Robert P. is Unavailable
Altmedia- Think For Yourself.
He pretended, convinced himself, he had better things to do. That was The Problem. Being a loose end. A single man, “eligible” as Mother put it volcanically. Everything she said, however innocuous, bubbled and lava-ed just below the surface. Back on the Market, after the you-know-what, we can’t mention the D-word. Divorce. She advertised him to her ever-decreasing circles of tight friends. Ones who had toothy librarian daughters to move out from the vicarage. Others who preferred horses to men and women to both. Robert treated like some classic car with hidden rust.
He was strangely content to be the spare man, thirteenth at dinner. Perpetually the odd man out. A “born-again bachelor”, as he liked to describe himself. At least to friends who might understand. Understand that he was neither “Happy” or Un-happy. Like God, he believed in both and neither.
He need illusion. Deception. It was in the primrose yellow of his E-type Jaguar. He parked in a side street, so as not be obviously obvious. Offering the girl at the restaurant a lift home to the 15th arrondissement. But the two flights up to her apartment was a floor too many. Her flatmate- male or female he was never sure, was away. It came to nothing as he knew it would. As a player sixth senses he will fluff a serve at tennis. Game, set and match. He turned the key into the dark silence of his own apartment. He somehow lost interest when a chance was offered. Even when she lay on the bed, dressed in her silk pyjamas, as if she were going to sleep without him. He could watch her fall asleep if he liked. He did not like. Perhaps it was too easy.
Wasn’t that what Sex was all about? The Dance you danced like it or not. Sometimes not even knowing you were in the game. Invariably someone else’s game. He discovered later the waitress had invited him home to make the knuckle-dragging boyfriend jealous. Not even original as deception goes.
Copulation, the act, intercourse was a kind of mutual mass deception. If he were lucky, a 9 minute 25 second distraction from death. He longed, ached, for the skin that only a woman under 35 has. Yet even as child he couldn’t abide being touched. Prodded by fingering caresses and questions of women who meant well. Who believed if only he could, would let himself “go”. Priestesses who only knew how to save men like him, not how to love, men like him. Younger women with 40DD Daddy fixations. Perma-tanned leftovers and also-rans like himself, chasing shadows of “Love”- whatever that meant. A sunburnt man, moving in and out of the shade of time as it crept across the lawn.
Why he bothered so much, so minutely, with something that he professed did not bother him. Even bored him. Caught, torn in a contradiction. An enigma inside a contradiction, inside a… He gave up thinking. A mantrap of his own making. Relationships, sooner or later, always meant possession. An inevitable inequality. Men were emasculated as woman were enslaved, by a kind of warped feminism neither side believed in. Just as he worried more about his emissions, tripping over his carbon-footprint, than not ever becoming a father. Or hear himself being called Father. He suddenly glimpsed, there were many lives, he lived but had not lived. Experience within experience of this world, so much colour he avoided in this veil of existence. He had side-stepped. Become a bit-part player, an extra in his own movie. He was a man without a sense of taste imagining biting into a chilli.
Mother, being French, always wondered why every other man in England was homosexual. As if it surprised her there were any “straights”- across the channel as she called them. Given that English women “couldn’t cook a decent cheese soufflé”. Didn’t know how to “keep a man”. Mother who had three husbands still living and a Papal annulment for a fourth pending. Fumbling with her rosary even as she bedded No. 4- The Spaniard. But he was “a sort of Count” and a somewhat famous parfumier.
Her precious “Robbie” was blighted, like one of her old, woody roses she should have dug out Summers ago. But could never quite bring herself to dig the trowel into the root. Women today were unmarriable. Marriage, even relationships, were improbable if not impossible. Girls mistook being “assertive” for being aggressive. Tattooed their de-feminisation and dressed like streetwalkers. Pink-dyed and louty; breath smelling of their own confusion.
Besides all English women were “dykes”. Or would be given half a chance after dinner. Mother knew. It was their Public schools. Their climate. Everyone saw their politicians who wore chiffon dresses at private parties. Their kinky Royals. Her English husband, the most likely “runner” for Robert’s father, never trusted a woman who did not “ride or play tennis”. He noted, Mother excelled at neither. To mamma being born 21 miles on the other side of the straits of Dover, la manche, seemed to explain everything and anything. From his father’s low sperm count to soufflé. Being French was Mother’s excuse. Her alibi. She taught herself not to hate riding to hounds, jumping terrifying hedges just to please The Viscount, her Father-in-law. He was more handsome than the son and better “between the sheets”, she transliterated into her Franglais. When not cropping and indulging his fantasies in other ways. She never could pronounce “jodhpurs” correctly.
Ah, Les Anglais… she took a deep breath and sighed. She would have to arrange something for her Robbie. An old friend, who lie flint blown into dry grass, would spark her son’s success with those of the “other persuasion”- The Ladies. If he had been “a ladies’ man” she would have loved to hate him, like his father. He sensed another motherly rant was brewing with the blackening summer rain clouds.
No, no, Mother shook her head: real femininity was dead. Men were shadows. Eunuchs at the feast. Tongue-tied. By women who used their biology as an excuse to be bloody rude for a few days every month. Who were either pre- post or menopausal. An alibi for breakdowns, a mask, as Robert himself half-believed, for simply being, obnoxious. Unscrupulous. A-moral. “Like men in fact”, he interjected.
She told him to stop being “silly”, using the English word for emphasis. To remind him, in the first, deepest cut possible with one word. Remind her son of his weakness. His English-side. The half he could never expunge, quite. Too English for his French family. Too French for the English. Well, nobody’s perfect.