Story: Rose Glasses

Many years ago my father hurt my mother more deeply than a blow to her heart would have hurt. He had had an affair on one of his many business trips to China, but it wasn’t the shaming existence of the other woman that had cut my mother’s spirit. It was the fact that he had let her discover it through carelessness.

I remember overhearing parts of their modulated quarrel over his infidelity, even muffled as it was under the useless shield of my blanket. I did not physically see them, but images supply themselves in my recreation of the scene – I see my mother, sitting on the stool in front of her dresser table, ready to sleep but determined to impress upon him the importance of covering his tracks. My mother is a practical woman, but in this instance practicality and poetry meet in perfect harmony, and so my mother metes out his particular punishment. At this juncture, the scene shifts to my father as he picks up the phone, using the instrument of my mother’s misery and his mistress’s mischief to balance the scales once again, except this time with knowledge instead of ignorance.

Not too long after this I fell in love myself. It ended badly, but when I look back on the history of our brief and one-sided relationship, the similarly beautiful and almost filmic symmetry of it never fails to strike me. I see his face framed by the papers that bring him to me and change him from a classmate to a crush, see it smiling as the post-edit addition of a philharmonic orchestra of violins and flutes serenades what will ultimately turn out to be the cinematic cliché of a man clutching a bouquet of drenched roses, alone in the pouring rain. At this juncture, the scene shifts to me in a series of quick cuts featuring the end, as I frame his being again, only this time with the oppressive papers of my disappointment-fuelled letters.

Today, as I think about the parallel romances of my parents’ marriage and my own youthful foray, I wonder whether this is how we allow love to commingle with the attendant problems of love, by supplying sights and sounds to lyricize all of love’s permutations. There is a painting, Rene Magritte’s 1928 rendition of The Lovers, which captures this mood of love perfectly. In it, a man and woman kiss each other under a dark-filled sky, but their kiss is killing them, for their heads are shrouded in the white sheets of the morgue. And in that one image is captured love, which transforms interest to excitement, carelessness to willfulness, anger to fury, indifference to hate, and disappointment to tragedy. Love is a woman missing her bed, or a man being passed a form to fill, but we think love is transformative, and in so doing we transform love.