Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: romance

  • backbone

    Over breakfast my partner announced he is falling in love with another woman. I said, “What?” The omelettes had turned out so well. It was a cool, greyish day. I had asked why he kept heaving huge sighs. For a long time I could say just nothing. Then I asked a question, how can this be the first I am hearing of this. Because it is very new, he said. Also she’s married and has kids so it’s complicated.

    I think I said, Oh, how dramatic. I felt filled with pain and contempt, and the pain of contempt. I got up and took my breakfast into the other room, shutting the two doors between us. I couldn’t eat. Naturally after a while I went back and had to ask some more questions. He met her two weeks ago, at a friend’s. A friend’s of mine, as well. They talked for ages. The two of them really understood each other. They’ve been ‘texting’ a lot. I was outraged. How could you get to the point of asking a woman for her phone number – without saying anything to me? Oh no, he said, as though that made a difference: we talk online. I said, Why didn’t you just come home and say to me, after that first night, I met a woman last night and we had this amazing conversation, I feel very attracted to her. Everything might have had the chance to turn out different. It might have been the beginning of a new closeness for us. Or is it just that for some reason you wanted out – you don’t wanna live in Australia, you wanna stay in Berlin – and you lack sufficient emotional self-awareness to break up our relationship without using this lever.

    His emotional honesty and his courage were the qualities I most cherished in this man. Now those were gone, I felt nothing but a bitter disdain. The dry, unflinching, writerly part of my brain was saying, What a convenient trap. I cannot say or do anything. If I howl and cry I will be making myself more unappealing while this stranger, this mother and wife, remains mysterious and alluring because blah honeymoon. If I say, I’m so angry I feel like I could crack a dinner plate over your head, then I’m a monster and he can take refuge with her and be relieved to get away and thus basically whatever I do, I am making myself easier to leave, easier to get over. The cold tight tiny childhood feeling in the pits of me which whispers: didn’t we always know this, you are unlovable. How old is she? Young. What do you talk about in your endless emails, do you talk about how the two of you are falling in love and how you want to be together? “No, not really, we can talk about everything! Everything!” Oh, how divine. I could feel the grief and fury in me congealing over with a self-preservative lard of dry humour. Underneath this cold gel, the endless pain lurked dark and wild. I thought, well if he is prepared to jettison a three-year love affair, and to leave me in the middle of Europe alone; and if she is prepared to leave her husband and two (or three?) presumably quite young children – they must be made for one another. I just couldn’t get over my feeling of disgust. I said, I’ve never respected you less.

    The whole conversation took less than half an hour. He burst out at one stage, But I love you, Cathoel, I really do! Yes, I said, sourly… I can see that. He said, I honour and respect you so much. That cannot be true. For then how could you treat me so poorly? How can you have been so close with me the last two weeks while this was going on, and never even mentioned it? I said, Can I see your emails? “No,” he said, almost primly. “Those are ours, that is our private communication, and I protect that.”

    That hurt more, in the instant, than the rest of everything all put together. My wounded child soul was roaring, Wait! What? Help! No! Help! Isn’t it… our privacy that you should be protecting? We are so interwoven into one another’s lives. I thought we were. I threw him out. I went out, too, after he’d gone and walked in sunglasses through the dim afternoon along the green-shaded river. Berlin, so much pain. I passed the spot where in August of 2012 I had sat down on a park bench and cried, overcome by the dismaying enormity of what I had done: locked my house door in Melbourne behind me, and come to Berlin for a week, on a whim, on an instinct, and stayed on and stayed. Homesickness choked me and I did not love the swans. The man, who until this morning seemed so darling, so honest, so filled with love, went off into the greenery and scuffled. People were walking past smoking joints and wheeling their bicycles, I was busy crying as quietly as I could. Moments later he reappeared, holding out a sweet handful of fresh soft summer leaves, heart-shaped they were, I did not know the tree. He said, “Brush your nose,” which was the way he’d learned to say “blow.” In spite of everything I’m sure I must have giggled. He had graded the leaves, choosing only the softest, from smallest at the top of the pile to palm-sized below, so that I could ‘have a good blow’ as Gran used to say and reassemble myself. I thought, all my life I have never been loved like this. And I was right. And also, I was wrong. It is painful to love a weak person, it hurts. And it seems there are only two choices here, as to what might happen. 1: in a few weeks he comes over crying and saying, I’m so sorry I hurt you, I will never hurt you again. Gee… that’s attractive. Or 2. He really is falling in love – ugh, that phrase, in this context, it just fills me with contempt – and this is the end of the nicest, kindest, wisest love affair I have ever been a part of. Thus it is not only over but was partly imaginary. Aye… there’s the raw.

