The Ineffable Allure Of A December-May Affair - Extending Anthony Barker's Sexual Pull-By Date

The Coleman Silk character in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain is having an affair with a much younger woman.  His friend and colleague calls him on it, saying she is not of the same background, education and culture, and more importantly she is being shadowed by her schizophrenic, dangerous ex-husband. 'She's nothing but trouble, Coleman', he says. 

 

Silk pauses, reflects, hesitates, but then replies, 'Granted she's not my first love, and granted she's not my best love; but she's certainly my last love.  Doesn't that count for something?'

In Coleman's case it very much does.  A respected man wrongly accused by colleagues at the college where he teachers and was dean, prematurely widowed, and angry at the system which caused his disgrace and his wife's death, finds solace, comfort, satisfaction, and renewal in his relationship with Faunia Farley, janitor, cleaning woman, and milker at a local dairy. 

It is an old story, older men who leave their wives for or have an affair with a younger woman. There is something inevitable about a man's desire well into his elder years.  Konstantin Levin, Tolstoy's character in Anna Karenina notes God's greatest irony - to have created an intelligent, sentient, creative, insightful, humorous soul, granted him but a few decades on earth and then consigned him for all eternity in the cold, hard ground of the steppes. 

 

A more severe irony is that this same God created men with a lifelong desire for women, but granted them but a few decades to satisfy it.  The longer a man has to fulfill his sexual desire, the luckier he is. Few men whose virility persists well into advancing years do anything about it, either so set in their ways, hopelessly married, or somehow faithful to the idea of fidelity. 

Coleman does not go quietly into the night but takes Faunia as a lover and suffers the consequences, murdered by the crazed, schizophrenic ex-husband.  Yet he has no regrets and lives with the constant threat of Lester with equanimity. The epiphany, the resurrection the renewal, the reaffirmation has been so profound, that even death does not deter him. 

Anthony Barker was long since retired, and was enjoying a second career in academia.  His marriage was stable, his grown children reasonably happy in their marriages, and his days were satisfyingly filled with the intellectual pursuits he had little time for during his professional career. Yet the itch, that itch, was increasingly troublesome, and despite the lessons of Coleman Silk, he felt hopeless.  Who would have him?  He had neither the wealth to attract young women, nor a position of political power, a la Henry Kissinger ('Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac'), so he would have to fend for himself. 

Museums, art galleries, the gym, coffee shops, oyster bars? Fine for younger men but impossibly clumsy for a man of his age. He no longer had an office to go to, no Annette from Accounting, no trysts at the Mayflower. 

There was always the constant companion of reserve - the marriage, trust, honesty could not be so easily tested or dismissed without consequence. 

Marc Antony in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, is besotted by the Egyptian queen, a younger woman, and he risks everything - his field command, his place in the Roman triumvirate, his future - for her. A typical man, not unlike Anthony Barker, a man trapped by a genetic imperative. 

'Hire a prostitute', his doctor half-facetiously said, ironically because the man had many lovers, a Jewish Lothario. Anthony hesitated, not sure if he was being toyed with, the old fox of a doctor always smiling and insinuating. 

'AIDS is a thing of the past', said the doctor, 'and at your age something else will get you before the incubation period is over'. 

There was indeed that option, for Madame Currier's establishment was well-known in town, the go-to place for incidental sex; but Anthony had never before resorted to what had always been referred to as 'darktown pleasures', ghetto time, rather inappropriate and unnecessary for someone of his natural sexual appeal. Yet, there he was, approaching his pull-by date, desperate.  

A close friend of Anthony's had, like Coleman Silk, taken a young lover, and said that he felt gifted, an early Christmas present, an unexpected treat, a delight.  

But would sex with a young prostitute have the same annealing, epiphanic properties? Weren't the cheating, the infidelity, and the young emotions that go along with illicit sex be absent? No amount of money could buy something as transformative as his friend had experienced. 

'Try it, what do you have to lose?', he said

Anthony's suspicion was correct. Legions of satisfied veterans of December-May affairs report the same experience. When age disappears and when she loves your patience and your sheer delight, that is what the affair is all about.  It isn't the sex that rejuvenates, that restores confidence and virility - it's the adoration, the very feminine claim that sex starts and ends with emotion. Sex with a prostitute would have none of that, none of the stuff of regeneration. 

Yet there was the feel of youth, the softness and impossibly generous sensuality - that could be had for sale, could it not?  Might a young prostitute be but the first step to restoration, the remaining building taking time and some serendipity?

He gave in and gave up.  He had no recourse. The ticking clock needed no winding.  It was time, do or die; and so it was that he made and appointment with Madame Currier and paid top dollar for la creme do la creme of her establishment.  It was worth every nickel.  It might not have been restoration and certainly not renewal, but there was no substitution for the sheer physicality of the event.  It was recalling, heady times. It was, despite the cash on the night table, exactly what he had hoped for. 

The Sultan of Izmir, grand pasha of the Ottoman Empire, master of a harem of twenty young women from Azerbaijan to Palestine had written in his memoir:

She came to me in flowing silk, a delicate flower, an Arab princess worthy of Cleopatra and Nefertiti but without their worldliness. She was as innocent as the morning dew, as nubile and desirous as a maiden, a sheer delight. 

And the next night came Usha, olive-skinned beauty from the Levant, dressed in satin, covered with pearls and jewels from the Orient

And the next night came a blonde star, a green-eyed daughter of Alexander the Great from the hills of Mathura...

Neither love nor restitution, nor epiphany were in play in the pasha's realm, not a single verse. 

A man who had always prided himself on his attractiveness to women said that he had never resorted to prostitution. Why should I?, he said; but a colleague corrected him. 'Apples and oranges', he said. 

And so it was that Anthony Barker learned about the nature of sex, and how one thing always leads to another.  One was never sure whether he reconciled with his wife, found that young lover which had always eluded him, returned to Madame Currier's establishment or all three.  His epiphany was not at all what he expected, but then again it never is.