Bachelorhood Is Just Fine--Until It’s <i> Confirmed</i>

Sometimes I long for my single days. This usually happens on weekends, when I’m settling down with a book after a quiet dinner at home. I’ll start thinking about how, only a few years ago, Saturday night (or Tuesday or, come to think of it, any night) meant I’d be out partying.

But wedding bells, as the song goes, have broken up that old gang of mine. Those times of running through town, wild as a pack of dogs on garbage day, are done. And I say to myself: Face it, old man. You’re no longer a single guy.

You’re . . . a bachelor.

To be a bachelor is to be conspicuously unmarried. Look for these warning signs: 1) You’ve outlasted a sufficient number of friends to throw dinner-party seating arrangements off-kilter. 2) Your now-married women friends visit only when you’re down with something appropriately incapacitating--like broken legs. 3) You don’t know anyone who can make plans without getting permission.

In my case, bachelorhood is an unwelcome side-effect of my grand strategy, which is to skip my first marriage and go straight to my second wife, with whom I have a greater chance of success, according to statistics.

So it’s not that I choke at the mention of commitment. That is not true. Let me just say something about commitment. Well, it’s just that . . . the only problem is . . . you’ve got to understand . . . look, you’re a wonderful girl and I think we could work this out except that I’ve got to move to Paraguay or something.

My mother always had a soft spot in her heart for bachelors. There was a song she played on the piano called “Ballad of the Sad Young Men.” I don’t remember the words, but the gist of the story was a bunch of pathetic guys drowning their loneliness in some Godforsaken tavern, occasionally prying their beer mugs off their faces to catch a glimpse of the girl who might have taken them away from all this. But alas, too late--just as they roused themselves from their booze-sodden melancholy, she would disappear into the night on the arm of some luckier fellow.

By song’s end, my mother would usually be crying. I’d ask why and she’d say, “It reminds me of your father in his bachelor days.” I’d go away thinking how lucky my father was to have my mother impress upon him the depth of his misery before he met her. Otherwise, he might not have noticed.

So I grew up thinking of bachelorhood as a terrible fate, which is an idea a lot of people from my native Kentucky still embrace. Last time I was home, my grandmother asked me why I hadn’t brought my girlfriend. I told her I didn’t have one. After a pause, she said, “You’re going to be just like Uncle Willy.”

“What about Uncle Willy, Grandma?”

I knew what was coming next.

“That’s all right, honey. He didn’t mind too much that he spent his whole life alone. At least till he took sick and died all by himself alone in that room with no heat.”

I never knew great Uncle Willy--he came to his solitary and hypothermic end before I was born. But I suspect that he was what every bachelor most fears becoming: a confirmed bachelor.

The confirmed bachelor is a man so set in his ways that he would turn down a free trip to Paris for fear of missing “Murder, She Wrote.” The confirmed bachelor boasts of having spent no money on clothing for nine years, except for socks and underwear. Back in the old days, in small towns anyway, it was considered an act of charity to invite a confirmed bachelor to dinner once a week.

This could really test one’s charitable impulses, because a confirmed bachelor is likely to be fussy about food and prone to eat without relish or gratitude, while talking at length about the new mounts on the garage wall for his wood-carving tools. Unless, on the other hand, he is a glutton.

*

The confirmed bachelor may very well have an unnatural attachment to his mother. According to mine (let the record show that I live 2,600 miles beyond the reach of her apron strings): “Once they reach the stage where they’re carrying a change purse, they’re damn near terminal.”

But bachelors occupy a unique and necessary niche in society, and one that should be taken seriously. You have certain duties.

For example, you must inflame the fantasies of your long-married friends when they begin to speculate about what wild times they’d be having if not for the wife and kids. The bestiary of bachelorhood, you tell them, is inhabited by random encounters with sex-crazed twin models in convertibles (or better yet, on motorcycles), dalliances with tattooed dominatrixes, crazed revelries in lofty penthouses and lowly brothels. No matter that on the very night you claim to have frolicked with a rogue faction of the Swedish Women’s Soccer League, you were watching reruns of “My Mother the Car.”

A bachelor must reduce his male married friends to quivering masses of envy, and he must stand still while those same friends’ wives point to him as an example of what wretchedness befalls the unmarried.

Bachelors and hangovers, the wives will note, go together like dogs and fleas. As you hold your aching head and whimper “Oh dear, oh dear,” they will cluck sympathetically and call you “cute.” But in their eyes you’re a pitiful bachelor who lives in a pitiful cave carpeted with a pitiful swamp of festering fast-food wrappers and half-eaten TV dinners.

Unless, of course, you are a rich bachelor. Ah yes, you may be off to Cabo, Tahoe, Aspen with a different woman at your side each weekend, but inside, your heart is breaking. “It may look like nymphomania,” the wives will say with a sigh, “but it’s really a cry for help.”

*

My dad was 37 when he finally got married. My mother always made it sound as if that were one foot in the grave, as far as marriageability goes. Now I wonder what his rush was.

Some bachelors do end up in a hurry. I know at least half a dozen men who spontaneously erupted into wife-hunting mania. It’s as if they wake up one morning and start chanting, “must find wife . . . must find wife.”

They hire a direct-mail consultant and a telemarketing team to assist their search. “Must find wife!” By lunchtime, they’ve got her cornered, by dinner they’re engaged. Sometimes the courtship lasts long enough for them to pin down their intended on a few of life’s basic questions, like what state they live in.

I hope this doesn’t happen to me. But I guess anything’s better than dying by yourself in that room with no heat.