3. 'Have you been trying on my underwear?' asked Chloe a moment later, emerging from the bathroom wrapped in a fluffy white robe and a towel around her head. 'What have you been doing all this time? You have to get out of bed, we can't waste our day.' I sighed playfully.
'I'm going to go and prepare us some breakfast, so why don't you have a shower in the meantime. There's some clean towels in the cupboard. And how about a kiss?'
The bathroom was another chamber of wonders, full of jars, lotions, and perfumes: the shrine of her body, my visit a watery pilgrimage. I washed my hair, sang like a hyena beneath the cascade, dried myself, and made use of a new toothbrush Chloe had given me. When I returned to the bedroom some fifteen minutes later, she was gone, the bed was made, the room tidied and the curtains opened.
Chloe had not just made toast, she'd prepared a feast. There was a basket of croissants, orange juice, a pot of fresh coffee, some eggs and toast, and a huge bowl of yellow and red flowers in the centre of the table.
'It's fantastic,' I said, 'you prepared all this in the time it took me to have a shower and get dressed.'
'That's because I'm not lazy like you. Come on, let's eat before everything gets cold.'
'You're so sweet to have done this.' 'Rubbish.'
'No seriously, you are. It's not every day I get breakfast cooked for me,' I said, and put my arms around her waist. She didn't turn to look at me, but took my hand in hers and squeezed it for a moment.
'Don't flatter yourself, it's not for you I did this, I eat like this every weekend.'
Her lie was symptomatic of a certain pride she took in mocking the romantic, in being unsentimental, matter of fact, stoic, yet at heart, she was the opposite: idealistic, dreamy, giving, and deeply attached to everything she liked verbally to dismiss as mushy.
In the course of a supremely mushy breakfast, I realized something that might perhaps have seemed obvious, but that struck me as both unexpected and complicated: that Chloe had begun to feel for me a little of what I had for many weeks felt for her. Objectively, this was not an unusual thought, but in falling in love with her, I had somehow entirely overlooked the possibility of reciprocation. I had counted more on loving than being loved. And if I had concentrated largely on the former dynamic, it was perhaps because being loved is always the more complicated of the two emotions, Cupid's arrow easier to send than receive.
It was this difficulty of receiving that struck me over breakfast, for though the croissants could not have been more buttery and the coffee more aromatic, something about the attention and affection they symbolized disturbed me. Chloe had opened her body to me the night before, in the morning she had opened her kitchen, but I could not now prevent a sense of uneasiness, that bordered on irritation, and amounted to the muffled thought: 'What have I done to deserve this?'
If one is not wholly convinced of one's own lovability, receiving affection can appear like being bestowed an honour for a feat one feels no connection with. Lovers unfortunate enough to prepare breakfast for such types must brace themselves for the recriminations due to all false flatterers.
10. What arguments are about is never as important as the discomfort for which they are an excuse. Ours started over strawberry jam.
'Do you have any strawberry jam?' I asked Chloe, surveying the laden table.
'No, but there's raspberry here, do you mind?'
'Sort of, yes.'
'Well, there's blackberry as well.'
'I hate blackberry, do you like blackberry?'
'Yeah, why not?'
'It's horrible. So there's no decent jam?' 'I wouldn't put it quite like that. There's five pots of jam on the table, there's just no strawberry' 'I see.'
'Why are you making such a big deal of it?'
'Because I hate having breakfast without decent jam.'
'But there is decent jam, just not the one you like.'
'Is the shop far?'
'Why?'
'I am going out to buy some.'
'For Christ's sake, we've just sat down, everything will be cold if you go now.' 'I'll go.'
'Why, if everything's going to get cold?' 'Because I need jam, that's why.' 'What's up with you?'
'Nothing, why?' 'You're being ridiculous.' 'No, I'm not.' 'Yes you are.' 'I just need jam.'
'Why are you being so impossible? I've cooked you this whole breakfast and all you can do is make a fuss about some pot of jam. If you really want your jam, just get the hell out of here and eat it in someone else's company.'
There was a silence, Chloe's eyes glazed, then abruptly she stood up and walked into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her. I remained at the table, listening to what might have been crying, feeling like a fool for upsetting the woman I claimed to love.
Unrequited love may be painful, but it is safely painful, because it does not involve inflicting damage on anyone but oneself, a private pain that is as bitter-sweet as it is self-induced. But as soon as love is reciprocated, one must be prepared to give up the passivity of simply being hurt to take on the responsibility of perpetrating hurt oneself.
The repugnance I felt towards myself for hurting Chloe was momentarily turned against her. I hated her for all the efforts she had made with me, for her weakness in believing in me, for her bad taste in allowing me to upset her. It suddenly seemed pitiable that she had given me her toothbrush, prepared breakfast for me, and begun to cry in the bedroom like a child. I gave way to an overwhelming urge to punish her for her weakness.
What had turned me into such a monster? The fact that I had always been something of a Marxist.
There is the old joke made by the Marx who laughed about not deigning to belong to a club that would accept someone like him as a member, a truth as appropriate in love as it is in club membership. We laugh at the Marxist position because of its absurd contradictions: How is it possible that I should both wish to join a club, and yet lose that wish as soon as it comes true? How was it that I might have wished Chloe to love me, but have been irritated by her when she did so?
Perhaps because the origins of a certain kind of love lie in an impulse to escape ourselves and our weaknesses by an alliance with the beautiful and noble. But if the loved ones love us back, we are forced to return to ourselves, and are hence reminded of the things that had driven us into love in the first place. Perhaps it was not love we wanted after all, perhaps it was simply someone in whom to believe, but how can we continue to believe in the beloved now that they believe in us?
I wondered how Chloe could be justified in even thinking she could base her emotional life around a scoundrel like me. If she appeared to be a little in love, was this not simply because she had misunderstood me?