My heart is like a stranger

  

'My heart is like a stranger in a land full of enemies:

I don’t trust it or like it even though it just aims to please'

 

 

I

Back in 1984 in the Strand and in his first job Neels considered half past eight a good time to amble into the office when half past eight was the officially designated start of the working day.

 

"Good morning," he greeted Mrs Vernon in his famously deadpan way.  He refused to be overtly cheerful when he walked into the office even if he were generally in a good mood. His basic philosophy of life was that it was better to start off the day neutrally and then improve, rather than start one's day with a broad smile and end it trying to drink away the memory of a troubled day.

 

"Good morning, Neelsie," Mrs Vernon chirped. Neels always suspected that her cheerfulness was probably not genuine.

 

Neels walked over to her desk and stood in front of it with his hands in his pockets, eyeing the great confusion of papers covering the rather small working surface. Mrs Vernon usually came into the office at least thirty minutes earlier than Neels, or anybody else for that matter, and sometimes as much as an hour earlier. When he arrived exactly on time, she would give the impression of someone who was super-efficient and incredibly busy, and had been so since the moment she sat down behind her desk. Apparently the reason for her early start was connected with the telephone.

 

"Do you realise what a nuisance the telephone is?" she’d asked Neels back when he was  very new in the job and keen to make a good impression on almost anybody and so was still prepared to tolerate her longwinded expositions. "Do you realise just how much time you waste daily by talking on the telephone?  Hours, hours.  And it's not even me phoning other people, no, it's other people who have got nothing better to do than interrupt my working day who phone me up, and then you really can't be rude to them and they keep on and on telling you something which they probably told you the previous day and will tell you again tomorrow. Anyway, when I keep having to answer the telephone I never get my work done, for which I'm paid, you know, and sometimes it is so frustrating to have a day, eight working hours, in which you have only half an hour's worth of uninterrupted work. In a whole day! It's not even ridiculous! So, if I come in early I can have peace and quiet until the switchboard opens, for thirty minutes or an hour. That's when I can get some real work done."

 

Neels tended to agree with her in principle but he knew through scientific observation that a sizeable portion of the time Mrs Vernon spent talking on the phone was given over to idle chats with her numerous acquaintances in all parts of the country.  Mrs Vernon had no real need to come in early to complete whatever task she may have had, as long as she got down to doing her job during proper working hours and had her gossipy chats during lunch hour or after work. Neels never came in early and virtually never needed to work late.

 

"Oh, look at you!  All dressed up in new clothes!" Mrs Vernon gushed in the profoundly irritating childishly arch tone of voice she used when she was feeling especially friendly, or making some sort of supposedly funny remark and which was much mockingly imitated amongst those people in the firm who didn't care very much for Mrs Vernon, but who were also careful to keep it a secret from her. She was a powerful figure in the firm and not someone to have as an enemy in the great office political struggle. 

 

"You noticed!" he gushed back with mock happiness and humble gratitude, as if it mattered to him, "Do you like it?”

 

"Very nice. It suits you. Where did you buy the jacket?"

 

He’d had the mad impulse to splurge money on clothes and after a lengthy debate with himself he made up his mind to buy either a good suit or a good jacket for work. In pursuance of this end he spent an entire, unexpectedly exhausting and somewhat frustrating Saturday morning going from men's shop to men's shop looking for an item that would suit both his aesthetic requirements and his pocket. Neels wanted clothes that would somehow improve his outward appearance; clothes that would show the world that he was a man of culture, taste and distinction, a man of discernment, a man who was a cut above the average.  He was one of those unfortunates who can never wear just my old thing and make it look acceptable; if he wore a sloppy T-shirt and dirty jeans, they looked like a sloppy T-shirt and dirty jeans, which of course they were, but there are people who can make the sloppiness of any sloppy clothes disappear, seemingly by force of personality, and instead give them a certain glamour. Unfortunately the clothes that would meet the ticket for Neels were also expensive.  Neels was very attached to his money and was loath to spend it extravagantly on clothes. These items were, after all, for professional use and would be relatively hard-used.  In the end he bought a decent enough navy blue   wool and Trevira blazer, a pair of grey flannel trousers and black shoes, with 'real leather uppers.' Neels was pretty pleased with his purchases though the outfit probably wasn't really as splendid as Mrs Vernon said it was.

 

"I'm glad you like it," Neels said. He didn't care, actually, but what the hell.

 

He went to his own desk where by now there was a steaming mug of coffee. Everyone in the office had their own mug, and some people threw tantrums if by mistake they didn’t get their hot beverage in their very own, personal mug. The firm provided a choice of a cheap brand of tea and cheap instant coffee, both of which were pretty awful. Neels reluctantly drank the cheap coffee for a month and then on his first pay day bought his own bottle of Nescafé, the brand he used at home, and from then on the tea lady made him coffee the way he liked it. Leisurely sipping at a mug of good coffee was an excellent way to ease into the working day.  Neels seldom got down to serious work much before nine and then only if there was something urgent on his schedule, otherwise he could spend a good hour just dithering around without purpose and without achieving anything more than looking busy.  Most of all he liked joking with Claire Jones, one of the typists, swapping stories with her and impressing her with his wit -- keeping her from her own work at the same time, but neither of them minded.

 

After two sips he decided that the coffee was too hot to finish off in a couple of gulps and strolled over to Jerry's desk.

 

"Howzit," Neels said.

 

Jerry made a face.

 

"That bad, huh?" Neels asked. He could see that Jerry was about to tell him of the great booze-up he'd had the previous night. One's early morning conversations with Jerry usually tended towards that subject.

 

"My mouth tastes like the cave a dozen bears have been hibernating in," Jerry said with a grin that was half cheerful, half grimace, "and my head feels as if two dozen dwarves are in there cutting up my brain with dull knives. I feel horrible," he added, not without a certain relish.  Neels had the idea that Jerry was quite proud of his hangovers. It seemed that he took great pleasure in being one of the boys, going on drinking sprees four or five nights a week, getting two or three hours of sleep a might, and still able to come to work and put in a full day’s work. Neels had never believed in the sanctity of hangovers.

 

"Tsk, tsk," Neels said, not unsarcastically, "tell me about it."

 

"You know I had this major consultation with Senior Counsel yesterday?  Eddie Couzyn? We got out of there only by half past six and Eddie suggested we have a drink or two to wind down. Well, you know how these things happen, we ran into a couple of other buddies of mine, and what with one thing and another, at about one someone suggested we go to this new club whose owner he knew, so of course when we got there drinks were on the house, and there was a bunch of hot chicks there and then things really got out of hand. I think we left at half past three and one of the chicks asked me to drive her home, which I did, nudge, nudge, wink, wink, and so I left her place round about five and this was still another half an hour to my place. I got to bed to bed at quarter to six and the alarm  went at half past six."

 

All in all a very successful night.

 

"And the wife?"

 

"Patsy’s not happy," Jerry admitted with that sly little grin. "Told her the client dragged me into it and that he’s a big client so I couldn’t very well refuse, could I? Patsy probably won't talk to me for a day or two. Aah, she'll get over it."

 

If Neels were Jerry's wife he would have gotten over Jerry a low time ago. From anecdotal evidence and office gossip it seemed that Jerry's wife spent most of her evenings alone at home while her husband gallivanted with the "boys" -- and diverse "chicks", no doubt. 

 

A telephone call for Jerry interrupted their conversation. Neels went back to his desk when Jerry started describing his hangover to the caller. Neels chuckled softly. There was a lot of conversational mileage in alcohol abuse.

