Nineteen: A Walk In The Morning Light

There's a small kerfluffle around the web today about an ad from an "upmarket" chain called Harvey Nichols. The ad is simple enough. It shows various girls coming home in last night's party dresses on what's now known as the Walk of Shame. The point of the ad is that in a Harvey Nichols dress, you'll look both fashionable enough to be out at night but still elegant and professional enough to pass as in daytime attire--- thus avoiding the Walk of Shame look. It's a reasonably cute ad, but it has drawn fire both for what's now called "slut shaming" and for "class privilege". The second claim does perplex me, and I'm not sure how its proponents justify it, or just what privilege it is to shop at Harvey Nichols.

There is a difference between the dawn walk home for males and females. That much is true. I've walked home from young companions' apartments in the morning in last night's clothes, but I've never thought of it as a Walk of Shame. I'm more likely to think of it as a kind of victory march, and I'm likely to recite Housman to myself: Soldier from the wars returning, spoiler of the taken town.... I will add here that the victory isn't over the young girl I've left sleeping in her bed. The victory is over time and fate and entropy. Walking home with a jacket over my shoulder and a tie stuffed into a pocket, I do feel like I've won something, or proven something. But never at my young companion's expense. The goodbye kiss as I left her bedroom for city streets was heartfelt and had no small amount of thank-you to it. Walking home, what I feel is elation. If the world and all the passers-by can tell that I'm returning from a lovely girl's bed, all the better. I've defied time and age and social expectations, and I've been given a whole nested set of gifts: pleasure, certainly, and a sense of renewed life and potential.

I'm usually at coffeehouses early on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and there's always a steady inflow of Walk of Shame girls at the ones near the university--- hungover, tired, often carrying last night's stiletto heels. I can understand why they're walking. It's a close neighbourhood, bars and clubs and undergraduate apartments all together. (I've never understood girls having to do the Walk of Shame in places like London or New York; you'd think last night's partner would have the grace to offer cab fare.) I'm often amused by the girls--- who avoids her friends' eyes, who sits with other returning girls to share stories or commiserate, who's too hungover to do more than try not to go face down on the table. Amused, but never contemptuous. That's a distinction worth making. I enjoy watching them and inferring stories, but I don't feel contempt. I do feel envy, of course, the standard male wish that one girl or another had been in my bed last night. And there's always the fact that last night's party dress may be delightfully revealing in morning light. I can't deny that, and I'd never think of denying it. I will always turn the Male Gaze onto youth and beauty. But there's never contempt or derision. Why would there be?

Well, I still don't understand the "class privilege" attack on the Harvey Nichols ad. The remnants of the class system in Britain are as mysterious as ever the older system was. Is it only that the dresses sold there are expensive? I'll leave that for readers' comments. I will just say that I like seeing Walk of Shame girls--- though I certainly have no interest in shaming them. And while I think of my own dawnlight returns as a small Roman triumph, there's no reason at all why a lovely girl shouldn't stride home with her own sense of victory.

Eighteen: Sleeping Beauties

I read Kawabata's "House of Sleeping Beauties" years ago, and I have seen the German film version done a few years back. There's a new version out this season--- "Sleeping Beauty", with Emily Browning. The reviewer at New Yorker was very much taken with Ms. Browning--- certainly understandable ---but less than taken with the premise of the film.

The reviewer despised the clients in the film--- the older men who pay their money for the chance to lie there next to a beautiful girl who's been given a sleeping draught. "Foul and foolish" he calls them.  Kawabata's novella and the German film both had more sympathy for the elderly clients. Foolish, yes, in those versions. But also deserving of sympathy. Kawabata wrote the novella in late middle age, and he understood that age not only takes away one's own beauty and power, it disqualifies one from being around youth and beauty. I identified with his hero, just as I identified with the main character in the German film. A film made for Australian and American audiences here in the new century can't show any sympathy for the older men who purchase nights next to Emily Browning' s character. The politics of the day don't allow for sympathy for older men who'd buy time with a sleeping girl.

