Oscar Wilde once famously quipped that past the age of 25 everyone is the same age. There is a grain of perennial truth in this observation, which makes possible the curious spectacle of the older man and the woman half his age. The older European man, in particular, falls into an inevitable comedy of manners with younger American women. The two combatants eye each other with a wary curiosity, separated by so many chasms of expectation and experience that only the lightning-flash of animal desire can bridge them. There is a delicious mutual horror, even, that fascinates as much as is complicates. As you might have guessed, I am that older European man—not so old, but a tenuous figure in many ways.
I came to New York in the 1990s, divorced, a little jaded, mid-thirties, British. It’s a wonderful combination in a novel. In real life, it’s anything but. I was immediately taken aback by the tension, the finger pointing, the blatant distrust, and sometimes the borderline disdain that made New Yorkers of both sexes dance around each other like so many snake charmers and their cobras. It became quickly apparent that New York is more about power and money than it is about love and sex, and I had certainly noticed a curious pattern in myself as I floated free and single through the bars and party rooms of New York. I was only desirable in so far as I was exotic. You could see it hopelessly in their eyes: Was there an estate in Cheshire somewhere lurking behind that twee accent? Did I offer the social climber some quirky Old World ladder they could climb? Did I matter?
I have never been especially attracted to younger women per se. The vaunted physical beauty is rarely enough to offset a host of complications. But then again, there is always that thirst to experience the world for the first time—and how can one not be moved by that? It’s a return to one’s own prior self, a nostalgia (which in Greek merely means “the pain of returning”). And perhaps, too, there is a sadder, more primitive force at work, namely, the possibility of children. At a certain point, to be with a woman one’s own age one has to close that door, and it’s not an easy door to shut forever.
Everyone in New York has their appalling dating tales, in which they trade like anecdotes of prison or unhappy childhoods. In part it’s because nowhere else is this elaborate sham of a ritual taken more seriously: The New Yorker dates because he doesn’t know how to get it on with ease. He or she is not comfortable with the opposite sex, deep down. There is something perpetually strained and tense.
In other places that I am familiar with, like France or Italy, people decide they like each other, then they jump into bed to see if their first impression is correct. If it isn't, no harm done. Courtship exists, of course, but it is not a formulaic ritual. The tone is different, in some way. Mischief and humour, perhaps, are allowed their due. In any case, although I am only an adopted New Yorker, I offer my little tales in a spirit of scientific objectivity, and without a shred of remorse. I am actually curious about them myself.
My first attempted date arose at a loud literary party where I met a 24-year-old beauty who worked for a notable film director. I competed for her with another British guy, and, as British men do, we fenced furiously with tinny verbal swords. Even though he was wearing the better suit, I got the girl’s number, and three days later called to ask her out. To my great surprise, she was rather friendly on the phone. We met at a bar in the East Village and when I walked in a look of horror came over her face. I was obviously the wrong Brit. Naturally, we all sound the same. I made a mental note as I labored through awkward, agonizing chitchat followed by a hasty exit: never underestimate the power of a suit.
Next up, a girl called Amanda whom I met at the Metropolitan Museum of Art while walking around the Oceania rooms in scholarly mode. Perhaps I looked shabby and lost, or easy pickings, or else Amanda, a second-year Columbia student, had a sadistic streak. We got chatting, and I thought, “An American girl came right up to me. How wonderful. And this time I am the right Brit, there can be no error.”
The older man is allowed to be a gentle pedant. I have traveled in Oceania quite a bit ( which was why I was there ) and so I could play Pygmalion to the younger Eliza Doolittle. Amanda, needless to say, knew more about Oceania than I do, and she was no Doolittle, but nevertheless I was given licence to drone on.
I’ve found that younger women are quite amused by this act. It puts you on display.
“Among the Fore of Papua,” I said, “a menstruating woman is forbidden from walking across a man’s shadow.”
“Really? Do you approve of that?”
“I’ve never tried it.”
“Don’t Fore women eat their mens’ brains after they die? Isn’t that why they get Jacob-Kreutzfeld disease?”
A twinkle in the eye and a hint of rapier.
We made a date for the following Friday—same place, same time, and I wondered if this how dating could happen, accidentally, with a tiny amount of vestigial spontaneity? But at the same time I found myself fascinated by the passive-aggressive nature of the relation between the older man and the younger woman. It is like a duel whose real motives are unclear. Martin Amis notes somewhere of one of his characters that he had reached the age—his late forties—when women looked right through him as if he didn’t exist. Personally, I always rather looked forward to this mystical state of invisibility. But no such luck. As a foreigner, your age is viewed in a subtly different way—and vice versa. I wondered if I could be with a European girl of 23 or 24, and I found the idea bizarre. But here, it became increasingly easier to get involved in tormented affairs with younger women, perhaps premised on VAST confusions and driven by Freudian dramas best left unconscious. As the astute doctor said, “Whenever two people make love, four people are involved.” Perhaps that is why we have dating: so that the four people involved can get to know each other subliminally. It’s a testing ground, a mock-up, a trial run. So the parents can get to mentally copulate.
It was with these thoughts and anxieties in mind that I met Amanda at the first-floor gallery bar at the Met. She arrived with that overdone physical perfection that seems to characterize the dating person. We chatted, endured the awful string quartet and drank the house dry Martinis, which are generous by any standards. At 8:45, 15 minutes before the Met closes, she said she had to go to the bathroom. The loos are located at the end of the Greco-Roman galleries, so I said I would meet her back at the front doors. She staggered off, a little tipsy. By nine, however, she was nowhere to be seen. By 9:15, as the doors were closing, I was obliged to tell the guards that my friend had not returned from the toilets. A female search party went to investigate. Sorry, no ladies in the ladies room.
