I’ve seen the dates. We’re nowhere near young enough for the present war, but when the world war comes—we’ll be just right to fight it. We are, after all, a superb physical specimen. Our feet aren’t flat. Our vision is clear. We’re not clubfooted or Marxist or nuts. We have no conscientious objections or anything of that kind. We’re perfect.
The standard affair, nowadays, will start something like this. It starts, in effect, with a moment of horror.
Most typically it starts with a late-night drive to some little restaurant. The waiter has just brought us our dough, our honorarium or whatever it is, and we’re sitting there quietly snorting and drooling into our brandy balloon, and relishing a perspicacious perfecto. We become aware that people are looking at us. And we don’t like it when people are looking at us. … Then our eyes will be firmly caught and firmly held by a bent female figure hurrying in through the door and across the room toward us. Fair, dark, slim, plump, elegant, not so elegant. Then she spins round. It’s a big power moment when they spin round, with the flourish of challenge, and we get to see what they look like. Speaking personally, for now, it’s always cause for alarm, when they spin round—whatever they look like. Because here’s the weird thing about these relationships with women: you get everything on the first date. Well, every now and then it’s the second date, but generally it’s the first. Instant invasion. Instant invasion and lordship. An hour or two here, max, is all it takes. Oh, mercy. You can go up to a woman on a street corner and start yelling at her and ten minutes later she’s back at your place doing God knows what. On more than one occasion the first physical contact, the first touch, has been a slap or a shove: the swipe of her hand across Tod’s feeble leer of—what? Lust? Contempt? All that needs to happen, in between, is this moment of horror I mentioned. It activates; it legitimates. It seems to be a necessary condition.
So she’ll settle at the table, flushed, exalted, imperious, resolute—anyway, thoroughly pissed off—and I’ll get the ball rolling with something like, “Don’t go—please.”
“Goodbye, Tod.”
“Don’t go.”
“It’s no good.”
“Please.”
“There’s no future for us.”
Which I greet, I confess, with a silent “Yeah yeah.” Tod resumes:
“Elsa,” he says, or Rosemary or Juanita or Betty-Jean. “You’re very special to me.”
“Like hell.”
“But I love you.”
“I can’t look you in the eye.”
I have noticed in the past, of course, that most conversations would make much better sense if you ran them backward. But with this man-woman stuff, you could run them any way you liked—and still get no further forward.
“Please. You can sleep over.”
“This is goodbye, Tod.”
“Beth,” he’ll say. Or Trudy or whatever.
“It just doesn’t sit well with me anymore.”
“Give me one more chance.”
Then they launch into this routine. It lasts from nuts to soup. Don’t get them wrong: Tod has his good points. He is, it is widely allowed, “very affectionate” (I think I know what that means. But how would they know?). And they don’t go on about his obvious flaws, like his being a doctor and having three dozen girlfriends. No, the trouble is, apparently, that Tod can’t feel, won’t connect, never opens up, always holds something back. What Trudy and Juanita and the rest of them are trying to say, it seems to me, is that Tod gives them the creeps. But whatever it is, whatever it is they’re saying or trying to say, it never cramps Tod’s style.
He likes to make love in the deathly hour of dusk. He won’t let them sleep over—another much-discussed shortcoming. Only Irene ever sleeps over. . . . On her lap Beth’s handbag yawns. She’s miserable that it all has to end. Me, I’m miserable that it’s all beginning. By the time we’re on the other side of this, I know (I’m experienced), by the time I’ve become really fond of them and their pretty ways, they will start to recede, irreversibly, fading from me, with the lightest of kisses, the briefest squeeze of the hand, the brush of a stockinged calf beneath the table, a smile. They’ll be fobbing us off with the flowers and the chocolates. Oh yes. I’ve been there. Then, one day, they just look right through you. Next thing you know they switch jobs or cities. All of a sudden they have kids to put through college or they’re shacked up with some old wreck of a husband.