If you see her, say goodbye

Does the imagination dwell the most

Upon a woman won or a woman lost?

If on the lost, admit you turned aside

From a great labyrinth out of pride,

Cowardice, some silly over-subtle thought

Or anything called conscience once;

And that if memory recur, the sun’s

Under eclipse and the day blotted out.

— William Butler Yeats, The Tower

Earl Fowler

Another thing old guys think about from time to time, here among the deepening shades, and I’m pretty sure the same applies to women, is their own unique version of what I’ll call (in my case) the laundry basket moment.

That perfect romantic nanosecond you muffed that could have changed your life forever. Though for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, who the hell knows?

Jean-Paul Sartre writes about what a crock he thinks they are in La Nausée. We’ll get back to that.

Me, I just watched Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy for the first time since not much liking it when it came out in 1982. This time, it came home to me that botching this magic moment, so different and so new, is what the movie is mainly about. So it held my attention.

All of my friends, so far as I know, have an iteration of this stuck in their heads, no matter how happy they are with their current partner, no matter how many times they have tried to suppress it or analyze it or drink it away. So let’s get to it.

Consider the near-universal human experience of the romantic misstep.

That instant where you acted on instinct when you should have thought it over. That instant where you dithered when you should have acted on instinct.

Vladimir Nabokov, the masterly ne plus ultra of unseemly, unconsummated lust, described the setup this way in Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle:

As he bent toward her … she moved her head to make him move his to the required angle and her hair touched his neck. In his first dreams of her this re-enacted contact, so light, so brief, invariably proved to be beyond the dreamer’s endurance and like a lifted sword signalled fire and violent release.

But Dr. John said it in American.

“I been in the right place, but it must have been the wrong time. I’d have said the right thing, but I must have used the wrong line.”

And so, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, you find yourself on a darkling plain at 3 a.m. with all the other bleach-brained, bone-washed insomniacs half a century later, enervated, enfeebled and eternally turning over that image of the time she was clearly yearning for a kiss and you hesitated a second too long and the person from Porlock arrived and the moment was gone.

Do I dare eat a peach? Do I dare? Disturb the underwear?

It’s the desire for a mulligan, a do-over on that apparent life-altering blunder (perhaps you have a collection of them), coupled with the ease of reaching out and touching someone in a social-media age, that has prompted so many people who should know better to contact the objects of never-quite-extinguished passions.

In our minds, George Babbitt’s fairy child (see below) awaits us all “in the darkness beyond mysterious groves.”

But in real life, of course, that fairy child is now a 70-year-old grandmother with hemorrhoids and only the faintest notion of who you are.

Were.

In my recurring highlight reel, we are jointly carrying a laundry basket through a campus grove, en route to a friend’s washing machine. The sun bursts through to play on her hair, her eyes burn into mine — yes I said yes I will yes — and when I grope for my inner Errol Flynn, up comes Deputy Sheriff Barney Fife.

We were rudely summoned from that mystical encounter by the anxious washing machine owner who was then interested in me, faute de mieux, and for whom I felt only good will and toward whom I harboured not the slightest amorous stirring.

The scenario was right out of one of those many farces where he loves her but she loves another who loves someone else who’s in love with you — and all of a sudden we’re in a high school cafeteria again, passing notes at the geek table and discreetly staring at the legs of the girl with the fascinating bangs across the room.

As I realize now that I’m ever so much wiser and geezerier than back in the summer of ’82, A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy plays off Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac and is packed with allusions to famous movies of Jean Renoir (A Day in the Country, 1936; The Rules of the Game, 1939; Picnic on the Grass, 1960) and Allen’s beloved Ingmar Bergman (Smiles of a Summer Night, 1955).

Above all, it has obvious roots in the Shakespearean comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96) and, most palpably, Max Reinhardt’s 1935 surrealistic film version of the play — which includes, by the way, chilling portents of the horrors to which the surging fascism of the day was leading ineluctably. Plus ça change.

