I don’t want to come between you. I’m sorry, drunk and stupid and sorry. But these flashes. I’m staring out at the city sky through my little window and I’m walking hand in hand with you both as we sample virgin olive oil and the way you both kiss, your mouths wet and laughing as, each on either side of me, you reach for my hands.
I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I’ve been running it through my head all week as Mike packed. Maybe it’s me thinking I can’t be a couple again, can’t risk so much on one person. Maybe I need two lovers not one. Maybe I’m invading and wanting the love you have for each other for myself. Blackmailing you into it. I don’t know. How could it even happen? Could we live together? Should I take you at your word, both of your many words? ‘We love you so much,’ you said together. ‘I love you,’ you both said to me, separately, secretly.
‘You terrify me,’ you said, Tobe, in a whisper as you bit my neck when Fi was in the shower.
And Fi, the way you held my waist as I tried on your bikini. The way you, your fingers lingered.
I worry though that our time together may have pushed you both apart. Maybe you have been fighting like me and Mike did over ‘the other woman’. Please don’t make me that. Please.
This phrase going round and round in my head.
It’s something you said but it seems contradictory.
‘We love you.’ Not ‘I’.
And it scares me.
I want you both. I am too much, I want it all. I want to take that moment further. For Tobe to massage my shoulders and to look up at you, my love, my delicate Fi while he enters me, I want to kiss your neck, your cheek and hold that long kiss that we broke from ten years ago.
I want us to make a life. Together. To give you both that child that you want so much. Just ask me, please.
Please tear this up. I’m so stupid. I’m crying and so happy and I know I’ve destroyed everything. Can we still be friends?
I’m not going to read this over. I don’t know where we go from here. I can’t bear to think of the days and weeks waiting for your response. I hope I’ve not forced you apart. Maybe, Fi, you should call me first, if any of this has made sense to you. If not then I’ll take your silence as a ‘No’. Please, please know I love you both, that I want and need your love, that I want to share your pain and laughter as we did in Naxos. To just have you both on either side of me. I want this letter to bring you closer, my loves. I so hope you’re reading it together.
I’ll understand if you never reply to me. I love you both so much that I’m willing to take this risk.
On second thoughts please don’t call or email or text me. I’m spending the next week with the phone turned off. Please, the only way we can deal with this is if you write me a letter. If there’s no letter after a week then I’ll understand.
I love you.
I love you.
Dot
MARGARET ATWOOD
You don’t need to know my name. Let’s just say I’ve been around for a long time, and after my years – my decades – my centuries of immersion in the trade, I know my stuff.
Some people call me Anon., but that can be confusing, as there are a lot of Anons around and the quality varies. Anons write on washroom walls quite a lot – Call me, I’ll surprise you, with a phone number – and they do a roaring business in the Personal Classifieds: Morose MWM seeks afternoon dalliance with well-built SBW, 25–35, non-smoker, spanking. No skill to it, merely the crude particulars. I hate being confused with that sort of riff-raff.
So don’t call me Anon. Don’t call me anything. We’ll just skip the formalities, shall we? When we meet, that is. As we will.
How then will you recognise me?
I used to be well known. I’d go about from city to city, on horseback if times were flush, on foot if the pickings had been slim. I carried a carved staff and wore a pair of sturdy sandals. My garments were a bit eldritch – made the customers believe I was versed in ancient wisdom, which I was, and that I had a pipeline to the invisible forces, which I did. I shouldn’t have had to emphasise these features, but if you’ve got it and you don’t flaunt it who can tell? So I wore the eldritch outfit as a kind of signage. I’d set up shop in the main square, tucked discreetly into a corner, quill and papyrus at my elbow, or later, vellum, or later still, pen and paper. The desperate would know where to find me.
Things changed. They always do. History shunted me here and there, from one prime game park of love to another. A clientele with time on their hands – romance needs that – and a little spare cash, which never hurts either, and an interest in appearing stylish. Nowadays I hang out in Toronto, once a desert for my kind of enterprise, now an oasis. Where there are tapas bars, there are love letters.
