I had a very interesting insight over the Christmas period……..
(Warning: sorry, no smut in this post.)
Absent family members were being discussed at the dinner table one day over the Christmas holidays. And I’ve got to admit that I was being mischievous - backing a hunch, seeking a bit of extra research - newly aware as I was of the dynamics of my childhood from my once-a-week psychoanalytic excavations. As adolescents and young men, my brother and I had attracted girls and formed relationships with them; but some insidious mechanism, planted in us during childhood, had then sabotaged our desire. It still rankled that I’d parted from my first real love, for no good reason at all. And I’d seen my brother Tom lose his earliest amours in a similar way; almost giving them up to rivals, like some noble fictional character. It seemed that neither of us had possessed the determination to really go for the one who mattered and either fight for her, or hang onto her.
“Whatever happened to that beautiful girl, Heather - the one Tom was going out with at university?” I enquired innocently of my mother. “My brother should have stayed with her. She liked him – I’m sure she did. And she was gorgeous and perfect for him - I thought it was a done thing, and then he went and let her go.”
“Oh she did, she did like him,” my mother confirmed; “she even called her little boy Thomas.”
I was surprised by this immediate and unequivocal confirmation of my suspicions.
“Blimey! Of course there was someone else, wasn’t there – an Irish guy - there’s always someone else lurking in the background, where a beautiful woman is concerned……”
“Yes, but she preferred Tom.”
“Evidently! Either that, or she just liked the name. But why didn’t he hang onto her, then?” I insisted; though I hadn’t been shelling out for therapy every week without having a damn good idea of the answer to this question. “He should have got her away from this other character.”
“I don’t know – he just seemed to let her go.”
Mindful of an opportunity to instruct and encourage my teenage boys not to make the same mistakes, but always to go for it in matters of the heart, I warmed to my theme:
“He shouldn’t have done. He should’ve just said: ‘Come with me – now! – I want you more than anything or anyone else. I’m taking you to Paris – tonight!’” I went on. “Or New York, or wherever…. The point is, tell her in no uncertain terms that she’s the one for you and you’re going to prove it to her…. So bear that in mind!” I told my sons.
“Righto, Dad. You won’t mind when I touch you for the airfare, then,” the oldest came back, quick as a flash.
“Oh well, at least you practise what you preach,” my wife chimed in. “I’d only known you a couple of weeks, and you said: ‘Come to Ibiza with me’. I was very tempted, but in the end, I said ‘no’, because I thought I hadn’t known you long enough and then you’d see too much of me too soon and get put off…… I suppose I should just have said ‘yes’!”
Well, that would have been the right answer.
Anyway, all this was a bit of a turn-up - and way more information than I’d been expecting. I’d completely forgotten that proposal of mine; though I did remember that (distant) holiday; finally taken on my own, on an as-yet unspoilt Ibiza. Apparently, I had learnt from my first loss, after all. On the other hand, you could say, with hindsight, that I had received advance warning of unsuitability, which I obviously went on to ignore at my peril. We can’t have been completely mismatched, since we’ve stayed together, brought up children, etc. Yet I had been forewarned of trouble ahead: that early test had demonstrated my present partner and I were not well matched in some important ways: she’d evidently lacked confidence; as well as my impulsiveness and my romantic nature.
Something else came to me, subsequently. I realised why it gave me so much pleasure to take Karolina to Spain or Paris – apart from the fact that she's gorgeous and fun, that is - it was because she’d said, ‘yes’.
I remember the first time we went away together. We’d arranged to meet up at a particular airport, and I’d been nervous she’d change her mind. (I think I now understand how much was riding on it). Anyway, she’d had various transport problems and had got herself delayed. I couldn’t get her mobile to answer. I tried to be philosophical and decide whether to wait for her in the hope she’d still turn up so we could go on later, or whether to abandon the break entirely. But I had no idea what to do really and I was getting a bit despondent. Then, at the last minute, I saw her making her way through the crowds, and when she caught sight of me she gave me that big, perfect smile of hers and my heart just melted; it just overran with happiness: I loved her, then, simply for turning up. I was so happy, I felt like crying.
And that’s how it went on – or rather, it got even better. We caught the plane, landed in southern Spain, and picked up the hire car. As we headed west along the main coast highway in the unaccustomed brightness of the late morning sunshine, K put some music on, and wore her big Dior shades, and we opened up the windows and the sunroof, and the warm wind whipped her dark hair back, just like in those Springsteen songs. On one side, the Mediterranean was azure, paling to translucence where it met a cloudless sky. On the other, hamlets and billboards and truck stops and fields baked the colour of biscuit gave way to the ragged outlines of the Sierra Blanca, already floating in a heat haze. I wanted to say something; to tell her how it felt to be there, with her beside me, at the beginning of a holiday.
