In Praise of Older Women

by Stephen Vizinczey

  “Then don’t waste my time,” Boby declared regally, turning away from him.

  As we were leaving the party, Boby suggested that I should go home and sleep if I felt tired; but I wouldn’t hear of it. It was Friday, and during the night she decided that we should go skiing on the weekend. I had only skied a few times in my life, with the American soldiers in Austria, and had neither clothes, nor equipment, nor inclination to spend Saturday on the windy hills of Buda. However, Boby had an extra pair of ski pants and a pullover which fitted me, and she knew that I could rent boots and skis at the Lodge. We got up to the hills before eleven, and arrived back at her place around eight in the evening.

  Boby’s apartment was small, spotless and full of striking colours. Black wall-to-wall broadloom covered not only the bed-sitting room but the bathroom as well, and there was a great deal of vivid blue and orange about the furniture. Nothing seemed to have edges: it was as if the solid pieces were about to dissolve into liquid colours. At least that was how I saw them that evening, in my exhausted and exalted state. Boby boiled eggs and made toast and tea, and we ate sitting on the carpet in front of the artificial fireplace, which held the radiator for the central heating. Above it, on a silver chain, hung the now polished and glittering ashtray, as if to remind me of my once casual approach to women.

  “I’m still freezing,” I told Boby, in the cowardly hope that she would excuse me for the night.

  “That’s wonderful!” she exclaimed, as if I had just announced some exciting news.

  “I don’t see what’s so wonderful about it.”

  She didn’t explain until we were in bed. “You’re ice-cold,” she whispered, “but I’m warm inside. This is going to be the nicest.” She was right.

  We spent Sunday in bed and I could doze while she was having a bath or searching for something to feed us. But I had no more chances to sleep the following week, except in classes or at concerts. I went home for the second weekend, and took a day off now and then, but I was beginning to feel perpetually drunk. Not unpleasantly, though. Besides, I took pride in keeping up with Boby, and felt richly rewarded for my efforts. She used to walk around her apartment with nothing on but her panties, while I lay on the bed, watching — fascinated by her long white toes, those ten live roots of her whole body, as they sank into and emerged from the deep blackness of the broadloom. I can still see them, through a haze, just like then. And I can still feel the touch of her wide-awake fingers on my shoulders while we talked or made love.

  If I resented anything about Boby, it was that she appeared to find nothing out of the ordinary in my ability to stay awake with her every night, and go for swims and long, brisk walks during the day — besides attending most of my lectures at the university. I wished she would acknowledge that not many men could or would do what I had been doing.

  “You’re such a fool,” she told me one afternoon toward the end of May, as we were walking in the park in the last hour of the sun. “You’re killing yourself for me. It’s silly.”

  “Nonsense,” I insisted, with nervous foreboding. I had noticed lately that she was restless in my company, and that it took her more and more time — and a perceptible act of will — to reach her orgasm with me.

  “I feel guilty about you, András.” She sounded more irritated than contrite. “I sometimes sleep in the afternoon, you know — but what about you? This whole business is getting to be too much of a good thing for you, don’t you think?”

  “No I don’t,” I protested miserably. “But I’m glad you worry about me.”

  It was the only time I ever saw her at a loss for words. We were silent for a while and continued our walk under the trees, in and out of the small clearings of sunlight.

  “How do you want me to tell you?” she finally burst out with frustration. “Don’t you think it’s time for you to take it easy?”

  I didn’t try to argue with her. I decided, not without bitterness, that the time to exert myself for Boby was the time when and while she loved me. I think she expected me to complain, but I couldn’t do that either. Indeed, what could I have complained of, after those dizzy and dreamlike months?

  Eleven

  On Virgins

  O purity, painful and pleading!