You can usually spot me at the Bar Mercurio, an establishment I’ve singled out in tribute to my patron god, Mercury, alias Hermes. He’s the ruler of communication and charm – you can see why I’d want those attributes – and also of trickery and lies, which can come in handy as well. My other patron is Aphrodite, goddess of Looove. That can be sticky, as the two of them don’t get on very well. For Hermes, a roll in the hay is a roll in the hay, after which he’s on his way with no tears shed. If he has to do a cunning imitation of being lost in love, he’ll do it, but that’s all it will be – a cunning imitation. Description, for him, is an end in itself: not for nothing has he been called the Dancing King of the Adjective.
Whereas Aphrodite’s a purist. For her, love is serious to the point of tedium. She’ll push her devotees all the way to the funeral pyre if need be. Your heart really does have to beat triple-time, your longing and despair must be genuine, or she’ll give you what for by making you fall in love with a donkey next time around.
I can draw on either one of them, depending on the wishes of the client: a quick seduction, an in-depth life-altering emotional experience complete with threats of suicide. Your choice.
(Don’t make the mistake of believing that I’m scornful of love. I make jokes about it, yes, but it is after all the most powerful force in the world, and in any case I wouldn’t want to offend my goddess. I have dedicated myself to its service, at least on Wednesdays and Fridays. Essentially I worship it, like everyone else.
It’s only that nowadays its manifestations have become so tawdry, so paltry, so venal, so shrivelled … but enough of that.)
I used to do most of my work at night, but the music has become too loud for me, so I’ve taken to the mornings. The Bar Mercurio is near the Bata Shoe Museum, so I can nip in there when I’m feeling homesick for the old days and ways, and gaze at my outworn shoes – fifteen pairs of them at least, from the aforementioned Roman leather numbers to the pointy toes of Renaissance Florence to the stacked red heels of the eighteenth century French monarchy.
These days I wear comfortable trainers, and the aqua and lilac leisurewear of a plump matron out for a slenderising morning jog. Or, in my male avatar, some good-quality jeans, an admittedly ridiculous though sincere baseball cap – I (heart) The LEAFS – and a black T-shirt, with a gold chain around my neck. Only one gold chain, mind you; I don’t want to stand out.
I sit there with my latte, reading the newspaper – the horoscopes add a touch of comic nostalgia to my day – and wait for customers. If you require my services, just sidle up to me and introduce yourself in the following manner:
‘Hot enough for you?’
(For which Cold, Wet, Foggy, Sunny, Cloudy, Smoggy or Snowy may be substituted as appropriate.) After I have given the standard reply – ‘We’ll suffer for it later’ – you should give the password:
‘O lente, lente currite noctis equi!’
If I like the look of you and feel that we can work together, and that you aren’t likely to stiff me for the fee – I wouldn’t recommend doing that, by the way – I will answer, ‘The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike.’
But if you don’t come up to my standards, I will say, ‘I’m sorry, I only speak English.’ If you pers
ist, and start shouting that you know who I really am and you absolutely have to avail yourself of the essential services only I can provide – if you fall on your knees and start kissing the hems of whatever it is I have on – I will call the manager. I can’t handle complete lunatics, but he can.
You see, although you have to trust me, I must be able to trust you as well. Our enterprise requires teamwork. You’ve got to feed me the emotional raw material. You can’t just sit back and do nothing. That’s why I’m so choosy.
But I’m not turning down as many applicants as I’d like, these days. My stock in trade has always been the graceful and effective manipulation of the written word, directed towards a desired end – copulation at midnight, long-drawn-out sweet’n’sour flirtation, full-throttle white satin wedding bells – but grace seems to be flying out the window. Now a young man can text-message his target on her cellphone – I WON 2 FKU – and she might actually turn up at the video arcade and go through with it. The decline of modesty has not been a plus, from my point of view. It’s bad for trade.
Once there was a heavy demand for well-turned sonnets – Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, that sort of thing – or even for lighter verse – Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, and so forth. It showed a girl – however erroneously – that a man or woman had more on his or her mind than her or his body. Now it’s just URAHOTTEE. Where’s the art in that?
