Wednesday, February 12, 2014
POETRY: THE ONE THING
Day to day, night to night, breath to breath,
My heart is starving for only one thing,
Which would be my sweet medicine,
And would cure me from my dreadful illness.
The last hope of a hopeless man,
Who's lips were thirsty for a kiss for so long,
Ears were "hungry" to hear the word "love,"
Soul and body cried for a soft touch.
I'm afraid of what I am feeling again,
Because my heart was broken so many times;
When a girl said, 'bye...' I felt I would die.
Your love gave me hope again,
But happiness and joy are not my guests;
I'm afraid to be happy... but I want to be
2
The need to be loved is so powerful
So great that it is almost pathetic
Yet everyday we crave this thing called love
Our one passion to be wanted by another
To feel important to that one person
We desire that happiness in our lives
Alone at night, we are not ourselves
In our minds we secretly go crazy
Our hearts grow more vulnerable as each lonely,
Aching moment goes by
We begin to feel like there is no tomorrow for us
Yet when tomorrow rings in bright and new
The madness will toll loudly once again
There is no escape from this thing we call love
The world is filled with that enduring feeling
As lovers stroll down the street hand in hand
For not even sleep can release us of this desire
For even in our dreams we are tormented with the want
You can't escpae your mind so what is one to do
This thing called love
It will eventually take control of you
3
So when you close your eyes,
Do you dream of soft blue skies,
Or do you float out on a river,
And watch the flowers as they shiver?
Do you find youself falling through a hole,
Do you reach deep inside your soul,
Or do you sing your song out loud,
And float away inside a cloud?
Do you run through an endless maze,
Do you cry inside a soft haze,
Or do you climb up an endless tree,
And strain to find the top you can't see.
So when you wake up,
Do you try,
To escape,
Back inside,
That realm we call imagination,
That erotic, soft, scary sensation,
In your dreams.
4
Why do I love you so
You sometimes ask
I wish I had the answer
Because I really don't know
Maybe it's the way
the gentle touch you give
The one that I sometime crave
Or, how you comfort me
When I'm not sure which direction to choose in life
Or how you are understanding and forgiving
With the choices I have come to make, even in the past
Maybe it's the way
I get scared of you, all the while wanting you
Or maybe it's the way
You don't brush me aside and place me second
Or, how you promise me the world
When all I want is you
Or, maybe it's just because
My heart's so attached to you
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
LOVE/DATING: HIGHT FIDELITY SECTION OF THE BOOKS
It’s easier in the house. You can feel that the worst is over, and there’s a tired calm in the room, like the tired calm you get in your stomach when you’ve been sick. You even hear people talking about other stuff, although it’s all big stuff—work, children, life. Nobody’s talking about their Volvo’s fuel consumption, or the names they’d choose for dogs. Liz and I get ourselves a drink and stand with our backs against a bookcase, right in the far corner away from the door, and we talk occasionally, but mostly we watch people.
It feels good to be in this room, even though the reasons for being here aren’t so good. The Lydons have a large Victorian house, and it’s old and tatty and full of things—furniture, paintings, ornaments, plants—which don’t go together but which have obviously been chosen with care and taste. The room we’re in has a huge, weird family portrait on the wall above the fireplace, done when the girls were about ten and eight. They are wearing what look like bridesmaids’ dresses, standing self-consciously beside Ken; there’s a dog, Allegro, Allie, who died before I came along, in front of them and partially obscuring them. He has his paws up on Ken’s midriff, and Ken is ruffling the dog’s fur and smiling. Janet is standing a little behind and apart from the other three, watching her husband. The whole family are much thinner (and splotchier, but that’s the painting for you) than they are in real life. It’s modern art, and bright and fun, and obviously done by someone who knew what they were about (Laura told me that the woman who did it has had exhibitions and all sorts), but it has to take its chances with a stuffed otter, which is on the mantelpiece underneath, and the sort of dark old furniture that I hate. Oh, and there’s a hammock in one corner, loaded down with cushions, and a huge bank of new black hi-fi stuff in another corner, Ken’s most treasured possession, despite the paintings and the antiques. It’s all a mess, but you’d have to love the family that lived here, because you’d just know that they were interesting and kind and gentle. I realize now that I enjoyed being a part of this family, and though I used to moan about coming here for weekends or Sunday afternoons, I was never bored once. Jo comes up to us after a few minutes, and kisses both of us, and thanks us for coming.
“How are you?” Liz asks, but it’s the ‘How are you’ that has an emphasis on the ‘are,’ which makes the question sound meaningful and sympathetic. Jo shrugs.
“I’m all right. I suppose. And Mum’s not too bad, but Laura … I dunno.”
“She’s had a pretty rough few weeks already, without this,” says Liz, and I feel a little surge of something like pride: That was me. I made her feel like that. Me and a couple of others, anyway, including Laura herself, but never mind. I’d forgotten that I could make her feel anything and, anyway, it’s odd to be reminded of your emotional power in the middle of a funeral which, in my limited experience, is when you lose sense of it altogether.
“She’ll be OK,” says Liz decisively. “But it’s hard, when you’re putting all your effort into one bit of your life, to suddenly find that it’s the wrong bit.” She glances at me, suddenly embarrassed, or guilty, or something.
“Don’t mind me,” I tell them. “Really. No problem. Just pretend you’re talking about somebody else.” I meant it kindly, honest I did. I was simply trying to say that if they wanted to talk about Laura’s love life, any aspect of it, then I wouldn’t mind, not today, of all days.
Jo smiles, but Liz gives me a look. “We are talking about somebody else. Laura. Laura and Ray, really.”
“That’s not fair, Liz.”
“Oh?” She raises an eyebrow, as if I’m being insubordinate.
“And don’t fucking say ‘Oh’ like that.” A couple of people look round when I use the ‘f’-word, and Jo puts her hand on my arm. I shake it off. Suddenly, I’m raging and I don’t know how to calm down. It seems like I’ve spent the whole of the last few weeks with someone’s hand on my arm: I can’t speak to Laura because she lives with somebody else and she calls from phone boxes and she pretends she doesn’t, and I can’t speak to Liz because she knows about the money and the abortion and me seeing someone else, and I can’t speak to Barry and Dick because they’re Barry and Dick, and I can’t speak to my friends because I don’t speak to my friends, and I can’t speak now because Laura’s father has died, and I just have to take it because otherwise I’m a bad guy, with the emphasis on guy, self-centered, blind, and stupid. Well, I’m fucking not, not all the time, anyway, and I know this isn’t the right place to say so—I’m not that daft—but when am I allowed to?
“I’m sorry, Jo. I’m really sorry.” I’m back to the funeral murmur now, even though I feel like screaming. “But you know, Liz … I can either stick up for myself sometimes or I can believe anything you say about me and end up hating myself every minute of the day. And maybe you think I should, but it’s not much of a life, you know?”
Liz shrugs.
“That’s not good enough, Liz. You’re dead wrong, and if you don’t know it, then you’re dimmer than I thought.”
She sighs theatrically, and then sees the look on my face.
“Maybe I’ve been a little unfair. But is this really the time?”
“Only because it’s never the time. We can’t go on apologizing all our lives, you know.”
“If by ‘we’ you are referring to men, then I have to say that just the once would do.”
I’m not going to walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk. I’m not going to walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk. I’m just not.
I walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk.
The Lydons live a few miles out of the nearest town, which is Amersham, and I don’t know which way the nearest town is anyway. I walk round the corner, and round another corner, and come to some kind of main road, and see a bus stop, but it’s not the sort of bus stop that fills you with confidence: there’s nobody waiting, and nothing much there—a row of large detached houses on one side of the road, a playing field on the other. I wait there for a while, freezing in my suit, but just as I’ve worked out that it’s the sort of bus stop that requires the investment of a few days, rather than a few minutes, I see a familiar green Volkswagen up the road. It’s Laura, and she’s come looking for me.
Without thinking, I jump over the wall that separates one of the detached houses from the pavement, and lie flat in somebody’s flower bed. It’s wet. But I’d rather get soaked to the skin than have Laura go mental at me for disappearing, so I stay there for as long as is humanly possible. Every time I think I have got to the bottom, I find a new way to sink even lower, but I know that this is the worst, and that whatever happens to me from now on, however poor or stupid or single I get, these few minutes will remain with me as a shining cautionary beacon. “Is it better than lying facedown in a flower bed after Laura’s dad’s funeral?” I shall ask myself when the bailiffs come into the shop, or when the next Laura runs off with the next Ray, and the answer will always, always be ‘Yes.^1
When I can’t take it anymore, when my white shirt is translucent and my jacket streaked with mud and I’m getting stabbing pains—cramps, or rheumatism, or arthritis, who knows?—in my legs, I stand up and brush myself off; and then Laura, who has obviously been sitting in her car by the bus stop all this time, winds down her window and tells me to get in.
What happened to me during the funeral was something like this: I saw, for the first time, how scared I am of dying, and of other people dying, and how this fear has prevented me from doing all sorts of things, like giving up smoking (because if you take death too seriously or not seriously enough, as I have been doing up till now, then what’s the point?), and thinking about my life, especially my job, in a way that contains a concept of the future (too scary, because the future ends in death). But most of all it has prevented me from sticking with a relationship, because if you stick with a relationship, and your life becomes dependent on that person’s life, and then they die, as they are bound to do, unless there are exceptional circumstances, e.g., they are a character from a science-fiction novel … well, you’re up the creek without a paddle, aren’t you? It’s OK if I die first, I guess, but having to die before someone else dies isn’t a necessity that cheers me up much: how do I know when she’s going to die? Could be run over by a bus tomorrow, as the saying goes, which means I have to throw myself under a bus today. When I saw Janet Lydon’s face at the crematorium … how can you be that brave? Now what does she do? To me, it makes more sense to hop from woman to woman until you’re too old to do it anymore, and then you live alone and die alone and what’s so terrible about that, when you look at the alternatives? There were some nights with Laura when I’d kind of nestle into her back in bed when she was asleep, and I’d be filled with this enormous, nameless terror, except now I have a name for it: Brian. Ha, ha. OK, not really a name, but I could see where it came from, and why I wanted to sleep with Rosie the pain-in-the-arse simultaneous orgasm woman, and if that sounds feeble and self-serving at the same time—oh, right! He sleeps with other women because he has a fear of death!—well, I’m sorry, but that’s the way things are.
When I nestled into Laura’s back in the night, I was afraid because I didn’t want to lose her, and we always lose someone, or they lose us, in the end. I’d rather not take the risk. I’d rather not come home from work one day in ten or twenty years’ time to be faced with a pale, frightened woman saying that she’d been shitting blood—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but this is what happens to people—and then we go to the doctor and then the doctor says it’s inoperable and then … I wouldn’t have the guts, you know? I’d probably just take off, live in a different city under an assumed name, and Laura would check in to the hospital to die and they’d say, “Isn’t your partner coming to visit?” and she’d say, “No, when he found out about the cancer he left me.” Great guy! “Cancer? Sorry, that’s not for me! I don’t like it!” Best not put yourself in that position. Best leave it all alone.
So where does this get me? The logic of it all is that I play a percentage game. I’m thirty-six now, right? And let’s say that most fatal diseases—cancer, heart disease, whatever—hit you after the age of fifty. You might be unlucky, and snuff it early, but the fifty-plus age group get more than their fair share of bad stuff happening to them. So to play safe, you stop then: a relationship every couple of years for the next fourteen years, and then get out, stop dead, give it up. It makes sense. Will I explain this to whomever I’m seeing? Maybe. It’s fairer, probably. And less emotional, somehow, than the usual mess that ends relationships. “You’re going to die, so there’s not much point in us carrying on, is there?” It’s perfectly acceptable if someone’s emigrating, or returning to their own country, to stop a relationship on the grounds that any further involvement would be too painful, so why not death? The separation that death entails has got to be more painful than the separation of emigration, surely? I mean, with emigration, you can always go with her. You can always say to yourself, “Oh, fuck it, I’ll pack it all in and go and be a cowboy in Texas/tea-picker in India,” etc. You can’t do that with the big D, though, can you? Unless you take the Romeo route, and if you think about it …
“I thought you were going to lie in that flower bed all afternoon.”