 

Back at the desk, okay, finish the coffee; then what? Shuffle some papers, page through a couple of files that would need action soon but not absolutely immediately, glance cursorily at a Law Society circular commenting on recommendations for a new fee structure. 

 

Neels sat back in his chair and surveyed the room. Mrs Vernon was gabbing into a telephone receiver, discussing clothes; Jerry, morosely and with marry sighs, was dictating a long letter into his Dictaphone. Neels prayed for relief.

 

It came in the not unshapely shape of Claire.

 

"Won’t you please take a look at these?" she asked, smiling prettily, as always, "They’re letters for Mr Armstrong but I want you to check them first before I take them to him. There are probably masses of mistakes but please quickly go through them. You don’t mind, do you?"

 

"No," Neels said. "I don’t mind,” 

 

Neels gave her the benefit of his best smile to demonstrate that he was telling the truth.  Mr Armstrong was a senior partner, notoriously finicky about his correspondence, known for thinking nothing of tearing up a three page letter if he found as much as one typo in it and this was in the days before word processors. The poor erring typist would be forced to retype the entire letter. Being a prudent sort of girl, whenever she had important typing to do Claire asked Neels to vet her typing for mistakes before she handed over the work.

 

Claire waited while Neels read through all the letters, marking the typographical errors with pencil. He also corrected some bad grammar and improved some extremely odd bits of syntax. Mr Armstrong tended to ramble on disjointedly and repetitively when he dictated lengthy correspondence and always emphatically denied that he was the source of bad grammar or lousy syntax when the typist simply reproduced what she heard on the tape. Since this was another reason for the tearing up of letters, it was advisable to produce letters that were concise and made sense.

 

"There you are," Neels said and handed Claire the corrected letters, "I could have a new career as a proof reader or sub-editor. I've done this often enough." 

 

"You don’t mind, do you?" she asked with a knowing grin.

 

“I don’t mind," he grinned back. "Feel free anytime.  I'm at your service. How are things going with you, otherwise?"

 

“Aagh, you know, not so hot."

 

"Well?"

 

"My husband is acting up again. He drives me up the wall sometimes."

 

"What's he done now?"

 

"You know, the usual thing. Last night I came home at half past six, you know, because I was here with a heap of urgent typing I had to finish before I could go home, the clients were coming in first thing this morning.  So, I come home and Ronnie starts off very sarcastic, you know? asking me if I’d gotten lost in the woods, or something, forgot where we lived, and he says he's only been waiting for an hour for me to come home and he’s hungry, he’s had a tough day.  So I told him why I was late and then he got uptight about that, started screaming about my overtime, like I always work late and I don’t get paid for overtime.  I’m never home when he arrives, my job is more important to me than my home, you know? and him. That type of thing. So of course this evolves into a row of awesome proportions, you know?  calling of names, recriminations, threats, you know, just a big, ugly scene. And it's so unfair, you know? I don’t work late all that often, only when it is really necessary.  Most days I’m home half past five at the latest, maybe a bit later if I first go past the Pick’n’Pay. And when I get home I have to cook supper, Ronnie won’t lift a finger to prepare it if he wants to eat earlier, you know? and I’m not home yet, he won’t even think of starting the food, He wouldn't dream of helping me when I do it. Ronnie is so fussy and particular; there are certain dishes I've learnt never to make because his mother made them, you know? and now he can't stand it if I do it my way if that isn't the way his mother did it, Not because mine is wrong or tastes worse, you know? it's just a different method but Ronnie doesn't go for that. Okay, so eventually after all this palaver we've finished supper, then I wash the dishes all on my lonesome.  Ronnie's either slumped in front of the TV or he‘s got his nose in one of his endless supply of motorbike magazines. When I eventually join Ronnie and try to have a conversation, you know, some inter-spousal communication, he tells me to shut up, the TV's on and he's trying to watch, you know? Or he's reading this stupid magazine and he's trying to concentrate. So I shut up, you know? not bothering him, just carrying on with my own thing. Okay, so Ronnie's reading his magazine and now maybe I’m watching TV or reading something else and Ronnie finds something really interesting, you know? like a seven cylinder 12000cc Chinese bike, or whatever, Ronnie insists on reading it aloud to me who, of course, isn't all that madly interested. Then he notices my lack of genuine interest and starts raving about how I should share his interests, you know? how we should do thing together. But of course when I want to read Ronnie something from a magazine I’m reading, he'll tell me not to waste his time with something from a woman's magazine, he isn't a poofter yet, he says, you know? like really witty. What this all adds up to is, we don’t converse much, you know? not really, just like how was your day, nice, how was yours, fine, how much housekeeping have we got left, that little? Well, we'll stop buying this or that, do you feel like getting a video? and so on. Nothing that means anything. And then Ronnie complains, you know? when this occurs to him too, not very often I may add, and the boy’s really upset by this, another row starts because Ronnie accuses me of never talking to him, you know? Ronnie's never in the wrong, it 's always me who ignores him, or me who demands too much of his affection, me who doesn't care about him, me who is smothering him with my affection, you know? always Claire.  Ronnie treats me like some kind of infant, you know? as if I’m not capable of doing things the way I want to do them, as if it’s too dangerous for me to be left to my own devices, you know? Like, for example, sweeping. One day I decided the kitchen floor needed sweeping, so I got the broom and merrily started sweeping away. Then Ronnie happens to come into the kitchen for a beer or something and of course he immediately sees what I'm doing wrong, you know? He says: you don’t use a broom like that, you're supposed to do it this way. So I said: well, show me how it is meant to be done, you know? show me my grievous fault, give me the benefit of a demonstration. So Ronnie took the broom and showed me the 0ne True Way of Sweeping, and this made me so mad that I walked away saying, well, Ronald babes, you obviously sweep much better than I can, you know? so from now on you can do all the sweeping in this house, I bow to your superior technique. This didn't strike Ronnie as very amusing. He then proceeded to tell me how wrong my attitude was, you know? that I should listen to him when he's trying to teach me the right way to do things, I ought to learn how to do something correctly if I've been doing it wrong, you know? I mean was he serious? I could almost not believe it. But he was, you know? Ronnie actually, sincerely thought he had to teach me how to sweep the floor. To sweep, for God's sake!  Of course Ronnie’s way is always the right way. Another example: I'm in the lounge on the comfy couch, reading a book, I light up a cigarette, take a few puffs.  put it in an ashtray.  I can't handle both the cigarette and the book with only two hands, you know? I take a couple of puffs when I feel like it but mainly I read. So, what happens but that Ronnie sees this and comes over and puts out the cigarette, you know? just like that, without asking me or anything. So, I try very hard not to scream at him, you know? I try very hard and I ask him, Ronnie, why did you put out the cigarette I’m smoking? I know it’s not that he objects to me smoking.  Ronnie then tells me I should either smoke or not, that I shouldn't waste the cigarette by letting it burn in the ashtray, because I only get a very small amount of benefit from it, you know? I'm not getting my money's worth. So I tell him that’s the way I want it, I don’t want to actually smoke a whole cigarette, you know? all I want is a drag now and then while I'm reading. But this isn't good enough for Ronnie, you know? that’s not the way he would do it, therefore it's not acceptable, therefore I must do what he would do, you know? Some days I could just kill him, he makes me so mad. My marriage has gone very sour, you know? It isn't a marriage really, apart from the legal thing, because a marriage is co-operation, right? Two people as a team. And we don’t have that anymore, that's for sure. But I'm stuck you know? I haven't got the money to leave him and set up house by myself, and probably not the guts either, you know? rather have a bad relationship but with the comforts of a well-equipped and nicely-furnished home."

