Late in the Day (4*)

The New Yorker introduced me to Tessa Hadley, a late blooming author who populates her stories with men and women far removed from my experience.  Yet her writing always manages to strike a chord more resonant than most. People don't differ from one another all that much, no matter where or how they live.

They were domesticated in that cautious way of heterosexual men living together, hedging their housework about with mockery, as if it were a performance they could leave off at any moment:  they painted the walls of the flat, made innumerable pots of tea, washed up when the sink was full.  Zachary cooked pans of curry and chili, Alex baked fish in foil in the oven with herbs and olive oil.  When they smoked they found they couldn’t remember in the morning what they’d laughed at.  They were carefully tactful:  neither asked after the other’s well-being, even when they were stoned—least of all then.  Male tact was an iron law; without the tactless interventions of women, Alex thought, men would never tell each other anything.  Grown men ought to live with women, he believed that.  That was what his maleness was for, to be balanced against women’s unlikeness, their opposition.

Hadley's story of two heterosexual couples vanquishes any speculation that gay men of a certain age may have a harder time sustaining long-term relationships because we've been conditioned by traditional gender dynamics to think we're intellectually superior to our partners, that the needs of the dominant partner come first.

Long ago, when Isobel was a baby, Christine had fought Alex for her life, so that he would acknowledge that in the domain of the mind they were equals, separate as equals.  She couldn’t remember now why this had mattered so much, or where her appetite had come from for those long late-night sessions, pricing away layer upon layer of resistance and falsity, confession matched with counter-confession.  The lovemaking that usually ended things had sometimes amazed and reconciled them, sometimes seemed the continuation of their fight by other means . . . She had been so keenly interested, then, in what Alex thought.  But after a while things weren’t so difficult after all, and she never really knew how much that had to do with all those sessions of interrogation.  Anyway, she didn’t think any longer about the truth in the same way:  as a core underneath a series of obfuscations and disguises.  In the long run, weren’t the disguises just as interesting, weren’t they real too?  She and Alex were so unlike, really; associated through some accident in their youth—the accident of his choosing her, because of what he thought she was.  Since that beginning, they both changed their skins so often.  Marriage simply meant that you hung on to each other through the succession of metamorphoses.  Or failed to.

I also love the way she acknowledges that the biological imperative of male sexual desire is more than procreative and how it refuses to diminish with age.

It was both a thirst and a blessing, the late renewal of his erotic life.  When he was young he’d been too absorbed in the problem of himself to appreciate possibilities blooming around him everywhere.  Now how long before the women only looked at him with distaste, or pity?  He thought that he understood his father at last, how he accepted this pursuit of women as if it were in lieu of every kind of outward honour.  Sex looked like a cheap trick from the outside, but in its moment it burned up the world.  You could not have everything:  the whole wisdom of life amounted to that.  Whatever you had, was instead of something else.

Has Hadley watched drone footage of me eating appetizers in the Pines?

Balding, Nathan still wore long what hair he had left, tucked it behind his ears.  He had grown bulky over the years, across the shoulders and in the thighs, and now was scoffing more than his share of the potato crisps, dabbing greasy-fingered in the bowl with the oblivious appetite of one who mostly eats alone.

Or seen pictures on my blog of my refreshed apartment?

Christine joked that she was depressed by how lovely the flat looked.  Didn’t everyone do this as they got older, the ones anyway that didn’t just go to see?  Compensating for their own decaying looks, they spruced up the outer spaces of their lives to perfection—then knocked around inside these mini-palaces like wizened nuts in a shell.

Best of all, Late in the Day reads like a marriage manual disguised as an emotional thriller.  Choose the partner who sees and believes in you.