“Eh? Oh. Ha ha. No. Ha.” Assumed nonchalance is tougher than it looks in this sort of situation, although lying in a stranger’s flower bed to hide from your ex-girlfriend on the day that her dad is buried—burned—is probably not a sort, a genre of situation at all, more a one-off, nongeneric thing.
“You’re soaking.”
“Mmm”
“You’re also an idiot.”
There will be other battles. There’s not much point in fighting this one, when all the evidence is conspiring against me.
“I can see why you say that. Look, I’m sorry. I really am. The last thing I wanted was … that’s why I went, because … I lost it, and I didn’t want to blow my top in there, and … look, Laura, the reason I slept with Rosie and mucked everything up was because I was scared that you’d die. Or I was scared of you dying. Or whatever. And I know what that sounds like, but … ” It all dries up as easily as it popped out, and I just stare at her with my mouth open.
“Well, I will die. Nothing much has changed on that score.”
“No, no, I understand completely, and I’m not expecting you to tell me anything different. I just wanted you to know, that’s all.”
“Thank you. I appreciate it.”
She’s making no move to start the car.
“I can’t reciprocate.”
“How do you mean?”
“I didn’t sleep with Ray because I was scared of you dying. I slept with Ray because I was sick of you, and I needed something to get me out of it.”
“Oh, sure, no, I understand. Look, I don’t want to take up any more of your time. You get back, and I’ll wait here for a bus.”
“I don’t want to go back. I’ve thrown a wobbler too.”
“Oh. Right. Great. I mean, not great, but, you know.”
The rain starts again, and she puts the windscreen wipers on so that we can see not very much out of the window.
“Who upset you?”
“Nobody. I just don’t feel old enough. I want someone to look after me because my dad’s died, and there’s no one there who can, so when Liz told me you’d disappeared, I used it as an excuse to get out.”
“We’re a right pair, aren’t we?”
“Who upset you?”
“Oh. Nobody. Well, Liz. She was … ” I can’t think of the adult expression, so I use the one closest to hand. “She was picking on me.”
Laura snorts. “She was picking on you, and you’re sneaking out on her.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
She gives a short, mirthless laugh. “It’s no wonder we’re all in such a mess, is it? We’re like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it. And it’s much worse in a real life, because it’s not just snogging and bunk beds, is it? There’s all this as well.” She gestures through the windscreen at the field and the bus stop and a man walking his dog, but I know what she means. “I’ll tell you something, Rob. Walking out of that funeral was the worst thing I’ve ever done, and also the most exhilarating. I can’t tell you how good and bad I felt. Yes I can: I felt like a baked Alaska.”
“It’s not like you walked out of the funeral, anyway. You walked out of the party thing. That’s different.”
“But my mum, and Jo, and … they’ll never forget it. I don’t care, though. I’ve thought so much about him and talked so much about him, and now our house is full of people who want to give me time and opportunity to think and talk about him some more, and I just wanted to scream.”
“He’d understand.”
“D’you think? I’m not sure I would. I’d want people to stay to the bitter end. That’d be the least they could do.”
“Your dad was nicer than you, though.”
“He was, wasn’t he?”
“About five or six times as nice.”
“Don’t push your luck.”
“Sorry.”
We watch a man trying to light a cigarette while holding a dog lead, a newspaper, and an umbrella. It can’t be done, but he won’t give up.
“When are you going to go back, actually?”
“I don’t know. Sometime. Later. Listen, Rob, would you sleep with me?”
“What?”
“I just feel like I want sex. I want to feel something else apart from misery and guilt. It’s either that or I go home and put my hand in the fire. Unless you want to stub cigarettes out on my arm.”
Laura isn’t like this. Laura is a lawyer by profession and a lawyer by nature, and now she’s behaving as though she’s after a supporting role in a Harvey Keitel movie.
“I’ve only got a couple left. I’m saving them for later.”
“It’ll have to be the sex, then.”
“But where? And what about Ray? And what about … ” I want to say ‘everything.’ What about everything?
“We’ll have to do it in the car. I’ll drive us somewhere.”
She drives us somewhere.
I know what you’re saying: You’re a pathetic fantasist, Fleming, you wish, in your dreams, etc. But I would never in a million years use anything that has happened to me today as the basis for any kind of sexual fantasy. I’m wet, for a start, and though I appreciate that the state of wetness has any number of sexual connotations, it would be tough for even the most determined pervert to get himself worked up about my sort of wetness, which involves cold, irritation (my suit trousers are unlined, and my legs are being rubbed raw), bad smells (none of the major perfume makers has ever tried to capture the scent of wet trousers, for obvious reasons), and there are bits of foliage hanging off me. And I’ve never had any ambition to do it in a car (my fantasies have always, always involved beds) and the funeral may have had a funny effect on the daughter of the deceased, but for me it’s been a bit of a downer, quite frankly, and I’m not too sure how I feel about sex with Laura when she’s living with someone else (is he better is he better is he better?), and anyway …
She stops the car, and I realize we’ve been bumping along for the last minute or two of the journey.
“Dad used to bring us here when we were kids.”
We’re by the side of a long, rutted dirt road that leads up to a large house. There’s a jungle of long grass and bushes on one side of the road, and a row of trees on the other; we’re on the tree side, pointing toward the house, tilting into the road.
“It used to be a little private prep school, but they went bust years ago, and it’s sat empty ever since.”
“What did he bring you here for?”
“Just a walk. In the summer there were blackberries, and in the autumn there were chestnuts. This is a private road, so it made it more exciting.”
Jesus. I’m glad I know nothing about psychotherapy, about Jung and Freud and that lot. If I did, I’d probably be extremely frightened by now: the woman who wants to have sex in the place where she used to go for walks with her dead dad is probably very dangerous indeed.
It’s stopped raining, but the drips from the trees are bouncing off the roof, and the wind is knocking hell out of the branches, so every now and again large chunks of foliage fall on us as well.
“Do you want to get in the back?” Laura asks, in a flat, distracted voice, as if we’re about to pick someone else up.
“I guess so. I guess that would be easier.”
She’s parked too close to the trees, so she has to clamber out my side.
“Just shift all that stuff on to the back shelf.”
There’s an A-Z, a couple of empty cassette cases, an opened bag of Opal Fruits, and a handful of candy wrappers. I take my time getting them out of the way.
“I knew there was a good reason for putting on a skirt this morning,” she says as she gets in. She leans over and kisses me on the mouth, tongues and everything, and I can feel some interest despite myself.
“Just stay there.” She makes some adjustments to her dress and sits on top of me. “Hello. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I looked at you from here.” She smiles at me, kisses me again, reaches underneath her for my fly. And then there’s foreplay and stuff, and then—I don’t know why—I remember something you’re supposed to remember but only rarely do.
“You know with Ray … ”
“Oh, Rob, we’re not going to go through that again.”
“No, no. It’s not … are you still on the pill?”
“Yes, of course. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean … was that all you used?”
She doesn’t say anything, and then she starts to cry.
“Look, we can do other things,” I say. “Or we can go into town and get something.”
“I’m not crying because we can’t do it,” she says. “It’s not that. It’s just that … I lived with you. You were my partner just a few weeks ago. And now you’re worried I might kill you, and you’re entitled to worry. Isn’t that a terrible thing? Isn’t that sad?” She shakes her head and sobs, and climbs off me, and we sit there side by side in the backseat saying nothing, just watching the drips crawl down the windows.
Later, I wonder whether I was really worried about where Ray has been. Is he bisexual, or an intravenous drug user? I doubt it. (He wouldn’t have the guts for either.) Has he ever slept with an intravenous drug user, or has he ever slept with someone who’s slept with a bisexual male? I have no idea, and that ignorance gives me every right to insist on protection. But in truth it was the symbolism that interested me more than the fear. I wanted to hurt her, on this day of all days, just because it’s the first time since she left that I’ve been able to.
We drive to a pub, a twee little mock-country place that serves nice beer and expensive sandwiches and sit in a corner and talk. I buy some more fags and she smokes half of them or, rather, she lights one, takes a drag or two, grimaces, stubs it out and then five minutes later takes another. She stubs them out with such violence that they cannot be salvaged, and when she does it I can’t concentrate on what she’s saying, because I’m too busy watching my fags disappear. Eventually she notices and says she’ll buy me some more and I feel mean.
We talk about her dad, mostly, or rather, what life will be like without him. And then we talk about what life will be like generally without dads, and whether it’s the thing that makes you feel grown-up, finally. (Laura thinks not, on the evidence available to date.) I don’t want to talk about this stuff, of course: I want to talk about Ray and me and whether we’ll ever come as close to having sex again and whether the warmth and intimacy of this conversation means anything, but I manage to hold myself back.
And then, just as I have begun to accept that none of this is going to be about me me me, she sighs, and slumps back against her chair, and says, half smiling, half despairing, “I’m too tired not to go out with you.”
There’s a kind of double negative here—‘too tired’ is a negative because it’s not very positive—and it takes me a while to work out what she means.
“So, hold on: if you had a bit more energy, we’d stay split. But as it is, what with you being wiped out, you’d like us to get back together.”
She nods. “Everything’s too hard. Maybe another time I would have had the guts to be on my own, but not now I haven’t.”
“What about Ray?”
“Ray’s a disaster. I don’t know what that was all about, really, except sometimes you need someone to lob into the middle of a bad relationship like a hand grenade, and blow it all apart.”
I’d like to talk, in some detail, about all the ways in which Ray is a disaster; in fact, I’d like to make a list on the back of a beermat and keep it forever. Maybe another time.
“And now you’re out of the bad relationship, and you have blown it all apart, you want to be back in it, and put it back together again.”
“Yes. I know none of this is very romantic, and there will be romantic bits at some stage, I’m sure. But I need to be with someone, and I need to be with someone I know and get on with OK, and you’ve made it clear that you want me back, so … ”
And wouldn’t you know it? Suddenly I feel panicky, and sick, and I want to get record label logos painted on my walls and sleep with American recording artists. I take Laura’s hand and kiss her on the cheek.
There’s a terrible scene back at the house, of course. Mrs Lydon is in tears, and Jo is angry, and the few guests that are left stare into their drinks and don’t say anything. Laura takes her mum through to the kitchen and shuts the door, and I stand in the sitting room with Jo, shrugging my shoulders and shaking my head and raising my eyebrows and shifting from foot to foot and doing anything else I can think of to suggest embarrassment, sympathy, disapproval, and misfortune. When my eyebrows are sore, and I have nearly shaken my head off its hinges, and I have walked the best part of a mile on the spot, Laura emerges from the kitchen in a state and tugs me by the arm.
“We’re going home,” she says, and that is how our relationship resumes its course.
She’s a quarter of an hour late, which means I’ve been in the pub staring at the same article in a magazine for forty-five minutes. She’s apologetic, although not enthusiastically apologetic, considering; but I don’t say anything to her about it. Today’s not the right day.
“Cheers,” she says, and clinks her spritzer against my bottle of Sol. Some of her makeup has sweated off in the heat of the day, and her cheeks are pink; she looks lovely. “This is a nice surprise.”
I don’t say anything. I’m too nervous.
“Are you worried about tomorrow night?”
“Not really.” I concentrate on shoving the bit of lime down the neck of the bottle.
“Are you going to talk to me, or shall I get my paper out?”
“I’m going to talk to you.”
“Right.”
I swish the beer around so it’ll get really lime-y.
“What are you going to talk to me about?”
“I’m going to talk to you about whether you want to get married or not. To me.”
She laughs a lot. “Ha ha ha. Hoo hoo hoo.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“Oh, well thanks a fucking bunch.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. But two days ago you were in love with that woman who interviewed you for the local paper, weren’t you?”
