Being Eighty - Running A Country Or A Chaise Lounge In Florida, So Why The Angst?

‘How does he do it?', said Ben Licht to his cousin, Abe. 'Me, I'm happy just to be upright and mobile'. 

The two were talking about Donald Trump, President of the United States at eighty responsible for national security, the financial and economic health of the country, and the overall well-being of the nation, when most men of his age were playing shuffleboard at their Florida condos.

Both Ben and Abe had been successful businessmen.  Ben was a furrier who catered to the women of the West End - mink stoles, ermine coats, and sable jackets - and his cousin Abe who was a clothier and had a high-end store on Main Street with couturier dresses, blouses, and skirts.  

Both men were known and respected by the town. They were honest, God-fearing, community-minded men who were model citizens.  Abe was cantor at the Beth-El, and Ben on the board of the New Brighton Yeshiva. 

They had given the best years of their lives to the town and to their families, and now at eighty it was time to close up shop, trade their spurs for a chaise lounge, relax and enjoy life for a change, retire to a condo in Miami, on Collins Avenue, South Beach, the traditional winter havens for rich Jews which is what they were, so who's complaining?

'Nah' said Abe, no class anymore. Not what it was.  Remember the Fontainebleau? Now that was a classy outfit. What a time I had there.  Esta Pilchman under a beach umbrella by the pool, a sweetheart, wife of Saul Berman, a real prick, no wonder she was a gay divorcee.'

'Don't live in the past', replied his cousin. 'That will get you nowhere'; but Abe, once started down memory lane, was in no mood to pull up. 

'And Bette Cohen.  Ah, a real darling, the times we had!; but Cousin Ben wasn't listening.  He was a practical man, a sensible man, and Abe's meanderings were no more than early senility or at best a flighty nostalgia. Ben  knew Esta Pilchman, and she was a cunt, pardon my language, but that's what she was, my furs and his Armani trolling for rich widowers on Collins Avenue, what else is there? 

And that Cohen bitch, a chip off her father's block, that diamond-cutter who cheated and weaseled his way to becoming The Diamond King Of New York, shyster, gave a bad name to all Jews, a man who brought up his daughter to be just like him, a conniver, a cheap con artist, and an intellectual hack.

'Back to Donald Trump', said Ben.  'I'll bet his mind's not on some Bette Cohen or Esta Pilchman', and the two men marveled at the President's energy, persistence, all-hours work ethic, macho bully, transformer, undaunted premier.

He is running the country while we're still here.  Caterers is all we are, in-between men who buy cheap, charm the old ladies with our stories of Monte Carlo and Rimini.   What were our lives worth?  What difference did we make?  And here we are at eighty stumbling our way down to Florida on the Orange Blossom Express. 

Abe and Ben were not the only old men comparing themselves to the President.  Eighty was a time for aches and pains, prothesis, indifferent children, plumbing issues and lawn maintenance and thoughts of Riverside Senior Living; and here was Trump duking it out with Putin and Xi, bombing Iran, sending storm troopers to Chicago, electrifying border fences, whooping it up before tens of thousands of adoring Americans while most other men his age were doodling and dithering their way to the cemetery. 

Take Alvin Blatter, Yale Class of ____, now well into his eighties still fighting for traction in the progressive movement, securing his legacy, leaving something behind, standing at the podium at his Class Reunion, still harping and banging away about climate change, the coming Armageddon, and the fate of the planet.  

He was just a wheezy, jowly old man pounding away on an issue no one was interested in any more since the polar ice caps were gaining ice at record rates, sea levels were decreasing, the weather was as modulated and regularly capricious as ever, but there he was, red-faced and apoplectic, his furnace fired up, steam rising in one last, gasping attempt to show the world he meant something. 

There was no vaudevillian second in the wings ready to hook him off the stage, so he kept on whaling away until the very last, his way off the stage to desultory applause and sat down. 

If he wasn't the President, he was at least somebody of worth and perennial merit; but only a scattering of alumni sat in Woolsey Hall to listen to him and were just anxious for a breath of fresh air after Alvin's bellowing bombast. He was not presidential material. 

So two old Jews and a bunch of well-to-do Wall Street, Nantucket, and Palm Beach Yalies found themselves in the same boat, struggling with old age and wondering how they failed so desperately when Donald Trump was a firestorm of agency, wit, energy, and meaning.  