So I’ve had to hustle a bit to keep myself going. I’ve come up with what I think is a subtle yet convincing pitch. Here’s what’s on offer:
SCRIBE OF AGELESS LOVE!
THE MENU OF DESIRE!
Wide experience of both main genders, plus gaiety, cross-dressing, paedophilia, fetishism, animal husbandry, and more!
Melt her/his/its heart with a splendiferous bouquet of customised verbiage!
Candy’s dandy, say it with flowers, liquor’s quicker, but an expert letter is way, way better!
What modern woman wants: Great abs, an agile and persistent member, total adoration, but, more than that, a sense of humour! Woo her with drooling drollery!
All girls are curious: Let me turn you into a purple package of dark mystery she longs to open!
Arouse her pity! Allow me to hint at your secret wounds – those only the poultice of Love can heal!
Choice of 100 openers: My sweet darling, My beloved pumpkin, My sinful but organic chocolate, My Venus in furors, My leather whiplet, My surreal fur-lined teacup, My jugular vein of passion, My voluptuous and odoriferous onion, I kiss your tattooed triceps, I want your Size 12 stiletto denting my neck, You unbelievable shit, many more!
Optional: Disappearing ink! Vanishes after a week/month/year, to avoid embarrassment at a later date!
Dignified letters of rebuke for dumped Misses. Win him back with a cool/hot note!
Odi et amo, updated!
No job too small, no heart too fractured!
Braille at no extra charge!
I can do for you what Viagra can’t!
TORTURED BY THE PANGS OF LOVE?
THINK YOU CAN’T AFFORD ME?
YOU CAN’T NOT AFFORD ME!
So there you have it.
With each order I can offer a month’s supply of scented notepaper, with tasteful monogram in a rose design – for the gals – and, for the men, a genuine snakeskin card case, with several false names on the cards. Handy when you’re in a hurry.
And here you are, at last! Look into my eyes. You have my full attention. Tell me your love problem. Propose your favoured solution. Don’t be shy: remember, anything you’ve fantasised about, I’ve already done. More than once. Oh, so much more.
Leave it with me overnight. Payment in advance, please: you’ll soon be in such raptures you’ll forget to write the cheque.
Don’t worry. It’s money well spent. I always get results.
Thank you.
You won’t be sorry.
DAMON GALGUT
My dear Wouter
I should confess straight off that I’ve been hitting the gin again. Mostly it’s under control, but I’ve lurched off the straight and narrow lately. Never before sunset, of course, or at least the middle of the afternoon. But everybody needs their anaesthetic, my dear, as you of all people should know, blissed out with religious ecstasy in your little cell. But let me not sound bitter, so early on.
Wouter, I’m going to come right out and say it – I WANT YOU TO COME BACK. I’ve tried to be understanding and supportive and all that, but the truth is that this set-up is just bloody awful. I mean, what are you doing there, actually? Well, I know what you’re doing, the praying and meditating and fasting and the rest of it, which I have to say sounds diabolical, by the way – all that deprivation – but what are you hoping to achieve? You’ve tried to explain it to me, the oneness with the universe etc. etc., but deep down you know it’s twaddle. You’re too sensible to fall for such hollow consolations. Of course, you’ve always had a tendency towards, what’s the right term, spiritual fads, you know what I mean, your yoga phase, for example, until you put your hip out, and that dreadful retreat you dragged me on, no speaking or eye contact and the gurgly chanting by that shiny fat man. I know you accused me of running away that time because the food was bad, but really it was the chanting that did it. There’s something so egotistical about people trying to lose their ego, I can’t bear the self-indulgence, and even you admitted afterwards that the organic gruel they served us was unspeakable. But what you’re doing now sounds just like that retreat, bad food and silence and stupid chanting, except that it never comes to an end. I hope you won’t take it personally when I say that I can’t imagine anything more hellish.
