Piecework

For any truly conscious middle-aged American must recognize that belief is the great killer of the century. Political belief has slaughtered millions. Religious belief has slaughtered the rest. Agree with me or die has been the essential slogan of the believers, at home and abroad, and you could fill every line of every page of every newspaper in the world with the names of their victims and still not have sufficient room. And yet we cannot seem to ever get free of them; charlatans pose as wise men; hustlers offer themselves as redeemers. And in come the brawny young men with the shovels, to turn the earth and bury the dead.

So in middle age, I am permanently secular. Television preachers provide inexhaustible entertainment, on screen and in motel rooms. And I am moved to outbursts of crazy laughter at the irrational gibberish of the New Age pitchmen, whose public appeal so perfectly mirrors that of the Swaggarts and Bakkers. Both represent some peculiarly American mixture of political exhaustion and the fear of death. Here (they say): grip this crucifix or this crystal and place your faith in the unseeable. Don’t worry about the homeless, the starving, the injured, the humiliated; this life is a mere vestibule through which you must pass to greater happiness on the other side of death. Great stuff. But when they start running for the presidency or proclaiming on The Oprah Winfrey Show that they are God, I begin to check the locks on my door.

The basic question in middle age might be this: How can I live the rest of my life with a modicum of grace?

For many men, the heart of the matter sometimes becomes sexual desire. In spite of the Leather Elbow School of American Literature (aging professor with leather elbows sewn on his corduroy jacket falls in love with hot sophomore), I’m convinced that most middle-aged men aren’t interested in involvements with very young women. It is not that sex has lost its power; if anything, the drive is stronger, because you know what you are doing at last, you have the accumulated sensations of a lifetime packed within you.

But very few young women can join middle-aged men in the exacting voyage of a love affair, never mind embark on the ardent passage of a marriage. Sensible men know this. Unless they have recently emerged from monasteries, middle-aged men simply know too much for young women — about sex, about themselves, and about the world. And most such men are not yet old enough to be cast in the role of sage. In the last years before I married again (fifteen years after my first marriage ended), I met some enchanting young women. They possessed a fresh beauty. They were intelligent. They had common sense. But I couldn’t bring myself to explain again who Sandy Koufax was, or Flattop, or to recite the lyrics of “Teach Me Tonight.” I couldn’t describe the rules of stickball or nights at Birdland. None could believe that there was once a world without television and that I had lived in it. Their myths were not mine.

So, like most sensible middle-aged men, those who have learned to adjust their emotional thermostats, I let them pass by. Their young, taut bodies were delightful to gaze upon, but they only reminded me of the serrated flesh of my own aging carcass. They were of an age when they could still expect ecstasy, some gigantic removal from the planet in the union of love and sex; I envied this blind romantic faith but I also knew better. I also did not want to become a comic figure, the dirty old man of song and story, who gets older and older while the women remain the same age. And I suppose, too, that I feared an inability to perform; all aging men do. Was it possible (I asked myself at the midnight hour) that I once made love eight times in a single day, to two different women? And answered: yes, but no more.

But if my own experience can stand for that of others, then sexual desire certainly does not wane as you move into middle age. It does assume its proper part in the larger drama of the completion of a life. And any life is obviously more than sexual bliss or its denial. I have friends who have been searching in vain for two decades for some simple explanation of the meaning of life. I’m convinced that there is no such meaning. I don’t ask for the meaning of the song of a bird or the rising of the sun on a misty morning. There they are, and they are beautiful, and I embrace them when I can. They are part of living, and living does have a value. When we’re gone, the world vanishes forever. We lose baseball and Vermeer, the poetry of Yeats and the moves of Fred Astaire, wives and children, brothers and sisters, the smell of dogs in winter and the sound of bees on a summer afternoon.