On Younger Women

On the advice of my dear friend and teacher Marcy Tilton, I am reading Mary Gordon's novel, "Spending". As I was lying in bed early this morning, waiting for the grandbabies to wake up in the next room, Mary Gordon's words jarred me:


"I know the importance of the look of things. So, naturally, I was tempted to suggest to him that he find someone younger. One of the thousands, millions of young women with perfect breasts and thighs and—in the words of a video I once spent twenty bucks on—buns of steel. I thought that if I were a man I'd do that, I wouldn't be able to resist, because the visual bombardment of beautiful female flesh is constant. Why not an eighteen-year-old with honey-colored arms . . ., with no legible marks of childbirth, without the inscriptions or incisions of fifty years?

He said he knew all about it, he'd done that, and he wanted me. He said it got boring, and above all I should understand how terrible it was to be bored. I said, 'But can the visually beautiful ever be boring?'

He said, 'Weren't you ever bored by your kids?'

And I remembered that I never found them unbeautiful but that sometimes I felt that if I didn't have an interesting conversation with someone, I would die, that after a while the touch of that beautiful skin wasn't enough.

'Is that what it's like?' I asked him.

'Yes,' he said, 'Now do you understand?'

I did, sort of, but I didn't quite believe him. I didn't want to talk much about it, though. I was afraid I'd change his mind, that I'd make such a good case I'd lose, whatever else, a lot of fun."


Personally, I'll take good-looking substance over mindless beauty any day!