The Nation's Pulse / Look Back in Anger
Stein, Benjamin J.
THE NATION'S PULSE LOOK BACK IN ANGER A normal Sunday. I was sitting in a chair reading the financial statements of a very large insurance company, trying to see if the management had taken a...
...And listen, that's not the worst of it...
...Someone with bright eyes...
...Lenny finished his bottled water, screwed the top on, and walked out the door, with no more salute than when he had walked in...
...A smoldering conflict, which no one has any chance of winning at all, in which there is so much anger on every side that no one will ever give up, and yet no one has the energy left any longer to do anything but feel defeated...
...Looking great...
...Like out of a magazine...
...Every man wants you, but I have you...
...Maybe to Mississippi...
...Defeated...
...It's like postwar Berlin...
...Lenny, this is so sad I can't stand it...
...And it didn't matter if the date didn't work out...
...It's more than sad," Lenny said...
...Before everyone got so angry...
...Upset...
...I asked, since I spend most of my time with defaulted bonds...
...The whole little episode is a sign of the way things are with women today...
...They are so bad that I can't even start to tell you about it...
...Like it was springtime...
...Anyway, so we're separated and I still support her and she quit work because she supposedly was going to do this big giant project teaching art to inner city kids, and also 'cause she had terrible headaches...
...Now, when I meet a woman, if I take her out, it's like a cobra and a mongoose circling eachother over the Chardonnay...
...They can start little public relations businesses...
...I mean, they are terrible...
...When it wasn't so lonely out there...
...No, not just angry...
...But I wasn't doing anything mean to the other women...
...I gave her a dog biscuit and went back to my tables on bond defaults in the 1990s...
...They looked angry...
...Offshore here in Malibu, a large sailboat was just barely visible through the disappearing fog...
...Right...
...Early twenties...
...I want it to be like it used to be," Lenny said...
...For example, my wife and I have been separated for a few years...
...6 6D enjy, I'll say it again," Lenny LP hissed...
...When there wasn't that horrible silent rap sound of muscular rage...
...I have to talk to you," he said...
...But what do they do for anyone but themselves...
...They can go to the gym...
...I mean girls...
...I know that," I said...
...Trixie, my pointer, slept...
...I wouldn't mention it if she were a freak of some kind...
...That's not just one woman...
...Only everyone's tired and sort of smoldering with fatigue and ingrown anger...
...Now, just in the last couple of years, the young ones are nutty, too...
...Can you blame them...
...But somehow, she always has time to go to Spago or Morton's with her pals...
...It used to be a war...
...I've thought about that," Lenny said...
...When men and women smiled at each other and meant it...
...Sometimes I put on a disc of Glenn Miller...
...As usual, they had not...
...He had clearly just been running on Point Dume...
...Crazed...
...Skin glowing...
...My wife was at home being sick, except when she had to go to the gym...
...My little blond girlfriend used to go to the library for me all the time...
...And somehow, she always has time for a manicure and a pedicure and somehow she finds time to go to the gym...
...They have that same air about them, that says, don't bother me with it, don't bother me with your problems...
...That's just one woman...
...That should be her epitaph: 'She did for herself.' "My point is that she's the way all the middle-aged women I know are...
...Just a cold, defeated exhaustion...
...It's like a flu that's everywhere...
...That's how we said good-bye, too...
...Now, it was just three warring camps in that little room, and when we were all called in for our lines, the men said good luck to the other men, and the young women to the young women, and the middle-aged women to themselves...
...It's not unnatural to stare at a beautiful by Benjamin J. Stein young woman...
...Well, it's sad...
...Chattanooga Choo-Choo.' And I just think to myself of what life must have been like when men and women got along...
...When it wasn't like walking down an alley in Vienna in 1946 to pick up a woman for dinner...
...And when I think about that, think about how wary and how cagey everyone is, there's none of that quality of anticipation that there used to be...
...The young ones act like I'm worth knowing about...
...I do it myself," I said...
...And my parents' friends always seemed to be getting along great...
...middle-aged guy who's sort of worried looking...
...Anywhere that women and men can still get along...
...You think that because you spend all day with your bonds and your dog," he answered in a monotone...
...That's my point...
...They want to be there...
...Absolute26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 ly terrible on a giant scale...
...Lenny, of course I know all that...
...Look, remember when we were in high school or in college, and we'd start to get ready for a date...
...And it's gotten so bad that I spend a lot of my time every day thinking about moving to Thailand or to Malaysia or somewhere...
...It doesn't really interfere with my writing, and it gets me out of the house, and it's fun, and it pays pretty well...
...And then when I ask her to find something in the files, it's like I asked her to do a triathlon, and she can't even think about it...
...It's like a weight when I'm thinking of going out...
...Maybe to Montana...
...That it's like a kind of cold war out there...
...The young ones have that same sneering look around their mouths, too...
...They want to hear how my day went...
...D ut the main thing is that I play LI basketball with a lot of younger guys, in their twenties and thirties, and they tell me the exact same thing...
...She didn't know how to do much in a library, but she tried...
...She did her work at the studio, hung out with her pals, but I might as well have been invisible...
...You won't believe your eyes...
...Lenny, I'll say it again...
...I had a girlfriend and she totally neglected me...
...I'm going to spend even more time with my dog...
...You mad, impetuous fool...
...Even the guys who are still at USC or UCLA...
