The Older Woman:  Colette’s “Break of Day”

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Colette is my favorite 20th-century French novelist, a charming writer of novels about independent heroines in love. Her style is splendidly, subtly comical and sexy. Indeed, it is difficult to surpass her post-modern lyricism. While Virginia Woolf wrote manically gorgeous stream-of-consciousness in To the Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway, Colette expressed her characters’ thoughts and actions in in shorter,  more pointed sentences, lightly strewn with descriptions of gardens and fresh strawberries.

Colette’s women struggle in and against love. And perhaps we readers love these novels, because they do not tally with our own experience, nor with Colette’s, as she tells us repeatedly, and we are grateful for our own domesticity, though we like a brilliant love story. 

And what I’ve noticed during this rereading is that she is fascinated by the problems of older women in love with younger men.

In her two most famous novels, Cheri and The Last of Cheri (which are my least favorite, by the way), Lea, a 50-year-old courtesan, gently rejects her 25-year-old lover, Cheri,  realizing that she will not be able to conceal her aging much longer. Later, in a painful scene in the second book, Cheri visits her and is horrified by Lea’s aging, as she had predicted. 

This is what I call one of Colette’s Older Woman’s Conscience books.  And  Break of Day, her masterpiece, is another Older Woman’s Conscience novel.  The narrator, called simply Colette, exults in her life as a  woman in her fifties. She feels she can throw off her constraints and explore freedom from sex.   She strives to attain to her mother’s philosophical acceptance of nature, and to live mostly in the garden and with her animals.

 Perhaps this was  Colette’s fantasy, to live a completely independent  life, the  opposite of what  she knew, because she always had lovers or husbands.  She explains in Break of Day that though she calls the narrator Colette, the fictional character is not the same person as the writer.

Break of Day is part contemplation of aging, part epistolary novel, and part laudation of the joys of  living  alone.

Her life in a house by the sea is idyllic, except for one problem, her friendship with Vial, her 35-year-old neighbor.  He is in love with her, and she likes him very much, too, though she is determined not to get involved sexually. But her interactions with him are almost conjugal.  They are together all day, almost every day.

 We enjoy the scenes of Colette’s impish, enjoyable flirtation with him while she prepares chicken in sauce.  She enjoys the way he looks. She doesn’t mind his silence.

“Tie my apron for me, Vial.”

Later, she asks him to pour some oil for her,

“When I said ‘Stop!’  he cut short the thread of golden oil and and straightened himself, and I laid my hand caressingly for a moment on his chest, as one does with a horse. He looked at my hand, which proclaims my age – in fact it looks several years later – but I did not withdraw it.”

This is such a sexual scene.  It is impossible for the reader not to notice Colette’s flirtation: she offers her aged hand with the same confidence an older man might to a younger woman. Does she know what she’s doing, or is  it being French?  Does she like Vial more than she says?  She does.  But triangulation occurs when a young woman acclaims her love for Vial – to Colette, not Vial.

In real life, younger men often fell in love with Colette, and when she was 52 she fell in love with 35-year-old Maurice Goudeker, a Jewish man, who adored her.  They lived together for many years, married in 1935, and tried to lie low in the ’40s in Occupied France, but one day  he was dragged away to a French concentration camp. Colette managed to rescue him after six weeks, perhaps because she had never written about politics.  There is an Anything for Love vibe in Colette’s life.

The Art of Urban Sprawl: Peggy Guggenheim, Jackson Pollock, and Reading Too Much

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Query:  Where would we live if we had a choice? Not Midwest City 1, nor, we regret to say, even Midwest City 2.

Midwest City 2 was the more attractive of the two, celebrated for old-fashioned virtues, like a viable downtown, safe urban neighborhoods, and an excellent transit system. 

But things were changing in the early 21st century.  A huge mall was built on the edge of the city. The Chinese Tea Room closed. The department stores closed. Java Joe’s closed, The Breakfast Place and Arnie’s Pizzeria closed.  A special section in the newspaper was devoted to restaurant closings.

And that wasn’t the end:  deer began to move into the city.  When you see a herd of deer in the middle of the street you know something’s wrong with the ecology.

Sometimes, out of sheer idleness when I was new to the city, I went to the nearby art museum.  What I loved most was Jackson Pollock’s 1943 painting, Mural, which was on loan from the University of Iowa.

