This was kind of a weird thought - what would happen to your perspective when you'd watched couple after couple get together (with your love-arrows in their hearts) only to see them divorce? This story is a random thought about how Cupid might be like in modern times.
You remember how I told you about my revelation? How I wished I’d never gotten this job? I’ve become jaded. I can’t be objective anymore. There’s no real love in the world, and with the decline of love came the decline of my romanticism. Yes, I’m now a true cynic at heart. I realized it a year ago, at the theatre. You remember, the couple I told you about?
No?
I could swear I told you about that. Maybe not. Coincidentally, that’s Them on the street there. Look, They’re just passing below us. Look happy, don’t They?
Of course I’m positive it’s the same couple. Remember who I am!
Yes, there They go, meandering down main street without a care in the world - enraptured with one another, totally and completely in love. Newlyweds, of course. You never see people celebrating their five-year anniversaries with that kind of perfection.
Of course, most people just see that - the perfection of the moment. They’re a cute couple, They look well together. How strange that Their perfection was born from the ultimate imperfection. How strange that underneath that exterior lies a smoldering marsh of iniquity, guilt and deceit. Trickery. Lies. Affairs. Cheating. You name it, these two have done it.
You may be a little puzzled. Come closer if you dare. Listen if you dare. If I were you, I wouldn’t. But then, obviously I’m not you, because here you are, closer and listening. Very well.
I always found it a little weird that She met Him at a performance of “Oklahoma.” They both hate the play so much - They both hate all Broadway. Sometimes I think They hate all music. That night They were both there with Their fiancés, who both loved “Oklahoma.”
She was getting Her boyfriend a drink. He was getting His beloved a truffle. It was between acts, and the crimson carpet was crowded. I was watching from the water fountains - They didn’t see me. They were juggled by the crowd, elbow to elbow across the space. It was terrifying, sickening, and amusing all at the same time. Madame Fate messing with human lives again. At least, I assume it was Fate and not just luck that pushed Them together, that knocked Her glass over onto His truffle.
I watched, and grinned through the roiling of my stomach and the pounding in my head. It was like sitting on top of a building, watching two cars careen towards the corner, knowing what was going to happen but unable to stop it. The inevitability of the crash was as set in stone as Excalibur, and I was no Arthur. I couldn’t stop it. Not that I would - I found that I liked to watch people bumbling around, falling in love with the wrong people. Much more entertaining than all those perfect marriages I’d worked so hard to attain for people all those years.
Their first words made me laugh, though I had to strain through the crowd to hear them. Memorable.
“Oh, shit!” Her tone was strident, high-pitched in frustration and anger and remorse.
“Oh, shit.” His voice was quiet, mumbled in an only slightly lower tone.
I wonder if those first words caused the initial attraction. Somehow I doubt it. He scrubbed futilely at the melting truffle. She scrubbed futilely at His wet shirt. I watched and laughed and cried.
“Sorry, I’m so, so sorry. Let me get you a napkin or something.” She had given up spreading the water around on His very expensive shirt-front and was standing, shifting from foot to foot. “Let me at least buy you a new truffle.”
Now personally, I have a theory about just when They fell in love. Some might say it was later on, when They met secretly for coffee, or maybe even later than that when Their faces were still flushed and shiny from sex and guilt, or maybe when He gave Her the rose on the top of the Space Needle. I personally think the fateful moment was right then and there, when She was blubbering and He was staring mournfully at a ruined truffle.
The clincher was when He turned, looked at Her, grinned a floppy little grin and said, “Do you have a map? Because I think I just got lost in your eyes.”
How could a woman resist that kind of originality, charm, grace, wit and tactfulness? Note the sarcasm. To be sure, using pick up lines like that on a woman - when your fiancé is still waiting on a ruined truffle - may be a turnoff for some, but I believe it was the sheer lowliness, the sheer toadiness of that moment that drew Her to Him. All I know is that She sort of sighed, and fluttered Her eyelashes, and simpered wordlessly. As if what he’d said was actually cute.
Sometimes I think the whole sordid affair was my fault. I am the prince of love, the master of romance, the most powerful match-maker of all time. I know how these things go. I could have stopped it right there. It would have been easy for me to tell some sort of gossip to Her about Him - I could tell Her how He was caught with three whores at the same time, or how He was caught selling crack downtown, or how He’d already cheated on His fiancé twice… with other men. But somehow I just couldn’t make myself get up. I couldn’t make myself walk over and stick my hand between Them and destiny.
Besides, it was fun to watch, in sort of a sick way.
They parted ways, then. Of course, I knew They’d find a way to get back together. They didn’t know it now - They just went back to Their beloved ones and kissed them, and pretended to enjoy “Oklahoma” for them, and wrote off the encounter as just a little harmless flirtation between strangers. I knew Madame Fate, and I knew her wily ways, and I knew they She and He would be thrown together in that coffee shop by this time next week.
You know, that one coffee shop with the romantic inscriptions on the wall paper? I think they serve truffles with their coffee. Good one, Fate.