“Not in love exactly, but … ”
“Well, forgive me if I don’t feel that you’re the world’s safest bet.”
“Would you marry me if I was?”
“No, I shouldn’t think so.”
“Right. OK, then. Shall we go home?”
“Don’t sulk. What’s brought all this on?”
“I don’t know.”
“Very persuasive.”
“Are you persuadable?”
“No. I don’t think so. I’m just curious about how one goes from making tapes for one person to marriage proposals to another in two days. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough.”
“So?”
“I’m just sick of thinking about it all the time.”
“All what?”
“This stuff. Love and marriage. I want to think about something else.”
“I’ve changed my mind. That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. I do. I will.”
“Shut up. I’m only trying to explain.”
“Sorry. Carry on.”
“See, I’ve always been afraid of marriage because of, you know, ball and chain, I want my freedom, all that. But when I was thinking about that stupid girl I suddenly saw it was the opposite: that if you got married to someone you know you love, and you sort yourself out, it frees you up for other things. I know you don’t know how you feel about me, but I do know how I feel about you. I know I want to stay with you and I keep pretending otherwise, to myself and you, and we just limp on and on. It’s like we sign a new contract every few weeks or so, and I don’t want that anymore. And I know that if we got married I’d take it seriously, and I wouldn’t want to mess about.”
“And you can make a decision about it just like that, can you? In cold blood, bang bang, if I do that, then this will happen? I’m not sure that it works like that.”
“But it does, you see. Just because it’s a relationship, and it’s based on soppy stuff, it doesn’t mean you can’t make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you’ll never get anywhere. That’s where I’ve been going wrong. I’ve been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself.”
“Maybe.”
“What d’you mean, maybe?”
“I mean, maybe you’re right. But that doesn’t help me, does it? You’re always like this. You work something out and everyone else has to fall into line. Were you really expecting me to say yes?”
“Dunno. Didn’t think about it, really. It was the asking that was the important thing.”
“Well, you’ve asked.” But she says it sweetly, as if she knows that what I’ve asked is a nice thing, that it has some sort of meaning, even though she’s not interested. “Thank you.”
It feels good to be in this room, even though the reasons for being here aren’t so good. The Lydons have a large Victorian house, and it’s old and tatty and full of things—furniture, paintings, ornaments, plants—which don’t go together but which have obviously been chosen with care and taste. The room we’re in has a huge, weird family portrait on the wall above the fireplace, done when the girls were about ten and eight. They are wearing what look like bridesmaids’ dresses, standing self-consciously beside Ken; there’s a dog, Allegro, Allie, who died before I came along, in front of them and partially obscuring them. He has his paws up on Ken’s midriff, and Ken is ruffling the dog’s fur and smiling. Janet is standing a little behind and apart from the other three, watching her husband. The whole family are much thinner (and splotchier, but that’s the painting for you) than they are in real life. It’s modern art, and bright and fun, and obviously done by someone who knew what they were about (Laura told me that the woman who did it has had exhibitions and all sorts), but it has to take its chances with a stuffed otter, which is on the mantelpiece underneath, and the sort of dark old furniture that I hate. Oh, and there’s a hammock in one corner, loaded down with cushions, and a huge bank of new black hi-fi stuff in another corner, Ken’s most treasured possession, despite the paintings and the antiques. It’s all a mess, but you’d have to love the family that lived here, because you’d just know that they were interesting and kind and gentle. I realize now that I enjoyed being a part of this family, and though I used to moan about coming here for weekends or Sunday afternoons, I was never bored once. Jo comes up to us after a few minutes, and kisses both of us, and thanks us for coming.
“How are you?” Liz asks, but it’s the ‘How are you’ that has an emphasis on the ‘are,’ which makes the question sound meaningful and sympathetic. Jo shrugs.
“I’m all right. I suppose. And Mum’s not too bad, but Laura … I dunno.”
“She’s had a pretty rough few weeks already, without this,” says Liz, and I feel a little surge of something like pride: That was me. I made her feel like that. Me and a couple of others, anyway, including Laura herself, but never mind. I’d forgotten that I could make her feel anything and, anyway, it’s odd to be reminded of your emotional power in the middle of a funeral which, in my limited experience, is when you lose sense of it altogether.
“She’ll be OK,” says Liz decisively. “But it’s hard, when you’re putting all your effort into one bit of your life, to suddenly find that it’s the wrong bit.” She glances at me, suddenly embarrassed, or guilty, or something.
“Don’t mind me,” I tell them. “Really. No problem. Just pretend you’re talking about somebody else.” I meant it kindly, honest I did. I was simply trying to say that if they wanted to talk about Laura’s love life, any aspect of it, then I wouldn’t mind, not today, of all days.
Jo smiles, but Liz gives me a look. “We are talking about somebody else. Laura. Laura and Ray, really.”
“That’s not fair, Liz.”
“Oh?” She raises an eyebrow, as if I’m being insubordinate.
“And don’t fucking say ‘Oh’ like that.” A couple of people look round when I use the ‘f’-word, and Jo puts her hand on my arm. I shake it off. Suddenly, I’m raging and I don’t know how to calm down. It seems like I’ve spent the whole of the last few weeks with someone’s hand on my arm: I can’t speak to Laura because she lives with somebody else and she calls from phone boxes and she pretends she doesn’t, and I can’t speak to Liz because she knows about the money and the abortion and me seeing someone else, and I can’t speak to Barry and Dick because they’re Barry and Dick, and I can’t speak to my friends because I don’t speak to my friends, and I can’t speak now because Laura’s father has died, and I just have to take it because otherwise I’m a bad guy, with the emphasis on guy, self-centered, blind, and stupid. Well, I’m fucking not, not all the time, anyway, and I know this isn’t the right place to say so—I’m not that daft—but when am I allowed to?
“I’m sorry, Jo. I’m really sorry.” I’m back to the funeral murmur now, even though I feel like screaming. “But you know, Liz … I can either stick up for myself sometimes or I can believe anything you say about me and end up hating myself every minute of the day. And maybe you think I should, but it’s not much of a life, you know?”
Liz shrugs.
“That’s not good enough, Liz. You’re dead wrong, and if you don’t know it, then you’re dimmer than I thought.”
She sighs theatrically, and then sees the look on my face.
“Maybe I’ve been a little unfair. But is this really the time?”
“Only because it’s never the time. We can’t go on apologizing all our lives, you know.”
“If by ‘we’ you are referring to men, then I have to say that just the once would do.”
I’m not going to walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk. I’m not going to walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk. I’m just not.
I walk out of Laura’s dad’s funeral in a sulk.
The Lydons live a few miles out of the nearest town, which is Amersham, and I don’t know which way the nearest town is anyway. I walk round the corner, and round another corner, and come to some kind of main road, and see a bus stop, but it’s not the sort of bus stop that fills you with confidence: there’s nobody waiting, and nothing much there—a row of large detached houses on one side of the road, a playing field on the other. I wait there for a while, freezing in my suit, but just as I’ve worked out that it’s the sort of bus stop that requires the investment of a few days, rather than a few minutes, I see a familiar green Volkswagen up the road. It’s Laura, and she’s come looking for me.
Without thinking, I jump over the wall that separates one of the detached houses from the pavement, and lie flat in somebody’s flower bed. It’s wet. But I’d rather get soaked to the skin than have Laura go mental at me for disappearing, so I stay there for as long as is humanly possible. Every time I think I have got to the bottom, I find a new way to sink even lower, but I know that this is the worst, and that whatever happens to me from now on, however poor or stupid or single I get, these few minutes will remain with me as a shining cautionary beacon. “Is it better than lying facedown in a flower bed after Laura’s dad’s funeral?” I shall ask myself when the bailiffs come into the shop, or when the next Laura runs off with the next Ray, and the answer will always, always be ‘Yes.^1
When I can’t take it anymore, when my white shirt is translucent and my jacket streaked with mud and I’m getting stabbing pains—cramps, or rheumatism, or arthritis, who knows?—in my legs, I stand up and brush myself off; and then Laura, who has obviously been sitting in her car by the bus stop all this time, winds down her window and tells me to get in.
What happened to me during the funeral was something like this: I saw, for the first time, how scared I am of dying, and of other people dying, and how this fear has prevented me from doing all sorts of things, like giving up smoking (because if you take death too seriously or not seriously enough, as I have been doing up till now, then what’s the point?), and thinking about my life, especially my job, in a way that contains a concept of the future (too scary, because the future ends in death). But most of all it has prevented me from sticking with a relationship, because if you stick with a relationship, and your life becomes dependent on that person’s life, and then they die, as they are bound to do, unless there are exceptional circumstances, e.g., they are a character from a science-fiction novel … well, you’re up the creek without a paddle, aren’t you? It’s OK if I die first, I guess, but having to die before someone else dies isn’t a necessity that cheers me up much: how do I know when she’s going to die? Could be run over by a bus tomorrow, as the saying goes, which means I have to throw myself under a bus today. When I saw Janet Lydon’s face at the crematorium … how can you be that brave? Now what does she do? To me, it makes more sense to hop from woman to woman until you’re too old to do it anymore, and then you live alone and die alone and what’s so terrible about that, when you look at the alternatives? There were some nights with Laura when I’d kind of nestle into her back in bed when she was asleep, and I’d be filled with this enormous, nameless terror, except now I have a name for it: Brian. Ha, ha. OK, not really a name, but I could see where it came from, and why I wanted to sleep with Rosie the pain-in-the-arse simultaneous orgasm woman, and if that sounds feeble and self-serving at the same time—oh, right! He sleeps with other women because he has a fear of death!—well, I’m sorry, but that’s the way things are.
When I nestled into Laura’s back in the night, I was afraid because I didn’t want to lose her, and we always lose someone, or they lose us, in the end. I’d rather not take the risk. I’d rather not come home from work one day in ten or twenty years’ time to be faced with a pale, frightened woman saying that she’d been shitting blood—I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but this is what happens to people—and then we go to the doctor and then the doctor says it’s inoperable and then … I wouldn’t have the guts, you know? I’d probably just take off, live in a different city under an assumed name, and Laura would check in to the hospital to die and they’d say, “Isn’t your partner coming to visit?” and she’d say, “No, when he found out about the cancer he left me.” Great guy! “Cancer? Sorry, that’s not for me! I don’t like it!” Best not put yourself in that position. Best leave it all alone.
So where does this get me? The logic of it all is that I play a percentage game. I’m thirty-six now, right? And let’s say that most fatal diseases—cancer, heart disease, whatever—hit you after the age of fifty. You might be unlucky, and snuff it early, but the fifty-plus age group get more than their fair share of bad stuff happening to them. So to play safe, you stop then: a relationship every couple of years for the next fourteen years, and then get out, stop dead, give it up. It makes sense. Will I explain this to whomever I’m seeing? Maybe. It’s fairer, probably. And less emotional, somehow, than the usual mess that ends relationships. “You’re going to die, so there’s not much point in us carrying on, is there?” It’s perfectly acceptable if someone’s emigrating, or returning to their own country, to stop a relationship on the grounds that any further involvement would be too painful, so why not death? The separation that death entails has got to be more painful than the separation of emigration, surely? I mean, with emigration, you can always go with her. You can always say to yourself, “Oh, fuck it, I’ll pack it all in and go and be a cowboy in Texas/tea-picker in India,” etc. You can’t do that with the big D, though, can you? Unless you take the Romeo route, and if you think about it …
“I thought you were going to lie in that flower bed all afternoon.”
“Eh? Oh. Ha ha. No. Ha.” Assumed nonchalance is tougher than it looks in this sort of situation, although lying in a stranger’s flower bed to hide from your ex-girlfriend on the day that her dad is buried—burned—is probably not a sort, a genre of situation at all, more a one-off, nongeneric thing.
“You’re soaking.”
“Mmm”
“You’re also an idiot.”
There will be other battles. There’s not much point in fighting this one, when all the evidence is conspiring against me.
