Free My Summer With George by Marilyn French Page B

simply continue. I was urgently fighting off an awareness of this. I felt, in regard to him, as if I were carrying a vial of nitroglycerin: if I dropped it, all of what I had planted in him, in our relationship, would blow up in my face. And I wanted to avoid that above all. I’d rather let him treat me shabbily than accept that failure. After all, I had only two choices: I could let myself love him and hope he would return it, thus risking disappointment or even serious hurt in the future; or I could retreat behind my prickly wariness and end this right now.
    If I had been thirty or forty, I would have ended it then. Before my mid-fifties, I met attractive men with some regularity. I could count on meeting at least one every few months, and there were periods in my life when the world seemed to be populated mainly by amusing sexy men. There simply wasn’t time for all of them, alas, but a light regularly went on in me, indicating that I was sexually alive. I relished the feeling.
    This was no longer the case. Nowadays, not just months but years went by without my meeting a man who shimmered for me, who made the night brilliant. Partly this was because I had erected a new barrier to love—age. I created it out of cowardice, nothing else. It wasn’t that twenty-odd-year-old boys no longer appealed to me (although, in truth, they no longer did). But mainly I dreaded being perceived as acting flirtatious or seductive toward anyone who might find my no longer young person repulsive. So afraid was I of finding my physical being a source of repugnance that I simply erased the young from my sexual vision, I deleted their existence from my sexual consciousness as completely as if they had been some other form of life, robots or chimpanzees, say. But of course, to expunge any class of people from consideration greatly reduces one’s possibilities. Moreover, as I aged further, the ban silently spread from people in their twenties to those in their thirties; I was eliminating the most gorgeous people in the world, so of course I faced greatly diminished prospects.
    I gave this matter considerable thought, but I always ended up making the same choice. Even if it meant feeling less than alive sexually and possibly even sacrificing some possible felicity, I would censor my vision, limit it to people within a decade or two of my own age rather than find myself reflected in the eyes of some beautiful young person as a ludicrous grasping old lecher.
    Perhaps as a result of this policy and the generally uninspiring appearance of most (but by no means all—consider George!) people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies; or perhaps because desire does wane as one grows older; or because older people who remain vivid and interesting tend to be deeply committed to long-term relationships—the last decade of my life had been far less populated with sexual partners than earlier ones. The truth is, there had been none. And while I missed the frequent passionate raids, forays, and pincers movements from near strangers that I used to enjoy—missing, no doubt, because of signs of age on my own person—I was even more disturbed at the fact that I myself rarely felt drawn to anyone, rarely found anyone desirable. I missed feeling desirable, but even more, I missed feeling desire.
    Yet I had felt drawn to George from the first moment I laid eyes on him, and felt desire for him the moment he looked at me with excitement. This feeling was too rare, too precious nowadays for me to let it go, even if grasping it meant I would eventually suffer—indeed, was suffering already. With this man, I was sexually reborn, reawakened, returned to youth and vitality. How could I not submerge myself in the feeling, clasp it to me like a dram of eau-de-vie, the water of the fountain of eternal youth?
    I thought about all this as I dressed for dinner. I wondered if I would bring it up that evening.
    I love my women’s group. Women’s groups are the most