'"We all end up in a pile pele-mele", said Ronsard or Villon or one of those French poets', said Ben remembering Harold Bloom's guest lecture at NYU when he and Abe were students. 'In the end, worm food, and don't you forget it, you, me, and Donald Trump in the same mouldering grave'; but Abe was having none of his cousin's morbid philosophy.  

Who cares what one did?  Only did you have fun doing it, with Esta Pilchman and Bette Cohen and all the groupies on Washington Square when he was a radical, friends with Abbie Hoffman and Mark Rudd, talking Marx and Engels, charming girls who left Vassar and Smith for the East Village and the likes of him. 

'He's closing the Straits of Hormuz', Abe said to his cousin. 'Can you imagine that?'.  Not that the President of the United States was enforcing a naval blockade, but an eighty year old man. 'What’s going on?', said Abe. 

'Don't overreact', said Ben.  'You're being melodramatic'. 

And so it went with the Licht boys, back and forth both trying to make sense out of being so old.  Vladimir Nabokov had written in Speak, Memory his memoir, that the present is but a fraction of a millisecond, an indefinable moment and the future but a possibility.  Only the past is real.  We are our past

Nabokov knew this from the very start, and spent his youth indelibly fixing memories of Moscow, Paris, and the Mediterranean in his mind, playing the tape over and over again so that the past and the present were indistinguishable.  The more memories that became as substantial as anything in the present, the more substantial he became. 

'See', said Ben. 'Take a lesson'. 

'Being eighty is no picnic', replied Abe who couldn't get the Straits of Hormuz out of his mind and Donald Trump's finger on the button while he was ready to open the Collins Avenue condo for the winter, clear the deck, get some provision from Katz's Delicatessen, run by Herman Katz, great grandson of the founder of New York's Katz's (Send a salami to your boy in the Army). 

'No point in fussing about Trump', Abe conceded as he tucked into a prelim - an overstuffed pastrami and chicken liver on rye made specially by Joe at Wagshal's. 

Jealousy - The Evolutionary Advantage Of Sexual Suspicion

There is no more common human trait than jealousy.  Shakespeare understood it perhaps better than most, and featured virulently jealous characters in Othello, The Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and Much Ado About Nothing.  While these are plays about men behaving badly – all have been duped, tricked, and deceived, and on the flimsiest of evidence have gone on to condemn their lovers and by the way condemning all women.  Othello tells his judges about to sentence him for the murder of Desdemona that he did them a favor ridding the city of yet one more lying slattern.

Claudio, lover of Hero, is taken in by the most transparent trickery of Don John who wants to avenge Claudio’s military victory.  He arranges for a mock balcony scene where imposters play Hero and her lover and their exchange is to be overheard and relayed to Claudio.  Claudio takes this contrived hearsay for fact, and launches a virulent attack on the unfaithful Hero and on all women.  Even Leonato, Hero’s father is quick to judgment and assuming guilt condemns his daughter.

Posthumus in Cymbeline is taken in by Iachimo, and in one of Shakespeare’s most violently misogynistic passages, condemns his wife as a treacherous vixen.  The men, fathers and sons, in The Winter’s Tale are no different. Hearsay added to innuendo and jealous suspicion throws the sweet, innocent Perdita’s character into disrepute.

As much as one can accuse the men of these stories of hateful misogyny, jealousy is standard fare for all societies. A woman’s infidelity, never certain and always suspect, can lead to illegitimate birth, questions of lineage and heritage for the well-to-do and questions of economics for the hoi polloi. Why should a man, hard pressed to survive in a marginal environment, invest anything in a child who is not his? Issues of misogyny, machismo, patriarchy, and sexual abuse all derive from male uncertainty. It is a matter of security, let alone male ego and pride, to know paternity.

As much as one can accuse the men of these stories of hateful misogyny, jealousy is standard fare for all societies. A woman’s infidelity, never certain and always suspect, can lead to illegitimate birth, questions of lineage and heritage for the well-to-do and questions of economics for the hoi polloi. Why should a man, hard pressed to survive in a marginal environment, invest anything in a child who is not his? Issues of misogyny, machismo, patriarchy, and sexual abuse all derive from male uncertainty. It is a matter of security, let alone male ego and pride, to know paternity.

Some bio-ethicists such as Megan Doe have suggested that jealousy provided an evolutionary adaptation for males to assure paternity and to avoid spending resources on other males’ offspring and led females to guarantee protection and support for her offspring by having a steady partner. Men need to be sure that their children are theirs; and women, once having secured an economically viable mate, need to be sure that he doesn’t stray.

