At What Age is Love Enthralling? 82
It has been many decades since I went through menopause. At the time, I regretted the concurrent invisibility, when men stopped noticing me on the street. The funniest moment happened in Italy, where, as a young student, I had grown accustomed to walking down the street in a mist of commentary: “Bellina, bella.”
Later, visiting Florence in midlife, I heard two boys on a motor scooter cry out behind me, “Bellina! Bellissima!” And then, as they passed: “Ah, scusa, Signora.”
I broke out laughing.
Over time, I grew to appreciate the freedom of not having to wear stilettos, attract anyone or struggle for the exquisite body I once had. I moved into what is now termed the aging process. And I wondered: What does it mean to age?
As a teenager, I read a book by H. Rider Haggard called “She.” In my memory of the story, a white adventurer in Africa comes across the most beautiful woman he has ever met and they fall in love.
It turns out she is immortal, having walked through the flames of eternity, which are found deep in underground caverns. She wants him to become immortal as well and to live with her, but he is too fearful of the fire to enter.
She tells him she’ll show him the way and steps into the flames, only this time she turns into a withered hag and burns up. He staggers back, surrendering to aging and mortality.
It’s the sort of story that makes an impression. I’m an old woman now, although blessed with the accident of health. I feel youthful for my age — active, playful, energetic, lighthearted. I’m told I’m attractive, but I don’t believe it, of course, because how could I be? I’m old.
And if I occasionally forget, the high numerals of my years rush back into my brainpan, as big as Burning Man, to remind me that I should be practicing a shuffling stoop, hunching my back, sitting heavily, taking naps.
The other day, however, I was brought up short. A younger man I know came knocking on the door. We sat on the deck behind my house to talk about what I expected would be the death of his father, or the girlfriend he had broken up with recently. I’m accustomed to being a kind of mother figure, the wise older woman who provides empathy and advice. Instead, this man 30 years younger than I screwed up his courage to blurt that he felt attracted to me.
I was stunned. Embarrassed.
Yes, Emmanuel Macron, president of France, is married to a woman 25 years older than he, and I have friends who have had affairs with men 18 or 20 years younger, but that was when they were 40!
Yes, the writer Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, who married the novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, took up after his death with a young writer, Ned Field, nearly 40 years younger and wild about her when she was in her 70s (which 100 years ago was the equivalent of today’s 80 or 90). She was, he wrote, the only woman in the world worth dying for.
After her death he married her daughter, only 20 years older than he, and who knows how she felt about not being the only woman worth dying for.
On the morning of our conversation, I was swept by a confusion of emotions, including the embarrassment of not having thought of the younger man in that way. I thanked him for the compliment. I probably blushed. “You made my day,” I said.
I didn’t tell him how embarrassed I felt, with wrinkles on my face and liver spots on my hands, so ashamed by my visible signs of aging that I no longer like to look in the mirror. Or how my heart lifted with pleasure at his compliment, at the same time that somewhere in the back of my mind I became a scolded child again, curling like a cooked oyster before my mother’s disdain: “Shame on you! Who do you think you are?”
I no longer remember what she was scolding me for, but I know that voice well, that of my inner judge thundering up the basement steps to flog me for my hubris.
Source – Modern Love, NY Times, by Sophy Burnham
Continued in Part 2.
