49. "Shedding Mr Nice".

[see 25. "Rachel's Massage" and 44. "Rachel's Counselling" for background to this story.]
_______________________________________________________

“Look,” Rachel says, “I understand the difficulty you have letting your emotions loose and you don’t have to talk about them to me. But at some point you have to trust yourself to bring your feelings out into the open, because until you do you won’t be able to let them go. It’s good you’re writing, even if you’re only playing on the edge of what you really feel. The next step is to stop shadowboxing, stop playing games. Let go. Get it out there. Don’t even read it afterwards. Burn it, shred it, whatever you like. But get rid of it. You don’t have to rush and it won’t necessarily make you feel better right away. Will probably upset you. Should upset you. Pouring out hurt, anger, frustration, you’ll feel raw, vulnerable, drained. But, in time, you’ll find it cathartic. Healing.”

“Better than smashing golf balls?”

“Is that what you do?”

“No, not normally, but it’s what I did Saturday. I was so mad after a spat with Anna that I went over to the driving range and bought a bucket of golf balls. Tried to hit the covers off them. A hundred of them. Then I went for a walk along the beach. A mother was there with her young daughter. They were dancing on the sand. It was such a sweet picture, so innocent. I felt very calm after that. Almost as relaxed as after one of your massages."

...

It’s evening. I’ve taken on board what Rachel said about writing from the heart or the gut or wherever it is that my raw emotions hide.

I’ve opened “A Hobbit’s Journal”, the journal Josie gave me last Christmas. The printed inscription inside the front cover reads:

Wayfarer
Kingbearer
Stranger or Friend
Rest here a while
And take up your pen

So I have.

Strange sense that my destiny now is to write up, bear testimony to, some form of life narrative of a factual/fictional kind. That I have had these experiences thrown at me, randomly in a way. I think of Logan Mountstuart in William Boyd's Any Human Heart who accepts that life is just a mixture of good luck and bad luck and that he has little agency in what happens in his. So I see my task now is to ‘go away and make sense of that lot.’ Even while I know that there is no sense other than my construction of one – after all I was weaned on the theatre of the absurd and existential angst and an acute awareness of the black hole into which life may plunge at any moment. And yet the creative instinct is still towards sense making and the construction/reconstruction of the narrative(s) of my life.

...

“Did you read your old letters again?”

“I did, yes. Only a few though. There are forty or fifty of them. I read enough to remind myself what all the fuss was about. Lovers do go on a bit, don’t they? Must admit I got bored after a while. A lot of words.”

“And did you find the answer you were looking for?”

“Well, yes and no. Found a lot of things, but a single answer? No, I don’t think so. Bits and pieces of answers, suggestions, and then more questions, always more questions. Threads without patterns.”

“Would you like to explore some of those today or would you rather talk about something else?”

“Trouble is, Rachel, I’ve begun to feel this quest may be rather futile, this exploring. It’s premised on the idea, isn’t it, that there’s something to find, some holy grail, some key to understanding my relationship with Anna, understanding her, understanding myself? Yet I find it harder and harder simply to describe it adequately.”

“Don’t be too ready to abandon the process, Jamie. Not yet. You need to be reconciled to what happened, to make some sense of it so that you can move on. And describing what you think happened, in your words, in your stories, is in part an explanation of it."

“But there are so many possible explanations, possible stories. I wanted to find some truth, something rational to hang on to. Isn’t it truth that’s supposed to set you free? Not multiple truths, not this mishmash of reality and fantasy. My scientific training, my career, my life I suppose, has been underpinned by a belief in the supremacy of the mind, the will, the rational. And then I look at my letters. I see the passion, the love, the idiocy, the madness, and I wonder who that person is. Or was. I’m embarrassed at myself. And admiring too in a strange way. I’d forgotten I was capable of all that emotion, that irrationality, that I could be consumed like that – by love, by passion, by desire.”

“Emotion has its own rationality, Jamie. There’s nothing necessarily irrational about it. Think of love as having an emotional truth.”

“Because I feel something strongly, believe in something passionately, that makes it true in some way? I don’t think so, Rachel. People believe in all sorts of weird and wonderful things, strongly enough to change their lives, to change the lives of those around them. Change the world too if they had their way. I distrust that. Distrust it totally. It’s a dead end. Literally. Can lead to folk destroying each other. I want to believe in things that have some approximation to the idea of truth. Otherwise it’s just a smorgasbord, a tower of Babel. Pick your belief and live by that, any old psychobabble rubbish that’ll get you through.”

