Monogamy Book One. Lover: This is one love for life and beyond time

by Victoria Sobolev

  Quietly, with a choke in his voice, Alex whispers into my ear, ‘Tell me, is there anything in the Universe capable of convincing you? If so, then just tell me what it is. Even if it meant I had to fly to Mars, I’d do it! Or to another galaxy – I’d do that too!’

  At that moment, a French airport official clears his throat and, with a polite ‘Madame’ and a motioning hand gesture, gives us to understand that our time is up. I am the final passenger and check-in is closing. I tear myself away from Alex with some difficulty and give him a quick kiss on the cheek. Although I try not to look into his eyes, I see them anyway. They are not crying, they will never cry again, but what I see in them makes me realise, makes me know without a single doubt that, at this very moment, this very second, Alex’s soul is weeping and wailing, expressing its gut-wrenching, anguish-ridden grief at our latest parting.

  CHAPTER 13. SAY SOMETHING,

  I’M GIVING UP ON YOU

  “A man proves his love not by the way he speaks of it,

  but by the way he is silent of it.”

  Moritz Gottlieb Saphir

  Separation is followed by reunion, however, and ours is even more emotionally charged. Alex stops leaving such long gaps and starts coming to see me more often, every three weeks or so, although his trips do get less and less as time goes on. This gap is enough for us to miss each other, but not enough to suffer from longing or built-up and unspent sexual energy. Unspent only in my case, because I don’t know what Alex has finally decided to do about his fidelity. I mean, seeing as it failed to convince me, there now seemed little point in it. Just as there seemed little sense in the torment to which he had subjected himself in his desire to prove how serious his intentions had been.

  Prior to the Paris trip, Alex regularly brought up the issue most sensitive to us and was always really depressed afterwards. He shared parts of himself with me, admitting that he dreamed of having a family, that he desperately wanted to raise a daughter. He said there was nothing more glorious than girls, and how much happiness it must bring to watch them grow up and blossom with femininity and tenderness. He asked me to be the mother of his children. After Paris, he withdraws into himself, clamming up for a year. He comes to see me less and less regularly and is a little quieter each time. We make love just as soulfully, but now with a kind of anguish. There are no more heart-to-hearts. He is becoming older, wiser. We are growing up together.

  One cloudy and rainy, but incredibly beautiful day in November, Alex arrives unexpectedly, without warning. I see his car outside our house, go out to him and can immediately sense the intensity of his feelings and despair.

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘So urgently?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I can’t right now, you’ll have to wait.’

  *** ‘Say Something’ by A Great Big World & Christina Aguilera ***

  A welcome without being welcoming. I don’t get away at once, I have to convince my parents to take my son since my husband has never shown any ability or desire to spend time with him. We drive Danny to my mother’s and I tell her, not without bitterness, that Alex and I are splitting up and that I hope she’ll be able to sleep easy now. I’m ahead of myself with this news, but not by much.

  We arrive at his apartment and I mentally start bidding farewell to this extraordinarily beautiful place. By this time, our relationship has been going on for more than two years.

  Alex says he can’t live like this any longer and wants to grow old with me. He asks me one last time to go away with him.

  I reply that I won’t go without Danny, but no one is going to give him to me and, anyway, I wouldn’t dare take a child from his father.

  Alex says that the greatest happiness is to have a family.

  I reply, ‘What’s the problem? Find a woman, make a child together and then you’ll have a family. Just live and enjoy life.’

  He says nothing, only stares into my eyes with his dark, infinitely beautiful ones, and I see so much pain deep down in them that I want to escape. I go into the kitchen and make us some coffee. When I return, Alex is sitting on the floor, his back against the edge of the bed, looking out of the window. I realise that he is weeping soundlessly. Leaving his coffee on the floor, I walk out of the room again.

