I Was Misinformed

Sexual Myopia

Every once in a while a male friend in his 60s tells me that try as he might, he just cannot get turned on by women his own age and naturally I channel Cher in “Moonstruck” and let him have it: Snap out of it, I say! Look in the mirror! We all age! What’s more important to you, a woman 30 years younger whom you can show off on the beach or someone who doesn’t draw a blank when you talk about Bullwinkle and Boris Badenov? Not that I have that many conversations in which I need to reference Bullwinkle and Boris Badenov, but when I do I don’t want to have to get bogged down in the whole back story. This is why I know this whole cougar thing is a myth. I do not know any women in their 60s who want a 30-year-old boyfriend because what would they talk about?

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So you will imagine my horror, when talking with some very nice, accomplished and thoughtful men in their mid-60s, to hear in my head the voice of a deeply superficial woman, saying exactly the sorts of things my male friends have said.

“Boy, he’s old,” the voice said. “His hair is entirely white. I am trying to picture him naked and I am not sure I want to go there. Could I really spend a dirty weekend with this guy?”

It was obvious, as I am a woman of too much depth for this to be the real me, that I had been possessed by an evil spirit, some sort of vapid dybbuk with a hideous sense of values, but, I suspected, extremely nice shoes. It’s not like you can go to anyone these days and talk demonic possession so I went home, lowered the blinds and tried to summon the vile creature:

“Oh, vapid dybbuk,” I said, “I command you to leave my body so I can hook up with a good guy my own age already, who will know whereof I speak when I invoke Dion and the Belmonts.”

You know that scene in “Peter Pan” where Peter is pretending to be a beautiful lady and running behind trees and enticing Captain Hook as Hook sings, “Oh you mysterious lady, where can you be?” The Broadway show with Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard, which was televised in 1955? Of course you do. This dybbuk was behaving like that, tee hee heeing, hiding in hard-to-get spots in my brain, taunting me in a high-pitched voice: “Who me? What dybbuk? No, I couldn’t possibly leave your body and come out. There’s not a thing in this house to drink. What do you say we go to a sports bar and trawl for a 29-year-old? “

“There’s vodka in the freezer,” I said. “Why don’t you go get yourself some.”

“Please,” the vapid dybbuk said, “Mrs. Dybbuk didn’t raise any stupid demons. I’m staying put, while you throw away one opportunity after another.”

This is the thing with dybbuks, they know how to get under your skin.

I would have told you, before I was possessed, that I was fine with men my own age. The last guy I dated, after all, was someone who had been a friend when we were teenagers, a guy who, in his youth, looked like the blond ski instructors you would see on the Swiss tourist poster: “Come to Gstaad! Ski the Alps! Sleep with Rolf!” When we ran into each other again, 40 years later, we were both fatter, wrinklier and literally scarred from run-ins with serious illness. But none of that mattered. I looked at Rolf of the Mountains and I saw the face and body of the guy I had hung out with in school. Which, I now understood, was the problem. I was fine with aging when it came to old friends or people I had known for years, because I looked at them and saw the people they used to look like. Meeting men my age for the first time, I realized with a dreadful shock of self-recognition, I saw men who were too old.

“And that’s with their clothes on, " the vapid dybbuk said. “Wait till you get a look at them in the morning when they head into the shower. You know those cute little butts even screenwriters who lay on the couch all day have in their 40s? You ain’t gonna be seeing that moving across the skid-free tiles. And their necks? If you think chicken necks are limited to women, wait till you get a load of one of these old kockers. You zone it to give it a bite, the skin will be so loose you won’t be able to breathe. You know how cats dive under the sheets when you toss the laundry on the bed to be folded? It’ll be like that. Only the cats are having fun.”