In Praise of Older Women
Page 17
That’s how I got together with Ann MacDonald again. I hadn’t met her for about a year, when one afternoon I saw her sitting a few tables away from me in a newly opened Hungarian coffee house. We smiled and waved and when she was leaving, she stopped by me.
“How are you?”
“How are you?”
Neither of us knew what to say next. I asked her to sit down and have another espresso with me, if she wasn’t in a hurry.
“I’d love to,” she said in a strained voice. “I have a lot of time on my hands these days.” It was late November and she was wearing a black velvet dress which set off perfectly her rounded figure and bright rosy complexion. “I like this Hungarian place,” she remarked as she sat down, “it’s wonderful to have places like these in stuffy old Toronto.” For a while we discussed the changes European immigrants were bringing to the city and of course I took full credit for them.
“I’m sorry,” she finally said, “that we had so little time to get to know each other at Couchiching.”
“I thought even the time we had was too much for you.”
“Yes, you must think I behaved like an idiot. As it turned out, Guy couldn’t care less what I do.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Oh, it’s a long story. Now he claims that I make him feel old and unattractive. So he seduces his secretaries. I wouldn’t mind so much, but he insists on telling me all the details. I get the impression he’s expecting me to applaud him.”
It’s because you always tried to look smarter, I thought. “Oh well, that means your opinion is still the most important thing for him. It means he still loves you.”
“I doubt it. But I don’t really worry about my marriage any more. I made up my mind to enjoy life.”
She threw promising glances at me, but I had a date, and I wasn’t going to miss it this time. We talked some more, about the weather and Toronto, and parted amicably. Old enemies, new friends.
In the following months, I heard many stories about Ann MacDonald’s love affairs. Sometimes she told me about them herself, at our accidental meetings. There was a new sensuous evenness to her personality; she had the melancholy self-confidence of a woman who has several lovers to look after. As we exchanged confidences, I told her about my problem of wanting too many women.
“I know how it is,” she sighed. “I’m the same way myself.”
“You’re the one I really need. You understand me — with you I wouldn’t have to pretend.”
“It’d be nice,” she conceded wistfully, reaching out to press my hand. “But let’s be practical, Andy — we’d only compound each other’s problems.”
She expressed her refusal with such affectionate regret that only later did I realize that she had turned me down. The disaffected housewife had become a lady of the world, and I couldn’t help being impressed. I began thinking about her, wishing she would ring me up, wondering jealously about the men in her stories. Did she talk to me for the same reason that her husband told her about his exploits? Was she trying to annoy me or did she just want an audience? Gradually I became convinced, not without misgivings, that I was in love with her.
Thereafter, I tried to seduce Ann MacDonald each time we met, but I didn’t succeed until the winter of 1962. I cornered her at a party, while her husband was busy in another room and none of her lovers seemed to be around. She was wearing a low-cut evening gown, and I literally backed her into a corner and leaned so hard against her that I could feel the warmth of her breasts through my dinner jacket.
“I got the worst of you,” I protested. “Here you are, a wise and beautiful woman, and I have to content myself with memories of a silly bitch at Lake Couchiching. It isn’t fair. We must put this right. Besides, I think I’m in love with you.”
Ann’s eyes gleamed with something more like a flash of lightning than my old familiar glint, but her voice was motherly and soothing. “You’re a stubborn boy, aren’t you?”
“I don’t mind being a boy. In fact, the older I get, the less I mind being a boy. I want to rest my head on your breasts.”
“You’re a dear-dear baby.”
That I didn’t like, baby was too young. I let her drift away.
After midnight, when the guests no longer bothered hiding in dark corners for their furtive but passionate embraces and we were all heady from having too much of too little, I went in search of Ann again. Discovering her in the hands of our tall and lecherous host, I waited by stubbornly until the appearance of our jealous hostess.
Then Ann was glad to notice me. “I don’t know where Guy is,” she said, flushed. “If you’ve nothing better to do, you can drive me home.”
By the time we reached the street, she’d agreed to drop in at my place. She filled my small car with her scent and gently stroked the back of my neck as we drove along in silence. I was exalted and relaxed, dreaming of our happy future. There’d be no more running for either of us, I’d be Ann’s slave and spend with her every moment she could spare from her husband and children.
