Unaccompanied Women Read online

  Oh no you don’t, Greta. The very tiptop item on my list of topics to be avoided is Elderhostel. Now, I know that Elderhostel is a wonderful organization, one of the few with no detractors, but I have heard more than enough about accommodations, good and bad, and bus drivers, ditto, from the ever-increasing number of retired persons I happen, by virtue of my age, to know. Alas, I am too late; she takes my silence for encouragement. “My main problem with Elderhostel, or any of the trips I’ve been on, is the single supplement, and should I pay it?”

  Indeed this is a concern, and not a trivial one either, but seen perhaps from my own decadence, Greta is far less interesting and appealing when she talks about travel than when she turns into a butterfly. She goes on: “I hate it when we stay in college dorms. The bathrooms are down the hall, and sometimes they’re unisex. I remember up in Oregon, where we went for the Shakespeare, I kept bumping into the bus driver in the bathroom, and then in Switzerland it happened once, too, though the bus driver wasn’t the same one, naturally.”

  She is on a tear. “But this once, this one time I didn’t pay the single supplement, I got put together with this really, really boring woman, you wouldn’t believe . . .”

  I tear a sheet out of the my little green writing book and write the title of my book on it. “Here,” I say, “get this book. You’ll like it.” And I slip off my chair and out of the corner bar at the Plaza, into the wintry winds of West Fifty-eighth Street.

  The following October I receive a letter from Greta, who did indeed like the book, as did her single women friends. Greta has just acquired a new home in a very large retirement community and invites me to visit her and “meet a wonderful group of women.” A new house and with money left over, I’ll bet.

  The life expectancy of butterflies is short, and I wonder if Greta, like so many people, has gone to New Mexico to die. Probably not. Nabokov, in his lifelong fascination with butterflies, traveled many places to study and collect butterflies. In the Grand Canyon of Arizona he discovered and named a new species of butterfly: Neonympha dorothea. Maybe Greta is a new species, Neonympha gretea. Nymph: One of the young of any insect that undergoes metamorphosis. Wouldn’t that be nice.

  The next year Greta writes to give me an update on her sex life: neither she nor her women friends have one. They are all attractive and financially independent but cannot find a man who is not very, very old; they wish for men unlike those who come to mixers at the retirement center and, if they are ambulatory at all, shuffle. So how, Greta wonders, does one meet a man? Hang out in bars? Come tell us, she invites me. Me? Tell you how to do it? How to meet a man? What would I say? Don’t give up, I’d say, Don’t give up. Empty, hollow. Greta has not given up, nor have her friends; otherwise they would not ask the question I do not have the answer to.

  This question—How does one meet a man?—will assail me wherever I go: to readings, to panels, to signings, to the speakers’ dais. And I don’t know what to say. I would certainly not recommend that everybody post an ad in the personals, though I would not recommend not doing it either. I do not like this position of authority my readers will carve out for me. I didn’t write a how-to book; I did not write an advice book. I sure as hell would not recommend that anyone do what I did once the personal ad came out—traipse across the continent, heart in hand. I’m no expert! I’m no sexpert! Never mind. I am what my readers want me to be, and so as I move about the country giving readings, the question becomes a plea: “Tell us how to meet a man.”

  I fall back on my reading: In novels how do men and women meet? Elizabeth Bennet meets Darcy after Darcy’s friend, Mr. Bingley, moves into the neighborhood and Elizabeth’s father calls on him, thus paving the way to marriage, though not before the hurdles of pride and prejudice have been surmounted. Jane Eyre meets Mr. Rochester when she takes the position of governess to Mr. Rochester’s daughter. What a mess that turns into! Well, in novels old and new there are dances and parties and church suppers and funerals and beaches and boardrooms where young women meet young men, and, if the writer takes kindly to them, they marry and, we are led to expect, live happily ever after. But, my women readers ask me, if I’m not young, if I’m widowed or divorced or just alone, how do I meet a man?

  What am I supposed to say? The truth? That my outright boldness, my shamelessness, got me not just one man but five? And that they all live three thousand miles away? And that my all-time favorite dumped me for a younger woman? And that I can’t get a date on the whole West Coast? Why are you asking me, for crissake? But I answer finally; we are all getting desperate here. I say something like, “This is the new millennium, ladies, go online.”

