Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(27)
Esquire
December 1983
Younger Women, Older Men
Raoul and Tommy stop by for a few minutes on the way back from the beach. They come onto the porch with their girlfriends, one of whom looks eighteen. Raoul is close to forty, worn, with gray hair. He hasn’t shaved but somehow seems stylish. It’s probably worry—he owns two restaurants, the pressure is always there. Tommy works in one of them. He’s younger and Raoul is like a father to him.
The girls are wearing sandals with heels and slight bikinis tight as string. The sexual flux on the porch has violently changed, as with a powerful magnet, but they act unconcerned. In-ess, one says her name is, the one who looks eighteen. She had a slight accent, South America, Rome? In any case, to the other women she could be Kali, the goddess of destruction, wearing a garland of skulls. Women fear girls in a way that men do not react to boys. Ines stands there indifferently, nearly naked, her skin smooth and blemish-less. The dog, inquisitively, is sniffing her feet. At last she seems to have found something of interest. “Oh,” she says, reaching down to pat him, “he’s so sweet.”
Raoul slips a shirt on over his pale, skinny chest. He refuses a drink. He says something to Ines, who nods. They’re going to the American Hotel for dinner. One can picture them there, not talking much but on display. The two men are talking. They order a good wine—Raoul knows these things. This is all later, the last light lingering, the pleasant weariness from the sea, the food, the crowd. What happens afterward, one is forced to imagine. Raoul has never married though he has the ease of a married man. Tommy is separated from his wife.
When they have driven off there is a dampened spirit in the house. The women are somehow annoyed; a bruise, a tender spot, has been irritated. Their dignity has been injured in some way, or at least their feeling of confidence. Their husbands’ thoughts have gone to where they should not be . . .
It is true that Hélo?se was a mere sixteen when she began her immortal love affair with her smitten tutor, Abelard, who was thirty-nine, and that Ajax and Achilles, as has been pointed out, were both in love with their servant maids, but it is an unfortunate thing, this open attraction to young women, many of whom have barely gotten their teeth and claws and who, insufficiently warned, allow themselves to consort with older men whose interest in them cannot entirely be one of friendship. It is a perversion of the state that nature intended of amity and understanding between men and women, equipping them both as she did with the same heart, blood, and sinew as well as with similar limbs, desires, and powers of thought.
Having established this, let us go further.
There is something deeply moving, something innate and good in the image of a young couple, intelligent, even-tempered, filled with hope and rich expectations. They are the alpha pair, upon which all society is founded. Everything else is inferior to them, every choose-it-yourself paradise, the men who love men, women who love women, the radicals and sexual Bolsheviks raging in the streets.
It is an invincible pair but also highly volatile; youth is volatile. Their desires, which now seem so clearly focused on one another, are in fact teeming and infinite. Life is very long and the struggle fierce. So many things will conspire to pull them apart, so many crises for which there seem to be no rules.
The young shun the old, probably with reason since they are usually nothing more than themselves squeezed of vitality and lacking ideals. Still there are exceptions. There are older people who know things and have done things, and anyway they are not that old. At least they don’t seem to be. There can be a natural and classic conjunction. A. J. Liebling in his beautiful chronicle of Paris, Between Meals, describes a great—though not important—French playwright and friend, Yves Mirande, who as a boy of seventeen fresh from the provinces was taken to bed by older women, in their twenties as it happened—as Madeleine Béjart did with the green Molière—made love to, and taught the rules. “When he was a ripe man,” Liebling wrote of Mirande, “he returned the favor by making love to the young.” In a sense this is like a career in education, studying for a doctorate and then afterward proceeding to instruct so that knowledge passes on more or less undiluted.
It is painful to recall life’s pleasures once thought of as unshakable, such as ocean liners, the tango, and dry martinis, that have now been swept into the rubble, but the intoxicating relationship between experience and inexperience endures. There are few things more gratifying than being in the company of someone younger who admires you for your knowledge and is avid to have it shared. If you are lucky, it is a woman.
Des arrived with his new fiancée. She came in first, hair tousled, wearing a man’s black overcoat and boots. When she took off the coat you saw how good-looking she was. She was from New Orleans and had a wonderful smile. Des and I kept talking nonstop, reminiscing, making jokes. “I see why you guys like each other,” she said.
Later she had her bare feet up on the table, beautiful nude feet, long and white. We were on the second bottle of wine. She hadn’t said very much and then—we must have somehow mentioned it earlier—out of nowhere, “What’s so great about Louise Erdrich?” she wanted to know.
She was just starting to read books. All that was ahead of her, the newness of it, the things you learned you could do, the real dimensions of life. Des was going to lay it all out.
How had he met her, I wondered—that’s always the question.