14. We helped to define what we wanted by reference to others. Chloe had a friend at work who had a history of relationships with unsuitable types. A courier was the current blunderer.
'I mean, why does she hang out with a burly bloke in leather trousers who smells of exhaust fumes and is using her for sex? And that's fine if she wanted to use him for sex too, but apparently he can't even sustain an erection for that long.'
'How terrible,' I answered, worried by the possible definition of the word 'long'.
'Or just sad. One has to go into relationships with equal expectations, ready to give as much as the other - not with one person wanting a fling and the other real love. I think that's where all the agony comes from.'
15. Because it was past six and her office was closing, I asked Chloe whether she might not after all be free to have dinner with me that night. She smiled at the suggestion, stared briefly out of the window at a bus heading past St Martin- in-the-Fields, looked back and said, 'No, thanks, that would really be impossible.'
Then, just as I was ready to despair, she blushed.
16. Faced with ambiguous signals, what better explanation than shyness: the beloved desires, but is too shy to say so. The seducer who wishes to call his victim shy will never be disappointed.
'My God, I've just forgotten something terrible,' said Chloe, offering an alternative explanation for a red face, 'I was supposed to call the printer this afternoon. I can't believe I forgot to do that. I'm losing my head.' The lover offered sympathy.
'But look, about dinner, we'll have to do it another time. I'd love that, I really would. It's just difficult at the moment, but I'll give my diary another look and call you tomorrow, I promise I will, and maybe we can fix something up for before this weekend.'
4
Authenticity
1. It is one of the ironies of love that it is easiest confidently to seduce those to whom we are least attracted. My feelings for Chloe meant I lost any belief in my own worthiness. Who could I be next to her? Was it not the greatest honour for her to have agreed to this dinner, to have dressed so elegantly ('Is this all right?' she'd asked in the car on the way to the restaurant, 'It had better be, because I'm not changing a sixth time'), let alone that she might be willing to respond kindly to some of the things that might fall (if ever I recovered my tongue) from my unworthy lips?
2. It was Friday night and Chloe and I were seated at a corner table of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, a French restaurant that had recently opened at the end of the Fulham Road. There could have been no more appropriate setting for Chloe’s beauty. The chandeliers threw soft shadows across her face, the light green walls matched her light green eyes. And yet, as though struck dumb by the angel that faced me across the table, I lost all capacity either to think or speak and could only silently draw invisible patterns on the starched white tablecloth and take unnecessary sips of bubbled water from a large glass goblet.
3. My sense of inferiority bred a need to take on a personality that was not my own, a seducing self that would respond to every demand and suggestion made by my exalted companion. Love forced me to look at myself as though through Chloe's imagined eyes. 'Who could I become to please her?' I wondered. I did not tell flagrant lies, I simply attempted to anticipate everything I believed she might want to hear.
'Would you like some wine?' I asked her.
'I don't know, would you like wine?' she asked back.
'I really don't mind, if you feel like it,' I replied.
'It's as you please, whatever you want,' she continued.
'Either way is fine with me.'
'I agree.'
'So should we have it or not?'
'Well, I don't think I'll have any,' ventured Chloe.
'You're right, I don't feel like any either,' I concurred.
'Let's not have wine, then,' she concluded.
'Great, so we'll just stick with the water.'
4. The first course arrived, arranged on plates with the symmetry of a formal French garden.
'It looks too beautiful to touch,' said Chloe (how I knew the feeling), 'I've never eaten grilled scallops like this before.' We began to eat. The only sound was that of cutlery
against china. There seemed to be nothing to say. Chloe had been my only thought for too long, but the one thought that at this moment I could not share with her.
Silence was damning. A silence with an unattractive person implies they are the boring one. A silence with an attractive one immediately renders it certain you are the tedious party.
Silence and clumsiness could of course be taken as rather pitiful proof of desire. It being easy enough to seduce someone towards whom one feels indifferent, the clumsiest seducers could generously be deemed the most genuine. Not to find the right words is paradoxically often the best proof that the right words are meant. In that other Liaisons Dangereuses, the Marquise de Merteuil faults the Vicomte de Valmont for writing love letters that are too perfect, too logical to be the words of a true lover, whose thoughts will be disjointed and for whom the fine phrase will always elude. Real desire lacks articulacy – but how willingly I would at that moment have swapped my constipation for the Vicomte's loquacity.
I had to find out more about Chloe, for how could I abandon my true self unless I knew what false self to adopt? But the patience and intelligence required to fathom someone else went far beyond the capacities of my anxious, infatuated mind. I behaved like a reductive social psychologist, eager to press my companion into simple categories, unwilling to apply the care of a novelist to capturing the subtleties of human nature. Over the first course, I blundered with heavy-handed, interview-like questions: What do you like to read? ('Joyce, Henry James, Cosmo if there's time'), Do you like your job? ('All jobs are pretty crap, don't you think?'), What country would you live in if you could live anywhere? ('I'm fine here, anywhere where I don't have to change the plug for my hairdryer'), What do you like to do on weekends? ('Go to the movies on Saturday, on Sunday, stock up on chocolate for getting depressed with in the evening').
Behind such clumsy questions (with every one I asked, I seemed to get further from knowing her) rested an impatient attempt to get to the most direct question of all, 'Who are you?' – and hence 'Who should I be?' But my directness was doomed, and the more I practised it, the more my subject escaped through the net, letting me know what newspaper she read and music she liked, but not thereby enlightening me as to who she might really be.
Chloe hated talking about herself. Perhaps her most obvious feature was a certain modesty and self-deprecation. When the conversation led her to refer to herself, it would not simply be T or 'Chloe', but 'a basket-case like me'. Her self-deprecation was all the more attractive for it seemed to be free of the veiled appeals of self-pitying people, the false self-deprecation of the I'm so stupid/No, you're not school.
Her childhood had been awkward, but she was stoic about the matter ('I hate childhood dramatizations that make Job look like he got off lightly'). She had grown up in a financially comfortable home. Her father ('All his problems started when his parents called him Barry') had been an academic, a law professor, her mother ,Claire’) had for a time run a flower shop. Chloe was the middle child, a girl sandwiched between two favoured and faultless boys. When her older brother died of leukaemia shortly after her eighth birthday, her parents' grief expressed itself as anger at their daughter who, slow at school and sulky around the house, had obstinately clung to life instead of their son. She grew up guilty, filled with a sense of blame for what had happened, feelings that her mother did little to alleviate. The mother liked to pick on a person's weakest characteristics and not let go. Chloe was forever reminded of how badly she performed at school compared to her dead brother, of how gauche she was, and of how disreputable her friends were (criticisms that were not particularly true, but that grew more so with every mention). Chloe had turned to her father for affection, but the man was as closed with his emotions as he was open with his legal knowledge, which he would pedantically share with her as a substitute for warmth, until her adolescence when Chloe's frustration with him turned to anger and she openly defied him and everything he stood for (it was fortunate that I had not chosen the legal profession).