On Fire

(3 December 1999)

Now it’s time to step back in time to the earliest journal entry which will be in this blog.

When I left Hervé, I became roommates with a woman whose apartment was so small there wasn’t even a living room.  After unpacking as much as I could, there were still piles of boxes which I couldn’t unpack.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to live there long, but it was a landing place.  These last two weeks, the elation of freedom has been outweighed by depression.  No matter how badly I’d wanted to get out of my marriage, the loss of it is excruciatingly painful.  I break down in tears each night in the grocery store, because simply trying to choose a can of food to heat up is overwhelming.

(14 December 1999)

I’ve suddenly swung up into a manic phase.  My thoughts are racing so quickly that I can’t concentrate on what I’m doing.  I keep moving from one room to the next in the apartment, to do something, only to find I’ve forgotten what it was I wanted to do when I got there, so I go back to the previous room trying to recapture the thought that I’d had there.

I’ve also suddenly lost a lot of weight, become slender again, cut my hair and dyed it, and built up a classy wardrobe.  At work the other day, my boss came up to introduce herself.  She had great fun taking me around the office introducing me to me colleagues, none of whom recognized me.

(15 December)

Single again inParis, “the capital of romance.”  This isn’t a city where meeting people is easy.  The French tend to be quite cold and distant.  Making friends isn’t easy; it’s a bit of a triathlon.  One evening, walking alone in the evening along the Seine, I thought to myself, “The city of romance, yes, it could be, but…but, where are the men?”  Everywhere.  So how do you meet them?  I’ve been asking everyone I can, which means my students mostly.  Generally the answers are, you meet them at university–which was long ago, or you get introduced by mutual acquaintances, but in most circles everyone is taken.  Everybody agrees that while you can meet men at work, by the time you’re in your thirties most of them are taken or are absolute losers.  The more people I ask, the more people I find who’ve been asking themselves the same question, and they’ve started coming to me for advice!  After all of this research, they reckon I must have found the secret.  Unfortunately, instead of finding any real answers, what I’ve found is a number of attractive and interesting men and women whom I’d like to introduce, but they aren’t the right match.

(21 April 01)

Back in December I went to work as a consultant at a company.  One day when I stepped into the receptionist’s office, a stunning Arabic man was on his way out, when I turned my head, I saw that he’d also turned his head; he glanced at me casually and moved on.  I crossed him again standing in the hallway a few minutes later, and was able to study him for a few moments; he had a sensual and gentle demeanour, and was dressed elegantly.  I hate to admit it, but I have a weakness for a man who knows how to wear a suit.  I asked one of his colleagues who he was, Véronique did a little research, and got confirmation that he was single.  One of the only single men in the company!  She warned me that he was a bit odd, that he lived in his own world, that he spoke little to others, and when he did, it was often like he was speaking in mid-thought, so you weren’t sure what he was talking about.  He's reputed to be extremely intelligent, but no one can figure out how his brain works, his teammates don't know how he does what he does.  That didn’t daunt me—I have a bad habit, which I keep meaning to break, of being attracted to quirky, silent men.  And high intelligence is one of the first things I'm drawn to in a man.

Véronique managed to get me an invitation to an exclusive company party, to which even spouses were not invited.  She showed up just long enough to introduced me to Hervé and pointed out the colleagues that he was friends with, so I’d know who to hang out with.  Then she had to leave, because her parents were in town.  Quickly I found myself lost in a crowd of about three thousand people, walking around in circles wondering what my chances were of finding him again, when I suddenly found myself face to face with him at a moment when he happened to be alone.  We spent the rest of the evening together.

All started well.  Hervé said he’d just broken up with his girlfriend.  It was true then that he was available.  He was incredibly sensual.  Our bodies caught fire, a fire which we couldn’t put out.  I’ve never met such a sensual man, when he caresses me time stops as I melt under his magnetizing touch.  The nights I spend with him I barely sleep, my body is enveloped by a wonderful warm tingling sensation that I’ve never known before.  Throughout the night, every time I turn, he turns and keeps me in his arms.  The smell of his body intoxicates me, I don’t want to sleep, I just want to breathe it in.  Every time I step into his apartment, I breathe his scent in deeply.  We spend hours in each other’s arms hugging in a way that’s more relaxed than with any other man I’ve known, making love, hugging again, having dinner, hugging, and making love again.

It’s true that he’s very quiet.  The first time we went out to dinner I was so bored by the conversation that I seriously wondered how I would get through the whole dinner.  It took me three months to discover something that interested other than his work.  But still, for some reason, I like his company, something about him fascinates me.  It’s just a question of patience, little by little I’ve been learning more and more about him, and he has started to open up and tell me stories about himself.  Also, I love the meals he fixes for me and the little ways he spoils me.  He’s so gentle and sweet.

