Do you love me enough that I may be weak with you? Everyone loves strength, but Do you love me for my weakness? That is the real test. Do you love me stripped of everything that might be lost, for only the things I will have for ever?
That evening at the architectural office, I first began to sense Chloe slipping away from me, losing admiration for my work and beginning to question my value in relation to other men. Because I was tired, and Chloe and Will were not, I went home and they chose to go on to the West End for a drink. Chloe told me she'd call as soon as she got home, but by eleven o'clock, I decided to call her. The answerphone replied, as it did when I called again at two thirty that morning. The urge was to confess my anxieties into the machine, but to formulate them seemed to bring them closer into existence, dragging a suspicion into the realm of accusation and counter-accusation. Perhaps it was nothing - or at least everything: I preferred to imagine her in an accident than playing truant with Will. I called the police at four in the morning, and asked them in the most responsible tone a man drunk on vodka may adopt, if they had not seen evidence, perhaps a mutilated body or wrecked Volkswagen, of my angel in a short green skirt and black jacket, last seen in an office near the Barbican. No, sir, no such sighting had been made, was she a relative or just a friend? Could I wait till morning, and contact the station again then?
'One can think problems into existence} Chloe had told me. I dared not think, for fear of what I might find. The freedom to think involves the courage to stumble upon our demons. But the frightened mind cannot wander, I stayed tethered to my paranoia, brittle as glass. Bishop Berkeley and later Chloe had said that if one shuts one's eyes, the outer world may be said to be no more real than a dream, and now more than ever the power of illusion came to seem comforting, the urge not to look truth in the face, the urge that if only one did not think, an unpleasant truth might not exist.
9- Feeling implicated in her absence, guilty for my suspicions, and angry at my own guilt, I pretended to have noticed nothing when Chloe and I met at ten o'clock the following day. Yet she must have been guilty – for why else would she have gone to her local supermarket to add to her kitchen the missing breakfast cereal to fill Weltschmertz's stomach? She accused herself not by her indifference, but by her sense of duty, a large packet of Three Cereal Golden Bran prominently placed on the window ledge.
'Is something wrong with it? Isn't that the one you like?' asked Chloe, watching me stumble over my mouthfuls.
10. She said she had stayed the night at her girlfriend Paula's house. Will and she had chatted till late in a bar in Soho, and as she'd had a bit to drink, it had seemed easier to stop off in Bloomsbury than make the journey back home to Islington. She had wanted to call me, but it would surely have woken me up. I had said I wanted to go to sleep early, so wasn't it the best thing? Why was I making that face? Did I want more milk to go with the three cereals?
An urge accompanies epistemically stunted accounts of reality - the urge, if they are pleasant, to believe them. Like an optimistic simpleton's view of the world, Chloe's version of her evening was desirably believable, like a hot bath in which I wished to sit for ever. If she believes in it, why shouldn't I? If it's this simple for her, why should it be so complicated for me? I wished to be taken in by her story of a night spent on the floor of Paula's flat in Bloomsbury, able in that case to set aside my alternative evening (another bed, another man, unfaked pleasure). Like the voter from whom the politician's caramel promise draws a tear, I was lured by falsehood's ability to appeal to my deepest emotional yearning.
Therefore, as she had spent the night with Paula, had bought cereal, and all was forgiven, I felt a burst of confidence and relief, like a man awaking from a nightmare. I got up from the table and put my arms around the beloved's thick white pullover, caressing her shoulders through the wool, then bending down to kiss her neck, nibbling at her ear, feeling the familiar perfume of her skin and the brush of her hair against my face. 'Don't, not now,' said the angel. But, disbelieving, caught up in the familiar perfume of her skin and brush of hair against his face, Cupid continued to pucker his lips against her flesh. T said once already, not now!' repeated the angel, so that even he might hear.
The pattern of the kiss had been formed during their first night together. She had placed her head beside his and, fascinated by this soft juncture between mind and body, he had begun running his lips along the curve of her neck. It had made her shudder and smile, she had played with his hand, and shut her eyes. It had become a routine between them, a signature of their intimate language. Don't, not now. Hate is the hidden script in the letter of love, its foundations are shared with its opposite. The woman seduced by her partner's way of kissing her neck, turning the pages of a book, or telling a joke watches irritation collect at precisely these points. It is as if the end of love was already contained in its beginning, the ingredients of love's collapse eerily foreshadowed by those of its creation.
14. I said once already, not now. There are cases of skilled doctors, experts at detecting the first signs of cancer in their patients, who will somehow ignore the growth of football-sized tumours in their own body. There are examples of people who in most walks of life are clear and rational, but who are unable to accept that one of their children has died or that their wife or husband has left them – and will continue to believe the child has merely gone missing or the spouse will leave their new marriage for the old. The shipwrecked lover cannot accept the evidence of the wreckage, continuing to behave as though nothing had changed, in the vain hope that by ignoring the verdict of execution, death will somehow be stalled. The signs of death were everywhere waiting to be read - had I not been struck by the illiteracy pain had induced.
The victim of love's demise grows unable to locate original strategies to revive the corpse. At precisely the time when things might still have been rescued with ingenuity, fearful and hence unoriginal, I became nostalgic. Sensing Chloe drawing away, I attempted to pull her back through blind repetition of elements that had in the past cemented us. I continued with the kiss, and in the weeks thereafter, insisted that we return to cinemas and restaurants where we had spent pleasant evenings, I revisited jokes we had laughed at together, I readopted positions our bodies had once moulded.
I sought comfort in the familiarity of our in-house language, the language used to ease previous conflicts, a joke designed to acknowledge and hence render inoffensive the temporary fluctuations of love.
'Is something wrong today?' I asked one morning when Venus looked almost as pale and sad as I.
'Today?'
'Yes, today, is something wrong?'
'No, why? Is there any reason it should be?'
'I don't think so.'
'So why are you asking?'
'I don't know. Because you're looking a bit unhappy'
'Sorry for being human.'
'I'm just trying to help. Out of ten today, what would you give me?'
'I really don't know.'
'Why not?'
'I'm tired.'
'Just tell me.'
'I can't.'
'Come on, out of ten. Six? Three? Minus twelve? Plus twenty?'
'I don't know.' 'Have a guess.'
'For Christ's sake, I don't know, leave me alone, damn it!'