The Ages of Women by Kathleen McClain
“She must have been very beautiful when she was young,” visitors to Exeter Manor would say.
Clarisse’s hair had been as black and glossy as a starling’s wing, her skin as white as the finest linen, her eyes so violet they made a man’s soul quake.
She took her first lover when she was fifteen, he a student at the music conservatory. She accepted as her due his adoration of her body and reveled in the pleasure of their love-making.
She took many lovers before she married at twenty-four—her husband thinking he’d captured Venus. She loved him, after her fashion.
She was still beautiful at thirty. She had started taking lovers again by then.
At thirty-five, she had a surgeon do her chin, her neck, her eyes. Still, she found fewer handsome young men to excite, adore and pleasure her.
At forty, more surgery, still fewer men to choose among.
At fifty, she paid her first male escort, charging it on her husband’s credit card. Some of her paid companions played the role of supplicant well. Many did not.
At sixty, she had fallen to taking lovers who were not so young. Her husband had died by then.
At seventy, Clarisse could no longer find a lover who met her standards. She started using sex toys which she hid from the facility’s staff. But, she missed the light of lust and pleasure in a man’s eyes, so she let the man across the hall watch her at her play.
She also enjoyed sitting in Exeter Manor’s spacious lounge and reading erotic romance novels. But, then she started to become confused, thinking the stories were about herself.
When the mortuary staff prepared Clarisse for her viewing, the cosmetician said, “She must have been very beautiful when she was young.”
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About the Author
Kathleen McClain
Born: Pennsylvania, USA
Now Resides: Raleigh, NC, USA
Bio: I published a lot as a sociologist and epidemiologist. Then in 2006 I became visually impaired. Writing fiction and memoir (using software for the blind) allows me to say a lot of things left unsaid in my life and a chance to use words to express my view of the world in a way that’s very different from that of Kathleen, the scientist. I’m working on a novel, flash and short stories. I’ve published in the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature and The Shine Journal. I live with my husband and the ghosts of our beloved dead dogs.
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image by NightAngel92.
