Out of the Woods

by Lynn Darling

  In the oceanic expanse of the silence, the darkness and the harrowing beauty, Byrd found himself changing: “Yes, solitude is greater than I anticipated,” he wrote in his journal, sixty-four days into the experience, “and many things which before were in solution in my mind now seem to be crystallizing. I am better able to tell what in the world is wheat to me and what is chaff.”

  I was beginning to have a small sense of what he meant. For me, solitude was roomy—it provided a space in which my half-formed assumptions about myself, the world, other people, unpacked themselves, stretched out and assumed their full shapes and walked about, giving me a chance to see them as they really were, and to assess them accordingly. So, too, with the cramped fears, regrets, and anxieties I was always too afraid to look at. Unpacked, no longer twisted in their ugly pretzeled shapes, they weren’t so scary. In the light, in the quiet, we didn’t get so much in each other’s way.

  Not always, of course: “There are days when solitude is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom,” Colette observed, “others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall.” There were still days when every love song on the supermarket Muzak lineup would make me cry, or I would find myself fantasizing about adopting the young schoolteacher sitting at the next table at the manicure salon because she hadn’t had a date in seven years and her parents wouldn’t let her live with them. But for the most part, I came to see loneliness as less of a fatal poison and more like a bad case of the flu—a temporary misery. I had found a tentative equanimity.

  Or at least I thought I had.

  Around that time, I had a visitor. Not a friend exactly, not an enemy certainly, but the holder of a title of dubious distinction—my last seducer.

  Not my last lover (although they had been rather scarce on the ground for some time), but the last man who had held me in erotic thrall, the kind of scorched earth sexual obsession that leaves you burned and blistered and picking thorns out of your paw for years afterward without any regret whatsoever.

  I had met him many years ago—one summer, when I was renting a place in Vermont, we had gone out for what I thought was a hike but turned into a masterful seduction, the like of which I had never encountered, involving a lost trail, an unexpected mountain lake, a stolen canoe, a vintage red wine, and a loon summoned out of the sky. If it had ended there, as I intended, it would have been a work of art, more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace or a roaring automobile, to borrow from the old Futurist manifesto, but, of course, it didn’t end there and a few months later it shuddered to a standstill in pain, rage, and humiliation. I turned him into a monster, the predator, the vampire, the incubus, against whom I swam endless laps at the YMCA pool, trying to exorcise the hurt he had caused. I had not seen him for years, though he kept in touch in a desultory way, politely ignoring the cross and garlic I had laid in his path.

  He was staying with friends nearby in New Hampshire, he said on the phone. Could he come for lunch? I was tempted to say no, as I did most times he called, but this time I hesitated. The day before I had been cleaning up the living room, listening to a favorite Lucinda Williams song in which the singer demands to know why she couldn’t have both the pleasures of solitude and passionate kisses. And out of nowhere I was missing them, those passionate kisses and the mischief in a man’s eyes, and so this time I said yes.

  He drove up in a black Mercedes. I greeted him at the doorway. He looked old, my old seducer. He had been ill, and the illness showed in the deliberation of his walk and the translucent pallor of his skin. How hard the decline must have been for him, this man who reveled in his physical strength. His left eye wept, the side effect of recent surgery. He bore it all without comment, and his gallantry was touching. I had once seen a photograph from his youth, and in it he was beautiful, long-haired, bare-chested, muscles taut as he prepared to release the string on a hunting bow. I was overwhelmed now by how much of himself he had lost.

  But it wasn’t the physical changes that made him look strange to me. No, it was the fact that he looked out of place, the way a seal does when it leaves the water, the way any obsession does when it leaves the murk of your desire and your need and stands awkwardly in the light of day. What was I thinking? you ask yourself, so many years later. But of course thinking had had nothing to do with it.

  He arrived carrying a big canvas bag. Inside was a bottle of wine, the same wine, he pointed out, we drank that summer afternoon so many years ago; I was surprised he remembered. I wondered what it would taste like untouched by the extravagant magic that had blessed everything that day. But he said he no longer drank wine, so I left it unopened on the mantelpiece.

  I made him a good lunch. A roast chicken, a carrot ginger soup, a salad with blue cheese and pear and walnuts. We sat at the table and talked, a little awkwardly, about the economy, about the situation in the Middle East. And then the lunch was over.

  He said he was cold. I went to the woodstove and picked up a log to throw on the fire, but when I straightened up he was right behind me. I turned, and he tried to kiss me and bumped instead into the rough bark of the wood between us. Wait, I said, surprised, because even though I had thought about it, must have expected it on some level, I had grown so used to the platonic nature of our infrequent dealings that I was taken by surprise. Or maybe what surprised me was how unmoved I was, how little I wanted what had once been oxygen to me.

  Instead I made him a cup of tea, and he told me about the operations and the pain afterward and how bad the nightmares still were. He finished the tea quickly, anxious to get on the road before it got dark.

  I watched him go.

