Wednesday, March 31, 2010

What I saw at the (sexual) revolution

This will be the last of the relation-ship based stories, for now anyway. Like all the others, it is based on real events with some veiling to protect identities. I've left one name—Stephanie—unchanged because I feel a certain admiration for her. She and "Ted" are the only ones who could possibly figure out which Stephanie.

There are no turning points in life. There is just a time when things that seemed confused and uncertain suddenly seem no longer to be so. We sometimes call this the turning point when, if such a thing were possible, any actual turning has already happened. If there was a turning point on sexuality, it must have happened in the 1980s. If it happened, I didn't notice it; I don't know anyone else who did either.

But things did turn and I do remember the shock when I realized that things had changed and that people playing by the old rules had been left behind. It was a shock because with a subject like women, men and sex, I'd always assumed that it was the way it was and that it would never change.

There had apparently been a sexual revolution starting before I was born and over before I hit puberty but that seemed to me to be a mostly about things that had always been happening in the shadows coming out into the light. What happened in the 1980s was different and I think far more significant than the sexual revolution. The very basis of sexual relationships between women and men changed.

I noticed it talking to a guy named Ted. We reconnected a few years after university and just a little while before Ted moved to Paris. I'd met Ted in 1980 at university. Ted was a romantic. At the same time he was being so romantic, there was a lot of sex around the university. There were really only two sexually transmitted diseases in those days and both were curable. Besides which, nobody you knew ever got them. That would change, of course—in just two years time herpes would be the Time cover storyand it was our fault it changed. In those days you could walk into the university library and if you caught something in a girl's expression, a girl you had never even met before, you could invite for tea and oatmeal cookies followed by sex on the couch. You wouldn't mention the sex in your invitation, of course. It wasn't reasonable to expect the girl to commit herself that quickly, or, more to the point, that openly, but you both knew where things were likely going.

A lot of us did things like that back in those days. A doctor who worked at the university's health centre once told me that she spent the first two months of every year doing nothing but prescribing the pill to one woman after another: five appointments an hour, seven hours a day, five days a week. And there were a half dozen doctors on staff. "Anyone who showed up with an actual health problem, we'd send to emergency." These women, girls really, were away from home and away from their family doctors for the first time. They'd maybe had one lover in high school and maybe not even that but now they were free to do what they wanted and they meant to make the most it.

In that sort of atmosphere you could almost feel sorry for the poor sods, especially the male sods, who wanted love. Even if you found a girlfriend, she'd cheat on you. It seemed easier and safer to just go with the flow. I did and so did did Ted at first. It never bothered me; it did bother poor Ted. He was a romantic, as I say, and he wanted love.

And he found it when he met Marie. They met around the end of our second-last year and got serious at the start of final year. And for a while they lived in bliss. They'd spend entire weekends in bed together. Ted went to her place at Christmas and they'd snuck down from their separate rooms in the middle of the night after her parents were gone to sleep and had sex in front of tree and ate Santa's cookies afterward.

Ted thought he'd done us all one better. He had all the sex we did and love too.

He had it for six months. Then things got tougher. Ted didn't talk about it with me. He wasn't the type to talk about it. Most men aren't. But I didn't need to be told because I could see it. When Ted and Marie were in the room with me there was a tension that hadn't been there before. And it felt to me like a bond that used to exist between them was now missing.

They went on being boyfriend and girlfriend though. And that cold period was a lot longer than the six months of warmth had been. Ted persisted—he was in love and he wasn't going to abandon love. Neither would Marie. They started to talk about getting married. Then they were engaged. They both were thrilled and things seemed to get back to what they had been for a while.

And then they cooled off again.

University ended that year and I moved back to the town I'd come from and lived with my parents in the suburbs for a while. Ted, romantic that he was, couldn't imagine leaving either Marie or Québec, so he moved into her apartment in a beautiful old house of the kind you dream of living in. Marie had a roommate named Stephanie.

I eventually moved back too. I guess I had some romance in me after all. I worked at a bistro in la vielle capitale and one day I ran into Ted again and we went for a beer together down in the lower town. For some reason I quite clearly remember ordering a Dortmunder. We covered all the old stuff but I didn't mention Marie for a long time. I'd expected an invitation to their wedding and I was hurt I hadn't gotten one. It never occurred to me that there might not have been a wedding.

Finally, I did ask. "How is Marie?" Ted said, "I have no idea." Then he told me they had broken up quite some time before. I said I was sorry to hear that. And then, although I hadn't asked, he told me how they broke up.

