Body, Remember: On Aging, Desire, and the Slide into Invisibility

December, 2023: This is a revised version of a post that originally ran in January 2021.

I am queen of all my sins
forgotten. Am I still lost?
Once I was beautiful. Now I am myself. 

— Anne Sexton

A few years ago, during the first phase of the pandemic, I caught up with an old friend of mine from my Berkeley days.  We’re the same age, both parents, though her older daughter is now out of college, and her younger one is older than Diane and I were when we first met.  I’ve been divorced five times, but when we spoke, Diane had just gone through her first, and she’s started dating again. (Diane is not her real name. She gave me permission to tell this story with a pseudonym.)  Diane reaches out for advice from an old friend from time to time, and I try my best to help.

“I wish I didn’t feel sexually invisible,” she says.  She knows I know what she means, as I’ve mentioned the same thing to her.  I didn’t know Diane in high school, when she was a self-described “ugly duckling,” but I knew her at Cal, where she was head-turningly pretty.  A roommate of mine, who tried unsuccessfully to date her, called Diane “the queen fox.”  She knew it too, and frankly reveled in the power she felt it gave her.  (Though I often fell in love with my friends when I was young, I never crushed on Diane nor she on me.  That was not our story.)  “I like groveling with cute boys,” she often said, using a very Berkeley term for “hooking up” – “and I love that they like groveling with me.”

Diane knew that I was having sex with older men that I met off-campus, mostly at a bar in North Oakland.  I didn’t tell her they usually gave me money, but I did tell her how much I loved the way they praised my body.  I liked the sex, and I liked the cash for which I was very poor at negotiating, but more than anything, I liked the excitement in their eyes. Having sex with guys my own age was intimidating, particularly if they were handsome.  It was the eagerness I saw in the eyes of the aging, less attractive ones that was my payoff, more satisfying than any orgasm. 

I told partly redacted stories of my escapades to Diane, and she told me stories of the frat boys and TAs she left in her wake.  We both agreed: sex could be good, or it could be bad, but if you could see and feel someone almost shaking with lust for you, it was always, always worth it.  Diane and I would have bristled to be called sex addicts.  We were addicted to being wanted, not to wanting, and for us that was an important distinction.  We bonded over it.

It was the mid-1980s in the Bay Area, and I was willing to risk contracting AIDS in order to get affirmation.  I looked for it from men because it seemed that only men had a vocabulary for my desirability.  The girls I had crushes on may or may not have thought I was attractive, but they certainly didn’t say it if they did.  A girlfriend might say, “I love you,” or even “You make me feel so good,” and while those were pleasant to hear, they were nothing compared to a man three times my age staring at my body and saying, “You’re so hot, you make me want to cum just looking at you.” 

I knew I wasn’t model gorgeous.  My body was too soft, the skin on my face still too marked by acne.  I just knew I had something that some men wanted, even if my being underage or later, barely legal, was a considerable amount of the appeal.  Still, some of the men would occasionally give precious compliments about something they liked about me – and I would store these up in my memory, treasuring them and ruminating upon them, then carefully crafting my clothes or my mannerisms to highlight whatever it was they had pointed out as desirable.  (Not surprisingly, I ended up developing a serious eating disorder that would plague me into my early 30s.)

When I started teaching at Pasadena City College, I was 26, lean and fit and hungry.  I saw how some of my female students looked at me, and I was stunned by how familiar the gaze seemed.  A few of them seemed to look at me exactly as the older men once had, and I felt that same thrill.  I knew intellectually that women could lust, but I couldn’t imagine myself as the object of that desire.  Now, I could see it written on at least a few of their faces, and I was instantly addicted.  I started to pay attention to whether it was the tight jeans and t-shirts, or the Brooks Brothers suits, that seemed to get more affirmation.  (The relative appeal varied depending on the predilections of the student.)

Just as I was willing to risk a deadly disease to get my affirmation from older men, now I became willing to risk my career and reputation to get that same affirmation from younger women.  I liked the sex, and twice I fell in love with students I took to bed, but what I craved more than anything was that they seemed to want me.  As with the men when I’d been a boy, I always let the female students make the first move.  I wanted them to feel it was their idea, not because I was afraid of a harassment allegation, but rather there was no payoff if I couldn’t tell they desired me.  The sex could be joyous or awkward, but no matter how good it was, it couldn’t compare to the ecstasy of feeling desired. I knew they didn’t want Hugo as much as they wanted to live out a deeply common fantasy.

I was 29 when an older faculty member came into my office hours.  Dan was about 60, close to retirement.  He sat too close to me, and showed me photos of himself as a handsome young professor. Dan told me he’d slept with dozens of students early in his career.  “It was the Sixties, man, it was so easy.  I loved the attention.”  I nodded uncomfortably; I didn’t like thinking that I was like this old man who smelled of booze and onions.  Dan needed to brag, it seemed, and he was tenured — something I wasn’t yet. I humored him for a while. 

