In Praise of Older Women

by Stephen Vizinczey

  In fact, some of those whom I succeeded in taking to bed were even more bizarre. There was a thirty-two-year-old librarian who opened her limbs for me less than half an hour after we met at a party, and was proposing marriage within the hour. Then she gave me a lecture on my new responsibilities as her future husband. It was to be my duty to provide for her in comfort while I lived and after my death — that is, I had to take out a life-insurance policy. In altogether less than two hours, in less time than it takes a salesman to draw up a fraudulent contract, this strange creature was ready to marry me and bury me. She actually thought she was being practical, and wouldn’t leave until I explained to her that I came from a tribe which buried the widow alive beside her dead husband.

  Such unpleasant though brief romances seem now mere preludes to my encounter with Ann, a mercilessly irrational woman who had a profound influence on my life — as if to prove that the best way to teach a man is to make him suffer. We had two abortive affairs, with years in between which altered her personality a great deal, though her genius for the incongruous remained unaffected. I first met her at the Lake Couchiching Conference, which I attended in the summer of 1958, in order to get acquainted with some of my future colleagues at the university.

  Couchiching is one of the thousands of lakes which make the unindustrialized regions of northern Ontario still wild and beautiful, in spite of the annual motorized invasion from the cities. On one large tract of shoreline, surrounded by dense woods, there is a YMCA camp which is turned over each summer to a ten-day conference on the great issues of the country and the world. From the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific, three to four hundred Canadians converge on Couchiching: professors, newspapermen, high-school teachers, televison commentators, librarians, housewives active in community affairs, even a couple of odd politicians — in short, all kinds of people who care, and spend most of their lives indoors. Such summer conferences by water, trees and open sky are very popular among North American intellectuals, and justly so, for it’s much more profitable to discuss the balance of terror, automation and the population explosion in shorts and the fresh air than in stiff suits and stuffy lecture halls. Besides, one is not obliged to attend every speech or discussion. It’s possible to take a dip in the lake, lie on the dock in the sun, or just walk barefoot in the deliciously prickly grass. People who have to wear the burden of respectable common sense for eleven months of the year can spit on the ground, holler to hear their own voices and wait for the echo, scratch their bellies in public — while husbands and wives have the additional option of getting the stale air of the marital bedroom out of their lungs. Of course those who happen to have nothing better to do assemble in the conference hall; but according to my personal calculations (which aren’t necessarily accurate) about half-a-dozen adulteries are consummated during the discussion of one single aspect of a world crisis.

  However, it would be misleading to claim extraordinary vitality and sophistication for Canada’s intellectual community. I was billeted with five other bachelors, and there were several evenings when all five of them stayed in the cabin, drinking. They were all university graduates, two of them had Ph.D.s, and yet, while the woods and the lakeshore were filled with wandering girls and lonely wives, these supposedly intelligent, bright, healthy young men chose to sit on their bunks, holding onto a bottle for dear life, and exchanging inane dirty jokes, as if they’d been locked in. Even though I recalled my taxi-driver friend’s warning about the Canadian male’s preference for the bottle over all other pleasures, I found the spectacle of these young people drinking away such marvellous opportunities absolutely incredible. When I left them to try my luck in the dark, they used to laugh at me and call me, with amiable contempt, “the mad teetotaller.”

  There was a newspaperman named Guy MacDonald at the conference, covering the discussions for one of the big dailies, though his regular job was writing nameless editorials. He was short, skinny and bowlegged, had thinning hair and a large sunburned nose, and wore old-fashioned wire-framed spectacles, which gave a kind of dignified unity to his plainness. Yet his wife was a pretty woman, the sort of blooming English beauty whose hair and skin combine the tints of blonde and redhead — all soft colours and contours, bursting with tensions. They had brought along their two daughters, who had unfortunately inherited their father’s physique. The older girl told me she was “nine and a half,” so the MacDonalds must have been married for at least ten years; but Guy MacDonald was still anxious to please his wife, and always turned the conversation around to her when she was present. She used to listen to him with an expression which seemed to say I’m smarter than my husband . One morning, when we were sitting together on the edge of the dock, with our backs to the sun and our feet in the water, he told me that he had been born in Ottawa while Ann came from Victoria, British Columbia. The fact of their meeting and marrying in spite of the vast distance that separated them at birth struck him as strange and wonderful.

