The Dating Game

by Avril Tremayne

  She jumped instantly to her feet. ‘Wait! Wait, David! You … you can’t just … just throw all that at me and expect me to have a quick response or an easy … easy … solution.’

  ‘There is no solution.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t believe that. Sit down with me, talk to me, and I’ll find it. I’ll make coffee, and we’ll talk. Please, David, please.’

  He sighed. ‘All right, Sarah.’ Another sigh, long and deep. ‘All right.’

  While Sarah made coffee, David took himself over to the shelves of Sarah’s snow domes, staring at the perfect little worlds, wondering if his own monumental imperfection could ever fit in Sarah’s life, but knowing that it couldn’t. What was he doing? Why hadn’t he left as planned, without the complicating declaration of love? What would he gain by staying to talk? Why spill all his secrets, when there was no solution to the problem and neither of them could be happy at the end?

  And yet when Sarah announced that the coffee was ready, he found himself taking a seat at her child-sized dining table and reaching for his cup, because he was too weak to resist the lure of a few minutes more with her.

  ‘So, David, let’s put the drama aside and state the facts,’ she said. ‘I love you. You love me. We’ve spent six whole weeks together.’

  ‘And one day,’ he couldn’t resist interjecting.

  ‘And one very spectacular day,’ she agreed, giving him a brilliant but tremulous smile. ‘Which is longer than either of us has been with anyone for the past nine years.’

  ‘Nine years. Think about that, Sarah. Nine years ago, when I was twenty-five, you were fifteen years old!’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So you can’t compare our relative life stages.’

  ‘But I was dating eight years ago, when I was sixteen. That’s when I lost my virginity, just FYI. And I’ve been seriously dating for three years now, so I’m not exactly a sweet innocent who has no idea what she’s doing.’

  David just shook his head.

  ‘And you were already married at … at my current age and … and preparing for parenthood.’

  ‘Yes, but Rebel wasn’t.’

  ‘Wasn’t married at my current age or wasn’t preparing for parenthood at my current age?’

  ‘Either.’

  ‘Oh.’ Pause, while she stared at her coffee. He saw her swallow, and then she looked over at him. ‘How old was Rebel in the … in the period we’re talking about?’

  ‘Thirty-two. Which doesn’t quite constitute enough of an age gap for me to suffer an Oedipus complex like Earl, husband number three.’

  ‘Oh. Oh! If that isn’t j-just typical of you. Marrying an older woman. You’re so sophisticated it’s sickening.’

  ‘Too bad you’re not an older woman.’ He reached across the table, took her hand, which was wilting on the tabletop. ‘If you were fifteen years older, maybe we could work it out.’

  ‘That’s not fair, David,’ she said, and her eyes were swimming again, ‘because I can’t be that. Tell me something I can be, and I swear I’ll be it if it means I can have you.’

  He didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Anyway, you always knew how old I was,’ she continued, ‘so what’s with the sudden age hang-up?’

  ‘It’s not sudden. It’s bothered me from the moment I started to fall in love with you. It’s about … ticking clocks,’ he said. ‘It’s about the fact that women’s biological clocks do start ticking eventually, if they want children the way you do.’

  ‘Rebel was thirty-two and running out of time,’ she said slowly.

  ‘She thought so—and she was right to think it, as it turns out. Right to cut her losses. At least she ended up pregnant, with time to spare.’

  ‘Pregnant and trying to castrate you!’ Sarah pulled her hand free, pushing her chair away from the table. ‘I can’t listen to this. Sorry, I thought I could but I can’t.’

  ‘Goddammit, Sarah! I didn’t want to talk about this. You’re the one who wanted me to bare my heart and soul, and now here I am doing it, you do not get to walk out in the middle of it. You wanted to talk, I’m talking—be we have to really talk. Skirting around the tough issues and blocking our ears against the hard parts won’t make them go away.’

