Love With An Older Gentleman - The Happy Ending To The Life Of A Privileged Man

Prentiss Hetherington was a descendant of the Northumberland Hetheringtons, the first member of which was knighted by Henry II - the Duke of Hampshire - and later descendants paid tribute by Elizabeth I and Elizabeth II. 

 

Prentiss was an American of patrician roots - a close relative of both Cabots and Lodges in Boston and direct descendant of John Davenport, member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, founder of New Haven and scion of the Newport, New Bedford, and Nantucket whaling and Three-Cornered slave trade families.

The Hetheringtons had long divested their holdings in the Prentiss Holding Company, LLC, the original Wall Street-backed financial institution responsible for the millions of dollars in transatlantic and Caribbean trade, but were principal shareholders in the company's offspring, the Hetherington Trust, an investment fund worth billions. 

Prentiss went to Groton and then to Yale, Class of 19___, and then took up his family's seat on the New York stock exchange as well as continuing to manage it's extensive wealth portfolio.  He had homes in Beacon Hill, Portofino, Gstaad, and Palm Beach, and remained married to Clementine Adderley, a woman of equal social status, recognition and wealth whom he had met at Wellesley and carried on a famously outrageous affair in Boston and New Haven before marrying to bells, ushers, bouquets, and champagne on Nantucket. 

 

All went along swimmingly in the life of the Hetheringtons - a life led with taste, virtue, and good causes - until Prentiss began to feel that familiar male scratchiness that sets in in late male middle age - that unnamed, improvident, but persistent sexual desire for youthful encounters common to all men. 

Now, Prentiss had had his affairs - Usha, the lovely Palestinian princess with whom he had spent his Thousand and One Nights in Jerusalem; Berthe, the Ice Queen, the Icelandic beauty who, out of an exuberant desire to help others travelled to the same remote outpost in Africa where Prentiss was overseeing his family's investments in diamonds, emeralds, and rare earths; and Monica, the tennis player from Serbia who, beaten badly in the Prague finals, was looking for solace at the bar of the St. Regis hotel.

 

For many years Prentiss remained faithful to his long-suffering wife, and it was with surprise and renewed energy that another woman had come so late into his life.  She, an ordinary working girl with few ambitions other than Branch Manager, with little interest in older men as she entered her thirties, and beginning to accept the long slide to spinsterhood and a single life, was not primed for Prentiss Hetherington, not by a long shot. 

Yet there she was at the Mayflower bar, drinking Stoli martinis and picking at the mixed nuts, when Prentiss struck up a conversation.  They had little in common. She was a working girl from Gaithersburg, he the scion of one of America's finest families; but difference makes no difference at Happy Hour, and all that mattered to Lisa Marvis was attentive company, and all that mattered to Prentiss Hetherington was the interest of a young woman thirty years his junior. 

If young women like her can be interested in older men like him, then sex never dies, essential responses being forever alive and well. Whether she shuffled papers, filled out forms, or filed claims mattered little. For him, nearing the last decades of his life, such incidentals were of no concern; and for her, a lonely, alone, but still vitally sexual young woman, age did not matter in the least. 

And so it was that they became known as the odd couple - for despite their attempts to keep the affair quiet, Washington being the porous, gossipy town that it is, their romance became the thing, the affair that affirmed love itself.  The two were not predictable caricatures - gold-digging working girl lands fabulously wealthy Boston patrician; older rich man buys his way to sexual satisfaction - but a cute couple imagined in a romantic fairy tale.  The knight in shining armor woos diamond in the rough, Mr. Right finds his true love in the ashes. 

The Coleman Silk character in Phillip Roth's novel, The Human Stain, an older man, a college dean, having an affair with a young janitor says to a reproachful colleague, 'Granted she's not my first love; and granted she's not my best love, but goddamn it, she's my last love. Doesn't that count for something?'; and of course it does for any older man, married for decades to the same tired, sour-smelling wife and with the same virility and male desire he was born with.  

Konstantin Levin, a principal character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina reflects on God's supreme irony - having created Man, a supremely intelligent, creative, insightful, humorous being, and after granting him a spare, scant few decades on earth, consigns him for all eternity in the cold, hard ground of the steppes. 

The corollary to that irony is that God created men with a lifelong desire for women, but granted them only a few decades to satisfy it; and Prentiss had been feeling that irony and that awful consignment until he met Lisa Marvis from HR. 

Their weekends in her one-bedroom walk-up in Adams Morgan were inexplicable - no foresight or romantic imagination could have predicted such a happy, unregulated, free and easy sexual affair.  Their partings became more tearful as they planned their life together, each ignoring reality. He could never divorce his wife for a child of Iowa farmers, a young women with potential but without ability; and she could not possibly care for a man approaching doddering old age. 

All this, the best of all possible December-May affairs, was what made the end of Prentiss' life bearable. Like thousands of older men before him, he would die in the arms of a young lover, and he looked forward to the moment. 

It was a male moment - a man relieved of husbandly duty, responsibility, and fidelity; his own man, the pasha of a formerly unremarkable, ordinary life, an Übermensch, the Man. 

'There is no dignity in rutting', a Yale classmate arrogantly said to him upon finding out about his dalliances with an office girl; but Prentiss was unmoved and uncontrite. There was no patrician lodging, no family legacy, no prescribed duty that trumped this - the final, uncompromised statement of a man. 

The affair of course did not last.  Lisa went back to Iowa, and Prentiss returned to his wife, turned over management of his estate to his sons, and retired to his beachfront villa in St. Bart's. 

It is often said that a December-May affair, while firing the sexual jets for one last time, leaves the older male lover devastated that he must live out his life in dismally celibate years.  Yet Prentiss looked at it another way - the affair was seminal, worth far more than the hundreds he had had as a young man, a prize, an early Christmas present. 

As he moved to advanced old age, he remembered many things - wife, parents, children and more - but on his deathbed he thought only of Lisa from HR.  Not God, not eternity, not loss; but the renovating, immeasurably happy life at the end.