Bewitched by Older Women

She stood alone and completely calm on the empty railway platform, her long coat tugged by the train's draft. The first thing he noticed in the overbright lights of the station was the lustrous bones in her face. Boarding the train, she looked straight ahead and carried a small suitcase. Then she disappeared. Once the train pulled out on its journey to Ventimiglia, he walked the length of it and didn't see her. He could only conclude that she was in one of the first-class sleepers.

He saw her an hour later in the dining car and was stunned again by her composure and the odor of jasmine that reached him two tables away. Though she faced him, he could not help staring. She didn't appear to see him. She looked through him as she finished her meal and lit her cigarette and guillotined the flame with the lid of her lighter. Her eyes went to the window and watched with a pitying lack of interest the feebly lighted countryside. She crossed her legs and something ripped inside him.

She was 40, perhaps more, but her make-up worked--her lipstick was so neatly done, the highlights in her hair so convincing and the languid glamor of her movements so studied she awoke in him his earliest sexual memory and she was ageless. More tempting even than her slender grace, her pretty mouth pursed on her cigarette and movements of her breasts--with just a hint of weight, they trembled over the table--more tempting than the hunger he saw in her bones was the fact that she had not looked him in the eye. She was perfect. Private. Impenetrable. She hadn't smiled, and yet she wasn't sad. She was a lioness in repose. She had lived in the world--he hadn't.

He considered offering her a drink but hesitated. Being older, she had it in her power to make a fool of him. He decided to risk everything. The dining car emptied. He joined her, sitting next to her at her table. Then she smiled, unmistakably her victory, and before he could think of anything to say ("How far are you going?" he had ridiculously rehearsed), she said, "Where do you Americans get such splendid boots?"

"How did you know I was American?" he said. He had registered her British accent, her cool enthusiasm that was almost theatrical.

She ignored his question and went on, "I'd love to buy some for my son. He's just started at the university."

Son 18. She got married at about 24. A little arithmetic. She was about 42.

He said, "You could probably get them here, but things in France are so expensive."

"France," she said, mimicking his accent. "You make it rhyme with pants."

"What's wrong with that?" he said. "I like pants."

She smiled and touched her throat and said, "At least we have that in common."

It was then that he went for her, reaching his hand under the table and placing it just above her knee, where the hem emphasized the division between the heat of her leg and the coolness of her dress. If she had been younger, it would have meant nothing, but she was old enough to understand that his hand there was both an appeal and an invitation. She did not react. She was still speaking about her son and he moved his hand up her thigh and let it rest there, burning.

Without interrupting herself, she gently lifted his hand from her leg and glanced around. Only one waiter lingered. The boy wondered if he had made a blunder. He began to apologize.

"Listen," said the woman, "we haven't got much time. I'm only going as far as Cannes. I'm in the next coach, room fifty-two. Give me ten minutes." And she got up and left.

He did as he had been told and when he knocked, she opened the door a crack before letting him in. She wore a robe and when she kissed him and pressed herself against him, it loosened and fell open. He caressed her, but she drew away and said, "Aren't you going to take those clothes off?"

The train rocked slowly southward. He was sprawled on the berth and could see the lights of passing stations in her hair--her head was against his stomach. "No. No," she said. "Let me do it." And so he lay with his feet braced on the jolting wall while she knelt and worked on him with her feathery mouth and her hands. His orgasm trembled and teased him, rising and stopping like fluid heating in a pipe. Her tongue snaked furiously and the spurts came in (text continued on page 146) five spasms that she controlled with her lips and he heard in the darkness the sound of her gulping it down.

Later--she hadn't spoken a word--she began again on him, with her fingers, and then mounted him. She moaned and cried out so acutely, finally uttering wild little shrieks, that afterward his clearest memory was of having to stifle her sobs of pleasure and make love to her with his hand over her mouth.

•

This is, of course, fantasy: There was no woman. There was no dining car. There was only the blue train and the boy. But the encounter is plausible (more plausible now than when Tea and Sympathy was considered shocking) because you have seen that woman traveling alone and idly wished yourself upon her. If the woman had been younger, she wouldn't have been alone or would have asked for more. Pretended to be sullen. Demanded high spirits. Her moves from the beginning would have been more obvious. The older woman makes no decisive moves except the last and she knows, if she is attractive, that you are hers for the taking. So she seldom is disappointed and never is humiliated. She is not looking for flattery and certainly is not husband hunting. She has met your kind a hundred times before.

