I’ve said it many times, I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day. I didn’t grow up with it as a tradition (although you should see the commercial fervour of flowers and chocolates being sold in Romania nowadays!), I believe in long-term and consistent gestures of compassion and love rather than an overblown, overpriced one-off romantic gesture. Besides, even in my youthful years I had quite a cynical view of love, and all the experiences I’ve had since have done nothing to dispel my cynicism.
Which is a long pre-amble to the story below, a story that has been exaggerated for artistic purposes but was inspired by true facts: in 2019/2020 a flurry of former boyfriends and admirers got in touch and claimed they wanted to see me. Whether it was middle-age or Covid that sparked their interest, the results were pretty much what I’d expected: so disappointing that it became hilarious. I wrote this piece in autumn 2021 and have been submitting and editing it sporadically ever since. Since it’s unlikely to see the light of day in a respectable publication anytime soon, I might as well share it here. Not just as a very sceptical Valentine’s Day gift, but also as a timely reminder to myself not to expect too much of a reunion next month with the high-school sweetheart I haven’t seen in person in over thirty years.
P.S: Warning: this is over 1600 words!
Fifty Ways to Meet Ex-Lovers
Well, OK, not fifty, not all lovers (at least one of them was a husband), but it certainly never rains but it pours!
After Covid reminded all of us of the minuscule amount of time we spend on this planet, I had no less than five former lovers/boyfriends/what-have-yous get in touch out of the blue and invite me to meet them. Maybe they craved one last pat of approval and farewell before we shuffle off this mortal coil. Maybe they wanted to reassure themselves about their achievements, that they hadn’t missed out on anything by not choosing the fork on the road leading to the clapped-out Dacia Sandero with me jeering (sorry, should have that been ‘cheering’?) inappropriately from the driving seat.
I wasn’t quite sure where they got my contact details from, but there are so many ways to stalk people online nowadays. Who hasn’t, on a particularly sleep-deprived full moon night, googled pictures of the high-school sweetheart who dumped you just before Leavers’ Ball, in the hope they would be fat, wrinkly and toothless by now?
I’m so good at complete oblivion that I wasn’t sure I’d remember enough about those who exited my life decades ago to sustain a sensible conversation. But my worries were completely unfounded, as you will infer from the results of the observations below.
Besides, after two years of working from home in a cramped room, with only the grunts and complaints of my ferally-home-schooled sons for company, what did I have to lose? I had probably been reading too much Donne that winter as well, which did not bode well for the flickers of desire I’d successfully stamped out for the past few years. My Donne-less friends were regaling me with horror stories of their online dating adventures, so it couldn’t be worse than that. Not that I believed desire ever meant revisiting old haunts.
What the hell, enough water under bridges, curiosity got the better of me…
The first had even been a husband once: the starter-kit model you embark upon at the age of nineteen because it is the only way you can escape parental control without ending up sleeping on the streets. The kind of guy you picked because you knew he would appeal to parents: a good few years older, respectable profession, the kind of looks that almost guaranteed lifelong fidelity on his part… As I discovered soon after the wedding, he also had the jutting elbows and greasy-pole-climbing abilities of the preternaturally ambitious. He hoped to mould me into good politician’s wife material but I was ungrateful and mould-resistant.
Twenty-five years and a pandemic later, he invited me for lunch at his club. The food was lousy and the atmosphere funereal – all the other diners were either whispering or rustling newspapers. He apologised that he hadn’t been able to get reservations at the Ivy at such short notice. Besides, he only had an hour for lunch, he was attending the G7 summit, his expert evidence and diplomatic skills were highly coveted, he hoped I wouldn’t mind. He kept glancing at his watch to emphasise how indispensable he was – or maybe to demonstrate that he would never wear anything as vulgar as a Rolex, but a Patek Philippe for connoisseurs.
Before our food even arrived, I was fully informed of the foibles of each of the negotiating teams who had turned up at the G7. During starters he filled me in on his CV, just in case I had missed any of the latest developments. Increasingly senior positions with national security, then NATO. The main course was all about his latest venture, something to do with sending satellites into orbit. Or else shooting them down. Or maybe protecting them from being shot down. Something along those lines. It would all have been riveting, I’m sure, except that, just as he had predicted all those twenty-odd years ago, I was too flighty and self-absorbed to grasp the importance of what he was doing.
