Late-Life Love

by Susan Gubar

  Then there is the problem of the visual. With every wrinkle exposed on Stu’s loose flesh, he resembles a figure in a Lucian Freud painting: sagging breasts and a penis that “looked like a small round neck with an eyeless face barely peeking out above his pouchlike scrotum.” Dissatisfied with her own looks as well, Marianne sees bright-red raised spots on a torso reminiscent of her father’s, the flesh hanging from her bony ass and thighs, the skin visible beneath her sparse pubic hair.

  Arlene Heyman makes me consider how many people get into bed together when an older couple copulates. While Marianne and Stu use K-Y jelly and he performs oral sex, she thinks of her finger-painting granddaughter, her son, and her first husband, who had died unexpectedly. After Stu enters her, she rubs her clitoris and draws on a series of fantasies of herself at earlier stages of her life as she reaches orgasm, trying “very hard not to look pleased” so that Stu would not immediately ejaculate, which of course he does.

  There are five people in the couple’s bed, not counting her earlier avatars. The heads of older men and women are seemingly crowded with dead and alive people who rarely disappear, even when they ought to. The fact that the noun clitoris and variants on the verb ejaculate have not appeared before in my consideration of late-life love stories speaks volumes about late-life sex or about the reticence of most writers about late-life sex (including me, myself, and I).

  That Marianne’s discontent with her second husband reflects a more general discontent she had also conveyed to her first illuminates the final fantasy that closes this story, which reminds us that the primary sexual organ remains firmly positioned between the ears of people of all ages. For oldsters, it can play tricks with the past. At the end of “The Loves of Her Life,” Marianne imagines having powerful sex with her thirty-seven-year-old son, who sports the blond hair he sprouted as a baby. Her own body as “taut as a young girl’s” responds explosively as “they went on and on.” Sex in old age, whether in the head or in the body, can shock us at the perversity of our desires, including the desire to regain the person we remember having been but maybe never were and in any case can never become again. In the senior years, true and false memories go to bed with bodies.

  I had ordered a copy of Scary Old Sex as soon as it appeared, but I needed to wait until my assistants could obtain a copy of 45 Years. That took several months, during which Project Divest went into overdrive. What to do with the painting of leeks and radishes, which needs a larger wall than any at the condo? An administrator responsible for artwork exhibited on Indiana University’s campuses found a cooking and nutrition program in Kokomo that could give the vibrant canvas a home. The piano went to a young man starting up a school for children. Don donated his collection of three hundred 78 rpm records to a jazz writer who produces a local NPR program. Like the wingback chair, the blue couch was shaggy, but our housekeeper convinced us that she could profit by selling them. When Sandra arrived to introduce us to her new old partner, the Inverness had started emptying out.

  Whereas the first part of 2016 was spent hobbled by disability, donating, dumping, shoring up walls at the Inverness, and pulling them down at the condo, the second half was spent unpacking and settling in . . . with Don and me and our friends increasingly fearful about the outcome of the presidential race, despite the optimistic polls.

  On July 8, we moved into the Windermere apartment, which was filled with boxes. I worried that our courteous construction workers and movers were harboring deep resentments against the older woman running in a historic election. Don and I struggled to find the strength to unpack clothing, hang paintings, shelve books, and recycle cartons. Along with most of my cast of characters, who helped us survive the chaos of moving, we found it difficult to believe that a candidate spouting racist slogans and flaunting sexist practices was becoming the Republican nominee for president.

  We did what we could to invoke the Inverness at the Windermere. The kitchen cabinets are white. Built-in bookshelves in Don’s study resemble those in his old study. Julie found a blue couch on sale in a furniture store in town and a La-Z-Boy that looks like the wingback chair. Since the living room windows at the Inverness were bare, we bought shades for the condo that, when lifted, disappear. We used suction cups to affix a clear acrylic window birdfeeder. Warblers arrive, but no chartreuse finches or scarlet cardinals yet. Our bed in its wooden frame sits amid the same photographs of the children and grandchildren as it did in the country: Don is back on my right, me on his left. On Wednesday mornings, the beeping and whooshing and clanking of garbage and recycling trucks awaken me to the thrill that we have landed safely, though in old age we don’t tempt the gods by crowing too loudly.