The reviewer at New Yorker disdained the whole idea of ritualised sex as well. He dismissed high-end, high-fashion s/m costumes as looking "like Victoria's Secret had been bought out by the Freemasons". He also found something distasteful in all efforts of males (meaning especially older males) to make sex seem "grand and sinister", efforts that he claimed only and ever emphasised how ridiculous ritual sex is and how pathetically ridiculous the men are.

We're back to Andrew Holleran's claim that "intelligence leads directly to s/m", I think. That's a phrase I've agreed with all these years. Well, more specifically, being literary and bookish leads to s/m, or at least to ritualised sex. I came to sex through books, and expected that all the actions and settings for sex would be like those in books I'd read. My young companions over the years have all shared that. The lovely girl sitting across a table and kicking off a ballet flat under the table to graze an ankle or a bare foot along her lover's leg learned that from somewhere--- a book, a film ---and is re-enacting a scene. And the seduction, the conversation, going on across the table is its own re-enactment of scenes read or viewed.

I have to have sympathy for the older clients in "Sleeping Beauty". After all, who am I but one of them? Though it is hard to imagine what I'd do with a girl--- however naked and lovely ---who'd been given a sleeping draught. Sex for me has always been based on conversation, on building up stories and exchanges as my young companion and I create scenes and try particular things. I can imagine kissing a sleeping girl--- lips and eyelids and all the places I've loved ---and I can imagine brushing fingertips over her. But penetration at all wouldn't appeal to me without conversation, without stories being exchanged. Paying for the services of a lovely girl is beyond my resources, but I have no moral or political problems with the idea. What I'd pay for, though, is the stories as much as the flesh or her skills with mouth and hands and hips.

I've always sought young companions who can tell stories with me, who can create worlds with me. A sleeping girl is a beautiful nullity. She's not even the girl in fashion/erotica photos. Talking to a sleeping girl isn't sex. It's only emptiness. I need voices to catalyse beauty, to bring beauty to life, to metamorphose beauty into stories and rituals.

Do I expect sex to be "grand and sinister"? That's not a bad idea, though I expect things less "grand" than simply crafted and literary. I can't imagine sex that isn't at least those two things. As far as I can tell, even sex that's nominally purely carnal and wordless and only about physical urges and acts is all mediated through what we've seen in films or read in novels about raw, overwhelming passion. I haven't been able to imagine sex that isn't about the artificial and ritualised and mediated since I was...in my teens? None of that dispenses with love or affection, mind you. But it does mean that we have a repertoire of acts and costumes and poses and words in our memories and imaginations that's based on books and films and photographs, a set of tools and references that we use to build up the worlds we need for love and lovemaking.


I want to see Emily Browning in "Sleeping Beauty". She's a lovely actress. But I'd want her fully awake across a futon from me, fully awake and going through a set of shared rituals. Costumes like "Victoria's Secret bought out by the Freemasons"? Well, why not? We'd both be aware of having constructed a world for intricate games. And I'd want her to respond to my touch and kisses with stories and carefully choreographed shared moves.

My age may make me ridiculous, though there are young companions who've found it an asset. I do have stories and a sense of craft to offer. I have a sense of safety in the dance to offer a young, literary companion. All sex may be foolish, though sex and love are always examples of where a bit of foolishness or even madness is welcome. But there's nothing "foul" here. I won't give the reviewer at New Yorker that.


 

Seventeen: Season's Ghosts

The holiday season has begun, and I had a birthday just as Thanksgiving week began. Every birthday brings its own ghosts. I have enough of my own, I know. There are memories of other cities and other times, of lovely young companions from the past. Memory is a dangerous thing, after all. It's too easy to live inside memories, too easy to be trapped by them. Joan Didion has made a career out of pointing out that memory is always a trap, and that only selective amnesia enables one to go on with life.

A friend wrote once of a Christmas Eve where she was aboard a train from Chicago to Syracuse, listening to her iPod and sobbing helplessly in the upper bunk of her sleeping car. She was traveling away from one lost affair to a city where there was still the remembered pain of another. Another friend told me once that she'd spent empty nights wandering through Montreal, looking at her reflection in shop windows and wondering who this ghostgirl was, asking herself what--- in a short story, in a film ---this girl had lost.

