The Thing About Life is That One Day You'll Be Dead (5 page)

Boys vs. Girls (ii)

At birth, body fat is 12 percent of body weight, increases to 25 percent at 6 months, and 30 percent at 1 year. At age 6, it's back down to 12 percent again, then it rises until the onset of puberty. Postpuberty, the rise continues in girls, while in boys there's a slight decline.

During high school, girls' bone development is 2 years ahead of boys. Young girls surpass boys in height and weight, and they frequently remain taller until boys enter the adolescent growth spurt that accompanies pubescence. Maximum skeletal development occurs at 16 for most girls and 19 for boys; dating between classmates in high school is by definition a hormonal mismatch and a farce.

“At seventeen, you tend to go in for unhappy love affairs,” said Françoise Sagan, who should know.

In males, the sexual urge peaks during their late teens or early twenties, but not until a decade later does it peak in females.

“I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, / or that youth would sleep out the rest; / for there is nothing in the between / but getting wenches / with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting”—so saith the Shepherd in
The Winter's Tale.

Between ages 15 and 24, men are three times more likely to die than women, mostly by reckless behavior or violence—e.g., murder, suicide, car accidents, war.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his daughter, Scottie, “For premature adventure one pays an atrocious price. As I told you once, every boy who drank at eighteen or nineteen is now safe in his grave.”

         

Hoop dream (iii):

My father was the manager of a semi-pro basketball team called the Brooklyn Eagles, which consisted of Harry Glatzer; his brother, Nat, who played for Thomas Jefferson—where they both went to high school—“but,” according to my father, “went nowhere following graduation” Max “Puzzy” Posnack, at the time the captain of St. John's; Allie Schuckman, also a star at St. John's; Max “Kappy” Kaplan, from St. John's as well; Artie Jackson, a black player who displayed “dazzling accuracy from all over the floor” and Isador “Midge” Serota, who “filled his days playing pickup basketball.” The Eagles were to be paid $100 under the table (since many of the players were college athletes) to provide the opposition for a Christmas Day game at Yale.

There is, I'm sure, much mythmaking in my father's version of the story (and all his stories); the last time he told me this story, he told it with the same, implausibly perfect details he always does: as he and the seven players drove from Brooklyn to New Haven, “a slight snowfall came down at about four or five o'clock
P.M.
, making driving a little tricky, but Kappy was a good driver. Somewhere, about twenty-five or thirty miles from New Haven, the light snowfall turned heavier, making driving a little dangerous. We were making slow but steady progress toward our goal, the Yale basketball court.

“All of a sudden, we felt a bump against the front fender. A body rolled up over the fender and off the car onto the roadway. We'd hit a man. We stopped the car, raced to a nearby farmhouse, and called the local sheriff, who showed up in about fifteen minutes and started asking Kappy if he'd been drinking or driving too fast, especially under these hazardous conditions. One look at the body by the sheriff and he said, ‘It's that old Polack, the town drunk. He probably never saw you.'

“We were watching the time. We had to be in New Haven by six-thirty. The sheriff told us about a farmer who lived nearby and did commercial driving. By this time—five-thirty or so—we had to skip dinner, hire the farmer-driver for twenty dollars, and get to the game. Kappy's car was impounded as evidence and would have to be kept in the town of Wilton, where we hit the man. We piled into the big limousine and got to the gym about seven, cold and hungry. The Yale people, who thought they'd been stood up, were furious with us.

“We changed into our uniforms, had a brief warm-up, and the first quarter ended with the Yalies leading by twenty points; the half ended with Yale up about thirty. At halftime, Allie and the team gulped down sandwiches and sodas. Hardly the recommended diet for players engaged in a clash with finely trained athletes—rested and ready for the game against those ‘tough guys' from Brooklyn. Puzzy gave the team a pep talk at halftime and the second half was a different story.

“Puzzy, Allie, and Artie began hitting their shots. The game ended in a tie. We played two overtimes and lost by a basket. The Yale captain thanked us and paid me the hundred dollars, twenty of which immediately went to the farmer-driver to drive us back to the bus station in Wilton. We got on board the bus around midnight and arrived back in New York at about six
A.M.
The players made a dash for the Automat (now defunct; you placed nickels in food slots, and out came the food, from main dishes to dessert). I distributed what was left: each player got a few bucks. I took nothing. We had enough for subway fare—five cents back to Brooklyn—and the game was history. It soon became a neighborhood legend.

