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?

Twelve: Preferences

Desire enters at the eye, but it passes through so many levels and pathways before it's ever confirmed. Everyone has preferences, though I'm catching hints out there in the world of gender politics that preferences are regarded now as suspect. Preferences are regarded as exclusionary and as just a bit tainted. No preference, I've seen it asserted is ever "innocent". That's an unsettling choice of words. The clear implication there is that any preference is guilty, that anyone having a "type" that he prefers (and it's always a "he" under attack here) is accepting all the evil things about the culture. To have a type, the gender moralisers tell us, is to accept stereotypes and devalue the subjectivity of...well, you can fill in the ranting speeches.

I suppose I have to ask myself whether I have a type. My preferences aren't hard to determine. I like my companions much younger. There's no question about that. Tall is better than short. Slender and sharp-angled is always preferred. I've always been attracted to that look, and I can recall being twelve or thirteen and always looking at photos of actresses and models and choosing in my head the ones who were tall and greyhound-lean. I'm old enough to remember Twiggy, and how shocking her cohort was--- Twiggy and Jane Birkin and the young Marisa Berenson. Models were never very curvy, let alone zaftig--- curves distort the lines of the clothes being displayed ---but long, lean, coltish lines ("boyish", magazines like Playboy sniffed, with just a hint of panic) were still new when I was coming into puberty.   Still, that's a look I always preferred. I can remember taking silly multiple-choice quizzes in magazines that promised to tell you what your taste in female body types told you about your own personality and being informed that I couldn't be a "real man" since I didn't like "real women" with hourglass figures and D-cups. Well, my own tastes were formed by age twelve or so. I like to think that the culture changed to meet me rather the other way round.

If I were designing the perfect young companion, what would she look like? Tall, obviously. Long legs are a clear favourite. I'd prefer blonde to anything else. Yet preferences are just that, they aren't requirements. The tallest girl with whom I've been involved was just over six-one; the shortest was just five-one. The two I've loved most over the years were five-nine and five-eleven. Blonde would be the choice, everything else being equal, but again not a requirement. The two girls I did love most had raven-black and light chestnut hair. I grew up in an era where hair colour was endlessly variable, after all. Girls who were ash-blonde on Monday might be goth blue-black on Friday and add a few scarlet tips or streaks for Saturday night. I liked that. I liked the idea that looks could be changed and re-visioned; I liked the idea of colours that weren't "natural".

If I do have requirements--- stronger than preferences ---well, age might be one. Take that as a given. The others have to do with what's back of the eyes. Literate and literary, ironic, open to new ideas and a bit in love with crossing boundaries. A sense of play. A sense that one should live one's life as if inside a novel or a film. Those things I have to insist on.

And your own preferences, darlings? What do you prefer and require?

Eleven: Voix et Livres

I do have a certain fascination with classic erotica. Books, of course. There's the whole bibliophile attraction of collecting classic erotica--- things from that demi-monde of privately published editions in lavish bindings. Of course, the problem is that you're collecting the idea of a book; the text itself isn't all that important. Which may well be all to the good. The list of erotica, of erotic novels and memoirs, that can actually bear reading (let alone re-reading) is very, very small.

There was a time in my life when young companions asked me to read aloud to them. It's certainly a romantic enough idea, reading aloud to a girl curled up against you on a couch or in bed. I've read things by favourite poets--- Rilke, Cavafy, Wallace Stevens, Eliot, Pound ---aloud to lovers. I've read poetry aloud, but it's hard to imagine reading erotica aloud.

I suppose a more contemporary thing might be to watch DVDs of erotica with a companion, but the same set of problems applies. There are films that one can imagine watching with a young companion, but it's a short list: "The Lover", "Henry and June", certain Zalman King films, the French version of "Story of O" from the early 1970s, possibly "The Dreamers" or the 1997 "Lolita". There aren't too many more. The idea of the shared experience with the films would be to set a mood, to seduce and entice. But so far as I can tell, there are far too few films that actually set a mood, that don't just become trite or repetitive or silly.

Technology has made it actually more difficult to set a mood via music. When I was young, every young gentleman had a stereo system and could discuss the components and specifications. One played vinyl for a visiting young lady. One set the mood with jazz or classical or blues; one defined one's tastes with suitably hip and obscure tracks. Even when vinyl turned to CDs, the idea was the same: the girl curled up on the couch with a wineglass, her gentleman admirer playing music for her. That's not done so much these days. Music is on iPods and laptops; fewer people have stereo systems. I suppose I'll put that as a question: how does one set the mood now? Whatever are the guidelines for playing music as part of a seduction?  Do girls in their late teens or early twenties expect to have admirers play music for them as part of a seduction?

I'll pose this as a question. What counts as music for seductions these days? Does anyone even remember Juliet Greco or Miles Davis? Any girls reading this are invited to comment, too, on what they'd imagine having read to them by a lover. I think I'd be quite interested in that.