3. ‘Have you been trying on my underwear?’ asked Chloe a moment later, emerging from the bathroom wrapped in a fluffy white robe and a towel around her head. ‘What have you been doing all this time? You have to get out of bed, we can’t waste our day.’
I sighed playfully.
‘I’m going to go and prepare us some breakfast, so why don’t you have a shower in the meantime. There’s some clean towels in the cupboard. And how about a kiss?’
4. The bathroom was another chamber of wonders, full of jars, lotions, and perfumes: the shrine of her body, my visit a watery pilgrimage. I washed my hair, sang like a hyena beneath the cascade, dried myself, and made use of a new toothbrush Chloe had given me. When I returned to the bedroom some fifteen minutes later, she was gone, the bed was made, the room tidied and the curtains opened.
5. Chloe had not just made toast, she’d prepared a feast. There was a basket of croissants, orange juice, a pot of fresh coffee, some eggs and toast, and a huge bowl of yellow and red flowers in the centre of the table.
6. ‘It’s fantastic,’ I said, ‘you prepared all this in the time it took me to have a shower and get dressed.’
‘That’s because I’m not lazy like you. Come on, let’s eat before everything gets cold.’
‘You’re so sweet to have done this.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘No seriously, you are. It’s not every day I get breakfast cooked for me,’ I said, and put my arms around her waist. She didn’t turn to look at me, but took my hand in hers and squeezed it for a moment.
‘Don’t flatter yourself, it’s not for you I did this, I eat like this every weekend.’
Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter of fact, stoic, yet at heart, she was the opposite: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
7. In the course of a supremely mushy breakfast, I realized something that might perhaps have seemed obvious, but that struck me as both unexpected and complicated: that Chloe had begun to feel for me a little of what I had for many weeks felt for her. Objectively, this was not an unusual thought, but in falling in love with her, I had somehow entirely overlooked the possibility of reciprocation. I had counted more on loving than being loved. And if I had concentrated largely on the former dynamic, it was perhaps because being loved is always the more complicated of the two emotions, Cupid’s arrow easier to send than receive.
8. It was this difficulty of receiving that struck me over breakfast, for though the croissants could not have been more buttery and the coffee more aromatic, something about the attention and affection they symbolized disturbed me. Chloe had opened her body to me the night before, in the morning she had opened her kitchen, but I could not now prevent a sense of uneasiness, that bordered on irritation, and amounted to the muffled thought: ‘What have I done to deserve this?’
9. If one is not wholly convinced of one’s own lovability, receiving affection can appear like being bestowed an honour for a feat one feels no connection with. Lovers unfortunate enough to prepare breakfast for such types must brace themselves for the recriminations due to all false flatterers.
10. What arguments are about is never as important as the discomfort for which they are an excuse. Ours started over strawberry jam.
‘Do you have any strawberry jam?’ I asked Chloe, surveying the laden table.
‘No, but there’s raspberry here, do you mind?’
‘Sort of, yes.’
‘Well, there’s blackberry as well.’
‘I hate blackberry, do you like blackberry?’
‘Yeah, why not?’
‘It’s horrible. So there’s no decent jam?’
‘I wouldn’t put it quite like that. There’s five pots of jam on the table, there’s just no strawberry.’
‘I see.’
‘Why are you making such a big deal of it?’
‘Because I hate having breakfast without decent jam.’
‘But there is decent jam, just not the one you like.’
‘Is the shop far?’
‘Why?’
‘I am going out to buy some.’
‘For Christ’s sake, we’ve just sat down, everything will be cold if you go now.’
‘I’ll go.’
‘Why, if everything’s going to get cold?’
‘Because I need jam, that’s why.’
‘What’s up with you?’
‘Nothing, why?’
‘You’re being ridiculous.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Yes you are.’
‘I just need jam.’
‘Why are you being so impossible? I’ve cooked you this whole breakfast and all you can do is make a fuss about some pot of jam. If you really want your jam, just get the hell out of here and eat it in someone else’s company.’
11. There was a silence, Chloe’s eyes glazed, then abruptly she stood up and walked into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. I remained at the table, listening to what might have been crying, feeling like a fool for upsetting the woman I claimed to love.
12. Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.
13. The repugnance I felt towards myself for hurting Chloe was momentarily turned against her. I hated her for all the efforts she had made with me, for her weakness in believing in me, for her bad taste in allowing me to upset her. It suddenly seemed pitiable that she had given me her toothbrush, prepared breakfast for me, and begun to cry in the bedroom like a child. I gave way to an overwhelming urge to punish her for her weakness.
14. What had turned me into such a monster? The fact that I had always been something of a Marxist.
15. There is the old joke made by the Marx who laughed about not deigning to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member, a truth as appropriate in love as it is in club membership. We laugh at the Marxist position because of its absurd contradictions: How is it possible that I should both wish to join a club, and yet lose that wish as soon as it comes true? How was it that I might have wished Chloe to love me, but have been irritated by her when she did so?
16. Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and our weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe in the beloved now that they believe in us?
17. I wondered how Chloe could be justified in even thinking she could base her emotional life around a scoundrel like me. If she appeared to be a little in love, was this not simply because she had misunderstood me?
