Red Flame versus Home Fires

I mentioned I picked up eight "lust" books at the library yesterday, fearing I might be snowed in over the weekend. Well, it's cold and very windy, but will venture out to rescue a girlfriend from her husband and son watching the second football playoff game this afternoon. Which puts me in mind of a recent article I read on the Internet about the most successful marriages are those where each partner is a strong individual, more important than the proverbial sense of being a strong couple. Which in turn becomes my segue to comments on Annette Jaffee's The Dangerous Age, a novella about passion in middle age.

Right with the first two paragraphs, Jaffee contrasts the fulfillment of Susan Miller with her lover Robert Parrish compared to the sexual routine with her husband Barry. The sentences are a bit to risque to quote at length, but with Barry asking her, after twenty-five years of marriage if she was satisfied from his love-making, the reader has think "if you have to ask, it didn't happen, duh."

Parts of this story remind me of Nights at Rodanthe: a rich successful woman, a richer lover with a luxury car, perfectly decorated surroundings and wonderful food. How perfect the image of a contemporary American affair. Both lovers have recently undergone surgeries: Susan a hysterectomy and Robert for a bad back. They meet in the gym (shades of Bruce Springsteen?). Robert's sensuality gives Susan new sensations. But he tells stories, some of which eventually recollect his first sex with a prostitute and his high school sweet heart. Susan has no such memories. Besides her husband, who might have been a rebound match, she only lusted for the father of children she babysat.

Like Emma Bovary, Susan gives up her house, all her beautiful furnishings, ultimately her teaching job, alienating her grown children with her divorce. Robert spends weekends with her, nesting in an old farm house where she goes about trying to build a comforting home for the two of them. No other way to sum it up, Robert goes back to his wife and daughters after another health scare, leaving Susan to mourn over her aging body rather than being grateful for her short but satisfying dalliance.

The novella is a quick and engaging read and if somewhat superficial, Jaffee includes enough peeking into bedrooms to keep the pages turning. The story contains Paz perspective of love as violation of the social order. However, here the red flame of passion turns more to the pilot light of domesticity rather than the blue flame of live-long, lasting love.