Back in 2001, I got engaged to Elayne J. Kleeman, a girl who was the tender age of 71, to be precise.
We threw a party at Barbetta's, an Italian restaurant in New York.
Most of the guests, mainly friends of Elayne, were not sure if the engagement was a game, a provocation, a piece of performance art, or serious business--by which they meant that I was after Elayne’s money, of course, and that Elayne was after my body.
To be honest, I was a little bit puzzled, myself.
Having been to a few wedding parties, I would say that wedding parties, if anything, are pieces of performance art.
I would suggest that our engagement party was a serious attempt to bring performance art to a higher level.
This summer, Elayne passed away and a few months later, I was offered the chance to buy her apartment for $900,000.
So some of the rumors that haunted us were false, I’m happy to report.
I was reminded of Elayne while reading an article in this Sunday’s paper about female school teachers who fall in love with teenage boys.
Now, I don’t want to suggest that I’m a teenage boy or that Elayne was a school teacher, I just think that time has come for a reversed Lolita.
Of course, we have Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulvevard.
But a novel about a female schoolteacher falling in love, head over heels, with a fifteen (or fourteen) year old boy, is perhaps needed.
(I’m not going to write it.)
Couldn’t this be a novel about everything our culture has become? We do read about the war against poverty, the war against terrorism etcetera, etcetera.
But the real war being fought in European and American cities is the war against pimples and wrinkles.