Year's-end is a season for ghosts. Kisses on New Year's Eve, hotel suite weekends in a city lit up with Christmas lights, the ritual of parties and gifts... All those things are ways of dealing with ghosts, with the memories accumulated during a year. Year's-end offers a set of rituals for romance, but there's always a hint of desperation. That kiss on Christmas Eve, the stroke-of-midnight kiss as the crowds cheer in Times Square, the coatroom kiss at the party--- they're done to exorcise the bad memories of a given year, to drive away the ghosts of loss and solitude.

There are lovely girls there reflected in shop windows, lovely girls in long coats moving through the winter night, beautiful girls across a table in a restaurant--- and there are kisses implicit in their presence. As there should be, of course. But each one of them is a ghost for another year, just as you'll be a ghost in their memories.  We haunt one another, and we haunt ourselves.

That's one of the things to remember as the year gutters out.

Sixteen: The Reverse Of The Medal

A phone call inbound tonight from a young friend at Savannah. She called to ask me for literary advice, though there was something of the interview in it as well. Imagine, she said, that you were out on a date with someone my age. What drink would you order for them? That's not hard to answer. Jameson's on ice on a first date. But if the girl was someone I found truly compelling, then a good single-malt Scotch. There was bright laughter on the other end of the phone. Thought you'd say that, she said. That's always a thing older lovers do, isn't it: teach girls like me about Scotch. I had to laugh at that, though it is true. It is something I do. Something gentlemen of a certain age do.

I need to know that, she said. I'm writing about someone like you. I need to know what goes into being an older lover. I could imagine her sitting cross-legged on her bed with her new MacBook Air and her iPhone, glasses pushed up onto her forehead. It's complicated, isn't it, being an older lover?

She's probably right about that. That's something that does bear thinking about. There across a table, I'm the one who's the target of the gaze. I'm the one who's performing, the one with the established role. The young companion is the one reading me, determining what I am. I know what I'm looking for when I see a lovely girl. But there's always the mystery of what my young companion sees there on a first night.

That's a question I'll have to pose to young companions. It has to be separated from vanity; I think that's a clear thing to be wary of. But the gaze runs both ways. I want to read my lovely interlocutor's story when she's done with it. And I'd like very much to know how she reads the character of the older lover she's put into her story. I will be thinking about that, and probably writing about it here: what do I look like, what are my codes and semiotics from the other side of the table...?

Fifteen: Exchanges

A friend in London tells me that she'd dined late with an older admirer at someplace discreet and semi-private and, on the way to her admirer's car, some drunken lager lout staggering by pointed at them and called out, "So how much is he paying you, then?" They ignored him and walked on, but he kept calling after them, demanding to know how much she was being paid and adding the usual epithets. She wrote me about it this morning in a dark mood--- hungover a bit, but also depressed and unable to get the drunken chav's voice out of her head. I told her to remember that the fact was that, there the morning after, she was still fiercely bright and lovely and well-educated and someone who's done academia and the gallery world both, and the guy on the street was still a drunken yobbo.

My friend responded that she was depressed about her life. The man she'd been with had been older and moneyed, and she was angry both about being harangued on the street and about the fact that the insult was dual-pronged--- she'd been called a whore, and her admirer had been mocked as someone who could only attract her because he had cash. She was, she said, more angered by the insult to him and to the relationship  than by being called a whore.

I've never called a girl a "whore" as an insult. That's not something I've ever thought to use as an insult. I've never looked down on girls who are escorts or courtesans or who supplement a deficient income by accepting occasional clients. That never struck me as anything to look down on. But I do very much dislike yobbos (or anyone else) who'll use "whore" as an attack on a girl beacuse of her sex life, her attire, or her partner. There may be self-interest there, true. I'm always the older partner, and while I'm certainly not as moneyed as my friend's admirer, I'm nonetheless vulnerable to the assumptions behind the insult.

