The Fountain Of Youth - Older Men Don't Want To Be Younger, They Just Want Love With A Younger Woman

'I'm past my sexual pull-by date', Cohen said to his internist who as a married late middle aged man with a young lover wanted nothing of it.  

'Bullshit', said Dr. Rubinstein in his customary blunt way - the forthrightness that his patients had come to expect and appreciate.  No patronizing, patriarchal sugar coating - facts are facts, diseases are diseases, all of which pick their victims at random.

'Why me?', Rubinstein heard every day as he went over blood results.  'The luck of the draw', he said, never considering an evasive answer; and so it was with Cohen who in good health was in low spirits and sought his physician's advice. 

 

Cohen said, as his sexual expiry approached - although actuarily he had many good years left, death had its macabre persistence - that he felt despondent.  Not that he had not had a good, productive, and fulfilling life, but the pall of enforced celibacy was diverting his attention from everything else.  

All he could think of was his last love, a lovely young woman half his age. Lisa was not the most beautiful girl in the world, but she was the most complaisant, the most willing, the most needy of his patience, understanding, and sexual enthusiasm. 

As Coleman Silk says in Phillip Roth's The Human Stain about his young lover, '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?', Cohen said, ‘It certainly does’.

Nelson Rockefeller, heir to to the John D. fortune, Governor of New York, and a mature man in his prime, died of a heart attack caused by a historic orgasm with his young lover in a Manhattan hotel room. 

 

All older men want to go out that way.  What could be better, more fulfilling, more existential than that? A simple, ordinary death in bed surrounded by loved ones? Dropping dead in the Governor's mansion or the Oval Office? 

None of the above.  Men, the best and the brightest to the Walmart greeter have the same dream and all were united in their oneness with Governor Rockefeller.

Cohen's affair with Annette of course ended, but not badly.  Both knew that it was destined to end, so there was no intimation of manipulation, extortion, or accusations of exploitation. Yes, they had talked of a future and even had agreed on the name of their first child, but both knew it could never be.

‘One last time', pleaded Annette about lovemaking as Cohen was about to leave; but as much as he was tempted, he had had just enough of the elixir to sustain him, at least for a while. 

Now Cohen was bereft, alone, and becoming depressed over the fact that he was still more than sexually capable but consigned to his rocker well before his time. 

He was reminded of the Konstantin Levin reflection in Anna Karenina, that God had created Man, an intelligent, sentient, creative, willful and enthusiastic being; allowed him but a few decades of life, and then consigned him to an eternity beneath the cold, hard ground of the steppes.  God's irony - having created men with a lifelong passion and desire for women but granting them a similarly few decades was a far worse irony.

Dr. Rubinstein, doctor and amateur Talmudic scholar reminded Cohen both of the Biblical injunctions to love God no matter when, how, or under what conditions; and of Solomon's many wives and concubines, both well into old age.  

‘Contradictory?', the doctor asked rhetorically.  'Far from it', and went on to suggest that life, even a religious one, was not meant to be lived in emotional and sexual penury. 

'Get a hooker', Dr. Rubinstein suggested. 

At first Cohen was shocked by the proposition.  How could a doctor in good standing in an age where AIDS had not totally been eradicated, when adultery still destroyed the most stable and solid of marriages, possibly have even intimated such a remedy? 

'Because I am a doctor', Rubinstein replied, 'and my first, foremost, and only preoccupation is for the welfare and wellbeing of my patients'. 

The thought had never occurred to Cohen.  He had always been a msn about town, a Casanova of sorts, an attractive desirable man well into his sixties.  He had never paid for sex, and never thought he would. 

'Suspension of disbelief', said Rubinstein , a popular philosopher in his own way.  'Remember what Dominque Strauss-Kahn (former IMF high functionary and candidate for the French presidency) said when he was accused of solicitation. "I didn't know they were prostitutes. All women look the same with their clothes off". Don't be such a prude'. 

Now doctors are not supposed to be procurers, and Cohen was taken quite by surprise at Rubinstein’s suggestion.  He was about to ask him for a reference when the doctor, seeing his surprise, concluded, 'Or try someone fiftyish, more in your league and still many years younger.'

But the doctor, younger than Cohen and without the existential need for a soft, warm, pliant body in bed with him, had no idea of the epiphanic nature of a truly December-May affair.  Fiftyish simply wouldn't do it at this stage in life.  A post-menopausal lover, as sexually excitable as she might be, would not fit the bill.  It was young women he wanted, not younger women. 

And so it was that Annette from Accounting fell into his lap - a perfect storm of heritage, frustration, emotional need and passing age.  

Annette was from an Iowa farm family but not the idyllic, variety.  Her father and brother were both in federal prison and she by the skin of her teeth had escaped the same fate. 

She made her way through community college, junior college, and then the University of Iowa but after ten years in Washington was no better off than when she left the prairie. She was nearing midnight on her biological clock, when she fell for Richard Cohen, a senior executive at her firm, many years her senior but attentive, kind, solicitous, and passionate. 

 

Their Saturdays in her third-floor walkup were memorable - orgies of drunken, drug-addled, inimitable sexual adventure previously unknown to either of them.  

D.H. Lawrence was right, thought Cohen after one particularly heady Saturday.  Sexual mutuality is indeed the be-all and end-all of human experience, and at its best, epiphanic.

The affair went on for months.  Annette fell in love with this marvelous loving, considerate, and understanding man. 'You love women, don't you?', she said to him one day after sex, a woman truly appreciative of a man who loved everything about her, for who she was and who she could be. 

Cohen was in seventh heaven, saved from sexual dereliction by this simple farmgirl from Iowa, awakened from marital torpor, energized and given new life.  Thank God for Annette, he said not often enough. 

Esther Cohen knew what was going on, or at least surmised the real reason behind his 'working late' and 'weekend workshops' but her complaisance was equally predictable. She was brought up in a patriarchal age, and although she matured into a new world of female independence, she was only on the cusp of radical feminism.  Daddy was still king. 

More importantly Cohen was a good provider and a good father, and in these days of irresponsibility and venality, she was not about to give up a good, rare thing.  Men were simply this way and as long as there were no complications -  Aidan Jones, for example, a colleague and classmate, had had a child by his lover and his marriage had come to an expected, precipitous, calamitous end - she could overlook her husband’s depredations and soldier on. 

This was the conundrum, the puzzle faced by modern women.  Despite decades of feminist hectoring and misandrous aggression, men had not changed an iota.  Except of course for those intimidated, uxorious men like progressive Bob Muzelle who attended women's conferences on equality, who deferred to their wives on questions of dinner menus and portfolio adjustments; and for whom their wives and all women had nothing but scorn and hilarious laughter. 

No, Richard Cohen was none of the above.  He was simply both a man who loved women and who saw the younger of them as the answer to his existential angst. 

Nelson Rockefeller, heir to to the John D. fortune, Governor of New York, and a mature man in his prime, died of a heart attack provoked by a historic orgasm with his young lover in a Manhattan hotel. 

All older men wanted to go out that way.  What could be better, more fulfilling, more existential than that.  A simple, ordinary death in bed surrounded by loved ones? Dropping dead over an office memorandum? None of the above.  Men, the best and the brightest to the Walmart greeter have the same dream and all were united in their oneness with Governor Nelson. 

Cohen's affair with Annette ended of course, but not badly.  Both knew that it would end; and so there were no recriminations. Yes, regret, and yes they had talked of a future and even had agreed on the name of their first child, but both knew it was not to be.  '

‘One last time', pleaded Annette about lovemaking as Cohen was about to leave; but as much as he was tempted, he demurred.