“I can see why you say that. Look, I’m sorry. I really am. The last thing I wanted was … that’s why I went, because … I lost it, and I didn’t want to blow my top in there, and … look, Laura, the reason I slept with Rosie and mucked everything up was because I was scared that you’d die. Or I was scared of you dying. Or whatever. And I know what that sounds like, but … ” It all dries up as easily as it popped out, and I just stare at her with my mouth open.
“Well, I will die. Nothing much has changed on that score.”
“No, no, I understand completely, and I’m not expecting you to tell me anything different. I just wanted you to know, that’s all.”
“Thank you. I appreciate it.”
She’s making no move to start the car.
“I can’t reciprocate.”
“How do you mean?”
“I didn’t sleep with Ray because I was scared of you dying. I slept with Ray because I was sick of you, and I needed something to get me out of it.”
“Oh, sure, no, I understand. Look, I don’t want to take up any more of your time. You get back, and I’ll wait here for a bus.”
“I don’t want to go back. I’ve thrown a wobbler too.”
“Oh. Right. Great. I mean, not great, but, you know.”
The rain starts again, and she puts the windscreen wipers on so that we can see not very much out of the window.
“Who upset you?”
“Nobody. I just don’t feel old enough. I want someone to look after me because my dad’s died, and there’s no one there who can, so when Liz told me you’d disappeared, I used it as an excuse to get out.”
“We’re a right pair, aren’t we?”
“Who upset you?”
“Oh. Nobody. Well, Liz. She was … ” I can’t think of the adult expression, so I use the one closest to hand. “She was picking on me.”
Laura snorts. “She was picking on you, and you’re sneaking out on her.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
She gives a short, mirthless laugh. “It’s no wonder we’re all in such a mess, is it? We’re like Tom Hanks in Big. Little boys and girls trapped in adult bodies and forced to get on with it. And it’s much worse in a real life, because it’s not just snogging and bunk beds, is it? There’s all this as well.” She gestures through the windscreen at the field and the bus stop and a man walking his dog, but I know what she means. “I’ll tell you something, Rob. Walking out of that funeral was the worst thing I’ve ever done, and also the most exhilarating. I can’t tell you how good and bad I felt. Yes I can: I felt like a baked Alaska.”
“It’s not like you walked out of the funeral, anyway. You walked out of the party thing. That’s different.”
“But my mum, and Jo, and … they’ll never forget it. I don’t care, though. I’ve thought so much about him and talked so much about him, and now our house is full of people who want to give me time and opportunity to think and talk about him some more, and I just wanted to scream.”
“He’d understand.”
“D’you think? I’m not sure I would. I’d want people to stay to the bitter end. That’d be the least they could do.”
“Your dad was nicer than you, though.”
“He was, wasn’t he?”
“About five or six times as nice.”
“Don’t push your luck.”
“Sorry.”
We watch a man trying to light a cigarette while holding a dog lead, a newspaper, and an umbrella. It can’t be done, but he won’t give up.
“When are you going to go back, actually?”
“I don’t know. Sometime. Later. Listen, Rob, would you sleep with me?”
“What?”
“I just feel like I want sex. I want to feel something else apart from misery and guilt. It’s either that or I go home and put my hand in the fire. Unless you want to stub cigarettes out on my arm.”
Laura isn’t like this. Laura is a lawyer by profession and a lawyer by nature, and now she’s behaving as though she’s after a supporting role in a Harvey Keitel movie.
“I’ve only got a couple left. I’m saving them for later.”
“It’ll have to be the sex, then.”
“But where? And what about Ray? And what about … ” I want to say ‘everything.’ What about everything?
“We’ll have to do it in the car. I’ll drive us somewhere.”
She drives us somewhere.
I know what you’re saying: You’re a pathetic fantasist, Fleming, you wish, in your dreams, etc. But I would never in a million years use anything that has happened to me today as the basis for any kind of sexual fantasy. I’m wet, for a start, and though I appreciate that the state of wetness has any number of sexual connotations, it would be tough for even the most determined pervert to get himself worked up about my sort of wetness, which involves cold, irritation (my suit trousers are unlined, and my legs are being rubbed raw), bad smells (none of the major perfume makers has ever tried to capture the scent of wet trousers, for obvious reasons), and there are bits of foliage hanging off me. And I’ve never had any ambition to do it in a car (my fantasies have always, always involved beds) and the funeral may have had a funny effect on the daughter of the deceased, but for me it’s been a bit of a downer, quite frankly, and I’m not too sure how I feel about sex with Laura when she’s living with someone else (is he better is he better is he better?), and anyway …
She stops the car, and I realize we’ve been bumping along for the last minute or two of the journey.
“Dad used to bring us here when we were kids.”
We’re by the side of a long, rutted dirt road that leads up to a large house. There’s a jungle of long grass and bushes on one side of the road, and a row of trees on the other; we’re on the tree side, pointing toward the house, tilting into the road.
“It used to be a little private prep school, but they went bust years ago, and it’s sat empty ever since.”
“What did he bring you here for?”
“Just a walk. In the summer there were blackberries, and in the autumn there were chestnuts. This is a private road, so it made it more exciting.”
Jesus. I’m glad I know nothing about psychotherapy, about Jung and Freud and that lot. If I did, I’d probably be extremely frightened by now: the woman who wants to have sex in the place where she used to go for walks with her dead dad is probably very dangerous indeed.
It’s stopped raining, but the drips from the trees are bouncing off the roof, and the wind is knocking hell out of the branches, so every now and again large chunks of foliage fall on us as well.
“Do you want to get in the back?” Laura asks, in a flat, distracted voice, as if we’re about to pick someone else up.
“I guess so. I guess that would be easier.”
She’s parked too close to the trees, so she has to clamber out my side.
“Just shift all that stuff on to the back shelf.”
There’s an A-Z, a couple of empty cassette cases, an opened bag of Opal Fruits, and a handful of candy wrappers. I take my time getting them out of the way.
“I knew there was a good reason for putting on a skirt this morning,” she says as she gets in. She leans over and kisses me on the mouth, tongues and everything, and I can feel some interest despite myself.
“Just stay there.” She makes some adjustments to her dress and sits on top of me. “Hello. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I looked at you from here.” She smiles at me, kisses me again, reaches underneath her for my fly. And then there’s foreplay and stuff, and then—I don’t know why—I remember something you’re supposed to remember but only rarely do.
“You know with Ray … ”
“Oh, Rob, we’re not going to go through that again.”
“No, no. It’s not … are you still on the pill?”
“Yes, of course. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“I didn’t mean that. I mean … was that all you used?”
She doesn’t say anything, and then she starts to cry.
“Look, we can do other things,” I say. “Or we can go into town and get something.”
“I’m not crying because we can’t do it,” she says. “It’s not that. It’s just that … I lived with you. You were my partner just a few weeks ago. And now you’re worried I might kill you, and you’re entitled to worry. Isn’t that a terrible thing? Isn’t that sad?” She shakes her head and sobs, and climbs off me, and we sit there side by side in the backseat saying nothing, just watching the drips crawl down the windows.
Later, I wonder whether I was really worried about where Ray has been. Is he bisexual, or an intravenous drug user? I doubt it. (He wouldn’t have the guts for either.) Has he ever slept with an intravenous drug user, or has he ever slept with someone who’s slept with a bisexual male? I have no idea, and that ignorance gives me every right to insist on protection. But in truth it was the symbolism that interested me more than the fear. I wanted to hurt her, on this day of all days, just because it’s the first time since she left that I’ve been able to.
We drive to a pub, a twee little mock-country place that serves nice beer and expensive sandwiches and sit in a corner and talk. I buy some more fags and she smokes half of them or, rather, she lights one, takes a drag or two, grimaces, stubs it out and then five minutes later takes another. She stubs them out with such violence that they cannot be salvaged, and when she does it I can’t concentrate on what she’s saying, because I’m too busy watching my fags disappear. Eventually she notices and says she’ll buy me some more and I feel mean.
We talk about her dad, mostly, or rather, what life will be like without him. And then we talk about what life will be like generally without dads, and whether it’s the thing that makes you feel grown-up, finally. (Laura thinks not, on the evidence available to date.) I don’t want to talk about this stuff, of course: I want to talk about Ray and me and whether we’ll ever come as close to having sex again and whether the warmth and intimacy of this conversation means anything, but I manage to hold myself back.
And then, just as I have begun to accept that none of this is going to be about me me me, she sighs, and slumps back against her chair, and says, half smiling, half despairing, “I’m too tired not to go out with you.”
There’s a kind of double negative here—‘too tired’ is a negative because it’s not very positive—and it takes me a while to work out what she means.
“So, hold on: if you had a bit more energy, we’d stay split. But as it is, what with you being wiped out, you’d like us to get back together.”
She nods. “Everything’s too hard. Maybe another time I would have had the guts to be on my own, but not now I haven’t.”
“What about Ray?”
“Ray’s a disaster. I don’t know what that was all about, really, except sometimes you need someone to lob into the middle of a bad relationship like a hand grenade, and blow it all apart.”
I’d like to talk, in some detail, about all the ways in which Ray is a disaster; in fact, I’d like to make a list on the back of a beermat and keep it forever. Maybe another time.
“And now you’re out of the bad relationship, and you have blown it all apart, you want to be back in it, and put it back together again.”
“Yes. I know none of this is very romantic, and there will be romantic bits at some stage, I’m sure. But I need to be with someone, and I need to be with someone I know and get on with OK, and you’ve made it clear that you want me back, so … ”
And wouldn’t you know it? Suddenly I feel panicky, and sick, and I want to get record label logos painted on my walls and sleep with American recording artists. I take Laura’s hand and kiss her on the cheek.
There’s a terrible scene back at the house, of course. Mrs Lydon is in tears, and Jo is angry, and the few guests that are left stare into their drinks and don’t say anything. Laura takes her mum through to the kitchen and shuts the door, and I stand in the sitting room with Jo, shrugging my shoulders and shaking my head and raising my eyebrows and shifting from foot to foot and doing anything else I can think of to suggest embarrassment, sympathy, disapproval, and misfortune. When my eyebrows are sore, and I have nearly shaken my head off its hinges, and I have walked the best part of a mile on the spot, Laura emerges from the kitchen in a state and tugs me by the arm.
“We’re going home,” she says, and that is how our relationship resumes its course.
She’s a quarter of an hour late, which means I’ve been in the pub staring at the same article in a magazine for forty-five minutes. She’s apologetic, although not enthusiastically apologetic, considering; but I don’t say anything to her about it. Today’s not the right day.
“Cheers,” she says, and clinks her spritzer against my bottle of Sol. Some of her makeup has sweated off in the heat of the day, and her cheeks are pink; she looks lovely. “This is a nice surprise.”
I don’t say anything. I’m too nervous.
“Are you worried about tomorrow night?”
“Not really.” I concentrate on shoving the bit of lime down the neck of the bottle.
“Are you going to talk to me, or shall I get my paper out?”
“I’m going to talk to you.”
“Right.”
I swish the beer around so it’ll get really lime-y.
“What are you going to talk to me about?”
“I’m going to talk to you about whether you want to get married or not. To me.”
She laughs a lot. “Ha ha ha. Hoo hoo hoo.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.”
“Oh, well thanks a fucking bunch.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. But two days ago you were in love with that woman who interviewed you for the local paper, weren’t you?”
“Not in love exactly, but … ”
“Well, forgive me if I don’t feel that you’re the world’s safest bet.”
“Would you marry me if I was?”
“No, I shouldn’t think so.”
“Right. OK, then. Shall we go home?”
“Don’t sulk. What’s brought all this on?”
“I don’t know.”
“Very persuasive.”
“Are you persuadable?”
“No. I don’t think so. I’m just curious about how one goes from making tapes for one person to marriage proposals to another in two days. Fair enough?”
“Fair enough.”
“So?”
“I’m just sick of thinking about it all the time.”