  Or we—okay, I—could write a personal ad and ship it off to Gotham, again. All this blubbering about getting a date and not getting a date, why not begin anew? Why not write an ad that says: “Wanted: A man to stay the course.” The thing is, I don’t know if that’s what I want. I do know I haven’t the courage to begin again. I do know that my heart has not mended; Lord knows what would happen if it got broken again. I am trying to hurt less, not more, and New York, where being alone is the norm, helps me heal. A little vacation from the slings and arrows of love is what I’m taking, though if that is so, what the hell am I doing in a bar? Alone?

  My e-mail life, my whole life, is dreary because Graham is not in it. So in every Manhattan bar and restaurant I visit in this cold, cold month of January, I raise my glass and wish the newly weds all happiness. And I hope that when Graham exercises his conjugal right, he thinks of me.

  CHAPTER 9

  if there were world enough and time

  Who breathes overhead in the rose-tinted light may be glad!

  —SCHILLER

  UNLIKE GRETA AT the Plaza and despite my advice to the lovelorn—go online, don’t give up—I do not feel like a butterfly. I feel like a collapsed lung. At home back in Berkeley, back in the real world, my new landlords are taking possession of their real estate. They are a happy-looking couple, she twenty-eight, he thirty-two. Where the hell did they get eight hundred thousand dollars? Never mind, they want to keep me; they need my rent money to pay the taxes. So they double my rent. I cannot pay double my rent. I will have to grovel. I do, I beg for a few months’ grace period, promising to pay up once my book brings me a bit of money, sounding, I hope, more certain about that prospect than I feel. Now what will happen? What if they read the book and decide they don’t want a notorious person living in their backyard? Or one they may find guilty of moral turpitude? And what’s the use of lying awake at night worrying about all this? I can’t do a thing about it, certainly don’t have the money to go out and buy myself a place to live where I would be safe from the whims of the moneyed class. I’ll do the only thing I can do: sit tight and hope.

  At this point I can’t even imagine an acceptable version of my future; I can imagine, however, a future that will keep me nervous and on edge from fear of eviction, of being dumped, rejected. Where is everybody, dammit? Graham is a happy, I suppose, husband. John is content to sit in his fully owned and paid-for domicile and complain about the weather in New England, Sidney is sometimes on the telephone, Matt is too off-and-on, and c’mon, these men didn’t sign on to steady my life, to make me secure. They did what I asked: gave me good sex and fine conversation. It’s just that sometimes I could use a little help, a little accompaniment in a world so uncertain, so uncaring, so random in its meting out of punishments and rewards, a world remarkable for, in Thomas Hardy’s words, “the persistence of the unforeseen.” With all that in mind, maybe I ought to look for another rental:

  Bdrms: 2 Baths: 1 Furnished: no

  Rental period: month to month

  Unit has: stove, refrig, coin-op washer/dryer, carpet

  Landlord pays: water, garbage, heat

  # Units/bldg: 20 What floor: 2 # Stairs: 10

  Available parking: w/extra fee

  Wheelchair access: no (too many steps)

  Not yet, not yet.

  Add to everything t
his fact: I am getting no sex. I am back at square one, and square one is looking pretty bleak. Here where I live, women my age don’t go to bars alone. Women my age go to the movies alone—that’s okay, nobody sees you, anyway—and to concerts alone and museums alone. I didn’t used to go to all these things alone; until recently I went with my great good friend, Jo, a funny, irreverent, and marvelously intelligent woman, who at seventy-five got carried off by the cancer that had plagued her for the last twenty years of her life. During our friendship, when we weren’t in a concert hall or a museum, we were sitting together at her house, talking about the books we had just read, about the ideas and people in them, about the times those people lived in, about everything in that world and this. Jo is the woman I would have been if I had had good sense and a good figure, a very good brain, and great hair. She looked after herself in all ways, and she did it without a man. Though she enjoyed the company of men, she was more or less content to go home—she bought it with money she earned herself—alone.

