(1) That you're married! and that takes away all my words;
(2) That I'm sorry for being anti-social tonight - I'm truly glad for you, and appreciate the introduction, and do let's hang out soon;
(3) That I wish you would write to me, establish contact in some way, keep some line of communication open, so that in the far future we may yet start to be friends;
(4) That I saw La Jetee earlier today, followed immediately in the same tape by Buck Rogers and Bambi Meets Godzilla (whoever put that tape together either had a cruel sense of humour or no conception of the appropriate - which may come to the same thing in this case);
(5) That your name runs through every narrative I write, except I don't quite dare to say that, whether out of a belated reticence or courtesy (do you read this?) or wariness I don't know.
Endings. Frederica sat and waited for her lover, and wondered what the end of the affair would be. She had begun to think that there was always only an unreal moment's grace between the beginning of a love affair (the phrase was already old-fashioned, but she had a growing distaste for the word relationship) and this steady self-questioning about how and why and when it would end. The moment's grace was the moment of being 'in love', which brought with it a clear, driven purposefulness, an impersonal directed energy that was desired in its absence, and frightening in its presence. (Not least because at thirty-three a woman knew that the dreadful belief that it was possible to prolong this state forever was the most tormenting aspect of the illusion.) For days, or weeks, or months, as the case may be, Frederica thought, putting on a short white cotton nightdress, brushing her red hair, we do nothing without the accompanying image of the loved face, the imaginary limbs, and then, one day, we notice it's gone, there is no more, love is over. And what kills it? Often enough (she put out all the lights except the bedside lamp, she turned down the cover) a failure in oneself, or in the beloved, to conform to an ideal pattern put in the mind long before these particular two have met. ... [Love] is a dance. It has a formal pattern that friendships don't. It is a made-up story. Love. Something else, fiercer and harsher and hotter (Life?) needs us to believe in Love for purposes of its own, which are not ours. And we collude. She remembered playing the young Elizabeth I in the garden, the virgin queen whose power wsas the recognition that separateness and solitude were safety.- A. S. Byatt, The Whispering Woman
All a bit metaphysical, Frederica thought, waiting for the tap on the area window, from the basement steps down to the flat where she lived. All a defence against him not coming, which we always fear, even if really we are indifferent as to whether he comes or not.
But a month ago, six months ago, I wasn't thinking in language about what (if anything) is love. I was thinking about his mouth, and his arse, and his hands. People like me, who think too much, are so glad, so grateful, at least at first, to be overcome by thoughts of lips, hands and eyes.
...
She opened the door, and John and the night air came in, and he opened his arms. And immediately she knew that he was someone, not her idea of her own lover, and her idea of John Ottokar, but a complicated troubled breathing man, with ruffled hair and an erection. She closed the blind and with four quick hands they undressed him, and tumbled into the bed.