  Did I love him? I don’t know. I still don’t know, but I think that, since I let him go so easily, I either didn’t love him or I didn’t allow myself to. I used him. I just took and took without giving anything back in return. I enjoyed the incredible sex, fed off his energy, took comfort from his warmth, but my heart never ached for him, at least not the way it ached for my family. I wished him well, of course, but that’s as deep as it went. His feelings seemed empty and temporary to me, because I was sure that he would easily meet someone else. He could choose anyone he wanted: the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most talented. Any woman would gladly follow him, all he needed to do was ask. And it made no sense whatsoever for him to hold on to me, especially as all we really had was a summer, almost a holiday romance, albeit a drawn-out one.

  There is no intimacy between us that day, although I could have stayed the whole night. We talk a little more about nothing in particular and, during the whole awkward conversation, I furtively drink in his beauty and mentally take off his pale blue cashmere jumper so that I can bid farewell to every curve of his magnificent body, his tree tattoo, his flat stomach, the hollow at the base of his neck that I love so much.

  I hug him goodbye, breathing in every one of his smells, his heady and tantalising aroma, and he squeezes me to him for a moment before letting go. That night I spend at home, in the same bed as my husband.

  It was not to be our last meeting, however. Exactly three months later, Alex comes once more, turning up at my house again just as unexpectedly, and we go to his almost immediately. We make love for nearly the whole night and it is so magnificent that I decide he must have changed his mind, that we will go back to being lovers like before. I am so happy and almost feel I love him, but in the morning he tells me that he’s getting married in three days, that this will be the last time we ever meet, and that he is giving me the apartment – the legal side of things has already been taken care off, the papers are on his table, and I shouldn’t forget to sign them. It hurts like hell and I feel disgusted, so I quickly say goodbye and go, leaving my keys on the table.

  When I get home, I discover a CD in the pocket of my coat with just one song on it: ‘Say Something’ by A Great Big World & Christina Aguilera. As soon as I hear the first words, my heart crumbles.

  Alex either doesn’t like, doesn’t know how, or doesn’t want to talk about his feelings, and this is now the second time he has expressed them to me through a song. In the whole time we have known each other, in the whole two years, he has never once said that he loves me.

  When the song finishes, my heart is flooded with acid, corroding me, destroying me. I immediately throw the disk away and never look for or listen to the song again. It just hurts too much, the pain so intense that if I ever went there again, there would be no way back. There is nothing I can do, nothing that would help either me or him. Maybe I could have, but... but he has already gone. He has left my world forever to build his life with another woman.

  I get back the keys to his apartment nearly a year later on March 8th – International Women’s Day – when, while everyone is celebrating one of our biggest holidays of the year, a sense of longing takes me back to the place where I was once so happy. Although I’m soaking wet from the rain, I don’t feel cold because my mind is adrift in the infinite light and warmth of memories. I don’t know what was greater that day: the rain or my sorrow over the demise of everything wonderful in my life. The concierge notices my lone figure and hurries away to get me the keys. He smiles and curses the weather, then says that he is happy to hand over the keys because it means he will finally be fulfilling the request of a good man.

  ‘He was such a good resident... such a remarkable man!’ he tel
ls me, his eyes burning with admiration.

  *** ‘Goodbye’ (Hachiko OST) by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek ***

  I’m holding my set of keys with the keyring that Alex once attached to it – a white leather loop decorated with Swarovski crystals. I recognise the key fob that opens the door to the lobby – an unusual key to an unusual lock in an unusual building where I was once both unfaithful and happy. Next to it is a small key to the postbox and a few more that I have never seen before.

  ‘That’s to get into the underground parking and the storage room,’ explains the concierge.

  ‘What storage room?’

  ‘Every apartment comes with a space on the ground floor where the residents can store things... bikes, sledges, skis... snow tyres,’ he says, listing the possibilities, and I nod.

