Assemble at home

The first thing that happened was that almost immediately I started to believe that these marks on the computer screen were real people, and that I was having real relationships with them. I started to attach feelings to them. Warm feelings, hopeful feelings, and then, if they didn’t respond quickly to my “kisses”, wounded rejected feelings. From emailing, the next step was talking on the phone. And then, when that proved oddly easy, meeting.

Inside the café, I made my way over to the corner table and the vegetarian bag-waver. He had a face that was neither handsome nor unhandsome, or perhaps both, although I noticed that one of his teeth was cracked and discoloured. Again we talked easily. We discussed our children and schools and head lice. He talked about the multimedia course he was doing. My heart sank a little when I realised he didn’t have a job. Or even a car. “Well I don’t know about you,” he wrote the next day, “but I thought that was jolly good fun … (he was English, it had turned out) so I hope you’ll fancy catching up again …”

We met next at an inner Melbourne haunt with great food but no alcohol. It was a drizzling winter’s evening and as I drove past the restaurant looking for a car park I caught sight of him making his way on foot down the road. With his hunched shoulders and overlarge coat he looked to me like a little hobo. I had an impulse to keep driving.

Inside we made polite conversation and exclaimed at the food. The restaurant was crowded but our dishes came quickly and within an hour we were standing to leave. In an attempt at salvage, one or other of us suggested we go and have a quick drink. We looked in vain for a small convivial bar and retired instead to the lounge of a large and ugly hotel, with Foxtel on the TV. Here, over beer and cigarettes, the vegetarian proceeded to give me a précis of his life so far.

He told me that his mother had died when he was young and that his wife had died four years before, and about the circumstances of her death, and about the child he was now bringing up alone.

It was a big story and after it was out it sat uncomfortably there between us on the polished wooden bar. I said what I hoped were the right sorts of things and we smoked the last of the cigarettes and eventually pulled on our coats and left. It was still damp, and the vegetarian, now motherless, was about to head up the street to his bus stop. My car was in the other direction. We turned to each other in the street, and I made as if to shake hands, but he stepped forward and kissed me lightly goodbye on the lips. I knew the nice thing to do would be to offer to drive him home. But I couldn’t bring myself to. It was all too much and not enough.

I raised my hand in a salute and turned and walked away, relieved. And then something unexpected happened. As I was walking I could hear my head talking (this wasn’t unexpected; this was normal), confirming all the reasons why the vegetarian was not the man for me: the non-job, the stained tooth, the too-short trousers, the dead wife etc. etc. So it took me a while to notice that something was happening in my body. There was a strange warmth, heat almost, emanating from behind my breast bone. I was flummoxed. I actually looked down at my chest, expecting to see, I don’t know what - a small brazier perhaps. I couldn’t or wouldn’t understand what was happening, but I remember in my puzzlement the words that came to me, a throwback to the years I had spent reporting on local council meetings with their interminable agenda items, each needing to be voted upon or deferred. “Received and noted,” I said to myself politely. A startled little voice. And then I got in my car and drove home.

I did not, it has to be said, wake up the next morning and realise I was in love with the vegetarian. My brain was still clutching onto its list. The next day he emailed me. After a longish preamble, mostly without full stops or capitals, he wrote:

I am finding that I am quite refreshed about the world after I talk to you, and although this is almost disconcerting, because after all the last thing one expects is what one wants, it is a very pleasant kind of bouleversement (ah got there in the end!) I hope that makes a modicum of sense. x

I was furious. I didn’t know why but the tone of the letter - sweet and carefully careless and finally (obscurely but unmistakably) confessional - enraged me. How dare he be so - so - so what? I didn’t know. So vulnerable perhaps. I felt - and I am not proud of it - as if I were being asked to care for a waif or stray.

For a week I avoided contact. And then suddenly and spontaneously, the following Sunday afternoon, I rang and when he answered, said, “I’m going to see a really crappy movie - nothing arty - do you want to come?” “Yep!”

And so we met a couple of hours later at a cinema in town, both wearing our overlarge overcoats, and the film (the remake of The Italian Job) was suitably crappy, - and afterwards we wandered down the street and found a small convivial bar, and over the next two hours had more fun talking and laughing than I could remember ever having had. Eventually we left, at which point he realised, or at least confessed, that he had missed the last bus, so I dropped him at his place, where we kissed chastely goodbye, and then I drove back to mine alone, feeling light and happy and free.

A week later I returned to his house for a dinner party, at which he turned out not to be a vegetarian after all (he served sorrel soup followed by chicken, and later argued that he had once gone a decade without meat and was thus, in effect, an honorary vegetarian). But I didn’t mind. His friends were raucous and funny and laughed like drains. He stood at the stove in the kitchen and served course after course of wonderful food. He was smart and sweet and funny and sexy and, yes, serious - at least some of the time.

Reader, I stayed.