Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

He can only gaze at her, a lost, wordless little boy. He takes her hand, and that one vulnerable touch — the infant clutching at his mother — erases all her hurt and jealousy and rage. She puts his hand to her cheek,

RUTH

Never you mind, honey. Never you mind. .,

she murmurs soothingly. This is it, then; he needs her for something, and she’ll take it. Whatever it is — comfort, friendship, mothering, maybe sex, maybe not, maybe just being another body in the room, another clutching hand and lonely beating heart. But she’s right; whatever reinvigorating, revitalizing thing they once shared — love? — or that he brought into her life, is ruined now. It is lost, completely, and has taken the last of her reawakened hope and faith with it.

I’m not going to become a sad Ruth Popper, not ever, no.

One night with my young man, I speculate how our “relationship” will come to a close, as if raising this question will illustrate my lack of anxiety, my sophisticated expectation that this little arrangement of ours will, of course, end. I casually mention, chuckling, that my friends worry I will get hurt — a notion he rejects, because he is sure some “distinguished gentleman” with far more to offer will come along and sweep me away. I do not point out the dearth of distinguished gentlemen lining up at my door, but he has a point: They once did, my own Carys and Harrisons and Seans, and I once liked that. (“You’re used to being the young one, aren’t you?” my young man had said, smiling, when we swapped some of our romantic and sexual histories.) I had always liked older men, yes, was happy to trade bloom for worldliness; I liked the empowering yet kittenish feeling their interest gave me, that faint echo of my Lolita days. Indeed, my last relationship, six years ago now, was with a man almost twenty years my senior. But as my stepmother, fourteen years younger than my father, once said to me: Honey, at some point, an older man just becomes old , and she was right.

So is it my turn now, to feed off this young man’s carefree vitality, his boundless, unsullied energy? Passion offers a heightened awareness of and sensitivity to life, but also a blinding, consuming distraction from whatever existential terrors one is stalked by — I think of the vampiric Countess Bathory of legend, who bathed in the blood of virgins for the collagenlike infusion of their youth; am I her metaphorical contemporary, trying desperately to halt or turn back the clock, mute the ominous tick ing, stave off age, decay, death? Because that soak-up-their-essence ploy is not just figurative or the stuff of myth, I’ve learned — that stuff works . I have been revitalized by this young man’s fresh pulse. I am working out, eating my veggies, breaking out the lacy lingerie once again, bothering to put mascara on, giddily gathering roses. I do feel reawakened; I must admit to myself that I have absolutely become emotionally invested in this, yes, relationship . I am, I realize, genuinely in love.

Not that I am in love with this young man. For all his adorableness, his sweet-and-nasty sexual skill, despite the genuine affection we feel for each other, this is not a love affair, for either of us — we barely know each other. But I am in love with the experience he can create, or re-create for me; the truth is, this relationship is all about feeding my aging ego, bolstering my saggy sexual self-esteem, assuring me I am still oh-so-damn hot. And I find myself feeling a bit ashamed and guilty about this. Am I just using him ?

But that is also a reassuring thought, offering me the illusion of control, here. . because I am getting anxious. That ticking clock is increasing in volume, getting so intrusive, so distracting. I’m feeling sexually empowered, sure — oh my, did that twenty-five-year-old barista just flirt with me? — but I am also, paradoxically, feeling more insecure than I ever have in my life. Do you not see the crepey skin of my throat, I find myself thinking when my young man and I are trysting. Do you not notice my Shar-Pei belly, the spider veins on my thighs, that old hag chin whisker I always forget to pluck? Are you unaware of how I always strategize to be seen in the kindliest, most low-wattage light? Do you not see the calcium tablets in my medicine cabinet, my posthysterectomy prescription for estrogen? Do you see all this and not care? Does it inspire your tenderness toward me, your pity? Is it fetishistic for you, a source of arousal, a form of gerontophilia —sexual preference for the elderly — or anililagnia : the “atypical” sexual attraction of a younger man to an older woman? Am I just some new experiment in kink?

But this doesn’t have to end with my being rejected or getting hurt, I remind myself; there are some happy models for this. A few. The older woman isn’t always a vicious Mrs. Robinson, a vulnerable, defeated Karen, a sad sack Ruth. In 4 °Carats (1973) Liv Ullmann stars as a forty-year-old divorcée, who enjoys a rapturous one-night fling on a Greek island with twenty-two-year-old Edward Albert; they rediscover each other back in New York City, and he pursues her relentlessly until, overcoming her anxieties, she succumbs to his adoration and they go prancing back off to Greece together. 92 White Palace ’s twenty-seven-year-old James Spader is fixated on forty-three-year-old Susan Sarandon, and their age difference is played up as transgressively erotic, whetting the “Oh, we can’t possibly be together!” forbiddenness of their pairing. 93 Something’s Gotta Give has late-thirties Keanu Reeves falling madly in love with fifty-seven-year-old Diane Keaton — until she rejects him for “age-appropriate” Jack Nicholson; forty-something Angela Basset gets her Stella -groove back in the coconut-oil arms of twentysomething Taye Diggs. 94Thirty-two-year-old Joseph Gordon-Levitt, in his 2013 Don Jon , is finally able to overcome his addiction to online porn and his inability to experience true intimacy with the help of fifty-three-year-old Julianne Moore. 95And the gold standard, of course, of the happy older woman/younger man love story is 1971’s Harold and Maude , which my young man and I watch together one night (he had never seen it, maybe never even heard of it, ouch. .), the ironic humor of which I did not appreciate until halfway through; Harold, eighteen, and Maude, eighty, are blissfully, anililagniacally in love, until the end when she, well, dies. 96(She was eighty, after all.)

But other than Harold and Maude or the so-rare example of a Diane Keaton giving up a young Keanu for a paunchy Jack, we do not see how these older woman/younger man relationships actually work or eventually end; there is nothing beyond the climactic What the hell, let’s throw societal convention to the wind and just be together ! Of course we almost never see how any love story “ends”—the Jane Eyre “Reader, I married him” (and then Mr. Rochester got his sight back and we had a kid and we really, really are living happily ever after in the burned remains of Thornfield Hall. .) type of coda has gone out of style. But we know in our hearts that crazy Scarlett and Rhett are going to work it all out, that Mr. and Mrs. Smith will stop assassinating people and go buy a nice dinette set and raise beautiful children, that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan will grow cozily old together in matching cardigans. We subconsciously extend the narrative beyond happily ever after , invest in the mythology of true love’s longevity after the The End of the standard rom-com.