  He waited for a sign from her that she was ready to hear him, ready to face reality, ready to let him go. She was shifting from foot to foot. It reminded him of that first night, when she’d been about to bolt from the art gallery storage room. If he’d let her run away then, they wouldn’t be in this soul-aching situation. But it really wasn’t in him to wish away the past six weeks and one day with her. And it hadn’t been in Sarah to run away from a challenge. Not then, and not now. It was one of the reasons he loved her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and settled back in her chair. ‘Please tell me. I want you to; I do.’

  David took a moment, letting all the old arguments re-run through his head. And then he nodded. ‘You said “unlikely is not impossible”, and that’s what Rebel said, too. She insisted we had options. The easiest one was to wait and see if we’d be spontaneously lucky—but how much longer could we do that before she ran out of time? We also looked at IVF—no guarantees. Adoption—that can take up to six years. Sperm donors—ah, but the complications, should either the child or the father get curious down the track. In the end, Rebel wasn’t willing to waste time on exploration that could turn out to be pointless and risk finding herself five years down the track with no baby and deteriorating eggs. So she suggested an option that was fast and safe.’

  ‘The stud and sperm donor option,’ Sarah said quietly.

  ‘There was a man who was crazy about her. Jameson, his name was. Wealthy. Smart. Excellent genes. Her age. Good father material. What would I say to a divorce, so she could be efficiently impregnated?’

  ‘You said yes.’

  ‘What else could I say?’

  ‘But what she really wanted, I mean romantically, was you.’

  ‘Apparently so.’

  ‘And she thought she could have you as well as Jameson.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sarah half-smiled as she looked in his eyes. ‘She didn’t know you very well, did she?’ she said, and he loved her so damn much just then, it was physically painful.

  ‘The way she put it was that since I was her real love, why couldn’t she have me too? But on the side, I had to understand.’ He ran a finger around the top of his coffee cup. Around, around, around. ‘And really, when you looked at it logically, it was so much better that I was infertile, because there’d be no risk of her accidentally foisting another man’s child on her new husband. That’s something to admire; you have to agree. To not want to pass off one man’s child as another’s.’

  ‘Oh, David. David!’

  ‘Anyway …’

  ‘You said no.’

  ‘I said no.’

  A minute ticked by, David sipping his coffee just for something to do.

  And then Sarah said, ‘But I don’t have a man in the wings waiting to whisk me off to married bliss. And I’m not thirty-two, so I don’t have a biological clock ticking, either.’

  ‘That makes it worse.’

  ‘How can it be worse when we have years ahead of us?’

  David took the last sip of his coffee, tasted nothing. ‘Let me put a scenario to you, Sarah. Let’s say you decided today that you didn’t care about having children. That all you cared about was me.’

  ‘That is all I care about.’

  ‘Okay, so let’s run with that.’

  ‘You don’t believe me.’

  ‘I believe it today. So … let’s go there. Today, all you care about is me. You’re only twenty-four and you’ve told me kids are a thing for the future.’

  ‘But— But I could nevertheless start trying straight away.’

  ‘Why should you have to do that?’

  ‘For you.’

  ‘That’s not the solut
ion, Sarah. Not one I would accept, not at twenty-four. I’d say you have … what? Six years before you intended to start thinking about motherhood?’

  ‘I … I guess that was— But now— I don’t know.’ She closed her eyes tight. ‘I don’t want to say the wrong thing.’

  ‘There is no wrong thing; there are only the facts.’

  Slowly, she opened her eyes. ‘Okay, then. For the … for the sake of argument, we could say …’

  ‘At thirty years old?’

  ‘No! No. Earlier.’

  ‘Because of me?’

  She said nothing.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s say you had been thinking you’d be ready to start trying at thirty, but now because you know I have this problem, you’re determined to start trying earlier. With me saying an absolute “no” to twenty-four, you’re thinking we could reach a compromise and go with … what? Twenty-eight?’

