Companion Pictures XI
Part two of our three-part series on Missed Connections. Also, apparently, part XI of our ongoing portraits in duality.
While Alicia and Mark were certainly not a couple in the conventional sense, people thought of them together. They couldn’t help following the thought of one with the thought of the other, any more than politicians can help following “high crimes” with “misdemeanors”. Surely you’re a couple if you’re harder to separate than “over” from “above”?
They were exactly the same height but Alicia looked slightly taller - she had the build of a goddess of old, with broad flat Scandinavian hips, and a Valkyrian bosom at just the right height to whack lesser mortals in the face. Mark looked like a monk because he lived like a monk, he drew no particular attention by face or figure, but had a clear calm voice. Each trusted the other above anyone else, there was a freedom and ease in their conversation seen usually between family members, or very close lovers, or very old friends. But the most profound thing they had in common was their uncertainty; it was what bound them together and it was what undid them.
No one would associate Alicia with uncertainty, she was confident in every situation, friendly, charming, open and adaptable. As the child of a diplomatic something-or-other she had grown up in a dozen different countries, and had the foreigner’s familiarity with the unfamiliar. The uncertainty was hardly noticeable even if you were looking for it, a slight quietness at the beginning of parties, a tiny lag before her discourse, as if she were running some kind of translation software. For Alicia also had the foreigner’s heart-deep hesitation, the ineluctable instinct to wait and learn about her surroundings before she could be herself in them.
Mark was just not particularly sociable, a natural geek and happy that way. The world didn’t understand him, and he didn’t understand it, and they kept out of each other’s path as much as possible. He was hard to know and slow to trust, indeed after Alicia he trusted no one at all.
The real question was not why it didn’t work out between them, but how it had ever begun in the first place. How does anything begin between two people whose credo is never to make the first move? Perhaps it was the comparative youth at which they met, for Alicia’s family had a summer home down the street from the place where Mark and his family spent summer and winter alike. However it was, when they wound up at university they were the best of friends. When one of them had something to say, it was the other who they wanted to say it to. Delight, catastrophe, brilliant idea or cool new movie, they were the first to hear it. And then?
Alicia’s love life consisted of a few lengthy, passionate, and unfortunate entanglements; she told Mark all about them and asked his advice and cried on his couch when they didn’t work. For his part, Mark, out of more of a sense of obligation than anything else, attempted a few furtive affairs, gave them up as a bad job, and laughed about them to her in elliptical phrases. And then? Perhaps they wondered, now and again, if something had gone wrong. But how could it have, how could it be other than as it should be between them, who understood each other so well?
At last Matt, a mountainous young man, informed Alicia that he was in love with her and she with him and that they were going to be spending the rest of their lives together. Alicia accepted, of course she did, relieved that at least someone knew what was going on. Mark wished her joy, she cried on his couch, they stayed up until four talking about marriage. And at this point in the romantic comedy, the audience is on the edge of their seats. Will they come to their senses before it’s too late?
Oh moviegoers, why do you insist on having your own way when it comes to other people’s happiness?
Their relationship continues unchanged, Alicia and Mark’s. He is godfather to her children, she still turns to him first with delight or catastrophe, brilliant ideas or cool movies. Matt knows no thought of jealousy, for he knows that his wife loves him and is faithful to him. And Alicia is glad she has someone to know this for her. Mark will never marry, will never indeed make another close friend. His soul, having selected its own society, has shut the door.
Did something go wrong? Are they unhappy? Was this a tragedy of character or an accident of timing, or one way among many ways that people sort themselves out with the world and with the ones that they love? Each is waiting for the other to tell them what world they are living in so that they can answer the question, and in this case I think it is fortunate that they will be waiting forever.
The Arrogant Emu’s Missed Connections series is brought to you by Anne and Frederick Wentworth, and by viewers like you.
I think they are beautiful. Bah to the movie-going audience.
August 9th, 2008 at 2:02 am