Exit Ghost

The young woman told me I am not an old man. In fact, she has said it several times before generally after I have identified myself that way. There is always some slight exasperation in her voice. It’s not an automatic reaction, and I don’t say it because I seek contradiction. I feel like an old man. I might as well tell it like it is, as my generation used to like to say in its youth. I think she likes me as a person though she always refers to me as Dr. Ellingham, never using my first name. She is 30 years younger than I. I am the same age as her father. I suspect he has said he’s an old man before. I suspect she has told him he is not in exactly the same way she tells me. Maybe parents don’t want their children to grow old because it means they are getting old. Children want to be older, to a point. Though their parents are older, they don’t want them to be old. That smacks of mortality. Children, generally, don’t want their parents to die. Old people die. Therefore, parents can’t grow old. I’ve seen her with her parents, and they are a loving family. Who would want to lose that? She still lives at home. Someday she will strike out on her own, but she is in no hurry now. My own daughter was in a hurry.

I think of all this as I read Philip Roth’s newest book, Exit Ghost. His old protagonist, Nathan Zuckerman, is in his 70s. Due to earlier prostate cancer and surgery, he is both incontinent and impotent. He retreated to a mountain cabin and left New York. Eleven years later, lured by the promise of a surgical procedure that could correct the incontinence, he has returned to New York. He also answers an ad from a young couple who want to swap their apartment for a cabin to retreat from the city and the fears brought on by 9/11. He agrees to do it, but then regrets his decision as the surgery doesn’t work, he meets a very combative young man who wants to develop a literary reputation through him (the young man is also, apparently, sleeping with the wife of the young couple) and, to further confuse things, he falls in love (or is it lust? I haven’t read enough yet to know) with the young woman. This kind of lust doesn’t seem to have physical origins or at least it doesn’t seem like it will have a physical outlet. This all resonated with me as I had speculated before in this blog about whether old men always had at least one last fling in them with a young woman (and, I hoped they did) and the statement by the aggressive young man that old men always hate young men. I’m not sure about the latter. I still wonder about the former. I have thought about the young woman who tells me I am not old in a very non-fatherly way. I find her both physically and intellectually stimulating; well, it’s mostly physical. I once had a very sexual dream about her. I would never tell her that nor ever even suggest that I was attracted to her. I guess I take some solace in the fact that my core is still alive even as some parts of me seem to be dead.

Old men are curious things. Roth contends that there are still things we can learn about ourselves, even at an advanced age. I guess he’s right.