  The phone in the condo rang on the bright morning of the closing on the Inverness, two hours before the legal transfer: a frantic call from Zak that the new owners could not get into the house for their final walk-through. Our housekeeper had dead-bolted the front door. I rushed Don into the car and drove for the last time down the highway, through the winding country roads, and finally along the driveway bordering the meadow. I parked next to the elephant trunk of the giant beech. Under a tulip poplar, several adults sat picnicking on a blanket with a baby and two toddlers. A man moved quickly toward us to shake hands. “Welcome to the circle of beauty,” I said, handing over a plastic bag with the keys. Standing in the verdant sunshine, I knew it would be my last sight of the place, but the beginning of a beautiful, new relationship for this young family.

  There was much commotion about cataract surgeries for both Don and me, and also about the purchase of a sofa bed so that the kids could come to stay. There was great glee, at least on my part, about Don’s snagging a disabled parking permit, though I am now the designated driver—his Honda has been sold—when we go to savor Brahms at Auer Hall or Mingus at Bear’s Place. Inside the apartment, Don moves around without the cane and has resumed doing the laundry. I find a note in his minute handwriting, though I don’t know when or why he composed it: “The nearness of you.” In the late afternoon, oblivious to queries, he sits with his headphones on, listening to his latest passion, Bud Powell, whose biography distresses him. In the evening, with a visitor describing her activism on behalf of the LGBTQIA community on campus, Don adds a new identity category: Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, Asexual, and O for Old. If there are no guests, I concoct a meal of punctuation marks or draft a column while mixing my wine with water.

  When our struggles with an Internet provider finally concluded, I could watch 45 Years, a moving portrait of marriage with Charlotte Rampling playing the sixty-eight-year-old wife and Tom Courtenay the seventy-seven-year-old husband. 45 Years broods on the unexpected crisis confronting a couple during the days leading up to and then at the party celebrating their forty-fifth wedding anniversary. The genius of the movie hinges on the explosive nature of a past occluded throughout the wide gap of half a century. It suggests that the twined and twinned intimacy treasured by aging couples can be detonated by revelations that sunder them.

  The anguish of infidelity in Andrew Haigh’s film has nothing to do with sex or adultery and everything to do with emotional obfuscation. When the incommunicative Jeff receives a notice that the remains of a former girlfriend, Katya, have been found preserved in a fissure of the Swiss Alps, he reminds Kate that he had told her about this affair, which occurred before they met. Does the youthful intensity of first love—encapsulated and conserved in memory—eclipse the quotidian pleasures of later-life love? A fissure results in the marriage as Kate struggles with her jealousy of a dead girl. While she prepares for the anniversary party, she begins a series of probing conversations with him—if Katya had lived, yes, Jeff would have married her—and eventually Kate starts sleuthing. A climb up the attic stairs leads to the discovery of color slides that she projects onto a hanging sheet. Blurry, the images present a pregnant Katya.

  Old photographs beamed in contemporary settings hint that the present remains a palimpsest: current scenes layere
d with ghostly traces of earlier scenes. Unbeknownst to Kate, her marriage has been haunted by Jeff’s youthful love affair. The shock of seeing a picture of the pregnant Katya renders ominous Kate’s childlessness. Had Jeff influenced her against having children because of Katya’s and his never-mentioned lost baby? Kate had thought about her marriage that there were two of them, but really there had been three . . . and the promise of a fourth. Katya had the aura of the original, Kate has the replacement value of a copy. As she goes on her daily rounds, Rampling’s face registers the sorrow of a loving wife losing faith in the most important relationship of her life.

