“i’m reviewing the situation” (thinking aloud, online)

Fagin sings that in Oliver.

In a different context I, too, am ‘reviewing the situation.’

I have to remember what RS [Rolly's shrink, and mine] said Tuesday: I don’t want to see your heart broken prematurely by a man who may not break your heart in the end.

And he also advised Festina lente, make haste slowly.

* * *
That’s what I’m doing. Slowly… reviewing the situation…trying not to make haste…but quite uncertain how things will turn out with Plan C, or even how I want them to turn out.

* * *
Before me is a photo of Plan C and myself taken a few weeks ago by my daughter. We’re standing, our arms around one another. I have quite a number of those shots, in none of which do I look really good, and certainly in none of which do we look good at the same time.

I’ve got a number of the same kind of shots of Performer and myself, taken last October — some even taken by the same daughter.

* * *
How many of these will I have before the photo’s of me and the Final Man?

* * *
Okay, here are the negatives, the case against staying with Plan C, at least as I see it now:

1) is he smart enough for me? He and I both think — or is it know ? — that I’m ’smarter,’ but what does that mean, really? what kind of smarts? My two husbands were both extremely smart, definitely my intellectual equals, possibly more-than in the case of my first husband, but that relative equality didn’t make for a happy marriage. RS started to give me examples of happily married intellectual-unequals, Nobel prize-winners he knew married to ‘ordinary’ women, but I stopped him before he could go into detail. ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to do it with the genders the other way: smart women with less-smart men. If you mean male Nobel prize-winners [he did], then that doesn’t show me anything. That’s a traditional pairing, the genius male and his ‘ordinary’ wife. I can’t learn anything from that.’

Not that Plan C is dumb or dim; by no means. But he is resistant to learning things. He hates being taught, hated school, didn’t attend a lot of his college classes, dropped out of graduate school, and stopped reading books a few years ago when he stopped smoking (because he got lung cancer….duh!). He said he used to stay up all night reading and smoking…. The books on his bedside table (including one of mine….) look really good, but they’re unread.

Or do I mean that he isn’t interested in ideas?

But he’s a good ‘reader’ of literary style. Once he read something I wrote and made a — well, I won’t say ‘astute,’ but a useful and valid criticism of it.

Or maybe it’s just that he’s stubborn. He doesn’t have a flexible mind. After we went to see the film The Counterfeiters, he got angry when I said I didn’t like watching violence in films, or really depressing subjects. He kept saying, ‘But it really happened. That’s what the camps were like.’ Of course I knew that; my response had nothing to do with the accuracy or truth-value of the film. I just don’t like seeing people beaten or shot or tortured. I didn’t like Bonnie and Clyde for the same reason. He kept arguing for a long time (this was at a cafe on Columbus Avenue). How could he not see that I wasn’t appraising the film aesthetically, or denying the existence of Nazi cruelty, or anything like that? I was simply saying that it upset me to see violence and torture, and I didn’t like watching films like that.

It was not unlike an argument of ours I described in the ‘lovers’ quarrel’ post: it became important to me for him just to understand the distinction between having a certain kind of response to a certain kind of film, always, all my life (i.e. i get upset by watching violence on screen), and making a judgment on the value of this particular film (i.e., this film is good, this film is poor). I felt an idiot could understand that distinction; why couldn’t he?

Yes, it was late at night, maybe 11 or so, and as I’ve often noted here, Plan C is often not good to talk to late at night. Sometimes he gets in rants, and sometimes he just gets dense.

But do I want to spend the rest of my life with a man who can’t have a simple, easy conversation about a movie, a discussion in which we have different opinions? I wasn’t feeling argumentative. Many people have no problem with violence in films, and so be it. We might then have gone on to talk about other aspects of the film. But he found it impossible to tolerate what for me was a very simple matter of gut emotional response. I would certainly have tolerated such a response, or a similar one, in him.

That’s the only example of that I can think of. Maybe he was angry about something else, and it came out that way? It’s true that only happened once, but wouldn’t it be nice to have a life-partner who wasn’t so intolerant?

2) Or maybe it’s that he’s not all that interesting to me?? He has stopped reading, more or less, as I said above, though he has read a few political pieces that I’ve showed him in The New Yorker. And today (he said in an email) he read something I wrote that relates to the trip we’re about to take.

But he seems to have slowed down intellectually. He’s not in peak form. I’m rarin’ to go. I’m full of ideas. And I’m eager for and open to new ones. And I don’t have to agree with people to find them interesting — well, I do have limits. I don’t want to talk with anyone who defends the war in Iraq. But so far as movies, books, and Democratic candidates go, I like to hear lively, non-belligerent debate.

* * *
Maybe it’s that when the devotion is taken away, I mean, when I think of Plan C as someone who may or may not love me, when I appraise him coolly, I wonder what’s there.

