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The prose-poetry of the everyday speech can also enthrall. Desmond MacCarthy, a minor member of the 1920s Bloomsbury group, was “tongue-enchanted,” his talk flowing like free verse. Known as the “delectable Desmond,” he spoke in a “stroking, meandering voice,” with the flair of a “troubadour.” He accomplished little as a writer (only four essay collections), but Virginia Woolf thought him “the most gifted” of them all. Her female contemporaries went further: to them, he was an entrancer.

He wasn’t loved for his looks. He had “smallish genitals,” missing teeth, and the face of a “bald, battered Roman emperor.” Yet one woman after another succumbed to his incandescent conversation. He liked “the company of pretty women” and easily seduced them—notably the glamorous chatelaine of a Greek Island, and the litterateur, Mollie Warre-Cornish, whom he married in 1906.

Monogamy, however, proved difficult. Admirers hovered around. The charismatic Lady Cynthia Asquith, one of his “distractions,” said that talking to him was like “dancing on a floor hung with chains.” Unable to part with him, his wife endured his romantic capers for decades. Then at age forty MacCarthy met American artist Betsy Reyneau, and his marriage collapsed. MacCarthy’s and Reyneau’s passionate affair lasted twenty years, sustained in part by his lyrical letters. When she moved to New York during World War II, he wrote, Let’s imagine we’re in a Manhattan restaurant, surrounded by “bewildered people” who can’t conceive why we see “a world of delight in each other.” “Absurd?” he asked. “Not from the inside.”

WHITHER SEDUCTIVE CONVERSATION?
Cultural critics fear the art has nearly vanished with the onslaught of i-communication and passive entertainment. We’re living in a postverbal age of wordless love. The typical romantic couple in movies, writes film critic David Denby, is now boringly “inarticulate.” Reality shows stream with nonversation and birdbrain banter between the sexes. Little wonder. Men no longer have to verbally court women in a world of the “seven-minute seduction,” sexts, and mute hookups. Amid this impasse, relationship coaches flog “communication”—dull dialogues in mutual comprehension—but ignore artful, sexy conversation.

Amorous conversation, though, is the left ventricle of desire. It pumps and preserves passion and keeps the blood up. Romantic love is never a sure thing and needs life support. Good talk—an unspoken/spoken erotic duet—soothes, charms, delights, informs, and thrills. Robert Louis Stevenson thought men and women should converse “like rival mesmerists.” Be a “talkable man,” he urged—summon drama, “giddy and inspiring” words, and transport her to “new worlds of thought.” In the film
Sade
, the marquis is more direct. Advising a greenhorn suitor, he says, “Talk to her first. Women grow randy through the ear.” Only the fluent deserve the fair.

CHAPTER 6

Torching Up Love

–

[Without art] none of Medea’s herbs can keep a passion from dying.

—O
VID
,
The Art of Love

S
am is a magnate who runs a retail conglomerate and can have his pick of ladies. He’s fetching to women, and still handsome at fifty-five: short and svelte, with a thick shock of black hair and elfin eyes in a rugged Mediterranean face. Tonight I’m his guest at a charity gala, seated beside him and across from his wife, Lynn. They exchange a “private joke” look, and Lynn, an un-Botoxed blonde in plain black velvet, winks back.

Over the appetizer, I ask Sam about them: “Tell me your secret. You and Lynn seem to be so—like this!—after what? Thirty years.”

Sam puts down his spoon, glances at Lynn, and talks almost nonstop through dinner. “My only advice to my son, Josh,” he begins, “was ‘marry a woman who wakes up happy, and if she doesn’t, it’s your responsibility to make sure she does.’ ”

“How so?”

“Well, first,” he says, lowering his voice a notch, “you’ve got to reliably—reliably—take a woman to a place she’s never been before. Also, I like to give her little surprises, like the Key West Fantasy Fest trip last year.”

“But there must be more,” I prod. “Staying excited by each other is pretty rare.”

“Yes, well!” He flings an arm over the back of my chair. “We share a lot of interests. We laugh. Then there’s this other thing: she’s a lawyer, you know, an old school feminist, and holds her own. We tussle over stuff. Plus, now this is strange: I’m a ‘glass half full’ person, extroverted, and Lynn’s the reverse—a mystery woman in some ways—and that’s challenging, interesting. Besides we’re not the rest-easy type—always on the move. Right now, I’ve gotten interested in the Silk Road; long story short, learning Mandarin. Lynn’s off on Roman history.”

He swivels suddenly. Lynn is giving him the “less talk, please” eye. He blows her a kiss, shrugs, and says, as he turns back to his chocolate bombe, “It’s courtship every day! You have to keep it going.”

Almost any man can make a woman fall in love with him; the hard part is retaining it. The odds aren’t favorable. Romantic love—much as we like to believe otherwise—is fickle, unstable, and highly degradable. After the first euphoric rush, desire declines, eroding over time into quiet companionate love at best, boredom at worst. Under these circumstances, women may become even more restive than men. They burn out faster in relationships, initiate 60 percent of breakups, and according to some theorists, are more inclined to stray. Since the dawn of history, lovers have dreamed of stemming this tide and preserving the first passion.

