Essays by DAR

The Aging of the Vôlf:
A Speculation

(First published in Madison)

The word itself boasts enough synonyms to make you blush. Libertine, philanderer, loose fellow, gay dog, rip, rake, rou?, ravisher, fancy-man, skirt-chaser, curb-crawler, swordsman, womanizer. The old-fashioned variants sound quaint while the newly-minted ones more menacing. No matter: Call him what you will, down through history, a wolf's a wolf - someone rapacious and predatory in his amatory attentions to women. But what does a wolf call himself when he's near the end of his playing season and no longer the wolf he was? What, in other words, must it be like for a wolf to push 50?

Let us call him Baron, as in Baron Christian von Wolff (1679-1754), the German mathematician and philosopher who popularized the work of Leibnitz in the early 1700s. I have no idea whether this particular Wolff - which we should not resist pronouncing vôlf - was in actual fact a swordsman of note. I choose a third party only because I myself have elected to tread the sacred path of celibacy these last several decades and must channel my inquiry in the nature of abstract speculation. No vôlf, I.

Purely theoretically, then. But if Baron had been a bit of a prowler in his 30's, I wonder what it would be like for him, as for any wolf, to career headlong into middle age when prowling is, perforce, passe, or at least a jot unseemly. On a transatlantic flight to be offered the choice, for instance, between remaining seated next to a beautiful woman in coach or to be bumped up to first class … and to amaze himself by choosing first class. Where he is incomprehensibly seated next to an ex-NBA player named Champ who's wearing a size 22 catheter ("the diameter of my ring finger") from his prostate operation. Does Baron console himself with the statistic that 84 per cent of those hit by lightning are males age 10 to 35, and thus he's at least in some sense ensconced in a safer age bracket? Does he take solace in the fact that most of the premiere Himalayan trekkers are over 40, when they've at last learned to pace themselves and not burn themselves out? Or does he stare down at his companion's loosely-belted midriff and wonder what the fuck-all he's letting himself in for?

To refortify himself back on earth, I imagine Baron taking his little daughter's pi-ano teacher to a business lunch. She has long chestnut locks; he is smitten. But she's less than half his age! Metaphorically at least, he diapered her schoolmates! Must it not give him pause to realize that the loins for which he lusts (doubtless swaddled in pink bows he could untie blindfolded with his teeth) are capable of giving him grandkids? When she mentions that she's about to drive cross-country, does he caution her to bring a "slumber bag" instead of a "sleeping bag," as though she might as well be attending one of his daughter's sleepovers? Watching her convey her martini glass to her lips, must he bite his tongue against reminding her not to spill? Accepting the placement of her childlike hands (with random phone numbers smudged in ball-point pen on the palms) on his to show the piano technique for trilling, does it pain him to acknowledge that for her, it's as innocent as laying hands on her dad? No doubt about it: She's adorable when adorable is the last thing he wants. Everlasting death-defying danger, that's the ticket - someone he can take in the shower with him, with all that massage-spray jack-hammering away!

But what's this? In the Battle of the Self-Absorbed that is what most business lunches are about, Baron has always won hands down; what does it mean that he's attend-ing to her? Instead of plying her with gin, he buys the piano teacher decorous drinks like White Russians with lots of creamy nutrition in them, and plenty of tofu elan vital on the side. Preferring to watch her eat than to eat anything himself (Baron ate a roast beef sandwich at age 36 and it seems to have tided him over), he reluctantly registers the fact that she's a human being who needs her vitamins as much as she needs food and water and sunlight and … yes … boys. Boys! Not old men who've been divorced three times and have baby seats in the back seat of their Austin Healeys where sheepskin pillows used to lie! Not old men whose address books are filling up with the numbers of physical therapists instead of dancing girls, and - let's be frank - whose knuckles are beginning to be shadowed with liver spots.

Then there's the question of the piano teacher's energy. Her friskiness seems dis-tinctly foreign to Baron, impressive the way an alien's might be impressive - from a dis-tance. That pimple on her chin, for instance. To his stupefaction, rather than being put off by it, Baron admires that pimple. He sees it now not as a flaw but as an emblem of youth, all that hormonal gunk aching to go somewhere, irrepressible and ever-new; were she to allow it, the aging rogue might kiss that pimple as a 20-year-old boy kisses a woman's nipple: a worshipful thing, a miracle from the other side. Heeding the odd in loco parentis feeling of filling her up in this unaccustomed fashion, Baron admits to himself that to try to get her in the shower with him a la the old days seems a bit, well, unfair.

"Unfair to whom?" his self wisely replies.

Another scenario. I imagine Baron hitting the strip tease, for old time's sake.

No longer does his mustache sweat with anticipation as he approaches. Nor, once there, does he feel himself in hormonal battle with every other male in the place, his wolf rivals. Now when a pack of 22-year-olds swaggers in the door, bristling with explosive sullen vitality, he hears himself whistle silently - wow, that's a pack. Much as he hates to admit it, he's a little awed by such rude well-being. They really must be in heat to overlook the ammonia stench of this beat-off palace and, in the bathroom, the inevitable sight of the man with the mop. (What was he in his last reincarnation, that he should have deserved this?)

All right, the youngsters may have brute health, Baron concedes. But he's still got the moves.

"What is your name, my turtledove?" he gallantly coos to the stripper who has her ankles locked around his neck as she rockets her tits deep into his dry (too dry?) face.

"Carrie," she purrs.

He's grazing dreamily inside her breasts and feeling her thighs and quivering with wonder at how strippers' skin always manages such rubber-like hairlessness. "Carrie, eh?" he murmurs, "I used to have a friend who had a stripper friend named Carrie."

