Conundrum

By Geoffrey Gaskill.

It began with three words in the night. ‘I love you,’ she whispered.

Two lonely people. Three words. Spoken by one lover to another in the night.

Now here they were in the park. Two of many, heads close together, arms linked. No-one noticed them more than they noticed any of the dozens of others who walked close together in a communion that only lovers know.

She was younger than he. Much younger. ‘I love you,’ she said looking up into the man’s face.

He gazed at her, smiling with the corners of his lips. He, too, wanted to say those three little words, but held back. He couldn’t say them because it wasn’t true.

He also wanted to say, ‘No, you don’t love me. You’re in love with the thought of being in love.’ He cursed himself for his arrogant pomposity. Why could she not love him?

Last night in the throes of his passion and hunger and yearning he thought … no, he believed, he would have sworn … that he loved her. Then, in a moment of blind stupidity, by saying he loved her too, he’d joined his fate to hers.

Now in the cool of the morning he knew beyond all doubt he didn’t mean what he’d said.

He felt her fingers caress his arm before touching his cheek. The sensation of flesh on flesh sent an electric shock through his body and into his loins. Like it had last night.

He shouldn’t have got this close, this involved. The easiest  – and worse thing – would be for him to lie and say he loved her. It would sweep him into madness. He didn’t have to be told of the heartache for both when it ended as it would.

No. Better to be cruel now. To both of them.

Her eyes smiled. Her beautiful eyes. He all but drowned in those eyes the first time he had seen her. Happiness and youth always led to those three words. As well as her eyes, her smile captivated him. Together the two of them seemed to demand he tell her of his love.

‘Yes, I love you,’ he felt the words forming on his lips like they had in his bed last night.

Noises of the park broke the spell. The background of the traffic beyond the fence, the clinky-clink of the swings in the playground. Children were laughing and crying, dogs were barking. From behind him he heard a sharp word followed by a slap and then a wailing cut through the other noises. He did not turn around. He felt a cool breeze riffle over his skin and felt cold. It was as though someone had walked on his grave.

Where, he thought, were his reservations when he’d taken her to his bed? Not just once. Once might have been forgivable. But twice, three times, four. More? He’d lost count. He did loved her until he blundered and used those three little words.

She wasn’t passive. It was she who’d first said she was attracted to him. He didn’t blame her about that. It wasn’t as if he had not had the thoughts of her in his arms, in his bed. After the first time, she talked about moving in together. If he hadn’t been blinded by his lust, he should have seen what was coming. After she’d left, he felt someone or something tugging on his heartstrings, telling him to slow down.

The world doesn’t turn so fast, his brain told his loins. Not even in your wildest dreams.

He wasn’t guilty of any impropriety. She was willing as well as well past the age of consent.

But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Conscience had made him feel like a weakling, an equivocator.  The second, third, fourth times declared him to be a man of action who saw what he liked, liked what he saw and took it.

She liked what she saw too. She said so. That’s when she said she loved him.

That complicated matters. Their romance … he winced. Was it a romance? An affair? Looking at it in the cold light of day it was the stuff of comic opera, a soapie … was the cliché of an old man and a young woman. Him looking for a bit of skirt, she desperate, vulnerable. Neither, yet both, true.

He shook himself out of his reverie. What was he going to say to her? I don’t love you. It was easy to think. He didn’t love her. Not love as in love. He couldn’t. God knows he may have wanted to but he couldn’t. He knew he was going to have to say something. Her eyes demanded it.

It was a beautiful Melbourne afternoon, warm and sunny but all he felt was the chill hand of cruelty creep up his back to manipulate his mouth.

‘You don’t love me, do you?’ she asked suddenly as the sun went behind a cloud.

He wasn’t sure what to say. Just like he didn’t know what to say when she said she loved him. He smiled at her with his lips again. When she opened her mouth to speak he held up a hand.

‘Ordinariness is dull and that’s what I am. Ordinary.’ He cleared his throat. ‘And now in the twilight of my life – and twilights may be long and lingering, but they only end up in one place – I can offer you precious little.’ He hesitated. ‘Love is cruel as well as blind. I am too …’ He stopped before the word old escaped his lips. Instead, he said, ‘I doubt if my heart could take another battering.’

He felt awful. She looked so vulnerable.

‘Can you understand what I’m trying to say?’

She grabbed him and hugged him. ‘Why are you talking this way?’

He’d always thought he was an honest man. When he needed to be, he couldn’t.

He’d lusted after her, he still did. He liked her. But here in the park, here on this beautiful Melbourne day, surrounded on all sides by love at its most pure he knew he didn’t love her. He couldn’t. It would be dishonest for him to continue to sleep with her, to lust after her, to see her. He could see the ache for them both charging over the hill but better to make a stand here than to go on, dishonest to the last. She’d love again. It was true that love knew no barriers of place, age and particularity but time hadn’t finished applying its healing balm to him from the last time. He knew at that moment it never would.

On her deathbed, his wife, the love of his life, had told him not to be a monk. He remembered the pale, damp face and the attempt she made to smile at him. ‘If it were me, I wouldn’t play the grieving widow.’ It was the last thing she’d said to him, and he heard the words echo through the corridors of his mind everyday since.

But a monk he was. He tried to make a new life for himself with other women. God! How he’d tried. Nothing seemed to work. Each time he tried to … what was the word he’d used? … connect … each time he’d tried to connect it was like he was sitting down for a job interview. He gave up. Things would happen, he decided, or they wouldn’t. he put his future in the hands of fate.

Then he met her. She seemed to be everything he was looking for – vital, vivacious and voluptuous. He shook his head. But there was the age difference. He was jealous of her age and youth, as the saying goes, was wasted on the young. He rationalised their relationship by saying he was the same person he’d always been, but he couldn’t lie to the mirror. He was seeing what he wanted to see. Time had passed him by. But when they were together it was like watching things fall back into place, she rewound the film of his life. It was beautiful. And doomed.

It was easy to begin with. He thought it was love.

By declaring her hand, she’d forced his.

‘I don’t pretend to know much,’ she said. ‘I do know that I love you. And I will forever. I thought I’d got over someone breaking of my heart.’

Forever. It’s a long time. Just ask an old person. In this instance, he was that old person. He looked at her. He was in the wrong. He should never have let it get to this stage. Why had he? He shook his head. Hindsight. Damned hindsight.

She was vital, vivacious and voluptuous and he wished he loved her.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Geoff spent thirty something years of his working life telling children how to write.

At retirement he decided to practise what he preached. Much of this output sits in his top drawer at varying stages of ‘completion’.

Otherwise he is an actor and director in the local theatre scene. After all, actors and directors are storytellers too.