Richard Sharon - Diary of a Lover

"I want you, Susan. And I don't care if you're lying naked in bed or sitting on the John. I want your intellect because it can keep up with mine, and grow with mine. I want our music and our art and the things we love around all the time. I want your brightness, your joy in just living, just breathing air and seeing sights and doing things. I want that quality you have of making me want to hold you so badly sometimes it hurts physically, and I don't mean between my legs.

"I want you. And if all of that's love, then I love you."

Susan pushed her chair closer and slipped her arm under mine, taking my palm from the inside with her soft hand. I was staring out the window at the rocks below, afraid to look at her, afraid of what I might see in her face. I felt the caress of soft hair on my cheek as she lay her head on my shoulder.

We sat some time in silence. My mind seemed dull. Random, meaningless thoughts kept flashing through my head.

"And if all of that's love, then I love you," she whispered, crying softly. She squeezed my hand tightly and we didn't speak until the waitress carne over to hustle us for another drink.

After we were served, Susan turned and looked at me intently. I could feel the love from her touch, from her eyes. I could feel it pouring out of her and over me, bathing me in a flow of blessed warmth. God it felt good, better than the best cunt, better than anything I had ever known, the feeling of real love received from a woman and the feel of love given from yourself. I wished that I could have sat there like that with her forever.

Susan rubbed her eyes, drying them with the back of her hand. I reached to smooth away the tears with my finger but she stopped me. "Don't. I'm not going to live with you or marry you or anything else. You want to know the truth? Okay, I'll tell you the truth. I don't know what you've got or what you did to me, but I love you so much I can't even think straight anymore. I go out on dates with men old enough to be your father and I can't stand them because I'm thinking about you all evening. Their conversation bores me and their pawing hands annoy me and I can't wait for the evening to be over so I can go home and get into my bed and think about you in your bed and masturbate myself to sleep, because that's the only way I've been getting any sleep lately. And if I've shocked you it's just too bad, damn you.

"My life was all set. I finally got what I wanted, what I worked so hard for all these years, and then you come along and screw it all up just as it's starting to make sense, just as I'm starting to be happy on my own. Because I'm not giving it up. I've worked too hard for too long and I'm not going to lose it all now, just when I've almost got it. You're not worth it, no man is worth it.

"There's a whole world full of men out there, and when I find one he's going to be the right age and have a good position and I'll be able to teach as long as I want without complications, and loving him isn't going to cause me trouble, like loving you would.

"I don't want you to drive me any more and I don't want to see you outside of class. I don't even want to talk to you, not even in class. I want you to get out of my life and get out of my dreams and stop turning me upside down." She started to cry again.

The elation of love that I had felt instantly dissolved into bewildered panic. Susan was here, with me, loving me, and telling me that she wanted to break it off; it had the sense of the unreal. I could hear what she was saying but my brain refused to digest the words.

When she got up to leave I grabbed her arm and pulled her back into her chair. "Do you realize what you're doing?"

"I think so," she said. "But I'm going to do it, anyway."

"I don't think you really do realize," I said. "Look, the insurance companies say we'll both probably live to be around seventy years old, give or take a few. Right now you're twenty-four and I'm eighteen. Do you think the difference in our ages will matter when you're fifty-eight and I'm fifty-two? Or when you're a broken-down old broad of seventh-three and I'm still a young stud of sixty-seven? What the hell difference could it possibly make then? Or even next year, when you'll be just one of thousands of young teachers who are working while their husbands go to school on the GI Bill, or whatever? Nobody would even think twice about it, especially if you kept your maiden name for work. If we had any problem at all, it would just be from now until next June, when I graduate.

"Think about it, Susan, just think. We're two people who have found each other in a world full of people who are searching and searching and finding nothing. I'm not saying that I'm the only man in the world for you. Almost everything in life can be turned into mathematics, even love, because it's all probability.

"Given all the qualities we have that brought us together, there must be 'at least a few dozen other men in San Francisco who you could love the way you say you love me. Figuring a population of eight hundred thousand, there must be about sixty or seventy thousand men in the right age bracket for you. So all you have to do is find one of those few dozen among the seventy thousand, and you've got it made. And if you dated ten guys a week for the next twenty years, your chances would still be zilch of finding a man for whom you could feel the way you feel for me.

"Of course, you could always compromise. You could find somebody who was close, somebody with whom you could be reasonably happy. And that's all we can ask in life, to be reasonably happy, right? But if you did that, if you didn't find the perfect replacement, you'd still spend the rest of your days thinking about me and about what could have been, wouldn't you?

"Christ, Susan. I'm asking you to live with me, and if things work the way we both know -they're going to, I'm asking you to marry me. I'm proposing to you."

I couldn't think of any more to say. We watched the lights accentuating the foaming white of the ocean swirling about the base of the rocks. The sound of her chair sliding back on the wooden bar floor grated at my nerves like fingernails on a chalkboard. "Good-bye," Susan said quietly.

I didn't turn to watch her leave.

The weeks that followed were hell.

For the first time in my life I felt really depressed. There was a sense of loss that kept with me constantly, devouring my insides and gnawing at the wall of well-adjusted solidarity that I had so painstakingly built for myself. I sat in class and watched Susan gallop around the room, fresh and challenging, seemingly unperturbed by my presence, except for possibly being a bit snappier with the kids.

As for myself, I never raised my hand, never spoke, never offered an opinion. I suddenly became the class dummy, turning in written work, coming and going. I tried to catch Susan's eyes, to tell her with mine how much I hurt, but she refused to look, even for an instant. I filed in and out of the room, passing her at the desk as though she weren't there. On my papers I made no personal notations, although once I wrote, "We're both committing suicide but we're too stupid to lie down and be buried." But I tore it up.

If the days were bad, the nights were agony. I asked Terry to come sleep with me several times, not because I wanted sex so much but because I didn't want to be alone. We would fuck and talk, -and I would find myself lapsing into long periods of silence, my thoughts in Susan's apartment a block away. Terry said that she still loved me, and gave me such comfort as she could, but I couldn't accept it. I didn't want to start with her again.

The sex that had seemed so satisfying months before was now empty and sterile. When Terry wasn't around I raided the bars or picked up clucks at the club. I performed like a fucking machine. That's what they all used me for anyway, wasn't it? I might just as well be honest with myself. All those stupid broads, it wasn't my great character or charming personality that made them keep calling me back, keep ringing my doorbell. All they wanted was what hung between my legs and a few good orgasms when they were horny. It wouldn't have mattered to them if I had been the hunchback of Notre Dame. They came to get it off, to use the fucking machine and come back again some other time, when they felt the need of physical release that their old men or their fingers couldn't give them.