No apologies. No explanations. She knows the essential things about concealment and, more than anyone else in the world, this woman has a heightened awareness of time. As the boy sees maturity in a sexual encounter--proof of his manhood, another statistic to relish--the older woman is granted a reprieve and in that encounter has outwitted her age. For her it is a private, mutual compliment. In the classic situation, she does not want to see you afterward. The preliminaries, the half-truths, the confidences--all these are dispensed with. There isn't time. She will come straight (concluded on page 183)Older Women(continued from page 148) to the point. And, unlike many of her younger counterparts, she does not want to be caught. She doesn't need witnesses. For someone younger, sex is not an end in itself but a means to another end--the image is intentional: job, money, marriage, power, domination. And so if they never know this older woman and deal only with the 20-year-old, most men grow up believing in sex as a favor they've been granted--sex as strategy or currency. Therefore, the act itself is a threat. The sexual power seeker literally has you by the balls and can invest in the only act of equality the human animal performs. A gross inequality. There is a dangerous bravado in the sexual publicity the younger girl seeks. If sex grants power, she must be seen to be sexy--and involve you--before she can be acknowledged powerful. The older woman isn't really interested in power. Her age has liberated her from that deception.

But this is all theory. There are better reasons for preferring an older woman, not the least of which is that a woman between the ages of 30 and 45 is sexually alight. Her manner may be cool, but her body blazes. She is at an age to have learned every trick in the book and if it weren't for her pride--which inspires respect and annoyance to the same degree--she could probably make a fortune as a hooker. One has to meet her in real life. Literature has very few older women who are convincingly seductive within the conventions of the novel. It is hard to establish such a character. Maybe Madame Bovary. Possibly that woman in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Perhaps Madame De Vionnet in James's The Ambassadors. But who else? One or two of Byron's ladies in Don Juan. No one in Dickens, Melville, Conrad or Dreiser. The older woman has not been well served by fiction writers, though Stephen Vizinczey's In Praise of Older Women is a worthy contribution, and so is Brian Moore's recent The Doctor's Wife.

Movies and plays have succeeded where novels have failed. The films that spring to mind are Sunset Boulevard, Bergman's Torment, This Sporting Life, Nothing but the Best, Sweet Bird of Youth, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (also a novel but better as a film). A Cold Wind in August, The Last Picture Show, Room at the Top and the brilliant Fassbinder film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. I think of Anne Bancroft in The Graduate and Deborah Kerr in The Gypsy Moths. Each is the older woman to perfection. Mrs. Robinson is resourceful, responsive, independent and a knockout. Was there anyone who saw that movie who did not regret the fact that the hero went off with the daughter and not with the mother? There is no doubt that masculine wisdom begins when a man prefers the mother to the daughter, though I suppose it is only normal to want them both. In Lolita, Humbert marries the mother so that he can get the daughter, but that was many years ago and he was a pedophile. Our pointless folklore about deflowering virgins or at least finding a snug fit has made many a misguided man a pedophile, inevitably a power seeker (which is why Nabokov turns the tables and makes Lolita a pain in the neck).

The older woman is not trying to catch your eye. She is beyond that--but if you look, she'll notice and if she is interested, she will make it simple for you, even protect you. You have only to cooperate.

There is one chance in ten that she'll be hysterical or reckless, but the signs of that will become apparent long before the last move and at any hint of threat, you must fold your tent and steal away, for she is capable of destroying you.

She awoke in him his earliest sexual memory. I am not speaking of the Oedipus complex, which is nonsense and, in any case, enough of a taboo to make one suppress it. But of that friend of your mother's who visited and left an odor of perfume and cigarette smoke and an aphrodisiac smudge of lipstick on her gin glass. The first schoolteacher you wanted (you didn't know how it was done) to go to bed with, the first woman who gave you informed encouragement and knew what was happening to you, even if you didn't--she was always older and always the ideal. We don't abandon that fantasy. The older woman gives us something that is very nearly incomparable, the chance to complete in adulthood what was impossible to complete as a child, a blameless gift of lechery that combines the best of youth and maturity, romance and realism, in equal parts.

"The older woman gives us the chance to complete in adulthood what was impossible to complete as a child."