  “You know,” he said, turning to pat his wife’s knee, stretching out his arm with a long slow gesture as if he was reaching across the thousands of miles, over the forests, the prairies, the lakes, the mountains, “Ann comes from the West Coast — she grew up in Victoria.” Ann reacted to his remark and his touch with a martyred sigh — not crudely obvious, but perceptible.

  “It isn’t fair, but I can’t forgive Guy that the girls inherited his looks,” she told me once when I found her alone on the dock keeping an eye on her daughters, who were splashing about in the water.

  Late one night, as I was groping through the darkened camp on my way to meet a girl, I passed by the MacDonalds’ cabin. Ann was sitting on the doorstep, and she called out like a sentry: “Who goes there?”

  “Hi! It’s Andrew Vajda.”

  “Where are you off to?”

  It unnerves me to shout down the silence in the dark, so I walked over to her. “I’m going to meet somebody.”

  “Good for you,” she said resentfully. “I’m not meeting anybody. The girls are asleep and Guy’s playing bridge somewhere. I haven’t a thing to do but sit here and count the stars.”

  “You don’t have to worry about the children in this place — why don’t you go and join him?”

  “Why should I? I’m glad to be alone for a change.” Her voice was hostile, as if she wanted to be rid of me as well. Yet she added, in an urgent tremolo that sounded like a confession of availability, “Why don’t you sit down? We could watch the sky together.” I’d never known a woman whose moods changed so abruptly: she used to talk with drastically different intonations within the same sentence. Even on the dock, during the most casual conversation, Ann’s voice would keep flapping about like a flag in contrary winds, as if her soul were in the grip of a savage storm.

  No sooner had she tempted me to sit down beside her than she warned me off with heavy virtue. ” I don’t invite men further than my doorstep,” she said significantly, “so don’t you get ideas.”

  “I’d be glad to keep you company, but I’m already late.”

  “Oh well then … Help me up though, will you? I’ve been sitting here so long, my leg’s gone to sleep.”

  I raised Ann to her feet and she pulled me against her, placing my two hands firmly on her buttocks. I could feel them move through her flimsy summer skirt and I couldn’t resist, even though I knew that there was a nice, bright girl waiting for me, with whom I would spend a far more pleasant evening than with this erratic housewife. It was a compulsive submission to the immediate sensation. As soon as the currents of our skins connected (in the darkness, filled with the faint but mesmerizing smell of the lake), I wanted Ann as desperately as if I’d never touched a woman in my life. I dragged her away from the cabin in search of a soft patch of grass protected by bushes, and at first she giggled delightedly behind me. Then she stopped short and began to pull in the opposite direction.

  “Wait, Andy,” she said unhappily.

  “Why, what’s wrong?”

  “I
don’t know … I guess it’s just that I love my husband, in a way.”

  “God forbid me to spoil a good marriage!” I said, quickly dropping her hand. Since my memorable night with that overheated virgin, Mici, I’ve been immune to teases.

  “It isn’t so much that I’m in love with him,” she added, even more unhappily, “but you see I’ve never been unfaithful to him.”

  “Then you shouldn’t start now.”

  “That’s not the way you re supposed to talk,” she protested with genuine indignation. “You’re supposed to seduce me.”

  “Someone must have misinformed you, Ann. If you need convincing, believe me, it isn’t worth it.”

  “I thought you Europeans were supposed to be heroes in the war of the sexes!”

  “I’m a pacifist.”

  Thus we dissipated in talk whatever feelings we may have had, and she wouldn’t lie down on the grass until we were bored and sick of each other. It was long agony for brief pleasure. I’d hardly entered her when we heard Guy MacDonald’s voice in the distance.

  “Ann — Ann? Are you around? Ann?”

