Fear of Dying by Erica Jong

Author:Erica Jong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

9

Age Rage

I am too long in the tooth to think you can make demands on life and expect that they will be granted, like waving a magic fairy wand.

—Annie Lennox

Ash came home and at first he was very weak. He lay in bed, complaining about lying in bed. He entertained his brother, his competitors, various artists he admired. He even entertained me. He had not the least interest in sex. He was probably afraid it would kill him. I worried about that myself.

* * *

No matter what the cheerleading gurus of aging may say, sex among seniors is not what it once was when we were young. Viagra is not for everyone. It gives many people blue polka dots on the retina. It makes others faint. Shots and pumps are unaesthetic.

At least we were alive and together. How dare we ask for more? We had beaten terrible odds and we were still holding hands in bed.

I look around at my friends and I see a world of widows—or almost widows. If I were more entrepreneurial, I would set up a sex shop for widows—someplace they could come, get their needs swiftly taken care of by young studs, and then move on to their grandparently duties, professional duties, filial duties (all their mothers are old-old as opposed to oldish). The rules of old keep changing. We used to think sixty was old. Now it’s the prime of life. But does that mean people want to admit to it? My widow sex shop might not work because the widows would sabotage themselves by falling in love with the studs—the way Isadora nearly fell in love with the personal slaves in Paris. Their hearts would break. Someone would sue, the secret would be out, and the shop would be closed down. It would get into all the papers.

I did not want to be a widow. I was too young to be a widow. At sixty pretending to be fifty, the world was full of unattached women rattling around, looking for a place to put all that unfulfilled sexual energy.

Asher was calm. Denial served him well. He never thought he might die. He simply did as he was told by his doctors. He didn’t argue, didn’t think apocalyptic thoughts. He was so much saner than I was.

Getting older means giving things up—sex and good looks in particular—but Ash never complained. And he always thought he’d get better. I loved him for his optimism. Hadn’t Dashiell Hammett said, “You got to look on the bright side, even if there ain’t one”? Asher might have said that if he were a hard-boiled writer instead of a hard-boiled billionaire with a soft center.

* * *

“I don’t want to be a widow,” I say to Isadora on the phone.

“Who does?” she asks.

“And I have the fear I’ll never encounter an erection again.”

“Ah—‘the old in-out,’ as Anthony Burgess called it. Possibly overrated. Be patient. There are a million different ways to have sex. I’ve already told you that. Maybe you need to think about why you have such a need to hold on to control.

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