Mural was commissioned by Peggy Guggenheim, and it hung in Peggy’s entrance hall in her townhouse in New York.  She donated it to the university in 1951.  It was installed in the university’s new museum in 1969.

The more I thought about it, the more impressed I was by Peggy Guggenheim’s intervention in his career, sponsorship of his work, and her influence on critics, curators, and gallery owners.  Looking at Mural is dizzying but also oddly calming:  the colors and patterns are perfectly intermeshed and one sees faces and animals, as well as other abstract figures. It is enormous: almost 20 feet in length and eight feet high. 

Pollock, known for his abstract expressionism, later developed his “drip style,” splattering paint or pouring it directly from the can on the horizontal canvas.  

A FEW WORDS ABOUT READING IN THE EARLY 2000s

When we first moved here I spent a lot of time – so much time – reading.  I complained to my doctor during the annual checkup:  “I’ve already read 100 books this year.  Don’t you think that’s strange?” By strange, of course, I meant pathetic. 

His reply: “The only strange thing is that you write it down.”

I laughed. Memo to Self: Give Dr. a book!

Creative Writing:  Short Stories to Be Adapted from Rock Songs

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I have discovered by listening to Carly Simon that songs conceal short stories.  Years ago, I absent-mindedly listened to Carly Simon and other singers on the booth jukeboxes.  I would put a quarter in the slot, or approach a Wurlitzer with its charming lights, and before you knew it Carly Simon would be singing “You’re So Vain” or “That’s the Way We Always Heard It Should Be.”

Both of these songs seem particularly to apply to women’s lives, and are worthy of a short story based on them.  They are written from a woman’s point of view:  in “You’re so Vain,” the narrator, a vain man’s former girlfriend, sings about him:  he is a rich, overly-confident man, a former lover who dumped her abruptly, and went on to have many women.

You walked into the party
Like you were walking’ onto a yacht
Your hat strategically dipped below one eye
Your scarf it was apricot
You had one eye in the mirror

All the girls want to be his partner:  the woman remembers cynically his promises to her that he would never leave her.  It doesn’t hurt much anymore:  it was his leaving so long ago that hurt.

And of course he has had many women since, and treated most badly.

Simon sings,

… when you’re not [where you should be], you’re with
Some underworld spy or the wife of a close friend

This is my addendum to fans of “You’re So Vain””:   someday you will roll your eyes over the break-up, and sing along with Carly Simon.

***********************************************

The second song, “That’s the Way We Always Heard It Should Be,” is poignant, grave, and a bit numbing. A woman’s lover insists they should move in together and get married.

But Carly Simon’s narrator remembers her parents’ marriage, and how far the two grew apart over the years.  Her father sat “with his cigarette in the dark,” and her mother sat in a separate room. The narrator “tiptoe(s) past the master bedroom where/ My mother reads her magazines

The narrator tries to argue her case against marriage.

She sings,

You say that we can keep our love alive
Babe, all I know is what I see
The couples cling and claw
And drown in love’s debris

And here is finally her chorus of reluctance and denial:

Well okay, it’s time we moved in together
And raised a family of our own, you and me
Well, that’s the way I’ve always heard it should be
You want to marry me
We’ll marry (Marry)

We don’t know what will happen, but we suppose it will be a marriage not unlike those she describes. But pray for the future! Optimism lives.

Isn’t There a Herald?  Bit Parts in “The Medea”

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“So you want me to be the herald?”  I asked my friend Lou when he called.

“It’s a messenger, Kat!  A messenger!”

“How many lines does this messenger have?”

“Off the top of my head, not many.”

“But exactly?”

“Well, there’s another thing.”

“I’m not doing the chorus,” I said, shuddering.  The chorus has a million lines, so DO NOT AGREE TO BE THE CHORUS.  I had already looked over my copy of The Medea.  The chorus has the kind of lines that make me very nervous.  I heard a shriek that is laden with sorrow/ Shrilling out her hard grief she cries out/ Upon him who betrayed both her bed and her marriage. 

“Well, if you read a few pages of the chorus, someone else will finish it,” said Lou.

“Is that Griselda?”