“A month later, Kappy went back to Wilton for the inquest. He was declared innocent. We never played another game.”

Why Lionesses Prefer Dark Brunettes, or Why Both Men and Women Are Attracted to Deep Voices

The olfactory system—the sense of smell—bypasses all the brain's thinking processes and directs its information exclusively toward the regions that control sex and aggression. In order to mate with a female hamster, male hamsters must have this system functioning. Male mice need it in order to respond to female fertility signals, and female pigs need it to be aroused by boars. In humans, scent no longer dominates sexual response; scent is nowhere near as significant for us as it is for the rest of the animal kingdom.

Sight is much the most important human sense; appearance is what attracts us. “Gentlemen prefer blondes,” but lionesses prefer dark brunettes, which are believed to have higher testosterone levels and potentially better genes.

Humans and many other species find voices attractive. In humans, deep, husky voices—considered sexually attractive by both sexes—are also correlated with high testosterone levels and therefore potentially high sex drive and good genes.

Fear and terror, not shared pleasant experiences, are more likely to result in mutual attraction. The release of stress hormones activates the brain's neurochemical systems that promote attachment bonds. In a famous experiment, an attractive woman interviewed young men on a swaying rope bridge 200 feet above a river, and also on the ground. Midway through the interview, she gave them her phone number. Over 60 percent of the men she interviewed on the rope bridge called her back; only 30 percent of the men on the ground did so.

         

I was 17, as was my girlfriend, Carla, and neither of us was sexually experienced. Rain fell like needles, but Carla's parents' cabin's back porch, sheltered by a lean-to roof and enclosed by a tight green net, kept us dry. I wanted to sleep outside, catch cold. I wanted to share disease and shudder. Carla wanted to brush her teeth. She liked the smell of bathrooms, mirrors, warm toilet seats. Toothbrush and towel in hand, she pushed open the screen door and sought linoleum.

I unfolded the sleeping bags and unrolled them on the wooden floor, fluffing up our backpacks, tucking them into the mouths of the sleeping bags. I pushed the bench out of the way into the corner of the porch. I rearranged things and waited.

“Everything's wet out here,” Carla said when she emerged. “Let's sleep inside.”

“No,” I said. “The rain'll stop soon.”

I shut the door to the house, jiggled the doorknob, and pronounced the door locked. The only way to get in was to find the key somewhere on the porch come morning.

Carla got under the covers and lay down next to me in her sleeping bag.

“How do I look?” she asked.

I searched my mind for adjectives. I wanted to please her, choose the right ones by being descriptive. “Kissable. Dreamy. Exquisite.”

“H-H-How do I look?” I asked. I stuttered less when I was alone with Carla than I did with anyone else, but it still cropped up occasionally.

Carla laughed and avoided the question. Whenever she asked me how she looked, she knew that whatever I answered, she was irresistible. She wanted me to be handsome, but I wasn't. My pimples wouldn't go away; I wouldn't go away. I was who I was. I wasn't handsome. Carla knew that. She could see. She wasn't blind. She loved me, nevertheless. She loved me for the complexity of my soul—something like that. Anyone can have clear skin (as my father does), blue eyes (ditto), wavy hair (till middle age), a mellifluous voice (still).

We touched fingertips, interlocked fingers, pressed palms together like flat stomachs, squeezed tight. I spread her middle fingers, moved my index finger up and back between her fingers. I held the back of her neck, closed my eyes, kissed her. Surprisingly, she sat up, kissed me, and then we bumped foreheads while I was undoing the zipper of my sleeping bag and sliding closer to her. She laughed at what she took to be my clumsiness. I kissed her pug nose. We joined lips and twisted our heads until I said, “We're destined to make love tonight.”

“I don't know,” she said. “I'm not sure I'm ready. It's cold. I really need to use the bathroom first.”

She got out of her sleeping bag, gathered up a few things from her backpack, tried the door.

“It's locked,” I said.

She turned the doorknob, pushed the door open.

“Liar,” she said.

“I honestly thought I'd locked the door,” I said.

She closed the door softly behind her while I lay down on the sleeping bag. Outside, tree limbs swayed like broken arms and thick sheets of cutting rain erased the sky. I waited for Carla, who could easily be another few hours. She got lost in bathrooms. She felt safe in them, at home, locked in. She had a toilet kit like a suitcase. She liked to be clean. She talked about towels and soaps and different kinds of tissues—their warmth, their softness. She liked to play with faucets. Transfixed on beauty, she stared into mirrors for hours, scared away blemishes.