Scientists have discovered a tiny group of couples, like Lynn and Sam, who’ve managed to hold the glow. When psychologists viewed their brains with an fMRI scanner, they found the same payoff in the reward circuitry that new lovers experience, along with extra activity in the attachment and pair-bonding centers. But, cautions neuroscientist Stephanie Ortigue, these studies tell us only so much; the understanding of long-lived love is still “frustratingly elusive.” Scientifically speaking, we seem no more enlightened than the ancient Hindu
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
, which attributed enduring passion to “bewitchment techniques.”

There is, however, a long philosophic tradition devoted to the maintenance of desire. “The art of love,” instructs Havelock Ellis, “is even more the art of retaining love than of arousing it,” and he cites dozens of works since antiquity on the subject. As he and others underscore, this is advanced seduction. It requires dedication and creativity and the entire gamut of erotic spells, from charisma and character to physical and psychological lures. Women must do their part, of course, but men bear the chief responsibility. They’re obligated, stress amorists, to take the initiative and invest more “mating effort” to keep love alive.

Great lovers are perpetual suitors. Instead of settling back after the “catch,” they intensify courtship. As the drift to ennui impinges, they scale up praise, humor, great sex, and conversation and raise the soothe quotient with intimacy and shared interests. They keep erotic tension humming. Passionate love is a charged dynamic—nothing inert about it—that demands an experienced hand at the controls, an artist who maintains a sexy flux of calm and rapture, habit and novelty, presence and absence, pleasure and pain, intimacy and mystery, concord and discord, yes and no. Ladies’ men don’t do dull. They combine accelerated love charms with an alternating buzz of opposites and infinitely faceted personalities. They lead a dance, to
that
woman’s tune, as if the music never ended.

Fun/Festivity

How much fun are you to live with?

—D
R
. P
HIL

Every morning when Gustin steps out of his “Top Transport” Town Car, the cabbies at the Darien, Connecticut, train station say, “Here comes Hollywood.” It’s easy to see why. With his close-cropped white hair, pencil mustache, starched white camp shirt, and leonine carriage, he looks like a middle-aged Creole version of Errol Flynn. “These guys,” he chuckles (some of whom work for his car service), “can’t understand how come I’m an old man and I can get women.” He understates the case; Gustin is a love rocket. Amicably separated from his wife, he has more female adulation at sixty-seven than he knows what to do with: a live-in girlfriend of three years, a devotee who calls daily from the Caribbean, and comely singles in bars and nightclubs.

One hot June morning, he invites me into his parked Lincoln, turns on the AC, and tries to explain his “certain something” with women. “I’m from Trinidad,” he says in his silky island upspeak. “God didn’t give us money, but he gave us happiness.” That, he thinks, is the key to it all, besides “class,” “character, of course,” and “supergood sex.” “You see,” he says, “you have to get a woman to feel relaxed, and the way to do it? Laughter, laughter, laughter. If I quarrel with my lady it always ends in laughter, and we hug each other up.”

Gustin also swears by festivity. “In Trinidad we party
all
year. You have a good time, the blood starts flowing, the music puts a rhythm into your body.” And the women can let go and get their wild on. He met his wife that way, seduced others, and once incensed a husband so much at Carnival that he can’t go home again. “He says he’ll kill me whenever I come back.”

In the meantime, he’s living to the hilt. The last time he went to the dentist, he realized he’d slept with everyone in the office except the male doctor. “The women talk,” he figures, “they want to find out if it’s true—whether they’ll enjoy it too.” Rip-it-down joy: that’s his love mantra. As he drives off to pick up a passenger, he rolls down the window and throws me a thumbs-up: “Crank it!” he calls. “To life!”

Passion is fun-dependent; without play, gaiety, and carnival license, it fades to gray. Commitment conspires against us; custom and dailiness insidiously sap desire and induce ennui. Therapists, for that reason, tell couples to work on playfulness—kid around, take date nights, and vacations to holiday resorts. Howard Markman, a psychologist who runs a breakup-prevention program at the University of Denver, found that the amount of fun in a relationship predicted its success.

Fun, though, is easier said than done. A consumer-capitalist ethos of overwork and purchased, passive entertainment militates against celebration. There’s also an art to festivity. For fullest enjoyment, it’s episodic and alternates with everyday reality. (Imagine a year-round Mardi Gras.) And a flair for gaiety is crucial; eros is “addicted to play” and insists on unbound merriment, nonsense, song, and dance. Ladies’ men not only maintain a rhythm between carnival and the nine-to-five; they are masters of revels.