“All what?”
“This stuff. Love and marriage. I want to think about something else.”
“I’ve changed my mind. That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. I do. I will.”
“Shut up. I’m only trying to explain.”
“Sorry. Carry on.”
“See, I’ve always been afraid of marriage because of, you know, ball and chain, I want my freedom, all that. But when I was thinking about that stupid girl I suddenly saw it was the opposite: that if you got married to someone you know you love, and you sort yourself out, it frees you up for other things. I know you don’t know how you feel about me, but I do know how I feel about you. I know I want to stay with you and I keep pretending otherwise, to myself and you, and we just limp on and on. It’s like we sign a new contract every few weeks or so, and I don’t want that anymore. And I know that if we got married I’d take it seriously, and I wouldn’t want to mess about.”
“And you can make a decision about it just like that, can you? In cold blood, bang bang, if I do that, then this will happen? I’m not sure that it works like that.”
“But it does, you see. Just because it’s a relationship, and it’s based on soppy stuff, it doesn’t mean you can’t make intellectual decisions about it. Sometimes you just have to, otherwise you’ll never get anywhere. That’s where I’ve been going wrong. I’ve been letting the weather and my stomach muscles and a great chord change in a Pretenders single make up my mind for me, and I want to do it for myself.”
“Maybe.”
“What d’you mean, maybe?”
“I mean, maybe you’re right. But that doesn’t help me, does it? You’re always like this. You work something out and everyone else has to fall into line. Were you really expecting me to say yes?”
“Dunno. Didn’t think about it, really. It was the asking that was the important thing.”
“Well, you’ve asked.” But she says it sweetly, as if she knows that what I’ve asked is a nice thing, that it has some sort of meaning, even though she’s not interested. “Thank you.”
LOVE/DATING: HIGH FIDELITY QUTOES: How had I managed to turn her into the answer to all the world’s problems?
When Charlie opens the door, my heart sinks: she looks beautiful. She still has the short, blond hair, but the cut is a lot more expensive now, and she’s aging in a really elegant way—around her eyes there are faint, friendly, sexy crow’s-feet which make her look like Sylvia Sims, and she’s wearing a self-consciously grown-up black cocktail dress (although it probably only seems self-conscious to me because as far as I’m concerned she’s only just stepped out of a pair of baggy jeans and a Television T-shirt). Straightaway I start to worry that I’m going to fall for her again, and I’ll make a fool of myself, and it’s all going to end in pain, humiliation, and self-loathing, just as it did before. She kisses me, hugs me, tells me I don’t look any different and that it’s great to see me, and then she points me to a room where I can leave my jacket. It’s her bedroom (arty, of course, with a huge abstract painting on one wall and what looks like a rug on another); I have a sudden panic when I’m in there. The other coats on the bed are expensive, and for a moment I entertain the idea of going through the pockets and then doing a runner.
But I want to see Clara, Charlie’s friend, who’s right up my street. I want to see her because I don’t know where my street is; I don’t even know which part of town it’s in, which city, which country, so maybe she’ll enable me to get my bearings. And it’ll be interesting, too, to see what street Charlie thinks I live on, whether it’s the Old Kent Road or Park Lane. (Five women who don’t live on my street, as far as I know, but would be very welcome if they ever decided to move into the area: the Holly Hunter of Broadcast News; the Meg Ryan ofSleepless in Seattle; a woman doctor I saw on the telly once, who had lots of long frizzy hair and carved up a Tory MP in a debate about embryos, although I don’t know her name and I’ve never been able to find a pinup of her; Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story;Valerie Harper in the TV series Roda. These are women who talk back, women with a mind of their own, women with snap and crackle and pop … but they are also women who seem to need the love of a good man. I could rescue them. I could redeem them. They could make me laugh, and I could make them laugh, maybe, on a good day, and we could stay in and watch one of their films or TV programs or embryo debates on video and adopt disadvantaged children together and the whole family could play soccer in Central Park.)
When I walk into the sitting room, I can see immediately that I’m doomed to die a long, slow, suffocating death. There’s a man wearing a sort of brick red jacket and another man in a carefully rumpled linen suit and Charlie in her cocktail dress and another woman wearing fluorescent leggings and a dazzling white silk blouse and another woman wearing those trousers that look like a dress but which aren’t. Isn’t. Whatever. And the moment I see them I want to cry, not only through terror, but through sheer envy: Why isn’t my life like this?
Both of the women who are not Charlie are beautiful, not pretty, not attractive, not appealing, beautiful—and to my panicking, blinking, twitching eye virtually indistinguishable: miles of dark hair, thousands of huge earrings, yards of red lips, hundreds of white teeth. The one wearing the white silk blouse shuffles along Charlie’s enormous sofa, which is made of glass, or lead, or gold—some intimidating, un-sofa like material, anyway—and smiles at me; Charlie interrupts the others (‘Guys, guys … ’) and introduces me to the rest of the party. Clara’s on the sofa with me, as it were, ha ha, Nick’s in the brick red jacket, Barney’s in the linen suit, Emma’s in the trousers that look like a dress. If these people were ever up my street, I’d have to barricade myself inside the flat.
“We were just talking about what we’d call a dog if we had one,” says Charlie. “Emma’s got a Labrador called Dizzy, after Dizzy Gillespie.”
“Oh, right,” I say. “I’m not very keen on dogs.”
None of them says anything for a while; there’s not much they can say, really, about my lack of enthusiasm for dogs.
“Is that size of flat, or childhood fear, or the smell, or … ?” asks Clara, very sweetly.
“I dunno. I’m just … ” I shrug hopelessly, “you know, not very keen.”
They smile politely.
As it turns out, this is my major contribution to the evening’s conversation, and later on I find myself recalling the line wistfully as belonging to a Golden Age of Wit. I’d even use it again if I could, but the rest of the topics for discussion don’t give me the chance—I haven’t seen the films or the plays they’ve seen, and I haven’t been to the places they’ve visited. I find out that Clara works in publishing, and Nick’s in PR; I find out too that Emma lives in Clapham. Anna finds out that I live in Crouch End, and Clara finds out that I own a record shop. Emma has read Wild Swans; Charlie hasn’t, but would very much like to, and may even borrow Emma’s copy. Barney has been skiing recently. I could probably remember a couple of other things if I had to. For most of the evening, however, I sit there like a pudding, feeling like a child who’s been allowed to stay up late for a special treat. We eat stuff I don’t know about, and either Nick or Barney comments on each bottle of wine we drink apart from the one I brought.
The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn’t (they didn’t split up with Charlie and I did); as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self-confident and I am incontinent, they do not smoke and I do, they have opinions and I have lists. Could I tell them anything about which journey is the worst for jet lag? No.
Could they tell me the original lineup of the Wailers? No.
They probably couldn’t even tell me the lead singer’s name.
But they’re not bad people. I’m not a class warrior, and anyway, they’re not particularly posh—they probably have mothers and fathers just outside Watford or its equivalent, too. Do I want some of what they’ve got? You bet. I want their opinions, I want their money, I want their clothes, I want their ability to talk about dogs’ names without any hint of embarrassment. I want to go back to 1979 and start all over again.
It doesn’t help that Charlie talks bollocks all night; she doesn’t listen to anyone, she tries too hard to go off at obtuse angles, she puts on all sorts of unrecognizable and inappropriate accents. I would like to say that these are all new mannerisms, but they’re not; they were there before, years ago. The not listening I once mistook for strength of character, the obtuseness I misread as mystery, the accents I saw as glamour and drama. How had I managed to edit all this out in the intervening years? How had I managed to turn her into the answer to all the world’s problems?
I stick the evening out, even though I’m not worth the sofa space for most of it, and I outstay Clara and Nick and Barney and Emma. When they’ve gone, I realize that I spent the whole time drinking instead of speaking, and as a consequence I can no longer focus properly.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Charlie asks. “She’s just your type.”
I shrug. “She’s everybody’s type.” I help myself to some more coffee. I’m drunk, and it seems like a good idea just to launch in. “Charlie, why did you pack me in for Marco?”
She looks at me hard. “I knew it.”
“What?”
“You are going through one of those what-does-it-all-mean things.” She says “what-does-it-all-mean” in an American accent and furrows her brow.
I cannot tell a lie. “I am, actually, yes. Yes, indeed. Very much so.”
She laughs, at me, I think, not with me, and then plays with one of her rings.
“You can say what you like,” I tell her, generously.
“It’s all kind of a bit lost in the … in the dense mists of time now.” She says “dense mists of time” in an Irish accent, for no apparent reason, and waves her hand around in front of her face, presumably to indicate the density of the mist. “It wasn’t that I fancied Marco more, because I used to find you every bit as attractive as him.” (Pause.) “It’s just that he knew he was nice-looking, and you didn’t, and that made a difference, somehow. You used to act as though I was a bit peculiar for wanting to spend time with you, and that got kind of tiring, if you know what I mean. Your self-image started to rub off on me, and I ended up thinking I was peculiar. And I knew you were kind, and thoughtful, and you made me laugh, and I loved the way you got consumed by the things you loved, but … Marco seemed a bit more, I don’t know, glamorous? More sure of himself, more in with the in-crowd?” (Pause.) “Less hard work, ’cause I felt I was dragging you round a bit.” (Pause.) “A bit sunnier, and a bit sparkier.” (Pause.) “I don’t know. You know what people are like at that age. They make very superficial judgments.”
Where’s the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn’t seem like superficial to me. These aren’t flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs.
“Do you find that hurtful? He was a wally, if that’s any consolation.”
It’s not, really, but I didn’t want consolation. I wanted the works, and I got it, too. None of Alison Ashworth’s kismet here; none of Sarah’s rewriting of history, and no reminder that I’d got all the rejection stuff the wrong way round, like I did about Penny. Just a perfectly clear explanation of why some people have it and some people don’t. Later on, in the back of a minicab, I realize that all Charlie has done is rephrase my own feelings about my genius for being normal; maybe that particular talent—my only one, as it happens—was overrated anyway.
But I want to see Clara, Charlie’s friend, who’s right up my street. I want to see her because I don’t know where my street is; I don’t even know which part of town it’s in, which city, which country, so maybe she’ll enable me to get my bearings. And it’ll be interesting, too, to see what street Charlie thinks I live on, whether it’s the Old Kent Road or Park Lane. (Five women who don’t live on my street, as far as I know, but would be very welcome if they ever decided to move into the area: the Holly Hunter of Broadcast News; the Meg Ryan ofSleepless in Seattle; a woman doctor I saw on the telly once, who had lots of long frizzy hair and carved up a Tory MP in a debate about embryos, although I don’t know her name and I’ve never been able to find a pinup of her; Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story;Valerie Harper in the TV series Roda. These are women who talk back, women with a mind of their own, women with snap and crackle and pop … but they are also women who seem to need the love of a good man. I could rescue them. I could redeem them. They could make me laugh, and I could make them laugh, maybe, on a good day, and we could stay in and watch one of their films or TV programs or embryo debates on video and adopt disadvantaged children together and the whole family could play soccer in Central Park.)
When I walk into the sitting room, I can see immediately that I’m doomed to die a long, slow, suffocating death. There’s a man wearing a sort of brick red jacket and another man in a carefully rumpled linen suit and Charlie in her cocktail dress and another woman wearing fluorescent leggings and a dazzling white silk blouse and another woman wearing those trousers that look like a dress but which aren’t. Isn’t. Whatever. And the moment I see them I want to cry, not only through terror, but through sheer envy: Why isn’t my life like this?
Both of the women who are not Charlie are beautiful, not pretty, not attractive, not appealing, beautiful—and to my panicking, blinking, twitching eye virtually indistinguishable: miles of dark hair, thousands of huge earrings, yards of red lips, hundreds of white teeth. The one wearing the white silk blouse shuffles along Charlie’s enormous sofa, which is made of glass, or lead, or gold—some intimidating, un-sofa like material, anyway—and smiles at me; Charlie interrupts the others (‘Guys, guys … ’) and introduces me to the rest of the party. Clara’s on the sofa with me, as it were, ha ha, Nick’s in the brick red jacket, Barney’s in the linen suit, Emma’s in the trousers that look like a dress. If these people were ever up my street, I’d have to barricade myself inside the flat.
