Cherchez le jeune homme

Here comes yet another OWYM film – Chéri is set to hit U.S. theaters at the end of June.

Set in turn-of-the century France, the film follows the affair of retired courtesan Lea (Michelle Pfeiffer), and her 19-year-old lover (Rupert Friend). Adding to the drama: The young man, the Chéri of the film’s title, is the son of a fellow courtesan.

The affair lasts six years. Complications arise when the young man’s mother arranges a marriage for him with a woman closer to his own age. I don’t know how the movie ends (although I can guess), so I can’t be a spoiler.

 But I can reveal the true story on which the movie is loosely based.

The movie is based on the 1920 book “Chéri” by the French writer Colette, whose life seems far more interesting than that of her fictional heroine. (For more on Colette, see this New York Times review of a 1999 biography).

At age 46, Colette began an affair with her 16-year-old stepson.

Uncommon love was a common theme in Colette’s work and life. She had already had affairs with women, bared her breasts in Paris music halls and divorced her first husband. The stepson affair would last five years and end her second marriage, to her lover’s father. Her third husband was 16 years younger than she.

All of which is to say that the recent excitement over younger men with older women is nothing new. It’s been frothed up by all things Demi and Ashton and by TV shows like The Cougar. But it predates all of that. It predates Colette, too.

 Still, there’s something about older women and younger men at the current intersection of media and culture that gets people excited. The recent movies and TV shows (The Reader, Cheri, Desperate Housewives, The Cougar),  the popularity of Demi and Ashton as supermarket tabloid fodder, and the revelation by AARP that three out of 10 single women between 40 and 69 are dating younger men — all of that bespeaks a fascination with this kind of uncommon love. And it says, too, that it’s not so uncommon after all.

The Undiscovered Country

Years create secrets. A younger man in love with an older woman learns this quickly. Watching the film The Reader reminded me. I didn’t learn all Sheri’s secrets right away. Some came out the first night we agreed to love each other. She revealed others in the months and years that followed. Perhaps there are some she still keeps to herself even after fifteen years of marriage. But I remember important truths she told me and when – truths few if any other people know.

The first night we shared our secrets, we sat on the couch in Sheri’s condo apartment. Her cat Pequot hid; it would be weeks before he trusted me enough to sit with us. It was March. In my memory, any March night in Hartford is rainy. In a few short weeks Sheri and I had moved from dating into something lasting, though how we knew neither could say. We trusted. I trusted. So I told Sheri a secret I thought she needed to know. My secret, that of a 26-year-old, seemed important then, but now I know it was like a folded note in a school desk, a teenaged concern. Sheri took the information without judgment or surprise. Then she spoke. Her secret, earned through another 17 years of living, as part of another generation, tasted like blood in the mouth.

An older man in love with a younger woman will have stories to tell. Is that the difference, that older men have stories, while older woman harbor secrets? Maybe. Maybe the difference – at least in the case of Sheri and Hanna Schmitz in The Reader – is that older women willing to dare unconventional love with younger men have likely led unconventional lives. Unconventional lives lead to unconventional joys and unconventional pains: secrets.

Now Sheri’s secrets are mine.

More than anything to do with sex, Hanna Schmitz’s private history initiated her young lover into the complex, complicated questions of adulthood. A younger man with an older woman will learn more about life from her secrets than from her bed.

Equilibrium

We were on the beach in Belize, the drowsy afternoon heat sweetening our limbs and our libidos. It had become our neverland, this stretch of sand out the front door of our rental cabana. For two blessed weeks, we were away from jobs, snow, deadlines and misbehaving faucets. We floated through each day and could, if we chose, reinvent our whole lives for the duration.

Belizean men and women trudged the shoreline to show us their wares: woven bags, coconut shell jewelry, beach hats. One of them was George, a garrulous guy from a nearby town who hawked hand-carved bracelets and marijuana. Making small talk, he bumbled into the Land of Big Mistakes.

What he said to Michael: “Are you and your mother enjoying Belize?”

The sweetness shriveled; his banal question shredded me like a handsaw. We were unmasked, the Older Woman and the Younger Man. I felt as though my husband (then 41) and I (58) had been ripped apart by all the waters of the deep: his generation on one shore and mine on the opposite.

What Michael said to George: “She’s my wife.”


I thought of that day yesterday while watching The Reader, the film starring Kate Winslet as 36-year-old Hanna Schmitz in post-war Germany who takes up with a 15-year-old named Michael. During a bike holiday in the countryside, a waitress at a roadside café inquires whether his “mother” has enjoyed her meal. Yes, he says. Then, while the scandalized waitress watches, he kisses Hanna. Yes, he tells the world, we are lovers.

You have to love a kid who would do that. It’s easier, though, for the teenaged movie Michael to proclaim his infatuation with a woman in her 30s — those ages and even the span between them are saucy, seductive, juicy.

In real life, my Michael never wavered. “She’s my wife,” he said, as though any fool could see that. With those three words the churning waters subside, the continents reunite, the lovers’ equilibrium recovers.

You have to love a man who can do that.