 

Claire suddenly became aware that it was still office hours and that she was standing in front of Neels's desk with a sheaf of letters in her hand and that she had just told him an awful lot about her personal life. She blushed slightly, embarrassed and self-conscious, and looked away from him.

 

"I'm probably just exaggerating," she said, with an unconvincing smile, "Things will improve, I'm sure. Well, I've got to get back to my typewriter, people will wonder whether I've taken the day off. See you later!"

 

Claire hurried off and Neels admired the way her hips swayed and her luscious behind moved in sympathetic rhythm with her stride. I could fall in love with her, he thought, I could very easily persuade myself that she's the one. 

 

Claire, Claire, he thought, your life seems such a mess but even so you are much more cheerful than I am. Jerry seems to suffer from a congenital hangover but still seems to enjoy life a lot more than I do. Mrs Vernon may be a phoney but she genuinely seems to have a great many more friends than I have. Is this my punishment for trying to he a sane, rational human being careful to keep the equilibrium between heart and mind?

 

 

II

"So, tell me, Neels, how are things?"  the therapist asked. 

 

"If you really want to know:, not so good. I'm feeling awfully depressed lately and there doesn't seem to be any particular reason for it.  As far as I can tell my life is much like it’s always been."

 

"That could be the root of your depression. You feel that way exactly because there is no change in your life, neither for the better nor for the worse. The monotony is getting you down and you feel a certain subconscious despair about your life that’s stuck in a dull,   seemingly permanent, rut.  At this point you would welcome most my change, as long as it is genuine change, No matter what the effects might be. A life lived soberly and without excitement does not necessarily mean happiness."

 

Neels marvelled at the therapist's astute analysis.

 

"You could be right," he said hesitantly, "you could be right."

 

"But ..." 

 

"But there has been change in my life recently, or at least a deviation from the norm, that could be significant enough to fall under the heading of genuine change. Well, it is not really a change in my life, just a change in the circumstances around my life."

 

“Well, go on, tell me."

 

Neels's hesitancy was caused by a feeling of unease directly related to this situation. When he was with people he knew well and trusted, he usually wouldn't be shy about his emotions or experiences, but when he was in a situation, like this one, where the other party, even the therapist he’d only recently started seeing, was a comparative stranger and his words were being recorded for a second, closer study at some later occasion, then he wondered whether it wouldn't be better to stick to small-talk and avoid subjects and thoughts of substance and especially about his state of mind.

 

"Is it your love life?"  the therapist asked.

 

This was only their third session and already Neels's major weak point had been noted.

 

"How is your love life?" the therapist asked.

 

Non-existent except on the level of adolescent fantasy.

"Okay, I'll tell you about it. Please don't expect anything very exciting or strange or anything like that. In fact I'm probably rating a whole lot of it as far more important than it is, but bear with me.  In the attorney’s firm where I work I’m employed as an articled clerk, a two year apprenticeship before I can be an attorney, and I deal mainly with debt collection files which means that I have to write a great number of letters daily and deal with Court process, summonses, writs of execution and the like.  I dictate instructions into a dictaphone and then a typist types the letters or process.  The collections typists are what I would call semi-skilled labour since they do nothing but type all day, and that is a job I think of as being on the same level as that of an assembly line worker. What happens is that a messenger collects my dictaphone tape and gives it to the typist who happens to have no other work at that moment, and that means that virtually every single one of them must, at one time or another, have done my typing.  I check the work and sign the outgoing letters and give the Court process to a qualified attorney to sign. 

 

I have no close friends at work though I do get on well with most of the people I work with but it is on what I would call a purely professional level, and I don't see any of them after hours.  Of course, my male colleagues weren't so reticent. To them the typists' pool was also a dating pool.  The men think little of the girls, really, other than as exploitable commodities. They're the type of girls who could give you couple of laughs, dance with you, drink with you and go to bed with you if you wanted and then not wake up the next morning thinking that they now own you. All very fine but the important, and definitely not unspoken, premise was that not one of my colleagues would for one minute think of marrying one of these typists. The girls are splendid up to a point and for a specific purpose, and the point was quite a distance short of a formal, lifelong commitment and the purpose wasn't connected to the role of spouse and the raising of children.  Nobody had my moral qualms. The argument ran thus: it takes two to tango, these girls were modern girls and they knew what life was about and what the situation was.  Men and women can enjoy each other and have fun with each other on a strictly short term, uncompromising basis where it was understood that neither party could or would expect more from the very temporary attachment than to be happy here and now. So, maybe that is the modern way but it runs against my way of thinking and it is a lifestyle I would never be able to adopt.  I am the sort of person who wants personal relationships to be as permanent. as possible precisely because of the tremendous insecurity I would feel in a temporary relationship.  I can only enter Imo a relationship if I commit myself to make it lasting and therefore I would expect the other person to make the same kind of commitment; it's circular in that I would only make the commitment after I was completely sure the other person would do the same. All of this is important because my general attitude is to remain aloof from all emotional  attachments; it is a stance which has actually become my lifestyle and which has caused a certain amount of anxiety in itself, and which is further the cause of the particular situation, which I am trying to explain, in perhaps a very elaborate way,  coming about.

 

I met this particular girl on her first day at the firm. She wasn’t actually a collections typist, she was meant to be in the commercial department, do the typing for a couple of the senior partners, but somehow she had been given some of my typing and had found some error, a discrepancy, in my dictation and came to me to tell me about it.  In my experience this was totally unprecedented.  The collections typists usually type exactly what they hear and don’t pay any attention to grammatical correctness or syntax. Their attitude was: if he writes badly or makes mistakes, let him correct the mistakes.  And here this girl, obviously new and very green, had the gall, as I felt at the time, to come and discuss my dictation with me. The reason for this, shall we say 'concern', was that it apparently used to her habit in her previous job in a small private company who employed about three people, or such was the impression I got.  She liked to work with the boss as a team, so that she could show him she actually paid attention to what she was doing. The thinking typist. This interruption upset me a little because it was unexpected and unusual and I acted in a rather stuffy way and was very stern and businesslike with her. Although I was very polite it was the kind of politeness that is so often the front for anger.  She, on the other hand, was quite blithe about it all, no doubt trying hard to be accepted in her new job and she seemed totally oblivious to my careful and very considered manner. In fact, she tried to chat a little, just being sociable, while I was getting uneasy and wanted her to go back to her own desk as soon as possible so that at least one of us could get some work done.

This initial reaction is a conditioned reflex that never fails when I meet new people. I’m extremely uncomfortable in the company of persons I’ve only just met. A friend of mine put it neatly and not inaccurately, when he said that I hate people I don’t know. Sometimes I think it isn’t a question of hating but rather of being apprehensive.  Whatever it may be, I am uncomfortable in situations where I have to make small talk with people whose names I have forgotten just about as soon as I was introduced to them and whose interests and likes and dislikes I don’t know.  It is even worse when the meeting, such as the one with this girl, is unexpected because in those cases I’m not psychologically prepared for the ordeal.  It's not that I really don’t like strangers, well, not always.  It's just that I am tongue tied because I get into a panic when I’m forced to think of suitable topics of conversation and because I generally fail to think of any as a result of this almost blind panic I'm thrown into, I don’t say anything except 'hello' or 'how are you' and then appear dour, uncommunicative and, worst of all, hostile. The thought that the stranger would think that I’m, when I’m really not, is even more distressing and leads to even greater panic which then unfortunately does tend to lead to hostility when I start resenting this person for confronting me and creating this entire situation. In the long run I do make friends, or at least get on well with people, once the unfamiliarity wears off but only if the relationship is allowed time so that I can get to know the person, and so that he or she can get to know me. That is the bane of my life: people having the incorrect impression of me because they don’t know me well enough. And often do not have the opportunity to get to know me better.