“We were just talking about what we’d call a dog if we had one,” says Charlie. “Emma’s got a Labrador called Dizzy, after Dizzy Gillespie.”
“Oh, right,” I say. “I’m not very keen on dogs.”
None of them says anything for a while; there’s not much they can say, really, about my lack of enthusiasm for dogs.
“Is that size of flat, or childhood fear, or the smell, or … ?” asks Clara, very sweetly.
“I dunno. I’m just … ” I shrug hopelessly, “you know, not very keen.”
They smile politely.
As it turns out, this is my major contribution to the evening’s conversation, and later on I find myself recalling the line wistfully as belonging to a Golden Age of Wit. I’d even use it again if I could, but the rest of the topics for discussion don’t give me the chance—I haven’t seen the films or the plays they’ve seen, and I haven’t been to the places they’ve visited. I find out that Clara works in publishing, and Nick’s in PR; I find out too that Emma lives in Clapham. Anna finds out that I live in Crouch End, and Clara finds out that I own a record shop. Emma has read Wild Swans; Charlie hasn’t, but would very much like to, and may even borrow Emma’s copy. Barney has been skiing recently. I could probably remember a couple of other things if I had to. For most of the evening, however, I sit there like a pudding, feeling like a child who’s been allowed to stay up late for a special treat. We eat stuff I don’t know about, and either Nick or Barney comments on each bottle of wine we drink apart from the one I brought.
The difference between these people and me is that they finished college and I didn’t (they didn’t split up with Charlie and I did); as a consequence, they have smart jobs and I have a scruffy job, they are rich and I am poor, they are self-confident and I am incontinent, they do not smoke and I do, they have opinions and I have lists. Could I tell them anything about which journey is the worst for jet lag? No.
Could they tell me the original lineup of the Wailers? No.
They probably couldn’t even tell me the lead singer’s name.
But they’re not bad people. I’m not a class warrior, and anyway, they’re not particularly posh—they probably have mothers and fathers just outside Watford or its equivalent, too. Do I want some of what they’ve got? You bet. I want their opinions, I want their money, I want their clothes, I want their ability to talk about dogs’ names without any hint of embarrassment. I want to go back to 1979 and start all over again.
It doesn’t help that Charlie talks bollocks all night; she doesn’t listen to anyone, she tries too hard to go off at obtuse angles, she puts on all sorts of unrecognizable and inappropriate accents. I would like to say that these are all new mannerisms, but they’re not; they were there before, years ago. The not listening I once mistook for strength of character, the obtuseness I misread as mystery, the accents I saw as glamour and drama. How had I managed to edit all this out in the intervening years? How had I managed to turn her into the answer to all the world’s problems?
I stick the evening out, even though I’m not worth the sofa space for most of it, and I outstay Clara and Nick and Barney and Emma. When they’ve gone, I realize that I spent the whole time drinking instead of speaking, and as a consequence I can no longer focus properly.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Charlie asks. “She’s just your type.”
I shrug. “She’s everybody’s type.” I help myself to some more coffee. I’m drunk, and it seems like a good idea just to launch in. “Charlie, why did you pack me in for Marco?”
She looks at me hard. “I knew it.”
“What?”
“You are going through one of those what-does-it-all-mean things.” She says “what-does-it-all-mean” in an American accent and furrows her brow.
I cannot tell a lie. “I am, actually, yes. Yes, indeed. Very much so.”
She laughs, at me, I think, not with me, and then plays with one of her rings.
“You can say what you like,” I tell her, generously.
“It’s all kind of a bit lost in the … in the dense mists of time now.” She says “dense mists of time” in an Irish accent, for no apparent reason, and waves her hand around in front of her face, presumably to indicate the density of the mist. “It wasn’t that I fancied Marco more, because I used to find you every bit as attractive as him.” (Pause.) “It’s just that he knew he was nice-looking, and you didn’t, and that made a difference, somehow. You used to act as though I was a bit peculiar for wanting to spend time with you, and that got kind of tiring, if you know what I mean. Your self-image started to rub off on me, and I ended up thinking I was peculiar. And I knew you were kind, and thoughtful, and you made me laugh, and I loved the way you got consumed by the things you loved, but … Marco seemed a bit more, I don’t know, glamorous? More sure of himself, more in with the in-crowd?” (Pause.) “Less hard work, ’cause I felt I was dragging you round a bit.” (Pause.) “A bit sunnier, and a bit sparkier.” (Pause.) “I don’t know. You know what people are like at that age. They make very superficial judgments.”
Where’s the superficial? I was, and therefore am, dim, gloomy, a drag, unfashionable, unfanciable, and awkward. This doesn’t seem like superficial to me. These aren’t flesh wounds. These are life-threatening thrusts into the internal organs.
“Do you find that hurtful? He was a wally, if that’s any consolation.”
It’s not, really, but I didn’t want consolation. I wanted the works, and I got it, too. None of Alison Ashworth’s kismet here; none of Sarah’s rewriting of history, and no reminder that I’d got all the rejection stuff the wrong way round, like I did about Penny. Just a perfectly clear explanation of why some people have it and some people don’t. Later on, in the back of a minicab, I realize that all Charlie has done is rephrase my own feelings about my genius for being normal; maybe that particular talent—my only one, as it happens—was overrated anyway.
LOVE LETTER: DEAR SOULMATE
Dear Soulmate,
Seams of my life have unraveled to reveal my heart,and expose my love to you. You arouse my spirit. Rekindle the fire. Unleashed the passion. You caress the very essence of my soul.You linger in my heart even when you're gone.The breathless anticipation of seeing you from day to day awakens my loving desire for you whenever you come into sight.My love for you has no boundaries or secrets.It's in my essence, devouring the fiber of my being
and is devoted to you alone.My love for you reaches far and wide and travels through the four seasons, the four corners of the earth and far beyond space and time. My love for you is a journey of lofty mountain tops, beautiful gardens, deep seas, blue lakes, rivers and streams. My love for you consumes my heart. My love for you soars beyond the edge of the world, up into the sky, through the clouds, past the sun,the stars, the moon, the heavens, and the galaxy searching for you, my love, to tell you how much I care. My love for you is the totality of all existing things.My love, I Love You.
Seams of my life have unraveled to reveal my heart,and expose my love to you. You arouse my spirit. Rekindle the fire. Unleashed the passion. You caress the very essence of my soul.You linger in my heart even when you're gone.The breathless anticipation of seeing you from day to day awakens my loving desire for you whenever you come into sight.My love for you has no boundaries or secrets.It's in my essence, devouring the fiber of my being
and is devoted to you alone.My love for you reaches far and wide and travels through the four seasons, the four corners of the earth and far beyond space and time. My love for you is a journey of lofty mountain tops, beautiful gardens, deep seas, blue lakes, rivers and streams. My love for you consumes my heart. My love for you soars beyond the edge of the world, up into the sky, through the clouds, past the sun,the stars, the moon, the heavens, and the galaxy searching for you, my love, to tell you how much I care. My love for you is the totality of all existing things.My love, I Love You.
LOVE/DATING: THIS IS FOR ALL THE NICE GUY LIKE MYSELF
This is for all the nice guys like myself.This is dedicated to those guys who hold open doors. This is in honor of the guys that obligingly reiterate how cute/beautiful/smart/funny/sexy their female friends are at the appropriate moment, because they know most girls need that litany of support. This is in honor of the guys with open minds, with laid-back attitudes, with honest concern. This is in honor of the guys who respect a girl’s every facet, from her privacy to her theology to her clothing style. This is for the guys who always play by the rules in a game where the rules favor cheaters, for the guys who are accredited as boyfriend material but somehow don’t end up being boyfriends, for all the nice guys who are overlooked, underestimated, and unappreciated, for all the nice guys who are manipulated, misled, and unjustly abandoned, this is for you.
The nice guys don’t often get credit where credit is due. And perhaps more disturbing, the nice guys don’t seem to get laid as often as they should. And I wish I could logically explain this trend, but I can’t. From what I have observed on and what I have learned the only conclusion I can form is that many girls are just illogical, manipulative bitches. Many of them claim they just want to date a nice guy, but when presented with such a specimen, they say irrational, confusing things such as “oh, he’s too nice to date” or “he would be a good boyfriend but he’s not for me” or “he already puts up with so much from me, I couldn’t possibly ask him out!” or the most frustrating of all: “no, it would ruin our friendship.” Yet, they continue to lament the lack of date-able men in the world, and they expect their too-nice-to-date male friends to sympathize and apologize for the men that are jerks. Girls like that are beyond my ability to fathom. I can’t figure out why the connection breaks down between what they say (I want a nice guy!) and what they do (I’m going to sleep with this complete jerk now!). But one thing I can do, is say that the nice-guy-finishes-last phenomenon doesn’t last forever. There are definitely many girls who grow out of that train of thought and realize they should be dating the nice guys, not taking them for granted. The tricky part is finding those girls, and even trickier, finding the ones that are single.
So, until those girls are found, I propose a toast to all the nice guys like myself. You know who you are, and I know you’re sick of hearing yourself described as ubiquitously nice. But the truth of the matter is, the world needs your patience in the department store, your holding open of doors, your party escorting services, your propensity to be a sucker for a pretty smile. For all the crazy, insane, absurd things you tolerate, for all the situations where you are the faceless, nameless hero, my accolades, and my acknowledgment, go out to you. You do have credibility in this society, and your well deserved vindication is coming.
The nice guys don’t often get credit where credit is due. And perhaps more disturbing, the nice guys don’t seem to get laid as often as they should. And I wish I could logically explain this trend, but I can’t. From what I have observed on and what I have learned the only conclusion I can form is that many girls are just illogical, manipulative bitches. Many of them claim they just want to date a nice guy, but when presented with such a specimen, they say irrational, confusing things such as “oh, he’s too nice to date” or “he would be a good boyfriend but he’s not for me” or “he already puts up with so much from me, I couldn’t possibly ask him out!” or the most frustrating of all: “no, it would ruin our friendship.” Yet, they continue to lament the lack of date-able men in the world, and they expect their too-nice-to-date male friends to sympathize and apologize for the men that are jerks. Girls like that are beyond my ability to fathom. I can’t figure out why the connection breaks down between what they say (I want a nice guy!) and what they do (I’m going to sleep with this complete jerk now!). But one thing I can do, is say that the nice-guy-finishes-last phenomenon doesn’t last forever. There are definitely many girls who grow out of that train of thought and realize they should be dating the nice guys, not taking them for granted. The tricky part is finding those girls, and even trickier, finding the ones that are single.
So, until those girls are found, I propose a toast to all the nice guys like myself. You know who you are, and I know you’re sick of hearing yourself described as ubiquitously nice. But the truth of the matter is, the world needs your patience in the department store, your holding open of doors, your party escorting services, your propensity to be a sucker for a pretty smile. For all the crazy, insane, absurd things you tolerate, for all the situations where you are the faceless, nameless hero, my accolades, and my acknowledgment, go out to you. You do have credibility in this society, and your well deserved vindication is coming.
DATING/LOVE: WHEN I HEAR SOMEONE'S HEART BREAKING
When I hear from someone who is going through a romantic breakup, my heart truly breaks for them. Someone they loved is no longer theirs to love and the sadness in their words tells of, not only hearbreak, but a loss of self as well. It seems that one cannot go through a romantic loss without feeling that it's their fault, or that something is wrong with them. Before going any further, let's put an end to that myth immediately. People of all weights, heights, classes, looks and sizes have people who love them. There is no one "mold" that love-worthy people are cut from. Anyone who would insist on someone fitting into a certain mold isn't worth your time, let alone your heart. (More times than not, they aren't exactly cut from Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie's cloth, either!)
