Saratoga News

Point of View

Carl Heintze

Joe Paris tries to prove he's ageless

I've always been impressed with the story of the Greek epic The Iliad, because it tells us the Trojan War--in which the Greeks bested the Trojans--was fought because of a woman.

The woman, of course, was Helen, who was carried off by Paris, a Trojan, even though she was married. In due course, the Greeks, urged on by Helen's husband, came to get her back and the rest is, as they say, history, or at least legend.

A lot of heroes, including Paris, the kidnapper, and Achilles, the Greek superman, got killed, the Trojan horse was invented and Homer (or someone) wrote his famous poem about it all.

I bring all this up not to get you to reread The Iliad (although that's not a bad idea), but because it reminds me of what I call the Helen, or maybe the Helena, Syndrome, the sudden mad desire of middle-aged men for younger women.

I'm not sure how old Paris was (history doesn't tell us), but whatever his age, he was so infatuated with Helen that he abducted her from home and hearth and husband. For some reason middle-aged American men sometimes go through this same process. They have to pursue a younger woman, even though they may be married, and carry her off, if not to Troy, maybe to Hawaii or some other place this side of paradise in an effort to live happily ever after.

I've seen it happen a dozen or more times, fortunately to no one I know well. All of a sudden, around his mid-40s, Joe Paris suddenly dumps his wife of 20 years and falls into the arms of a woman half his age. Now and then the story ends happily, if not for the abandoned wife at least for Joe and his new bride. But more often than not, it's the pits.

Joe can't keep up with his new Helen; she discovers he is not only mature, he is rapidly growing old, and she goes in search of another Joe, leaving him friendless on the beach in front of Troy, as it were.

It's easier to understand Joe--at least for me, perhaps, because I'm male--than it is Helen. Joe is in search of his swiftly vanishing youth. His male menopause makes him aware that his sexual prowess is declining, that he's getting wrinkles and is growing baggy under the eyes and along the waistline. Trying to deny all this, he goes off to prove that he really is ageless when, of course, he's not.

But he has to try to deny his morbidity and mortality. Better he should take cold showers.

But what about Helen? That's the part of the equation I don't understand, again perhaps because I'm male. What does she see in a guy who is obviously on the decline and about to go over the hill? It can't be his athletic ability, which is 20 years from where it was when he was her age. It might be his wisdom, though you would think someone who doesn't understand male menopause doesn't have a lot of that, either.

A woman with whom I discussed this says it's a search for security. Younger women see a middle-aged man as someone who has made it, financially and socially, and so they hook up with his security blanket rather than struggling through the years of a marriage with someone their own age.

She also says older men are gentler (or maybe just more pooped out), are grateful for the attention and so on.

Well, maybe. It's certainly flattering if you are going down the long road toward bye-bye to find someone who thinks you're attractive, but older men have problems younger women may not at first glance discover. Parts of them--teeth, for instance--are no longer real.

Not only have their personalities been formed by the time these men are 40, they have become set in stone. They don't want their fixed habits changed. The wives they left understood this and had become resigned to it. Not so their new Helen, who has to either try to change them or spurn them. For it's certainly true that the little things in marriage become big things over time.

What's even worse than Joe Paris in his 40s trying to revitalize himself with a new love is Joe in his even-older years trying to do the same thing. I offer as an example two famous men. One was Nelson Rockefeller, who died in the arms of a woman much younger than he. The other is the Nazi industrial genius Albert Speer, to whom the same thing happened.

I suppose they may have considered it a good way to go, but to those of us left behind, it only looks foolish. And what of their lovers? No one, to my knowledge, has ever interviewed the two women involved in these two famous cases.

What prompted them to take up with men twice their age? And what was the lasting effect on them of what happened? Did it make them swear off older men?

Well, I suppose in the long run it really doesn't matter. Middle-aged men will keep on acting foolishly around younger women, and even older men will continue to dote on girlfriends who could be their daughters (or maybe even granddaughters).

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