is more leaf-sigh than bray.” Two aging bodies in one bed are “the vehicle, not the point”: the vehicle of intimacy. The same could be said of the present moment: it is not the point but the vehicle, for Joe and Violet are lying in bed remembering the past while they murmur under covers “both of them have washed and hung out on the line.” Another, more mysterious enigma: reaching out to each other, “they are inward toward the other.” The visual plays no role in their enclosure: “They are under the covers because they don’t have to look at themselves anymore.”

  The last page of Jazz reviews the more public manifestations of an enduring marriage: fingers touching as a cup is passed or brushing lint from a serge suit. Several conundrums emerge here. First, late-life lovers show their love with “no need to say” it. Second, the flamboyant narrator, who has known love only “in secret,” has “longed to show it—to be able to say out loud what they have no need to say.” What the storyteller cannot say appears in italics: “I have loved only you. . . . I want you to love me back. . . . I like your fingers on and on, lifting, turning.” The unsayable words, printed on the page, publicly acknowledge the narrator’s love of her readers as Morrison goes on to dramatize the links between loving, freedom, and reading.

  In the novel’s final lines, the storyteller urges her reader to “remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.” Instructed, I look at my hands holding my copy of Jazz, my fingers lifting and turning its pages. The loving narrator, as fallible as the characters, grants me the freedom to remake Jazz into a bluesy anthem to injurious but abiding late-life love. Loving Toni Morrison back—she once urged me to take immediate action against a particularly deranged haircut—I try to imagine you, I mean you leafing through these pages, but I lack her vision. Your face turns into the visage of first one and then another member of my cancer support group, whom I must join immediately.

  There was an important meeting to attend. At our lunches over the past half year or so, we had put on our activist hats. On the day before Christmas Eve, three of us met in the hospital with representatives of the Olcott Center for Cancer Education as well as some nurses and medical administrators. It had been a shower day, which always makes me nervous about the newly applied apparatus. But no accident occurred and the dream of my support group might come true: a registry for newly diagnosed patients who would be paired with and mentored by patients more experienced in dealing with their type of the disease.

  On my return to the Inverness, I sniffed with satisfaction: Don was baking. I have always been the savory chef, he the sweet: Christmas cookies, chewy bars, brownies, peach cobblers, pineapple upside-down cakes, muffins—to the delight of whichever visiting grandson was singing “Little Rabbit Foo Foo” or hopping away from Julie’s Farmer McGregor. I immediately set to work chopping vegetables so I could join him as he tested, removed from the pan, and tasted the triumph he would almost certainly disparage. Late-life love may heat at a lower temperature, but it bubbles and rises. We were cooking again, as we had back in our dating days, when we would prepare BLTs or a cheese soufflé that we consumed in a picnic on his or my bed. (“You make me feel so young” turned up in the first volume of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, maybe because at my house Don had to be careful about hiding notes.)

  It seemed gratifying to anticipate laying out a quilt sandwich of topping, batting, and backing. Before and after I sewed during late-night comedy news shows, Don and I would while away the hours by decrying progressive political rifts, signing petitions, mailing contributions, and kibitzing about the world our grandchildren might inherit. Happily, the neuropathy that prickles my soles or numbs my toes has not affected my hands. I had found yards of delicate, green-and-white fabric in one of Molly’s closets, which meant that the coldest months could be spent with the warm, basted flying geese lying in my lap, ready for the hoop and the tiny running stitches that would bind it together.

  Don was sixty-seven when we moved into the Inverness and I will be seventy-one moving out, I thought as I picked up the books I had studied to understand one of Philip Larkin’s most famous poems. But we age at different rates and the cancer has taken its toll. Don’s response to “An Arundel Tomb” had mystified me. “Safe in their alabaster chambers,” he had said; however, Larkin’s lovers were hardly safe in their tomb. We know nothing about them or the inside of their ancient sepulcher. Larkin remarks only on the effigies lying on top of it.

  Side by side, “The earl and countess lie in stone” with blurred faces. Like Shakespeare, Larkin puns on the word “lie.” Stone statues of the husband and wife lie horizontally, but the sculpture itself also lies about their marital intimacy. Although the eye of the observing poet sees with a tender shock that the left-hand gauntlet is empty—the earl’s ungloved hand clasps the hand of the countess—Larkin realizes that this detail illuminates not their affection but the commissioned sculptor’s wish to prolong the significance of their names. The earl and the countess will never “be stone no more.” They will be nothing but the recumbent stone replicas that probably misrepresent their partnership.

