Tonight, all on my own, I engaged in a solemn ritual that was in all probability lengthy overdue. After about 50 years of service, a few of it fruitful, most of it futile, I made a decision to place my libido away, as soon as and for all.
No, no, I hear you say, don’t surrender fairly so quickly. There’s all the time one other bus coming across the nook, a couple of fish within the sea and so forth.
However I do know after I’m licked (figuratively talking solely, in fact), and so I’ve positioned my libido, symbolized by a single blue capsule, in a small however elegant mahogany field, sealed with a rubber band. Then, teetering on a step stool, I slipped the field onto the highest shelf of the corridor closet, proper behind the Christmas wrap and the three urns containing the ashes of my useless canine.
There it now rests, together with any lingering hopes I might need had for one final hurrah.
What, it’s possible you’ll ask, prompted this resolution? An excellent query, however one to which there is no such thing as a easy reply. It wasn’t anyone factor, however extra like a slowly mounting cascade.
Was it the dating-site mixer on the Mexican restaurant on Ventura Boulevard, the place the one girl even near my very own age strode as much as me, sloshing margarita in hand, with the opening line — requested not as a query, thoughts you, however a declaration — “So … you’re retired”?
Was it the afternoon when, out with a a lot youthful girl, I received winded on a road nook, and, whereas struggling to catch my breath, needed to feign curiosity within the window show of a vacuum cleaner retailer? (“Nicely, will you take a look at that? A few of them not want a canister!”)
Was it the night time when, regardless of my atrial fibrillation, I went for broke and surreptitiously swallowed a half-dose of generic Viagra?
Thirty minutes later, when it ought to have kicked in, my face was flushed, my sinuses have been congested and the one factor rising was my blood strain.
“Are you OK?” Alice requested.
Even within the candlelight of her bed room, I suppose the glow from my cheeks (simply two, not 4) was obvious.
“Positive,” I mumbled, “Why … do you … ask?”
“Sit up. I’m getting you a glass of water.”
The water was adopted by a visit to the kitchen, the place, wrapped within the quilt, I slumped right into a chair whereas she swiftly ready a bowl of vegetable soup.
“I feel you could eat one thing,” she stated, slapping the bowl onto a spot mat, and he or she was proper.
I don’t know why, however I used to be all of the sudden ravenous and wolfed down a dozen saltines and two chocolate chip cookies simply to chase the style of my humiliation.
Nevertheless it isn’t merely a query of age; all my life, my libido and I’ve had a fractious relationship.
After I was 5 years previous, I might by no means resolve who I liked extra: blond Laurie or brunet Libby. All of it trusted what Laurie wore to kindergarten that day or whether or not Libby was sporting a ponytail, which slayed me each time.
Even then, I apprehensive that mine was a fickle nature.
As soon as I began courting, my mom stated {that a} boy who liked his mom would hunt down somebody like her.
Now, I did love my mother — actually — however brief and spherical was simply not my kind.
For years, it was WASPy, long-legged women, with a tennis racket over one shoulder and a touch-me-not perspective. I finally married a blond, doe-eyed magnificence, a former member of the homecoming queen’s courtroom at UCLA, who was out of my league however favored my jokes.
Jokes have been my mainstay.
For a while now, nevertheless, the joke has been on me. Divorced for 14 years, I’ve been out on the hustings, each on the road and, at my youthful brother’s behest, on-line. “You reside alone, you’re employed alone, so until you intend up to now your cleansing girl, it’s important to put your self again on the market,” he stated.
So I had joined a few websites, met a motley crew of the great, the unhealthy and the unmedicated (and even discovered one respectable relationship), however saved up my searches within the wild.
Throughout the pandemic, on my afternoon stroll alongside the Santa Monica bluffs, I did truly meet one other ex-New Yorker, who shaped a welcome little pod with me that noticed us each by that darkish age. On New Yr’s Eve, Amanda and I celebrated with no one else, however watched the stay feed from Occasions Sq., whereas consuming microwaved burritos in mattress.
I imply, it’s not that I don’t see the marriage bulletins within the paper that trumpet late-in-life unions. They’re meant to be heartwarming, I do know — “Take a look at these two, who met within the nursing dwelling when their wheelchairs collided popping out of the bingo recreation!” — however they simply make me sadder. Worse but are the adverts in locations just like the AARP journal the place older of us embrace below headlines proclaiming: “The perfect intercourse we’ve ever had!”
Can that presumably be true? Have been you by no means 18? Should you’re really having higher intercourse in your 70s than you have been within the ’70s, you’ve got my condolences.
Plainly, I’m shallow; another reason for retiring my libido. Sure, I’m completely satisfied to report that I do have some very completely satisfied recollections of intercourse, from a time when my very own momentary reflection in a mirror didn’t trigger me to duck and canopy, after I might be part of somebody in mattress with out first ensuring, in case I needed to rise up for any motive, that I had a camouflaging bathrobe inside straightforward attain. No, as of late there are too many issues — from bleak expectations to “iron-poor blood” (solely individuals in my presumed courting pool will even keep in mind these ubiquitous Geritol adverts) — that puncture my libido earlier than it might even get inflated.
And although I’ve been an evening owl for many of my life, I’m usually in mattress by 9:30 p.m., and probably the most sensual second of the day is pulling up the brand new quilt, with the TV distant and a replica of the New Yorker on the nightstand, for a few hours of relaxed, if solitary, leisure.
It’s a mature perspective, or so I inform myself, and I’m not totally sad about it. However I can’t say I’m precisely happy both.
The lack of the erotic drive, which made a lot of my life thrilling and surprising, can depart me feeling a bit adrift. It feels as if my eating regimen has gone from bountiful to ordinary, my prospects from mysterious to mundane.
Seems, after I received up on that step stool to stash my libido field within the closet, I used to be placing away not solely my previous, however to some extent my future — that was the tougher half — and now I’m simply unsure what to exchange it with.
Please, God, let it not be pickleball.
The creator is a author of historic fiction (although this essay is, sadly, true), residing in Santa Monica. His most up-to-date novel is “The Haunting of H.G. Wells.”
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