Swoon by Betsy Prioleau

Author:Betsy Prioleau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

How much fun are you to live with?

—DR. PHIL

Every morning when Gustin steps out of his “Top Transport” Town Car, the cabbies at the Darien, Connecticut, train station say, “Here comes Hollywood.” It’s easy to see why. With his close-cropped white hair, pencil mustache, starched white camp shirt, and leonine carriage, he looks like a middle-aged Creole version of Errol Flynn. “These guys,” he chuckles (some of whom work for his car service), “can’t understand how come I’m an old man and I can get women.” He understates the case; Gustin is a love rocket. Amicably separated from his wife, he has more female adulation at sixty-seven than he knows what to do with: a live-in girlfriend of three years, a devotee who calls daily from the Caribbean, and comely singles in bars and nightclubs.

One hot June morning, he invites me into his parked Lincoln, turns on the AC, and tries to explain his “certain something” with women. “I’m from Trinidad,” he says in his silky island upspeak. “God didn’t give us money, but he gave us happiness.” That, he thinks, is the key to it all, besides “class,” “character, of course,” and “supergood sex.” “You see,” he says, “you have to get a woman to feel relaxed, and the way to do it? Laughter, laughter, laughter. If I quarrel with my lady it always ends in laughter, and we hug each other up.”

Gustin also swears by festivity. “In Trinidad we party all year. You have a good time, the blood starts flowing, the music puts a rhythm into your body.” And the women can let go and get their wild on. He met his wife that way, seduced others, and once incensed a husband so much at Carnival that he can’t go home again. “He says he’ll kill me whenever I come back.”

In the meantime, he’s living to the hilt. The last time he went to the dentist, he realized he’d slept with everyone in the office except the male doctor. “The women talk,” he figures, “they want to find out if it’s true—whether they’ll enjoy it too.” Rip-it-down joy: that’s his love mantra. As he drives off to pick up a passenger, he rolls down the window and throws me a thumbs-up: “Crank it!” he calls. “To life!”

Passion is fun-dependent; without play, gaiety, and carnival license, it fades to gray. Commitment conspires against us; custom and dailiness insidiously sap desire and induce ennui. Therapists, for that reason, tell couples to work on playfulness—kid around, take date nights, and vacations to holiday resorts. Howard Markman, a psychologist who runs a breakup-prevention program at the University of Denver, found that the amount of fun in a relationship predicted its success.

Fun, though, is easier said than done. A consumer-capitalist ethos of overwork and purchased, passive entertainment militates against celebration. There’s also an art to festivity. For fullest enjoyment, it’s episodic and alternates with everyday reality. (Imagine a year-round Mardi Gras.) And a flair for gaiety is crucial; eros is “addicted to play” and insists on unbound merriment, nonsense, song, and dance.

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