* * *

3) Okay, so today, I was doing a lot of walking, especially during the lovely evening hours between about 5:30 and 7:30. Manhattan was beautiful: there were actually Cool Breezes, and the air looked pink and grey. It was very nice. I was going this direction to Duane Reade, to buy lightbulbs, then that direction to buy Stoneyfield and Fage yogurt, then another direction to pick up a prescription.

During the 1990s, when I was out doing chores at that time of day, I was always glad I had my little family to go home to, and dinner to make for them (forgetting or ignoring or denying the way my ex fought over meals…), because at that time of day so many people are homeward bound. It’s an hour when you — by which I mean I — want to be around a table with your family.

Of course, I was passing lots of restaurants with couples,many of them on dates, sitting at tables outside, but I had no desire to be on a date.

So I asked myself, Would you like to be coming home to Plan C? Would you like him to be there waiting for you? Would you like dinner with him every night? Would that be nice?

* * *
I wasn’t sure.

* * *
Why didn’t it seem right, or desirable? I kept picturing his face, pleasant-looking, good-looking, and his body and posture, imagining him waiting for me to come home, imagining us eating dinner together (in my apartment) — and somehow it wasn’t fulfilling. It didn’t feel right, didn’t make me happy. He seemed sort of like a generic man, not someone I’d be excited to talk with when I got home. I even imagined him smiling and glad to see me, but I still couldn’t feel any happy anticipation at the thought that he would be the man I’d come home to.

* * *
So I invented a fantasy man, based on the one viable not-yet-known-to-me man who met my specs on jdate two nights ago, when, after Plan C told me he wasn’t sure if I was still his beshert, I scanned the available men to see what was there for me, should I return one of those days.

And this fantasy man seemed really interesting!

He was eager to talk, wanted to tell me what he’d just been thinking about what he’d just been reading, wanted to hear my response, know my thoughts, talk some more.

* * *
It wasn’t a sex fantasy.

It was an evening-conversation-over-dinner fantasy about the man I’d want to come home to.

And he definitely wasn’t Plan C.

* * *
So does that mean that without the love, or with the love in doubt, I find — or I would find — Plan C boring?

? ? ?

* * *
This seems a quick turn-around, doesn’t it?

* * *
I don’t hate and despise him, the way I did Performer when things were over; I see him as trapped in his past, emotionally paralyzed as described in the previous post.

But I guess what was most appealing about Plan C was his apparent devotion to me, and feeling that coming from him, I gave him the love I was so eager to give someone.

And we had — have — fun dancing and stuff.

* * *
He sent two emails today. I answered the first, and he wrote back, and I didn’t. I’m “withdrawing,” big time. I don’t have anything to say, and I’m curious to see if / when he’ll phone or write again. And I’m going to follow RS’s advice and ‘make haste slowly.’ We’ll go on our trip, and I’ll see how things go. Maybe I’m exaggerating the problems, or maybe this is a form of self-protective retreat. I have no idea. However, I could be seeing the truth now. Maybe the romance got its energy from the strong need each of us had for romance, but maybe really, we’re not suited. He responded to something in my profile and picture, and then I responded to his emotions, and ‘it’ took off…….

* * *
Of course, there’s the fact that I had written him, responding to his profile, 18 months earlier. That seemed to give a validity to the romance: each of us singled out the other.

* * *
I see I’ve forgotten to list the ‘positives,’ having begun this post listing the ‘negatives.’

Hmmm…..

I must not be feeling the ‘positives.’

If I had to list them, I’d say, we have fun together; I enjoy dancing with him, or at least I do more and more; sex with him was fun (why am I using the past tense??), and he was — I mean is — good in groups of people, especially people he doesn’t know. He’s friendly and accepting and — I hesitate to put it this way, but I will — he ‘presents himself well.’ He makes conversation pleasantly, people like him, and oh yes, he always looks good.

I like his friends and they’ve liked me, though I’ve only met them all once each.

* * *
I guess that’s about it.

Is that enough for a lifetime?

We’ll have ten days of togetherness, far more than we’ve ever had, on this trip, and that should give me a better sense, a clearer sense, of what I think.

Of course for me even to consider staying with him, he’d have to want his name on that person-to-notify-in-case-of-accident-or-serious-injury line. Without that, forget it.

But I guess I mean, if his love returns, will mine?

And if mine doesn’t, does that fantasy man I want to come home to, he of the lively conversation, exist somewhere?

* * *
I’m reviewing the situation.

* * *
UPDATE
message from Plan C sent at 11:23 pm this evening:

Mimi,
[Son] stopped by about 8 unexpectedly and we have until he just left had one of those nice visits we have had since he showed up last summer. Hence my absence tonight. So, darling girl, this to say goodnight, a mellow one for me.
Love,
Plan C

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