Homo festivus
has a special draw for women. The “Perfect Man,” writes Erica Jong,
must
have “a sense of playfulness.” This may be related to women’s tendency toward hypervigilance in desire (via the judgmental neocortex) and their current stress overload. In studies, women report significantly higher tension than men over the last five years, and cite stress as a major reason for disinterest in sex. Critic Laura Kipnis speculates that women often have affairs just to flee the sociocultural pressure and have some “fun.” Joyous revelry provides the perfect sex holiday for the mind: reward receptors light up, and opiate-like chemicals flow free.

Men who put fiesta into the love bond may strike an adaptive chord in the female libido. Besides disinhibition, joy, and emotional discharge, festivity gives women a read on a man. Playfulness, as psychologists Geoffrey Miller and Kay Redfield Jamison observe, is an excellent fitness indicator, denoting youth, creativity, flexibility, intelligence, optimism, and nonaggression. Prehistoric men were prone to violence toward stepchildren and refractory mates, and modern hotheads still can be. Shared frolic diffuses aggression and assures women they’re in safe company. Larking together is an “affinitive display” that binds a couple and creates a secure play space to unwind, goof, and celebrate.

Mythic archetypes may have left an imprint too. Sex gods were “liberators.” At their rites, early mankind imitated the deities and cut loose. They shed rules, rank, and prohibitions and mimed the prodigal exuberance of nature. The Sumerians threw a New Year’s free-for-all after the commemoration of the sacred marriage of fertility gods Dumuzi and Inanna; and in ancient Egypt, women waved images of genitals, talked dirty, and danced in the streets in honor of Osiris, the creative spirit. Dionysus was the “deliverer” and joy-bringer who released everything that had been penned up, and led women to wanton mountaintop revels.

Scholars of eros recommend “some fun” to keep passion fresh. The
K
ā
ma S
ū
tra
spends almost as much space on the arts of festivity as sexual positions, and Castiglione’s
Courtier
advises Renaissance lovers to supply “magnificent banquets” and gaiety for romantic success. Modern thinkers agree: Ethel Person, author of
Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters
, ranks playfulness and the delights of regression as a precondition for lasting desire, and British psychiatrist Adam Phillips suggests that “the cruelest thing one can do to one’s partner is to be good at fidelity but bad at celebration.”

If Charles Bovary and other dour husbands hadn’t dispensed this form of cruelty, we’d have fewer adultery novels. It’s Dr. Bovary’s tedious gravity that drives Emma up a wall and into the arms of the roué Rodolphe. Fittingly, Rodolphe seduces Emma at an agricultural fair where the carnival atmosphere suspends social constraints. “Why cry out against the passions?” coos Rodolphe. Let’s overturn “conventions of society.” As the judge announces the prize hog, Emma enlaces her fingers with Rodolphe’s.

Carol Edgarian’s novel
Three Stages of Amazement
updates the mirthless cuckold to the twenty-first century. Charlie Pepper, a driven surgeon and robotics entrepreneur, pursues a bicoastal career with such frenetic resolve that he forgets festivity and leaves his wife, Lena, to a dismal grind of freelance deadlines and child care. That is, until an old beau, the sportive Alessandro, resurfaces and lures her into an AWOL escapade. When the stunned Charlie confronts her, Lena replies, “You were good, smart. Steady. Loving. Kind,” but “we want to laugh. We want to laugh.”

Popular romances fantasize beyond flings with playmates. In these novels heroines demand committed partners who keep the party going. Colt Rafferty of Emily March’s
Hummingbird Lake
is more than a safety engineer with a PhD; he’s a celebrator, and just what the doctor ordered for traumatized pediatrician Sage Anderson. As they become a couple and marry, he teaches her how to play. He appears in jeans and a Santa suit, carrying a pillowcase filled with a Slinky, Silly Putty, and bottles of Napa wine, and barrels off with her at the finale on a Gold Wing motorcycle as she lets out a “joyous laugh.”

History has short-shrifted Roman politician and general Mark Antony; he’s viewed as Cleopatra’s puppet, a bungler, and “gigantic adolescent.” Antony, however, was a formidable public figure as well as a ladies’ man who sank deep hooks into women. His looks helped; he was tall, muscled, and heartbreak handsome, with a corona of thick curls and a “tunic tucked high on his rolling hips.” He was, besides, a seductive blend of a lord of misrule and a lord of the realm.

A born leader of men, Antony commanded brilliant campaigns and rose through the political ranks to become governor of the Eastern Roman Empire under the triumvirate after his defeat of Julius Caesar’s assassins. At the same time, he was an unapologetic party animal who traveled with a caravan of musicians, actors, and mountebanks and drank deep of hedonistic excess. He carried golden drinking cups before him in processions as though they were religious relics, and entered Ephesus as the new Dionysus, accompanied by bacchants, satyrs, and pans.

Women flung themselves at him. Besides mistresses, Antony had five wives, none of whom wearied of him. His third wife, Fulvia (who treasured his practical jokes), made war on his behalf, and after she died in the attempt, he married his rival’s sister, Octavia. She, too, remained fond of him, interceding with her brother and sending Antony troops, despite his defection to Cleopatra.