sexier than I remembered her, and was flirting slightly with the camera, looking obliquely up at it with a faint smile. In the one snapshot of the adolescent Lucy which I had ever seen, again taken by a college friend, her expression is almost identical.
Leah, on the other hand, stares directly at the camera with a look that seems to say ‘The very idea that you might be able to pin down a complex, free-flowing, multi-faceted, liberated woman like me with your simplistic male technology in itself constitutes an insult of the kind I have come to expect from someone like you.’ This would have been in Islington, early seventies. Leah had been my first, although by no means my last, example of that class of women, particularly prevalent then, who disliked men but felt that they sort of needed one anyway, and gave themselves and the man involved a bunch of grief as a way of demonstrating just how despicable the whole sorry business was.
Leah certainly had no intention of compromising her unique particularity by having children, and since the surrender to gender stereotypes this involves is symbolized by the female orgasm – I’m paraphrasing her rhetoric here – her attitude to sex had been ambivalent too. Theoretically, she’d held that every ‘penetrational act’ was tantamount to rape, and repeatedly accused me of ‘imposing’ orgasms on her. In practice she was the most demanding lover I have ever had, particularly when it came to the precise details of sequence, duration, technique and post-game commentary.
But I’d been young then, and saw Leah as a challenge which at least three other men in our circle were ready to take up any time I felt I couldn’t handle it, so I’d hung in there gamely. In the end she’d pretended to come around to my point of view, having finally decided that maybe she should have a child after all. I promptly ditched her. The tragedy of every relationship is that it changes the way you look at things, including the relationship itself, which it may well end by making seem irrelevant. I could forgive Leah her endless diatribes and sparring matches, anything but turning herself into a pallid version of someone I’d wished I’d never met in the first place.
Later on I learned never to mess with women who hate their mothers, and came to regard my affair with Leah as a humiliating waste of time. Now, looking at those photographs and the others in the pack, I felt only the insidious power of the past. Sally and I had met at university, where she was a year ahead of me. When she graduated, she stayed around for most of the following year, in the hope, I discovered during the bitter rows at the time of our eventual breakup, that I would marry her, settle down and have a family.
We never did have children, but what I didn’t understand at the time was that we were creating a past together. It wasn’t in any sense a glamorous or interesting past, but it existed, and as soon as we broke up it started to undermine the present. The second time is never the same as the first, even when it’s identical. Think of double bars in music.
The past can’t take on the present on its own terms. Anyone who’s ever revisited a childhood home or school friend knows that. But in this apparent defeat lies its abiding victory, because absence is so much more insidiously powerful than presence. Those places and people have nothing to say to us now, but they did then. We’ve lost something, and our very vagueness about precisely what that something is makes the brash, shallow immediacy of the present look like fast food compared to a real meal.
I knew all this already. I’d learned it the year after Sally dumped me and hooked up with her future husband and the father of her children. I’d tortured myself with images of the happy times we’d spent together, even when in truth they hadn’t been particularly happy. But I was twenty then, and as soon as I could I headed up to London and made myself an
Leah, on the other hand, stares directly at the camera with a look that seems to say ‘The very idea that you might be able to pin down a complex, free-flowing, multi-faceted, liberated woman like me with your simplistic male technology in itself constitutes an insult of the kind I have come to expect from someone like you.’ This would have been in Islington, early seventies. Leah had been my first, although by no means my last, example of that class of women, particularly prevalent then, who disliked men but felt that they sort of needed one anyway, and gave themselves and the man involved a bunch of grief as a way of demonstrating just how despicable the whole sorry business was.
Leah certainly had no intention of compromising her unique particularity by having children, and since the surrender to gender stereotypes this involves is symbolized by the female orgasm – I’m paraphrasing her rhetoric here – her attitude to sex had been ambivalent too. Theoretically, she’d held that every ‘penetrational act’ was tantamount to rape, and repeatedly accused me of ‘imposing’ orgasms on her. In practice she was the most demanding lover I have ever had, particularly when it came to the precise details of sequence, duration, technique and post-game commentary.
But I’d been young then, and saw Leah as a challenge which at least three other men in our circle were ready to take up any time I felt I couldn’t handle it, so I’d hung in there gamely. In the end she’d pretended to come around to my point of view, having finally decided that maybe she should have a child after all. I promptly ditched her. The tragedy of every relationship is that it changes the way you look at things, including the relationship itself, which it may well end by making seem irrelevant. I could forgive Leah her endless diatribes and sparring matches, anything but turning herself into a pallid version of someone I’d wished I’d never met in the first place.
Later on I learned never to mess with women who hate their mothers, and came to regard my affair with Leah as a humiliating waste of time. Now, looking at those photographs and the others in the pack, I felt only the insidious power of the past. Sally and I had met at university, where she was a year ahead of me. When she graduated, she stayed around for most of the following year, in the hope, I discovered during the bitter rows at the time of our eventual breakup, that I would marry her, settle down and have a family.
We never did have children, but what I didn’t understand at the time was that we were creating a past together. It wasn’t in any sense a glamorous or interesting past, but it existed, and as soon as we broke up it started to undermine the present. The second time is never the same as the first, even when it’s identical. Think of double bars in music.
The past can’t take on the present on its own terms. Anyone who’s ever revisited a childhood home or school friend knows that. But in this apparent defeat lies its abiding victory, because absence is so much more insidiously powerful than presence. Those places and people have nothing to say to us now, but they did then. We’ve lost something, and our very vagueness about precisely what that something is makes the brash, shallow immediacy of the present look like fast food compared to a real meal.
I knew all this already. I’d learned it the year after Sally dumped me and hooked up with her future husband and the father of her children. I’d tortured myself with images of the happy times we’d spent together, even when in truth they hadn’t been particularly happy. But I was twenty then, and as soon as I could I headed up to London and made myself an
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