In Praise of Older Women II

You want to see a No. 16 seed beat a No. 1? Check out Esquire magazine’s March Madness Sexiest Woman Alive bracket and vote for the 64-year-old.

"CINDERELLA HELEN MIRREN TALKS MEGAN FOX UPSET" says the headline suggesting that it's an upset when men prefer a 64-year-old to the star (human) bod of the Transformers franchise. In Esquire’s bracket, Mirren is a No. 16 to Fox’s No. 1 seed. In the NCAA men’s and women’s basketball tournament, a sixteen has never beaten a one. But Dame Mirren has been kicking Megan’s tattooed 22-year-old backside.

Said Dame Mirren to Esquire when she heard the news: “I am gobsmacked.”

“Personally,” Esquire quotes her as saying, “I think Ms. Fox is one of the smartest, coolest, and sexiest creatures in the Western Hemisphere.”

I’m not sure when Mirren can be declared the winner and move onto the second round. Esquire first reported the upset days ago, but said Fox was closing the gap. At that point, it was Mirren, 61 to 39 percent. The last time I voted (for Mirren, naturally – read my old post about my boyhood crush), the gap had closed to 54-46. Maybe that’s because Fox mentioned the voting on her Twitter feed. Does Helen Mirren even have a Twitter feed?

I don’t know what explains Helen Mirren standing tall in a sexiest-woman-alive-death-match with one of the reigning teenage-boy poster girls. But I’m glad for it. Let’s face it: The world is lousy with Megan Foxes, and next week there will be dozens more and we’ll have forgotten a thousand others, but there has really been only one Helen Mirren. She’s smart, talented, witty, and, as Esquire notes, a bombshell. She’s also proving that when a woman enjoys a bounty of the virtues that combine to describe sexy, one of them need not be youth.

In Praise of Older Women

The recent gaga about older women-younger man relationships is much focused on the sex lives of celebrities (42-year-old Sam Taylor-Wood having baby with 19-year-old! Demi and Ashton still married! Madonna still with younger man!).

But most of us Himplus couples don’t attend star-studded parties or walk red carpets. We teach. We commute. We walk our dogs. We plant a peach tree in the spring. We wrestle with taxes, insurance, monthly bills.

I was reminded of the divide between my life and those celebrity Himplus couples when I read recently that Stephen Vizinczey’s “In Praise of Older Women,’’ initially published in 1965, is being re-released as a Penguin Classic.

Set against the backdrop of war, the semi-autobiographical book details the sexual education of the narrator through a series of relationships with older women, starting when he was 12. While the narrator discovers erotic pleasure, he also learns about life.

“Vizinczey is more interested in the metaphysics of sex than the mechanics; it is, for him, a means to forge a deep connection with another person, a way to liberate the soul,” writes William Skidelsky in The Observer.

In another recent interview in the Telegraph, Hungarian-born writer Vizinczey, now 76, says his fascination with older women was as much about the brain as the body.

“The most attractive thing about a woman is her intelligence. The older women in the book were intelligent enough to learn from experience. An older woman who is an idiot is clearly inferior to an intelligent 20-year-old but the intelligent 20-year-old will be even more interesting and exciting when she's 40 or 60."

He talks, too, more about relationships than about coupling. "Most relationships don't last,” he told the interviewer. “Enduring relationships depend not only on the ages of the couples but whether they are on the same wavelength.”

Still, there’s this too: "To be a young man and have a grown woman as your partner is not just attractive, it is paradise.”

Of Guitar Heroes and unmade beds

The older woman is out of town visiting a sister. That means I’ve reverted to my fifteen- year-old self.

When Sheri is here I wear cardigans and make lists of errands and chores and then do them. At night, I choose piano jazz for our dinner sound track. Some evenings I pour wine, and we talk about our days as grown-ups do. Or we read or finish work from the office. Sometimes we go out. The other night, we treated ourselves to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. I wore a sport coat and felt every bit of age forty-five.

But now, with Sheri gone, I’m tempted to order up last summer’s teen-boy spectacle, Star Trek, on my cable TV. I’ve eaten chocolate ice cream from the container. I’ve wrassled the dogs on the living room rug until we barked at each other. I haven’t made the bed; if I did I’d have to move the basketball. If the neighbors are lucky, I’m shaking the windows with Pearl Jam. If they’re unlucky, it’s Rush.

I know other guys who morph into adolescents when their wives leave town. There’s one fellow who could be a 24-7 Guitar Hero if his wife skedaddled for a week. Another drinks more beer. Texas Hold 'em anyone?

My conclusion: Despite what birth certificates suggest, all husbands are younger men. All wives are older women.

How Kaimin got her groove back

We brought home a new dog about a month ago. We missed having two dogs after our beloved Ozark died last year, and we wanted company for Kaimin, our 8-year-old English setter/Rhodesian ridgeback mix.

Kaimin missed Ozark, too. She had been mopey and lonely, acting and looking old. Her muzzle was turning gray. She watched squirrels in the back yard but no longer leapt off the steps to chase them. She showed no interest in dog toys or ropes or even the backyard branches she used to gnaw on. She didn’t like to be outside unless we were.

At a local shelter, we found Mimsy: about a year old, give or take. She is an enthusiastic dog who galumphs around the house making friends with the furniture and tearing apart Kong ball toys and stuffed hippopotamuses and frogs. Kaimin had no idea what to make of her new partner. She spent the first week watching, asserting her alpha-dog-ness, and asking us if we really intended to keep this white streak of energy.

