Notes On Dogger At Forty

Dogger Gatsby was nearly forty that year--ten years before his death--so much too much in the middle of life that he often felt he couldn't judge any woman's age or beauty any more. Some women ten to twenty years younger seemed about to become attractive and some women ten to twenty years older seemed still attractive, and in-between it was almost impossible to find someone unmarried near his own age who wasn't either brain-dead or--something. The eighteen to twenty-year-olds coeds were certainly sleek and attractive, like young animals, but most of them seemed so witless to him. Not that the old dog was any more attractive to them! Their beauty, he thought, was little more than the glow of youth in their flesh. They were like Jell-O that hadn't gelled, too unformed and too uninformed to ever be really attractive to him. They weren't Keepers! God knows what they thought, if they could think, of him. Not much, he presumed. Some of the older women could stand to take him as a lover and to talk to, but most were far too stable in themselves to become in any way addicted to him. He wasn’t exactly a keeper, either. It was his fault. It was always his fault.

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