  — Barry Pain

  A few weeks ago, one of my students wrote an article in The Saskatoon Undergraduate , proclaiming that he couldn’t care less whether a girl was a virgin or not. His statement caused a furore both on and off the campus. There were stiff editorials about it in the newspapers, and our kind-hearted dean made a valiant attempt to create the impression that he was going to expel the boy. For a while even my own job was in jeopardy, because it was assumed that my lectures had helped to corrupt the young man. At the emergency faculty meeting, one of my elderly colleagues pointed out, waving an imaginary Red Ensign in his fist, that I wore Italian pullovers to my classes and flouted morality in my atrocious accent. To protect my-self, I felt compelled to write a letter to the editor of The Undergraduate . “I was recently shocked,” I wrote, “by your music critic’s unwarranted personal statement that he saw no difference between a girl who was a virgin and one who was not. I can find no words strong enough to condemn his undiscriminating attitude. It seems to me that irreproachable young women, who have kept themselves immaculate through heaven knows how many tempting skirmishes, deserve special consideration and respect. If your critic can’t appreciate their virtue, he would do well to leave them alone. There are already too many young men as it is who are willing and eager to engage in all sorts of wild attempts to seduce a pure girl, without any thought of the dreadful retribution they are bound to bring upon themselves.”

  I’ve heard nothing further about the matter, so I suppose that I may complete my recollections in peace.

  Back in my own student days at the University of Budapest, I knew a young actress named Mici, a redhead with long legs and arms. We used to say hello to each other for two years before we got any closer. She was supposed to be talented, and was pretty in a febrile sort of way — but too obvious to inspire curiosity. I knew her only from the marxism-leninism classes which the students of the College of Theatre and Film Arts attended with us. Yet I felt I knew her well enough, if only by sight and sound. She was fond of shouting obscene words, she wore unusually short skirts, and a different man was waiting for her after class every second week. During this time I had affairs with a few girls of my own age, and they taught me that no girl, however intelligent and warm-hearted, can possibly know or feel half as much at twenty as she will at thirty-five. Still, I wasn’t afraid of a young face any more, and if I kept away from Mici, it was because I saw nothing attractive about her.

  I changed my mind on a Friday evening in November. It was a red-letter Friday for me, for I could take a girl home for the night. My mother had gone to the country to visit her parents and help out with the grape harvest, and I was left alone in our apartment for two days. By this time we were living together more like brother and older sister — good friends, but independent of each other — and I stayed out as often as I wanted to. But it would have been unthinkable to bring a girl to my room while my mother was at home. I had enjoyed few chances to actually sleep with a woman since Boby had grown tired of me, and now that I had the apartment to myself I was anxious to indulge in this opportunity for leisurely cuddling. Unfortunately the woman whom I was seeing at the time was married, and I couldn’t very well ask her to abandon her husband and children for the weekend. I planned to find a companion at the National Theatre Ball, which was being held that evening to celebrate the first opening of the season. This was the most important social event of the year for Budapest’s theatre and film community, and it used to attract the biggest crowd of pretty women I’ve ever seen in one place. The students from the College of Theatre and Film Arts were also invited to mingle with the great, and I succeeded in passing for one of them by going in with a group of my friends. The huge foyer with its marble columns, bronze statues and cry
stal chandeliers served as the ballroom for the orchestra and dancers; the checkrooms were turned into bars and buffets; and the darkened balconies served as instant boudoirs for those who wanted to withdraw from the crowd. It wasn’t at all like our get-togethers at the university, and I was eager to join in, but I had no luck.

  I was still without a partner when Madame Hilda, a superb Shakespearean queen, made her spectacular exit. This lesbian star was a truly royal character, who held everybody in utter contempt and had the nerve to show it, whether the objects of her scorn were of no account or men with power over life and death. Her gall was so monumental that she could get away with anything. It was well known that she had once snubbed Rákosi (the country’s dictator, who had his ministers murdered for much less serious offenses) and the Soviet ambassador, when they went back-stage to congratulate her after a performance. Nor did Madame Hilda bother to conceal her strong male drive. She used to make passes at girls more frequently and openly than most men. At about two in the morning, she finally selected a couple of willing disciples from the ranks of student actresses and, patting their behinds with her firm hands, herded them away. Through the foyer, under the dazzling crystal chandeliers, Madame Hilda strode in her dark-green satin gown, prodding her pale charges ahead of her. Seemingly oblivious to the sidelong glances of Hungary’s artistic community, she fixed her eyes and hands on the awkwardly twisting bottoms of her protégees. Madame Hilda was famous for her exits, which rendered those who remained on stage invisible.

