Then I noticed a small plate of complimentary marsh-mallows near Chloe's elbow and it suddenly seemed clear that I didn't love Chloe so much as marshmallow her. What it was about a marshmallow that should suddenly have accorded so perfectly with my feelings towards her I will never know, but the word seemed to capture the essence of my amorous state with an accuracy that the word love, weary with overuse, simply could not aspire to. Even more inexplicably, when I took Chloe's hand and told her that I had something very important to tell her, that I marshmallowed her, she seemed to understand perfectly, answering it was the sweetest thing anyone had ever told her.
From then on, love was, for Chloe and me at least, no longer simply love, it was a sugary, puffy object a few millimetres in diameter that melts deliciously in the mouth.
11
What Do You See in Her?
Summer flew in with the first week of June, making a Mediterranean city of London, drawing people from their homes and offices into the parks and squares. The heat coincided with the arrival of a new colleague at work, an American architect, who had been hired to spend six months working with us on an office complex near Waterloo.
'They told me it rained every day in London – and look at this!' remarked Will as we sat one lunchtime in a restaurant in Covent Garden. 'Incredible, and I brought only pullovers.'
'Don't worry, Will, they have T-shirts here too.'
I had met William Knott five years before, when we had both spent a year together on scholarships at Yale. He was immensely tall, with the perpetual tan, intrepid smile, and rugged face of an explorer but the hands of a pianist. Since finishing his studies at Berkeley, he had developed a successful career on the West Coast, where he was considered one of the most thoughtful practitioners of his generation. The Architects' Journal had described him, with little concern for biological reality, as 'the illegitimate love-child of Mies van der Rohe and Geoffrey Bawa' and even the normally reserved Architectural Review had commended him on his use of concrete.
3. 'So tell me, are you seeing anyone?' asked Will as we began our coffee. 'You're not still with what's her name, that . . . ?'
'No, no, that finished long ago. I'm involved in something serious now.'
'Great, tell me about it.'
'Well, you must come over for dinner and meet her.' 'I'd love to. Tell me more.'
'She's called Chloe, she's twenty-four, she's a graphic designer. She's intelligent, beautiful, very funny . . .' 'It sounds terrific' 'How about you?'
'Nothing to say really, I was dating this girl from UCLA, but you know, we were getting in each other's head-space, so we sort of both pulled the rip-cord. We weren't ready to ride the big one together, so . . . But tell me more about this Chloe, what is it you see in her?'
4. What did I see in her? The question came back to me later that evening in the middle of Safeway, watching Chloe at the till, enraptured by the way she went about packing the groceries into a plastic bag. The charm I detected in these trivial gestures revealed a readiness to accept almost anything as incontestable proof that she was perfect. What did I see in her? Almost everything.
For a moment, I fantasized I might transform myself into a carton of yogurt so as to undergo the same process of being gently and thoughtfully accommodated by her into a shopping bag between a tin of tuna and a bottle of olive oil. It was only the incongruously unsentimental atmosphere of the supermarket ('Liver Promotion Week') that alerted me to how far I might have been sliding into romantic pathology.
On the way back to the car, I complimented Chloe on the adorable way she had gone about the business of doing the grocery shopping.
'Don't be so silly,' she replied. 'Can you open the boot, the keys are in my bag.'
It is easy enough to find charm in a pair of eyes or the contours of a well-shaped mouth. How much harder to detect it in the movements of a woman's hand across a supermarket checkout. Chloe's gestures were like the tips of an iceberg, an indication of what lay submerged. Did it not require a lover to discern their true value, a value that would naturally seem meaningless to someone less curious, less in love?
Yet I remained pensive on the drive home through the evening rush hour. My love began to question itself. What did it mean if things I considered charming about Chloe, she considered incidental or irrelevant to her true self? Was I reading things into Chloe that simply did not belong to her? I looked at the slope of her shoulders and the way that a strand of her hair was trapped in the car headrest. She turned towards me and smiled, so for an instant I saw the gap in between her two front teeth. How much of my sensitive, soulful lover lay in my fellow passenger?
9- Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent normality of the loved one. Hence the boredom of lovers for those standing on the sidelines. What do they see in the beloved save simply another human being? I had often tried to share my enthusiasm for Chloe with friends, with whom in the past I had found much common ground over films, books, and politics, but who now looked at me with the secular puzzlement of atheists faced with messianic fervour. After the tenth time of telling friends these stories of Chloe at the dry cleaner or Chloe and me at the cinema, or Chloe and me buying a takeaway, these stories with no plot and less action, just the central character standing in the centre of an almost motionless tale, I was forced to acknowledge that love was a lonely pursuit.
10. There was of course nothing inherently lovable about Chloe's way of packing the groceries, love was merely something I had decided to ascribe to her gesture, a gesture that might have been interpreted very differently by others in line with us at Safeway. A person is never good or bad per se, which means that loving or hating them necessarily has at its basis a subjective, and perhaps illusionistic, element. I was reminded of the way that Will's question had made the distinction between qualities that belonged to a person and those ascribed to them by their lover. He had carefully asked me not who Chloe was, but more accurately, what I saw in her.
Shortly after her older brother died, Chloe (who had just celebrated her eighth birthday) went through a deeply philosophical stage. 'I began to question everything,' she told me, 'I had to figure out what death was, that's enough to turn anyone into a philosopher.' One of her great obsessions, to which allusions were still made in her family, concerned thoughts familiar to readers of Descartes and Berkeley. Chloe would put her hand over her eyes and tell the family her brother was still alive because she could see him in her mind just as well as she could see them. Why did they tell her he was dead if she could see him in her own mind? Then, in a further challenge to reality and because of the way she felt towards them, Chloe would (with the grin of a six-year-old child facing the power of its hostile impulses) tell her parents she could kill them by shutting her eyes and never thinking of them again - a plan which no doubt elicited a profoundly unphilosophical response from the parents.
Yet solipsism has its limits. Were my views of Chloe anywhere near reality, or had I completely lost judgment? Certainly she seemed lovable to me, but was she actually as lovable as I thought? It was the old Cartesian colour problem: a bus may seem red to a viewer, but is this bus actually red in and of its essence? When Will met Chloe a few weeks later, he certainly had his doubts, unexpressed of course, but evident from the way he took little interest in her, boring her instead with a lengthy account of how he had once built a cantilevered roof for a villa in La Jolla, and in the way he told me at work the next day that for a Californian, English women were of course 'very special'.