“Ahhh!” she sighed, before I could say anything; “here is perfect! This is just what we ordered……?”
“Just what the doctor ordered.”
“Ye-es! Is just what the doctor ordered.”
My thoughts exactly. (I assume she meant Dr Freud, not Dr Foster who went to Gloucester, or Dr Mengele, Dr Doolittle, or Dr Jekyl.) I felt as if I’d been holding my breath for twenty-five years and could finally exhale. Is this the meaning and nature of a mid-life crisis – to identify the thing you needed and to do it again – so that you can get it right this time? To act your symptom? You lose sight of it, I suppose, in the welter of children and careers and home-making; but it never goes away. I hadn’t known it at the time, of course; but perhaps all I’d been after, I now realise, was someone who said ‘yes!’ – not, ‘I don’t know you well enough’, or ‘perhaps later’, or ‘I’ll give it some thought.’ Because when will you ever know anyone well enough; when will it be 'later' and yet not 'too late'?
In fact, not only did she say ‘yes’; but when we got back from Spain, she looked up at the departures board, and said: “Let’s go somewhere else! Where shall we go now?”
No wonder I have such happy holidays with K. And yet there’s something else, particular to her. Because it doesn’t matter what she proposes – a restaurant or club, getting drunk, a midnight swim, modelling her new shoes, or simply riding through Paris with her in a cab – whatever it is, Karolina has that knack of convincing you completely that you’re in exactly the right place, doing the best possible thing you could be doing – and doing it in the best possible company. So you are utterly lost in the moment – there’s nothing of you left over, wanting something more or something else.
Material Girls
In Stardust Memories, (1980) Woody Allen has a recurring dream of riding on a train, in a carriage of miserable misfits, and glancing across to a train on parallel tracks, where attractive people are clearly having a ball. Although one of them (a youthful Sharon Stone, as it happens) beckons him over, he’s unable to leave his own train and the tracks eventually diverge, sealing his fate. Driving along that sunny Mediterranean highway with Karolina, I felt as though I had finally managed to get across to the other train.
(Warning: sorry, no smut in this post.)
Absent family members were being discussed at the dinner table one day over the Christmas holidays. And I’ve got to admit that I was being mischievous - backing a hunch, seeking a bit of extra research - newly aware as I was of the dynamics of my childhood from my once-a-week psychoanalytic excavations. As adolescents and young men, my brother and I had attracted girls and formed relationships with them; but some insidious mechanism, planted in us during childhood, had then sabotaged our desire. It still rankled that I’d parted from my first real love, for no good reason at all. And I’d seen my brother Tom lose his earliest amours in a similar way; almost giving them up to rivals, like some noble fictional character. It seemed that neither of us had possessed the determination to really go for the one who mattered and either fight for her, or hang onto her.
“Whatever happened to that beautiful girl, Heather - the one Tom was going out with at university?” I enquired innocently of my mother. “My brother should have stayed with her. She liked him – I’m sure she did. And she was gorgeous and perfect for him - I thought it was a done thing, and then he went and let her go.”
“Oh she did, she did like him,” my mother confirmed; “she even called her little boy Thomas.”
I was surprised by this immediate and unequivocal confirmation of my suspicions.
“Blimey! Of course there was someone else, wasn’t there – an Irish guy - there’s always someone else lurking in the background, where a beautiful woman is concerned……”
“Yes, but she preferred Tom.”
“Evidently! Either that, or she just liked the name. But why didn’t he hang onto her, then?” I insisted; though I hadn’t been shelling out for therapy every week without having a damn good idea of the answer to this question. “He should have got her away from this other character.”
“I don’t know – he just seemed to let her go.”
Mindful of an opportunity to instruct and encourage my teenage boys not to make the same mistakes, but always to go for it in matters of the heart, I warmed to my theme:
“He shouldn’t have done. He should’ve just said: ‘Come with me – now! – I want you more than anything or anyone else. I’m taking you to Paris – tonight!’” I went on. “Or New York, or wherever…. The point is, tell her in no uncertain terms that she’s the one for you and you’re going to prove it to her…. So bear that in mind!” I told my sons.
“Righto, Dad. You won’t mind when I touch you for the airfare, then,” the oldest came back, quick as a flash.