  • grappapa

    I found a bar lit solely by candles. To get there I had to pass twenty-five Christmas trees, laid out to die on the stones. A wax-stick notice scribbled in the window of a nearby cafe said, Be at least epic. I found a bar I liked and it took me two passes to work up the courage to go in. The barman was Spanish and wearing a beautiful waistcoat. He brought me a clean glass of water, a fresh white napkin, a glass bowl of pretzels, and an ashtray. He folded his hands and said, Was darf’s sein?

    I said, I’ve had a fight with my boyfriend and we’re living in one room, I’ve got nowhere to go so I came here. No, actually, I said: have you got some kind of grappa, or something? Sure, he said, and poured me a large measure. He swung the bottle between his middlemost fingers, to show me it now rung empty. “That would be it,” he said. Some more Spanish guys came in and the world was lost in embracing. I saw them pull out their tobacco pouches and grabbed my drink and took it right up the back. Couches. Little spindly tables. Candles.

    There was a note written on a napkin framed on the wall. I translated it for myself. Dear Sebastian. Once again we have to find ourselves another bar. This sucks. This is the 85th time! Please let us know when you are opening once more. Next to it a sampler stitched in cursive said, Liquor. I got out my notebook and started to analyse. Last night was his fault, and he’s apologized. This one was probably more to do with me. I guess I overreacted. We neither of us do well with sharing the one room: us and the dog. Two individualists sharing four walls. Baby, I was born to run.

    Last night a quarrel blew up over dinner, a civilized affair involving a bottle of red wine from Spain I’d fetched and some luscious spaghetti he had made. I couldn’t stand it, simply just couldn’t stand it. “What is the matter with you?” I asked him. He went out to drink a beer with his friend, a darling man whose snarling cat has just died. I mean, just in the last week. “Tell him from me I’m sorry, very sorry about the little one. Don’t let anyone tell him it’s only a cat, or he should get another one. Love hurts.” “Ok, I’ll tell him.” When he got back I had just finished my book – Robinson Crusoe – and was disposed to complain. “It starts out so adventuresome then it ends in a ten-page account of his tax debts and financial affairs. Ducat by ducat.” He said, “Didn’t anything exciting happen?” “O yes,” I said, shrugging, “I suppose – he and 12 other people got set upon by 300 wolves in the Pyrenees. But it somehow made dry reading.” He sat down beside me and stroked my hair. I said, “I can’t believe he went into all that detail about his monetary decisions and didn’t mention one word about how it felt when he left his island, where he had lived alone for almost 28 years!” He swung his long legs up beside me and opened his own book with one elegant finger. “I wish I could read you some of this,” he said. “But I think you’ve already read it.” I lay my book on his chest so that it slid into his lap. “Read me some of this,” I said, wheedlingly. I felt so baffled by Berlin. I felt homesick but hardly knew for where. The point of the city began only gradually to seep back into me as I strolled this late evening, my fury settling, looking in the windows of bars. I felt transplanted, my roots snapped and shrivelled. That tiny village of a few hundred souls where we had made our home – unexpectedly, unplanned, sleepily – since just before Christmas was gone. I needed to be held.