Critic Gail Kern Paster focuses less on evolutionary factors for jealousy and suspicions, and draws on Pauline influence: “Sixteenth century English society had not yet dispensed with forms of overt, virulent misogyny inherited from medieval Catholicism which made marriage, especially for men, a less perfect way of life than celibacy.”

She goes on:

The point is not only that the difference between man and woman…but that women are responsible for their sins, and men are not. Even more crucial is to recognize the instability between a misogyny which posits All-Women-Are-The-Same and an idealization which posits Women-as-Different. In the conversations between Claudio and Benedick, as in the similar conversations between Romeo and Mercutio this instability in the categorization of women is easy to detect. “Can the world buy such a jewel as Hero?” idealist Claudio asks rhetorically. “Yea”, comes the misogynist’s bawdy reply, “ and a case (vagina) to put it into”.

Perhaps the best fictional depiction of jealousy is in Strindberg’s play, The Father.  For years the Captain has ruled his wife, Laura, and commanded all decisions about her, their home, and their daughter.  When Laura feels that he has finally overstepped his bounds, making arbitrary decisions about their daughter and her education, she decides to refuse and force his capitulation.  She does so with the psychological canniness and evil intent of Iago, introducing the idea, however subtlety that their daughter is not his. She knows that paternity is at the heart of male jealousy and insecurity – men can never absolutely know whether the children borne by their wives are theirs – and she progressively suggests that their child might not be his.  Such doubts, especially since they never can be proven, are by nature corrosive, and eventually the Captain goes mad.  Laura commits him to a mental institution, and she takes charge of her daughter.  Adding insult to injury she tells him, “Now you have fulfilled your function as an unfortunately necessary father…, you are not needed any longer and you must go.”

Marcel Proust was perhaps the most eloquent about jealousy:

It is not even necessary for that person to have attracted us, up till then, more than or even as much as others. All that was needed was that our predilection should become exclusive. And that condition is fulfilled when – in this moment of deprivation – the quest for the pleasures we enjoyed in his or her company is suddenly replaced by an anxious, torturing need, whose object is the person alone, an absurd, irrational need which the laws of this world make it impossible to satisfy and difficult to assuage – the insensate agonizing need to possess exclusively.

Vladimir Nabokov was equally compelling about jealousy, and in the final scenes of Lolita Humbert has Claire Quilty read this poem:

Because you stole her
from her wax-browed and dignified protector
spitting into his heavy-lidded eye
ripping his flavid toga and at dawn
leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort
the awfulness of love and violets
remorse despair while you
took a dull doll to pieces
and threw its head away
because of all you did
because of all I did not
you have to die

And Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Before long, unfortunately, she began to be jealous herself, and Tomas saw her jealousy not as a Nobel Prize, but as a burden, a burden she would be saddled with until not long before his death.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets to his young man express a jealousy which is romantic and purely felt.  The poet expresses no anger, no hostility, or no vengeful thoughts. It is simply love which demands an emotional fidelity to be returned and requited:

Sin of self love possesseth all mine eye/And all my soul, and all my every part;/And for this sin there is no remedy/It is so grounded in my heart…(Sonnet 62)

While Darwin’s Origin of the Species makes ultimate sense and has been part of the scientific canon for over 150 years, it is hard for many to accept its application to human behavior.  Yet, there it is, the survival of the human species characterized by territorialism, self-interest, aggressive defensiveness, tribal hegemony, and the impulse to dominance.  That we are no different from the animals is one thing, but to accept the fact that we can never outgrow, evolve or mature from a hardwired human nature is another entirely.  Despite millennia of human history and its record of territorial wars, the bloody expansion of empire, and the perennial struggles for supremacy, there are those who insist that we can overcome this nature and become better human beings.  We can achieve Utopia, a peaceful, verdant, calm and collaborative world.

These same observers would like to think that the personal drives and instincts that fuel the international conflicts of today and yesterday can be blunted, expunged, and dismissed.  Jealousy, known less for its literary appeal and universality and more for its physical violence, abuse of women, and virulent misogyny is no different.  With compassion, understanding, and education, men can be tamed of their worst instincts.

The evidence is all to the contrary, and jealousy is an essential piece of our Darwinian destiny.  Jealousy is an expression of possession, and possession is at the heart of survival of the fittest.  Men are jealous of the women they have won because of their high valuation of them, and the chance to continue the line.  Women are similarly jealous of the men they have attracted because they do not want to lose their prized possessions.