One night he and Marie had an argument. They'd gotten so they argued a lot. After it died down, unresolved, Marie fell asleep. Ted was so discouraged that he could not sleep. He got up and watched television but was so unhappy he decided he needed to get out out of the apartment. He got dressed and headed out into the winter cold. It was just before sunrise and he figured he'd find a coffee shop or something.

He was on his way down the street when he heard Stephanie call him in a loud whisper. He turned and saw her on the sidewalk in the snow wearing a flannel nightie and her boots and he rushed back to try and get her to go back in where it was warm. She refused. She wanted to tell him something. The two of them stood there in the cold morning air while she talked.

Stephanie had been listening to their fights for a long time. She'd had no choice in the little apartment. She'd often been waked by the sound of Ted and Marie talking. She knew their argument from start to stop. She knew it so well because, as she told Ted that morning, it was always the same argument. And then she said the words that set Ted free. "It's her body Ted. She's been living with it for 23 years now. If she doesn't know how to make it work, it's not your fault."

Ted didn't know how to respond to that and he was getting quite nervous about Stephanie out in the cold. He got her to go in but it took a while. She kept insisting that he acknowledge what she'd told him. "It isn't going to change Ted—she isn't going to change." He really didn't want to acknowledge it. She really did want him to. He finally said he did but it was more to get Stephanie to go in than anything else.

Then he went and found a coffee shop. It was while he was eating his pain au chocolat that he finally accepted what Stephanie had said. It wasn't easy. He really loved Marie and wanted to marry her. When he thought about the times they were happy together, and they had lots of these, he couldn't imagine anything he wanted more than to be married to Marie.

He didn't leave Marie that day. It took him a few months. He kept imagining what he'd say to her. He always had to do that with difficult issues with Marie. Anytime he'd tried to raise them, he'd always felt tongue-tied and she always seemed to be able to argue circles around him in the subsequent discussion. He had to formulate everything ahead of time or else she'd overwhelm him. This time, he couldn't even make his argument in his imagination. "I kept trying to say it in a way that she wouldn't turn against me and I couldn't."

The problem was that he kept trying—in his imaginary conversations—to convince her that it was best for both of them. And he had no trouble seeing how she would turn that on him. She'd say he was trying to make it sound like it was good for her when it was really what he wanted. He'd gone through a lot of variations on that argument and had come to dread them. The only thing he dreaded more was having the actual argument.

One day, he found an apartment on Cartier. It wasn't at all romantic. It was upstairs from a store and Cartier was a busy street. He took it anyway. Then he took a day off work, rented a van and moved his stuff out. The only big things he owned were his bed and a kitchen table and chairs that he'd promised his parents he'd return to them some day. Everything he could carry himself he took. He left the big furniture behind.

He called Marie that night and told her it was over. He just told her; he didn't explain or try to justify. He called from a payphone because he didn't have one in the apartment yet. The conversation lasted about forty five minutes and most of it was her hating him for what he was doing. He didn't dispute one word she said because he didn't feel any need to anymore. He was going and it didn't matter that much to him if she hated him now. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that Stephanie would quietly tell another story to some of their female friends. That made it easier.

"The only thing that got me thinking about it later was that she'd threatened to leave before. I never had. I was the one who always begged her to stay. Sometimes—more and more often as time went on—she'd interrupt one of our arguments and say, 'I give up,' or 'Let's give up.' That used tear me apart. I'd cry and she'd look at me with these cold eyes. But when I actually did it, I was some sort of monster."

He stood it though. "Because she was right," he laughed as he explained this. I laughed with him and then laughed again for real a few moments later when I realized he meant not the real Marie but the one he'd been having the imaginary arguments with. What she was right about was that he was doing this for himself. "I finally faced it. I couldn't live like that. I couldn't go through that for the rest of my life."

So he left.

After we'd said goodbye, I went back to my place and thought about it. And it hit me that everything had changed. I'd never taken Ted very seriously and I still didn't. But that was what made it so impressive. If Ted had noticed this change, it had to have really happened. Sometimes you see people who seem to be riding some new trend but it fades because it never was a trend; they were just trendy. But not Ted. He was always behind a little. If he'd turned, everything had turned. And he'd needed Stephanie's help to see it. He never could have without her. She was the real heroine of the story the way Ted told it.

Ted never stopped being romantic. It was a little while after that he announced he was going to move to Paris. I don't know if he found love and happiness there. I doubt it somehow.

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