At last Dan put the photos away and gave me a long, hard, look.  “You can’t see it coming, Hugo, but it will all go away when you turn 37.”  That seemed oddly specific, and also very far off. I asked what happened at 37.  “You start to be old enough to be their dad,” Dan explained, “and no matter how well you take care of yourself, the number who get crushes on you will start to drop.  You’ll notice it too, and if you’re not careful, it will hurt.  After a while, you’ll only be left with the troubled ones with daddy issues, and at some point, you’ll become a joke.”

I stared at him.  Thirty-seven still seemed so random.  Dan patted my knee.  “I know what you’re thinking.  You can’t imagine that I was ever like you.  But I was, and if you don’t quit or get your reckless ass fired, you’ll end up going invisible to all those pretty girls just like I did.”  I thanked him, my manners kicking in reflexively, and I promised to think about what he said.  Dan laughed.  “You think I’m full of shit,” he said as he rose to go.  “But when you look out into a classroom and you see dozens of young women but not one of them has that shine in her eyes anymore, you remember I warned ya.”

Dan left, and I thought of one of the last older men whom I had slept with.  He had poked my tummy as he wiped his cum off my skin.  “If you don’t work out more,” he had said, “someday you’ll get fat.  You can get away with it now, but not for much longer.”  I’d been 19. 

These warnings haunted me, but they weren’t enough to save the marriages and relationships I lost to infidelity, and they weren’t enough to save my career.  I lost my job at 46, long after Dan’s prediction had turned out to be true. I had seen the change in how the students looked at me, and it had happened exactly when and as he had predicted.  The final handful of students with whom I had affairs were young women who either did have “daddy issues” or a specific and considerably rarer fixation on much older men.  The desire in their faces seemed like a final chance before a gift was gone forever. 

One of the last students I slept with told me that she had confessed our affair to a friend who had rolled her eyes, and called me a “dirty old man.” I visibly recoiled to hear myself described as the very thing that had once pursued me.  My student kissed me and smiled. “Don’t worry, Hugo, I like ‘dirty old men.’”  She thought that would reassure me. It did nothing of the sort. It made me feel both predatory and pathetic.

The poet Donald Justice wrote that “men at forty should learn to close softly, the doors to rooms they won’t be coming back to.”  I lingered at the door, and slipped back into that room, like an aging athlete who lies to himself about having one more championship season left in his bones.  Yes, young women with their own agency knocked on the door, and beckoned me in, but I should have known better. The price I paid and the pain I inflicted as a consequence is widely known. I did it because I wanted one last chance to be thought beautiful, to be craved.  That’s the selfishness and the narcissism at the root of my small tragedy.

Today, I am 56. Since I wrote the original version of this post, I’ve gone back to the gym, kept myself under 200 pounds, and can wear the same waist size I wore in college. I am still invisible. I see the way the young people look at each other, and the way some of the older ones look at the young, and I do my best to remember that I had more than my share for a very long time.  And I try not to let myself feel the bitterness of having, as Diane puts it, “slid into invisibility.”   

I do not have a woman to share my bed. I am celibate, partly out of frailty, partly out of exhaustion, partly out of lack of interest, and partly out of a keen sense that I cannot offer what I once could offer. On the other hand, I have my children, a career I enjoy, and a place of my own. I have friends and I have my health. Some days, these seem like consolation prizes for those who have aged out of a merciless game.  Other times, I remember this is real life at last instead of a fantasy. I don’t just say that because I need an upbeat conclusion, or because I need to convince myself it is true.  It is genuine contentment, hard-won, like sobriety after years of alcoholism. On the best days, It is trading in being longed for by those who project something onto me for being truly seen by those who know me best.  That’s a good deal, and I know it isn’t offered to all.  I clutch it with both hands, and I am grateful. 

Diane says she has no desire to go back to her 20s.  Like me, she remembers the excitement of that erotic power, but she cannot recall it without also remembering the unhappiness and insecurity and confusion that accompanied her in early adulthood.  “My self-confidence isn’t rooted in how men look at me anymore,” she says, “It’s entirely my own.”  Diane and I are glad to not be as we were, glad of whatever wisdom and balance we have earned in this late summer of our lives.  Contentment and gratitude, however, are not always perfect analgesics against wistfulness.  There’s a difference between permitting oneself fleeting nostalgia, and giving in to a yearning to return to what is gone. There’s a difference between acknowledging grief over what is gone, and being contemptuous or dismissive of one’s gifts in the present.

“Once I was beautiful,” Anne Sexton wrote; “now I am myself.”  A transaction happens; we become who we are when we give up what was once so vital to our identity.  The great American poet was right about something, but a great Greek poet was right too, and he gets the last word:

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds on which you lay,
but also those desires which for you
plainly glowed in the eyes,
and trembled in the voice -- and some
chance obstacle made them futile.
Now that all belongs to the past,
it is almost as if you had yielded
to those desires too -- remember,
how they glowed, in the eyes looking at you;
how they trembled in the voice, for you, remember, body.

-CP Cavafy.

And remember we do.