Food fight, Shot shy, Womb for hire

“I like bars just after they open for the evening,” Terry Lennox tells Philip Marlowe in the early pages of The Long Goodbye. “When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar — that’s wonderful.” They’re drinking gimlets — gin and Rose’s lime juice — which some people, though not me, consider a type of martini.

Recently, a famous American novelist came to stay at my place in London. In her later Substack post she described me as “an older gentleman.” It’s an accurate description — I’m sixty-eight! — but why does it make me feel so uneasy? Older is fine. And so too is gentleman. But put them together and the phrase “older gentleman” brings to mind — at least my mind — a Prufrock-like figure. A rotund old guy who wears a bright cravat and a brave smile and potters through his pointless days, softly whistling half-remembered showtunes from the Golden Age of Broadway. A life punctuated with sighs and resuscitated with cups of tea. Reader, I’m not that man — yet. No, I don’t have a problem with growing older; I have a problem with growing up.