    So he took up the book I had offered, a novel from Mills and Boon. Gravely he read me the title and author and all of the details on the inside sleeve page. “Towards the Dawn, by Jane Arbor. First published 1956. This edition 1969.” I curled into his belly and listened there to the secondary rumble of his voice. The soft hesitancy of his European accent that executes perfectly the French towns and train stations and hesitates over words like “battleaxe” (pronounced “battle eggs”). A few pages in the girl alights at an unknown French provincial station. It is late and dark, the station sign almost seems to swing overhead. We had ourselves just recently alighted from a long European rail journey, all the way back to Berlin through the night from his family to our tiny apartment. As she looks blankly round the empty platform, a shadow looms. “‘Mademoiselle finds herself in difficulties?’ he asked.” He stopped reading and we both indulged a romantic shiver. “He….!” he said, just as I said, “He!” I confided, “I can tell you how to tell if this is the hero. If he’s charming and frank with her, he is just an obstacle the hero will remove. But if he is grumpy and has no patience with her, if they strike sparks off one another… that means he’s definitely the one.” “I see,” he said, nodding as if wisely, taking up the little book and slicking back its page. I coiled into the doona and listened and he picked his way over the words written long, long, long before my parents were courting. Another world. Reminder of the true world we’re in. The book has yellowed stiff pages and its cover is printed dark pink. I took up one of my heavy bedtime plaits and dropped it over my eye so that the bed light wouldn’t disturb me. I started falling asleep. As I fell I remembered another gentle man I had loved in the past who once when I could not sleep at all drew barely a sigh when I woke him for the dozenth time, saying patiently, “Alright listen. I’ll roll over and you cling onto me and off we’ll go into sleep together. You ready? Hold on tight! You hangin’ on?”

  • can he floss: not so sweet

    I was seeing this guy once who got comfortable enough to start flossing in front of me, thus revealing his ingenious method: he’d extract the string of floss periodically and holding it still taut between his fingers, sniff at it. Possibly the most repulsive act I’ve ever seen in my life & I could never kiss him again, the relationship foundered. Anybody got anything grosser? And do I really want to ask this question?

  • cafe dating

    First date in a cafe. “They always play such excellent jazz here,” he is saying. “Try the cakes, they’re always good.”

    “Right,” the girl says lightly. He has over-ordered, wanting to induct her into his routines. “I think heaven must be an eternal breakfast,” he says. The girl is drinking coffee as though it were ice cream, with a spoon. Elbow on the table she slumps onto her hand. “May I?” She tears the best bit off his croissant, the fresh, unbroken, creamy end of the horn. I watch him watching it all the way into her mouth, his resentment almost audible.

    Now the waitress brings his fruit salad, poignant with yoghurt. The yoghurt shimmers fat and glossy and unbroken. “Go ahead,” he says, “try.” She shakes her head. The third dish arrives, two soft-boiled eggs in a glass, with pretty salad arranged all around it in a tide. “I’ll just try a bit of your egg,” says the girl to her date, having presumably told him she is not hungry, that she never eats breakfast. “Or maybe I can just take half, some salad, a little of your bread?” She draws the saucer from underneath her coffee cup and holds it out.

    “I usually don’t ruin it,” he says. “They always arrange it so nicely here. But – yes! Please! Of course you can! Please: help yourself.” They are neither of them native speakers but both speak in English. I think she is Spanish and I think he is German. His voice is soft and seducing but I think the relationship is off to a stony start. Now they are talking about her work. “It’s an animal. No, it’s a fung, a fungus, right?” “Ja,” she says, “a fungus.” “Have you ever given a name to a bacteria?” he asks her. “There must be some good bacteria out there.” Maybe tonight this girl will call one of her closest friends. “There must be some good men out there,” they will say. Maybe the man will ask himself how come a woman can be so resistant to being induced into the world he has already arranged so perfectly for her. It just has this one hole to be filled, a her-shaped vacancy. Why won’t she fill it? Don’t women want love?