Women’s stories are often sad stories.
Like most people past the age of sixty, Woman A often thinks about growing old. At the same time, she often thinks back to those years when old age seemed a very distant thing, more like an option than a law of nature. After graduating from college, she had gone to live in a large city. In those days, rather than look for a husband, or even a steady boyfriend, she was happy to date several different men, and given that she was attractive, fun-loving, and not terribly choosy, this goal was not hard to achieve. Of course, this playing the field wasn’t going to last, it wasn’t supposed to last (remarkable, in fact, how fast it got old), and she had imagined herself, in due time, settling down with the One. But long before this could happen, now and then when she happened to see a certain type of couple—an elderly woman accompanied by some geezer with rounded shoulders and sparse white flyaway hair, his belt riding high on his ribs—she would feel a sort of ache for the old man she herself was going to end up with one far-off day. That man, as she saw him, though bereft of youth, would still have certain essential things. To begin with, thanks to a long and successful career, he’d have plenty of money to live on. He’d have a good heart, and in spite of the frailties of old age, he’d have his dignity. (It goes without saying he’d have all his marbles.) He and she would live a quiet but stimulating life together, a rich, elegant life, as she saw it: going to concerts and plays and movies, and traveling abroad, though never as part of any god-awful retirees’ group tour please. Past the age of passion, they would still be romantic, as anyone who saw them, as she did, against the backgrounds of those foreign cities and exotic landscapes could tell. As the years passed, the image of the old man began to appear to her more and more clearly, almost as if he were walking toward her. But as more time passed, his image began, as if walking backward, to recede. And now that she finds herself facing a different old age from the one she used to imagine, the question won’t leave her alone. It plays in her head, like something from an old song, or a poem she was forced to memorize in school: Where is the old man? Oh where is the kind, companionable old dear? Could somebody please tell her?
That kind of woman’s story.
Another story, this one set in Umbria.
. . . where, one summer, Woman B had rented an old farmhouse. Every morning, before it got too hot, she would go for a run in the hills. Most mornings, always at the crest of the same hill, near the remains of a medieval watchtower, she would see the same car parked by the side of the road and the old man to whom it belonged standing nearby, leaning on his cane. The man had a dog, a golden-haired spaniel, that would hurtle furiously barking in her direction whenever she approached. Each time this happened, the old man, failing to remember her from before, would call out, Signora! Ha paura dei cani? And each time she would assure him no, she was not afraid of dogs.
The first few mornings, out of courtesy as well as a sense that the old man would probably welcome a bit of attention, she stopped to chat. Her Italian wasn’t very good, but since he never remembered her, let alone the substance of their previous conversations, little Italian was needed. She gathered that he was some kind of retired workman and that he had lived all his life in those hills, the descendant of people who had once worked the land belonging to one of the region’s castles. She was never sure why he chose to drive always to this particular spot to walk his dog. He himself was too frail to take more than a few cautious steps at a time.
One day, when the air was much heavier than usual, the woman stripped off the long-sleeved shirt she always wore over her sports bra and tied it around her waist. Just as the old watchtower came into view, the dog came barking toward her. Ha paura dei cani? But as she approached she saw that something wasn’t right; the man was plainly agitated. She was afraid that maybe the heat had got to him. But a few steps closer and she understood. Indeed, the man made no effort to conceal his lust, eyes raking her half-naked torso, sighing, Ah, signoraaah, and lolling out his tongue as if in mimicry of the dog panting at their feet.
She was about to move on when, to her dismay, he let his cane clatter to the ground, and, seizing her bare arm with one hand, began energetically stroking it with his other. A stream of lascivious burbles and grunts poured from his lips. Taking care not to knock him off balance, she managed to wrench herself from his grasp and sprint away.
Easy enough to laugh off the incident, which had been, after all, more comical than anything else. (Like being caught by a satyr, as she would describe it to friends.) But there was also something lingeringly unsettling about it. That she had never felt in any real danger didn’t mean there hadn’t been an element of violence in his behavior. More troubling, perhaps, was something she saw in his face at the time but did not identify until later: far from being ashamed, the old goat had been proud of his arousal.
Even with the slump of age, he was several inches taller than her and, however weak, still carried considerable bulk. It wasn’t hard to see the powerfully built man he must once have been. Not hard at all to imagine a dangerous and virile young brute capable of seizing a helpless woman he happened to meet in a lonely spot and whom she’d have had no hope of escaping.
It was doubtful that the old man remembered this encounter any better than he’d remembered any previous one. In any case, after that morning she never stopped to speak with him again. Each time she saw him, though, she was struck by the same thought. Here he was, in his eighties at least. No memory, no legs, no wind—yet how the mere sight of a bit of female flesh could knock him off his perch. Surely it had been a while since he’d been capable of fucking. But still. He wanted. He lusted. Even at the risk of falling and breaking a hip—the catastrophe that spells the end for so many old folks—he just had to cop a feel. The wildness in his rheumy eyes, the panting, the crude guttural noises—it was as if there among those ancient sunstruck green hills she had been confronted not by a fellow human being but by some uncontrollable force.