“What relation do you have with this woman, sir?”
I couldn’t say I was on a date. That would be too absurd. “She’s my wife.”
Aha. That made them urgent.
“The gentleman,” the supervisor was told, “has lost his wife.”
“Lost your wife, sir?”
My date turned into a surreal search through the dim galleries of the after-hours Met with dogs and flashlights. Meanwhile, I tried to theorize what had happened to the eminently reasonable Amanda. There was only one way out of the Met. Had she simply run for her life at the first opportunity?
The guards regarded my accent with high suspicion, as if I were cognate with Jack the Ripper. I called Amanda’s cell many times, demanding that she call me as soon as possible. Nothing. It was a full two days before a return message appeared on my answering machine, and a mere three words—“Very funny, asshole.”
It was at this point that I realized that I was out of my depth. Strange American psychodynamics were at work that I could not fathom. True, it did transpire that Amanda had exited by mistake through the Met’s service door and had fallen asleep in Central Park on a giant bank of snow. She’d had no idea where she was when she woke at dawn, and how she had gotten there. But, she reasoned, it must have been my fault, and I must have taken advantage of her in some way.
It was her youth, her uncertainty, which had suddenly gotten the better of her. In the Pygmalion relation, as we might call it, there is a tussle between the striving egotism of the young and the vulnerable superiority of the old. Martinis only make it worse. Thus, when we finally spoke, she was furiously indignant, with a dubious authenticity which she wielded as a weapon. In the cosmology of American college students, after all, the Older Man is often a patriarchal villain.
“You ran away,” I said.
“How can you say that? You abandoned me!”
“Are you insane?”
“Don’t call me insane!”
“I didn’t call you insane. I asked you a question.”
Other young girlfriends and other affairs seemed to pass through predictable phases like the motions of celestial bodies. The seduction, the torrid weeks, the days locked inside Paris hotel rooms, the inevitable farewells, the years of fond little letters that could never find the right tone: clichéd, but moving, like many things in life. The younger American woman chews her way through these things with a kind of determined zest, never quite meaning what she says. She knows she’s headed elsewhere ultimately.
Sometimes I confided with male friends my own age who had gotten sucked ( willingly, oh so willingly ) into the same vortex. “The worst thing,” one of them once said, “is that eye-rolling, condescending disapproval from women our own age. They think we’re Humbert Humberts. Whereas they’d do the same if they could – and they do. Of course, then the age difference is all cool and wonderful. Stella gets her groove back, and all that.”
“Yes,” I said, “but what are we doing exactly?”
“Look at it this way. We didn’t get it right first time round. It’ bloody complicated, after all. It’s hard to get right. So we giving it a second go. But this time, with a bit of wisdom. Plus, face it, we treat them better now. We’re not total pricks any more. They know that. They’re not stupid.”
But there may well be deeper cross-cultural confusions at work. Perhaps it’s the idea of love itself, which Europeans and American seem to share, but don’t. The Constitution’s injunction to pursue happiness as a right has set up an incorrigible paradigm for the sexes, one that paradoxically makes them more suspicious of each other. The temperature is notched up, the tension heightened. The American idea that a relationship is like a well-run company with two shareholders always struck me as bound to end in tears and recriminations.
As a European I cling to the idea that love is not about equity but about unconditional surrender. Cyril Connolly once wrote (and I am sorry that I am so fond of quoting middle-aged, white, male, European writers) that it is impossible to love someone without “being torn limb from limb,” and by the same token “nobody was ever made unhappy in a brothel.” That, in a nutshell, is the European model. But during my dark dating days I often used to wonder if I was doing something that this great Anglo-Irish critic would condemn, for he also noted, with true Christian pessimism: “As bees their sting, so the promiscuous leave behind them in each encounter something of themselves by which they are made to suffer.”]]]
The solution to this dire dynamic, of course, is not to carry on dating but to find the right woman via this thankless rite. I finally did, as I assume most people do. Which brings me to a parallel subject—meeting the parents. Perhaps the frivolously archaic formulas of dating are still, deep down, about children and family—even though the subject is barely mentionable in New York.
I had often wondered about this when my teenage son occasionally met my girlfriends, some of whom were not so far distant in age from himself. They’d talk about music in ways that were beyond me, and I felt the dividing lines that demarcate generations whether we like it or not. He himself never had a problem with it, however. He would tease without judgement. On one fractious jaunt in Italy with a Parisian girlfriend he did take me aside with gentle irony and say, “I am the kid here. I’m the one who’s supposed to have tantrums, not her!” But as it turned out he was simply making a practical point, and giving me a warning. Age, he was saying, has to be itself, and not pretend otherwise.
When I met the woman who ended dating for me (younger, but not in her twenties), the next ritual was soon embarked upon. We flew down to Birmingham, Alabama, and then drove to the tiny town near Montgomery where she grew up. I was struck how similar it was to where I grew up in England, a place called Lindfield in East Sussex: the same secretive, flat roads with their secluded detached houses, the same low deciduous woods, the same schoolhouses and the high streets.
Her parents came to the door, and her father, an electrician with the local power company, said to me, “We’re rednecks and we talk funny. Think you can handle that?”
How like a first date the initial parental meeting is! Except that by the time you have made it that far, you know you are not going to exit by a service door.
“I am British,” I said. “We not only talk funny, we all sound the same.”
He nodded. “You do.”
“How old are you?” her mother asked at dinner.
