Stalking Youth and Women in the European Outback

When Steve gave me a ride to the airport, I was not ready—but could not have been more eager—to get out of town.  Three long years of unsuccessful struggle to avoid financial ruin had left me limp and lethargic, resigned to my fate, and tired of life.

But of course Nancy had begun to revive my spirit.  This worldly child of 22, with big dark liquid eyes and a body by Porsche, has the sort of confidence that comes from lack of failure and should be ample warning to an older man of the dangers that lay ahead.  I called her from the airport.  It was nearly ten in the morning but I still managed to wake her up.  It was pleasant to hear her sleep sodden since ordinarily her telephone voice is sharp and bright and brisk and has none of the purring, liquid flow that makes men meek.  It was as if I had caught her off guard—not that she is ordinarily on guard but just that her usual impervious gaiety was replaced by a faint hint of vulnerability.  If only it were so.

Here is a mystery for you.  This good Mormon girl with her four sisters and one brother is regularly on the phone with various members of her family making family plans and resolving family affairs.  She goes to church every Sunday and views the world through the eyes of a true believer whose perspective is predetermined by the confining limits of LDS doctrine.  She knows she will marry a good Mormon boy and she expects she will have children—probably a lot of them.  But set all this against the fact that she is career driven and intends to do an MBA and an LLD before becoming a successful entrepreneur.  Throw in the fact that she views this time in her life as an interlude in which—quite literally—sex, drugs, and rock and roll are worthy pursuits and peerless delights.  Now add in the unapologetic manner in which she carefully hides this wild side from her family and the result is a complex set of charming contradictions that surpass the already high levels that characterize the female sex.

Contradiction is, I suppose, the essence of being human, and by this standard Nancy is far more human than most.  It fascinates me, of course, even more than larger scale contradictions like the way China professes communism and practices capitalism.  China’s paradox is grander by far, but I can’t touch China.

It is comforting to pretend that the magnetic draw between the two of us is magnified by our mutual recognition that we have no future.  I do not mean no common future; I mean no future at all.  I am living in the sunset and, although the golden light and long shadows make this perhaps the best of times, I know that soon the sun will set and that a peaceful twilight period of greater or lesser duration will inexorably pass to total darkness.  In Nancy’s case, I imagine that this mad, wild spring will soon give way to a lazy, languid summer of such somnolent sameness as to leave her suffocating.  I do not think she can imagine this as living.