Ann’s thoughts must have been different, for she suddenly withdrew her hand from my neck. “Listen,” she said anxiously, prompted perhaps by the memory of an unpleasant experience, “I don’t know enough about you, we never really made love you know. I hope you aren’t one of those men who slip in and out just like that.” The very thought made her belligerent. “Frankly I have enough lovers right now and I don’t need little skirmishes, even for old time’s sake. If you want anything, you have to promise me performance.”
I wonder how other accidents happen. I shot through a red light and ran up on the sidewalk, stopping the car just short of a lamp post. “Listen,” she said fiercely, “if you get me into an accident and my daughters hear about us I’m going to kill you. Can’t you drive?”
It was about one in the morning and we were on a quiet residential street. No one had seen us. I backed the car carefully off the sidewalk and for a moment thought of turning it around and driving her back to the party. But the idea of having unfinished business with the same woman twice was intolerable. “Don’t worry,” I seethed, “you’ll have a night you’ll never forget.”
Neither of us said another word until we were inside my apartment. “I’m sorry,” Ann pouted as I helped her off with her coat, “I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that a woman is always at such a disadvantage. She never knows what she’s agreeing to.”
“As a matter of fact, I was planning to make you fall in. love with me,” I said sourly.
“Well, it’s still not too late.” She leaned against me and placed my hands on her buttocks, just as before. “And we don’t have to lie on a scraggly patch of grass in the woods,” she reminded me, and slowly rotated her buttocks to please my hands. I tried to undress her, but she didn’t want help. If Ann demanded performance, she was also willing to give it, and she did a strip-tease for me, throwing her clothes away with a tempting grace of anticipation.
Yet, when I tried to move above her on the bed, she held me away. “I don’t like it from above,” she said with thinly veiled exasperation, “Do it sideways, please.”
I grew dead in an instant. Playing for time, I began fondling her.
After a few desperate tries, Ann conceded our defeat. “Never mind, I’ve lost my impetus too, so you don’t have to worry. We just don’t have much luck with each other, I guess.” She leaped out of bed and collected her things, letting go of her temper on her bra, which seemed to have disappeared. I finally spotted it beneath the bed and crawled under to retrieve it for her.
“Thanks,” Ann said, “you’re wonderful!”
She withdrew to the bathroom with her clothes and handbag. I didn’t plan to follow her but after about twenty minutes I went to see if she was all right. I found her fully dressed, elegant and composed, brushing her eyelashes. When she saw the reflection of my guilty face in the mirror, she smiled at me with affectionate indifference. Then she took a final, thoughtful look at herself.
“
Oh, well,” she concluded, “one orgasm more or less doesn’t really matter, does it?”
The truth and humiliation of that moment marked, I believe, the belated end of my youth. I wanted to go to some peaceful, faraway place. A few days later, when I heard about an opening in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan, I applied for the job. Saskatoon didn’t turn out to be as quiet as I had thought, nor was I quite ready yet to sit down and grow old. But the adventures of a middle-aged man are another story.
AN INTERNATIONAL LITERARY SENSATION!
IN PRAISE
OF OLDER WOMEN
A best seller in Canada, the United States, and
England, Stephen Vizinczey’s highly acclaimed
novel of erotic experience is a forthright tribute
to mature women from a young man.
“He likes women, this Hungarian Julian Sorel,
not girls… . If this is unfair to girls, it’s a nice
valentine to their slightly elders … an essay on
erotics — refreshing, individual, forthright and
debatable.”
— Eliot Fremont-Smith, New York Times
“One by one he brings into the cool radiance of
memory the women he loved… . In English I believe we have to go back to Boswell’s London
Journal to find anything that matches Vizinczey’s
book for freshness, candour and unaffected
charm.
— Kildare Dobbs, Saturday Night
“András’s fiascos with girls are wildly funny, and
yet they, and the advice they occasion, are saved
from the merely facetious by resting on an intellectual and emotional structure… . His sensuous—
ness justifies itself, like the extravagance of
champagne, by its own effervescence.”
— Brigid Bropby, London Magazine
Printed in U.S.A.