  When she died, the lights went out for a while; for a while all the tickets we had ordered grew dusty in my drawer. Occasionally I would take a ticket out and show up at the performance hall, only to turn around and go home, my heart too heavy to bear it alone. Why are all the good ones dying? In my head I keep a list of people whose departure from this earth would make the world a better place. But so far the earth is poorer for the absence of my good friend Jo, who lived a rich life without a man to guide her or support her or buy her a house. She loved one man her whole life, who married everybody but her. She left a house that is perfect for me. We’ll see.

  Time does not heal all wounds, but now I do go to movies and concerts and museums—never bars, my butterfly wings having been clipped by the absence of Jo and by United Airlines en route from JFK to SFO. In the mirror of the plane’s restroom, once we are “free to move about the cabin,” my scalp shows pink. Jesus, I always had a lot of hair, What the hell happened to it? How long can I carry this off, this sensuality of mine; how long before I will have to fake it? Or not?

  And even in New York in those months long past, after Graham and I made love and I turned to him when it ended, I knew that my face was folding in on itself. I saw myself in his eyes, with all my creases and lines, the looseness of my face and breasts and belly, and I pulled the pillow over my nakedness and wondered how he could make such amazing love to me. I never asked and he never told. And now he’s gone, and nothing, absolutely nothing, can fill the enormous emptiness that is my center.

  So how do we live alone at the center of our shrinking selves? Thank God for Freud, who in his depressed and pessimistic, yet wise and articulate, way convinced me long ago in Civilization and Its Discontents that art—music and painting and literature—could sustain us in the face of life’s brutality. It does, indeed.

  The concerts I go to, my favorites—Jo’s, too—occur in St. John’s Presbyterian Church three blocks from my house. The concerts are called Chamber Music Sundaes because they happen on Sunday afternoons and because they are sweet and, like dessert, well earned by those who have eaten all their vegetables for years and years and are now allowed to partake of the last and the richest part of the meal. We are all regulars here, and, except for the musicians, I am the youngest person in attendance, a fact I used to point out to Jo, who was a few years older than I. Across the aisle a woman colored brown and wrinkled by years of sunshine dangles her hand over the armrest of the end of the pew. She wears gorgeous turquoise rings, many of them, sometimes two on one finger, the turquoise set in heavy silver. They are beautiful, and I bet she can’t get them off, for the knuckles of her fingers are knotted, swollen large and shiny, arthritis having come to call and deciding to stay. She will die with her rings on, for sure.

  A woman down front, dressed in red, turns to the audience in search of her friend. She has had a face-lift and is a living example of why not to. Her skin, a sunburn-red, is stretched—God, it looks painful—across her cheeks, her mouth pulled to the sides of her face. Why is this woman smiling? Or is she?

  In the pew in front of me a woman says to her friend, “We saw that cute little movie, the one with Diane . . . Diane . . .”

  “Keaton,” says the friend. “The one with Jack Nicholson: Something’s Gotta Give. Fred and I haven’t seen it. Did you like it?”

  “It was cute. Not great, but cute.”

  The friend speaks, “We saw Calendar Girls last week. Now, that was cute.”

  “Is that the British movie where the older women pose nude for a calendar?”

  “Yes. Helen Mirren was in it.”

  “Are you a Helen Mirren fan?”

  “Oh yes, we saw her in a Chekhov play once.”

  “I’m not a Chekhov fan.” Oh boy, she’d better watch out; those are fighting words in Berkeley. “Shhh.” The music is about to begin.

  Jesus! Why don’t they talk about sex and romance and “older” women? Yeah, Keaton at fifty-something sure is long in the tooth, and when, midpicture, she discards her turtleneck and shows up in a black minidress, why, she doesn’t look old at all! So then, metamorphosis complete, Jack gets her, although he has to wait till practically the end of the movie when, finally, she doffs the shroud of age and dons the spaghetti straps of youth. Isn’t Something’s Gotta Give supposed to be about “older” women and their aging bodies, and doesn’t it show that young men—Keanu Reeves, for god’s sake—can find “older” women attractive? What about all those “older” women, those Calendar Girls, over there in England getting naked, Helen Mirren included? Bet that sold some tickets. And what do the elderly women in front of me—they are not “older,” they are “old”—think about this? Absurd? Embarrassing? No, they thought it was cute.

