Something is missing

and has been for a a very long time.  It’s different for each of us, I know. I finally figured it out watching Rome Adventure. If you live in the country or simply love your cat and your laundry then you’ve got all you need; and you are blissfully happy in lock down. There are others though, like me, who are profoundly unhappy, which brings me back to many years ago. The turning point was, as I remember A Summer Place, a 1959 movie vehicle for Troy Donahue — I saw it in the 60s. Troy Donahue is now a trigger mechanism for me; at the time I didn’t know what was going on. All I knew was that when I saw A Summer Place something happened. It was partially the music (Max Steiner -- the best) —but when the movie was over I didn’t want it to be, and I plunged into what started as deep depression, but soon became paralysing anxiety. I wanted to be inside the movie (as silly as it sounds now) with Troy Donahue and Sandra Dee, and the fact that the movie was over and I couldn’t return to that world (they didn’t have videos back then) was huge. The only answer was not to think about A Summer Place ever again. But what was missing in my life, exactly? At the time I thought it was fun and romance and sun and bathing suits and the beach (I was raised near the ocean). But watching Rome Adventure I realised what I was missing was Troy Donahue. I make no apology for being obsessed with him. Sure, there is his slim figure, his wind swept blonde hair, his startlingly blue eyes (enhanced by technicolor, surely?), the lips, the smile, but there is also his voice —  there is something vulnerable about it (I swear). These movies were made for teenage girls but I had never been one; my ‘girlhood’ had been cruelly ripped away from me. That's what I missed so badly. (You miss something you’ve never had much more than something you have.) COVID- 19 has taken all that away for a second time. My old friend Nick used to talk about the rush of emotion he had when mounting the stairs to a gay bar -- the expectation and anticipation. Nick was such a walking fantasy of a boy.  He could pick up a man at the variety store — so for him, a gay bar meant instant attention. I was never that adored -- but nevertheless, for me a gay bar is plunging into an environment where what matters to me matters to everyone else. This means that I matter. When I walk into a ‘straight’ room what I desire most of all is scorned — if not considered repulsive — by everyone there, when I enter a gay bar I know that everyone wants what I want, even if they don’t want it with me. And there is also even the remotest possibility that I might become the centre of someone’s attention. That’s all I want, and why I would rather be desired than desire -- especially now as I get older.  I enjoy looking, but I am as cold as ice with anyone who doesn’t desire me, and if someone really wants me I lose control. This is something that in lock down I no longer experience,  it’s been taken away from me. I know it doesn’t matter to you, I have to assume that even if you’ve read this far, it’s only because you pity me, or find it bizarre that I can’t be happy with my cat and my laundry. It was only right that during this lock down that never ends Troy Donahue would lure me back  through Roman Adventure. It’s a piece of crap really; they wanted Natalie Wood -- they could only get Suzanne Pleshette, so they made her up like Natalie Wood. All this is ironic because Pleshette is a better actress — there’s nothing wrong with her -- especially in a movie like this. She’s light and real and smart and naturally funny — all things that Natalie Wood never could be. The film opens up with Pleshette standing before a tribunal of stuffy old female teachers at a stuffy girl's school. They are firing her for putting a scandalous novel on the reading list. Interesting that such a situation was not only plausible in 1962,  but such situations are happening all over at universities today. Pleshette defends the book as a lesson in pleasure and it seems like this is going to be a feminist movie. The way she announces her upcoming trip to Rome we imagine she is going there to have — no take — pleasure. She arrives at a pensione, meets Troy Donahue and falls in love. Most of the movie is taken up with him taking her on a tour of Italy My favourite part is when they visit a medieval church and Troy explains to the wide-eyed Pleshette that the reason for the paintings and sculptures and murals was to teach those who were illiterate about the Bible. Pleshette's morals are annoying impeccable --  of course she will not sleep with him, she is even concerned about the propriety of the fact that they stay in adjacent hotel rooms even though they never sleep in the same bed. One day she returns from church and he picks her up on his Vespa, and she asks him why men don’t go to church, and he explains that men 'feel things differently' than women do. (I remember this from my childhood —that fathers did not go to church, mothers did.) The movie proves not to be feminist but misogynist — the lesson Pleshette learns (the movie is based on a novel called Lovers Must Learn by Irving Fineman) “Woman's most important function in life is to anchor men, turn them into the responsible civilised creators they were meant to be.” Yulch. What draws me to Rome Adventure ( besides the moment when Angie Dickinson announces how much fun it is to make love to 'The Stars and Stripes Forever' --that's worth the whole thing) is the image of Pleshette hopping on that Vespa and wrapping her arms around Troy Donahue’s middle. At one point in the movie a naive young American woman  comments on this typically ‘Italian’ practice, saying that she’s always wanted to wrap her arms around a man while sitting behind him on a Vespa. That’s what I want, essentially -- and what I miss, what I never had. Me wrapping my arms around him, and then he takes off, and we sleep in a chateau -- where every room has a view -- and I  am eternally the centre of attention simply because I do not sleep with him, but he does kiss me, endlessly and dreamily, and I sink into his bottomless blue eyes. I know it seems unfair of me to accuse COVID-19 of doing away with all that. Perhaps then, I am imagining this longing. Perhaps then I’ve always imagined it. Yes, that must be it.