“It’s impossible to be unhappy on such a sunny day,” said Sarah, smiling at Stephen. Stephen smiled back across the breakfast table:

“Yes. I really don’t want to go to work right now; I’d rather stay with you and play in the swimming pool.” He patted her full thigh under the table, carefully, so that little Mickie would not see. This was their morning routine; it made them happy. Their eyes reconfirmed, “We are happy in this way.”

“But I gotta go,” he added rising from the garden chair. The full view of the town came before his eyes. Their house was placed on the slopes of a minor hill overlooking the busy human settlement. It was late spring and every color in the mountain air seemed to have gained in clarity, saying “I exist, a color different and truer than any other color.” Entering the house he caught the voices of his wife and 4-year old rising. Their morning quarrels were a part of the routine too, he remembered. Still, it was good, he admitted to himself quietly, to have somewhere to go away, in this case, to work.

He left the house and entered the garage. The new jeep gave him pride each time he looked at it. He managed in life: built a house on a plot of land in the most prestigious quarter of town, he supported his wife, paid for her expensive hobbies and kept her happy. “Someone has to make the money, and someone has to spend it. Neither is easy,“ Sarah often bantered with their friends. She played tennis, went for massage, took piano lessons, tried to improve her French, cycled and visited all sorts of weird lectures and self-improvement workshops; and although she had no talent in particular for any of these, she could do a little of everything. It was her duty to be happy and it was his duty to keep her so, they agreed. And such was their life for the past eight years since they knew each other. She talked to him, made jokes, arranged meetings with friends, attendance to parties, shopped and worried about the cleaning lady to do her job properly. He worked. That was their agreement.

Stephen liked his job: anyhow, it was his small company, his idea, effort and selected team. He enjoyed working and risking and solving problems and performing well. His firm was slowly growing and so was his time spent in the office. His house was a modernized building with a garden and a swimming pool n a town where poor flats and high rents were the usual fate of most young couples. He was not that young anymore, in his forties he had a business, a home of his own, a beautiful wife, a son, and a new jeep. All this gave him a sense of solidity in his masculinity. It was his monument in life and his tombstone, he joked. Stephen’s property was a block of marble he made by layering his manhood in it. It was good to be a man in his forties with a company, a house, a wife, a son, and a jeep. He knew he did not perform in bed that well anymore, but he worked hard, and he worked harder to excuse himself for failures in sex which were growing in frequency. Was it Sarah or him, he wondered. Her flesh smelt of milk and its scent put him to sleep early each night without arousing him. He liked her, he just could not get himself to feel excited from her body anymore. He hoped she was happy with her pastimes.

Sarah did mind the lack of sex; she did not trim her body and buy all the beautiful clothes just to be ignored in bed. Many nights she laid excited beside him sleeping, wondering what to do with a living husband who did not desire like a man anymore. She was committed to their marriage, she did her part, she was funny and happy for him, yet nothing ever happened. And when it happened, the few nights per month he would be awake enough to touch her, she would find over and over again that his skills as a lover were far from satisfactory, and growing less so. The first year of their life together he was exciting and an excited mate in bed. Just when she decided they had enough of plain sex and it was time to start experimenting with new ways of lovemaking, he started dropping behind her in the pace of their bedroom adventures. Her unsatisfied frustration had been slowly growing for years, moderated by tact, the friendship between them, and lately, her lovers.

She preferred having lovers to a satisfied husband. She chose them and made them everything her husband was not. Thus she was fulfilled and could keep fulfilling her role of the happy, always cheerful and warm wife. Sometimes Sarah wondered if she should feel guilty; but without lovers, she thought, she would grow miserable and pour all her frustration on her husband, cease being the happy wife and their marriage agreement would break down. Her having lovers was, in this regard, her way of keeping Stephen happy. She did not feel guilty; only very much afraid of being caught, afraid of the embarrassment and scenes and humiliation that would most likely come if her husband were to find out. But she didn’t think about what would happen if her husband would find out. It was simply her way to think only of joyful things.

Mark was her present lover. He was a student, twelve years younger than Sarah. Neither of them minded the age difference. Anyhow, it was a short relationship, clandestine and a bit mad; without concerns over future, it could go on intermittently almost for ever.