 

After the girl had left I sat in my office like a zombie, without any desire to get back to what I had been doing previously. Instead of dismissing her intrusion I dwelt on it, and on her. The main reason for this was that I felt that I had been wrong to be so unreasonably formal and stiff while she was so cheerful and happy, and I berated myself for not unbending a little. Although I didn't actually scowl at her. I didn’t smile once while I was talking to her and there was always a smile on her lips. The other thing was my inability to recall what she looked like, even after about ten minutes of fairly close proximity. It was, I suppose, similar to the bad habit of immediately forgetting the name of the person one has been introduced to for the first time."

 

"Do you now know what she looks like?" the therapist asked while making a note in her notebook. Neels always wondered why notes were taken when the whole session was recorded on tape.

 

"Yes, I know her a lot better now. "

 

"What is her name?"

 

"Claire Jones.  Mrs Claire Jones."

 

"Still married?"

 

"Yes, up to now."

 

"Why do you phrase your answer like that?"

 

"Well this means jumping the proverbial queue in the chronological sequence of events. The point from which I really started getting to know Claire well was one Friday afternoon, when we were going home and she came by my office as her habit had become.  By some weird coincidence we’d started arriving at work, the parking lot I mean, at the same time or within seconds of each other and we’d park next to each other.  Kind of logically we then started leaving work at the same time too and walked together to where our cars were parked. This Friday Claire didn’t look happy at all but I didn’t ask her what the matter was, since we’d only recently started talking to each other on a regular basis, she’d been at the firm only for about a month, and I certainly wasn’t going to pry into her personal affairs.  When she came into my office I wasn’t quite ready to leave yet, so she sat down while I tidied my desk. Then, out of blue, she announced, 'Well, Ronnie, my husband, is moving out on Sunday.' I was taken aback and could only think of the very pitiful reply of   'oh, I'm sorry to hear that. What is the matter?' And she launched into the description of the breakdown of her marriage caused by her husband Ronnie who’d had an affair with some woman, and he’d confessed to it and everything had suddenly become unhappy and eventually the solution seemed to be that he would move out and that divorce proceedings would be initiated.  She said that she was happy about this and the freedom that would follow and that she was going to make the most of it by having as much fun and as many boyfriends as possible, because the marriage had been something of a bind and she wasn’t going to give her husband the satisfaction of knowing that she was in any way suffering from the separation. Apparently he was going to leave all the furniture behind in their duplex town house and only take his clothes and personal things. The problem with the town house was that she wouldn’t be able to afford it by herself since the rent was just less than her nett salary, but this problem would be solved by taking in another girl to share. But she was resolute to be happy and carefree.

 

I really didn’t know what to tell her except that I told her that if this husband was truly such a bad egg, then she was well rid of him at an early stage rather than after twenty years of continual bitterness and lamentation for lost opportunities, and finally I gave her some optimistic blather on the type of person she should share with and how easy it would be to find a suitable flat-mate. That week-end I gave a lot of thought to Claire and the situation she was about to find herself in. The main worry I foolishly had was her stated intention of being the carefree divorcee because that was exactly the approach I thought she should avoid. That is, it would be a bad thing if she were to become easy prey for every scoundrel out there who was interested in an uncomplicated good time with a woman who would be so desperate for companionship and even a little affection that she would be like putty in the bands of any man who wanted no more than a tumble in the hay. In particular my concern related to the other guys in my firm, none of whom would have dreamt of passing up an opportunity like Claire. 0f course, at that time I didn’t know her very well at all.  Sadly, it never occurred to me to think that she would turn to me for solace, that I could be one of the many potential boyfriends. 

 

Comes Monday and I go to work fully expecting a very gloomy Claire, very much separated. No such thing. She actually makes the effort to share her happiness with me. Claire is very happy indeed and the reason is very simple: hubby is still at home. Ronnie packed all his stuff and was actually walking out the door when Claire decided that she just couldn’t let him leave, maybe there was still some affection left, maybe she didn’t want to lose the security he represented, maybe it was a combination of the two, whatever. She called him back and they rushed Into each other's arms and embraced tearfully and he unpacked his suitcase and they had a long discussion about life, love, marriage, etcetera. They made a solemn pact to give the marriage another chance and to really work at making a success of it. Putting the magic back into marriage, I suppose. Anyway, Claire was happy and determined to make a go of it, 0n the other hand, although I publicly shared her joy, I was strangely dissatisfied with this state of affairs."

 

"Did you want her for yourself?"

 

"In a vague way, I suppose yes. But, at that stage, not really since I was determined that our interpersonal relationship, in the neutral meaning of the phrase, should remain fairly impersonal. 0r, rather, that was the way I intended things to go but her revelation about the state of her marriage changed all that.  I was drawn deeper into her life than I had intended because she now really saw me as her confidant, you know, the ice had been broken. Up to that point I was just a guy she worked with and for and who she joked around with on a superficial level, but after this marital crisis she started confiding in me about all kinds of other personal things, told me the story of her life, and so on."

“Who you bond with more easily, men or women?”

 

"I become friendly with women long before I do with men. I find that after the initial awkwardness I get along very well with women because somehow I find it so much easier to chat with them about all kinds of inconsequentialities, you know, topics of conversation that never seem to come up amongst men, or that I would feel uncomfortable discussing with men.  With one exception, my best friends ore all female. And I mean friends -- not lovers. Women I get along with, feel comfortable and relaxed with and there’s little or no sexual tension."

"Sexual tension?" 

 

"It sounds stupid, I suppose, but that is what I call how I feel when I'm with sexually attractive unattached girls. That is, unmarried girls or girls without steady boy-friends.”

 

"Do you like pretty girls better than ugly ones?"

 

"No, I don’t mean that. I think that I like women for other reasons than their looks; things like Intelligence, wit, sense of humour. Obviously I’m not going to pretend that looks don’t count but I don’t go for stupid, pretty girls.  It doesn’t often happen that I meet people with whom I feel I can have conversations on almost my topic and feel satisfied with the way the conversation is going. With people I really like and enjoy talking to, the conversation can, in the space of as little as an hour, cover as many as ten topics, sometimes of a wide variety. We might not discuss anything in any depth but at least we have fun, and nothing is laboured. To get back to the sexual tension thing: it only comes up with pretty, unattached women because first of all, I naturally feel attracted to them exactly because of their physical appearance and that is why I feel the tension. It’s probably totally self-induced, I mean, the woman needn't necessarily feel the same way -- to her I might merely be another person she meets and who doesn’t appeal to her all that much and in whom she has no great, or any, sexual interest at all. There are certain preliminaries, call  it wooing. The man has to win the woman’s heart, in the old-fashioned sense. These days sometimes the woman pursues the man, but the important thing is that people don't enter lightly into situations where they might be stuck for thirty or forty years and be unhappy. Choosing one's mate is a serious business with serious long-term consequences. A large part of the compatibility between the man and the woman is sexual. That is where I come back into the picture. All of the above is in my mind when I meet an attractive woman, and I start agonising over the direction I'm supposed to take: do I want to get to know this woman better? if so, for what reason - as a friend or as a lover? I normally decide to let the relationship develop in its own way and at its own pace. I opt out.  it's better not to pursue and eventually possibly end up with a friend than to pursue and end up as the loser and without a friend. The tension then relates to the signals I perceive the woman is sending: is she willing to be more than a friend? Is she indicating that she regards me as nothing more than an amusing conversationalist? do I bore and/or irritate her?  I’m hyper cautious not to mistake signals for what they are not, which means I tend to ignore signs that are ambiguous even if they could be favourable.  Despite this I do manage to become friends with women as a substitute for anything else, I suppose. My approach is so cautious, almost timid, that I can’t be anything else." 