Jealousy is here to stay and well it should.

Class, Culture, And Sex - The Saga Of A Yale Man Who Ventured Across The Tracks At His Peril

Town-Gown relationships at Yale were always testy back in the day when East was East and West was West; or in other words, venture across the tracks at your own peril.  Maria and Leona might be appealing - a break from the blonde, blue-eyed, predictably suitable women from Smith, Holyoke, and Vassar that one was expected to marry - but they were dangerous.  

There was nothing but pure gold to be found in that neutral ground between Wooster Square and the Yale campus, the New Haven Green.  There Yale men who trolled for a pretty, dark-eyed girl from across the tracks might find a willing signorina from Olive Street for an interlude, a cross-cultural affair, a dip into foreign waters. 

The New Haven Green, historic burial place for the Davenports, the Potters, and the Longworths and gathering place for Revolutionary partisans whose militias were instrumental in the war against the British, was the modern day crossroads for the two communities.  Italians from Wooster Square came across the canal to shop at Malley's and see the latest Hollywood epics at the Palace and Strand, and crossed the Green in sight of Harkness Tower, the Old Campus, and Silliman College. 

Angie Lacava had never much thought about Yale, a world apart from the Italian neighborhood in which she had grown up. Depending on where you stood, you might see Harkness Tower and if the wind were right, hear the bells which rang every hour, but it would be passing, incidental, and irrelevant moment.  

The two sides of New Haven - the old Italian one with neighbors from Sorrento, Amalfi, and Naples, corner bakery shops that sold cannoli, bocconotti, and sfogliatelle, butchers, fish mongers, Jesuits, and mafiosi; and the Yale one, privileged, monied, well-to-do, legatees of old New England, the Massachusetts Bay Colony, Wall Street, presidents, and ship owners. 

Angie's father had always wanted her to marry a nice Italian boy, a doctor maybe, or a lawyer.  Italians were making it out of Wooster Square, having a go the the Anglo-Saxon world and at times making it big. Italians were already doing well in construction - demolition, cement, hauling, and roofing - and were big on the docks.  New Haven's port was small compared to anything in New York or New Jersey, but it captured the short-haul trade from Providence and Boston.  More than enough to make a living.

Most of the Italians on Wooster Square had worked their way up from day labor and were still half-educated guidos.  They made plenty but still were goombas with all the lawn ornaments, patio furniture, sconces, and Carrera marble of the working class.  Lacava wanted something more American for his daughter, and the Yale men across the green had it and then some.  They lived on Beacon Hill, had summer homes on Nantucket, wintered on St. Bart's, and skied on the slopes of Gstaad and Chamonix; and here they were not more than a mile away. 

Of course he underestimated the depth and width of the divide.  How could he possibly know what it was like to study Blake's Tyger, head off to Vail for Christmas, intern at J.P. Morgan, and marry similar wealth, privilege, history, and upper class drawing room sophistication?

However, he had a willing student in his daughter, Angie, who had always felt hemmed in, deceived, and misinformed.  America outside Wooster Square was not to be trusted.  It was venal, godless, greedy, and alcoholic; but on those occasions when Angie and her friends ventured past the Green and went to the movies or shopped at Malley's and rubbed shoulders with men from Yale, the warnings of her grandmother and maiden aunts seemed off the mark, inventions, gossip. 

The Yale men were handsome, confident, at ease with themselves, relaxed and able; and oh, what it would be like to be in love with one of them!

Once this scintilla of doubt crept in behind her protective, suspicious wall, it was preoccupying.  She could think of nothing else, and wondered what it would take to meet one of these gorgeous men.  Would she have to seduce them, trap them, entice them?  Or simply act their virginal, simple, pious selves and offer something deep and reassuring?

Anson Wright was one of these Yale men who was anxious to spread his wings, see what the palaver about hot Wooster Square girls was all about.  One foray across the tracks didn't mean a shotgun wedding, so if it happened, it happened. 

Watch your Ps and Qs', Angie's mother warned her when she got an inkling of her daughter's intentions. 'Those boys are no good' and went on to relate stories of girls of her generation who got hooked by the idea and snookered by one Yalie after another.  'You know what they're after', she said; and of course she was right.  No self-respecting Boston Brahmin or Fifth Avenue gentleman would want anything to do with them.  She knew because she cleaned up after them in their dining rooms, their residences, and their libraries. 