  Her departure from the ball marked a change toward a less formal behaviour. Couples content with each other began to leave, followed by women without escorts: the air had become too heavy to breathe, without someone to lean against. Accompanied by the decorous strains of a Schubert waltz, the men carried the girls off to dance or to the dark theatre boxes. Their faces still wore the stony expression of public idols, but their eyes were burning with a smouldering flame, like candles at a Black Mass. Alone in this aphrodisiac atmosphere, I could feel nothing but sympathy for another loner — sympathy and surprise, for Mici was not a girl one would expect to be left without company.

  Wearing a white chiffon dress which had scarcely any back or front above the waist, she strolled among the dancers, with an air of peevish boredom. When she spotted me, she stretched out her arms with that extravagant gesture of which only an actress is capable. “András!” she exclaimed, as if she had been born with the specific purpose of abandoning herself body and soul to me and to me alone. Before I had time to say hello, Mici put her arms around me and began to move with the music. We hadn’t revolved more than twice before she began to whisper in my ear: “You’re marvellous … I always liked you, did you know that?” ‘When the waltz ended she leaned against me. “Can one talk to you seriously?”

  “What about?”

  “About you and me.” She drew back, looking grave, suddenly deciding that it was time I gave an account of myself. “Listen, why is it that you never tried to fuck me?”

  “I didn’t think I knew you well enough for that,” I said, blushing.

  “That’s a hell of an excuse!”

  “Let’s go to my place,” I proposed, in a state of stimulated uneasiness.

  Had my good luck finally put me in the hands of a nymphomaniac? As soon as we got into the taxi, she began to kiss me, and at the same time, took my hand and guided it under her skirt.

  “I’m so glad to be alone with you!” she whispered impatiently.

  However, we were in a taxi. I assumed that Mici was blinded by her passion for me, in not seeing the driver’s slyly curious looks — as if such passion could ignore a circumstance that prevented its fulfillment. Nor did I consider the significance of her reversal of a traditional gesture, as she took my hand and placed it on herself, instead of reaching for me. I was too dizzy with anticipation to reflect. My hand deep under her pants, my fingers were feeling out that moist terrain, like scouts sent ahead of the main force.

  When we were finally alone in the elevator, Mici abruptly remembered her mother and drew away. “My mother wouldn’t like it if she knew I was up so late.” (It must have been around three in the morning.) “She believes in the old saying, ‘Early to bed and early to rise, makes you healthy, wealthy and wise.’”

  “Don’t you live with your parents?”

  “I’m in a dormitory. Strictly a small-town girl away from home. My parents aren’t too happy about it. They don’t like the idea of me becoming an actress.”

  As we stepped out of the elevator and walked along the curving corridor, Mici’s face turned wax-like in that peculiar yellow lighting characteristic of apartment houses. That’s how my own face must look, I thought, it’s too late in the night. I felt my body charged with a current of identification. She kept on talking about her girl friends back home. I was glad that she, too, needed a pause to collect herself after our heated grapplings in the taxi. On her way to a strange classmate’s bed, she was steadying her inner balance by recalling the companions of her childhood, as divers first twist their feet on the high board to make sure they have a firm grip on something solid before they jump.

  When we got into my room, Mici looked around to size it up with a quick and practical glance, and then headed straight for the bed with a kind of professional directness that reminded me of Fräulein Mozart. She sat down on the bed and shrugged off the scanty upper part of her dress. Before I could sit down beside her, she also got rid of her bra. Naked to the navel, she straightened her back, thrusting forward her small breasts. As I watched her, feeling put off and moved at the same time, she declared with an odd smile: “I want you to turn on all the lights. I want to see your face.”

