TMB IX: The Lion Tamer

I ordered a beer from the barkeeper behind the counter and sat on a table at the other end of the room. My palms were slightly sweaty, and I tried to play it cool, as cool as I could. Slowly sipping on my beer, I wondered what was going on – after all, I was the slow emotions guy. Must have been something like love at first glance, I thought, or at least what passed for it.

Between sips, I cast a careful glance over at her. She was just sitting there, paying attention to nothing in particular, as far as I could see, and nursed her drink, a tequila sunrise, as I was now able to notice. I turned to myself again, and it would be another two beers and a few whiskies before I’d muster the damn courage to approach her, via a short detour to the bar to have another whisky and an overlengthy chat with the barkeeper, what about I have forgotten. But I couldn’t stay away from that girl, for whatever reason, and I did not.

In fact, love at first glance it was not. It took several months for the two of us to figure it out, and some things we never really figured out anyway.

She was no beauty. That is, no beauty in the usual sense of the word. Not an ugly person, by no means, but on the rather unremarkable side of beauty for sure. But she commanded something I had no words for – a certain aura of decisiveness, some sort of fatal attraction there was no antidote for, that enchanted and maddened me whenever it showed, which could be as seldomly as every few months, and as often as several times a day, when we both had a day off and spent it without getting out of bed at all.

Thinking about it, one must wonder about our mutual secretiveness. I didn’t know her position about it, but she never inquired, and never provided any insights into her working life herself, so I kept my secrets to myself and let her have hers. Even when we finally moved in together, we spent half our lives on our own, in a low-key kind of way, I leaving the flat at around eight, she at eight-thirty, and meeting again at seven or eight o’clock in the evening. When one of us had to do any home office, which only infrequently but nevertheless occurred, he or she locked the door, and the other one accepted it.

We lived the life of two schizophrenics, two half-people, merging in the try to add up to a whole one, two ghost-like strangers that met each night like for the first time ever, and tried to make something out of nothing really – perhaps the reason we’d come together in the first place. We went to bars, to concerts or to the theatre, even made mutual friends on those occasions, friends we never met at home but only when we went out at night, but we called them our friends anyway and in serious. Thinking about it, it had worked for a surprisingly long time. In retrospect, I was surprised that it had even lasted so long. But as it was, I never had questioned our strange way of life for as long as it worked. Now that that life had collapsed, I had to admit for the first time that I had never known what her work had been. Just as she’d never had the tiniest clue about mine. She could have tamed lions on a regular basis, as far as I’d known. Something I would now have to undertake for real.