I Can No Longer Bear Playing the Part

Friends, and mama! There are a couple of sexual references in this piece that you might not wish to read.

Da pwanes are still tigh-tigh.

I make this remark as our rental car approaches Glasgow Airport. It is not quite 5:00AM, but since we’re in Northern Europe in late spring, it is already half-light outside. It is June 2001, and Elizabeth and I are at the end of our Scottish honeymoon, getting ready to catch the first in a series of flights home to California. I have seen that no aircraft are moving on the tarmac yet and have made an observation to that effect -- in baby talk.

Husband, Elizabeth says. We have been married ten days, but she does not say it with affection. It is a command, or at least a plea. It means, “Talk like a grownup, for fuck’s sake.”  We have already had this exchange half a dozen times on this honeymoon. I consider pointing out for a moment that over the past week, I have driven a manual transmission Peugeot on the wrong side of the road from Glasgow to John O’Groats and back, through the Grampians and the glens -- more than 500 miles without a scratch or a ticket or a near miss in a roundabout. I want to say, “I’ve proved I’m competent, wife, let me be childlike in speech if not in manner.”

 I don’t say it. I know better. Instead, in as neutral a tone as possible, I remark, We’re here in plenty of time.

Next to me, Elizabeth nods.  I am 34, she 30. Elizabeth will leave me sixteen months later, saying she made a horrible mistake, and did not love me after all. It will be my third divorce.

That was decades ago. Earlier today, I have coffee with a dear female platonic friend. Millie asks how I’m coping since the divorce from Victoria, and wonders if I’m ready to date. (Millie is happily married. She’s not volunteering. That is not our story.) I point out that I’m not only not ready to be close to someone, but I’m also not ready to change my mannerisms.  She asks what I mean.

Millie and I are sitting in an outdoor garden café on Larchmont Avenue, and I am leaning back in my chair, arms tightly folded across my chest. Half the time, as I talk, I am looking at my coffee cup or at the table.  I am not shy with Millie, whom I trust very much.

When she inquires what I mean by “changing my mannerisms” in order to date, I sit up, pivot my chair, and face Millie directly.  I lean forward, one arm on the table, the other resting on my knee. I lower my voice, make sure my body is still, look my friend in the eye in a way I never do, and ask – my cadence just 10% slower than normal - “So, How are you?”

Millie laughs in mild surprise. “Wow,” she says, “That’s good.”  I thank her, hold character for a beat more, then roll my eyes and wave my hands in the air, and declare the whole thing to be what it is: a tiresome act.

I have been married five times. I have lived with three other women. I have had four or five other serious girlfriends I didn’t marry.  Figure I’ve been in a dozen serious relationships, and let me tell you, every last one of those women accused me of a “bait and switch” after only a few months together.

Like many young men, I was a student of courtship. I figured out early that women liked confidence, competence, charm, and certainty. That meant keeping the neurosis, the neediness, and the passivity at bay. The problem was that I could never keep up the act for long. The end result was the same: the woman thought she’d met this witty, slightly-nerdy-but-rather-rakish academic filled with passion and purpose.  She may not have expected Cary Grant, but she certainly didn’t want Woody Allen. Woody – in his self-absorbed anxieties if not his darker proclivities – was what she got.  You can imagine what has happened to the sexual frequency in every one of my relationships.  Within a depressingly short time, honey, we’ll transition from three times a day to three times a year. You can bet all the wedding gifts on that.

“Bed death” has always proved a price I’m willing to pay in order to drop an act. The wives and girlfriends tend to feel I’m in breach of contract. It is my considered view that hot sex isn’t worth the pretending that is indispensable to manufacturing said heat. When the women get cross or confused, I’ll try to go back to the act for a little while longer, but it’s usually too late. They’ve caught on.  The clock ticks down towards the inevitable separation.

Victoria, my fifth wife, once asked me to try channeling Clint Eastwood. She didn’t mean I should walk around quoting lines from Dirty Harry; she wanted me to think before I spoke to her and ask myself how a strong, self-assured man would deliver a line. She was an actress, and she knew I’d been a teacher with a reputation for dramatic lectures. Surely I could pull it off, and keep pulling it off once I saw the immediate results. We tried it for a while, but the fraudulence was exhausting.

In 2011, when I was a regular contributor to Jezebel, I was asked to write a piece about pickup artists and feminism. I met with several men who offered lessons in how to meet, talk to, and bed women. I listened to their tips and observed their techniques, many of which did revolve around projecting a confidence that felt unnatural for most. Many of these pickup artists (PUAs) named things that I already did instinctively. Slow down the speed of your speech. Hold eye contact. Don’t be afraid to be still. Open your body. Lean forward slightly.  It was mostly very obvious stuff, and it struck me as both remarkable and sad that so many men had no clue how to present themselves.

