The Summer Without Men

house, not to speak of my Boris wandering the streets of NYC with my concerned Daisy on his heels; all of this will have to be dealt with. And we all know that simultaneity is a BIG problem for words. They come in sequence, always, only in sequence, so while I sort it out, I will refer to Dr. Johnson. Referring to Dr. Johnson in a pinch is a good bet, our own man of the English language, our wise, fat, gouty, scrofulous, kindhearted, witty glutton, a being of authority, to whom we can all turn in moments of trouble, a cultural pater familias who was so important he had his own man document him while he was still ALIVE. And that was the eighteenth century, well before every Tom, Dick, Harry, Lila, and Jane recorded each tawdry, moronic detail of his or her lamentable life on the Internet. (Please note the addition of Lila and Jane; there is no female equivalent of “Tom, Dick, and Harry,” which connotes Everyman; Everywoman, alas, is something entirely different.) Grub Street, however, to the great dismay of Dr. Johnson, was churning out countless confessions or faux confessions, just as lurid and hair-raising as today’s misery memoirs. But enough. We cite Rasselas, a section on marriage, in which our hero offers his appraisal of the sacrament:
     
Such is the common process of marriage. A youth and a maiden meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go home and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart, and therefore conclude that they shall be happy together. They marry, and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness had before concealed; they wear out life in altercations and charge nature with cruelty.
    Willful ignorance disguises grim reality: You mean I’m stuck with you? But it’s different now, says the savvy reader. That was the old days. We are more enlightened than the Enlightenment, we of the twenty-first century, with our widgets and gadgets and high-speed winklets and no-fault divorce. Ho! Ho! Ho! is my response to you. The sorrows of sex are never-ending. Give me an epoch, and I’ll give you a sobbing narrative of conjugal relations turned sour. Can I really blame Boris for his Pause, for his need to seize the day, for snatching the pausal snatch while there was still time, still time for the old-timer he was swiftly becoming? Don’t we all deserve to romp and hump and carry on? Dr. Johnson’s own sex life remains under wraps, mostly, thank heaven, but we do know that David Garrick told David Hume, who told Boswell, who recorded it in his journal, that after witnessing Dr. Johnson’s pleasure one night at the theater, Garrick hoped aloue happy tohe eminent lexicographer would return often, but the Great Man averred he would not. “For the white bubbies and the silk stockings of your Actresses,” said the Sage, “excite my genitals.” We all have ticklers, adaptive or not, and it is our nature to use them. One can be sick with jealousy and loneliness and still understand that.
    But there is another aspect of long marriages that is rarely spoken about. What begins as ocular indulgence, the sight of the gleaming beloved, which incites the appetite for around-the-clock rumpty-rumpty, alters over time. The partners age and change and become so accustomed to the presence of the other that vision ceases to be the most important sense. I listened for Boris in the morning if I woke to see his half of the bed empty, listened for the flushing toilet or the sound of him filling the teakettle with water. I would feel the hard bones of his shoulders as I placed my hands on them to greet him silently while he read the paper before going to the lab. I did not peer into his face or examine his body; I merely felt that he was there, just as I smelled him at night in the dark. The odor of his warm body had become part of the room. And when we had our conversations that often went on into the night, it was his sentences I attended to. Alert to the transitions he made from one thought to the next, I concentrated on the content of his speech as it unwound in my mind, and I placed it inside the ongoing dialogue between us, which was sometimes savage, but more often not. It was rare that I studied him. Sometimes after we had done the deed, and he walked naked across the room, I would look at his long pale body with its round belly and his left leg with its blue varicose vein