This whole play-reading thing was fun until Griselda got involved. I never aspired to go on the stage, but I did not expect to read plays with a homeless prima donna.  That being understood, I agreed to read aloud bit parts of plays at Lou’s monthly reading club.  Reading aloud, mind you, is not acting.  And you know, I’m usually the herald, so I don’t need talent.  But this time it was a PUBLIC reading.  I was doing it for Lou; I have a soft spot for him.

He sighed when I mentioned Griselda.  “That was an accident last time, you know.”

Needless to say, I was not a fan of someone who threw a vase at my head. “Sorry, I’m not reading with Griselda.”

“How about Creon?” he wheedled.

“Oh, no. That’s a starring role as far as I’m concerned. Sorry.”

The Medea is a great tragedy, and Griselda, too, had a tragic story, in that she was mad, cuckoo, out of her mind, and kicked out of the group home for drug addicts. She’d majored in theater, played Puck in a college production of A Midsummer’s Dream, and was afterwards very, very, very, very disappointed with life.

At the moment she sewed costumes for a small local Shakespeare summer theater, which happened to be run by  my friend, D, who happened to live by the river, and who happened to save Griselda from the homeless camp on the riverbank.  He allowed her to live in his basement, but she was not allowed in the rest of his house. D was a saint, but Griselda broke things and stole things. He made a deal with the owner of the consignment store, that if Griselda brought in anything at all, one of them would call him up, and he’d “buy” it back.

In the end, of course, I agreed to everything Lou wanted. He was fun, he was a great organizer, and everybody loved him. So I agreed to be the messenger!  I was the tutor! I was Creon!  And I was the chorus for a few pages, and then would be relieved by someone (probably Lou himself).

“Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” he said.

“Namaste, ” I said cheerfully and inappropriately.

Well, I was a bit sick to my stomach because I was more a cozy reader than a public reader. Why had I agreed to read so many parts? Lou is persuasive… and charming. But it’s the kind of thing that puts me off theater – reading so many bit parts that you end up the star.

On the Trail:  My Sneakers & A Nature Walk

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I meant to be quiet on our nature walks.  A walk in the woods should be a meditation, I think.  At least, that’s what I decided today, though it is not my nature to be silent. As I walk I muse on the slogan on my shirt, Arma virumque cano…, “Of arms and the man I sing…” which is the opening of Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid. I try to think of other slogans.

We chat about the acorns and the walnuts – we almost tripped on the walnuts, as usual.  Then we see a strange animal, and wonder if it is a beaver, though it may have been a badger. 

It is fairly quiet, though it it is not a wild park.   It is an urban park, and in summer it is crowded with picnickers, fisherman, and people sprawling by the lake. There are slim trees, scraggy trails, and a paved trail, which we have chosen because it has rained for two weeks, and there’s mud everywhere.

Here’s what I’ve learned about hiking shoes: sneakers are the perfect footwear for almost every occasion. My white sneakers are for the the HD opera and art museums; my black sneakers are for the woods and the rainy days. 

Today I mixed my shoes up, and my white sneakers will never be pristine again. The  black sneakers  don’t show the mud, because they are already crusted with mud, so what’s a little more mud?  “Here’s mud in your eye!” says Hazel in Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde.” This is how Hazel toasts the cleaning lady after she is resurrected from suicide.

What did I see in nature today?   Dozens of monarch butterflies, which are now an endangered species, with their flight patterns disturbed by climate change, so I am thrilled to see them, ghosts from the past, from a time when scientists warned us about climate change, before it had dried up rivers and caused never-ending wildfires. .

We also saw a hawk – there’s always a hawk – they soar, they swoop, they’re beautiful from a distance, but I don’t like the look of them close up.  There were geese on the lake – there are always  geese. And there was a goldfinch, and a Great Horned owl.

At the end of the walk, which came much too soon, I told my Other Half the plot of Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, because he had never heard of this masterpiece.  I said off the top of my head that the psychedelic scene is Hesse-esque.” Why did I say this? There’s an academic article lurking in there.

And then we are peaceful and silent on the way home.

Dorothy Parker’s “Big Blonde”: Are We Having Fun?

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Dorothy Parker’s long short story, “Big Blonde,” is a masterpiece worthy of Chekhov. if he had written long stories about suicidal big blondes. Parker takes a certain type, a large, attractive, high-breasted blonde, and analyzes the disastrous trajectory of her life.