Wouter, nothing, NOTHING in my whole life, has hurt me as badly as your last letter. Even now it stabs me to the core when I think of it. Because you made it sound like it was, in fact, the very last time that any of us would be hearing from you. It’s cruel, darling, to play with people like that. That rubbish about dying to the world in order to be reborn, having no family or friends or possessions … It’s all very well if you’re a monk, but you’re not. Well, yes, you are now, I suppose, in a technical sense, but not really, not deep down. Let’s be honest about this and admit that what you’re doing is a reaction to being caught in bed with me by Renata and your mother. It was terrible, of course, I’d be the first to admit it. I was just as ashamed and humiliated as you were. Or maybe I was a teeny bit less traumatised, because, well, it wasn’t my wife and mother, and thank God for that, I may add, especially with regard to your mother, and I wasn’t hiding anything, sexually speaking, but I wasn’t in the most flattering position at the time, as you know. But let’s not dwell on that.
The point, darling, is that – bugger it, I’ve forgotten the point. It’s always about this time of the evening that things start to get hazy. The plot disappears, only the characters remain. And this is about all the future has to offer me right now, a hangover in the morning and a long gin-slide into obscurity after lunch. But it could’ve been so different, Wouter, and now I remember the point again. It’s that, instead of being a calamity, Renata and the Mater Carnivora coming home early like that was actually an opportunity to turn this whole thing around. No more sham, no more acting and pretence. No more of those horrible weekends away, with you being all loud and over-jolly and me dragging along some colourless appendage as a cover. You were living a lie, you said it yourself many times, and all because your father was a Dutch Reformed minister who thrashed you senseless as a boy. But he’s been dead many years, and we’re not in the Middle Ages any more. For God’s sake, my dear, gay marriage is legal here now, even the blacks are doing it. We could’ve just told the truth and been ourselves for a change. The truth is middle-aged and past its prime and not very pretty any more, if it ever was, but it’s … well, it’s the truth, I suppose.
I’m not sure what I was driving at, actually, in that last paragraph, but I know what your answer will be in any case. You’ll say that you’ve found the real
truth where you are now, in that awful cold monastery place. But you haven’t, darling. The truth is me. The truth is what Renata found when she came stomping in unexpectedly that Wednesday afternoon. Better to face up to it than spend the rest of your life languishing in what, when you come down to it, is not very different to a common jail cell.
Wouter, I LOVE YOU! I want to scream it out like the death-bellow of a lung-shot buffalo. I speak metaphorically, of course, never having shot a buffalo, or anything else for that matter, but you get the point – anguish and desolation and loss. Not to mention a tank of gin, which I see needs replenishing. And this is a good moment for it, my darling, because I can feel myself going to pieces. Things have got to the point where I can’t tell the difference between grief and alcoholic dementia any more.
All right. I’ve pulled myself together. You’d be astonished at the insights that come to a man on his lonely odyssey between the fridge and the booze cabinet. I had a very clear one, a moment ago – an insight, that is, except that I’ve lost track of what it was. Damn it, can’t you see what I’m reduced to, after only three months without you? Do you know we’ve hardly spent a day without seeing each other since we met at the station eight years ago? All right, it was a relationship with inauspicious beginnings, I grant you that, but we went from strength to strength. We defied language and class and culture. Nobody has ever made me as wildly, dizzily happy as you did, even with all the lying. The only really tragic occasion was being best man at your wedding, and I can tell you I had to choke back a sob when you kissed the bride, though you made up for it with that sly pinch in the registry office. Blast and bugger, it was written in the stars, it was meant to be, all we had to do was follow the inevitable, and now look what’s happened. After the big scene with Renata and the White Witch, all the screaming and crying and throwing of shoes, everybody knew the score. The divorce, well, it was gory and painful and all the rest, but it was FREEDOM, Wouter, don’t you see it? You shouldn’t have given her everything, for God’s sake. The house, the car, the savings – what were you thinking? Not to mention the tattoo parlour, which was a real money-spinner in these parts, as you know. I mean, a little guilt might’ve been appropriate under the circumstances, but to reduce yourself to a snivelling, selfless heap like that – oh, it broke my heart. And then, of course, when you wanted to go off to Korea to find yourself, you couldn’t even pay the air fare. And who did you come to …?
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