It’s likely been a while for you (since seeing the Allen flick, I mean, let alone its cinematic antecedents), so a quick reprise of the major sexcapades:

Andrew and Adrian Hobbes (played by Allen and Mary Steenburgen) play host to a summer weekend gathering attended by grizzled professional philosopher Leopold Sturgis (José Ferrer), Leopold’s beautiful and much younger fiancée Ariel Weymouth (Mia Farrow), free-spirited (if she were male, we’d say horny) nurse Dulcy Ford (Julie Hagerty), and horny (if he were female, we’d say sexually liberated) doctor Maxwell Jordan (Tony Roberts), Dulcy’s womanizing employer.

If you’re a fan of early Woody films, you might remember that the characters played by Allen and his (sadly, recently deceased) friend Roberts in Annie Hall also call each other Max, an apparent inside joke.

But there’s an overt joke in Annie Hall, a knee-slapper in 1977, I guess, that you could never make today — especially (given his turbulent personal life) if your name is Woody Allen:

Roberts’s character (actually named Rob) is summoned by Allen’s Alvy Singer to pick him up at a Los Angeles police station and none too pleased about the interruption:

ROB: Imagine my surprise when I got your call, Max.

ALVY: Yeah. I had the feeling that I got you at a bad moment. You know, I heard high-pitched squealing.

ROB: Twins, Max. Sixteen-year-olds. Can you imagine the mathematical possibilities?

Cracks about threesomes with 16-year-old twins would be career-ending in 2025 (unless your name is Donald J. Trump or, God help us, Matt Gaetz), but to return to A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy: Given the weekend guest list and the magical country setting, can you imagine the mathematical possibilities for frivolously frothy, romantic hide-and-seek and three-cornered mating games? Woody could.

Ariel (you Bardolaters will twig to the name of the spirit bound to serve the magician Prospero in The Tempest) and Andrew are both haunted by their failure to act on a shared romantic impulse years ago, next to a babbling brook.

Maxwell has invited Dulcy for the weekend, planning to seduce her, and she’s on board with that. But upon meeting Ariel, he’s suddenly smitten with her instead.

Looking for a final fling before his imminent wedding, Leopold tells Dulcy that he had a dream about her in which he was taken with “great erotic fervour” … and so on and so forth. There’s more intrigue afoot but save your fork, duke. There’s pie.

With a side order of existentialism. A la mode de 1938.

In Nausea, Sartre’s first and arguably his best novel, protagonist Roquentin finds himself in a discussion with former lover Annie regarding her attempts to create “privileged situations” — those perfect romantic culminations that Erica Jong would memorably encapsulate in her 1973 novel Fear of Flying rather more graphically as the “zipless fuck.”

ROQUENTIN: The privileged situations?

ANNIE: The idea I had of them. They were situations which had a rare and precious quality, style, if you like. To be king, for example, when you are eight years old. Or to die. … I developed all that later on: first I added a new situation, love (I mean the act of love) …

ROQUENTIN: And the perfect moments? Where do they come in?

ANNIE: They came afterwards. First there are annunciatory signs. Then the privileged situation, slowly, majestically, comes into people’s lives. Then the question whether you want to make a perfect moment out of it.

ROQUENTIN: I understand. In each one of these privileged situations there are certain acts which have to be done, certain attitudes to be taken, words which must be said — and other attitudes, other words are strictly prohibited. Is that it? … In fact, it was a sort of work of art. …

ANNIE (irritated): You’ve already said that. No: it was ... a duty. You had to transform privileged situations into perfect moments. It was a moral question. Yes, you can laugh if you like: it was moral.

Work of art? Moral duty? Whatever that perfect romantic moment is, it’s way too easy to misread the “annunciatory signs.” To cock it up, Erica Jong might say.

And this is why after 50 years of mulling it over and groping in the wilderness, I’m still not sure why, unable to sleep, I keep returning to this banal light and large circle of shade through a campus clearing next to the quad. A resolution never did come out in the wash.