  That evening, I picked up a book, but the questions crowded in, claiming my attention. What story did I tell myself now about this thing that had brought so much pleasure and so much pain over the years? Were dusty memories enough to justify all the real estate this man and others had taken up inside my head? Perhaps it didn’t matter now. Maybe it never had. And if so, what now?

  Just this:

  The night was cold, the fire warm, the dog slept while Chopin played. A glass of sherry glowed amber in the lamplight. I turned back to the page of the book I was reading. I told myself it was enough, but I was pretty sure I was lying.

  Deal with Sex, I had written on the list I made when I first moved in, just ahead of Learn Latin.

  The Latin part was easy enough to put into motion: I just needed to find a new copy of Wheelock’s Latin, my favorite textbook on the subject. The other item wasn’t so simple.

  A woman has two jobs when she is young, said Simone de Beauvoir. One is to be a human being. The other is to be female. A balancing act, at best. One can drive you crazy. The other can save your life. Sometimes it’s hard to know which is which.

  You are young, and a light blinks on. A light that blinds you and dazzles you and makes you suddenly visible to yourself and to others. To men. You become something different in the light but you get used to it. And then, just as suddenly, the light goes out. And though you hated the glare, you grope for the switch.

  In the years after Lee’s death I realized I was becoming invisible in the world of men. I liked it sometimes. I hated it sometimes. This was curious country, an awkward place full of awkward questions. The ground beneath my feet shifted, and the world of things I thought I knew had become like a game of fifty-two pickup, with the exhilaration of flinging the cards—all of them!—into the air, the chastening realization that you are the one who has to pick them up again.

  I would watch men and women together, sometimes with envy and sometimes with smug relief as they threaded their way through the quotidian clash of love and anger and the crowd that two can make. I am done with that, I told myself. But that wasn’t quite true. I wanted to be done with that. Didn’t I?

  I found myself in a volatile state of change. My place in the world was up for grabs—freed, if that was the word, from the demands of fertility and confro
nted by the potential largesse of a life where sexuality played a very different role. I had always loved the power of desire, the way it affirmed my presence on the earth, the joyful thing it had been when I was young. But what could it be now that I was young no longer? At first I was frightened, sad, and very angry.

  I remembered something Isak Dinesen once said: “In Africa, all old women had the consolation of witchcraft; their relations with witchcraft were comparable to their relations to the art of seduction. One cannot understand how we, who will have nothing to do with witchcraft, can bear to grow old.”

  And yet sometimes, walking home through Washington Square Park in the afternoon in those first years after Lee’s death, I felt a buoyancy, a lightness I had not known in a very long time. I looked at the young women in their twenties sauntering down the street, their carefully made-up faces composed into masks of indifference to the attention they courted and disdained; I looked at the couples entwined on the benches, rapt with the drama only they could see, at the mothers in the park hoisting children onto swings, their eyes anxious, bored, amused, weary. I’ve been to each of those places, I thought, and now, for the first time in a long time, I was in a place I’d never been before. Who was this woman who was no longer lashed so tightly to the world of men; what did it mean to be finally getting old, to live alone, to be invisible in a way that I had not been since I was a teenager? I was nervous, but I was excited as well.

  “You only begin to discover the difference between what you really are, your real self and your appearance when you get a bit older,” Doris Lessing said in an interview in Harper’s in 1973. “A whole dimension of life suddenly slides away and you realize that what in fact you’ve been using to get attention has been what you look like… . It’s a biological thing. It’s totally and absolutely impersonal. It really is a most salutary and fascinating thing to go through, shedding it all. Growing old is really extraordinarily interesting.”

  Lessing was British by way of Zimbabwe: perhaps that accounts for the crisp understatement. Salutary? Interesting? Yes, the way a dive into ice-cold water is interesting. Leaving that kind of desirability behind is also scary, bewildering, and disorienting. Still, Lessing’s approach was much more comforting than contemporary commentary on the subject, books that talked about “juicy crones” and “seasoned women” (culinary metaphors were apparently de rigueur where older women were concerned) and seemed to mandate that to be really happy, women must remain as randy as rabbits as they tottered toward the grave.

  Which was unfortunate, because the choice was not entirely mine to make. What lay ahead was an age, in Judith Thurman’s elegant phrase, “of increased authority, erotic exigency and forced retirement.”

  Besides, I liked the idea of retirement, of thinking of sex as just a handful of seasons in one’s life—the sense that redemption lies in knowing when to leave it all behind.

  Desire, however, doesn’t have the good grace to die, simply because you ask it politely to do so. I was angry with myself for still wanting love, for still craving all that went with it. It was an embarrassment, a barnacle, something I should have outgrown. Besides, I didn’t know what I wanted from sex anymore.

  When I was young, desire had been a drug, one that I wanted for much the same reasons I would court getting lost—because it let you off the hook from your ordinary life, the one where I was always late, always lacking. I loved the fever of it, the color in which it drenched everything, the excitement with which it imbued the act of turning a corner, answering the phone, checking e-mail. Desire had been my theater of war, my coming-of-age, the weapon of choice in my own rebellion. And now?

