The Girl That Has Everything is sitting across the table from The Current Man.
I am calling her “The Girl That Has Everything”, but really this was how she saw herself. It isn’t, as will become apparent, how we are going to see her. Sure, she had the looks, the body, the charm and the high adrenalin career, but she lacked elements of self-awareness. All of us lack elements of self-awareness; and, logically, we don’t know what these elements are.
This Scenario, then, is about what The Girl That Has Everything doesn’t have.
I am calling him, “The Current Man”, but it really doesn’t matter what I call him because he only has a walk-on part. I could have replaced him with the man that came before him, or the one that will come after. He is merely the “current” man because I have chosen to write this in the present tense. My choice of tense, like the way that The Girl That Has Everything chooses her men, is arbitrary.
The candlelight is too dim to fully illuminate each of their faces, and this makes it easy to maintain eye contact. They just have to focus on the vicinity of each other’s eyes, and the impression is that eye contact is maintained. This creates in each of them the perception of an intimacy that doesn’t really exist.
They are most of the way through a bottle of wine, and she knows that they are going to sleep together. At least, she knows that they are going to sleep together unless he messes it up. She isn’t going to mess it up. She has done this enough times to perfect the routine.
That is all the dialogue that we are going to have in this Scenario. Two words isn’t much, but it is enough for us to analyse her language and explore what it is that The Girl That Has Everything doesn’t have. “Adorable” literally means “capable of being adored”. It refers to a capability of a hypothetical someone else. Therefore, if we take the meaning of her statement in its strict sense, logically The Girl That Has Everything isn’t doing the adoring herself. This is a subtle nuance of language that conveys a colossal weight of fact. You might think that her lack of adoration would be something that she couldn’t possibly miss. However, she does miss it because she is affecting adoration. She is doing this with her eyes, and with the way she leans forwards to the Current Man as though she is enthralled.
The Current Man might notice her choice of language means that she doesn’t adore him, although it is unlikely. However, even if he does, he isn’t going to say anything because if he did, he wouldn’t get to sleep with her. The Girl That Has Everything thinks she knows that only he can disrupt their sleepwalk into her bed, but the Current Man knows that the right ploy is to say nothing. So the absence of dialogue of the man in this story is not just a literary conceit; it is realistic – practical advice in how to get into the bed of a woman like The Girl That Has Everything.
She knows that one day she will meet a man that will be The One. At least, she thinks she knows. In fact this is merely a belief, and this is not actually a belief about a man, but a belief about a feeling. She believes that if she keeps searching, a man will come into her life that will trigger a feeling in her that she will know is love.
Her belief is mistaken.
This is not because the man does not exist. It is not necessarily because the feeling does not exist. It is because she won’t recognise the feeling when it arrives. Sure, she knows the words “adore” and “love”. However, her ability to understand what these words mean is because she has seen the look that people have on their faces when they say they have the feeling. Perhaps she knows this just from the movies, or if she is lucky she will know it because she saw it in her parents throughout her childhood.
How then is she supposed to know when she has this feeling herself? Normally, she would know it because when the feeling occurred in her, she would realise that it causes the same reaction in her that she has seen in others. However, she can’t do this because she regularly affects this outward appearance when she does not have the feeling. She might also know it by the way the Current Man responds to the way she is looking at him. But how could this occur? If she always fakes adoration of the men she sleeps with, how can she know whether their response is ever genuine? In fact, if they respond genuinely to behaviour that is affected, then are they worthy of respect? How then, could she ever know that the Current Man is The One?
It’s not that her encounters with men don’t involve any feeling. The feeling that she has is called orgasm, but this isn’t the feeling that she is looking for. Certainly, she has been known to fake orgasm, but she has not done this unselfconsciously. Her faking the body language of love is unselfconscious because she has done it for so long, and with so many men. She is no longer aware that she is doing it. It has become habit.
She fakes orgasm for the benefit of her men. However, originally she faked love purely for herself. Certainly, though, her men do benefit. Her faking an unfelt intimacy gives them the green light to proceed to her bed. Mainly though, she benefits short-term from faking love because of her need for denial. This denial is the increasingly desperate need to hide from herself that she is like a bee repeatedly hurling itself at the inside of a window. Her repeated adventures with men will not lead to a stable relationship. Without denial, she would realise that she will continue to do this until her beauty fades.
Ultimately, though, she is The Girl That Has Everything, and her inability to find a nice man with whom to have a loving relationship must be down to some failure on their part; not on hers. She cannot see that the problem lies with herself, and her unselfconscious selfdeception.
She is repeating a strategy that she believes will lead to a man who will trigger a certain feeling in her, but if that feeling ever actually arose, she simply wouldn’t recognise it.