  The middle of the poem emphasizes the indifferent advance of time as generations of visitors gaze at the medieval figures, not understanding their circumstances. During the passage of season following season, years following years, an endless parade of people come to the cathedral. The earl and the countess recede into an incomprehensible “scrap of history”: “Only an attitude remains.”

  Regardless of the actual nature of the earl and the countess’s marriage, the attitude that remains results from their holding hands, stone skin touching stone skin, palm in palm. In pictures of the tomb,
he lies on her left, she on his right. Her right hand crosses over her body to hold his right hand. Larkin later faulted himself for getting “the hands the wrong way round,” but it makes no difference when we get to the final stanza:

  Time has transfigured them into

  Untruth. The stone fidelity

  They hardly meant has come to be

  Their final blazon, and to prove

  Our almost-instinct almost true:

  What will survive of us is love.

  Once again, Larkin the critic later quibbled with Larkin the poet: “Love isn’t stronger than death just because two statues hold hands for six hundred years.”

  The “central paradox” of this poem, according to one scholar: “the historical untruth that the modern visitor perceives is the important truth that the figures on the tomb have to show.” Despite the onslaughts of centuries and the limits of our understanding, the couple has “Persisted, linked” down through the ages. They may not have embodied their “stone fidelity,” but its conveyance has become a testament and tribute not to the poem’s romantic maxim—“What will survive of us is love”—but rather to our almost-instinctual need to believe and to act on the “almost true” belief that “What will survive of us is love.” Love has not survived, but our wish that it will does.

  More modestly than Shakespeare, who boasted about his monumentalizing verse, Larkin hints that the lovers’ “final blazon”—the ultimate display of their virtues—is of the sculptor’s devising and also of his own. Surely more people read “The Arundel Tomb” than visit the Arundel tomb. Surely many visit the Arundel tomb because they have read “The Arundel Tomb.” And Emily Dickinson’s poem “Safe in their alabaster chambers” does illuminate Larkin’s verse. Dickinson presents the dead in their caskets, oblivious to the ongoing breezes, the babbling bees, and the singing birds. The imperturbable cycles of the seasons mock our fervent wishes. The earl and the countess are not safe inside the chamber of their Arundel tomb; they have crumbled into dusty obscurity. Yet their “stone fidelity” does stay safe in the inviolate chamber of “The Arundel Tomb,” which—along with many of the other works I have read this past year—remains immune to the vicissitude of time and shelters the union Don and I hope to continue prolonging a bit longer.

  At that moment, on the brink of a new year, a lightbulb went on and I hummed, vibrated, pulsed until I felt marinated, preserved, pickled, cured in a mishmash of rippling realizations. My passionate bond with Don is based, yes, on his humor and on his kindness, intelligence, and reliability, but also on our mutual head-over-heals romance with literature. Wait! Shouldn’t that be head-over-heels? Maybe there’s an element of truth in every typo. The poems and stories Don and I share have played such a healing role during the past year and, indeed, during our decades together. On so many occasions with him, the mental aerobics of reading have upended me, sent me into exhilarating cartwheels. Without literature, we might have survived all our various upsets, but impoverished of the piquancy it transmits. Not just piquancy, but the word will have to do.

  Most poets of late life heed “Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near.” Here resides the reason for the paradoxical nature of late-life love poetry, which emphasizes the contradictory nature of desire for couples persistently linked through natural seasons and historical cycles. Awareness of transience can strengthen our human attachments, but human attachments heighten our awareness of transience. “No one in love really believes love will end,” Anne Carson once stated in an analysis of a classical text. “They are astonished when they fall in love, they are equally astonished when they fall out of love.” Yet lovers living on an implausible cusp know all too well that love will end and not because they have fallen out of love. This tradition—attentive to the brevity of our prospects—imagines not love against death, but love and death. Not W. H. Auden’s “We must love one another or die” but his “We must love one another and die.”

  Anticipatory grief—not morbid, but vigilant—is betrothed to love in late life. I am undoubtedly a nudnik, but my broodings are not unprecedented. Maxine Kumin, in her beautiful poem “The Long Marriage,” teaches me the compound German word Torschlusspanik: fear of time running out. “Every couple who stays together long enough,” Alix Kates Shulman knows, “has intimations that a catastrophe is waiting.”

  As my dear dead friend Carolyn Heilbrun intuited, “We who grow old can taste the biting edge of passion’s anticipated annulment, and savor it as the young cannot.” Her remark reminds me of the mellow tints and tart tastes of ripe fruit and of all of Shakespeare’s pronouncements about ripeness and readiness. Carolyn, with whom I frequently converse, would have objected to this book’s emphasis on personal fulfillment not through courageous work or heady quests or tough-minded politics. I agree with her that women, historically programmed to depend on men, should seek independence. Yet too many aging women are relegated to loneliness, as are too many aging men. The social isolation of the elderly is toxic.

