New lust

(2000)

Old lust

(1997)

A few years ago, I realized I was turning into a Dirty Old Lady. The progression goes in leaps and spurts, but I remember the defining moments in my Dirty Old Ladydom. They both came in the course of a week.

I was pulling around the corner onto my street when I saw a teenage boy, shirtless and lean and taut, riding his skateboard, completely absorbed. My mouth began to water and I felt a pang of greedy lust—the kind of pang you get every few waking moments between the ages of 13 and 21, and that gradually fades away as you get more involved in Serious Relationships. The kind of pang that would have provoked my 14-year-old self or one of my 14-year-old girlfriends to say we wanted to "jump his bones," not really meaning anything more serious than that our mouths had been set watering.

It only lasted about a second, and I felt immeasurably guilty—the kid had to be at least 12 years my junior—but there it was, unerasable: lust.

The second, more embarking moment came while watching TV with one of my girlfriends—either Suzanne or Angele—I can't remember. We were watching TV when a commercial came on that had a beautiful, Mediterranean woman standing on a beach, kind of hot and sweaty and still. She was looking off on the horizon at a pack of men—and the rest of it's a blur. Something about ironing boards being used as surf boards, something idiotic. I think it was a Dockers commercial, which is even more dreadful. But all of the men were shirtless and laughing and tan and smooth and gave me that same 14-year old feeling of sitting on a blanket with your girlfriends, giggling and watching the hot young dirty boys at the beach, dragging your eyes all over them before you had any apprehension of objectification or shame or self-doubt. And as the commercial faded out, both of us (my girlfriend and I) kind of gasped at the same time, realizing we hadn't been breathing, and looked at each other and giggled apologetically.

And that's when I realized I was turning into a Dirty Old Lady. Because at some point, you quit looking for the guy with the hottest bod and start looking for the funniest guy or the smartest guy or the nicest guy or the coolest guy or whatever, but at some point, you drift past the threshold of pure physical attraction and quit being led around like a moth. You quit spending every spare moment daydreaming about the smooth feel of a young male back or the little hairs on the back of someone's neck or the soft feel of his hair or that excruciating muscle that makes those valleys between the hips and either side of the belly just above the jeans or whatever it was going through your mind when you weren't paying attention to that important thing some adult was telling you. And at that point, when you become preoccupied with Real Life and More Important Things, the door to the beach of the beautiful teenage boys closes on you forever and you know it's wrong, but you can kind of see Mrs. Robinson's point, you can kind of get how poor Mary Kay Letourneau deluded herself. Because even though your mouth might still water, you might get momentarily breathless and blushy and stupid over some beautiful boy, you might get glimpses of that beach, you'll never be able to avoid distinguishing that lust from the reality of the situation again. You'll never have that fearless, contextless mix of anticipation and impunity that you had in the girlish origins of that same feeling. You can never get that back.

Old lust