"Baron?" she shrieks, rearing back her tits and staring him in the face. "Oh my God, are you really Baron Christian von Wolff, the German mathematician and philoso-pher who popularized the work of Leibnitz in the early 1700s??"

How can he make sexual chitchat when he's been alive long enough to be friends with friends of everyone on the planet, even a stripper whose bosoms are, as it were, ringing in his ears?

He buys her a business lunch, that's how. But conversation over tofu turns to top-ics he wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole in his salad days. Here he has a breath-ing member of the opposite sex sitting two feet from him and he's wasting time compar-ing how their daughters like pre-K and still use pull-ups so they don't wet the bed at night. And he likes it! He likes everything about it - even the magnanimous pity he feels for her sad moony breasts (awww, no one loved them enough, the dears!) - he likes eve-rything except for the damnable voracity of her appetite which makes him feel so … old. So … encumbered. How vivaciously she chews! With what gusto she chomps and crunches and swallows! Good lord, did nobody ever feed this generation? She wolfs it down!

Poor wolf. Out-ravished by a younger female wolf. Charity is called for.

"Guys like you deserve to be …" she volunteers, out by his car, lying her hand on his tie, palm-side down, so the heat starts spiraling inwards beneath his sternum,

"…unencumbered."

So, for old time's sake, she unencumbers him. It gives him a rough kind of joy, unencumbering. It helps him stay jubilantly unattached, like a wolf. And like a wolf slipping home through the underbrush on snowy paws, the moonlight glinting off his bloody grinning teeth, he pauses afterwards to let bay a howl of lonely bliss. "Yip, yip, yurewwwww" - his salute, his winsome hurrah for freedom and for the females who suc-cor him now as in days of yore.

Yet unlike days of yore, in the midst of his howl a nefarious two-word thought occurs to him. A thought so awful that had he conceived it in his 20's it might well have convinced him to hang up his cleats. (But of course the thought was inconceivable in his 20's; not with all those pimples in the brain …)

Two-word nefarious thought: "That's it?"

Once conceived, he can't put the two words aside. Is this all it is? Is this the why and wherefore that compelled Paris to carry off Troy? Is this the big deal that sparked the Trojan War and just about all the other wars down through history, causing men to pillage and burn and compose symphonies and litter the moon? Does all the historic commotion of civilization's discontent really revolve around a couple of tablespoons of pearly secretion that barely covers the bottom of a Dixie Cup? He's not sure, and he doesn't want to overreact to the infant thought, but the whole incendiary sex business that's consumed the bulk of his own life seems a bit … quaint … in retrospect. All it was was the innocent conjunction of bodies. With all their feverish machinations, why did everyone think they were getting away with something? They were only doing pre-cisely what Mother Nature was bidding them do with her implicit blessing, nothing more nor less than what boys and girls are supposed to do …

… And what this boy's been doing for too long. For the bottom line is that he has done his biological bidding. He's had his fill. He knows how Miss Alabama wraps the telephone cord around her big toe when she talks long-distance to her mother after bed, how Ph.D. candidates swat gnats away from their eyelashes at the breakfast table, how sweet and tangy the armpits of Thai women taste after a ten-mile jog and how loopy they look when their mascara runs during a fight. He knows how badly the orchestra flautist gets along with her sister but how kindly she feels toward her niece, and how his yoga teacher prefers to spend a sunset pinching the blackheads on her boyfriend's back to cruising through the rainbow mist of a waterfall. They aren't inaccessible, forbidden, or intimidating, these women. They're just people a notch or two prettier than the other half of the populace, with hair that sticks to their bicycle helmets just like anyone else's does. They're not even that different from his own daughter, as a matter of fact …

The whole game begins to tilt. Quantum paternalism rears its ugly head, bringing with it a set of unwelcome understandings he's previously been too clotted with testoster-one to take in. Female porn stars are usually not only not enjoying it; they're often in pain! Most women aren't into the dating scene at all; they're just doing it to please the men! Kicking and screaming, he forces himself to recall how pregnable his daughter's piano teacher looked, sitting there so eager for his approval in her vulnerable pink bows. How could he ever have been callow enough to entertain the thought of plundering the poor homeless thing? (For she is suddenly "homeless" to him - she could be a scion of the Rockefeller clan, but at 20 what mortal is not homeless?)

It comes down to such a simple equation, at last: Is his hunt worth her heartache? In the last analysis, was that what being a young wolf was about - being at such a loss to control one's urges that one's humanity was never allowed to glow larger than a flicker? And is that what aging can be? Allowing one's humanity to blaze out at last, larger than lust? Then let me age, Baron finds himself thinking …

And the funny thing is, now that he sees the light and decides to give off hound-ing them, women hound him. They pick up on the lessened urgency and find him ever so much more companionable to be with, even to the point that if an unsuitable man is ogling them in a coffee house they send Baron a look that says, "What's his problem?" - expecting commiseration from him, not more dickhead complicity.

Well, that makes sense, doesn't it? Haven't women always been most attracted to him after he's made love and is no longer on the make? Now that he vows to stay more or less permanently off the make, he's gentled down to how they've wanted him to be all along, the sort of fellow who likes to make quiet love in a bath with champagne and can-dles rather than fuck in that pandemoniac shower of his, with all its bothersome racket and force. In fact, at the risk of oversimplifying his plight, he judges that up till now he's been virile in the way he wanted, a man's virility. In his 50's he may just become virile in the way women want. He can even foresee the day when he'll take comfort in the fact that, like making an omelet, there is more affection to the act than technique.

Ain't that a kick? It reminds Baron that the world works in mysterious ways.

After all, wasn't it his old pal Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz (1646-1716) who proposed the metaphysical theory that we live in "the best of all possible worlds?"

Best or not, it's the only one we've got. In other words, ready or not, Vôlf-y old boy, 50 here we come.