They had met at a self-development workshop. The methods of self-discovery and ruthless self honesty initiated rather intense experiences. Mark and Sarah worked together during several exercises. The passion of revelation and breakthroughs shared through short exchanges continued into a passion of revealing each other. They considered it a breakthrough that they could dare sleep together despite the hypocritical society which moralistically banns such relations.

Mark was fun. Sarah was a mature woman. Sometimes it does not take anything more to keep two people together for a limited period of time. But that time soon ended, not becuase of boredom, but because of competition.

2.

The town’s social life in summer could be summarized as a competition - who would give appearance of being less bored. The summer festival of classical music, a two-week long event, was the pride and joy of its citizens. Some of the female citizens however had a different pride and joy in it. They were competing for the musicians who, come from out of town, appeared to be the more important component of the musical function.

Several ladies, most of them in their thirties, fresh enough for adventures and cynical enough for calculations, regularly met for an overview of the musical potentials, or their potencies. There was a tacit competition, more or less discreet and unverbalized, where the annual winner would be the lady granted the attentions by the musician evaluated as the most attractive of the troop. Musicians changed from year to year, the ladies did so very little, which kept the summer going.

This year, it was the violinist. He was proclaimed as the ladies’ “prize” of the summer contest immediately after he arrived. He had been seen, dark and slim, bending over his luggage in a sleek manner, then raising his eyes, which, so they said, were full of flickers. A man of slight mystery, he was said to be. And a lady’s man, too.

“Nice,” thought Sarah, upon hearing this account. “Let’s see if he can stand up to me.” Sarah was the winner of two consequent musical contents of that kind, and was looking for a joyful third ladies’ prize this year as well. She had already bought tickets for all evenings of the festival; now, she promised herself to study a bit the repertoire and find out more about the composers and the compositions. She liked seduction in style, and she liked changing styles in each courtship. This year, she decided, it would be the intellectual style.

For the opening night of the festival she wore unrevealing clothes and glasses. She played her female opponents down, exhibiting her not too sexy outfit as a lack of interest in seduction. It worked.

The violinist took more interest in her than in the other ladies during the long-awaited cocktail party after the performance. His name was William. He could not be Will, or Bill, or even less Willy, with that accent on the long l-l. Mark, the student-lover, somehow disappeared from Sarah’s knowledge, passion and time in an instant.

3.

Wil-liam. Women found him delicious. They even forgave him that he left them. He was used to his charm as a hand to its glove. He could put it on, and put it off. Music was what the naked hand was doing in-between.

He liked women in general. He liked them rather too generally, since he often found himself bored by the specific samples of womankind: the repetition of phrases, personal histories and infinite questions. He did not mind being asked questions about himself, and answered with a merciless honesty, brief and unarguable. Many men, in his opinion, were unsatisfactorily successful with women because they were saying what they thought women would like to hear. This would only lead, he believed, to tasteless and flimsy affairs. William’s courage to speak the truth was based on experience. He knew women would like him more if he was honest, even though honesty was more than often hurtful to the affair they had. Women had a strange way to persuade themselves that a virtue is more virtuous when exhibited in a man for whom they had unvirtuous desires. Women could persuade themselves that a man is even more loveable when he is less loving. Certainly, not all women functioned in this way. He had lost a couple of good opportunities by his famous honesty, but they were defeats he could easily live with.

He liked Sarah at first sight and selected her to entertain him for that festival. He had his own solitary competition running on each trip. He would focus on one available lady and try to charm her. Perhaps to even seduce her, but that was not the essential part. He was looking for excitement, not for satisfaction.

Let us skip through the habitual sequence of mutual seduction: the measured words, holding on to what connects, denial of what divides, calculated risk of provocative ambiguities, prolonged gazes, slight touches. They won, each of them, their private contests. They were in bed together, knowing more or less the limits of their relationship by the third night.

The festival went on uninterrupted. It greatlypleased the town’s audience. On the tenth night, however, William and Sarah knew each other better. His clear ban on romantic words and Sarah’s discarded mask of intellectuality brought to the question, “And now what?” He wanted to slide back into his general love for women again, escaping the specific limits Sarah had, and she wanted to win him more than he was willing to give in.