  I tried to go on, certain that he wouldn’t find us, but Ann pushed me away with the strength of a tigress. She stood up, brushed off her skirt and blouse and turned toward me questioningly, and I took a leaf or two out of her hair. As she started off toward the path, walking with deliberate casualness, she called out in a calm voice: “I’m coming. I just went for a walk.”

  I waited until they’d disappeared inside their cabin, then ran, hoping that my date would still be waiting for me. She wasn’t.

  The next morning I went to the conference hall and heard two depressing speeches about the day when people wouldn’t have to work for a living and could devote all their time to leisure activities. When I got back to our bachelor quarters after lunch, my companions received me with leering faces. Mrs. MacDonald had been looking for me. “Now we know where you spend your evenings!” said the tall, effeminate lecturer in political science. “She’s very pretty.” After a dramatic pause, he added, “She was so anxious to find you, I’d bet a bottle of Scotch that she’s decided to leave her husband and shack up with you.”

  They were still laughing at their own jokes when Ann walked past our cabin, apparently not for the first time, and turned her head toward the open doorway. I rushed out to lead her away. I’d taken for granted that our joyless coupling would be quickly forgotten by both of us and I couldn’t imagine what she wanted from me. She was wearing a shapeless sack dress which didn’t show her figure, and she looked grim, almost possessed. So it was unlikely that she wanted us to mend our broken romance.

  “I must talk to you,” she announced. “I have to talk to someone. I feel so guilty.”

  “Oh, no!” I protested feebly. “What on earth for?” We walked between the cabins, trying not to look too conspicuous.

  “I’m thinking of telling Guy about it. He might be mad at me, but at least I’d get it off my conscience. I can’t stand feeling guilty.”

  “Are you religious?”

  “No, of course not. I was raised as an Anglican, but I’ve grown out of it.”

  “What’s your problem then? You don’t really care about Guy.”

  “I just don’t think it was right,” she said stubbornly.

  “I see. You no longer believe in sin, but it bothers you just the same, out of force of habit.” I tried to be flippant, to prevent her from being overcome by the majesty of her tragic mood. It didn’t work. Ann kept repeating that she felt guilty.

  “Look, we didn’t really make love. We’d hardly got started when your husband called.”

  Ann brightened immediately. “That’s true!” she exclaimed. “It isn’t as though we got to the point of anything serious .” Her eyes began to shine with innocence; she wasn’t pretty now, she was beautiful. Apparently what she was looking for wasn’t redemption but qualification — a technical loophole, so to speak “You’d say we were just necking, really. Necking a little hard,” she added, and smiled at an elderly registrar passing by us.

  I should have been relieved that she accepted my insincere white lie, but I was hurt. It was the first time a woman who’d made love with me thought that she hadn’t — and actually looked glad about it!

  “Guess I’ll go for a swim,” she sang as she ran off. “Bye-bye.”

  Nor was this the end of it. Mrs. MacDonald began to haunt me at parties, both at the camp and back in Toronto. Whenever the conversation got around to the affairs of those wives who were not present, she used to proclaim loudly and righteously: “I’ve never slept with any man but my husband.” Then she turned to stare at me defiantly as if daring me to challenge her statement. It got so that everybody was convinced that we were having an affair, and even her husband began to eye me suspiciously.

  I began dreaming about her. Once I was in an airplane and suddenly Ann jumped up from her seat and cried out, her voice silencing the roar of the jet engines, “I’ve never made love with anyone but my husband. Not really.” Then all the passengers got up and began to shake their fists at me. Another night, I was giving a lecture when she marched into the classroom, wearing her pink two-piece bathing suit from Couchiching, and shouted to my students: “I want you to know that I never really made love with Professor Vajda!” I woke in sweats of embarrassment.

  To regain my peace of mind (and to avoid the real danger of an unpleasant scene with Guy MacDonald) I stopped going to places where Ann was likely to be present. As a teetotaller, I hesitate to draw the moral, but it’s inescapable: at times it may be wiser to stay home with a bottle.

  On More than Enough

  Pleasure deprives a man of his faculties quite as much as pain.

