At first I wondered whether it was my fault—and then I understood. Men like Ben make you question your own behavior so that you won’t see that it’s theirs that is problematic.
I thought at first that perhaps if I had just been a little kinder, a little more sensitive, taken more care with his feelings, not led him on, it might not have happened. I was so caught up in those early days with Dan, I didn’t realize what Ben was at first. I know now what a fragile, dangerous thing the male ego is: like a plant that needs watering and constant attention or it withers and poisons the water supply for everything else in the vicinity.
We are taught to nurture it in ways we don’t even realize. Lower your voice. Laugh at his jokes. Giggle your way through this encounter, because it’s easier than taking issue with how he just spoke to you. Pretend you can’t manage by yourself so you don’t seem like a threat—whether it’s a photocopier, a car, or a condom.
Anything to avoid triggering the nail bomb they all wear just beneath their clothes. Even the ones in plaid shirts and nice suits. Especially the ones in nice suits.
I had my first taste of it at Cambridge—the lost week, Anna and Effie called it. The lost six months, it became, after I graduated and couldn’t get out of bed for the rest of the year.
I hated myself for having let down another woman—the one who let herself into her boyfriend’s home to find me, practically a child still, sitting in his armchair wearing one of his T-shirts and reading Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Her mouth in an O, her eyebrows raised in surprise—but her face soon closed up that shocked expression like a blind rolling down on a window.
“Oh, another one,” she sighed, as I rushed to grab my belongings and leave.
She must have been around the same age I am now.
I hated myself for having been so naïve. By the time I got back to college I was so catatonic with self-loathing, I couldn’t write the dissertation I’d been avoiding even if I’d wanted to.
So Effie wrote it for me.
She started it as soon as we got back from the clinic where I’d taken the tablets. Where as I’d left, a homely woman around my mother’s age and wearing a bonnet wreathed with flowers had pressed gory literature into my hands and told me I was eternally damned.
As I shivered and heaved in my bed, racked with pains I thought would break my back and my hips—would empty me until I was hollow—Effie tapped away on her computer next door. She authored seven thousand extra words in addition to her own paper on Emily Dickinson about how modernity is the corrupting force at the heart of the male-female dynamic in Thomas Hardy. He wasn’t wrong: just imagine how Alec d’Urberville would have treated women if he’d had an iPhone, or sanctimonious Angel Clare with a righteous Twitter account.
Effie quoted from reams of books she had read and I hadn’t bothered to; she gave me her eloquence, her breadth of knowledge. She loaned it to me for the future, so I could leave university and start my life again.
Blood on water. My baby was a raspberry in a bowl. I flushed it away in the girls’ loos of our student block.
What is it Hardy says? “Women do as a rule live through such humiliations, and regain their spirits, and again look about them with an interested eye.”
And I did eventually. But clearly, I learned nothing from it.
The night we met—or re-met, I should say, at the engagement party—Ben and I made innocent-sounding, awkward small talk. I was flustered, more by the context than by his presence. Surrounded by friends who had gathered to celebrate my getting married to another man, I guppy-mouthed and hedged while Ben asked increasingly banal questions. About our relationship, our engagement, my heart, he asked not a word.
It is not simple, hunting a person with your eyes when you are the focus of everybody else’s in the room.
I next saw the top of his head all the way across the crowd when I was on the dance floor with Eff, attempting the self-conscious shuffle of the woman who feels herself to be under observation, intimidatingly but deliciously so.
Except I wasn’t. Ben wasn’t even looking my way.
When he pulled me into the cloakroom later, it was the first contact we’d had since our handshake, and it was like I’d been branded with his touch—a burning patch on my arm where he had held it and steered me toward the back of the small room, behind the rails of coats.
“God,” he said, running one hand through his hair, breathing out forcefully through his mouth—whoosh—as though he were expelling the tension between us.
Close up for the first time in a year, those bottomless blue eyes, perfect teeth, strong jaw, and burly shoulders had almost the same effect on me as they had the first time round. I felt my stomach swoop toward my feet when I remembered how infatuated I had been with him back then.
Despite that, I saw the insecurity flash through him as he started talking. Though he practically filled up the tiny space with his burliness, Ben seemed smaller in here than he had before. Than he had that night all those months ago.
I realized in that moment that the Ben I had fallen so hard for was a figment I’d built up into something more. Dan was the real thing, a thousand times more real than the rooftop in Bangkok.
“So, this is weird,” Ben continued, laughing but without humor.
“Such a small world,” I murmured. “You can’t escape your demographic, I guess.”
I could have prattled on with platitudes for a while longer, but he stopped me.
“Look, I wouldn’t tell Dan about us if I were you. He’d find it too weird.”
I nodded, grateful to him for the advice. It hadn’t yet