 

"Let me see if I understood you. You feel the sexual tension because you think you ought to be making a play for the woman but you are too scared to do so in case she might reject you. And the tension is further increased because you are never sure what the woman's feelings for you are, and you solve this problem by assuming that her feelings could not be stronger than friendship."

"It makes me look stupid, doesn’t it?"

 

"You haven’t yet told me what Claire looks like. "

 

"Well, if I had to describe her I would say that she isn’t a great beauty but that she is attractive and very sexy. Average height, generally slim but out of condition, the thighs are a bit wobbly, nice small breasts, good legs, marvellous butt. She's got a very sexy walk. The face is not outstanding, no one feature is particularly attractive, nose slightly too big, mouth too wide, jaw too long. In repose the face is rather plain though the eyes are large and dark and generally twinkle. Claire is at her most attractive when she smiles and fortunately she does that a lot. Congenital cheerfulness, I call it.  Claire’s personality is her best feature because it makes an attractive, sexy, desirable woman out of a woman who is otherwise quite ordinary. She has black hair, longer at the back than at the sides, centre parting, and a floppy fringe covering her forehead, One of her nervous habits is to use both hands to push the fringe back, away from her eyes and forehead, only to have it fall forward immediately after she lets go, then she pushes it back, and so on.  She chain smokes too. She’s cheerful, talkative, not too witty but a good conversationalist who doesn’t dominate a conversation, an excellent straight man for my jokes and puns. All round a very likeable person."

"Do you like her a lot? It seems so."

'"Yes, I do but that is exactly the cause for the unease I feel these days."

 

'Why?"

 

"We must go back to the beginning again. After that first meeting, the one where I wasn’t exactly bursting with friendliness, I didn’t see her for about a week and then she started coming into my office again because somehow she seemed to end up with a lot of my typing. This meant that she popped into my office two or three times a day to get answers for queries she had.  Talking officially led to chatting sociably, I had not again been so stuffy with her, and we found that we got along well. After work we walked down to our respective cars together, But it was all very low key and, as far as I was concerned, dispassionate. I wasn’t that much interested in her, because I didn’t know her too well.  But that Friday evening when she’d mentioned Ronnie's imminent walk-out everything changed. I had known that she wasn't completely happy with her marital life but my inner response was, hey, it’s her marriage and the troubles are her troubles.  By confiding in me to that extent she’d made her trouble mine, in the sense that I was now involved on a much more personal level with Claire and her life and I felt upset because she was upset.  Our relationship became more intimate, in a strictly platonic way, than it had been before; or at least I felt that way. Initially I’d wanted to keep the relationship uncomplicated and I was glad that she was married because that fact removed any temptation I might have felt, and I thought it would force me to 'know my place' as it were, since I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself over a married woman. This changed to a degree when I discovered that she wasn’t exactly blissfully happy with her marriage. The thing is that my feelings changed more than my behaviour. She was still married, was giving her marriage and her husband a second chance, and therefore it would have been stupid of me to behave like some kind of suitor. Apart from my usual trouble of not knowing exactly how she felt about me. That's the way it’s been going up to now."

 

"Does this constitute that 'deviation from the norm' you mentioned earlier, of which you aren’t sure whether it constitutes a real change in your life?"

 

"I think so. Although my attitudes have changed, it hasn’t affected my life."

 

"How do you manage that?"  The therapist sounded disbelieving.

 

"I feel differently about Claire now but my behaviour hasn’t changed significantly and I try to treat her as much as possible in the manner I always have."

 

"This obviously causes at least some of the depression you complained of. Wouldn't it be better if you changed the nature of the relationship, so that you either 'win' her and gain some happiness, or 'lose' her but know where you stand so that you can overcome the effect of uncertainty."

 

"Theoretically, yes. But practically I consider it best to continue as we are. If the situation improves for me, fine, and if it doesn’t, then it won't be that marvellous but it would have been natural and unforced, and for the good of all. I'm fatalistic -- maybe our relationship oughtn’t to be any closer than it is right now; whether it stays stable or deteriorates will be up to the fates and the outcome will be the best possible outcome. Maybe I should be satisfied merely, if that is the appropriate word, to be her good friend."

 

"That is all just conjecture on your part, isn’t it? Why don't you force the issue to see what becomes of it, rather than waiting patiently for the dice to fall where they want? Aren’t you guilty of some sort of moral or mental cowardice? What is so bad about rejection?"

"Isn’t that the standard advice I get!  Make a play for the girl; after all she can only say 'no'. Rejection is the most painful thing I can ever suffer. It is the rejection itself which is so awful and not the result thereof, that is, of not attaining one's object. It takes so much courage for me to actually make my own personal feelings known; it is so difficult for me to reveal my emotions, especially affection or love, that I would only want to do it when I’m absolutely sure the immense mental effort won't be wasted."

"What do you think Claire thinks of you?"

" I think we are fairly good friends, we get on well, there seems to a number of areas where we’re compatible. Apart from that I really don't know what she thinks of me, since she has never told me. She does seem to trust me enough to tell me a fair number of confidential things."

 

"If the relationship is as good as all that, why can’t it be improved?"

 

"I've never said it couldn’t be improved!  The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be enough evidence to suggest that Claire would want a change, or would welcome it if I tried to force the issue. Then there is also the question of her affair. "

“With whom?”

"Hannes, one of the Professional Assistants in the firm, a good-looking, rugged type who is something of a charmer and connoisseur of women.”

 

"Is she still with her husband?"

 

"Yes, I don't think she is going to leave Ronnie. I think the affair is some sort of attempt to pay her husband back for the affair he had, but she hasn’t told him and says she has no intention of informing him about it; she thinks it might 'break' him. If Claire hadn’t confided in me I would never have known, although retrospectively speaking she did mention Hannes a lot and he is the type who always has some girl or other on the side.  He is married too. That is why she discussed it with me; she was getting serious attacks of doubt and wanted someone to unburden herself on. Claire was very much in love with Hannes, really infatuated.  He wasn’t in love with her, and she knew that. For him she was a nice little diversion who was both easily available and very willing, and it must’ve been flattering for him that she had such a crush on him. And because they’re both married she couldn't make too many demands on him. Claire is in two minds about the affair: she is crazy about him but also knows that she means little to him and that he is definitely not going to give up his wife and home and professional respectability just to have her.  And what’s more she isn’t even all that keen on breaking up her own marriage. So she feels she ought to break up with Hannes. This would cause her more pain than the affair causes at the moment, wildly imperfect and unsatisfactory as it might be.  That’s the advice she asked me for:  should she continue with this affair with no future or should she put a stop to it, and should she remain with the firm where the temptation to resume the affair lurked or should she go, equally unhappy because of the absence of the object of affection.  I was immensely flattered that she should turn to me in her ‘time of troubles’ and also saddened by this since it showed exactly how she viewed out relationship, that is as friendship and nothing more. On second thoughts, maybe I ought to be grateful that she defined the bounds of our relationship before I could make a fool of myself by trying to expand it.  My advice was probably rather lame. I tried to analyse the situation for her and reached the conclusion of what she ought to do but it wasn’t what she really wanted to do and so I told her that the best thing she could do, would be to go with the flow and to let whatever happens, happen in its own time and that it would all be for the best.  Finally it boiled down to ‘do what you want’. All in all it probably didn’t matter what my advice was, she still made up her own mind, but the important part was that she had someone she could talk to, which made her feel a little better; you know, a burden shared is a burden halved.  A few days later she told me she’d made a decision: she would stay on in the firm but break off the affair, and she was adamant that it had ended.  A week later she confessed to me that the affair had resumed.  When it came to the crunch she hadn’t been strong enough to resist.  Is this an irony, or what?  She couldn’t stand to let her husband walk out and she couldn’t stand to end her extra-marital affair. I didn’t tell her this, but I had thought her resolve would in all probability not survive intact for long.  Now the affair is probably going to run its course. For Claire’s sake I hope her husband remains ignorant of her infidelity. I suspect his pride would be dealt such a mortal blow should he find out, that he would walk out on her for good, a prospect she isn’t too keen on, mainly for the loss of security and the gain of hardship it would mean. Otherwise she is quite flippant about a break-up. In fact, she often says she wishes she were single and independent again.”