18. Though from a position of unrequited love they long to see their love returned, Marxists unconsciously prefer that their dreams remain in the realm of fantasy. Why should others think any better of them than they of themselves? Only so long as the loved one believes the Marxist to be more or less nothing, can the Marxist continue to believe the loved one to be more or less everything. If Chloe had been lowered in my estimation because she had slept with me, it was because she had in the process caught a bad case of I-infection.
19. I had often seen Marxism at work in others. At the age of sixteen, I was for a while in love with a fifteen-year-old girl, who was both captain of her school volleyball team, very beautiful, and a committed Marxist.
‘If a man says he’ll call me at nine,’ she once told me over a glass of orange squash that I bought for her at the school cafeteria, ‘and he does actually ring at nine, I’ll ref
use to take the call. After all, what’s he so desperate for? The only guy I like is the one who’ll keep me waiting, by nine thirty I’ll do anything for him.’
I must at that age have had an intuitive understanding of her Marxism, for I remember efforts to seem uninterested in anything she said or did. My reward came with our first kiss a few weeks later, but though she was unquestionably beautiful (and as adept at the arts of love as she was at volleyball), the relationship did not last. It was too tiring to make a point of always calling late.
20. A few years later, I was seeing another girl, who (like a good Marxist) believed that men should in some way defy her in order to earn her love. One morning, before going out for a walk with her in the park, I had put on an old and particularly off-putting electric-blue pullover.
‘Well, one thing is for sure, I’m not going out with you looking like that,’ exclaimed Sophie when she saw me coming down the stairs. ‘You’ve got to be joking if you think I’ll be seen with someone with that kind of jumper on.’
‘Sophie, what does it matter what I’m wearing? We’re only going for a walk in the park,’ I replied, half-fearing she was serious.
‘I don’t care where we’re going, I tell you, I’m not going to the park with you unless you change.’
But pig-headedness descended on me and I refused to do as Sophie wanted, arguing the case of the electric jumper with such force that a while later we headed for the Royal Hospital Gardens with the offending garment still in place. When we reached the gates of the park, Sophie, who had till then been in a mild sulk, suddenly broke the silence, took my arm, gave me a kiss, and said in words that perhaps provide us with an essence of Marxism, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not angry with you, I’m glad you kept the old horror on, I would have thought you were so weak if you’d done what I told you.’
21. To be loved by someone is to realize how much they share the same needs that lie at the heart of our own attraction to them. Albert Camus suggested that we fall in love with people because, from the outside, they look so whole, physically whole and emotionally ‘together’ – when subjectively, we feel dispersed and confused. We would not love if there were no lack within us, but we are offended by the discovery of a similar lack in the other. Expecting to find the answer, we find only the duplicate of our own problem.
22. A long, gloomy tradition in Western thought argues that love is in its essence an unreciprocated, Marxist emotion and that desire can only thrive on the impossibility of mutuality. According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one. The whole of troubadour poetry of twelfth-century Provence was based on coital delay, the poet repeating his plaints to a woman who repeatedly declined a desperate gentleman’s offers. Centuries later, Montaigne declared that, ‘In love, there is nothing but a frantic desire for what flees from us’ – an idea echoed by Anatole France’s maxim that, ‘It is not customary to love what one has.’ Stendhal believed that love could be brought about only on the basis of a fear of losing the loved one and Denis de Rougemont confirmed, ‘The most serious obstruction is the one preferred above all. It is the one most suited to intensifying passion.’ To listen to this view, lovers cannot do anything save oscillate between the twin poles of yearning for someone and longing to be rid of them.
23. There was a danger that Chloe and I would trap ourselves in just such a Marxist spiral. But a happier resolution emerged. I returned home from the breakfast guilty, shamefaced, apologetic, and ready to do anything to win Chloe back. It wasn’t easy. She hung up on me at first, then asked me whether I made a point of behaving like a ‘small-time suburban punk’ with women I had slept with. But after apologies, insults, laughter, and tears, Romeo and Juliet were to be seen together later that afternoon, mushily holding hands in the dark at a four-thirty screening of Love and Death at the National Film Theatre. Happy endings – for now at least.
24. There is usually a Marxist moment in every relationship, the moment when it becomes clear that love is reciprocated. The way it is resolved depends on the balance between self-love and self-hatred. If self-hatred gains the upper hand, then the one who has received love will declare that the beloved (on some excuse or other) is not good enough for them (not good enough by virtue of associating with no-goods). But if self-love gains the upper hand, both partners may accept that seeing their love reciprocated is not proof of how low the beloved is, but of how lovable they have themselves turned out to be.
7
False Notes
1. Long before we’ve had a chance to become truly familiar with our loved one, we may be filled with the curious sense that we know them already. It can seem as though we’ve met them somewhere before, in a previous life, perhaps, or in our dreams. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes accounts for this feeling of familiarity by claiming that the loved one was our long-lost ‘other half’ to whose body our own had originally been joined. In the beginning, all human beings were hermaphrodites with double backs and flanks, four hands and four legs and two faces turned in opposite directions on the same head. These hermaphrodites were so powerful and their pride so overweening that Zeus was forced to cut them in two, into a male and female half – and from that day, every man and woman has yearned nostalgically but confusedly to rejoin the part from which he or she was severed.