There they were, on the tenth night, after love-making, in a hotel room full of shadows and footsteps from the corridor. Sarah was proud of her love-making abilities, and she tried once more to subdue him, to make him say how special she was, how different she was from all the other women, and how unique was their relationship to him. That was what she had planned to hear.

He had planned to have a quiet night after exciting love-making, and to have at least an amusing discussion with this aspiring provincial intellectual. However, he found her less interested in thoughts than she seemed to be when they first met.

As they were lying naked in bed, she finally said, “Then, you do not love me, do you?” His exercised honesty took over automatically, without thinking.

This triggered the awaiting avalanche of pitiful and outraged words. He got up from the bed, feeling he could not touch the naked woman’s body while this avalanche was going on. He waited silently for several waves to pass, expecting it to end up in tears. It did.

He could not have mercy. He spoke slowly, deliberately, in a low voice and calm. This triggered another wave of tears, which then changed to accusations. He waited again, without touching her, and spoke again. The accusations changed into insults. She blasted at him:

“You have come here, and seduced me, and then you leave me hanging on like this. How can you just stand there, how can you not care about me, not enough even to touch me?” Other words echoed silently through the room, “How can you not love me?” Then rage took over, and can changed into dare. “How dare you not love me?” roared through her mind. He heard the hidden words well.

He looked at her, and reluctantly he allowed himself to see her, in all her specificity. She was not a general womankind anymore. He disliked the sight so much that his eyelids tightened. He could not make love to this woman anymore.

She accused him of not having a heart, constancy, principles, that he was a worthless man. At last he turned toward this specificity, to the heart of it, which he could still see inside her, throbbing within its confines.

“You are a bored and a boring woman, Sarah” he heard his words resonating in flat voice. “You have nothing in you that guides you, no goal nor principle you have kept or honored. You do all these things,” he pointed at her music book and her tanned body, “but you are not outstanding at anything. You simply haven’t got anything great, strong or remarkable in you to make your playing, thinking, or sporting great, or at least unusual.” He paused, looking at her as if fascinated by a monster or a large empty cave of frost he imagined to see. “You pretend to have passion, but what you call passion is just a woman’s wet flame, and it rides you, not the other way around. You do not have any real heart, any real mind of your own, and not even the decency to stand for what you are, what you believe in, because you do not really believe in anything. You have no faith in people, music, words or in me, for the matter. You cherish nothing, while you spurn what you have... You have nothing in you that truly loves. How do you expect someone to love you truly then? How dare you speak of love?”

He stopped. The wordsroared through his mind. Suddenly, he doubted himself if he himself could speak about love. Well, he didn’t, he admitted to himself resentfully. Was he any better than that little scared prison he was seeing in front of him, lying naked on a stranger’s bed? With this unhappy insight he looked at her, pale and trembling, and he briefly pitied her.

In vain, as she sensed his faltering and interpreted it as his weakness. She blasted furiously at him in a torrent of angry and poisonous words that denied his right to speak to her in such a way, to speak to her at all, his right to think of her and in the end his right to be. She was foaming and he saw the monster that inhabited the frosty cave. That was enough. He picked himself up and left without a word. The world was too glorious a place to be wasted on pettiness, petty words and petty women in petty towns. Even if he himself was a petty man, which he probably was, he thought. He left.

She stayed, cold and angry. She tried to cry but found no tears in her, no reason to cry. It was his entire fault, she thought. She could not even remember anymore what exactly he had said, but she knew that he had no right, no right at all to speak to her in such a way. She had her value, she was not worthless, and no fiddling wanderer could tell her any different. That affair was finished, she determinately repeated.

Suddenly she missed her house, where she would be safe and loved and needed and irreplaceable. She knew what she needed: not some ignorant pompous artist, but her house, where she would stand in the middle of the living room and feel herself to be the center, the connecting point of everything that made a home for her, her husband and her son. She was too good to be wasted. She picked herself up, and soon she was where she truly belonged for that moment.