Angie, however, refused to be cloistered and corralled by a phalanx of fat duennas in black dresses.  Those were Old Country ways and this was America! and so she made her leisurely forays across the canal to park benches on the Green, hoping for a proper Mr. Right to notice her.  At the same time, despite her rebelliousness and hardened attitude towards Southern Italian prudery, she couldn't help but be influenced by it.  As she sat demurely on the bench, legs properly together, blouse buttoned to the top, and cardigan neatly arranged, she knew that there was more to Yale, the Green, and prospective wealthy husbands than met the eye. 

And so it was that they met on a park bench on the Green.   She reminded him of Anna Magnani who was playing in We, The Women at the Strand, of Anne Bancroft nee Anna Maria Luisa Italiano;  she with every stereotyped thing about him - his blond, straight hair, his fair coloring, his perfect teeth, his tall, easy grace.  They were who they were supposed to be, and that is as good a beginning of an affair as any. Men always are attracted to women who remind them of their mothers, etc. 

He was so charming, so unbelievably attractive, and so rich; and one thing led to another and soon he was inviting her to spend the night with him at the Taft.   He of course had been only trolling when he picked her up.  It didn’t take much with these Wooster Square girls unlike Vassar girls who checked family pedigree as carefully as a Hebrew manuscript in the Dead Sea scrolls.  They wanted to be wooed by someone of superior wealth, charm, and intelligence, but such a man was hard to find and harder to catch given the narrow, crowded milieu in which they lived.  These goomba twats only wanted someone, anyone with money. 

Angie politely declined his offer of a night at the Taft, but ended up giving it up in his Trumbull College dorm room anyway. “I can’t believe I’m really here”, she thought to herself as she kissed him and looked out the window at the College’s Gothic spires, manicured courtyard, and ancient window tracery.  Shortly after what had been a marvelous, romantic adventure for her but only a Townie interlude for him, he left her on the curb.

It didn’t pay to get involved with one of them she told her girlfriends, sobbing, missing him, but angry at how she was so shamelessly treated.  “Never again”, she said. 

At about this time Yale had begun to come under increasing pressures from New Haven to invest more in the city - not only in infrastructure, but in human resources as well. It wasn't enough, City officials said, for Yale to hire the men and women who served the elite; it was time for them to recruit talented New Haven students for Yale's undergraduate body itself. The moment had come for New Haven's Italian-Americans to stop serving strawberries, and to eat them.

Yale agreed, but with a prejudice characteristic of the times, assumed that any Italian-American New Haven student would be only suitable for menial work, agreed to admit Richard Puzzi, Alderman Guido Marucci's highly recommended candidate who had been a football standout at New Haven High. At least this slab of hairy meat would make short work of the Princeton line, so fuck the grades. A memo went out to all Puzzi’s professors at the beginning of the year: "Pass this ape".

What the Yale recruiters didn't know - and in their rush to scrape up a bit of detritus from Olive Street - was that this hairy piece of meat was the son of a connected guy. Mario Puzzi had worked his way up in the Gianfredo family and was known in the neighborhood as someone who did generous favors but brooked no disrespect.  The only reason that his son Richard had been admitted to Yale was because of the pressure he put on Alderman Marucci.  It was win-win all the way around - a son at Yale, an Italian finally learning not serving, and even more respect for Mario and his family. 

So, despite her WASP yearnings, Angie returned to her roots and went to Mario for a favor.  Could his son, Richard, now enrolled at Yale, teach that philandering, deceitful prick Wright a lesson he would never forget? 

No one found out how or why the unfortunate Anson Wright got so badly beaten, enough to force him to take a year off from Yale, but rumor mills, ethnic prejudice, and preconception being what they are, it was assumed that his goomba chippy was behind it.

They never once suspected the new Yale Italian fullback who was indeed making mincemeat of the Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth lines, but that's the upside of prejudice.  The oaf got admitted to Yale, so that had to mean something. 

All this has changed in the Yale of today of course.  It no longer is the Old World, British colonial place of privilege and wealth that it once was.  It is now 'democratic' with all comers let in.  Diversity - not just the town-gown kind of decades before, but the real kind is the meme.  No need to cruise the New Haven Green anymore.  However with such libertinage something was missing.  No risk, no crossing the canal, no pursuit, and no consequence.  A dull affair; and Yale is now a dumbed down, safe place - a university like all others without cachet, admiration, or privilege.