  ‘David—’

  ‘You figure that still gives us up to four years to try for a baby without intervention, so you’re way ahead of Rebel. So we try, we keep trying, and nothing happens. At that point, knowing how devastated I was the last time I went through all this, you remember that I’d tried to let you go.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, on the tiniest breath.

  ‘But you also remember that you wouldn’t let me let you go. Back then, you knew I loved you more than anything—no everything—in the whole fucking world, and that I didn’t have the strength to resist you, so even though I told you it was killing me, you knew you could talk me into staying with you. And the end result of that was that I did stay with you, and I’d fallen more and more deeply in love with you, because how could I not? So, of course, given all that history, now you’re thinking you’d better stick with me, for a while at least, or you might break my heart.’

  ‘Oh, David, please.’

  ‘And five years pass, and you’re not twenty-eight any more, you’re thirty-three. And the miracle hasn’t happened. And yeah, we could have a crack at IVF, but is that going to work? How many years do you give it, when there are no guarantees? And I’m now forty-three—so if it really takes six years to adopt, you’re starting to doubt if I’m even going to be in the running for that. I mean, I could be fifty-one by the time it happens. Grandfather age. And all the other would-be fathers out there are so much younger, so they’ll probably edge us out of the running.

  ‘And your clock is finally in alarm mode. And you come to me and you say, “David, how about we get a divorce, because I want children, you know I always wanted children, but I love you, I really do love you, and if you can bear to see me taking some other man into my bed, into my life, as my husband, and stand aside as I bear his children, then maybe we can meet for sex every now and then. So how about it, David? After all, it’s just a gradation of occupying space together in the middle ground isn’t it?”

  ‘And picture this: I am so besotted with you, so desperate to make you happy, I say “yes”. And then you go and marry someone else, and you have his children, while I’m hanging on the sidelines. Until gradually, your children start to occupy more and more of your time, and of course they need their father and mother to be together because everyone knows that’s the best thing for children, and as I turn a year older, then another year, and another, I see you less … and less … and less …’

  He stopped, then, listening to Sarah’s sobs, forcing himself to absorb them and do nothing to comfort her, because it wasn’t over, not yet. He had to finish this once and for all for both their sakes.

  ‘How do you think I’m going to feel, Sarah, when I’m past fifty and have been dumped again for something I can’t help? Only this time, because it’s you dumping me, and I know I’ll never love another woman after you, it’s worse?’

  ‘It couldn’t be worse,’ she whispered. ‘It … couldn’t.’

  ‘Sarah, look at me. Look at me!’ He waited, until she brought her eyes up to his. ‘I will not survive if it’s you doing that to me. Do you want to do that to me?’

  ‘No, I don’t want to hurt you. Ever.’

  ‘And I don’t want to hurt you.’

  ‘But you are hurting me.’

  ‘You’re young enough to get over it, over me,’ he insisted, his heart already pining for her. And the whole spiel he’d given himself last night about making her as miserable as he was going to be disintegrated. He didn’t want Sarah to be miserable. He wanted her to have everything she wanted, even if it couldn’t be him giving it to her. ‘You have to, Sarah, because I can’t bear it to be otherwise.’

  ‘No I don’t have to.’ She pushed away from the table again, so violently this time, the chair toppled over behind her. ‘I don’t want to get over you. And I don’t want you to get over me, either. I wish … I wish I had the w-words, the … the words. The words to make you love me enough to stay.’

  He got up, went to her, took her in his arms. ‘Sarah,’ he said, ‘I love you too much to stay. That’s the problem.’

  ‘Then love me less and stay.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  She was crying again, slumped against him as though utterly beaten. Crushed, lost, vanquished. ‘If you’d t-told me earlier, from the s-start, I would have done all the research, and had all the arguments ready by the time today came around. I’d be ready to t-tell you that you can trust me to stay no matter what.’

  ‘I do trust you to stay, my darling—that’s the problem. I trust you to stay, and stay, and stay, until all hope is gone, and you just can’t stay any more.’