  Occasionally my rational voice breaks in to save me from drowning in my own impatience; this time it says, “Not everybody has to be profound, you know. Not everybody has to think all the time.” “But hell,” my impatient self answers, “everybody’s a critic, and a bad critic at that, rushing to judgment, leaving discussion in the dust, getting to the end as fast as they can before reason becomes necessary. When they say ‘cute,’ the tone is dismissive.”

  Why don’t they talk about the British film The Mother? It’s playing right around the corner, and it puts the Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton film to shame: Anne Reid, the actress who plays the mother, is a real woman, age sixty-five and beyond, and she looks sixty-five and beyond. She has a belly, she is broad in the hips, her chin has descended all the way down her neck. On the other hand her hair remains brown and luxuriant; I wonder why the filmmaker didn’t decide to show it gray. She propositions the young man; she takes the initiative. They have wild sex of several sorts. We see her naked, at least her top half, and it’s really her (or someone her age). In the end no one in her family—not her son or her daughter—not the young man either (who does have gray in his beard, because gray hair on a man is sexy), is good enough for her: They are shallow and callow, and she goes off alone to make herself a life. She’s like Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, who leaves her family for god knows what, though anything must be better than what she leaves behind. Question: Why did the filmmakers of The Mother have to make the young lover snort coke and pop pills? Answer: Because were he drug-free, he would never take an old woman to bed. Question: Why do the moviemakers give him an autistic son he loves? Why do they make him married? Answer: To keep him home, to keep him from running off to France with an old woman and being happy. Breaking one taboo—an older woman and a younger man enjoying sex with each other—is enough for one movie. Giving the couple a happy ending would be way out of line. Audiences wouldn’t stand for it. Question: Why do I have to keep talking to myself? Answer: Because my friend Jo has left me behind.

  Completely unaware that the person behind them—me—is having this fascinating and intelligent dialogue with herself that they are missing out on, the women babble on. Finally I think, What the hell, I’m being unreasonably hard on these perfectly nice
women. Who am I to condemn them? Maybe the ability to be dismissive, to relegate rational conversation to its appropriate venue—the living room, say—is what the women in the forward pew have gotten good at over the years, because the people in this church come to hear music, seem to be happy people. Their husbands and wives, many of them, are still alive, their children are grown and presumably self-supporting; they themselves are ambulatory and not festooned with breathing tubes, and clearly they are not poor. Their makeup’s bad, though, the pasty cosmetic gunked into the lines of their faces, too much of it, greasepaint for old women trying to put on a good face for an audience that isn’t much interested. Why did these women get their hair done this way: tight curls all over? Ah yes, to hide the pink of their scalps, the part where greasepaint won’t go.

  The man sitting to my left looks great, of course; the lines in his face make him handsome. His eyes glitter over the half-glasses he bought at the drugstore, and a lot of his hair is still there. He looks a little like Jack Nicholson will when he’s really old, if he’s lucky.

  I ask too much. I want these very nice women, women who have lived long lives full of sorrow and joy and loss and love, to take up the cross for me, to plead our case to the world at large, to explain in words I can understand and then repeat—something about the vibrancy that remains in old age, the usefulness of us, the love in us, and yes, desire. Shhh, the music.

  Unless your ears are especially evolved, you have to be old to like chamber music. We here today have heard enough bombast to last us a lifetime (which it has). This afternoon we get to hear Schubert’s Quintet in C Major. When the violin sings the familiar melody to us from the first movement, some of us fall asleep or, at any rate, close our eyes, for the sweetness of this music needn’t be seen, only heard. In chamber music there is no conductor whose flamboyance might keep our eyes open, whose sexy backside—think Michael Tilson Thomas, Riccardo Muti—might provoke fantasy. No, we are in the presence of a musical democracy whose members have talked things over, who have agreed on where to get louder or faster or slower. They understand each other and have set individual differences aside in favor of the common good: Schubert. Don’t snore, I beg silently of the man across the aisle, who is clearly asleep and whose wife is afraid to nudge him for fear his waking snort might shatter the concentration of musicians and audience alike.