 

"She seems to be fairly open and honest about her private life."

 

"Maybe not 100% honest and open, but still to a surprising degree, yes."

"Has she told you why she dislikes her husband?"'

 

"I don’t think she dislikes Ronnie as a person. What she does dislike is what Ronnie became, as her husband, after they got married. By the time I met Claire they’d been married for about two years but had lived together for five years before that.  According to her the relationship was better when they were just living together because the two of them had to work hard at maintaining and improving the relationship because there was the feeling of insecurity from not being legally bound to one another. Neither one could be sure of the other, both felt independent and showed the other this. Therefore each one was more considerate toward the other and neither could take the other for granted. Now that they are married Ronnie's attitude has changed. Claire is his wife now, and that carries responsibilities and duties and obligations that being a girlfriend never did. The main demand he makes is that she must follow his lead, must do everything he wants and must be available at all times when he wants her to be available. In short, the very epitome of a male chauvinist, Claire doesn’t want to conform to these expectations because they’re demeaning and because she feels that she isn't getting anything in return.  Marriage should be a compromise between two equal partners. Ronnie isn't interested in compromise -- he wants capitulation. She’s put forward the best formulation of a viewpoint on the difference between marriage on the one hand and living together on the other hand,  that I’ve heard in years and also the most original.. The traditional argument in favour of marriage is that marriage gives much greater security to the woman. Claire's opposing argument is this: living together is much better for the relationship since because it is potentially so frail, the two people will be much more prepared to accommodate each other's foibles and irritating habits. They will make much more of an effort to stay together and their mutual tolerance will be much higher. Marriage does, maybe, give a certain formal, legalistic security but actually it’s in marriage where the woman can be exploited most by her husband when he demands that she do her wifely duty and that she should stay at home to look after the children when she might want a career too; and when she has a career she still has to run the household because the husband demands this as compensation for allowing her to have a career.  He takes his wife for granted and affection slowly drains away, leaving a relationship where the people are eventually bound only by legal custom and habit, and not love. Inevitably this would lead to the man seeking thrills outside of the marriage which could then lead to the break-up of a twenty year old marriage. And that would be infinitely worse than the collapse of a live-in relationship between two independent people."

 

"How do you think your relationship with Claire will develop, if at all?"

 

"I have no idea. Maybe that’s the cause of my present depression. The relationship might remain static or it might improve. I don't even really know what I would like it to do. Up to now I've only seen her in the environment of the firm and during working hours, I have never been to her home, I have never even run into her on the street. I would have to make an effort to change the nature of the relationship and I don't know whether I'm prepared to make that effort, Somehow I’m too scared to find out where the relationship could go to or not, as the as may be. Maybe I should just go with the flow and see what turns up."

 

"0n the other hand maybe you should take your destiny into your own hands."

 

With that piece of advice the therapist stood up, time had expired.  Neels stood up as well, thanked the therapist for her time and left. He had seven days until the next session to build up a nice load of psychological stress.

 

He was becoming quite good at it.

 

 

III

 

"I wrote a poem for you last night."

 

"Oh, really? What kind of poem?"

 

"Just a poem."

 

"Was it romantic, I mean, is it a love poem?"

 

"Sort of."

 

"Look, what's wrong with you?  Don’t be coy, okay? If you don’t want me to know what it's about, you shouldn’t have told me about it in the first place. It's very unfair of you to make me curious and then refuse to relieve my curiosity."

 

"Maybe it was a mistake to tell you."

 

"Tell me, did you write this poem or not?"

 

" I did."

 

"So, tell me about it. Show it to me so I can read it, if you don’t want to talk about it."

 

"I don’t think you should read it."

 

"Why? Is it obscene? Do you insult me?"

 

"It's too personal."

 

"Well, you shouldn’t have told me then!  This is ridiculous!"

 

Claire jumped up and walked away in a huff, leaving Neels with two cups of coffee, her half-eaten Danish and the bill. He sighed and finished his coffee; he would have drunk Claire's too if she didn't take sugar in her's. Why does Romance have to be so awfully difficult, he thought, why is it so hard to be in love and so impossible to come right out and declare one's passion? 

 

It was only half past one, lunch hour was far from over. There was a book seller across the road from the cafe where Neels and Claire had come for Danish and coffee. Neels loved browsing in this shop that allowed him lots of opportunity to flip through the reading matter. The shop assistant kept to her desk at the front of the shop and she showed no interest whatsoever in what the customers were doing. Neels headed for the Fine Arts section. If only given half a chance he could lose himself for hours in a volume with colour reproductions of famous paintings. In the shop he forgot about Claire.

 

But when he sat down at his desk again Claire came flooding back into his mind.  Claire, his passion temporal, his passion unattainable. Claire who wasn’t beautiful, merely desirable, Claire who wasn’t his ideal of an intelligent, contemporary woman, merely the person with whom he didn’t really want to conduct intellectual conversations. She was the woman he loved, to put it that simply and that terribly

 

His problem was that he had no idea what Claire’s reaction would be if he told her he was in love with her. For all he knew she would first laugh at him, for having the gall to even think of having such a preposterous emotion, and would them break off the friendship as well, punishing him for his impertinence.  

 

Anyway, how can one still be friends with someone you have just rejected as a lover?

 

Neels’s afternoon turned out to be a bit of a disaster. Virtually everything he did, or attempted half-heartedly, went wrong in some way or other because his thoughts were fixed on Claire, not on business.

 

After work Neels went to see his friend Sean who lived in a very down market part of town the redevelopers had not yet set their sights on.  Sean lived in considerable comfort since his income was substantially higher than Neels's and his rent was almost half what Neels paid.

 

Sean poured them each a stiff Bell’s and water and poured half a packet of peanuts into a small bowl. They were both still in their suits, Neels in a cheap artificial fibre two-piece, Sean in a pure wool three-piece. The first drinks went down quickly and in silence. Sean poured another round.  Neels took a handful of peanuts and ate them one by one, savouring the salty taste and the satisfying crunch. He mellowed out.

 

"So, tell me about it?" Sean said.

 

"Tell you about what?" Neels replied languorously. The Bell’s was doing its stuff, and doing it with that rare application that only a fine whisky can bring to the job.

 

"Whatever it is that made you come here to swill my expensive whisky and devour my exotic peanuts. You know I know you never visit unless something is hassling you."

 

"Isn’t it possible that I just want to relax a little here, just get my bearings back in a nice, relaxed atmosphere and that I don't want to really talk about it?"

 

"Give me a break!"  Sean snorted derisively, as he was entitled to do as a person who had known Neels longer, better and with more compassion than Neels knew himself.

 

"It's the old problem again," Neels admitted.

 

"You're in love with a girl who doesn’t return your affection but it doesn’t matter, anyway, because you haven’t even told her that you like her more than somewhat and that you wanted to be more than her friend, and now she's found a boyfriend and that makes you insanely jealous although you've got no reason because there has never been anything between you and this girl except polite smiles and vague small talk, but you've conducted an entire, passionate love affair in your mind."