  ‘But what if I can stay? Always, always stay?’

  ‘Then I will be a cruelly selfish bastard to have done that to you.’

  ‘What if I say I’m going to text you and c-call you and … and harass you, until you ch-change your mind,’ she sobbed.

  He kissed the top of her head. ‘I love you so much, Sarah.’

  ‘That is not helping to reconcile me. In fact, it makes me want to punch you.’

  He laughed, low and soft. ‘If it makes you feel better to punch me, go right ahead. If you want to harass me, you do it, bluebell. But when I don’t change my mind, you’ll eventually get sick of texting and calling. And then one day, you’ll find the one who can give you all of it and wonder what all the fuss was about with that old half-banker, half-artist guy.’

  ‘So that’s it? I’m some kind of … of cyclothone to you? You’ve caught me, tagged me, and now you’re going to release me because I’m not special enough to keep?’

  Against all odds, he started laughing. ‘Of course I have to let you go. It’d be a crime against humanity for you not to breed a bunch of little Sarahs for the world to fall crazily in love with.’

  ‘Well I’m not going to “breed”! And you know why? Because that tag you stuck through my skin is like a tattoo.’ She gave his chest a thump. ‘And it’s going to telegraph to anyone who tries to reel me in that they’re too late. It’s going to tell them that I belong to you, David. And all that’s going to happen is that I’m going to come and find you when I’ve hit menopause and can’t have children any more. And if you’re married and happy, I’m going to improve on Rebel’s aim and cut the lot off. The lot! And I’m going to carve those dimples right out of your face while I’m at it. Because I won’t have had sex for more than twenty years by then, and I will be so … so frustrated, I’ll be on a rampage!’ She thumped his chest again. ‘And it’s not funny so stop laughing.’

  ‘I can’t not laugh, with you. It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with you. And on that note …’ He kissed the top of her head again, released her. ‘Goodbye, brat.’

  She clutched at his arm. ‘Are you still not going to kiss me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? Scared you won’t be able to walk away after all?’

  ‘Actually, yes,’ he said.

  And that was when she dropped to her knees and brought his hand to her mouth and kissed it, like she was begging, and
he couldn’t stand to see her like that, so he dragged her to her feet, took her face in his hands, and kissed her, tasting her lips and her heat and the salt of her tears, and it was so, so hard to let her go.

  When he did, at last, release her, he looked at her face for the longest time.

  ‘Please don’t leave me,’ she whispered, as the tears kept rolling down her cheeks.

  He smiled, shook his head. ‘Love you,’ he choked out of his tight throat, and then he picked up his bag, left the flat, got into his car, reversed down the driveway, reached the road, and started driving.

  It was only when he saw the Harbour Bridge, and realized it was fuzzy, out of focus, that he realized he was crying too.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  For the first week, Sarah thought she was doing well.

  Okay, so she couldn’t face any food except the white chocolate mint ice cream, over which she cried so uncontrollably she covered it in snot, rendering it inedible; she was barely sleeping; she spent every spare minute researching antisperm antibodies, IVF, and domestic and international adoption; and her chest was practically disintegrating from the constant threat of all-consuming, grief-stricken tears.

  But she was still arriving on time at work every day instead of wallowing in bed, and that had to count for something.

  She’d also managed a quick catch-up with Lane and Erica without breaking down, convincing them that she was on the hunt for a new man now that her curse was broken. She had no idea how she’d stopped herself from blushing fire engine red as she did it … unless it was because the blood in her veins was really as frozen and lifeless as it felt.

  She’d even gone to Adam’s so the two of them could video call their mother—to hear the news that Elvira Quinn-Smyth-Jacobs-Grahame was not only going to become Elvira Quinn-Smyth-Jacobs-Grahame-Rossi, but was also moving to Italy—which came as no surprise but gave Sarah an excuse to bawl her eyes out and be hugged by her brother (which she desperately needed) without him being any the wiser about her failed love affair with David.