  I wasn’t sure. I was no longer at an age where I simply saw what I wanted to see in the eyes of the other; I couldn’t pretzel myself into the person I thought he wanted. Besides, I knew what love was now; it was hard to settle for less.

  Still, I couldn’t accept that love was over. I started to make bargains with myself, the way you do when you’re quitting cigarettes or anything you truly love. One more affair, I’d think to myself. After that, the veil.

  Finally it got to the point where I could not for one minute pretend I didn’t miss the touch of flesh against flesh. I did something I had sworn I would never do and created a profile on a popular Internet dating site. Before long I was driving over the George Washington Bridge to have dinner with a good-looking stranger who advertised himself as an entrepreneur, whatever that was, and who had been attracted to a line in my ad that said I was looking for a pirate who had learned a thing or two.

  The stranger was handsome, affable, and not very bright. The first night we had dinner and a long lingering kiss that told me what his conversation had not, that I wanted to see him again. A few dates later, he took me to his apartment and I had to laugh. It was decorated in a style I knew well: mattress on the bare floor; flamboyant, expensive quasi-erotic paintings and sculpture collected from souks in Marrakesh and Istanbul; a set of scales tucked back neatly on the kitchen shelf; a couple of burn marks on the battered coffee table; and an unmistakable aroma embedded deep into the upholstery. Ah, so you’re a drug dealer, I said.

  Yup, he said. How did you know?

  Just a guess.

  The next morning I rose early from a rumpled bed where a man lay sleeping, my eyes scratchy from lack of sleep, remembering how much I loved this leaving of a strange bed, of being the one that gets to go.

  Colette wrote often about the degrees of satisfaction a man can afford, “from a good meal to a solid mystical engagement.” The former, she thought, was not to be disdained: “a nice little nothing well-presented is already something.”

  I thought about the man whose bed I left that morning. He was none of these things a lover had once been to me, not God, not the devil, not friend or enemy, not poetry or prose. Making love to him had been the nice little nothing Colette had described it to be. I played with the notion that I would see him again, wondering if I was now at a stage where sex could simply be great good fun, like swimming, like getting stoned, something as ephemeral as blowing bubbles on a windy day.

  But I knew already that it could never be like that, not for me. The evening had proved what I already knew, that desire detonated huge holes in contentment, and if it didn’t, well, then, I wasn’t much interested.

  I had read somewhere that the ancient Greeks treated erotic desire like a flu, and sent condolence cards to any friend who had the misfortune of contracting a bad case of it. That seemed about right. Desire was not a thing to be encouraged. In Vermont, I had decided, I would give up sex altogether—I was afraid of losing any more of myself than I had already, and I had never solved the question of how to be myself and be in love with anyone but Lee.

  And it had worked, for a while. But the meeting with my old friend had shaken me, rattled the bones of a question I had come to Vermont to put to rest, or, perhaps, through which to drive a stake. He left behind a longing I couldn’t dismiss.

  Wheelock was still in print, I was glad to discover, going strong in its seventh edition. I ordered a copy online, and while I was at it, posted a profile on Match.com.

  6

  What’s This?

  They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;

  They pursued it with forks and hope;

  They threatened its life with a railway-share;

  They charmed it with smiles and soap.

  —LEWIS CARROLL, “The Hunting of the Snark”

  NEW IN TOWN” read the headline on my profile. What followed was some mortifying nonsense that tried to sound confident but not intimidating, vulnerable but not needy, witty but not brittle. I probably shouldn’t have worried so much—according to some research, men looking for women on Internet dating sites don’t usually read beyond the headline, once the picture passes muster. My approach was essentially passive: I didn’t bother looking at the prospective candidates in any detail. Former experience had proved that men in my age group tended to sound and look a lot li
ke puppies left out in the rain. So I lowered my traps in the water and waited.

  One of the advantages of living in a state with a very small population is that you don’t encounter the same competition you do in a place like New York. Before long a message came sailing in from an age-appropriate candidate who wrote well, seemed to be more or less sane, and possessed of a sense of humor. Let’s call him Mitch. Sometime before Christmas, Mitch and I started up a fairly steady e-mail correspondence—he was funny, personable, self-deprecating, and showed no inclination to wax rhapsodic about holding hands on the beach or similar Internet clichés.

  We met the first time at my house. He was good-looking enough, tall, long-legged, and reasonably fit, with gray-blue eyes set in a kindly nest of lines. He was mostly bald, it turned out, once he mustered up the courage to take off his red and blue ski cap. (Hand knit, I noticed. Ex-wife? Girlfriend?)

  All in all a perfectly presentable package, but one that quickened nothing in body or soul. Maybe it was the eyebrows, on which for some reason I fixated instantly. They were like furry little hyphens, very short and straight across, that bobbed up and down on the broad expanse of his forehead as he spoke, lending him a slightly sheepish expression. It was a bland face that looked like one of those fonts used in a child’s first chapter book.