After a short period of intoxication, a period of panic set in.  He began to play hide and seek.  Stand me up.  Cancel when I was just five minutes away from his door.  Leave obvious signs and lie like a child still too young not to know how to withhold the truth, which didn’t make the lies less painful.  I had constant panic attacks about being abandoned.  I didn’t want to admit to myself what was obvious, that there was another woman, and he was just seeing me on the side.  However, I couldn’t avoid admitting the truth to myself when he refused to spend Christmas with me on the grounds that he hated Christmas.  If that wasn’t enough to convince me, we couldn’t spend New Year's Eve together either because he was invited to a dinner party to which he couldn’t invite me.  To anyone else it would’ve been blindingly obvious that there was someone else from the start, since he was almost never available on Friday and Saturday nights.

When his father came to town we had dinner together, and his father showed me all of the family photos, telling me stories about each member of the family, and in conclusion, he told me how much he hopes Hervé will find a wife.  I was curious why Hervé introduced me instead of his girlfriend to his father.  It raised my hopes when it should've raised alarm: soon after Thierry was less and less available.   So I gathered up the courage to confront him about it.  It turned out that he hadn’t broken up with his girlfriend; she was just away on vacation when we met.  He said he knew he had to choose between us, but didn’t know how: “You’re intelligent, kind, and pretty.”  In conclusion, he said that was going to stay with her, because he knew her first.  At least he let me down as gently as he could.

I thought I’d taken the break up well, but after a month or so it occurred to me that I dropped my idea about options, I hadn’t been in the mood to meet anyone. After three months had gone by he called.  We spent many months breaking up and getting back together repeatedly, sometimes I initiated the break up, and sometimes he did.  I don’t know how many times we’ve broken up.  One day when we were making love passionately, just when I was biting my lips not to tell him that I loved him, he asked me to promise to be lovers forever.  Delighted, I promised.  She’s been nagging him constantly to move in with her, and sooner or later he’ll have to stop dragging his feet.  That will make things trickier.

While Hervé has stopped breaking up with me, he encourages me to meet someone else.  Undoubtedly he’d be more comfortable if our situation was symmetrical, if I had another man in my life, and just saw Hervé on the side.  Once a man, whom I’d been deeply in love with and wanted to marry, called, recently divorced, asking to see me.  We started up a short lived affair.  Hervé was enthusiastic: “You can marry a man with money, and I can be your lover.”  Whenever I meet another man and it’s serious enough that I stop seeing him, Hervé continues to call or email me, without asking to see me.  He’s always there when I’m available again.  It gets confusing because while it’s clear he wants to continue seeing me, there are periods when he does his best to get rid of me.  And the harder he tries to get rid of me, the harder I hold on.  For example, instead of calling me once a week, he got into the habit of calling me every three weeks or so, at 10:30 or 11 p.m. and asking me to come over to his place, which means that by the time I get to his place there’s just time enough to make love and go to sleep.  And then he’s up early in the morning and off to work.  It made me feel like 3615 dial-a-fuck, which pissed me off, but I would go anyway.  No dinner or conversation, just sex and then sleep.  It felt shitty being treated that way.

Finally one evening he pointed out how awful he was being to me; amazed at how mean he’d become.  I told him he couldn’t become mean enough to drive me away, so he might as well give up, which amazingly enough he did.  I added that the lies had to stop once and for all.  We made a truce.  In the morning he said: “I don’t have to hide like a child.”  The lies and meanness stopped.  Also, I said that since he wasn’t willing to come across town to spend the night at my place, that I would only see him on Tuesdays, because I see my psychiatrist on Tuesdays and they’re in the same neighbourhood—I’m not going out of my way to see him if he won’t go out of the way to see me.  (He claims it’s too far from my place to get to work in the morning.)  I should’ve stood up for myself sooner.

So our Tuesday night routine continues.  Oddly enough, I didn’t really mind just being lovers.  Deep down I know he isn’t the man of my life, I can’t imagine living with him, but at the same time I’m not ready to let go.  He’s become my North Pole, the one constant in my life during this period of big changes.  And I’m not willing to give up such great sex, even if the situation isn’t ideal.

(22 April 01)

The fire won’t go out.  The more we make love the better it gets, I’m starting to get performance anxiety because he counts how many times I come before he comes.  He isn’t satisfied until I’ve had at least six or seven orgasms.  He’s also started giving me these mind blowing orgasms that last fifteen or twenty minutes.  The first time it happened he shook me out of it because he was afraid I’d have a hart attack!  I just wanted more.

Many evenings I’m happy to be alone; grateful to be alone, to be able to do what I want when I want, without any commentary.  At the same time I’m tired of having a once a week lover.  Twice a week would be fine.  It doesn’t make sense to me that I feel so sexual, and yet I’ve led a life with so little sex.  I’ve had lots of lovers who weren’t very sexual, or were bad lays, or lived abroad, etc.  When I was younger, some of my lovers claimed that the problem was that I was frigid.  Although I wasn’t very experienced, I was sure that wasn’t the case.  They just didn’t know how to make love to me, or to make love period.  Why should I feel so sexual and end up so frustrated?  In sessions with my shrink, I’ve asked myself why, but I still haven’t come up with an answer.  For some reason I’ve spent most of my years feeling like I don’t have the right to pleasure.  Now I feel I have the right, but with a man I can only see once a week, and at the same timeoccasionally with other  men who are just short term lovers.  What’s up with that?  Why can’t I meet a man who can give me pleasure and wants to be with me for the long haul?

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