 In her twenties, Hazel Morse has fun at bars and clubs. She works as a model at a wholesale store, and at night she goes out with men, many men, and gets drunk, and believes being loved by many men is desirable.  

Parker writes, “Men liked you because you were fun, and when they liked you, they took you out, and there you were. So, and successfully, she was fun.  She was a good sport. Men liked a good sport.”

The “good sport” detail is horrifying because you know she won’t be able to keep it up.  And, indeed she can’t: she has a sort of breakdown after she marries the salesman, Herbie Morse, and cries and drinks a lot instead of being a good sport. 

Hazel had been afraid not to get married. She became more and more anxious after “a couple of thousand evenings of being a good sport among her male acquaintances.”  And she isn’t as pretty as she used to be: her blonde hair is turning dark, and she is worried about keeping her job as a model.  But marriage is not the solution:  she spends her days crying after the wedding.

Hazel is not a woman of Dorothy Parker’s type, yet Parker intuits the feelings of this lower-class uneducated woman. Hazel’s husband leaves her when she turns out not to be as much fun as he thought she’d be.  Then a succession of different men “keep” her when she is in her thirties, but all leave when they discover she is not fun.

In many ways this is a story about suicide.  Everything leads up to Hazel’s attempt.  Hazel is perfectly sensible and well-organized when she goes to New Jersey to stock up on Veronal, a sleeping drug, which you needed a prescription for in New York.  She goes from drugstore to drugstore, buying bottles and bottles of the drug.  She is cool-headed,and unafraid.  She doesn’t want to be fun anymore.

I am reminded of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, but Lily’s problems are less urgent than Hazel’s.  Lily feels that she’s at the end of her rope because she can’t find anyone rich to marry, so she overdoses on Veronal. But Hazel really is at the end of her rope, because she has no job skills, and men don’t like the real Hazel, and she has no choice but to go from man to man.  Hazel has no fear or regrets when she swallows all the pills. Her casual attitude is astonishing, but presumably Parker, who made four sucide attempts, knows the territory.

But the thing about suicide is that it doesn’t always work out.  In Parker’s poem about suicide, “Resume,” she ends with the phrase, “You might as well live.”  This is more or less what Hazel thinks, with a hysterical humor, when she is saved by the cleaning woman.  One of the first things Hazel does is send the cleaning woman to buy her a bottle of booze. “Oh, please, let her be able to get drunk, pleas keep her always drunk.”

How tragic it is that being “fun” is the measure of success.  One wonders, What IS fun?  How much fun is fun exactly? And perhaps if Hazel had looked that fact in the face, that “fun” of the kind she enjoyed in her 2os isn’t necessarily fun forever, she could have survived more happily. But how could she have supported herself? What happens next? There’s the question.

Despite her success in work and her reputation as a wit sy the Algonquin Round Table, Parker was an alcoholic and struggled with depression..

Her portrait of a “big blonde” is superb and tragic. It is a working-class woman’s tragedy, which I thought about deeply before I could absorb it.

Reading the “Iliad” or Watching Sports?

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Here’s what you need to know.

A guy insists he is your friend.  Of course he is!  Who wouldn’t be?  That’s the reaction of any woman with self-esteem.

I mean, you didn’t invite him to your house, but so what? Men have nothing better to do, so they just hang out for months and confide in you about their girlfriend, or their boyfriend, and watch a lot of sports.

Is it baseball season, or is it basketball season?  It seems to be both simultaneously.

And so you retreat to your room to read Homer, and you have some “men’s” and “de’s” to take care of.

When they get too loud, you open the door and say, with a wildly irritated smile, “Guys, you wouldn’t be yelling if you had enough sex.”

And then they hoot and ask you if you’re having enough sex.  “I am or I wouldn’t be reading the Iliad..”

This cracks them up.  “The Iliad? Or is it the Iliddad?

Okay, one of my friends shows me his copy of Naked Lunch to prove he’s reading. I gave it to him, because I do not like Burroughs, and now he always brings it over so he can mockingly show me his progress.  He’s on page 10, he claims.

“Hey, fickle woman! Why does he get Naked Lunch and I get Pride and Prejudice?”

