naxpoints.blogg.se

HEYMAN: I think the woman may be 65 and the man 70. GROSS: How old are these characters, Arlene? Yet, the hair thins out, underarm and pubic, as if the soil had changed to one that no longer supports that verdant shrubbery but instead nourishes an astonishing variety of wild mushrooms. Aged flesh is so fertile, grows excrescences, papules, papillomas, skin tags, moles that have to be checked yearly. But it is the daily familiarity with her husband's body she is missing, the handling of his old, knobby flesh. And besides, after 10 years of doing it, it is a reliable pleasure.Įleven years - it is not as though they met yesterday and are trying to figure out will this work? He is a permanent part of her, of her life. And the repetition of it, the making of it into a weekly habit, like phoning their children and speaking to the grandchildren, the lovemaking grafts them to one another, comingles them, despite their having no children together. You do it with regularity to show you are a human being, that you are alive and civilized and can still become ecstatic. Although, since they started having to schedule it in, it has become a little like brushing and flossing - something almost hygienic, good for you.

Not that frequency matters, so long as they care about each other, and making love helps them care about each other. (Reading) They have not made love since they started the cruise a week ago and she was too rushed and tense the week before getting ready.

Would you do the reading?ĪRLENE HEYMAN: Certainly. And they haven't had any sex since the cruise started. They each have children and grandchildren through previous marriages. And there's a couple who are on a cruise. I'm going to ask you to start with a reading, and this is from one of the stories in your book. She's a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who lives and works in Manhattan.Īrlene Heyman, welcome to FRESH AIR. "Scary Old Sex" is Heyman's first book, but she's been writing throughout her life. One of the stories is dedicated to the late writer Bernard Malamud and draws on the affair Heyman had with him when she was a student and he was middle-aged and married. A 68-year-old woman watches her 99-year-old mother lose her faculties. A woman watches her husband decline as he's treated for leukemia. A remarried woman compares her husband with her late husband. Viagra may be necessary, certain positions can aggravate arthritis, death is in the background or foreground of several stories. There are some graphic sex scenes in Arlene Heyman's new collection of short stories, "Scary Old Sex." But they're mostly from the point of view of people in their 60s and 70s for whom sex is still fulfilling but requires some effort and planning.