 

Sean knew Neels very well indeed.

 

"Well, something like that," Neels said. He had been through this scene with Sean so often before. “Except this one is already married.”

 

"If I've told you a thousand times then I must've told you a million times: if you want a girl, do something about it. Tell her, show her. Maybe she won’t want you but that is all right, you can always find a new object of affection, there's plenty. But you mustn't refrain from making your feelings known and then feel hurt when she ignores you or treats you as a good friend only, and then start to hate her because she finds a lover, or she prefers her husband to you. If you want something badly but refuse to do anything to obtain it, then you deserve never to have it."

 

"You're right, of course, perfectly right," Neels said with anguish "but it doesn’t matter how often you give me the same advice. It doesn’t work, not with me. With other guys, normal guys, it might be the solution but with me it isn’t.  I'm different, my psychological make-up is radically worse than just about everyone else's."

 

"Are you on hallucogenics, man? What makes you so special? How are you so marvellously different? Ha! It's that sort of specious bullshit that makes me despair sometimes. You are not different; you've just somehow got that idea into your mind and now it's poisoning your whole outlook on life. You know what? I think you deliberately created this image for yourself and now you live up to it as if you were a masochist. You thrive on irrational, unfounded, irrelevant jealousy and mental pain. You masturbate your self-pity until you have an orgasm of neuroses."

 

There wasn’t much Neels could say in self-defence. He knew he was wrong and that Sean was right. He knew that even better than Sean knew it. His whole life had been an existence in which he had searched for love, but whenever he was face to face with that phenomenon, whenever it was in his grasp to love and be loved, he turned his back, stepped away, rejected it. To tell the truth, Neels was truly scared of only two things: love and death. Death made him feel uneasy, uncertain, apprehensive, but love simply terrified him.

"What the hell," Sean said and poured Neels another drink, "if I can’t help you with advice, at least I can get you good and drunk."

 

"I think I can manage that.”

 

"Sure, sure. Maybe you should try it as a permanent condition. Get rid of hang-ups and inhibitions. Stay drunk and stay happy." 

Neels wasn’t very interested in being happy -- he just wanted to drink enough whisky to pass out, a state of mind that was guaranteed to be painless.

 

It was close to dawn when Neels woke up on Sean's sofa. His back hurt and his head was bleary. With great force of will and blind courage Neels forced himself to leave Sean’s place and drive home. It was a long, slow trip. More than once Neels wished he’d had the wisdom to stay at Sean's place and sleep until midday.  Unfortunately his employer demanded that he be at the office, present if not totally correct, every day. He wasn’t too fond of his job, and he wasn’t terribly dutiful. He worked because he was forced to do so by a money economy in which there was no such thing as a free lunch.

 

At work he made a point of avoiding Claire without seeming to avoid her, He found himself a mission in the library and it was already lunch hour when he chanced to bump into her for the first time that day.

 

"I was beginning to think you were off sick today," said Claire, with a delicately lifted eyebrow and a movement of the mouth that couldn’t decide whether it was a smile or a yawn. "Where have you been all morning?"

 

"Busy, busy," Neels replied, not able to hide a guilty little smile very well.

 

"Are you too busy to have lunch?" she enquired.

 

"I suppose not," he said. "Even I have to take it easy every now and then."

 

They went to their favourite place, had coffee and Danish and acted as if things were completely normal. The conversation was light and airy and frivolous and aimless. 

 

"James Freed is only a fantastic playwright." Claire gushed, "he knows what life is all about, know what I mean? Last night I saw this new play of his, 'Kill Your Mother And Make Love To Your Father', and it was so meaningful, so full of deep understanding of what it is that the human race is really all about. Marvellous acting, stupendous direction! It was just a total experience, there's no other way to describe it, it was so, so, so -- truly great!"

 

"Is it a feminist play?" asked Neels who was dead-set against chauvinism and sexism. His trouble with women didn’t lie in the possibility that they might be superior to him in strength or mental ability.

 

"I don’t know," Claire replied, frowning, trying to remember what feminism was. "There wasn’t even my women in the play, just men." 

 

"Does  the play deal with  homosexuality?"

 

"Are you talking about queers?" Not only the words but also the expression on Claire’s face left no doubt about her attitude. 

 

"Well, the word 'queer' has disappeared from common polite usage. Nowadays the acceptable term is 'gay', but yes, I m referring to 'queers'."

 

"No, these guys were confused and mixed-up about a lot of things but I don’t think it went as far as that. At least, if it did, I missed it." 

 

No doubt.

 

"I'm thinking of accepting that I’m gay," Neels said.

 

"What! You're joking, of course!" Claire's mouth hung open as if her facial muscles had failed without warning or mercy. She tried to appreciate Neels’s sense of humour but her attempt was not entirely successful.

 

"Why would you think I'm joking?"

 

'Well, I mean, you don’t even look like one. You sure don’t talk like one and I’ve never seen you act like one.”

 

"Would it wake my difference to you if I was?"

 

Sexually no, platonically probably.

 

"I don’t know. I mean, I don’t know anyone like that. It would certainly be a great adjustment to make, I mean, one day I think of you as on ordinary man and the next day you're a queer. That's some change, know what I mean?'

 

But, Claire, the root of the problem with this whole relationship is exactly that you don’t think of Neels as an ordinary man with sexual desires directed towards you, You may want a good male friend but that isn’t what Neels wants to be anymore, he wants to be your lover or he wants you out of his life -- but he doesn’t want you as a friend. You are too shallow and stupid, too inconsiderate, too self-centred, too beautiful to be a friend. 

 

Neels looked her straight in the eyes, no escape for her, not this time. Claire couldn’t stare him down. Her eyes dropped and she fiddled with a teaspoon.

 

"Are you really serious?' she asked.

 

"Would it truly upset you if I said yes?"

 

"I don’t know, it would just be so  ..,  different, all of a sudden." 

 

He decided that she wasn’t going to approve of him as a gay man and gave up.

 

"Come on," he said, "please don’t have a sleepless might because of what I've said. It's not that important."

 

Claire didn’t reply. On their way back to the office she left more space between them than usual, not that they had ever walked hand in hand before

 

At the precise moment that his digital watch showed half past four Neels left his office and went home. He had neither seen nor spoken to Claire since the lunch hour, for which he was thankful. 

 

The following morning Claire was waiting for Neels in his office when he came in. She looked less than happy.

 

"I've got to talk to you," she said, sounding less than exhilarated. 

 

"What's the problem?" he asked with a sinking feeling. Claire looked as if she had a major problem, probably not the prospective of his emergence from the closet, and he was in no mood to listen to it, much less give advice, as he was sure he would be called upon to do.

 

She closed the door and sat down. Agitated fingers ran through unruly hair. An agitated tongue licked luscious lips.

 

"What would you do if your girlfriend was, uh, fooling around with another guy?" she asked.

 

Neels considered saying, no, I don’t know what I would do; I give up, what's the answer? He decided against it. Claire was probably not in the right frame of mind to appreciate his wit.

 

"Is your girlfriend fooling with another guy?" he replied instead.

 

"This is serious!" she cried, "please don’t joke about it! My husband is cheating on me, he's having an affair with another girl. The bitch!"

 

"How do you know?"

 

"Ronnie confessed. He told me everything. He says it's all over but I don’t believe him. The son-of-bitch!"

 

"So, what happened?"

