Paper Covers Rock?

I sat on the terrace outside of Cocoon bar on Duke Lane, a long term Saturday night haunt of ours, swilling a glass of Pinot Grigio, as Simon explained to me how the Dark Lord had cut him out of his life with one simple, sharp text message: “don’t call me, I’ll call you”.

Sometimes I wonder has modern technology encouraged us to stop using our own functions, manners being one of them. “Simon, look, that is just not acceptable… ever”. I had been telling my best friend for the past year that there needed to be a clean cut after his relationship with the Dark Lord had ended, but in fairness, it was easier said than done. When I looked at my own relationship, people had been giving me advice that I had been ignoring for almost as long.

A buyer from Brown Thomas sat next to us with her baby, no more than six months old. An older gentleman sat together with the strawberry blonde, who’s make-up looked as if she was intentionally mocking a clown. He was a friend, not a lover, I assumed, for she most certainly wouldn’t be speaking so openly about baby weight and stretch marks to her husband, fiancé or boyfriend.

What kind of a person do you think she goes out with, I thought about asking Simon, before thinking, what kind of a question is that? How shallow can one man be? I expected that the man she would raise this designer baby with was a solicitor or surgeon with an impressive pile in Dalkey, drove a Bentley and holidayed in Marbella and the South of France. For all I knew, he could have been a bar man with a Fiat and a flat on Sheriff Street, but we, or at least I, have these preconceptions about people from their image.

Simon was still single since his split from the Dark Lord, and I had recently celebrated my three year anniversary with Beloved at an out of town hotel. I thought back to when we were both in relationships, and how neither of us knew which would last longer or whether “this” was “it” or not.

I wondered what it was that I had done that allowed my relationship to survive beyond Simon’s. From the outset Simon’s relationship could have been ideal had I not been informed otherwise. There were the mini-breaks to Paris and London, and of course there was the fact that they had considered moving in together in the not-too-distant future at the time. It was further than Beloved and I had reached in our three-year stint. From what I could see, their respective lives went from the setting of desirable city love to desolate suburban despair in a matter of months.

All of a sudden we were no longer complaining about the Dark Lord’s obsessive phone calls, we were complaining about the lack of phone calls period. Simon’s life was a full one with his work and studies, and becoming a full time English teacher wasn‘t lending him any free time, but Simon hadn’t felt his heart leap at the thought of what his Significant Other might have said in their most recent text in a time that felt like forever.

I, on the other hand, had a heart that never stopped leaping, each time my Blackberry buzzed, which had recently been kindly upgraded by Beloved to a brooding Burgundy model. When Simon’s phone rang, he knew it was another offer for a job interview, when mine rang, I knew it was a call from Lover Ville, and unlike Simon, I became disconsolate each time I realised I was unable to accept offers of interviews, because my interviews were with potential new friends with benefits over coffee, champagne or cocktails.

“Remember the Relative Stranger?” I asked Simon, taking a long sip from my glass. I was referring to a certain person whom I’d met at a certain Dublin 2 establishment in the later parts of 2007 and who had caused me to re-evaluate my relationship. “We met in Powerscourt the other night”, I whispered. “Are we talking about the stockbroker?”, Simon sat upright, becoming slightly excitable, his newly highlighted hair glistening in the late afternoon sunshine.

“Yes…well, I had sort of forgotten we had had the conversations and the repartee”, I gushed, “and when we ran into each other we sort of picked up where we left off. Significant Other, as you can imagine, isn’t exactly thrilled about the whole thing”. Simon wondered, why would there be a problem in having a friend that was interesting.

He wondered why it needed to be a threat to my relationship, which by all means should have been strong enough to endure this sort of thing after three years of flying high, even though we had experienced bouts of turbulence along the way. “You’re hardly supposed to cut the Relative Stranger out of your life, are you?”, Simon announced in a steely tone. “You are allowed to be fond of a person”, he assured me, with confidence that I wished he would reserve for his own matters of the heart.

I wanted to believe Simon, I wanted to say that it was the right thing for me to do in keeping a healthy balance of friends in my life alongside my authorised lover, but I was frightened that the Relative Stranger, with their good on paper credentials, would work their way into my mind and worse still, my heart. You have a rock solid foundation in your relationship, I told myself, and even if there are a few cracks in the paintwork, the damage can still be repaired.

There we were, now alone on the terrace on Duke Lane, as the strawberry blonde buyer and her male friend in tow headed on to Grafton Street. I realised, Simon, a good on paper guy himself, had been viciously cut out for a reason we may never know, whilst I, was fighting harder than ever to prevent good on paper from covering my rock.