I met him many years after the great disappointment, not to say heartbreak, he caused me. He is now an old man and, anyway, I too, am getting along in years. He is a widower and I have been divorced for some time. I live alone just like he does because my children are studying in Canada where we have some money and property. After the children left, I moved to an apartment close to his and, quite by chance, we met on the street, mon petit Paul and I, and our old peculiar and conscience-stricken erotic friendship resumed with the same intensity minus the sexual factor, which he claimed he still does not understand. He did not understand what a blooming flower like me found in a wilting one like him. He got it half right.
He too was a flower.
In our days, it is commonplace to find beautiful youth. Beautiful old people are a rarity and are so wonderful to contemplate. Paul was a handsome young man but for me he was outright beautiful in middle age. The hair graying but intact, the sculpted face, the white strong teeth, the wondrous smile. I saw women lose themselves in that face. But it was not only that. It was much, much more. It is the reason we are back together, inseparable friends. Wonderful friends hooked on each other's company. There is simplicity, modesty and tenderness in that man that is out of the ordinary. He is cultured and well read and there is no way one can get bored in his company. Oh, we talk for delightful hours now that my own amorous life is in steep decline. But there is another reason why, some ten years ago, I was crazy about him. It shall come out partly in the story and more explicitly in the epilogue.
For I have undertaken the task of recording an ordinary and passionate love story that, on the way, became extraordinary with a sequel that was not to be.
Thwarted by guilt and the last-minute doubts of a Narcissus. For he must have been a Narcissus, mon petit Paul, to have left me high and dry the way he did. More than anything else, I had lost a friend. The sex would have been an added intimacy and I never expected from him the performance of a twenty year old. I had tasted some of that and though orgasms are heavenly releases, they are not always enough. My husband was an accomplished lover and difficult as it is to leave a man who satisfies you sexually, I finally left him to escape his constant bad moods and insufferable behaviour. Two children tied me to him longer than I would have otherwise tolerated.
It is hard to believe that the depression that gripped me after Paul disappeared from my life lasted many months, almost a year. Nevertheless, I recovered a stronger person. One usually does, if one recovers. I often wondered if Paul left me from strength or from weakness. Probably, a little of both. In any case, one corrective action I took as soon as I was normal again was to send my husband packing. I was bitter at Paul and thought he acted selfishly, succumbing to the petty scruples of a generation ago. I did not see why I should be generous with Tony who was, if anything, many more times as selfish.
My father died a few months later of a heart attack. A lot of grief, of course, because he was a wonderful father to the whole family including my self-indulgent mother and I loved him dearly. A lot of grief but with it a little inadvertent recompense because he left me a reasonably rich woman. Rich enough, at any rate, 2
not to need to work, giving me the opportunity to try my hand at something I always dreamed of doing - to write. I started off with a novel and published it at my own expense as no publisher would accept it and gave the copies away to friends and acquaintances. I then started writing short stories in French and English and many were accepted and published in magazines and literary journals. I was, step by step, making a name for myself.
Years later when I met Paul again, it felt as if I had won a lottery. I would write his autobiography in the form of a fictitious story. He resisted the idea telling me he was a nonentity, that in his last professional post he was a minor employee, that he did nothing worthwhile in his life and so on. I told him I was not certain but suspected he had a long-term passionate love affair and he said he could not bare his soul to me. I told him his reticence showed he did not love me. He said he did, as much as his sons. Perhaps more. I was the daughter he almost committed incest with.
He loved me more than I could ever imagine. I told him to stop lying and he consented.
We spent hours talking and taking notes and I condensed this mountain of words to a hillock of sentences, reminiscences and emotions. I am in it, of course, a minor, incidental player, almost an accident, though Paul denies it. I do, it is true, start and end the story. I could also write a larger part for myself but I would feel less than honest even if this is supposed to be a work of fiction. I asked Paul what the story's title should be and he characteristically suggested "The Pathetic Suitor". Perhaps the reader shall figure out why. But I did not think "Pathetic" is an apt adjective for a man who, despite his weaknesses, loved so much and was so much loved.
Finally, I should like to introduce myself. I am "Amy" in the story. May the reader forgive me for talking of myself in the third person, like royalty, but I do so for the continuity of the story. I am peripheral in it and not always present and when I pop in, I want to be Amy and not use the intimate, all-knowing "I" for there are still so many things "I" do not know.