Fear of Dying (14 page)

“Why was it so special?” I ask.

“I'm sure it was being totally out of control. Politically incorrect it may be, but we all respond to giving up our will. If it's not
our
will, we can't feel guilt or ambivalence. We turn ourselves over to another. Some people get that from being chained or bound. But giving over the will is extremely erotic. I wouldn't dare write this, but I know it's true. We are such strange creatures in our sexuality. Every time I think I know everything I find I know nothing. Most people are utterly unsubtle about sex—but the Countess knew it took total surrender. When the night was over, I wept in her arms and couldn't stop. Have you ever surrendered completely?”

“I don't know,” I say.

“Well, now is not the time. You have too much else to do. You have Glinda, your parents, and you have Ash. But someday in the future, maybe we'll visit the Countess. You're not done yet. The future still gleams ahead of us.”

“What an amazing friend you are,” I say. “But tell me, why would you never write about it?”

“I think sex has to be utterly secret or it is utterly misunderstood. If I wrote what I told you, I would be asked dumb questions like, ‘So every woman wants to be dominated?' Or ‘What does this mean for feminism?' It's not about anything political. In our private lives we live our fantasies and even our fantasies change. What works at one time in our lives may not work in another. It's impossible to generalize about sexuality—even one's own. The only way to keep it pure is to keep it unspoken. Keep it out of words. Words are not where sexuality lives. Without privacy, there is no ecstasy—which leaves out the Internet, the press. I learned that the hard way.”

I just sit there staring at her in amazement. Isadora is the only person I know with whom I could have such a conversation.

 

 

 

Ash came home and at first he was very weak. He lay in bed, complaining about lying in bed. He entertained his brother, his competitors, various artists he admired. He even entertained me. He had not the least interest in sex. He was probably afraid it would kill him. I worried about that myself.

*   *   *

No matter what the cheerleading gurus of aging may say, sex among seniors is not what it once was when we were young. Viagra is not for everyone. It gives many people blue polka dots on the retina. It makes others faint. Shots and pumps are unaesthetic.

At least we were alive and together. How dare we ask for more? We had beaten terrible odds and we were still holding hands in bed.

I look around at my friends and I see a world of widows—or almost widows. If I were more entrepreneurial, I would set up a sex shop for widows—someplace they could come, get their needs swiftly taken care of by young studs, and then move on to their grandparently duties, professional duties, filial duties (all their mothers are old-old as opposed to oldish). The rules of
old
keep changing. We used to think sixty was old. Now it's the prime of life. But does that mean people want to admit to it? My widow sex shop might not work because the widows would sabotage themselves by falling in love with the studs—the way Isadora nearly fell in love with the personal slaves in Paris. Their hearts would break. Someone would sue, the secret would be out, and the shop would be closed down. It would get into all the papers.

I did not want to be a widow. I was too young to be a widow. At sixty pretending to be fifty, the world was full of unattached women rattling around, looking for a place to put all that unfulfilled sexual energy.

Asher was calm. Denial served him well. He never thought he might die. He simply did as he was told by his doctors. He didn't argue, didn't think apocalyptic thoughts. He was so much saner than I was.

Getting older means giving things up—sex and good looks in particular—but Ash never complained. And he always thought he'd get better. I loved him for his optimism. Hadn't Dashiell Hammett said, “You got to look on the bright side, even if there ain't one”? Asher might have said that if he were a hard-boiled writer instead of a hard-boiled billionaire with a soft center.

*   *   *

“I don't want to be a widow,” I say to Isadora on the phone.

“Who does?” she asks.

“And I have the fear I'll never encounter an erection again.”

“Ah—‘the old in-out,' as Anthony Burgess called it. Possibly overrated. Be patient. There are a million different ways to have sex. I've already told you that. Maybe you need to think about why you have such a need to hold on to control.”

“Are you blaming me?” I ask her.

“Absolutely not,” Isadora says. “I would just say you are only looking at sex in a very narrow way—as if it were a form of deep-tissue massage. It can be much more. Re-lax. Re-fucking-lax. You are not in control of the universe.”

*   *   *

What was wrong with my generation of women? We thought we would get better and better forever. We thought war and disease would afflict only people on the other side of the world. Even after 9/11—which was said to have changed everything—we still believed we had charmed lives somehow and that there was nothing Botox couldn't fix. We should have been preparing for global warming, armageddon, and the loss of our loved ones, but were we? Not at all. We were focusing on surfaces as usual. What would it take to wake people up to the danger we all were in?

Often I thought of myself living at the top of a crumbling flooded skyscraper at ninety. Little boats would be steaming around the towers, trying to save the last stragglers, but I would refuse. Before my tower crumbled, I would jump into the waves and slowly sink. Why would I want to go on living in a world like that?

Ash called out to me from the bedroom.

“I just wanted to see your face.”

“What do you need?”

“Just you.”

“Why are you so cheerful?”

“Here's how I figure it,” he said. “I had a weak spot in my aorta and it ballooned. They put in a much tougher fabric—which should be good for decades. Besides, what earthly good would it do to worry?”

“That's true. But I worry if I don't worry.”

“That's because you use worry superstitiously—as if it could keep the wild elephants away.”

“You mean it
doesn't
?”

We both laughed and hugged. What on earth would I do without him?

“Oh God—that hurts.”

“What?”

He pulled up his pajama leg and there was huge red swelling on his thigh, where they had taken a vein for a graft. Under the incision, there appeared to be pus.

“That looks horrible,” I said. “People get the worst infections in hospitals. You could have staph or MRSA. I'm calling the doctor.”

“Don't be ridiculous. It's nothing.”

“It is most certainly
not
nothing.”

He tried to temporize, to talk me out of it, to talk the doctor out of it, but over the course of a week, it got worse and worse.