It was only after I was whisked out of the club – which still viewed women visitors as regrettable modern progress – with just three minutes to spare from the generous one hour he had allowed for me, that I realised that my legendary self-absorption must have failed that day, for I had not been asked a single question about myself and what I was doing, other than the initial perfunctory ‘you look well’ greeting. Any half-way observant person would have noticed that I looked anything but well.
My second invitation came from an old admirer. His infatuation had clashed with my brief first marriage, so it had never quite come to fruition, but he remembered all too clearly the number and quality of the bouquets and poems he had sent me, and how I had, on the whole, avoided him as a partner at our ballroom dancing society in college. Was there any point in revealing at this late stage that his reputation for stepping on toes, both literally and metaphorically, preceded him? I didn’t think so, and I could only hope that he had become a better partner in all respects. Although, judging by the way he glided very quickly over his marital status and only boasted about his children, while ogling my décolleté…
The third meeting was over Zoom, a blessed opportunity to use all the screen filters I could find, as well as astute lighting. F. had been the best-looking man I had ever encountered in real life, and I still had enough vanity in me to want to avoid the glimmer of disappointment in his turquoise eyes. To my surprise, I discovered he was now a granddad. He had married young and his offspring – like mother, like daughter – had got pregnant in her teens. He clearly enjoyed his food now, even produced his own brand of sausages and pâté on his farm, promised he would send me some until I reminded him that it would likely get delayed at Dover. His eyes had turned watery, or perhaps it was sentimental pride as he shared file after file of pictures of his family, his dogs, horses and Mangalitsa pigs. Who would have thought a former Olympic medallist could have become so domesticated? Clearly my memories of him as a prowling panther must have been false.
I won’t bore you with details about the fourth one, except to say he could not get over how I’d lost my figure. Clearly, he hadn’t seen himself in the mirror recently or was blaming it all on lockdown spread in his case. I was having a good day for once and was determined to march well ahead of him on the perfectly flat Thames Pathway, while he panted and wheezed.
Number five was the only one who asked me any questions. After a blow-by-blow account of his many marriages, divorces and complex financial settlements, I was flattered when he turned to me and said, with genuine concern in his voice: ‘And you? I’ve heard you’ve not been doing too well lately.’
Turns out he was referring to my literary pursuits rather than my precarious private life. He had been a staunch supporter of my writing since high school, had urged me to abandon anthropology and focus on poetry instead. He had even published a few of my early pieces in a literary magazine he co-founded with our perennial Nobel Prize contender. The magazine still appeared sporadically, although the celebrity had moved on (to lick his wounds at not winning the Nobel yet again, I presume), and my high-school boyfriend had become far too successful in his career as a barrister to produce regular issues. Exhilarating though it was to discover that he still followed my writing career, I was soon flattened by his disapproval of the direction in which it had been heading.
‘You showed such promise with your poems. You really should have stuck to that, instead of those puerile crime novels you produce now.’
I opened my mouth to justify, say that crime paid my mortgage and life insurance, that I didn’t have time to wait for critics to recognise my genius. That all writing that tells of one thing necessarily tells of another. After all, aren’t all truths partial and contestable? Why should I chase them so ineluctably?
No time for erudite – or better still, sarcastic – responses, for he continued with a wordy tribute to art for art’s sake and the importance of not selling out for the sake of applause or monetary reward. Then he ordered a gold-covered steak and another bottle of Dom Perignon.
All these meetings took place within two months of each other. Such a coincidence that I almost suspected a coordinated assault on my youthful memories, if I could believe that they somehow all knew each other. Perhaps there was a ‘Former friends of Joanna’ Facebook page? Or should that be a Metaverse where we were all still young, flippant and healthy?
It has been a year since that flurry of activity and none of them have been in touch after that one meeting. Their nostalgia has been satiated, their penance for any imagined sins complete. Or it might have something to do with the fact that I have left most social media and changed my email address.
We’ve lived through interesting times and some of us have become less interesting to compensate. I too have lost my powers of analysis, synthesis and pattern recognition, somewhere between hospital appointments and setting up child trust funds.
On the whole, I’m glad they never asked and I never got a chance to show off my newly acquired knowledge about the distinctions between chronic and acute, between lymphoblastic and myeloid. I prefer to revert to my role as a participant observer, hoist them by their own petard tongue. I refuse to squeeze a single drop, not a drop of pity out of anyone.
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