I was, in a sense and for the moment, one of those blemishes: I wasn't Carla's dream boy. I didn't have a deep, husky voice. I wasn't the lioness's dark brunette.

         

My father, reminiscing to me recently about his first girlfriend, said, “For about five years, from the time I was twenty-three until twenty-eight, I dated one of your Aunt Fay's friends, Pearl Feinberg, a tall and very attractive young woman whose statuesque figure evoked appreciative whistles and oohs and aahs from onlookers. (Don't think we called it ‘dating' back then, but you know what I mean.) Pearl was employed as a secretary and part-time model for one of New York's big apparel firms. I had a good job (working for the
Journal-American
), a lovely girlfriend, a knock-your-eyes-out tan Ford convertible (which looked like today's VW Cabriolet), some money. I felt like I had the whole world in my twenty-five-year-old hands.

“Pearl and I were always busy when we saw each other on the weekends: the movies, the theater, picnics, parties, lectures, and tennis in nearby Highland Park. Although we dated steadily for five years—all our friends expected us to be together forever—we never talked marriage. The fault was mostly mine. We were both well past the age of consent, but I was too immature, afraid to the point of being phobic about taking on responsibility. I was the least sophisticated twenty-eight-year-old in the Western Hemisphere.

“The
Journal-American,
like all the other daily newspapers in New York, was suffering huge losses in advertising as a result of the still-lingering Depression and made big cuts in staff. In 1938 I, too, became unemployed. I managed to land a job with the
New York Post,
but six months later that was wiped out. That summer, after three months of unemployment, I decided to take a job at Chester's Zunbarg, the Catskills summer resort, maintaining the tennis courts and occasionally trying to teach tennis to overweight fur salesmen and Bronx schoolteachers. It was there and it was that summer that I met Helen [his first wife], who had just been divorced from a
New York Times
business page writer and was planning to spend most of her summer at Chester's.

“Helen was a very sophisticated woman—by my lights, anyway. I learned all about sex and politics from her. She was, even then, deeply involved in Communist Party politics. In fact, one year after we met, she left her Wall Street job—she was a librarian—to work as a volunteer for the Party.

“That torrid summer—emotionally, not the Catskills' fifty-degree climate—I forgot all about Pearl. At the end of the summer, I came back to Brooklyn and lived with Helen for several months before we got married. Never saw Pearl again.

“Forty years later, after coming to Providence for your commencement, I stayed for a week with Fay, now living in a posh condominium in Queens. One morning, she went shopping, and when she returned, the first thing she said was, ‘Milt, you'll never guess who I ran into at the mall. You'll never guess in a million years.' I tossed out the names of some of my boyhood friends with whom I'd lost contact.

“‘Believe it or not,' Fay told me, ‘I ran into your old flame, Pearl. Her name's not Feinberg now. She married one of the boys from our old neighborhood who used to play tennis with us. Her name is Richman, the name of her late husband. She still looks beautiful; her hair is gray, she has two daughters and several grandchildren and lives in Queens. She gave me her phone number. I told her you were visiting from California and filled her in a little on what you were doing. She said she'd like to hear from you.'

“Well, 1978 was one year after your mother's death. I was still working my way out of my depression. And the day before, I had seen the new Neil Simon play
Act Two,
which dealt with the anguish and torment faced by the leading character, a writer, who meets a young woman shortly after his wife's death. He wrestles with the thorny problem of whether he should keep seeing this new woman in his life. He tells his brother, who encourages the relationship—‘life must go on'—that he has strong guilt feelings about the new relationship because of his still passionate feelings about his late wife. The writer winds up continuing the relationship and—as the curtain falls!—marrying her. I totally rejected Neil Simon's cozy and glib ending. ‘How could he marry her so soon after his wife died?' I said to myself while seated in the theater. ‘What were all those professions of undying love of his deceased spouse that he made in the opening act? Just foreign propaganda? And what about those Valentine gifts he sent every year like clockwork? Phony as a three-dollar bill.' Those were the reasons I gave Fay for why I didn't feel up to calling Pearl, let alone visiting her. But the biggest reason was my shame about the shabby way I had treated her, the god-awful way I ended it. Never calling or writing. Nothing. Shameful. Unforgivable.”