“And love? You think you’ll find some science of love, Jamie?”

“I’m sure there’s as many sciences of love as there are sciences. Biology, physiology, psychology, anthropology, sociology – they’ll all have models of the behaviours we call love. And explanations. That they’re rooted in social and cultural conditioning, or early childhood experiences, or in our genetic wiring or brain chemistry or something. Ya pays yer money and ya takes yer choice.”

“More stories, then?”

James laughs.

“Yes, more stories. And just as unreliable in their different ways.”

“So, what story are you going to choose? Your story?”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” James says.

He takes a sip from his glass of water.

“And I do have a story. For today at least. It’s that love is a projection of oneself. I think we fall in love with projections of ourselves, a kind of romantic alter ego, the person we wish we could be. Not just be momentarily, in the heat of early passion when we’re beguiled by our illusions of the other person. But be permanently. We want to wear our romantic mask permanently, be defined by it. We love ourselves most, I think, when we’re in that heightened state – unselfconsciously engaged, committed, alive, totally absorbed in the present, in the moment. We wish we were like that all the time, living in that technicolour dreamtime. So when it doesn’t last – and it doesn’t, does it? - we blame our partner for destroying that magic persona in us. We spread our dreams under their feet and when those dreams get trampled we feel the loss terribly. Look for someone to blame. And then start the search again to revive our sense of ourselves, desperate to be in love. Ultimately it’s futile and we settle for something more stable, but stability chips away, eats away at our alter ego, burying it in everyday routines, in boredom. The world fades to monochrome. It’s the age-old love and marriage dilemma. Romance consumed by responsibilities, imagination by reality.”

“Is that your rationalisation of what happened with Anna?”

“One of them. But then again, when I look at the early days of our romance, I think perhaps love is precipitated by loneliness. Perhaps it’s just the joy of discovering you can connect with someone else on the planet. No, not loneliness. More a sense of solitariness. Tell me, Rachel, when you are out in public – in the checkout queue at the supermarket, or waiting for the traffic lights to change at an intersection – are you ever amazed, when you look at someone close by, that they are so totally strange? That they have a whole life going on in their heads that you know nothing about? Absolutely nothing really.”

“Does that frighten you?”

“Sometimes. Mostly, I enjoy solitude but other times, even though I’m on my own, it’s comforting to be among people, jostling in the shops, or in a crowd at a football match. Nice to go into a bar and have a drink and just soak in the noise, the chatter, and feel the warmth, share the experience with unspoken-to strangers. I suppose I’ve always had a sense of isolation, of separateness, of being on the edge, of having this stand-outside-of-myself perception of difference in sensibility and intellect, and yet longing at times to immerse myself, lose myself in the crowd, to just be one-of-the-lads, totally engaged in the moment. Being in love, making love, gives me that engagement, that bridge out of separateness. It’s a spiritual experience, I suppose.”

“Would you say you are a spiritual person in other ways, Jamie?”

“Not in any religious sense, no. But in the sense of wanting to find, to hang on to something outside myself, to override the purely physical realities of a secular world, then yes. Even though I know it’s of my own making, a projection of my own need, particularly a need for connection.”

“And sexual connection in particular?”

“To me that’s just the doorway. It’s the spirituality of love that I want to hold onto.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you mean by that.”

“No, I’m not sure I do either. It’s some vague notion of transcendence I suppose. Of escape. I suppose being in love, or at least believing one’s in love, is an excuse for abandoning other responsibilities, even if only temporarily. It’s a state that we believe will produce revelation. About ourselves. About life in general. And that’s primitive. Mystical. And incredibly unstable. It keeps us on the verge of chaos, I think. Maybe that’s a good way to live – dangerously – but I no longer have the stomach for it. Not at the moment anyway. For now, I’m just happy to survive. Take my pleasure in simple things. Find some tranquillity. Which I am doing, Rachel, thanks to you.”

"Are you finding some balance, some equilibrium? You do seem more philosophical about what happened between you and Anna.”

