THE CONFIRMED BACHELOR can be defined as the man who has the courage of his lack of convictions. Once he hasn’t made his mind up, he really sticks to it. Swinging more and more wildly from his loosening trapeze, he is another reeling acrobat in the disorganized circus of American love and marriage.
Let us look at him with magical omnipresence from a privileged station in the air above a big-city party. It could be anywhere in America—New York, Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, Denver, San Francisco. There is a crowd—busy, talkative, curious, and anxious—of human creatures hoping for amusement. Chink of glasses, gaggle of laughter, roll of eye. The bachelor enters alone.
What does the wife see? Sometimes she sees him as a bad example for her own husband, but more often she has tender feelings for him. She sees forbidden possibility: a handsome, perfect cavalier, perhaps, mysterious and challenging—unlike her all-too-real, all-too-known, heavy, snoring husband. (The bachelor never snores in the fancy of this lady.) Or she knows he is lonely and she sees a sweet lost lad to be comforted. Or she sees a combination of challenge and need. She wants to feed him, ease him of sorrow, perhaps—she tucks a tooth into her thoughtful lip-perhaps find him someone. Or, in some cases, if she and he are crowded into a corner with their drinks in their hands, she finds herself whispering those strange, hasty words in that bizarre language of invitation: “Call me. Call me. Hang up if a man answers.”
What does the husband see? He may see a lucky man who has avoided the tender trap (a trap baited only with hope and desire) or a man who has been able to undo the clamps by brute force. He claps him on the back and says, “Still got your pick of things, eh Jack?” Or he sees a poor fellow who hasn’t yet tasted the joys of children, hearth, steady conjugal affection. Or a paltry jokester, still trying to make out of an evening, like a fraternity boy or a conventioneer. Or perhaps he sees a challenge and a rival. (“Funny thing keeps happening. I answer the phone and the party on the other end hangs up.”)
What does the girl see? Ah, she scents rather than sees. She recognizes a possible catch. But if he carries the reputation of a confirmed bachelor, the girlish mind boggles before vague threats from Sunday supplements and ancient movies—weekends at ski lodges, abrupt petulance and shortness of mood, flowers and candy, and then echoing silence heaped up about her while she shrivels into scorned spinsterhood. . . . She blinks. He approaches. He has nice teeth. He’s a pleasant chap—no spats, cane, or waxed mustache. Still, she has been told that he has run through a dozen like her, and that his gray temples may bespeak merely an ironic heart. But I am different, she decides bravely. Let’s see, if I spread my net in front of the canapé table, and bait it with dimples, promises of home cooking, and—“What kind of work do you do?”
What does another bachelor see? A comrade, a rival, a friend with one button missing from his shirt, who is likely to bore him with complaints and then steal his girl.
The hostess sees the available extra man. The food table—little bits of things placed upon little bits of things —sees a gobbling mouth which has skipped dinner. And perhaps the psychiatrist sees a patient. Our individual confirmed bachelor in his J. Press suit turns out to have about as many identities as there are people in the room.
And what does he see when he looks into the bathroom mirror in his studio apartment while dressing for this party? Perhaps he sees a healthy young man with plenty of time, money (as much as the Bureau of Internal Revenue allows him to keep), opportunity, willingness for adventure. He is all set and the lights are winking on and the evening is before him. No wife will make demands; no child will wake him later; he can eat, drink, and wander where, when, and how he pleases; he has the initiative. He can look over the world and take his pick and accept the challenge of fighting for her, or her, or HER. He dwells in realms of liberal choice. He has time for everything, visions and decisions and revisions. Showered, shaved, brushed, he finds himself the freest man on earth, if only he be willing to define the world narrowly and shrewdly enough.
Or he may discover somebody else in that mirror.
He stares and sees the frazzled face of the undecided man who slides down the razor blade of time—lonely, bored, lonely, lonely, and lonely. Asked why he finally married, one ex-bachelor said, “I got sick of that same old face in the bathroom mirror.” He is tormented by a twisting loneliness which, oddly enough, feels to the belly very much like the pain of jealousy. But here we find just one person involved, a straight line any way you turn him, not three people, a triangle, as in the socialized pain of jealousy. He has less to contemplate; he has only his solitary, retracted state. The bachelor often suffers from indigestion and incipient ulcers. Too much restaurant food? Pans not clean enough? Or was the restaurant good but the interior monologue accompanying dinner stewed in unfriendly juices? He knows that all the statistics give him a shorter life expectancy—practical thought—than that of married men. Despite his naps, his self-indulgence, his cheerful acceptance of the haphazard, he dies young.
There is a law that a battery must be charged or it will be exhausted. It cannot generate from itself. The bachelor is a battery trying to charge itself.
In nature there is another parallel. A certain primitive variety of one-celled creature reproduces by what is called “binary fission”—by simply splitting in two. It requires no other, no mate. There appears to be nothing like sex needed. However, scientists notice under the microscope that a culture of these paramecia soon becomes “tired,” “sluggish,” and inactive, reproducing more and more slowly. Unless ... and here is the curious detail. If the creature does not occasionally swim up to another like it, move alongside and exchange nuclei for a reason which has no normal mechanical explanation, it will finally slow down absolutely, disintegrate, die. But if it does perform this mysteriously friendly act, it will regain strength, move and feed with healthy vigor, and renew its process of reproduction by binary fission with elegant enthusiasm.
