Liaisons Dangereuses - Infidelity Is The Rule, Not The Exception

Harry Fielding was a man of late middle age, not old enough to be worried about eternity, but not young enough to be indifferent to it.  He was a settled man - good job, good marriage, good children - and it was that very prosperous, well-ordered life that bothered him. 

He had skied the double-blacks at Aspen, climbed Mt. Whitney, taken a river trip down the Napo River, and was planning an Everest expedition; but all of that was just justification, acknowledgement of being alive, not living the life given to him which was drawing rapidly to a close. 

What he missed....what he really missed was youth, not his own but beside him in bed, a valediction of...of what? Maleness? Male identity? Not virility, certainly, for that no longer had to be proven, but the inimitable delight of a smooth, supple, and responsive body next to him.

The Coleman Silk character in Roth's novel The Human Stain, an older professional man, respected professor and dean, has taken a young lover and in response to the criticism of his friend who warns him of the consequences, says, 'Granted, she's not my first love; and granted she's not my best love, but she certainly is my last love.  Doesn't that count for something?'

Of course it does, thought Harry as he made his way up the north slope, making fast his foothold on the difficult ascent.  In all his accomplishments, his notable addenda to a successful professional life and respected social influence, why was there none of Silk's conclusive completion?

He, Harry, had always been a good father and husband, faithful, honorable, and dutiful.  Wasn't that what had always been expected of him? Church, City Hall, Rotary, and the Leland Country Club had all assumed propriety, doing the right thing.  Yet ever since he glimpsed the breasts of Nancy Blythe in the Spring of eighth grade, he had been the prisoner of women - or at least to the thought of them, the desire for them, and the satisfaction that only they could give.

His youth was not misspent.  There was Maria from Smith, a classic Italian beauty with a particular talent for woodcuts learned at the hand of Leonard Baskin; Alicia from Vassar, heir to the Davenport fortune; and Melissa Frank, Jewish princess, daughter of a Hollywood mogul, and as rapacious a Jewess as there ever had been, but he had married conservatively.  

His wife had been an anodyne to his adventurism, a woman of solid practicality and good sense - something Maria, Alicia, and Melissa did not have, free spirits all, on very individual paths, marvelous sexual company, but not life partners.

His marriage had been a good one. Elizabeth was a faithful, loving woman, good mother and companion.  And yet....

Of course 'and yet...'.  No man has ever been content or satisfied with just one woman, as remarkable as she might be; and Harry was no different. The itch had always been there, never absent, and while his dreams of sexual adventures became more and more insistent, he demurred.  Dishonesty  - a harsher, more accurate term for infidelity - was not something with which he was comfortable. 

There was Dina from Accounting and Marfa Parsons, available, increasingly worried young women in their early thirties whose biological clocks were ticking and whose libidos were on high alert; and he fell off the wagon, and met Dina every Saturday in her South Side apartment for two bottles of champagne and a long morning of lovemaking.  This is what he remembered. This is what sexual encounters were supposed to be about.  No accommodation, nothing casual and incidental, only the inimitable, indescribable sexual purity of it all. 

When his late life affair with Anastasia began, he was expecting nothing less and nothing more, but there was something perplexingly honest about her. Not demanding, for she was an independent woman, but forthright - a sense that liaisons were never indifferent, casual affairs. 

And it was then that the liaison became dangerous, a threat not only to Harry's marriage but to his whole idea of moral certitude.  There were lines that should not and would not be crossed.  But goddamn age!  As he and Phillip Roth well knew, the male pull-by date was a frightening passage.  There was no after-party. 

His wife never suspected, for decades of moral probity and sincere rectitude did not suggest dalliance. And yet he could not be comfortable in his skin.  He was a liar, a traitor, and adulterer, and a breaker of a solemn, anointed marital contract. 

Yet as all men know - and D.H. Lawrence wrote about - there is such a thing as sexual epiphany; uncommon and perhaps a fanciful idea of a frustrated Victorian writer, but all in all, something potent, and dangerous.

Was it love? Was that old, hackneyed, Petrarchan notion of romantic love behind Lawrence and all men's desire?

Whatever...Harry was a besotted, dumb, irrational lover.  He ate, drank, slept, and thought about Anastasia the whole day long, and could only count the hours until he saw her again. 

None of this is worth noting, men being what they are.  Shakespeare said it best in his Comedies as the likes of Rosalind, Viola, and Portia ran rings around the desperate suitors after their hand in marriage.  Courting is the stuff of melodrama. 

Edward Albee knew that marriage was the crucible of maturity - only in a restrictive marriage is one forced to face one's sexual insecurities, ambitions, and desires. and come out of it whole.  So did Tennessee Williams whose Maggie the Cat and Brick come to some kind of accommodation after years of sexually emotional incest, understand sexuality. 

 

Konstantin Levin, a principal character in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina said that God's infernal irony was to create Man as an intelligent, insightful, creative being, give him only a few decades to live and then to consign him forever to the cold, hard, steppes of eternity, 

Levin should have posted an addendum - men are created with a lifelong interest in women, given only a few short decades to fulfill their desire, but to spend the rest of their life living a frustrated desire. 

The affair between the young  Anastasia and the aging Harry ended as would be expected - a young woman, enticed, intrigued, and satisfied by an older man but with dreams to fulfill; and an older man suddenly cut off from his fountain of youth, left on the curb and faced only with decades, if that, of very pedestrian interests. 

The story ends there.  No one expected it to turn out differently; but it is a minor tragedy nonetheless. 'Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all' has its modern reprise.