Bill and I had phone sex again. I wondered if it would feel the same the second time, and it did, and that was kind of the problem. It was exactly the same, and it could be exactly the same for evermore. It isn’t a real event. It travels from one brain, one nervous system to another, down a wire, bypassing the world and its happenings. It’s a story we tell each other, and meeting is almost irrelevant. It has no past, no future, no present tense either. It’s a fiction, one we step aside from our lives into. It’s about us both being lonely. I feel almost romantic about its limitations.
I’m not even sure Bill wants to meet. I had a long non-sexual conversation with him at the weekend – he’s an intelligent, funny man – and I asked if he’d ever had a long-distance relationship. He said he had. He and she had love-commuted for a while, on alternate weekends. Distance had killed it, he said: the end of the relationship was mostly because of the distance. “So why try again?” I said. “There must be lots of women in your own city.”
“I’m probably on the phone for the same reason you are,” he said.
I’m casting the net wider. I got a sweet, funny email from him later that evening. He’s an attractive man in many ways. But 200 miles away.
I met a girlfriend in the coffee shop on Sunday morning and talked to her about it. It turned out that she, too, had had a long-distance relationship. It was a disaster, she said – they got into a spiral of suspicion. They’d made themselves unhappy imagining the other being unfaithful, then that suspicion began to cloud the actual meetings, and the whole thing imploded.
She had to run to pick up children, and 10 seconds after she’d left, Andrew swooped in to take her seat. “Hello, stranger,” he said. “How are you?”
I said I was wondering whether to say yes to a date with a man who lives far away.
“You should,” he said. “It’d be good for you.”
I asked what he’d been up to. As we talked, he kept glancing over my shoulder. A slim, blonde woman of 30 or so walked past the table and his eyes followed her. As other young women went by, to the left, to the right, or got up to leave, he appraised their back views as he was talking. I went to get more coffee and watched as he scanned the room. Another young woman had her rump evaluated as she queued to order. I’m fairly confident in telling you that Andrew’s an arse man.
Right, I thought, it’s now or never. When I sat down again I asked if he was dating. Not really, he said.
“Are you hoping for someone young?” I asked him.
Our eyes met and he considered his answer. “Well, I’ve decided that I want children and so it ought to be someone young-ish,” he said.
“You should have children – it’d be good for you,” I replied.
“It’s tricky, though, because most of the 30-year-olds I chat up in here think of me as elderly, at 55.”
“That is tricky,” I said. Children! Of course. He hadn’t mentioned once, in the hours and hours of talking we’ve done, that he wants children, but then why would he? I’m a woman he knows only in the coffee shop bubble; I don’t even know his address. We’ve had long conversations, intense and trivial, but never outside the four walls of the cafe. That’s only one level up from a Twitter friendship between people who chat a lot but who will never meet.
“You should mention on your profile that you want kids, I said. He shook his head. “That might look desperate,” he said. “What was it you did that you feel bad about?” I asked “You said once when we talked that you’re not a good person.”
“There’s a list,” he said. “I won’t bore you with it.”
“I hope when you find your 30-year-old that you bore her with it before you marry her,” I said.
He warned me he was going to shock me. “I jilted someone once, when I was young. At the altar. Changed my mind.”
Oh God, I said, tell me you didn’t. “I’m not going to do that again, so I need to be 200% sure.”
Stella Grey is a pseudonym