...He was in his sweats, with a headband...
...Without any preamble, he plopped himself into a chair, then jumped up, ran to the refrigerator to grab bottled water, and sat himself down again...
...Anywhere that women aren't like secret agents...
...It's like everything in America today...
...A very tired cobra and a very weary mongoose...
...I started to talk to one of them I had been talking to before the girls came in, and she just wouldn't even talk to me...
...All my pals think I had them because my wife is middle-aged and I wanted someone young...
...I'm hip," I said...
...Maybe we'd met a girl in a class in English lit and we asked her to go to a movie on Third Avenue, and we'd be so excited getting ready...
...String of Pearls.' `Tuxedo Junction...
...Women don't want to hear about it, don't want you to expect anything from them, don't want to owe you a thing...
...Yeah, I can blame them," Lenny said with a vigorous nod of his head...
...I think that's why there are art galleries with paintings of beautiful young women in them, Benjy, boy...
...I didn't do anything bad to those women...
...For twenty years...
...When there hadn't been whatever happened to make men and women feel permanently angry at each other...
...But to do for me, even though I pay the bills, never...
...I had a girlfriend...
...The young ones used to be interested, used to be worth getting to know because they paid attention, had some enthusiasm...
...It's the same as homelessness or drugs or diseases...
...Suddenly, through the door burst my neighbor, my pal, my Doppelganger, my friend Lenny who is so much like me that he might as well be me, except that he is a fitness buff, and is always running somewhere...
...It's considered kind of natural to stare at them...
...I had a lot of girlfriends...
...We were all getting along pretty well until some girls started to show up for another call...
...But I, don't think that's the whole answer...
...Look, I wasn't a model husband by any means...
...The point, the exact point, is that she's a perfect, absolutely typical middle-class, middle-aged woman with no kids to take care of...
...When I was sued by that Devil Worshipping Church a few years ago, my wife did not do one day's work in the library for me even though she's a trained lawyer...
...She wagged her tail and started to bark...
...Because we'd be meeting someone and getting to know her, and even if she didn't like us it was still exciting, and she was excited, too, just to meet someone new...
...I'm not blaming her for that...
...Yes," Lenny added...
...At least I don't think they did...
...They can go to the Golden Door...
...Furious...
...They want to help...
...And it's like two old secret agents, one from the CIA and one from the KGB, sitting across from each other at Spago or at Sam's Cafe, and they both have so much on each other, and they really have it in for each other...
...Really sexy...
...They talked among themselves and wouldn't even talk to us anymore...
...Lenny, that's one woman...
...Well, a few days ago, I was in town at a casting agency, and there were a few of us middle-aged guys there, waiting to read, and there were also some middle-aged women there, and they were well-dressed, attractive, intelligent-looking women...
...And so meanwhile, when the young women saw how the middle-aged women were acting, they got mad at us men, too...
...That's not why middle-aged guys have young girlfriends...
...But go out there in the real world...
...You know that sometimes I play myself in commercials, right...
...When men and women liked each other...
...Only the way it works is that she's trying to figure out how much she can get out of me before I lose interest, and maybe that's the way it is for me, also...
...It was like we'd be at some movie and then at some cheap Italian place afterwards, and it would be like there was this tingling in the air...
...I mean, I play a Benjamin J. Stein is a writer and producer living in Malibu, California...
...You fool," I said...
...It's because the young girlfriends pay some attention to them...
...Really built...
...I walked over and kissed my Trixie dog...
...That's how upset seeing those young girls come in made them...
...Only they're tired...
...Even in college...
...Anywhere that there's still that quality of excitement...
...That's all...
...Lenny, have you thought that maybe it's because you're forty-two and not twenty-four...
...We'd be just as excited for the next one, because maybe she'd be right, and even if she weren't right, maybe we'd be excited anyway...
...I remember that well," I said...
...But she supposedly still has the headaches, and maybe she really does, and she lies in bed all day having the housekeeper, who's sick herself, feed her fruit salad in bed, and she's always bitching and moaning about how her head hurts...
...So, the art project never got past a few luncheons, which for some reason always had to be held at the Bistro Gardens or the Polo Lounge, and then it was all over...
...That's not it...
...I agree...
...I was sitting in a chair reading the financial statements of a very large insurance company, trying to see if the management had taken a correct reserve on certain defaulted bonds...
...There was enthusiasm on both sides...
...H ow are things with women today...
...Across the back yard, through the palm trees, I could see the Santa Monica Bay, covered by a light haze, but still reflecting the sun in dazzling sprinkles of light...
...Just go out there...
...It's different now...
...Everyone shows up at a frat party or a game with a huge hod full of anger bricks and cunning bricks on his shoulders...
...That's a point...
...I can definitely blame them...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JUNE 1990 27...
...Lenny, that can't be right," I said...
...How many of them do you know who can be bothered to do a damn thing for anyone but themselves...
...Like each of us was getting a tiny electric shock...
...That's all the women I know...
...Now, it's worse than a war...
...Late teens...
...For one thing, my mother and father didn't approach each other with so much leaden anger...
...So, those girls come in, and all the men start to stare at them, and the girls sort of giggle back, and suddenly I sneaked a look at the middle-aged women who had been in the room...
...She can't be bothered to do anything for anyone but herself...
...That's gone now...
Vol. 23 • June 1990 • No. 6