“I already told you:  I had six copies of Pride and Prejudice.“

Well, the others have no books to show me, which is a shame because you’re sure you gave William Faulkner’s Snopes books to one of them, and he told you about the scene where mentally-challenged boy had sex with a cow. If you had remembered that, you would never have given it to him. THESE GUYS! 

And so you meekly go back to your room to read the Iliad. Yes, you’re going to a schoolmarmish event soon, a lecture on the Iliad.  What could be more fun for a schoolmarm? Except sex, of course…

Dorothy Parker’s “The Last Tea” & “Here We Are”

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I was laughing sadly over Dorothy Parker’s short stories as I tore through The Portable Dorothy Parker this afternoon. This Penguin Deluxe paperback is so beautifully -designed that you’ll want to read the cover as well. On the back cover flap there is a brief comic book biography of Parker. .

Although I don’t identify with Parker’s women, I empathize with them. They are affectionate and frustrated and eager to have relationships with men but are often paired with insensitive men.

There is a common trope in many of these stories: a man’s praise of another woman’s looks is an irritant to the woman he is dating. In “The Last Tea,” the woman responds by demonizing the woman he admires and ends up making up details about her own dating life. She claims there is a man who calls her 100 times a day to tell her she’s beautiful.

The man, identified only as “the young man in the chocolate-brown suit,” is forty minutes late for their date.  The woman sweetly declares she just got here herself, though of course she has been waiting… and waiting.   Dorothy Parker’s heroines do a lot of waiting.

He is not interested in amusing her. Instead he enthuses about a knockout of a woman he just met.

“Name’s Carol McCall.  Say, why haven’t I been told about her before?  That’s what I call a girl.  What a looker she is!”

“Oh, really?” she said.  “That’s funny – I never heard of any one that thought that.  I’ve heard people say that she was sort of nice-looking, if she wouldn’t make up so much.  But I never heard of anyone that thought she was pretty.”

“Pretty is right,” he said. “What a couple of eyes she has on her!”

“Really?”  she said.  “I never noticed them particularly.  But I haven’t seen her for a long time – sometimes people change or something.”

It is painful to read.

Well,nothing that terrible happened to me in my long-ago dating days, but I did go out with a man who kept raving about a friend’s beautiful voice. I thought it was likely that “beautiful voice” was code for “big-breasted “(N.B. I had read Nora Ephron’s essay, “A Few Words about Breasts.”)

Dorothy Parker’s heroines are not as assertive as women of the 21st century, but they certainly don’t take insults lying down. In another story, “Here We Are,” a young couple have just gotten married. On the train, the man praises a bridesmaid’s appearance. He says, “[When] I saw those two bridesmaids, I thought to myself, I thought, ‘Well, I never knew Louise could look like that.’ Why, she’d have knocked anybody’s eye out.”

The bride’s response, as you might expect, is chilly. 

“Oh, really?”  she asked.  “Funny.  Of course, everybody thought her dress and hat were lovely, but a lot of people seemed to think she looked sort of tired. People have been saying that a lot, lately.  I tell them I think it’s awfully mean of them to go around saying that around her. I tell them they’ve got to remember that Louise isn’t so terribly young any more, and they’ve got to expect her to look like that. Louise can say she’s twenty-three all she wants to, but she’s a good deal nearer twenty-seven.”

I love Dorothy Parker’s plucky women, and their humorous responses to their thoughtless men. The difference between the sexes may seem exaggerated, but there are, presumably, still women who sit by the phone waiting for him to call, like the heroine of “The Phone Call.” Saddest of all is the heroine of “The Lovely Leave,” whose husband comes home on a 24-hour leave from the army, only to learn that he must report back in a few hours. Instead of chatting to his wife, or having sex with her, as she had expected, he takes a bath and polishes his buttons.

That’s the kind of world Parker’s women live in.

Reading Dorothy Parker in the 21st Century: Five Poems

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First, let me tell you that Dorothy Parker’s poems and prose do not date.  They’re still fresh, witty, and broken-hearted. She knows who women are.  She knows that we all experience disillusion at one time or other.  The difference is I lounge on the floor, while she, I gather, remains vertical.  

HORIZONTALLY YOURS, by Kat

First, I curl up on the dining room floor. I am depressed, crying a bit and moaning. 

“What’s wrong, honey?” 

“Nothing.”  And it is nothing. 