2. Chloe and I spent Christmas apart, but when we returned to London in the new year, we began spending all our time in each other’s company. We led the typical romance of late-twentieth-century urban life, sandwiched between office hours and animated by such minor external events as walks in the park, strolls through bookshops, and meals in restaurants. We found agreement on so many different issues, we hated and loved so many of the same things, that, after only a short time, it seemed churlish to deny that, despite an absence of clear separation marks, we must once have been two parts of the same body.
3. It was congruence that made life with Chloe so attractive. After unending irreconcilable differences in matters of the heart, I had at last found someone whose jokes I understood without the need of a dictionary, whose views seemed miraculously close to mine, whose loves and hates kept tandem with my own and with whom I repeatedly found myself saying, ‘It’s amazing, I was about to say/think/do/express the same thing . . .’
4. Theorists of love have tended to be rightly suspicious of fusion, their scepticism stemming from the sense that it is easier to impute similarity than investigate difference. We base our fall into love upon insufficient material, and supplement our ignorance with desire. But, these theorists point out, time will show us that the skin separating our bodies is not just a physical boundary, but is representative of a deeper, psychological watershed we would be foolish to try and cross.
5. Therefore, in the mature account of love, we should never fall at first glance. We should reserve our leap until we have completed a clear-eyed investigation of the depths and nature of the waters. Only after we have undertaken a thorough exchange of opinions on parenting, politics, art, science, and appropriate snacks for the kitchen should two people ever decide they are ready to love each other. In the mature account of love, it is only when we truly know our partners that love deserves the chance to grow. And yet in the perverse reality of love (love that is born precisely before we know) increased knowledge may be as much a hurdle as an inducement – for it may bring Utopia into dangerous conflict with reality.
6. I date the realization that, whatever enticing similarities we had identified between us, Chloe was perhaps not the person from whom Zeus’s cruel stroke had severed me, to a moment somewhere in the middle of March when she introduced me to a new pair of her shoes. It was perhaps a pedantic matter over which to come to such a decision, but shoes are supreme symbols of aesthetic, and hence by extension psychological, compatibility. Certain areas and coverings of the body say more about a person than others: shoes suggest more than pullovers, thumbs more than elbows, u
nderwear more than overcoats, ankles more than shoulders.
7. What was wrong with Chloe’s shoes? Objectively speaking, nothing – but when did one ever fall in love objectively? She had bought them one Saturday morning in a shop on the King’s Road, ready for a party we had been invited to that evening. I understood the blend of high- and low-heeled shoe that the designer had tried to fuse, the platformed sole rising sharply up to a heel with the breadth of a flat shoe but the height of a stiletto. Then there was the high, faintly rococo collar, decorated with a bow and stars, and framed by a piece of chunky ribbon. The shoes were the apogee of fashion, they were well made, they were imaginative, and I detested them.
8. ‘I know you’re going to love them,’ said Chloe, unfurling the purple tissue paper in which they had come, ‘I’m going to wear them every day. Then again, they’re so amazing, maybe I should just wrap them back up, leave them in their box, and never use them.’
‘That’s an interesting idea.’
‘I could have bought the shop. They’ve got such great things there. You should have seen the boots they had.’
My mouth went dry. I felt a strange throbbing movement at the back of my neck. I couldn’t conceive how Chloe had lost her heart to a deeply compromised piece of footwear. My idea of who she was, my Aristophanic certainty of her identity, had never included this sort of enthusiasm. Hurt and disturbed by the unexpected turn in our relationship, I asked myself, ‘How could a woman who walks into my life (in sensible flat black shoes favoured by schoolgirls and nuns) and claims to love and understand me be drawn to such shoes?’ Yet outwardly, I simply enquired (in what I trusted to be a remarkably innocent tone), ‘Did you keep the receipt?’
9. It promptly seemed easier to love Chloe without knowing her. In one of his prose poems, Baudelaire describes how a man spends a day walking around Paris with a woman he feels ready to fall in love with. They agree on so many things that by evening, he is convinced he has found a companion with whose soul his own may unite. Thirsty, they go to a glamorous new cafe on the corner of a boulevard, where the man notices the arrival of an impoverished, working-class family who have come to gaze through the plate-glass window of the cafe at the elegant guests, dazzling white walls, and gilded decor. The eyes of these poor on-lookers are full of wonder at the display of wealth and beauty inside, and their expression fills the narrator with pity and shame at his privileged position. He turns to look at his loved one in the hope of seeing his embarrassment and emotion reflected in her eyes. But the woman with whose soul his own was prepared to unite has a different agenda. She snaps that these wretches with their wide, gaping eyes are unbearable to her, she wonders what on earth they want and asks him to tell the owner to have them moved on straightaway. Does not every love story have these moments? A search for eyes that will reflect one’s thoughts and that ends up with a (tragicomic) divergence – be it over the class struggle or a pair of shoes.
Essays In Love Page 4