A week later, we were back in the hospital, having his leg looked at.

“Clearly an abscess,” the doctor said. He opened the flaps of the wound and greenish yellow stuff came oozing out. I looked into the wound; saw the white cells and fluid and ooze, which seemed to me like the primordial matter itself. Dizziness came over me. To my horror, my knees buckled and I slipped down to the floor. When I came to, Asher had gotten a penicillin shot and his gash had been drained and dressed.

“That was the first time I ever fainted,” I said. “I must really love you a lot. There's nothing like a gaping wound to show the fragility of flesh.”

“Only you would think of it that way,” he said.

We didn't even try to make love for weeks. Ash was taking all kinds of medication to lower his blood pressure and he was exhausted. But when we did, it was clear there was a problem. Modern medicine had a name for it: ED. Fortunately, modern medicine also had a cure for it: Viagra. The problem was Viagra gave Asher those infamous blue spots, a blurriness that convinced him he was going blind, and the feeling of having been run over by a truck.

“There's always the pump,” I said, having been briefed on this stuff by female friends.

“What's the pump?”

“‘Watch your penis grow to amazing size with the sensosensational, silky pleasure pump in blow-up or electronic mode.'”

“That sounds horrible.”

“I'm told it can be sexy.”

“It sounds dangerous to me. Like it would make my penis fall off.”

“There are other things—you can ask your urologist.”

So we began the quest for an erection fixer to fix the erectionless fix we were in.

Clearly we were not the only ones in this situation. The pharmacopeia contained an endless variety of answers—from injections to implants, from rings to pistol pumps. We were the generation that never gave up. Orgasm was in our bill of rights.

I began my online research for sex toys. Not only were there pumps, vibrators, rings, wands, and slithery gels, but there were also environmentalists warning about the dangers of sex toys. Apparently they contained toxic substances. Apparently they were unregulated. Apparently there was a muckraking tome to be written about the dangerous objects people put inside—or outside—their bodies. They leaked gasses. They disintegrated with soap and water, with bodily fluids. No federal agency was testing them. And yet they sold by the millions. Nobody seemed to care about the dangers—except a few killjoy environmentalists.

But Asher found none of these toys the least bit erotic. The dildos were so big they made him feel small. The pumps seemed dangerous. The rings likewise. Maybe he was still too tired to contemplate any of this. There had to be another way.

When we did try to make love, it was clear we were not on our way to holding hands in two side-by-side bathtubs as in that ad for erection boosters. Every channel was full of ads for them. The metaphors were weird: The street falling away and becoming lush wilderness. A couple going up in a multicolored hot-air balloon. A beautiful English girl in the Caribbean reassuring her “honey.” An old couple harvesting cucumbers. And then that absurd image of the lovers holding hands in separate old-fashioned bathtubs. What madman thought that up? We were just lying there and looking at a limp dick.

*   *   *

Until your spouse nearly dies, you never really believe in your own mortality. Until you give up sex, you never believe you are old. Now I believed I was old, and I didn't like it. I didn't like the hairs on my chin. I didn't like dyeing my eyebrows. I wanted my youth back—even with all its miseries. I envy the young and they don't even know they are enviable.
I
certainly didn't know it when I was young.

I hate, hate,
hate
getting older. I would sell my soul to the devil to stay young. And then an idea begins to dawn—for a play.

I am in a rage against age. To that end, I have recruited dermatologists, yoga teachers, exercise coaches, nutritionists, herbalists, physical therapists, and doctors—alternative and plain.

There is no shortage of antiaging specialists in New York—from dermatologists who harvest and reuse your own fat to those who freeze your facial muscles with toxins. There are blasters and scrapers, injectors and fat-suckers. There are skin resurfacers, fraxelists if not taxidermists, pore shrinkers and redness faders for rosacea sufferers. There are plastic surgeons and acupuncturists and even hypnotists who regress you into false youth you dream is real. But I want more. I want magic.

*   *   *

While Ash was slowly mending, an older actor friend of mine hit town. We had been flirting for decades both on set and off. Heeding Isadora's advice from lunch the other day, I reasoned that seeing him would be less risky than a Zipless stranger but promising enough to excite me. I was just scared enough of the future to meet him at his hotel—a brand-new boutique-y place way downtown.

He was the kind of leading man who played James Bond when he was young but now played evil Borgia popes. He was English, RADA-trained, and handsome in a semi-spooky way—hollow cheekbones, deep-set green eyes, shaggy brows, and sonorous voice. He often joked that if he got much older, he'd eventually be cast as Nosferatu.

“I'm finally going to play an ancient vampire,” he said, embracing me at the doorway of his suite.

“Am I supposed to say mazel tov?” I asked.

“I think you're supposed to hold up a cross,” he said. “To protect yourself.”

I knew he had always fancied me and he knew I had always fancied him. One knows these things. Of course, we were both married—to other people—which always helps.

His name was Nigel Cavendish, and we had done a season of Shakespeare a million years ago.

We reminisced together in his suite. Both not drinking a drop due to our membership in various twelve-step programs.

Then we began to kiss good-bye and good-bye turned into hello and he swigged from an open bottle of Amarone his producer had sent and I got drunk on the fumes. Before we knew it we were both half undressed on the floor and stroking each other's aging skin tenderly.

“Shall we repair to the bedroom?” he asked, indicating it with his handsome hairy head (quite silver by now). And I nodded, and before we knew it, we were on if not
in
the queen- (or king-) size
letto matrimoniale
.

“I've always wanted you,” he said.

“Me too,” I said.

And I nodded but said nothing more because we were kissing so deeply. And soon he was sucking my nipples and touching my cunt. Then he was licking it enthusiastically. And then he was unrolling a condom onto his beautiful cock—by which time it seemed rather late to object.