Now, however, Kaimin has her groove back. She hogs the hippo from Mimsy, tricks her into a tug-of-war, chases her around the yard. They spend hours in dog play that involves sniffing and mouthing and nipping at each other’s legs. And we spend hours watching them, delighted and reminded.

... with apologies (sort of) to Garrison Keillor

And here is the HimPlus Writer’s Almanac for Wednesday. It’s the twenty-fourth of February, two-thousand-and-ten.

It’s the fifth day since Friday, when Michael and Sheri met two other couples for dinner. Ate thin-crust pizza garnished with feta cheese and walnuts. Listened to a guitarist whose play list ranged from Edith Piaf to Pearl Jam. Talked about Italy and gender roles and about what to call contemporary music made in the classical tradition. The couples at the table all writers of some sort – a couple of novelists, journalists, literary translators, and one who works with sounds rather than words. All Him+ couples, too: Him+10, Him+15 and Michael and Sheri, Him+17.

[deep, noisy inhalation]

It’s also the 130^th anniversary of the year Robert Louis Stevenson married his beloved Fanny, a woman ten – or maybe 11 – years his senior. Stevenson, author of classic books such as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a married woman, an American, while on a trip to an artist’s colony in France with his cousin, Bob. Pursued her to California, where she divorced her husband, married the penniless writer and joined him for a honeymoon in a shack in Northern California. Their love affair continued until Stevenson’s death in 1894, and included a sitting for Stevenson’s friend, the painter John Singer Sargent.

[deeper, even noisier inhalation]

It’s also five months until the birthday of Raymond Chandler, author of detective fiction including The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, and husband to a woman 18 years his senior. Chandler was thirty-five when he married his wife, who was fifty-three. She marked her age on the wedding certificate as ten years younger, and told Chandler that was her age. He believed her. When Cissy Chandler died in 1954, Raymond drank himself into alcoholism and attempted suicide. As quoted in Judith Freeman’s history of their affair, The Long Embrace, Chandler wrote of his despair to a friend: "My only problem is that I have no home, and no one to care for if I did have one."

And now here are a few lines from “The Older Woman”, a poem by Cathleen Calbert, published in The Southern Review, Summer 2007.

The Older Woman

means a younger man. Without him, she ' s just sipping cappuccinos alone at some canal-side restaurant in Venice

or lobbing a long one to her unfaithful yet age-appropriate, career-compatible significant other

or curled up as the cupie-doll sweetie-pie of Monsieur LaRue, sensitive if impotent lover seventeen years her senior.

She needs him, that fine-looking fly-boy, the babe who hasn't seen Casablanca,

who's had women bosses and not squawked,

who spoon-feeds her scrambled eggs, who buys her a tiny diamond chip, who says things like, I'm ready to commit,

because, by God, he is. He doesn't know he’s not supposed to. Where are his brother-men?

An excerpt from “The Older Woman”, by Cathleen Calbert, published in The Southern Review, Summer 2007. And that’s the HimPlus17 Writer’s Almanac, for today, Wednesday, February 24th. Be well. Do good work. And keep in touch.

Just Like Honey From the Bee

We put our four Van Morrison CDs on random this afternoon, cranked up the volume, and gave ourselves two hours to clean the house. When “Tupelo Honey” came on, just as Michael was picking up the rugs in the kitchen, I grabbed him for a Valentine dance.

We glided and twirled around the kitchen, stumbling now and then over the rolled up rugs. “Am I doing all right at following?” I asked.

Which question led to the following exchange.

M: I think we’re good now.

S: You’ve finally learned how to lead. I kept saying, “You have to lead! You have to lead!”

M: But you wouldn’t let me.

Which was true. It was like our arguments over kitchen work. I didn’t want him in my kitchen, but I also didn’t want to do all the work. I wanted him to lead on the dance floor, but resisted when he did.

S: You didn’t know how to dance with a woman.

M: I never learned, no. And I wasn’t used to leading you anywhere. You were older, the authority figure. I followed.

Until one day when he didn’t. Now, we dance close, then spin away. One of the dogs nuzzles us as if afraid we’ll crash into the fridge or garbage can. But we don’t. Michael leads, with a firm but gentle hand on my back. And I — most of the time — follow.

Marry Him

When I turned 40, I wasn’t too diffferent from Lori Gottlieb: single, not dating much, wondering what happened to all those men who used to call and send flowers.

Gottlieb’s lackluster love life went viral two years ago when she published a controversial article in the Atlantic. Now she is ramping up to Valentine’s Day with a defense of the book that article became — Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough.

Marry the guy who might not have 100 percent of what you want, she advises. One sentence in her piece in the Washington Post yesterday is still rattling around in my head. She wrote:

The majority of single women who responded to a survey I sent out said that getting 80 percent of what they wanted in a mate would be "settling." The majority of single men said finding a woman with 80 percent of what they wanted would be "a catch."

I read it out loud to Michael. He agreed that any guy getting 80 percent of what he wants in a woman would feel as though he hit the jackpot. I don’t think I ‘ve chosen men by the numbers, but the idea of not “settling” is pretty familiar to me. But when I chose not to settle, it was because the chemistry just wasn’t there, not because the guy didn’t earn enough money or wasn’t handsome enough or drove a beat-up car. When I met Michael, the chemistry and the certainty steamrolled any question of percentages.

Gottlieb is still looking for love this Valentine’s Day. I hope she’ll get lucky. Maybe she needs to look for a younger man.