À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs
When did you realize you were getting old?
I remember looking at the photos that I took on my phone camera during my first visit to Glyndebourne in 2018. I’d worn a short dress – formal, but above the knee (Which was a silly choice. If there’s any place you should wear a long dress, it’s Gly.) That in itself I could have lived with, but then I looked at my knees in the picture. Those were not my regular knees, that I lived with for well over 40 years, and that I know. Those were an elderly lady knees.
Then you start noticing other signs, and they are coming at you fast. Neck pain becoming a constant, back pain a regular. Not being able to eat late at night, or as much as it used to be customary in the course of the day. Hair acquiring that awful feathery quality. Not being able to jump out of bed in the morning (it’s a procedure now). A touch of arthritis here and there, like accents on a Slavic word. The font on food and cosmetics labels getting outrageously small. (I have carried a magnifying glass to the drugstore once or twice, what of it.) Whenever you go for a routine checkup, your dentist inevitably finding new maintenance issues. (You’re grinding your teeth in your sleep, let’s order you a mouth guard, he said.)
The fact that you remember the world before the internet. You remember life under communism. You know what the Save icon on MS Word actually depicts. And while we’re on the topic, you save files in folders, not in the cloud.
You wake up one day to discover that France elected a President who’s younger than you.
But the most disconcerting of all is the presence of young women in one’s life. Young women, my god. I used to be the young woman in most situations, because I always preferred older people. Preferred in every way. I’ve had good friendships with older people, excellent professional relationships. My basic fantasy for the longest time used to be myself and an older woman. (Don’t ask how that worked out.) And now, at least since I turned 45… the older woman is me.
And sometimes so much older that I could have been some people’s mother. I could have fecking birthed many of the people I find myself in social situations with. And this confuses me to no end.
But it gets worse.
At one particularly grey juncture of Covid-shutdowns in Toronto, I looked to join a basketball meet-up group. Great. Managed to connect with another newbie via text messaging, and so we met for some hoop shooting at Jesse Ketchum PS. A creature appeared with long, shiny black hair, a dash of freckles, and some kind of a permanent snarky smile. She wore a perfectly fitting fleece track suit (When you’re that age, everything suits perfectly, even the dumbest things; it’s just that they don’t know.) She wasn’t really a newbie; it turned out she played very seriously “in high school”, which I presumed was eons ago, and now she’d just like to get back to it. The energy! The drive! The precision! And just the right amount of aggressiveness! I found myself weirdly attracted, in that idle, parallel universe way. If this was my thing, I’d be very much into this thing. I put up some amount of defence before I croaked and we had to switch to just practicing shooting. During a break she told me she was showing her apartment to a potential roommate. Oh, you’re probably buying a condo, I said? (She had driven to our playground, so one presumption led to another.) She was slightly embarrassed; No, she was looking for a roommate to split the rent with.
Reader, she was 22.
When I arrived home I needed to lie down. Literally. I was exhausted in addition to shocked by the fact that for a second there I understood how you could be attracted to someone whose parent you could have easily been, Chronos-wise.
I pushed away the event, not particularly eager to analyze it, and a year passed. I never went back to the basketball meet-up group, though I still get notifications from another group of young women in North York, and I cheer for them in absentia. (The only course of action for me now is probably looking for a 45+ hiking group, or joining the old Italian and Portuguese men’s soccer or bocce clubs on the far edges of the west end. Old southern European men are my people). But the memory came back the other night, after a young woman DM’d me on Instagram. I am only on Instagram nominally, never post, follow 25 people who are not on any other social media, and maybe a retail establishment or two, and Holland Taylor. Anyway, the young woman sought me out and found me. I had written some kinds words about her comedy in a round-up in a large daily paper, and some time later she sent me a DM to thank me and tell me that it had made her happy.
She is something like 29, super attractive, an extremely confident heterosexual millennial. She posts Instagram stories from under her duvet, or a bath tub. She is funny. In response to her message, I tell her I’m interested in following comedy a little more, and that she should feel free to send me recommendations. She offers comps to her new show, I say no way, I’m buying my own ticket since the entire live performance world needs as much support as possible, forget the comps. She sends another message, saying If you’d like to interview me, I’m always available! If you’d like to review my show, ideal for me would be if the coverage appears before our second show, between such and such a date. I DM her back to tell her that I’m coming as a regular punter, not a journo. We agree it’s great to come out for any reason, and having smoothed the glitch in communication, we leave it at that.
There are hundreds and hundreds of pages on just this kind of communication in Proust – for example. The messiness of other motives coming in attached to or hidden behind something that looks like an invitation to a friendship, a flirting, or an expression of desire. A young, gorgeous, ambitious young woman (or, sometimes, differently, a man) wants something that older, more experienced person could provide (often, because they dominated all the instruments of culture and economy for centuries, a man – a Charles Swann, or the narrator of La Recherche, or even Charlus) and they ask for it. The older, more experienced, more melancholy person may find the younger person a source of élan vital, or joy, or something else essential but scarce. Or they may desire the younger person. And so the intricate social dance of interests begins.
The youth demands what is its due.
The elders get enchanted.
I thought about it all, and a sort of window opened. I felt for the humanity. The older side of it now, in particular.
It’s Stephen Fry as Oscar Wilde, humouring the much younger Lord Alfred Douglas of Jude Law after he had a tantrum: “But Bosie!”
It’s Simon Foster and the young Axel Nilsson, the gay couple of Iris Murdoch’s A Fairly Honourable Defeat, who survive this dramatic novel still a couple, in spite of or because their intense May to December dynamic. It’s also Michael Meade in another Murdoch novel The Bell, whose foolish attraction to young Toby will be his downfall.
It’s that mother of all elderly embarrassments, Mann’s (and Britten’s!) Death in Venice.
It’s the Charlotte Rampling character in François Ozon’s La Piscine, hypnotized and irritated by the extremely young and sexual Julie (Ludivine Sagnier) with whom she has to share the summer house in Luberon. (Rampling’s character’s secret weapon is her ability to write… It’s one of the best movies about writing ever made.)
It’s forever Swann, who is seduced by Odette, manipulated, devastated, then having sobered up realizing that he wanted to die over someone who wasn’t even his type.
It’s the professor at a provincial university, played by Catherine Deneuve, losing her sleep over her young, wild, fragile, unpredictable lover who comes and goes as she pleases and never tells the whole truth, in André Techiné’s Les voleurs.
I feel for us all! But for the older folk a bit more, now.
I am still waiting for the not being able to eat late at night phase to kick in - of all these problems that sounds like a blessing in disguise!