In general, breakups happen because the two simply can't find happiness together. Either one or the other realizes that they aren't a perfect match and they decide that it's time to move on. Often they move on, emotionally, long before they move on physically. Aloofness, coldness, a tendency to start arguments are all signs of someone beginning to pull away.
Even though it can be the hardest thing in the world to do, you have to let them go. If you plus him or her do not add up to both of you being happy, the equation isn't meant to be. For your own sake, as well as theirs, let go and move on - allowing them to do the same. The man or woman of your dreams may be just around the corner waiting for you. If you don't move on, you'll never find them!
How do you deal with the sadness in the meantime? First of all, stop kicking yourself. You are worthy of being loved! This particular relationship failed, you didn't. Learn from this lesson and move past it. Don't keep thinking about this person, by doing so you're just giving them more and more power to hurt you.
There's a great saying, "If you want a certain trait, act as though you all ready have it." I can't overstate how much truth lies in these words. Act as though you've moved on, and before you know it - you will have moved on. When you see this person in public, don't look at them waiting for them to see you or speak - just go about your business, smile and live your life. Life's too short and precious not to be lived with a smile on your face.
Whatever you do, don't let thoughts of making this person jealous, or thoughts of bitterness enter into your mind. You're much better than that! Just keep saying, "I'm moving on." Pretty soon, you will have done just that.
Above all, remember, love will come around again. But if you're looking back you'll miss it! Look forward, wear your best smile, and concentrate on getting the most from life. This sort of mentality and lifestyle will attract the sort of person you need in your life. The sort of person who'll make you smile so much your face hurts. He or she is out there waiting for you, maybe even going through what you're going through right now. The sooner you move on, the sooner you'll find real, lasting love. You deserve it!
In general, breakups happen because the two simply can't find happiness together. Either one or the other realizes that they aren't a perfect match and they decide that it's time to move on. Often they move on, emotionally, long before they move on physically. Aloofness, coldness, a tendency to start arguments are all signs of someone beginning to pull away.
Even though it can be the hardest thing in the world to do, you have to let them go. If you plus him or her do not add up to both of you being happy, the equation isn't meant to be. For your own sake, as well as theirs, let go and move on - allowing them to do the same. The man or woman of your dreams may be just around the corner waiting for you. If you don't move on, you'll never find them!
How do you deal with the sadness in the meantime? First of all, stop kicking yourself. You are worthy of being loved! This particular relationship failed, you didn't. Learn from this lesson and move past it. Don't keep thinking about this person, by doing so you're just giving them more and more power to hurt you.
There's a great saying, "If you want a certain trait, act as though you all ready have it." I can't overstate how much truth lies in these words. Act as though you've moved on, and before you know it - you will have moved on. When you see this person in public, don't look at them waiting for them to see you or speak - just go about your business, smile and live your life. Life's too short and precious not to be lived with a smile on your face.
Whatever you do, don't let thoughts of making this person jealous, or thoughts of bitterness enter into your mind. You're much better than that! Just keep saying, "I'm moving on." Pretty soon, you will have done just that.
Above all, remember, love will come around again. But if you're looking back you'll miss it! Look forward, wear your best smile, and concentrate on getting the most from life. This sort of mentality and lifestyle will attract the sort of person you need in your life. The sort of person who'll make you smile so much your face hurts. He or she is out there waiting for you, maybe even going through what you're going through right now. The sooner you move on, the sooner you'll find real, lasting love. You deserve it!
Monday, February 10, 2014
DATING/ LOVE: TIPS THAT WILL SAVE YOU
Dating has made me something of a cynic. Call it what you will – courting, dating, whatever – any non-platonic relationship with a female will most likely end in disaster. In fact, dating is a lot like playing darts with a blindfold on in a room full of crazed wombats. That is to say, it’s difficult to get right.
So, with my extensive knowledge in this field, let me give you some tips that will save you some time, money, and pain in your future relationships. These are valuable tips, but I’ve decided to be a Public Servant and not make you pay for them. That’s right. It’s all because I care.
1. There are three sorts of girls in the world, men. The ones that don’t care about you, the ones that hate you, and the ones that will hate you ex post relationship. Getting group one to care is no easy task. Don’t bother. Getting group two to care, believe it or not, is easy: they already hate you. Hate is pretty close to love, except that hate involves less intimacy and more bricks in purses. Group three is a write-off. Don’t bother. I know you want to, but don’t. Unless you suddenly become another person and that person’s name is Johnny Depp, they don’t want you.
2. If you’re so fortunate as to find a girl who cares and doesn’t hate you already, good going. You’re past the easy part. I’m going to assume here that you’re not a gigantic ass and that you’ll ask the girl out and not wait around for both your parents to arrange the deal, or for a giant tsunami to miraculously bring you together a la Hollywood. Here’s the catch: dating is an expensive, time-consuming hassle. So you need to know where this is all going. You need an objective. A purpose. Do you want to get married? That’s good. Go ahead and do that, see if I care. There’s a whole bunch of good reasons to date a girl. However, if one of those objectives is to “have a whole lot of sweaty sex”, go get yourself chemically castrated and have a nice day.
3. Once you’ve got a goal in mind, you’ve won half the battle of half the war of the rest of your life. Next comes dating in general. Now, let me let you in on a secret: every time you do something fancy for a girl, you’ve set a mark. And every time post-mark you do something fancy, it needs to hit or exceed that mark – which is bad news, considering that you probably suck at doing romantic thing for your girl. So, start small. Don’t be flashy from the get-go. Big things are nice memories, but the small things are what flesh everything out and really matter. Here’s an example: my first girlfriend just got married. So did my third. My second girlfriend is about as close to married as a llama is to a baseball bat, but this is all beside the point. I don’t have a single thing that reminds me of this first girlfriend. You know why that is? Because the biggest thing she ever gave me was this teddy bear I nearly forgot about after I doused it in gasoline and threw it out the window while driving down the 401. Okay, maybe I just burned it in the backyard. You want to leave an impression that lasts longer than it takes for a stuffed animal to burn. This leads to the next point.
4. Girls will say things they do not mean, and you must regard them as such. Girls will say things like “I don’t really care about flowers,” and “Valentines day isn’t a big deal for me.” You’ve probably heard it before. What these statements actually mean is “I don’t expect you to do anything on Valentines Day, like bringing me flowers.” Here’s the catch – unless a girl was beaten by a florist on Valentines Day when she was thirteen, she cares. So go small – don’t buy flowers on Valentines Day, because that’s just stupid. Do something else, something memorable. And if you can’t come up with any ideas, give me a call at my 1-900 number.
5. Be spontaneous. Really. Those flowers you see me talking about? Don’t buy them in obvious numbers on obvious days. Do it out of the blue. Get her one red rose. On a Friday, in the middle of winter for no reason whatsoever. You know what that says? It says, “Hey, I was thinking about you the other day. Not only was I thinking about you, but I care enough about you to express that through this gift.” You think that twelve roses says it better? Wrong. Look at it this way: she likes the rose you gave her, and it’s beautiful because of its simplicity. You think you get twelve times the appreciation when you have twelve times the roses? No. A dozen is a fundamentally unsound financial decision. Don’t do it, unless you want to set that bar higher. Remember the bar. Always, always, always remember the bar. Women have memories like you wouldn’t believe.
6. Be prepared for anything at any time. Relationships, and females in particular, are like a study in quantum mechanics. Things happen, and you can’re always be sure why, and you certainly can’t predict when. Your job is to not start fires, and to put them out when they do. It’s called taking charge. You’re not a hundred pound Dungeons and Dragons-playing wuss. But here’s the tricky part. Sometimes you just can’t fix things. You need to know when to let go. Let things run their course. If this doesn’t seem obvious to you, let me explain.
7. Women do not speak your language. They say things that don’t make sense. You, my friend, are a cryptographer. You’re going to break that code, because that’s how much you care. Sometimes, women say things they don’t mean. Sometimes they don’t say the things that they should. Sometimes they just want you to shut your pie-hole and turn on your ears. Especially when they’re frustrated with something – they suddenly become this giant fountain of speech that you can. not. stop. So don’t try. This is when you don’t try to fix things. You sit, you stand, you lie down, whatever – but you listen. Got that? Good.
8. Her parents are probably important to her. They probably hate you. Try to get along, would you? Even if that means golf, or household chores, or complimenting the absolutely awful design of the new addition to the house. Unless your girl is completely self-sufficient and approximately sixty, you’re just going to darn well have to do this.
9. It’s probably all a waste of time. After you’ve done everything right and gone to extreme lengths and been the most accepting, gentlemanly, respectful person ever, it’s probably going to blow up in your face and leave you back at square one. But this is a good thing, my cynical friend. For reasons that I can’t reveal due to national security concerns. But trust me, you’ll become a better person after it’s said and done. And if you don’t care about becoming a better person, well, you don’t deserve a girlfriend anyways, so go move to Nebraska and pan for gold or something.
Okay, so you followed the first post in this series pretty well, and you think you’re ready to do things right this time. Well, fellows, good luck with that. Here’s the cold and hard facts: you suck, and you always will. You have about ten thousand flaws, approximately a hundred of which are completely obvious to everyone but you. Trust me, your woman knows this before you know she knows it, which is when she tells you she knows it in a manner known as a “fight”, or if you’re the diplomatic sort, a “discussion”.
So you’re probably wondering, with all these flaws to get around, where are you ever going to find a girl that’s going to put up with all the crap? That’s the tricky part, but that’s why you’re listening to me and not watching Friends reruns. An aside: if you’re taking any cues from television about relationships and the show you’re watching isn’t “Homicide: Life on the Streets”, you’re about to have a shock along the lines of sticking your tongue in a toaster. So don’t do that, okay? Just trust me. The people that write TV shows have either been separated from reality for so long they wouldn’t understand it if it hit them with a skillet, or understand it perfectly and have some sadistic desire that you never do.
So you’re girl hunting. And you want to know what to look for, and how to look. I’m going to break this down into two sections. If, at this point, you’re really confused about what’s going on here, welcome to Hotel Bachelor and enjoy your long, long stay. Okay, for those of you still with me:
1. So you’re looking. The most important thing – and never underestimate this one – you can do while looking is look like you’re not looking. If women smell desperation, they run, except the ones equally desperate. And goodness knows you don’t want a desperate woman. Some of those would marry a dishrag if there was a diamond ring involved somewhere. The easiest way to not look desperate is pretty simple. Just don’t be desperate. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen because you’re going to make it happen. You’re just not going to make it happen right away, because girls aren’t microwave dinners or pizzas. They don’t don’t get delivered to your door. In fact, they’re more like free-range quail. I won’t explain that analogy.
2. Be comfortable with yourself, but not too comfortable. That is to say, you like yourself, but you don’t have a crush on your mirror. Most girls like easygoing guys with an edge of danger and a certain hidden intensity to them, except for the girls that like dangerously intense guys that can be easygoing, or intense guys that are easygoing in a dangerous sort of way. You. Cannot. Be. Boring. Because:
3. Guys are a dime a dozen. Think you’re special? Wrong. You’re a New York taxi: the same colour as every other taxi out there. It’s the inside of the taxi that makes the deal work, not the fact that you’re a blue or red taxi. In fact, being a blue or red taxi makes a girl suspicious that maybe you’re not really a taxi after all, and reluctant to find out whether or not they’re right. So what do you do? Be different, but not too different. If “you” is punk rock, mohawks, and piercings, make sure that your peer group is also punk rock, mohawks, and piercings. Every once in a blue moon, this punk man will meet and fall in love with a pink-bunny-slipper-wearing girl with a crush on Ricky Martin or whoever it is that graces the cover of Grabbing My Crotch Whilst Singing magazine, but you’re not looking for once in a blue moon. You’re looking for reality, and trust me, clothes make a little man, but those wonderful secret little things about you are what makes the girls drool. You’re like a brand name – think, marketing genus, what differentiates you from every other guy on the planet? Find something. Nurture it. Grow it. Even if you never actually get a girl, it’ll be worth it anyways.
