Love And Other Incidentals - How Sex With Younger Women Fuels Men In A Dog-Eat-Dog World

Love is a balm, spread it liberally and it will magically relieve angst and anomie and remove the desperation that the world is becoming unhinged, unaligned with sense and sensibility, and nothing but chasms, sinkholes, and emotional crevasses.  Yes, love the anodyne, the miracle-worker, the fountain of youth, the lucky charm. 

So thought Henrik Baylor many months into a December-May affair, an early Christmas, toys and bikes and baseball gloves under the tree, the smell of quince pies, pine needles, and turkey roasting in the oven. 

He had met Annette Browning at the Town & Country bar of the Mayflower Hotel, the grandest grande dame in Washington, a Victorian place of class and opportunity, a meeting place, a confessional place where policy is discussed and where affairs begin.

'I'll have another', said Henrik, one of Bill the Bartender's spot-on martinis, Stoli with just a breath of Vermouth, two olives in a fluted crystal glass.  Drinking at the Mayflower was not just an alcoholic routine, it was a ritual, a precedent, and the first step to trysts and confidences. 

Annette was a young lawyer at Parker & Fiske, one of K Street's premier firms, the go-to defender for white collar crimes, famous for its literary, high-toned rhetoric masking a wolverine viciousness.  They rarely lost a case and their lawyers had that brain surgeon machismo, so when Annette was hired they were breaking the mold, but the young woman was known for her steely, uncompromising will - a man in woman's clothing, one of the boys. 

She never lost a beat and did the firm proud, a honey bear in Lanvin and Armani, a gorgeous woman as smart as they come.  All the lawyers admired her but kept their personal distance.  Annette was intimidating, demanding in a way which suggested conquest in bed as well as the courtroom. 

Henrik knew none of this when he asked the attractive young woman sitting next to him at the bar of the Town & Country.  He was just a middle aged man striking out for new territory, long tethered in a dogtrot of a marriage, not exactly unhappy but not happy either, and realizing that the clock was ticking and he had nothing to lose, he decided to stray.

The Town & Country was known for its atmosphere - not its ambience so much as pheromones in the air. There had to be something floating free that heightened sexual sensibilities, offered promise and opportunity, and lubricated the machinery of love. 

December-May affairs on the surface suggest sugar daddies, gold-diggers, sexual opportunists, and hungry vixens; but this is far from the truth.  There is something particularly alluring about a mature, successful, handsome man that is irresistible to young women.  Older men will understand them; they will love them for who they are; they will look past the glamour and sexual appeal and discover the inner woman. 

The middle aged man sees youth, a reprieve from aging, a confirmation of his lasting virility.  A younger woman's love confers identity, transfers youth, and offers release from years of life with old parchment.

The affair began that night fueled by Bill's martinis, the pheromone-filled air of the Town & Country, the devil-may-care ferocity of Henrik, and the months-long celibacy of an intimidating woman. 

It was perfect, an easy meant-for-each-other sexual and emotional elision. It was what they both had been waiting for, hoping for, and increasingly worried that would never happen. 

There are always daddies and their little girls in such affairs.  Annette loved her father, his favorite, his special, his delight; and consciously or unconsciously she hoped she would find and marry someone like him.  Henrik loved his daughter Lucia, delighted at her charm, her enthusiasm, and her coquettish good humor. 

This is not so say that the affair was solely predicated upon these Freudian factors.  It was far from that, and was a Lawrentian equilibrium, two individuals who found equipoise and sexual equilibrium in the relationship. 

Now, sex for most is routine, at best limited to a pre-marital concourse, romantic love followed by predictably; for others it is conquest, and for still others it is dominance and submission. 

For the very few - the willful, Nietzschean few - a December-May affair adds octane to the already potent male desire for battle, conquest, and reward. 

Henry Kissinger, former Secretary or State under Richard Nixon famously said that power is the greatest aphrodisiac - men's sex drive is heightened and women are increasingly drawn to them.  

This however is only the tip of the iceberg, a pedestrian matter, an issue of sexual attractiveness; but in the case of men like Henrik Baylor, already the Genghis Khan of the courtroom, it made him invincible with a status, allure, and confidence only imagined by others. 

Sex with Annette conferred virility - the street variety, the take-no-prisoners, vandalizing, unleashing of pure male power.  He felt superhuman, indomitable. 

Now, as an older man who has been in such a revitalizing, energizing, unforgettable affair, the letdown is worse than coming down from heroin.  To have one's sexual life tail off, dwindle, and recede is one thing.  To have had it in a blaze of glory and then to lose it is insufferable.  Suddenly old age returns. There is nothing left.  Looking in the mirror the lover no longer sees a graying, dashing Errol Flynn, but a bagof bones, a lined, saggy, jowly old man. 

Henrik saw the end of the affair coming, tried to put it off, but the wisdom, patience, attention and loving insights of Daddy had run their course, and Annette grew restive and confined.  After she left, Henrik was disconsolate and dispirited.  His swagger disappeared, his appearance flagged, and he began to lose trials

With heroin there is always another fix; but with this unique, equally exhilarating hit, there is no re-upping.  It is too late, younger women look the other way or simply do not see the older man. 

Henrik was not only finished as lover but as an Ubermensch.  He felt deflated, flaccid, and empty.  How could this be? he wondered.  He hadn't changed from the superman he had been with Annette to now, and yet he felt supernumerary, unneeded.  Early detritus, a bit of unnecessary clutter. 

'Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all', was the old adage, totally inappropriate for the likes of Henrik Baylor for whom the end of a young-old affair meant a life of quiet desperation and nothing more.  The love he had with Annette became his benchmark, his touchstone, and everything was measured against it - it became an obsession, a reminder of mortality; and he couldn't shake it. 

He never got over it but accommodated nevertheless.  He retired early - what was the point of working? - and lived a comfortable life in South Florida.  Gradually thoughts of his grandchildren edged out Annette, but only for brief moments.