  Upon her arrival at the crowded party, Kate looks at a collage of photographs on a picture board crafted by her best friend, images that she and Jeff had failed to preserve. After toasts, as she and Jeff are dancing, the alarming footage that concludes the movie captures Kate’s baffled hurt. Jeff lifts their clasped hands, but she jerks her hand away. The unclasped hands hint at the ongoing pain of irreconcilability, clarifying why I have stowed photographs of Fran inside a desk drawer in my tiny study. The aging Kate may never achieve the numinous magnetism of the always youthful and lost Katya in Jeff’s psyche and now in her own as well. Kate reminds me of James Joyce’s character Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead,” who judges himself inferior to his wife’s first lover, the dead Michael Furey. In her startled distress, she nevertheless proves how passionate she remains. Yanking her hand free, she does not submit to her fate compliantly.

  45 Years is a disturbing postscript that I would not have chosen for my conclusion. Yet I had determined to follow the art where it would lead, and somehow it picked me. I finished a draft of this manuscript in circumstances I would also never have chosen: the 2016 election. For someone with my family background, Donald Trump’s victory on the anniversary of Kristallnacht resonated ominously with events in Germany during the 1930s. In the story on which 45 Years is based, David Constantine’s “In Another Country,” Katya is a Jewish girl trying to escape Bavaria, her parents “very likely dead long before they died of age.” Love of country permeates many stories of late-life love. Older people, settled, cannot imagine tearing themselves away from the beloved land of their origins. My paternal grandparents died before they had the opportunity to die of old age in Hamburg.

  The movie 45 Years and the story on which it is based and, for that matter, the political upheaval in November manifest the fragility of long-lasting unions—indeed, the gravity of losing faith in a coalition that constitutes the grounds of an adult existence, whether it be the institution of marriage or the Constitution of the United States: both based on the ideal of “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” But of course my shock at Trump’s win cannot be equated with Kate’s anguish. They just happened to happen simultaneously.

  Still, the political situation unleashed free-floating trepidation. I determined to use my Times essays to argue against cuts in health care and cancer research, but the idea of a cockamamie Trump administration seemed terrifying. The vertiginous idiocy of politics propelled me inward, focusing my attention on revising this account, which seeks to emphasize aspirations that remain meaningful to us as individuals. Retreating to the private realm does not relieve my apprehension about the public catastrophe, however. That I am beginning to comprehend the need for detachment makes me feel worse about myself. But detachment may be what we need to cultivate in old age, as we come to terms with divesting ourselves of houses or cars, autonomy or strength, as we reinvest ourselves in what remains.

  Only later still did my friend Jonathan lead me to a gem in the late-life love tradition and the conviction that I had barely scratched the surface. With its minute attention to every passing sensation of fervor, jealousy, attraction, delight, and abandon, Guy de Maupassant’s 1890 novel Like Death seems eminently French if not Proustian in its analysis of the durability and mutability of passion. Maupassant’s aging couple comes to believe that “It’s the fault of our hearts that have not grown old”: “It is only at our age that one loves desperately.”

  Age cannot wither love, nor custom stale its infinity variety, for Eros does not hate old age, and never did. Nor are older people unsexed; we are sexed differently, or so I came to understand during a fraught confinement that turned into an intensive reading retreat. A punning, broken sentence by Charles Olson sums up my coming-of-age story: “I have had to learn the simplest things / last.” Perhaps Elizabeth Bishop put my conclusion best in an admission to her last, younger lover: “The poor heart doesn’t seem to grow old at all.”

  Even if most theorists of love exhibit myopia about late-life love, Roland Barthes makes an important point: “A long chain of equivalences links all the lovers in the world.” He finds it “scarcely adequate to say I project myself,” for “I cling to the very image” of the lovers found in art. Maybe if Barthes had lived longer, he would have read some of the texts that have linked me with a succession of fictional couples who have proliferated from the times of Ovid and Shakespeare. I cling to the resilience of these aging partners’ intimacy. When we integrate old lovers into the “long chain of equivalences link[ing] all the lovers in the world,” our ideas of agape, eros, philia, and storge become more capacious, for these types of love, which root us in the world, blend and blur into each other.