  — Plato

  I suppose seven years of lecturing made me susceptible to the notion that I had something to teach: there appears to be no other explanation for my indulging in these reminiscences with the idea of edifying the young. Still, I’m glad I’ve written them. They may offer little to the reader, but they’ve been rewarding for the author: I find it increasingly difficult to take myself seriously.

  It seems now that whenever I thought I learned something about people or life in general, I was merely changing the form of my immutable ignorance — which is what compassionate philosophers call the nature of knowing. But to speak only of my search for happiness in love: apart from the time when I was at the mercy of teenage girls, I’ve never been so miserable with women as I was when I knew all the scores and had all the prerequisites of a carefree bachelor life. When I came back from Lake Couchiching to Toronto, I moved into a modern apartment and furnished it as a proper playboy pad: huge bed, books, prints, a Telefunken hi-fi set, records. Later I even bought a sports car. I didn’t have much cash, but my job at the university assured me of a good credit rating. In this country merchants consider corrupt politicians, civil servants and academics the best credit risks, because their jobs come with a nearly foolproof lifetime guarantee. I possessed average good looks and was also the right age: women are partial to men in their late twenties. I’d also grown quite keen at recognizing the women who weren’t for me, and unpleasant surprises of the kind I described earlier occurred infrequently. Now I was unlucky with women who were both lovable and loving.

  My trouble was that they were too numerous. I fell in love with them at the glint of an eye, at the sight of a well-rounded bosom (or a small, pointed one), at the sound of a husky voice or for less obvious reasons I was in too much of a hurry to analyse. Having a place of my own and irregular working hours, I could finally fulfil my boyhood fantasies and enjoy several love affairs concurrently.

  The time was right — not only for me, but for my lovers as well. High living had become part of the atmosphere. When I arrived in Toronto in 1957, I could walk on the main avenues of the city on a Saturday evening without seeing a single soul except for a few drunks. As the straight rows of ugly boxes, which passed for streets, and the innumerable billboards and neon signs clearl
y testified, people seemed to be interested in little else than buying and selling the basic necessities. They spent their free time watching television in their underground recreation rooms, sitting around their backyard barbecues, or driving about in their new cars. They seemed to be afraid of getting too far away from the things they had so recently bought, and from the mates who had helped them to choose the house, the furniture, the car. It was a puritan world, but luckily I was to get only a brief glimpse of it. By the end of the ‘fifties, people had got used to their standard of living and suddenly became interested in life. Imaginative new buildings sprang up, whole streets of old houses were renovated and transformed into exotic boutiques, art galleries, book-shops and outdoor cafés, and on warm evenings so many people were strolling about that it sometimes took me a quarter of an hour to walk one block. The divorce rate soared, as did the number of riding clubs, women’s committees for the support of the arts, Great Books discussion groups, and other organizations which could provide an alibi for a wife when she felt like taking a lover. This was the phenomenon which became known as the North American Sexual Revolution, and I was bent on making the most of it.

  The result was like driving in a speeding car through a beautiful landscape: I had an impression of all the exciting hills and valleys, contours and colours, but I was moving too fast to be able to take a good look. I often regretted not being able to know my lovers better — though I had to take considerable pains to prevent them from knowing me too well. Women have the habit of leaving a nightgown, a make-up case, a pair of nylons, at their boy friend’s apartment; steadfast Scottish-Canadian girls even left their diaphragms with me. Hiding the belongings of one from the eyes of another was difficult and nerveracking — along with the problems of timing, confusion of identities, and constant lying. Nor was I always successful: there were the inevitable slips and scenes. Once I was caught by failing to explain successfully why I had put a diaphragm in an old shoe-box, under a pile of laundry. I’d remembered to hide the thing all right, but had forgotten to put it back in the bathroom-cabinet before it’s owner’s next visit. I became jumpy and listless, a physical and mental wreck, unable to have a good time, let alone be happy. Yet I couldn’t stop. After all, wasn’t I lucky, being able to go to bed with nearly all the women I wanted? I used to envy myself, in the pit of my misery. More and more, I found myself drawn to women who were themselves getting battered by life.