  I climb the stairs. The apartment is coldly beautiful and desolate. I wander through the rooms and glance in the cupboards – no one has been here for a long time. Everywhere is empty and lifeless. All I find is a computer on the table in the office that controls the apartment’s systems. In an effort to distract myself from the pain and regret I’m feeling, I turn it on and try to figure out how it works. It turns out that the computer can not only be used to switch on the music and specify which rooms it should be played in, but also to light the lanterns out on the terrace, and to open and close the ethereal white curtains. I switch on all the lights in the glass partitions and change their colour, choosing the options displayed on the screen, then run to check that the computer has actually done it, catching my breath each time at the sheer beauty of it. It is also possible to light up the perimeter of the bed, I discover, making it look like a flying carpet. Alex never once showed me the immense ingenuity of his architectural and design ideas. I mean, he created all of this himself, he is the one who came up with it and perfected it. There is beauty everywhere – not just in Alex himself, but in everything around him. It is woven from his thinking, his hands, his ambition, and his quest for perfection in everything he touches.

  He is also modest, keeping so heartbreakingly silent about his achievements. Alex once said that he had built a house for me. And it is only now, sitting on the edge of his enormous, pristine white bed, floating on a cloud of soft, soothing light, and looking out at the marble terrace, the pool, and the beautiful plants in pots and containers just visible through the partly drawn curtains, that it occurs to me for the first time how incredible the house must be that he built especially for me. A house I will never see because I turned it down, and which has now been inhabited for some time by the wife of the extraordinary, even otherworldly, Alex. Now, a year later, what seemed bad at the time has been forgotten, smoothed over, leaving just beauty and magic, and the nagging realisation that this sexy, attractive guy was a good person and the best I’ll ever meet. He quietly became more than my lover; he became my friend.

  There is a folder of music on the desktop and I open it to discover a playlist. I look through the tracks quickly and know many of them, then, suddenly, I come across Hachiko... An image of green grass and his warm smile immediately flashes in front of me, and I can hear myself ask: ‘What’s your favourite music?’

  Good God, I never even listened to it! I click on the track and the notes of an unspeakably sad, unbelievably perfect melody fill the rooms like flowers. It sounds so beautiful and is so completely, so tightly intertwined with the state of my anguished heart that emotions suddenly spill out of me in an unbridled flood of hot tears. My face is awash with them and, without warning, I hear my own anguished howl: ‘Aaaaaalex!’

  I return to the apartment again and again, his home that he gave to me. I often ask myself, why? Why did he do it?

  He wanted me to remember him.

  Why?

  To hold him in high esteem? Unlikely. That is not what he needed from me.

  Not at all.

  I often come just to lie on his bed with my eyes closed, to relax in the silence away from my own home, my noisy family and my day-to-day worries. And every time I feel unbelievably calm, peaceful, I am gathering strength, healing my cuts and bloody wounds. Alex is no longer here and will never return, but the energy of his hands and his thoughts will always be in these walls, in the furniture, in the carpet on which he sat and bemoaned his feelings, in the floor of the kitchen where his soul cried out to me in desperation, asking me to listen, begging me to change my mind.

  And it is here that I spend hours reflecting on two questions that go round and round in my head: ‘Did I do the right thing in not betraying my family?’ and ‘Did I have a chance of something more with Alex, of staying with him to the very end?’

  CHAPTER 14. A PHONE CALL

  Then my husband suddenly decides to grow up. Our life improves and everything around me falls into place, returns to normal. I’m more confident and less angry, the arguments stop, and Timothy and I decide to have another child. I get pregnant almost straight away and, bar the morning sickness, the next nine months are the most carefree of my life. I don’t work and so don’t suffer from stress. I just calmly get on with growing a child inside me while my husband fusses around as if I were a china doll. This time, Tim is even there at the birth. He helps me with absolutely everything and I start discovering genuine feelings for him. It seems that everything is back the way it was when we were eighteen and we are a couple again.

  With the birth of our daughter, we finally become a real family. She is such a calm baby, and, as we find out later, smart and beautiful, that she brings us nothing but joy, only strengthening our already stable ship of family happiness.

  A large bouquet of white roses delivered annually on my birthday is the only thing that reminds me the dream named Alex was ever real. I am tormented less and less by the image of my passionate, dark-haired lover of truly divine beauty. Despite our rushed and painful breakup, he left me only happy memories. I will always be truly grateful to him for the happiness he gave me, but now I have a different kind of happiness.

