Sex and the senior citizen

While bar-hopping, Jane Juska explains to Salon's increasingly envious reporter why she's getting so much action and why old people don't need soul mates.

By Sheerly Avni

May 29, 2003 | It's late afternoon at the Redwood Room, the bar at Ian Schrager's swank and remodeled Clift Hotel, and Jane Juska, 70, newly famous author of "Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Love and Romance," is matter-of-factly explaining why she has no desire to try out online dating.

"I don't need to be sleeping with any more men right now," she says.

And how many men would that be, right now?

"Just three," she answers, demurely sipping her sauvignon blanc. Despite the calm posture, her eyebrows rise and her eyes widen when she repeats the number, as if to say, "Yeah, can you believe my luck?"

Of course, three men in your bed has nothing to do with luck. In Juska's case it's the end result of an ad she placed a little over three years ago in the New York Review of Books:

Before I turn 67 -- next March -- I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.

Within a few months of placing the ad, the life of Jane Juska, a divorced, formerly overweight, formerly alcoholic, retired schoolteacher living alone in a small cottage in Berkeley, Calif., was turned upside down. Those 32 words produced the tryst of a lifetime, and then another, and then another, and then a mostly inspiring personal memoir.

I say mostly inspiring, because though she certainly succeeds in meeting many men who know how to, er, talk Trollope, she falls for her fair share of chumps, skunks and pervs. As a young female reader, there were times when I wanted to chuck the book across the room in frustration, as Juska succumbed to the charms of scoundrel after scoundrel. There's the first man she sleeps with, an 84-year-old who makes off with both her born-again virginity and her underwear; a hot-and-cold curmudgeon named Robert, who blames her for his impotence; there's a fetishistic millionaire, who delights in grabbing her in corners and murmuring sweet nothings in public like "Touch it with your hand" and "Feel what you've done to me." I couldn't help wondering, shouldn't this woman be old enough to know better?

Before meeting Juska, I had imagined she would look decadent and glamorous, like Anne Bancroft's Miss Havisham, with a bit of Jeanne Moreau in "Dangerous Liaisons 1960," maybe even a dash of late Deneuve. If not glamorous, then I'd assumed she'd be ageless in a Cher sort of way, a hodgepodge of face-lifts and botox injections, salty and well-preserved, like a pickle.

But the woman who stands to greet me looks charming, intelligent, respectable. Not more than 5 feet tall, with a white-blond bob and bright blue eyes behind spectacles. My first thought is Mrs. Claus. No way Mrs. Claus gets more play than I do. She is wearing what in the book she calls her "stock first date uniform" -- a pair of black slacks and a long black sweater, cheerful cranberry red lipstick, and a matching red and white silk scarf around her neck.

Juska starts off by telling me about the recent changes in her life, since the publicity wheel for her book started spinning. She is holding in her hands a Nordstrom bag, because she has been shopping for a perfect dress, courtesy of her publicist, to wear on her upcoming trip to New York, complete with readings, press interviews and television appearances. "This is more money than I've ever spent on a dress!" she says, shaking her head and raising her eyebrows in a gesture that, rehearsed or not, is utterly charming and confident.

In fact, the woman before me seems much more confident than the woman in the book who worries about her weight, about having sex with the light on. She perches on the edge of her seat, eyes sharp behind the glasses, and takes in every detail around her -- oversize illuminated Klimts, restless-eyed stockbrokers from Duluth, the uncomfortably low couches, a hallmark of swank cocktail lounges. We order more wine. My plan is to get her drunk, or else to get myself drunk, so I can work up the nerve to ask her the questions that troubled me while reading the book. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to accuse a 70-year-old woman of being a doormat.

"When I first started dating, especially with Robert" (the book's most certifiable scumbag, and of course, the one who first broke Juska's heart), "I was still using my journal to cry into." But then, realizing she had some good material, she began taking notes on her adventures and bringing them to her writing workshop. When the episodes proved too steamy for the group, she decided to collect her stories into a memoir. One of her worst dates unknowingly gave her the juicy line she needed to kick it all off: "He asked me, 'Do you think you're a nymphomaniac?' and I thought, You're an asshole, but I got my first sentence. So I guess I owe him one."

Next Page: One of Juska's three current flames is less than half her age

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