 I’m lying on the floor until I feel up to crawling to the kitchen where I might find a dusty, expired antidepressant.

But then I wonder if it might have lost its anti- effect over the years. I take a vitamin instead.

Afterwards, I read some charming, funny, sad poetry by Dorothy Parker. Always the funniest person in the room, she struggled with depression all her life, but even her sad poems are comical.  

Here are five of my favorite of her poems.

NEWS ITEM

Men seldom make passes
At girls who wear glasses.

OBSERVATION

If I don’t drive around the park,
I’m pretty sure to make my mark.
If I’m in bed each night by ten,
I may get back my looks again,
If I abstain from fun and such,
I’ll probably amount to much,
But I shall stay the way I am,
Because I do not give a damn.

FROM A LETTER FROM LESBIA (N.B. This is a riff on Catullus’ love poems to Lesbia from the point-of-view of his girlfriend.)

… So, praise the gods, Catullus is away!
 And let me tend you this advice, my dear:
Take any lover that you will, or may,
 Except a poet. All of them are queer.

It’s just the same- a quarrel or a kiss
 Is but a tune to play upon his pipe.
He’s always hymning that or wailing this;
 Myself, I much prefer the business type.

That thing he wrote, the time the sparrow died-
 (Oh, most unpleasant- gloomy, tedious words!)
I called it sweet, and made believe I cried;
 The stupid fool! I’ve always hated birds….

RESUME

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live

ONE PERFECT ROSE

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
     All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
     One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the flowers;
     “My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
     One perfect rose.

Why is it no one ever sent me yet
     One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
     One perfect rose.

Dido’s Boyfriends & Buskins

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Perhaps it’s a Latin thing. Every time I taught Book IV of The Aeneid, most recently in 2011, I could not help thinking of buskins. They are the chicest footwear in the ancient world, a kind of boot worn by actors in Greek tragedy. Unfortunately, I have nothing to wear with buskins.

Kirk Douglas As Spartacus, wearing short buskins

I have always wanted to wear buskins.  It’s the word, not the look, that appeals to me, because the look is appalling. Imagine a combination of sandals and boots, open-toed sandal with the straps climbing wrapped around the calves.

Here’s the thing:  this summer I ordered some buskins.  They were not called buskins.  They were described as elegant,  stroppy sandals, but were indeed  sandals whose straps went halfway up the calf.

When I opened the package, I was excited.  “I’ve got buskins!”

“You’ve got what?” my other half asked.

“They’re buskins!”  I said excitedly.  

He groaned.  He, too, knows all about buskins.  We are avid Aeneid fans.

Well, those of you who have read Virgil know that Aeneas is a fickle lover, though, granted, it is because Zeus sends him a message ordering him to go fight a civil war in Italy (not very tempting), and he admits to Dido that he doesn’t want to go.

But I don’t at all like the way Dido commits suicide after he leaves.  She has already fled her own country to found Carthage.  She’s tough.

I mean, why would a queen commit suicide?

Don’t let the bastards get you down, Dido.

And another reason not to leave?  She has buskins!

Anyway, I may have mentioned that I have a master’s in classics and boyfriend (of course the department didn’t know about the boyfriend part). Therefore I’m a matchmaker and have seen all the movies set in the ancient world,  Ben Hur, Spartacus, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Gladiator…

And, after musings and looking up the movies n Google, I’ve decided Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) would make a perfect boyfriend for Dido.

Here’s how a typical conversation would go.

DIDO: Spartacus, I love your buskins.

SPARTACUS: I got them at Niemanus Marcus.

DIDO:  Where?

SPARTACUS:  It’s a little shop near the forum.

DIDO:  I know that shop.  Niemanus Marcus is a cobbler, right?

SPARTACUS: The best cobbler.

DIDO:  Really handsome, too

SPARTACUS (glumly):  I suppose.

DIDO:  Well, he’s not in shape, though.

SPARTACUS:  Yeah, he’s s___ at fighting.

Dido inwardly sighs.  Aeneas is refined, and would never use a word like that. But do Dido and Spartacus marry?  I should say they do, and in the same cave where she “married” Aeneas, with Juno presiding.

Not at all sure what Spartacus would wear to the wedding though.  At Google, he is pictured wearing underpants and buskins.