  *** ‘Heal’ by Tom Odell ***

  I am thirty years old and carrying a cake with two candles on it – it’s my daughter’s birthday.

  ‘Mum, your mobile’s ringing! It’s in the bedroom!’ my son shouts from the living room, trying to make himself heard over the noise of our guests.

  I hear the familiar ringtone and quickly change the direction I was heading. My right hand is holding the cake I have spent hours on and my left is frantically rummaging through my bag.

  On the screen is a long number I don’t recognise, but the first few digits instantly transport me from the present to the past. +1 425... That was how HIS number started.

  The shock makes my hands shake. I don’t know who’s calling me, but I feel sick. For the very first time, I can feel something otherworldly pulling me with invisible ropes towards where HE is.

  The telephone stops ringing.

  I look at the screen, trying to quell the terrifyingly powerful wave building up inside me.

  It rings again, the same number, and I accept the call.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that Valeria?’

  ‘Yes, speaking.’

  ‘Hi. My name’s Maria, I’m Alexander Sobolev’s sister. There’s something really important I need to talk with you about.’

  ‘I think you must have the wrong number. I don’t know an Alexander Sobolev,’ I say, breathing out. ‘Sorry, but I’m in a bit of a hurry...’ I hold the cake more tightly, my hand numb.

  ‘Please don’t hang up! Just listen to me. Whatever you have to do can wait!’

  I can’t believe her nerve and am just about to say something rude in reply when I suddenly hear: ‘Alex and I were very close when we were kids, and I know for sure that you had a strong hold over him. That’s really important right now.’

  At the name ‘Alex’, my concentration is fully switched on. The noise from the living room and my husband’s voice hissing ‘How long do we have to wait?’ through the open bedroom door cease to exist. My hearing is as sharp
as an animal’s.

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘The thing is, Alex is ill. He needs surgery, but he is adamantly refusing treatment. Time is running out, and I can’t just watch him kill himself. I’ve tried to convince him, as many others have too, but... I’ll be blunt – you’re my last hope.’

  ‘I understand... What is he ill with?’

  ‘He has acute leukaemia – blood cancer.’

  The cake slips from my hand, landing softly on the floor.

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Come here, talk to him, try and get him to change his mind. He doesn’t listen to anyone, but maybe you’ll be able to get through to him. I’ve bought a ticket in your name, but you urgently need to get yourself a US visa to fly out on September 4th.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll try.’

  I hang up and slide down the wall to the floor. I feel like an orange that has been cut in two and had all the juice squeezed out of it. There is nothing left, not a single drop of happiness...

  Getting a US visa isn’t that easy for people who live in poorer countries like mine. If the officer at the embassy doesn’t give it to me then I’ll scratch his eyes out, I’ll take him hostage. I don’t care, but I’m getting that visa. No matter what.

  It turns out I don’t have to do any of that, however. Evidently, my explanations about where I’m going and why are more than satisfactory and, after a very brief chat, the officer approves my application. Of all the applicants being interviewed that day, I am the only one who is granted a visa.

  *** ‘High Hopes’ by Kodaline ***

  Wisely, I don’t have the awkward conversation with my husband until after the visa has been stuck into my passport. And it’s not: ‘Darling, my friend is unwell. Do you mind if I go?’; it’s more: ‘My friend is unwell and I’m going.’ To be honest, I was expecting the reaction of my naive, fairly nonchalant husband to be along the lines of: ‘Yes, yes, of course. Go and help. And, while you’re there, you could maybe find a way to stay and then send for me.’ Tim has been obsessed with America since playing cowboys as a child and has always dreamed of living there. It is probably one of the main reasons why he was so deliberately ignorant of my ‘friendship’ with Alex. Until the very end, in fact, he had hoped that this ‘friendship’ would result in us moving to America. If only he’d known what it had actually been.