 

"Well, Ronnie's a rep, you know? He went on a course in Durban last year, a sales course, for two weeks and he met this woman up there, Ronnie was feeling lonely, of course, and so he picked up this bitch in some bar and they got on so well that Ronnie moved out of his hotel and moved in with her in her flat.  When Ronnie came home, it upset her so much to be separated from him that she resigned her job and moved down here. He helped her find a job and a flat. Sometimes when he told me he was going on long sales trips or other courses, he stayed with her. And all this time I thought Ronnie was faithful to me. I know we’ve had our troubles, just like all marriages, but I thought he loved me!"

 

The wail of despair of a woman robbed of the one thing she had thought was indisputably, irrevocably hers. The cry of confusion of a woman who had been shown that the one  apparently constant and stable thing in her life was no more stable than a certified lunatic and no more constant than a nymphomaniac.

 

Neels tried hard to keep his mental sneer from showing.

 

"Why did Ronnie tell you?" he asked.

 

"I think it is the guilt. Maybe he was finding it too difficult to keep secret any longer. Ronnie says he told me because it’s over but I don’t believe him. "

 

"Well, has he renounced you? I mean, has he told you that he wants the marriage to end?"

 

"No. As far as Ronnie's concerned he wants to carry on like always."

 

"Well, then don’t you think it is highly likely that his fling with this other girl is over? Otherwise he would have left you, wouldn’t he?"

 

"Maybe. On the other hand, it could be just a smoke screen. What should I do?'

 

Neels thought of suggesting suicide but refrained from mentioning this alternative since this solution would probably be too extreme for Claire's taste.

 

"Try putting arsenic in his coffee," he said. 

 

"Stop trying to be funny. This is serious!"

 

Oh, really?

 

"Do you still want to keep up the marriage?" Neels enquired. 

 

"I don’t know. Half of me wants to, the other half doesn’t. The thing is: it will never be the same again. I’ll always distrust Ronnie from now on and we’ll never be truly conformable with each other again. I think it will end, it just depends when. Should I stop it now -- tell him it's over as of today -- or should I let it die a natural death? Which would be less painful in the long run, do you think?"

 

"If you really believe it’s going to end sooner or later, rather kill it now. I'm a great believer in mercy killing. Once you start thinking about it, you’ll lose your nerve"

 

Is it possible that Neels saw a gap here he could exploit? When Claire was separated from her husband would she not need consoling? Would she not crave company when she was suddenly alone? Would she not need a little tenderness to ease the hurt and heal the wounds?

 

Probably. But Neels was definitely not the one.

 

Claire’s real attractiveness, leaving physical appearance aside for the moment, lay in the fact that she had always been unattainable. She was married and even if she hadn’t been  she wouldn’t have been interested in Neels in any but a most superficial way. The reason why Claire was a safe object of love and devotion was exactly because she would never have returned those feelings. Neels only wanted those girls he couldn’t have. Those he could have, didn’t interest him. Suddenly Claire seemed to have crossed over to this last category.

 

"It is easy for you to say," she wailed. "It is not you who will be lonely and deserted and miserable."

 

Well, there are always people who are more fortunate than others.

 

The scene was lapsing into the doldrums, once Claire's catharsis had come and gone. She had said it all, shown it all, and now Neels was wishing that she would leave. The manifestation of great emotional pain and stress can be great fun for the spectator but when it is dragged out to desperate lengths even the keenest appetite for voyeuristic thrills, always cheap, always disposable, is dulled. 

 

Just the previous day Neels would have moved heaven and earth to spend any small amount of time with her. He wouldn’t have minded whether they were conducting the most mundane of conversations or whether the talk was witty and exciting. He wouldn’t have cared if she'd only used him to pass an otherwise unproductive lunch hour with. It wouldn’t have mattered had she seen in him nothing but a harmless, malleable male who could easily be manipulated into putting her interests above his own.

 

Such was the nature of his obsessive adoration as recent as the previous day. 

 

Today the roles were not exactly reversed but Claire's had changed markedly and significantly. Yesterday she had been in control, of her marriage, of Neels, of her world generally. Today she had all but lost her husband, her grip on her world was shaky and loose indeed, and she had lost Neels totally. 

 

"I know very well that I'm not in your shoes,” he said, truthfully and accurately, "and I'm sure I probably don’t have a complete understanding of how you feel right now but the world goes on turning, as it is said, and your life goes on. Somehow or other you will have to carry on, with or without this husband of yours, My advice is this: get rid of Ronnie right now, even if it is very painful in the short term; get over him and find someone else, which shouldn’t be too difficult. In other words, make a brand new start as soon as possible."

 

"Do you really think that's the best way?"

 

"Yes,"

 

"But how long is it going to take before I meet a new guy? I couldn’t stand being alone!"

 

"You've got friends."

 

“That's true. You're my friend."

 

Neels had been afraid she would say that. Sure, he was her friend, just because he paid for her coffee and Danish a couple of times and because he had been trapped into listening to her tale of woe and despair. Sure he was her friend, just because he said hello to her first thing in the morning at work.  Sure, he was her friend, especially after he had taken her to a play once when she'd had two tickets but her husband hadn’t been able to make it.

 

And so on, and so on.

 

Friendship had never entered into it all. It had been lust, infatuation, obsession, and many other kinds of extreme emotional feeling -- but never friendship. Friendship is a meeting of minds, almost love, but without all the sexual traps and tensions of love, without the need for possession and domination. Anyone can fall in love but friendship is not so easy to come by, much more difficult to achieve. Love isn’t built the way friendship has to be -- no friendship is created whole, there is no friendship at first sight. 

 

Even though he might have been blinded by lust Neels had retained enough of his mental faculties to recognise virtually all of Claire's faults. To put it succinctly: he loved her, he didn’t like her. Although he was besotted by her, he did not approve of her.  More plainly put: he did not trust her.

 

Since she had never been his lover and since she wasn’t his friend, he had no shred of feeling left for her. He knew very well that she had never been aware of the exact nature and strength of his feelings for her and that he therefore had no right to blame her for not being his lover. After all, she had never spurned him.  All right, so he didn’t blame her, but the historical fact remained that no sentimental ties of the past bound them now, nor could there be my ties of that nature in the future.

 

Neels wished Claire would leave.

 

"I think the best thing for you right now is to go back to work and concentrate and forget all about this at least for your working hours. The worst thing you could do would be to let what happened take over your mind completely. Try to let it fade away naturally. Things will improve."

 

To his immense relief she accepted his advice and left. He sighed deeply and leant back in his chair. For Neels there would be no work that day. The inevitable reaction would follow. The feeling of emptiness that always came when he broke off a relationship, even if it had been broken off only in his mind, having existed only in his mind in the first place. Nature abhors a vacuum -- Neels’s obsession for Claire was replaced by an obsessive self-analysis, 0ne torment was exchanged for another until he once more found another object on which to lavish his dumb, secret, stupid adoration

 

It was a process he had gone through a hundred times before and would go through a hundred times more, to the day he died. He knew what was wrong with him, suspected why, and had been told often enough how to rectify the fault. But if he corrected his behaviour he would not be Neels. 

Neels defined himself as a poet. During those hours of the night when most people slept he sat up at his small pine desk, illuminated by a solitary, powerful light bulb, in the great all-encompassing darkness of his small, cluttered study, composing poems where rhyme cropped up intermittently, often gratuitously and without preconceptions, and where metaphor came and went as it pleased, neither an overbearing, boring nuisance nor a total stranger whose absence makes spaces seem emptier or phrases hollower. In these poems he portrayed a version of a version of reality that he conceived as being his very own privately created universe wherein he was the sole supreme being, but even so a supreme being who was never less than depressed, never worse than paranoid, never better than miserable.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

FINIS