Which leads us back to the confirmed bachelor and a delicate matter. He is not a boy. He is not a child. It is no secret: one of his major problems is sex, and this fact fills a large part of his life and has obvious repercussions on the lives of all the people around him. If he is a confirmed bachelor, the genuine article, he has no guarantees in this area. Sex produces two kinds of trouble, and accordingly two kinds of bachelor. One bachelor is the shrewd Don Juan, attractive, capable, efficient, going off into the evening of his life to do battle with little black address book in hand and perhaps a list of historical, used-up girls in a secret drawer in his heart. He gets what he wants; but the trouble is: he doesn’t want what he gets. He is often courted by women—as in that boyish dream where the responsibilities of manhood are taken over by clairvoyant girls—and he finds himself fought for as a commodity. Especially in large cities, where there tend to be more girls than men, he has an easy time of it. Everything works in his favor, even statistics. One confirmed bachelor says, “When I want to move or furnish a new apartment for myself, I just pick a girl who knows my taste. I tell her what I want, give her as much money as I want to spend, and tell her—go. I don’t have time. She finds me what I want.”
Smug? Hard-hearted?
Perhaps, but he can point out that the girl enjoys what she is doing. She wants to oblige; she wants to be needed, even if only as an unpaid interior decorator. Unmarried, without children, she is chafing to take hold. Far from feeling exploited, she is likely to harbor a tender indulgence for the man who trusts her so. She enjoys a brief glow of maternal and wifely joy. Later he can move her out of his life—or inform her that she has never moved in. “I didn’t make her do anything she didn’t want to do,” he says. “She could have said no. Elaine or Barbara would have been glad to do it if she hadn’t.”
His friend pounds him on the shoulder. “You old manipulator! Playing with fire! Just you wait!”
“Of course, she really didn’t have to sew all those curtains by hand....”
And then there is the meeker, milder bachelor who, in his secret reverie, imagines himself a conqueror of dames, a hero in the lists of love, a brave commissioner of apartments to be decorated. He has girls who sew curtains for him in his dreams, but not during the long waking day. What about him? He is that man who sits on the automatic washer in the basement of his apartment house, waiting for his clothes to be done—a rumble in the machine and a rumble in his heart—and trying to figure out how to pass the evening after his TV dinner and his little stint of ironing. Later, wandering, he is one of the ghost ships that cruise the great cities, watching, discouraged, gray. (If he has a sun lamp, he can cruise discouraged and tanned.) He may be lucky. Some equally saddened, equally hopeful girl may take pity. He may even find himself buying love in that most paltry way—spending a few dollars for an imitation of feeling that no paramecium would envy. More likely, he takes a couple of drinks, numbs himself, sighs, hopes for better luck another time, and tumbles into bed.
Are these two men so different—the sleek Don Juan in quest of his ideal, the meek Don Mitty unable to find anything? No, they are blood brothers under the thick or thin skin; they are both deprived. Neither can attain a state of rest; neither has been able to settle for the possible. Both are forever looking, forever disappointed. The earth spins and they spin. They may buy themselves all sorts of pleasure—hi-fi, foreign travel, sports cars, the paraphernalia of elegant consumption. They are likely to have time and money for these things—one can live cheaper than two. They pamper themselves because they have no one else to love. In the first weeks after birth, infants think of the rest of the world as extensions of their own bodies; they don’t understand that mother’s breast and father’s arms belong to separate, other persons. Like the infant, the bachelor is in primitive contact with the world of love, knowing only his craving, and so he remains infantile-extending his solitary body with the balm of luxury and indulgence. He follows the rule of constant enticement, seduction, dissatisfaction, another girl, wandering to another town, another girl, another job, another car, another girl. And again another.
Because no one reassures him very deeply, his vanity is inflexible—it is the savage vanity of the child. In his search for “true love,” he is eternally deceived and mocked. After the thrill of easy conquest, he asks himself once more, “Was it really conquest? She was, after all, so much like the others.”
What does this do for the bachelor’s masculine pride? It does not help it very much, any more than scratching an insect bite makes it stop itching. He itches more fiercely and knows no remedy. There are few things sadder than the success of the man who achieves all he craves, but then discovers his inmost thought: And now what? And now? And now?
The bachelor enacts an immense joke in which the leg he pulls may be his own. He searches for the “true meaning” of love, whose true meaning is that it has no single true meaning. He may finally, like the male models in certain advertisements, seem to be held together by little more than his clothes and his vanity; and if they were to let go, he would tinkle to earth in a little heap of discrete parts. His arms enfold air, his mouth kisses glass. His present is without a future or a past: it is only a place to store his tubes, drops, and pills (he grows hypochondriacal with age); with mysterious hope he takes vitamin E, which is said to be for fertility. Unless he explodes, protests, cries No! no to all that!—and thus joins the harried legions of newly-weds, forgetting his vitamins, and afterwards troubled in other ways.
Most of the time we see only the glamour of the bachelor’s freedom. We find him dressed, preened, rested, at his social best. He may simply age peacefully in our sight, growing gracefully into the permanent “extra man” for hostesses. Or he may finally be more fortunate than most men and find the girl of his dreams, the girl out of whose kisses he builds—as a poet wrote—“a ladder to the stars.” Equipped with experience and age, patience and determination, he wins exactly what he wants. He is then much to be envied. The prince has wandered the enchanted forest and found his heart’s perfect desire—not merely fallen out of bed and awakened groping on the cold floor. What a lucky man! He lifts the wand and She speaks to him. . . .
We see him during his best moments, on the verge of that discovery, with new girls, trying.
Usually he does not find the girl of his dreams. That ladder to the stars lies folded in a closet somewhere. Another evening has been spilled away with a swell kid whose name he will soon forget.
We do not see him during those moments when he is alone in his apartment, wondering why. Alone. Back home alone to his cold bed, his vacant hopes, and his Dacron shirt drying in the bathroom.
1958