Is it simply a matter of everybody playing the fool, sometime? No exception to the rule?

“The idealization of lost love,” Harold Bloom writes in his much-reviled and much-loved book The Western Canon, “is an almost universal human praxis; what is remembered across the years is a lost possibility for the self, rather than of the other.”

I guess that’s what Sinclair Lewis was getting at in his 1922 novel Babbitt, whose eponymous lead character has entered my Merriam-Webster as a “person and especially a business or professional man who conforms unthinkingly to prevailing middle-class standards.”

Except when he doesn’t.

“For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but George Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth.”

Dunno about you, but on my nuits blanches, I’m back grooving in mysterious groves. Ever so gallantly. I been in the right trip, but I must have used the wrong car.

My head was in a bad place and I’m wondering what it’s good for.

I’ve been married for four decades now to a spectacular woman I love love love love love, and have been blessed with fabulous children and grandchildren, great friends, decent health and just enough wealth to enjoy a carefree retirement.  We have enjoyed perfect romantic moments aplenty. Every day. Still do.

So why the entrenched pathetic yearning, when my guard is down, for something so will-o’-the wispishly adolescent and fatuous?

Cheap answer: Because I am a man. And man — zut alors, might as well drag Sartre into this one last time — “is a useless passion.”

At least I know I’m not alone in this. Bitter experience has taught us all that romantic opportunities, once lost, can never be recaptured. And yet. Isn’t it pretty to not think so?

There are two ways to read one of poet William Blake’s most perspicacious maxims. You know the one: “Sooner murder an infant in the cradle than nurse unacted desires.”

You can read that as a licence to do whatever you want, and many do. I just finished rereading Alan Watts’s autobiography, In My Own Way, and was struck by how a contemplative man as wise and prescient as he was could have his head so far up his ass with respect to his treatment of wives, lovers, children and grandchildren.

He twists his refined “epicureanism” into egocentric Möbius strips to persuade himself that joyful adultery is a spiritual exercise and that to act selfishly in sexual matters is the most unselfish thing you can do.

But as an astute friend pointed out to me the other day, another way to read Blake’s admonition is as a warning against “nursing” unfulfilled desires. We’re all burdened by the little id bastards. But that doesn’t mean you have to mollycoddle them in the middle of the sleepless night over a bottle of banished Kentucky bourbon.

And so I sought to wrestle back the remote.

Purely in pursuit of delivering compelling confessional journalism, I did, inevitably, become one of those people who should have known better than to contact a former crush. The girl from the other side of the basket, our unwashed clothes tumbling together in an orgy of wild abandon.

Who remembered me warmly but warily. (Less warily than her husband, if I’m being journalistically thorough.)

Who appears to have absolutely no memory of our foiled rendez-fou with Destiny. Or at least with Tide Pods.

Who now sends me Grumpy Cat videos.

Turns out there is no surer way to keep sleeping dogs lying than by sending Grumpy Cat videos. Also turns out there are quite a lot of them.

What tortures me now at 3 a.m. is the thought that I spent half a century drowning in the eyes not of a mystical fairy child but of Garfield. No wonder I hate Mondays.

Could have been worse, of course. It always can be.

She might think that I’ve forgotten her. Don’t tell her it isn’t so.

But I’m working on it. Anyone see the remote?

In A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, committed empiricist Leopold — who opened the movie derisively discounting the possibility of “ghosts, little spirits or pixies” — is transformed into an ecstatic, disembodied ball of psychic energy after suffering a fatal health crisis while achieving the one perfect moment of his life with Dulcy.

After her scream summons all the other characters, she explains:

We were making love. He was like an animal, he tore off my robe. He was wonderful. We did it all, violently like two savages and he was screaming with pleasure. At the highest moment of ecstasy, he just keeled over with that smile on his face.

Later on as the crowd thinned out, I’s just about to do the same.

Such a night. Such a night.

Sweet confusion under the moonlight.