I've had friends who did the demi-rep or part-time escort or domme thing while doing university or postgraduate degrees. I've never had any moral objections to any girl who works as "professional companion". I liked the girls before ever they told me what they were doing, and all I've said is that I wanted to hear their stories and that I hoped the money was useful. I can't speak about girls who work the street or who work in brothels; I've never known any. It may be that I'm only supportive of the girls I've known because they shared educational and class and aesthetic backgrounds with me. Or it may be that to some degree I feed off their stories. I recognise that I'm vulnerable to criticisms like that.  All I can say is that the girls I've known who exchanged favours for money were (and are) friends, to be supported as friends.

Someone I knew once upon a time came to me and made a simple enough offer--- she needed money for rent and she was willing to either sell me one of her paintings or spend the night. I wrote her a check and pointed to the bedroom. The next morning at coffee she took the check out of the pocket of one of my shirts and looked at it and asked if we were still friends. Of course, I said. She started to laugh and told me that the one thing that bothered her was the thought that I'd chosen sex instead of the painting because I thought her art was bad. I had to re-assure her--- very honestly ---that I liked her paintings a lot, and that my choice was strictly based on my predatory tastes in much younger girls. We stayed friends, and over the next couple of years I did buy a painting or two. Did I pay for her favours again? A couple of times, yes. Did she ever buy me drinks or dinner? Yes, she did. I've always wondered how initially serious she'd been, and whether she'd only made the offer because she thought I'd never choose sex. Why did she go through with it? And why come by again? I suspect that a fair amount of that was being nineteen and proving to herself that she could do it, about striking a pose. I'd like to think that she found me to be a useful character in the stories she was telling herself. We neither of us ever asked if the sex would've happened if I hadn't written the check. I've always thought that the idea of taking the money was what made the sex work for her.  I never presumed--- I'll note that. I never assumed that the exchange meant that she and I were involved, or that I could count on sex outside of an exchange. We did hang out sometimes, and there was some drunken making out at bars, but we only had sex again the few times when I wrote a check. I don't know if she'd have been interested, or if that would've ruined the story she was creating, or if it would've ruined the friendship we had.

It's Halloween night, and a night for ghost stories. There are ghosts in my past who've been part-time escorts, or been in keeping, or turned the occasional trick to pay rent or pay for airline tickets--- in one case, to pay for a signed first edition. Well, I do want my friend in London to know that she has my support and belief. I have no idea whether her older admirer is paying her rent or offering up envelopes of cash or gifts that can be readily converted to cash. If he is, then...well, fine. I do want her to remember, though, that she has nothing to apologise for, and that whatever she has or hasn't done, she's still far superior to any drunken yobbo.

Fourteen: Mornings

The girl at the next table this morning had a copy of Wings of the Dove, a Penguin edition with a yellow USED sticker on the spine. This was downtown, in a small coffee shop adjacent to two of the new boutique hotels. Very early, and only a handful of people on the street. She was dressed as one might expect (or hope) for a Sunday morning, in a mix of last night's clothes and a few things obviously pulled from the backpack by her chair. I sat over my own cappuccino and tried to read her semiotics.

Some things are easy. Alone at a coffee shop near trendy hotels so early on a Sunday morning is an easy call. Not with a regular boyfriend, or they'd have come  down together.  Not with friends who'd come into the city--- same reason. The book is an identifer: the yellow sticker comes from the university bookstore. That it's a later Henry James novel says something about her major and how far along she is at university. What says more is that she had it in the backpack. The backpack itself is another undergraduate marker, as well as place for a change of clothes. She was planning on staying the night, and the novel reinforces that. Walking alone through the hotel lobby at seven in the morning in last night's cashmere pullover and a pair of wrinkled olive-drab chino shorts, shouldering the backpack, she was striking a pose. Sitting over coffee with Wings of the Dove, she was elaborating on that: the literary girl on a morning-after, a girl who'd brought a serious novel to read after leaving her gentleman companion sleeping back in the hotel room.