4. Be mysterious. But don’t be a giant question mark. Share up to a point – and then stop. It’s like saying A New Episode At The Same Time Next Week honey! Play your cards pretty close to the chest. Don’t be that blubbering girl-boy that practically pees his pants in public to get noticed. Keep your best features locked away somewhere, and show the teaser trailer every once in a while in some non-obvious way. You don’t need to show a girl how wonderful and special you are by landing the Goodyear Blimp on her house with you suspended beneath it playing “Feels Like Home” on a grand piano. If there’s any interest at all, she’ll wait for the next shot.
5. You’re not a supermodel, and only seven girls out of a hundred expect you to be one. Face it, girls are interested in things like Chequebooks, Power, Faithfulness, and Strength. Don’t apply if you’re a wimp. Of course, this is a generalization. Some girls are interested in the fact that you really love your work and are content making nearly no money at all. Some girls just love the fact that you have what they would call a “beautiful mind”. Some girls just want a nice guy. But let me tell you something, gentlemen (oh, there’s another thing they like), talk to girls who have some sense in their heads, and you’ll find that some of the most wonderful guys in the world are pretty darn average looking. That’s most likely you, too. You’re moderately attractive, and that’s enough, thank you. Guys “grow” on girls as they get to know them – your personality and a hundred other things will actually make you look better or worse in their eyes, and I mean visually. Don’t try to understand it. Women’s minds are attached to their emotions. It’s a wierd thing, but it explains why so many pretty ugly guys get those gorgeous babes. And that’s the last time in my life I ever use the word “gorgeous babe”.
And wow, that was long. I’ll have to write that second part another time, because gee whiz, I’m feeling like ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag. I feel like crap’s crap. Like I’ve blown six sinuses out my nose, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have that many.
So, with my extensive knowledge in this field, let me give you some tips that will save you some time, money, and pain in your future relationships. These are valuable tips, but I’ve decided to be a Public Servant and not make you pay for them. That’s right. It’s all because I care.
1. There are three sorts of girls in the world, men. The ones that don’t care about you, the ones that hate you, and the ones that will hate you ex post relationship. Getting group one to care is no easy task. Don’t bother. Getting group two to care, believe it or not, is easy: they already hate you. Hate is pretty close to love, except that hate involves less intimacy and more bricks in purses. Group three is a write-off. Don’t bother. I know you want to, but don’t. Unless you suddenly become another person and that person’s name is Johnny Depp, they don’t want you.
2. If you’re so fortunate as to find a girl who cares and doesn’t hate you already, good going. You’re past the easy part. I’m going to assume here that you’re not a gigantic ass and that you’ll ask the girl out and not wait around for both your parents to arrange the deal, or for a giant tsunami to miraculously bring you together a la Hollywood. Here’s the catch: dating is an expensive, time-consuming hassle. So you need to know where this is all going. You need an objective. A purpose. Do you want to get married? That’s good. Go ahead and do that, see if I care. There’s a whole bunch of good reasons to date a girl. However, if one of those objectives is to “have a whole lot of sweaty sex”, go get yourself chemically castrated and have a nice day.
3. Once you’ve got a goal in mind, you’ve won half the battle of half the war of the rest of your life. Next comes dating in general. Now, let me let you in on a secret: every time you do something fancy for a girl, you’ve set a mark. And every time post-mark you do something fancy, it needs to hit or exceed that mark – which is bad news, considering that you probably suck at doing romantic thing for your girl. So, start small. Don’t be flashy from the get-go. Big things are nice memories, but the small things are what flesh everything out and really matter. Here’s an example: my first girlfriend just got married. So did my third. My second girlfriend is about as close to married as a llama is to a baseball bat, but this is all beside the point. I don’t have a single thing that reminds me of this first girlfriend. You know why that is? Because the biggest thing she ever gave me was this teddy bear I nearly forgot about after I doused it in gasoline and threw it out the window while driving down the 401. Okay, maybe I just burned it in the backyard. You want to leave an impression that lasts longer than it takes for a stuffed animal to burn. This leads to the next point.
4. Girls will say things they do not mean, and you must regard them as such. Girls will say things like “I don’t really care about flowers,” and “Valentines day isn’t a big deal for me.” You’ve probably heard it before. What these statements actually mean is “I don’t expect you to do anything on Valentines Day, like bringing me flowers.” Here’s the catch – unless a girl was beaten by a florist on Valentines Day when she was thirteen, she cares. So go small – don’t buy flowers on Valentines Day, because that’s just stupid. Do something else, something memorable. And if you can’t come up with any ideas, give me a call at my 1-900 number.
5. Be spontaneous. Really. Those flowers you see me talking about? Don’t buy them in obvious numbers on obvious days. Do it out of the blue. Get her one red rose. On a Friday, in the middle of winter for no reason whatsoever. You know what that says? It says, “Hey, I was thinking about you the other day. Not only was I thinking about you, but I care enough about you to express that through this gift.” You think that twelve roses says it better? Wrong. Look at it this way: she likes the rose you gave her, and it’s beautiful because of its simplicity. You think you get twelve times the appreciation when you have twelve times the roses? No. A dozen is a fundamentally unsound financial decision. Don’t do it, unless you want to set that bar higher. Remember the bar. Always, always, always remember the bar. Women have memories like you wouldn’t believe.
6. Be prepared for anything at any time. Relationships, and females in particular, are like a study in quantum mechanics. Things happen, and you can’re always be sure why, and you certainly can’t predict when. Your job is to not start fires, and to put them out when they do. It’s called taking charge. You’re not a hundred pound Dungeons and Dragons-playing wuss. But here’s the tricky part. Sometimes you just can’t fix things. You need to know when to let go. Let things run their course. If this doesn’t seem obvious to you, let me explain.
7. Women do not speak your language. They say things that don’t make sense. You, my friend, are a cryptographer. You’re going to break that code, because that’s how much you care. Sometimes, women say things they don’t mean. Sometimes they don’t say the things that they should. Sometimes they just want you to shut your pie-hole and turn on your ears. Especially when they’re frustrated with something – they suddenly become this giant fountain of speech that you can. not. stop. So don’t try. This is when you don’t try to fix things. You sit, you stand, you lie down, whatever – but you listen. Got that? Good.
8. Her parents are probably important to her. They probably hate you. Try to get along, would you? Even if that means golf, or household chores, or complimenting the absolutely awful design of the new addition to the house. Unless your girl is completely self-sufficient and approximately sixty, you’re just going to darn well have to do this.
9. It’s probably all a waste of time. After you’ve done everything right and gone to extreme lengths and been the most accepting, gentlemanly, respectful person ever, it’s probably going to blow up in your face and leave you back at square one. But this is a good thing, my cynical friend. For reasons that I can’t reveal due to national security concerns. But trust me, you’ll become a better person after it’s said and done. And if you don’t care about becoming a better person, well, you don’t deserve a girlfriend anyways, so go move to Nebraska and pan for gold or something.
Okay, so you followed the first post in this series pretty well, and you think you’re ready to do things right this time. Well, fellows, good luck with that. Here’s the cold and hard facts: you suck, and you always will. You have about ten thousand flaws, approximately a hundred of which are completely obvious to everyone but you. Trust me, your woman knows this before you know she knows it, which is when she tells you she knows it in a manner known as a “fight”, or if you’re the diplomatic sort, a “discussion”.
So you’re probably wondering, with all these flaws to get around, where are you ever going to find a girl that’s going to put up with all the crap? That’s the tricky part, but that’s why you’re listening to me and not watching Friends reruns. An aside: if you’re taking any cues from television about relationships and the show you’re watching isn’t “Homicide: Life on the Streets”, you’re about to have a shock along the lines of sticking your tongue in a toaster. So don’t do that, okay? Just trust me. The people that write TV shows have either been separated from reality for so long they wouldn’t understand it if it hit them with a skillet, or understand it perfectly and have some sadistic desire that you never do.
So you’re girl hunting. And you want to know what to look for, and how to look. I’m going to break this down into two sections. If, at this point, you’re really confused about what’s going on here, welcome to Hotel Bachelor and enjoy your long, long stay. Okay, for those of you still with me:
1. So you’re looking. The most important thing – and never underestimate this one – you can do while looking is look like you’re not looking. If women smell desperation, they run, except the ones equally desperate. And goodness knows you don’t want a desperate woman. Some of those would marry a dishrag if there was a diamond ring involved somewhere. The easiest way to not look desperate is pretty simple. Just don’t be desperate. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen because you’re going to make it happen. You’re just not going to make it happen right away, because girls aren’t microwave dinners or pizzas. They don’t don’t get delivered to your door. In fact, they’re more like free-range quail. I won’t explain that analogy.
2. Be comfortable with yourself, but not too comfortable. That is to say, you like yourself, but you don’t have a crush on your mirror. Most girls like easygoing guys with an edge of danger and a certain hidden intensity to them, except for the girls that like dangerously intense guys that can be easygoing, or intense guys that are easygoing in a dangerous sort of way. You. Cannot. Be. Boring. Because:
3. Guys are a dime a dozen. Think you’re special? Wrong. You’re a New York taxi: the same colour as every other taxi out there. It’s the inside of the taxi that makes the deal work, not the fact that you’re a blue or red taxi. In fact, being a blue or red taxi makes a girl suspicious that maybe you’re not really a taxi after all, and reluctant to find out whether or not they’re right. So what do you do? Be different, but not too different. If “you” is punk rock, mohawks, and piercings, make sure that your peer group is also punk rock, mohawks, and piercings. Every once in a blue moon, this punk man will meet and fall in love with a pink-bunny-slipper-wearing girl with a crush on Ricky Martin or whoever it is that graces the cover of Grabbing My Crotch Whilst Singing magazine, but you’re not looking for once in a blue moon. You’re looking for reality, and trust me, clothes make a little man, but those wonderful secret little things about you are what makes the girls drool. You’re like a brand name – think, marketing genus, what differentiates you from every other guy on the planet? Find something. Nurture it. Grow it. Even if you never actually get a girl, it’ll be worth it anyways.
4. Be mysterious. But don’t be a giant question mark. Share up to a point – and then stop. It’s like saying A New Episode At The Same Time Next Week honey! Play your cards pretty close to the chest. Don’t be that blubbering girl-boy that practically pees his pants in public to get noticed. Keep your best features locked away somewhere, and show the teaser trailer every once in a while in some non-obvious way. You don’t need to show a girl how wonderful and special you are by landing the Goodyear Blimp on her house with you suspended beneath it playing “Feels Like Home” on a grand piano. If there’s any interest at all, she’ll wait for the next shot.
5. You’re not a supermodel, and only seven girls out of a hundred expect you to be one. Face it, girls are interested in things like Chequebooks, Power, Faithfulness, and Strength. Don’t apply if you’re a wimp. Of course, this is a generalization. Some girls are interested in the fact that you really love your work and are content making nearly no money at all. Some girls just love the fact that you have what they would call a “beautiful mind”. Some girls just want a nice guy. But let me tell you something, gentlemen (oh, there’s another thing they like), talk to girls who have some sense in their heads, and you’ll find that some of the most wonderful guys in the world are pretty darn average looking. That’s most likely you, too. You’re moderately attractive, and that’s enough, thank you. Guys “grow” on girls as they get to know them – your personality and a hundred other things will actually make you look better or worse in their eyes, and I mean visually. Don’t try to understand it. Women’s minds are attached to their emotions. It’s a wierd thing, but it explains why so many pretty ugly guys get those gorgeous babes. And that’s the last time in my life I ever use the word “gorgeous babe”.
And wow, that was long. I’ll have to write that second part another time, because gee whiz, I’m feeling like ten pounds of crap in a five pound bag. I feel like crap’s crap. Like I’ve blown six sinuses out my nose, and I’m pretty sure I don’t have that many.
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