Looking For A Husband - Danube River Tours, Castles, And Eye Shadow, The Feminine Mystique Of Travel

Vicki Brice squawked all the way up to Vassar for the reunion.  'This time will be a charm', she said referring to the Danube tour where she hoped to find her a husband - or rather a companion - for at her age romance was a thing of the distant past.  So dim in fact that she had to dig deep in her reticule of memories to sort out Michael from Phillip, Robert from David - or was it the other way around.  Never mind, doesn't matter. Let bygones be bygones, and let life begin again. 

Her husband of many years was not yet cold in the ground before Vicki began to plan her future.  'God only knows how many years one has left', she mused to her classmates, limning the praises of Lindblad Travel, a savior in disguise, the happy refuge for still-young widows like her.  She was not going to sit on her behind and watch the clock tick her hours away, not on your life, so it wasn't long after Arnold was in the grave that she began her romantic journeys.

The reunion would be a lot of old cows mooing about some bull who took them in the pasture, but old times are good times, and along with the fragments of trips to Yale, the Old Campus, the parties at Davenport and Silliman, reunions were silly, happy, girly things.  

Vassar girls however were supposed to be a cut above Smith, Holyoke, and the rest of the Seven Sisters - a place for the brightest, the future of women and not the usual marriage mills. Yes, the college did arrange busses to take girls down to Yale for the weekend, but that was part of the perks of a school like Vassar - differential calculus and the pick of the litter.  

If a Vassar girl had not found the man she was to marry by the time she graduated, something had gone awry.  God knows, there was no lack of opportunity. 

Now, Vicki was not exactly Miss Universe, in fact far from it.  She had gotten all the wrong genes from her Guatemalan father and Canary Island mother - a pairing which looked good on college applications just beginning to look for 'diversity' but which genetically speaking was a bad hand. 

She tried her best to make up for her genetic misfortune and spent a fortune on cosmetics, hair styling, and Lord & Taylor, but not even a makeover genius could have done anything for those narrow-set eyes, fright wig hair, disappointing nose, and thin as paper lips.  As much as she tried to convince herself otherwise, she was not much to look at.

Yet Yale was a big place, and the bell curve applies to everything; so although the number of chisel-jawed, blonde, blue-eyed Adonises skewed the curve and flattened it considerably, there were bound to be good men, just men, the right kind of men for her. 

She did find one, her recently departed husband, Arnold; and if there is little record of the couple, individually or together, it is because there are people on this earth who barely leave a smudge, men and women who come and go with barely a notice, folded into the run of the mill so perfectly that when they die, it is as though they had never lived. 

So Vicki's squawking was her war cry,  She might have been married to an emotional bookkeeper all these years - Arnold was never able to muster much more enthusiasm than turning a page - but her new life was going to begin, albeit far too late.  

All in all Arnold was a good husband, one of the very few who never strayed - but to be honest, this sexual sedentariness, far from honorable, made him even more unattractive. She had always had eyes for Lance Reventlow, Yale's prize, a Casanova, Valmont, and Lothario even as a freshman; but watched him fall into the spider web of Alexandra Cabot of the Boston Cabots, a tart, une pute, but a girl with money galore and Hollywood looks.  How could anyone compete with that?

There was first the Caribbean cruise, a very pedestrian affair. First Class did not do much to separate the wheat from the chaff, filled as it was with jolly old men from Dubuque more suited for excusing themselves for port and cigars while the ladies retired than anything romantic.  

Not a one of these 'men' was of any interest, the on-and-off stops at hot, steamy places was enervating, and the meals, touted as being prepared by a five-star chef, were as limp and insipid as her fellow diners. 

The second tour - the Aegean - offered more promise. It attracted a higher caliber of client thanks to a team of docents from Columbia University, a whopping all-inclusive price, and luxury accommodations; but the men kept their noses in their Baedekers and took copious notes during all lectures.  Who cared who did what to whom in the Peloponnesian wars, for God's sake? 

So this third tour, the Danube tour, seemed right.  Thanks to AI, Vicki was able search beyond the brochures.  There was no shame in asking ChatGPT anything, so she typed in 'I want a river cruise where I can meet, attractive, eligible older men' and Avalon was at the top of the list. 

To take a step back - why did these matronly women possibly think that trolling for husbands on a cruise ship was going to catch them a prize? Vicki had been saddled with her unhappy ordinariness for decades, and in that time not one man other than her bookkeeper husband ever looked her way. In fact Arnold rarely looked up at her at all. He was happy in the relationship because she, unlike most women, never forced the issue.  

Beverly Adams, for example, a woman of some stature in her former profession, married to a man whom she missed when he died, still needed male company.  Who said that women could be complete without men? Beverly wondered.  Probably some lesbian feminist who never needed men.   

So she went on cruises just like Vicki with little more in her bag to recommend her.  She was still attractive in an older woman kind of way, still as pert and vivacious as she was years ago, and while not beautiful, certainly attractive.  However she came up empty handed each and every time.  Divorced men obsessed about their wives, either disconsolate for having been left on the curb or angry that they had been; and widowers were still living in the shadows of the dear departed. 

Beverly was adaptable. Waverly was dead and buried, they had led a good life, but old age is unforgiving and the clock ticks faster than it did when one is young.  Yet for all her sanguinity and enthusiasm, she found nothing but dissatisfaction on board.  

Cruises are deliberately configured to encourage companionship, to make romantic interchange easier, to grease the wheels.  The cruise line membership algorithm was designed for compatibility.  It took the chance out of meeting.  Otherwise why bother? One might just as well cruise the National Gallery of Art or the Corcoran for well-intentioned, cultured men. 

Let's face it.  Most of these women, although hardwired to need men, socially programmed to seek them out and to live with them, were diffident about the idea at best. Decades of marriage only confirmed what their inner voices told them - men really aren't worth it, better to live without them, especially as one gets older and sex fades  as a desirable commodity. 

Vicki squawked all the way up 95, the Dewey Throughway, and Route 9W to Poughkeepsie.  This time would be different, she told her classmates.  She would come back refreshed, invigorated, renewed, and with a beautiful man in tow. 

Needless to say the Danube Cruise was just as much of a bust as the others, and Vicki was forced to regroup.  Maybe she was barking up the wrong tree. 

After the reunion she dropped out of sight, not a peep in the alumnae notes of The Vassar Quarterly, not a sighting anywhere in Washington; so it was anyone's guess what happened to her.

‘I hope she found someone',  one Vassar friend said to another; but Vicki would have been barking and yapping if she had.  No, a singular fate must have awaited her. 

There was nothing really surprising about Vicki's odyssey, regardless how she might have ended up. Women of a certain age are simply too hardwired to the man thing, the social thing, to do anything else.  All well and good for both sexes when both are plump and juicy, not so later on.