  I turned on all the lights, sat down beside her, and started to take off my clothes. However, Mici drew me to herself, twisting her bare nipples against my jacket.

  “I’d rather you’d take off my panties.”

  I obeyed instantly. As I did so, her skirt slid up and she threw apart her slim, pale thighs, then closed them again. Nevertheless, she would not part from her white chiffon dress, which now formed an awkward bundle around her waist. I tried to enter her but that bundle was somehow in the way. “That was a sexy party, wasn’t it?” she whispered, catching my ready fellow and drawing him up against her belly. The floating scrap of memory that prompted her remark didn’t distract her to the extent of making her open her eyes. Or was it that she needed the extra stimulus of suggestive images, and kept her eyes closed so that behind her eyelids she could watch other bodies, while feeling mine? An imaginative girl is said to be capable of engaging in mass-copulation even with one partner.

  After an hour or so, I began to get impatient and Mici, sensing the increasing weight of my movements, rolled away to the other side of the bed and crossed her legs. She looked resentful.

  I staggered over to my old hand-winding record player and began to crank up the machine. It seemed as good a way as any to try to steady myself. With a girl who was so quick to come to the point, I felt duty-bound to let her choose her own time.

  “Look at me,” I heard Mici saying. “I want to see your face.”

  I looked at her and suggested that she move under the blanket — otherwise she might catch cold.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m religious.”

  “What do you mean, you’re religious?”

  “I’m a virgin.”

  I adjusted my disordered clothes, feeling shy about my stupidity.

  “Look at me, I want to see your face,” Mici insisted, and I began to suspect why.

  But she forestalled any possible reproach I might have made. “Even if you don’t look at me, I can tell you’re angry. But that just proves that you don’t love me. If you loved me, you’d be satisfied with just playing around.”

  “Well, we have played around,” I said bitterly, standing in the middle of the room, out on no man’s land. “How about playing something else for a change? Do you want to listen to
records? Just sit and talk?”

  “It must be four in the morning,” Mici pouted, “it’s too late for conversation.

  “Well, do you want to go home?”

  “It’s easy for you to talk, you’re a boy.” She drew the top of her dress on again, but not her bra, and pulled down her skirt. “I couldn’t look my mother in the face again, if I ever forgot myself. Don’t laugh” (I couldn’t possibly) — “you don’t know my mother. She planned to be a nun, even while my father was courting her. But then he knocked her up, so that was it.” She added with a conciliatory grin, “I guess you could say that I was a matchmaker even before I was born.”

  “That sounds just as phony as everything else you’ve said.”

  “And what if you’d made me pregnant? Of course you didn’t think of that!”

  “I’ve never made anybody pregnant,” I protested righteously. “But nuns don’t tell you about birth control, do they?”

  “I like you but I won’t do it.”

  “I thought you were complaining at the dance that I hadn’t ‘fucked’ you!”

  “I was complaining that you hadn’t tried .”

  Saying this, Mici couldn’t quite suppress a triumphant giggle. The sound threw me right back to where I had started, eight years ago, with the teenage girls.

  “Look, Mici, I’m going to call you a taxi.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “Mici — either you leave or I call the police.”

  “And what would you tell them?” Silence. “If you knew anything about women, you’d know that I love you.”

  “All right, then I’ll leave.”

  She caught me at the door and leaned against me, sad and hurt. She began to undo my tie, asking in a husky voice: “Why don’t you take off your clothes?”

  Overcome by the illusion that I was making progress, I undressed myself. She led me back to the bed by my fellow and we began our skirmishes again, both of us naked except for that moving bundle around Mici’s waist. I can’t recall exactly what happened and in what order, though I do remember my steadily worsening headache and some of our more violent moments. Mici succeeded in luring me back again and again, winding me around her body, but always closing her thighs in time to prevent me from entering her. I thus tried to make her while she was unmaking me. Shaking with rage, I accused her of being a sadist. Did she hate everybody or only men? And why? Had her father beaten her when she was a child? Once I called her a virgin whore, which made her cry.