“Oh well, at least you practise what you preach,” my wife chimed in. “I’d only known you a couple of weeks, and you said: ‘Come to Ibiza with me’. I was very tempted, but in the end, I said ‘no’, because I thought I hadn’t known you long enough and then you’d see too much of me too soon and get put off…… I suppose I should just have said ‘yes’!”
Well, that would have been the right answer.
Anyway, all this was a bit of a turn-up - and way more information than I’d been expecting. I’d completely forgotten that proposal of mine; though I did remember that (distant) holiday; finally taken on my own, on an as-yet unspoilt Ibiza. Apparently, I had learnt from my first loss, after all. On the other hand, you could say, with hindsight, that I had received advance warning of unsuitability, which I obviously went on to ignore at my peril. We can’t have been completely mismatched, since we’ve stayed together, brought up children, etc. Yet I had been forewarned of trouble ahead: that early test had demonstrated my present partner and I were not well matched in some important ways: she’d evidently lacked confidence; as well as my impulsiveness and my romantic nature.
Something else came to me, subsequently. I realised why it gave me so much pleasure to take Karolina to Spain or Paris – apart from the fact that she's gorgeous and fun, that is - it was because she’d said, ‘yes’.
I remember the first time we went away together. We’d arranged to meet up at a particular airport, and I’d been nervous she’d change her mind. (I think I now understand how much was riding on it). Anyway, she’d had various transport problems and had got herself delayed. I couldn’t get her mobile to answer. I tried to be philosophical and decide whether to wait for her in the hope she’d still turn up so we could go on later, or whether to abandon the break entirely. But I had no idea what to do really and I was getting a bit despondent. Then, at the last minute, I saw her making her way through the crowds, and when she caught sight of me she gave me that big, perfect smile of hers and my heart just melted; it just overran with happiness: I loved her, then, simply for turning up. I was so happy, I felt like crying.
And that’s how it went on – or rather, it got even better. We caught the plane, landed in southern Spain, and picked up the hire car. As we headed west along the main coast highway in the unaccustomed brightness of the late morning sunshine, K put some music on, and wore her big Dior shades, and we opened up the windows and the sunroof, and the warm wind whipped her dark hair back, just like in those Springsteen songs. On one side, the Mediterranean was azure, paling to translucence where it met a cloudless sky. On the other, hamlets and billboards and truck stops and fields baked the colour of biscuit gave way to the ragged outlines of the Sierra Blanca, already floating in a heat haze. I wanted to say something; to tell her how it felt to be there, with her beside me, at the beginning of a holiday.
“Ahhh!” she sighed, before I could say anything; “here is perfect! This is just what we ordered……?”
“Just what the doctor ordered.”
“Ye-es! Is just what the doctor ordered.”
My thoughts exactly. (I assume she meant Dr Freud, not Dr Foster who went to Gloucester, or Dr Mengele, Dr Doolittle, or Dr Jekyl.) I felt as if I’d been holding my breath for twenty-five years and could finally exhale. Is this the meaning and nature of a mid-life crisis – to identify the thing you needed and to do it again – so that you can get it right this time? To act your symptom? You lose sight of it, I suppose, in the welter of children and careers and home-making; but it never goes away. I hadn’t known it at the time, of course; but perhaps all I’d been after, I now realise, was someone who said ‘yes!’ – not, ‘I don’t know you well enough’, or ‘perhaps later’, or ‘I’ll give it some thought.’ Because when will you ever know anyone well enough; when will it be 'later' and yet not 'too late'?
In fact, not only did she say ‘yes’; but when we got back from Spain, she looked up at the departures board, and said: “Let’s go somewhere else! Where shall we go now?”
No wonder I have such happy holidays with K. And yet there’s something else, particular to her. Because it doesn’t matter what she proposes – a restaurant or club, getting drunk, a midnight swim, modelling her new shoes, or simply riding through Paris with her in a cab – whatever it is, Karolina has that knack of convincing you completely that you’re in exactly the right place, doing the best possible thing you could be doing – and doing it in the best possible company. So you are utterly lost in the moment – there’s nothing of you left over, wanting something more or something else.
Material Girls
In Stardust Memories, (1980) Woody Allen has a recurring dream of riding on a train, in a carriage of miserable misfits, and glancing across to a train on parallel tracks, where attractive people are clearly having a ball. Although one of them (a youthful Sharon Stone, as it happens) beckons him over, he’s unable to leave his own train and the tracks eventually diverge, sealing his fate. Driving along that sunny Mediterranean highway with Karolina, I felt as though I had finally managed to get across to the other train.