Harder to get a read on whomever she was with. He could simply be an out-of-town boyfriend, but then, why wasn't he staying at her rooms rather than hotel? If they'd rented a room as a romantic gesture, why wasn't he with her? She wouldn't bring the backpack if she planned to go back up to a hotel room.  For my own very obvious reasons, I'd like to believe the sleeping companion back in the room was significantly older. Someone she'd met and spent the night with before. Someone she was keeping as a secret-- after all, she isn't letting him walk her home, or even to a taxi . Out-of-town, obviously. Moneyed enough to afford the room. Married...not necessarily. Would there be money involved? Again, not necessarily, though I remain attracted to the idea of the envelope left for her on a table (hotel stationery, I'd think) with the bills inside. She might not be doing it to help with tuition. It might simply be her way of proving to herself that she could do what girls in novels and films do.

Of course, there are now two strands of stories being told here. The girl at the next table reading Henry James is telling her own story. The backpack, the book, the choice of Sunday morning-after clothes are all parts of the story she's telling the city around her, and telling herself as well. I'm telling a story for her, too, even though I know that I'm re-fashioning her  tale. My instant hope is that the man sleeping back in the room is at least twice her age, and probably more. I have to hope that, if I'm ever to imagine her leaving my own rooms on a Sunday morning. I think about the envelope with cash because I like the idea of a lovely undergraduate girl who'd do that as a kind of performance art piece, or as a tale she could embellish and tell to half-shocked friends in later years.

We tell stories about the people we see; we invent lives for the ghosts who pass us by. That's actually a small trope in Zalman King films, in Wild Orchid and Delta of Venus. The main characters sit in a restaurant or walk through early-morning Parisian streets and build up imagined love lives for strangers. 

Tell me, then--- how do you read strangers? What stories do you tell about strangers on the street, about the couple or the solitary lovely girl at the next table?  What are the stories you want to live inside yourselves?

Thirteen: Ghosts

I do wonder about the past sometimes. I wonder what became of the young companions from the past--- the girls I danced with, the girls I flirted with, the girls I kissed on late-night streets. I've always had a good memory, at least for scenes and moments. It's easy enough to think back across all the years and  remember  faces and names and locales. I do wonder what became of those girls--- the ones known en passant as well as the ones who were friends-and-lovers.  I do have to ask myself, of course, whether I'm wondering about them because of who they were or because I'm wondering what became of characters in a novel after that final page. I may only be wondering because I want to re-live those years and those nights. What I can say is that it's all-too-easy to recall faces and the taste of kisses and the music that was playing, and I do wonder what happened to those girls beyond the moments I can recall. Assign any reason you'd like, but I still wonder.

If you live in a city, no matter its size, you will cross paths with ghostgirls from the past. City life is always a series of small neighbourhoods and entwined networks. Six degrees of separation may be a global median, but it's always much smaller in city life. Class, professions, favoured bars and bookstores and bistros, neighbourhoods...so few degrees of separation in our lives. You will see faces you once loved...or at least awakened next to...and you have the issues of etiquette and social settings to consider. I believe that current gender politics has very little to offer in terms of situational advice beyond the assumption that ever speaking to an ex or thinking about one is somehow a gender-crime and tantamount to denying subjectivity or obsessional stalking.

I won't deny that it would be easier if all ex-lovers were translated to separate or parallel universes and never existed in one another's world again. The issues of politeness and social interaction are difficult enough. Memory and regret, unrequited longing, anger, possessiveness, jealousy, familiarity--- all those issues are there. Familiarity is always a dangerous issue. It's dangerously easy to respond to a voice you've once known, or a laugh, as if time had never passed, as if the person was still who and what she was years ago.  Yet being guarded and coolly polite, making the sort of distant conversation one makes with strangers, seems wrong and perhaps insulting.

We live amid our ghosts. That's only a given. Those of us who live in and through books and films are especially prone to seeing the ghosts that swirl around us.  A gentleman of a certain age  has more than a few ghosts of his own to see. I suppose I should ask you what you think of your own ghosts, of how one deals with faces out of the past. Any thoughts or memories of your own?