When my overwrought brain gets stuck on this particular spin-cycle, a memory or two will come to the surface, much like lint from the towel you didn't know was buried in the bottom of the washer. A couple of years ago, such frothings produced the saga of Heinrich and Peggy; this time - due to a specific situation that's been developing - it's coughed up a story about my friend Catherine, or more properly, the effect Catherine had on men.
Catherine was (well, is) a fun girl, beautiful, very clever, and as such had a cadre of friends. Male friends especially, but female friends, too. I'd known her for a long time and very well, so...how can I put this?...it was normal for Catherine's male friends (the heterosexual ones, anyway) to be in love with her. She has a way of making a man feel like he's the most fascinating thing on the planet, so whenever her lovely green eyes lighted on him, he'd get this massive ego-boost and come over all soppy in love.
This was just par for the course, and not something it ever occurred to me to think about overmuch. It's just a Catherine thing. In other words - don't take it personally, she's like that with everyone.
On occasion it did come up, when one of the guys came to me hoping for an inside track of Catherine's affections, or just to talk about their anguished unrequited crush. Then I would shift to the motherly role, giving them a pat and talking in soothing tones. I did not give them false hope - in those days, Catherine herself was suffering a bout of crazy love for one particular man, and frankly, no one else had a chance in hell. Oh, I'm sure I was kinder than that, but that's the gist. For her part, Catherine was glad I was there as a comforter of desperate love angst - that way she didn't have to hear awkward confessions like "I feel like a giant blinking neon penis whenever she walks into the room." ;)
This was the situation, back in Catherine's single years, and as I say, par for the course. This is not what's been preying on my mind, the lint in my mental load of washing. No, it's something else. It's that there were other men, too - also "friends" of a sort, but not so close, more on the periphery of Catherine's circle, and they were not like the sweet yet passive buddies who came to me with their feelings, or even just garden-variety friends. These were the ones about whom Catherine would sometimes say, "don't leave me alone with him" or "if he calls, tell him I'm not here".
There was no more promise of a romantic relationship with these guys then the others, but something was different. I could feel a cold, hard-edged rage coming from them, and the rage was not directed at Catherine - it was directed at me. This was an uncomfortable situation, and I tried hard to understand it. I knew they didn't like me and worked extra hard to be nice - though of course mindful that my friend did not feel comfortable alone with them - but the overwhelming feeling I kept getting was that I had ruined everything, that the only thing keeping said guy and Catherine apart was me, champion cock-blocker of all time.
There were only a few of these guys, but that was plenty. It's never a pleasant situation to feel so much hate flowing your way. Had I been more sophisticated at the time, I likely would have identified this as the kind of red flag situation akin to the the man who fawns over his date at dinner but denigrates the waitstaff. But if I'd been more sophisticated, I probably wouldn't feel the need to write this. Strange as it sounds, it's possible to be naive and knowing at the same time. It's the nature and sensation of being hated - that particular sort of hatred (disgust? derision?) that's been puzzling me. Being the target of a sort of blame I didn't understand.
This is where it gets muddled. It's hard to put into words. The best I can do is to say that, in the eyes of these men, Catherine was a sparkling treasure, and I was clearly some slimy thing that had crawled out of the bubbling muck at Innsmouth and was STOPPING THEM FROM CLAIMING THEIR PRIZE, DAMMIT!
But the thing was, I knew this wasn't true (about Catherine, not the Innsmouth thing). Catherine wasn't interested in them that way. I wouldn't have been there if she was. I was only there because she wasn't. For Pete's sake, who would bring along a friend if they were trying to make a sexual conquest? No one with any sense, and certainly not Catherine. So what did they think was going to happen?
And more to the point - was I really that awful, so wretched in comparison? Is my low self-esteem justified? These are the questions that keeps the bookish introvert up at night.
Long experience has taught that whenever something is muddled, there has usually been a failure of logic somewhere, or some clue that's been missed. In this case, the kind of clue that your average fourth-grader would have picked up, but must have slid right past me at the time. These particular guys - no doubt the more aggressive, possessive type - had misread the light in Catherine's eyes as romantic (or at least sexual) interest. In their minds, she must have been a sure thing, if it hadn't been for "the friend". Because the human psyche is full of peculiarities and blind spots, they didn't get that she was like that with everyone, or that she wasn't a possession to be claimed, or that this very attitude made them even more unappealing to her. Hey, there's nothing wrong with me, so it must be Cthulhu over there at fault. Not questioning why Cthulhu was there in the first place.
Well, it makes sense, but it's really not that hard to grasp. Surely I must have known this at an intuitive level? I'm not that dumb. Yet the subject still seemed muddled. Logic was still failing me somewhere, and therefore I had to worry it like a dog with a bone. This sort of obsession always means something is wrong, a blind spot in my own psyche. What was it that I couldn't see?
It seemed irrational, on the face of it. If someone is a close friend of the object of desire, it stands to reason that it would be foolish to alienate them from the start. After all, they're in a position to have information that one might want to know, aren't they? A potential way to someone's heart? Even from that strictly Machiavellian perspective, it makes no sense. And then I understood. The reason I fielded so much angst from Catherine's lovelorn buddies was the same reason for the cold-blooded disdain from those other guys.
No comments:
Post a Comment