I can’t find the piece I wrote about these pickup artists, but I remember that I mocked them for not suggesting the most obvious thing: listening to women.  It is important to listen to people, and to consider what they are actually saying rather than desperately trying to come up with your next line. It is very helpful to like women as people. What I didn’t say is that knowing how to flirt, and how to suggest sexual interest in a way that isn’t off-putting, is also a skill. It comes to some of us naturally, and others of us need to be taught. Some find they take to it right away and enjoy great success. It becomes second nature. Some never quite get the hang of it.

(The cruel lottery of height, looks, age, and chemistry comes into play as well, and those who are blessed by genetics or other privileges generally have an easier time.)

When I was at my handsomest and most alluring – a sly, cocky, preppy early-thirty-something professor – it all did come very easily. I quickly learned that how I dressed, stood, and used my hands mattered. I learned that if, halfway through a passionate lecture, I unbuttoned my cuffs and rolled my shirt sleeves, it had a very pleasing effect on certain undergraduates.  A great many men do not understand that forearms emerging from an Oxford button-down are at least as enticing as bulging biceps or washboard abs. I was fortunate enough to figure out all these tricks, and I deployed them often.

I didn’t just sleep with young students because I could. I didn’t just do it to soothe my ravenous ego or satisfy my sexual curiosity. I liked that in almost every instance, these girls did not want a relationship. They did not want to build a life with me. They wanted an obvious student-teacher fantasy (one that, as you can probably guess with an eyeroll, usually involved my desk.)  They didn’t plan to stick around long enough to find out what I was really like. The few who did were always disappointed. Once we’d moved beyond dinner dates and the frantic trysts against my office wall right before class, they found that I was anxious and peevish and insecure. That rarely took more than six weeks to discover. 

It’s fun to visit the Emerald City, but please know that the little man behind the curtain can only sustain the act for so long.

In December 2015, two years after I resigned from Pasadena City College, a former student of mine messaged me on Twitter. She invited herself over to my tiny grim studio apartment in Beverly Hills, explaining that she wanted to live out a fantasy she’d had when she’d been in my class. Ashley knew I had been disgraced, and she knew why. What would be the harm now? I agreed, equal parts terrified and eager. The day before our rendezvous, Ashley sent a second message.  Can we role play? And you should know I’m very submissive. I like to be hurt.

I was relieved. Ashley was giving me a script, and I like scripts. I am very good with them. I do not like BDSM in the slightest. It is tinged with a darkness and a sadness that I find deeply off-putting. My religious friends tell me it is demonic.  All I knew is that it didn’t matter what I wanted. I was 48, penniless and penitent and very much not a professor anymore. If a pretty 23-year-old asks you to walk one more time into a familiar role, you… well, you could turn it down, but I couldn’t. Or I didn’t want to.

In another Substack I won’t link, I wrote about Ashley’s visit, and how it was everything she wanted --  and therefore everything I wanted. I played the part well because anyone can sustain a role for twelve hours. I not only played competent and confident, but I also played cruel and calculating, two qualities that I can also produce if the running time is not too long.

(There’s a name for this in the kink world: I was a “service top.” A gentleman always tries to be of service.)

Ashley made a second visit a few weeks later, and we were gentle with each other, and there was no role play or bruises. “I know you don’t really like the rough stuff,” she said, “But you were so sweet to give me what I asked for. I wanted to give you something you’d like better.”

We lay in bed that second time, and I played with her hair, and I wondered if she’d keep coming back, and I considered how we’d fall in love, and then I’d start the baby talk and she’d flee in disgust. I had the whole thing mapped out in my head before Ashley told me that she was planning to get back together with her ex.  “Just wanted to get a few things out of my system,” she said.

Lucky kid, spared the sight of me curled in the fetal position, clutching a small herd of stuffed animals, whispering affirmations to teddy bears. I like that Ashley remembers me with mischievous eyes and a gleaming smile, her blonde hair wrapped in my hand.

I don’t ever want to slap a woman again, or coil her hair around my fist, or call her names with a plausible sneer in my voice. I do not even want to pretend to be the sort of man who likes those things.  “I like it when you let the darkness out of you,” another woman who liked things rough said to me years ago. I didn’t have the words to tell her that the more the darkness came out of me, the darker I felt. I rather prefer keeping it buried very deep inside if you don’t mind.

I can’t speak for everyone, but my demons get stronger when I feed them. I am too old to wrestle well-fed demons.

Dating again almost certainly does not mean play-acting with former students. It does not need to involve BDSM. What it does need to involve, though, is a projection of a confidence and a certainty that I rarely feel. All my life I’ve been told to “fake it until you make it,” but that only ended up making me a very adept and hard-working faker.  

I can sit with a woman and play those subtle games with my voice and my forearms, the stillness of my body and the rhythm of my words, and maybe it will still work at my advanced age and maybe it won’t – but either way, it will feel fraudulent.  Sooner or later, Clint and Cary will vanish, and a baby-talking Woody Allen will show up in their place, and I will read the disgust and betrayal in her eyes.

My children need me to be strong and competent. They need me to be a provider, they need me to be present and reliable. They need me to show up.  I do those things, and in return, they don’t mind if I frequently drop into baby talk about horsies and pwanes.

As long as I don’t do it in front of their friends.