  To brace myself against the miseries of moving, I sifted through all the stories and novels, poems and plays, memoirs and films in which later-life lovers cope in a multiplicity of ways with the degeneration of the body, the diminution of the libido, the permutations of eroticism, the prospects of a long past and a short future, the problems of controlling or covetous children and of retirement, the pangs and pleasures of caregiving, the storehouse of memories that have accrued over time or possibly diminished or disappeared, and the repercussions of earlier trauma.

  The compendium of couples I have assembled sends a resounding retort to overwhelmingly negative valuations of aging. Not superannuated, the duffers and fogeys, grannies and codgers, fossils and dinosaurs I have found dislodge gloomy premises about old age, for they extol—amid the ordeals of aging—the mutuality and reciprocity, the passion and compassion at the heart of tender relationships in later life. They clamor in a crescendo, voicing variations on an indelible theme sounded by Charlie Smith in his poem “The Meaning of Birds”:

  Look around. Perhaps it isn’t too late

  to make a fool of yourself again. Perhaps it isn’t too late

  to flap your arms and cry out, to give

  one more cracked rendition of your singular, aspirant song.

  With splendid specificity, all the creative texts I have studied provide alternative models for thinking about aging. Scanty and eccentric though they may be, their tributes to love and friendship tell me that many stories have yet to be recounted. But there is a late-life love tradition, and it explores the manifold ways enduring passion sustains older people dedicated to prized partnerships and also to a range of desires: to keep on writing or reading, to go on seeing and savoring beloved places or works of art, to continue nurturing each other or progenitors or descendants, to prolong the kaleidoscope of fractured and reformed memories that accrue as a diminishing future is enhanced by a lengthening past that embellishes the present for those lucky enough to be loving while living in our final years.

  Later

  DURING THE FIRST third of 2016, I did not think that we would get out of the Inverness. In January, I fell on the driveway, trying to drag the garbage bin up to the road. I can still feel beneath my hands the shock of the icy glaze I had not seen on the asphalt. Throughout that winter and the start of spring, after Carrol and then Ilka died, I hauled myself around on a walker, while Don ominously lost thirty pounds along with the little strength he had accrued. (Julie put purple bling on my walker to distinguish it from Don’s.)

  Prospects were dismal by the time we got to Passover, when workers began anchoring the walls of the house to stop it from slipping off its foundation. The Inverness, it turns out, had been imperceptibly moving toward the ravine. With the help of physical therapy (for me) and thyroid medication (for Don) and a crew of laborers at the Inverness and also at the condo, we persevered. I began to discern a pattern in aging. It plunges us down precipitous drops, and then (if we are fortunate) we land at a lower plateau, where
we stumble and fumble our way through the depleted but gratefully accepted next stage of being.

  In that period, when the dumpster Julie predicted did appear and we started bagging and tossing what could not be given to friends or family or donated to charitable organizations, I was startled by the appearance of two new works about later-life love, both of which received rave reviews: Arlene Heyman’s short story collection Scary Old Sex and Andrew Haigh’s movie 45 Years. Each title underscores themes I had pondered during the previous year.

  The first suggests that sex between old people has always been deemed scary: creepy or sinister according to most cultural precepts and daunting or intimidating for those who want to engage in it. The second accentuates the idea that aging lovers become preoccupied with numerical calculations as we count, recount, and commemorate our years apart and together. While Don and I shed boxes of books, stashes of fabric, and sets of crockery, both titles deepened my realization that the older we are in our partnerships, the more past there is to thicken the tissue of the present. Call me an opsimath wannabe.

  Especially in the unusually graphic descriptions of “The Loves of Her Life,” the first tale in Scary Old Sex, Arlene Heyman distinguishes old, premeditated sex from young, spontaneous sex. The story describes the intricate planning that often prefaces lovemaking in later life. Because of acid reflux, sixty-five-year-old Marianne must stay upright for a few hours after any meal. Low levels of estrogen mean she needs various tablets and creams, while Viagra and antidepressants make seventy-year-old Stu feel spacey, and timing becomes important to him as well. Marianne reminds herself to suppress any sounds so that Stu won’t ejaculate early, which generally happens unless he masturbates beforehand. “For them, making love was like running a war: plans had to be drawn up, equipment in tiptop condition, troops deployed and coordinated meticulously, there was no room for maverick actions lest the country end up defeated and at each other’s throats. . . .”