A friend of mine likes to tell about the time when, playing golf by himself for the twilight greens fee, he caught up with a threesome of men, all around 70, hale and boisterous, who invited him to join them for the last few holes. They must have been pretty good friends, because two of the fellows were giving the business to the third--mainly, about how he was no longer able to "service" his wife. It seemed an odd topic to raise in the company of a stranger, and my friend said nothing, only noted that the subject of the ribbing seemed to take it in stride and issued no denials or counter charges. When they came to the last hole, my friend and the allegedly impotent guy drove their balls in the same direction and headed down one side of the fairway together. They were making small talk about the weather and the encroaching darkness, and then the old guy, having arrived at his ball, said while fiddling in his bag for a club, "You know sonny, what my friends say is true, but let me tell you something that you may not have realized yet: forty years of that bullshit is more than enough." When my friend tells the story, he puts the emphasis on "more"--more than enough--to convey the impression that just the thought of sex filled the old guy with nausea.
Well, I like the story, and was reminded of it again recently when, happily rooting around in Edmund Wilson's Journal from the last decade of his life, I came to the following note:
The last lusts gutter out.
A force that keeps driving, nagging one that one has no memory of creating oneself.
That all this fuss should be made about getting one's penis into a woman--filling people with rapture and despair and stimulating them to all kinds of heroisms and excesses.
Still, on the evidence of the Journal, one has to say that Wilson's view of the subject was more ambivalent than that of my friend's new acquaintance. At age 75, for example, he (Wilson) managed to get drunk and then nearly naked with the young wife of his dentist. He commits to his Journal a thorough description of the encounter, including conversational details and such physical ones as "I stroked her brown body delightfully" before concluding, "--wonderful to feel a wet, gluey, reeking ______."
Yes, it is the one you think, the very worst one, else I'd spell it out as Wilson did.
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