Sunday, November 17, 2002

I found it curious the

I found it curious the first time, and nearly inexplicable the second.  I don’t know if it’s a common occurrance, or if it’s only me who is being confronted with this query.  But for the second time in five months I’ve found myself at a party of some distinction where I was fortunate to meet a new acquaintence who, in both these cases, was a young woman of wit, charm and indisputable beauty. 

These gatherings I attended bore no relation to each other - different friends, different styles, different states.  At one I wore a tuxedo; at the other I wound up hot tubbing in the raw.  These women I met - again, very little beyond the summary description I gave did they seem to share in common: one was blonde, french, a photographer of the boudoir school; the other an american brunette, a practitioner of the healing arts with a french boyfriend.  One was married; one was cohabitating and considering an nuptual engagement. 

Thus the viscissitudes of fate brought me through very different paths into conversation with each of them.  A few minutes into each of these conversations I was asked with frankness but no trace of self-consciousness for my opinion - as a man, representative of my gender, or at least one who was willing to promise to respond with candor, having no motivation to fabricate or embellish. 

Under such circumstances I was, on both occasions, only too happy to acquiesce.  In both cases my agreement drew my interlocutor to me with conspiratorial intimacy.  The wording differed but the inquiry was the same both times: Are men faithful; what is the connection, if any, between such fidelity and acutal love; and to the extent such connection was, or proved to be, tenuous, what was to keep a woman physically faithful to a man who had demonstrated his inability to reciprocate in kind?

Of course, I could not speak for my gender, and only haltingly for myself, but I’d let myself be put on the spot and had to say something.  The further content and resolution of these conversations I will not set down; they involved confidences shared with me with the understanding that I would respect them, and I intend to do so.  Suffice to say, they were both memorable and remarkable. 

What lingers in my mind now like a veil over a bookshelf is the curiosity of coincidence, the thematic recurrance in the midst of so many differences in the situations in which these conversations occurred.  It seems most likely to me that I was just a convenient source for information on a matter that must trouble many women, and that I was invited to offer my view because of an earnest, open conversational style that encourages total strangers to chat me up remarkably regularly.  I like to draw people out and get them talking, and maybe that’s how I would up twice where I wound up, talking to women about their relationships, their loves, their choices and opportunities, their regrets and frustrations and desires. 

Yet there is a question in my mind, arising out of the possibility that I was more than merely a blank canvas, a sympathetic ear, a not-yet-discredited stranger willing to reflect and express an opinion.  Maybe something inherent and unique to me elicited these parallel lines of questioning.  What that was, or what it might mean, are further questions I prefer not even to examine yet.