“Do you think so? Perhaps I am. But I swing between the banal and the mythic in understanding what happened. At one level, when I think about it, try to describe it, the whole love, romance, passion, betrayal thing with Anna seems a dreadful cliché, the eternal pop lyric. But the experience wasn’t like that. It was intense. And painful. I like to think that the apparent superficiality of what happened hides a more mythic story. I suppose every human life is bizarre to the person who lives it, and that what appears from the outside to be normal and humdrum, from the inside is random, chaotic and strange, full of chance happenings. And from all this randomness some coherent story is supposed to emerge or be invented, some story we are comfortable to live with, live by, some sense-making that gives a veneer of purpose to our lives.”

“Sounds philosophical to me, Jamie. Not so consumed by anger and bitterness. Not so revengeful as when we started out.”

“That’s true. I don’t feel so revengeful.”

“It’s a self destructive emotion. One you can do without."

“So they say, don’t they? But I’ve found it hugely motivating. Better than a doleful passivity in the slough of despond. Gets me out of bed in the morning, that’s for sure.”

“For a time, maybe. But eventually you need to let it go.”

“Yes, I do know that. And I’m getting there. It’s not revenge that concerns me now. More exorcism. And some kind of reconciliation. Reconciliation with Anna anyway.”

“Exorcism?”

“Yes, not of the real Anna. I learned to love the real Anna and then to hate her. When she betrayed me it was the real Anna I vilified. But the mythical Anna is the one I need to exorcise, the Anna I created when I fell in love, the Anna that was a creature of my dreams and illusions, that became the Anna of my nightmares, that’s the Anna whose spell I need to escape, the Anna I need to excise from my memory. Or if not to excise then at least to stabilise, to solidify as myth, to set down as history, as story, and then discard or shelve and move on.”

“Perhaps you should start by letting go of the letters. Think you’re ready for that now?

“I already did. Ceremonially tore them into tiny blue and white fragments, like confetti. Confetti for a funeral. Swept all the pieces into a large plastic bag and took them down to the beach. To just south of Thorne’s Bay, where the freshwater from Lake Pupuke springs out among the rocks and runs down into the Rangitoto Channel. Did you know the lake’s original name was Pupukemoana, the overflowing lake? Piece of trivia for you, Rachel. Anyway the tide was out so I threw the pieces into the little rivulets between the rocks and watched them rush away like enthusiastic sperm pushing and jostling towards the abyss of the ocean. Very poetic of me, don’t you think? I was conscious of it as a kind of ritual cleansing, a closure of this whole Anna saga. When I die I want my ashes to be washed out to sea like that.”

“That’s good, Jamie. I like that. I hope it brings some of the closure you’re seeking.”

“It moves me on, I think. A little at a time. It’s all progress.”

“So, where do you go from here, do you think?”

“I suppose, to change the analogy, I start growing a new skin. A tougher one, perhaps.”

“Or perhaps you need to be more forgiving, more accepting of yourself, particularly of your private self, the one behind Mr. Nice?”

“Mr. Nice, the self I hide behind?”

“Yes, think about shedding that skin. Stop using niceness as a mask, a weapon, a tool, a way of getting people to like you. Don’t be so afraid to let them see the rest of you, even the darker corners.”

“But perhaps nice is the only skin I’m comfortable in. And perhaps Mr. Nice has been my public image for so long that I’ve ingested him totally, that my Mr. Nice persona is now my character or as near it as I’m ever likely to get. That I am, essentially, however boring it may be, just nice.”

“Do you believe that?”

“No. Well, not just that. But I don’t believe nice is such a bad thing to be. I don’t despise it as much as I used to.”

“It’s OK as long as it’s not inhibiting you, as long as you’re not constantly tailoring yourself to please other people, validating yourself through other people’s perceptions of you. You need to shed the old skin before you can grow a new one.”

“Like a snake, you mean?”

“Yes, a snake’s a good analogy. Shedding the old skin’s necessary for its survival. Letting go to make room for change.”

“Nakedness before renewal?”

“Better than being a crustacean don’t you think, getting hard and impenetrable as the years go by?”

“And increasingly crabby,” James laughs.

“Good to see you laughing more, Jamie. Not taking yourself so seriously.”

“I suppose I’m reconciling myself to what happened with Anna. I no longer feel swamped by her. Feel I’m gradually regaining touch with who I am, with the core of myself. Beginning to believe there is a core after all and not just a squishy mess.”

“You need to focus on the positive aspects of the times with Anna and not just the negative ones. But start thinking about a better future too. Give yourself permission to play. Take some risks, develop new projects, have some fun. You’ll feel a lot healthier if you do.”

"And I need to be reconciled with Anna. Finally shed that skin too. Before she disappears from my life.”