  While I sit in a postage-stamp-size study overlooking the most grotesque, stubby tree I have ever in my life seen, I consider all the friends who have helped Don and me, realizing how many different sorts of love impel them: Jayne’s love of her mother, Jan’s love of painting, Shehira’s love of her son, George’s love of birds, Sandra’s love of poetry, opera, and jokes. Jonathan, Alexandra, Judith, Mary, Dyan, and Julie have not yet attained late life, but their loves seem similarly variegated, though their opinions on the tree remain divided.

  I had first thought the evergreen outside my study was a hybrid. Short and stocky, it has a fuzzy rounded bottom, but toward the top bristling branches stick out on two sides like the limbs of a Christmas tree or, oddly, antlers on a hat. One day Julie brought over landscapers who explained it was a dwarf Alberta conifer that has started reverting to a Canadian spruce. It was mutating back to its original form. “Not a case of graft incompatibility,” they said. “Not two trees, but one that refused engineering. Easy to take down.” I’m living with it for now. I admire its ugly tenacity.

  In the new kitchen after Thanksgiving, I was rattled by finding the wishbone splintered in the turkey stock.

  “Bear, who do you think will go first?”

  “My money is on me. You had your chance.”

  I thought about my voluminous reading over the past two years and came up with the one response that made sense to me.

  “Chirp,” I said.

  Notes

  THANKSGIVING

  7The famous lovers are at the respective centers of Homer’s Iliad, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. George Eliot’s Middlemarch was published in 1871–72.

  7Lady Wishfort appears in William Congreve’s play The Way of the World.

  7The senex amans (amorous old man) tradition is discussed by Christopher Martin in Constituting Old Age in Early Modern English Literature, from Queen Elizabeth to “King Lear” (University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), p. 103. Georges Minois describes detestable old debauchers in Latin literature: History of Old Age: From Antiquity to the Renaissance, translated by Sarah Hanbury Tenison (University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 92–95, and discusses detestably desirous old women on pp. 98–100. In the early Middle Ages, Minois argues, “Old people who engaged in debauchery were far more guilty than the young” (p. 123).

  7Plato, Symposium, translated by Walter Hamilton (Penguin, 1951), p. 68.

  7On Greek associations concerning love and age, see Thomas M. Falkner, The Poetics of Old Age in Greek Epic, Lyric, and Tragedy (University of Oklahoma Press, 1995). His discussion of The Symposium begins in chapter 4 (pp. 108–52), which focuses on early Greek poe
try. The best book on how Greek philosophy conceptualizes aging is Helen Small’s The Long Life (Oxford University Press, 2007). Cicero and Seneca articulate the idea that desire evaporates in people as their capacity to satisfy it diminishes. For Cicero, “the highest praise of old age” consists in the fact that “it does not greatly long for any pleasures.” According to Seneca, “One might say that no longer feeling the need for pleasure takes the place of pleasure itself.” Both are discussed in Karen Chase, The Victorians and Old Age (Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 210–11.

  8Karen Chase discusses “ ‘senile’ sexuality” with respect to the Victorian period in an essay of that title in Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Aging in Nineteenth-Century Culture, edited by Katharina Boehm, Anna Farkas, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein (Routledge, 2014), pp. 132–46.

  8“Abhorrent old age”: The chorus of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, lines 1236–38, is quoted by Stephen Bertman in “The Ashes and the Flame: Passion and Aging in Classical Poetry,” in Old Age in Greek and Latin Literature, edited by Thomas M. Falkner and Judith de Luce (State University of New York Press, 1989), p. 160.

  8A classicist has informed me that anus (old lady) and anus (fundament, anus) are Latin homographs—words that are spelled the same but pronounced differently.