Have You Ever Really Loved A Woman?

Exercise #2 (Reworked)

Do you see that couple walking in the corridor? They have been married for six years now. Do you think she looks sad? We think he looks puzzled. Are you wondering why? Well, we want to tell you their story but we don't know where to begin, as is usually the case with mundane stories, especially those with happy endings.

At the clinic, he had been looking at her as she listened attentively to the doctor. They could not have children. It was either adoption or surrogacy. She had listened to all the details of her anatomical inadequacies that made motherhood biologically impossible. She had taken the news calmly. Her heart had wept. But her mind had kept the tears away from her eyes. She had even asked a few questions. The doctor was pleasantly surprised at her knowledge of biology. She must be a remarkably strong woman to be take this so well, he had thought. He wished some of his patients were realistic, informed and intelligent like this woman. Husband and wife had walked out of the clinic in silence.

But hark, this should have been the ending to our story for it actually began about eight years ago. They had met, while still fledglings, mind full of ideals, eyes full of dreams. It was intellectual chemistry of the purest kind. They could talk for hours about philosophy, books, the sciences, politics and history. Then they fell in love, or rather he thought he did. He asked her to marry him. She looked at him in the eye and nodded. The deal was sealed. She would have told you matter of factly, if you had cared to ask, that their mental frequencies matched, as did their outlook in life, and that was good enough reason to marry. He would have told you the same, and then some more - the look of her eyes just before they closed after a tiring day, her rare smiles when she unburdened herself, just for an instant though, the way she would doodle on the piano, carelessly like an errant child, after careful hours of Mozart and Bach. He just felt like holding her then, on to those moments of intimate pleasure of glimpsing the child woman in her, the moments when she let her heart rule her clinical mind.

If you were to apply a surgeon's knife to the thoughts of our heroine, you would have clearly seen that what she felt for him could only be best described as adulation. His was a discerning intelligence that could appreciate, equally well, the elegance in a physics equation, Bach's Concerto in D Minor for two violins, Shelley, Jung's hypotheses and Michealangelo's David. Every moment with him opened new possibilities. What she most feared was that he would fall out of love with her. For to her, love meant mutual admiration. Nothing more nothing less. So she moulded herself more and more into the 'intellectual'. But she was blissfully unaware of all this. Life went on. They had a quiet uneventful wedding and an even more uneventful married life.

Five years flew by. They were flying high in their respective careers. They were wealthy and lived in a huge apartment in the middle of the city. Maids did all the housework, and the apartment was always neat and picture perfect. Their life was hectic. They no longer had the time for long intellectual conversations. Over dinner, he would remark that some book he was reading was good and she would make a mental note to read it. But it would be forgotten the next day. Sometimes, very rarely, during a Sunday afternoon after lunch, he would look up from some technical journal, and hear her playing on the piano. He would walk towards her study, and stand outside the door listening. All of a sudden Pachelbel's Canon in D would dissolve into mismatched notes and her humming. He would close his eyes and smile, grateful that he had not walked in and missed the pleasure of hearing these sounds. But these moments were few and far between. He didnt know she doodled because she thought he would not be listening. In fact, she didn't want him to listen to this side of her.

If you had applied the surgeon's knife to our hero's thoughts at about this time, you would have sensed discomfort in every layer. He was not sure how or why, but he saw his wife, his love, disappearing before his very eyes. (Only we knew that two pieces of the jigsaw were missing.) One fine morning, the truth hit him. Children. They needed to have kids. That was the missing link. He smiled when he thought of a daughter just like her. Maybe he would have a piano in his study where his very own BonnieBlueButler would doodle endlessly. There would be no need for him to listen from behind closed doors. But fate had other ideas.

It is almost a year later, that we find them walking out of the doctor's office. "Well," she says brightly, "adoption is some idea, don't you think? Wonder why it didn't occur to us before..." He stands paralysed, looking at her, as if trying to understand something. 'If only she had shed a tear on hearing the news...if only she had shown some kind of emotion...if only she had been devastated for an instant and then reconciled herself.' The pieces fell into place in the jigsaw. 'She is heartless. She has no emotions. She is a robot. To her, everything is either interesting or intellectual, or neither. What have I fallen in love with?' He feels revulsion filling him rapidly. He needs to get out of there. He quietly turns and walks out of the clinic and out of her life.

We are as surprised as you are for we were expecting a happy-ever-after ending. And what is this? The jigsaw is not yet complete. The last piece is still missing...That he needed her to show her emotions for him to know they existed...That she had to shed tears, for him to understand her devastation.

We cannot help but wonder if our story would have had a different ending, had he seen this missing last piece of the puzzle...