On startled awake mid-morning on a Saturday, with the line "you are a vessel of happiness" in his ear, he sits in bed and remembers stray snatches of poems borrowed in his head. First these lines of Eliot:

"And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time."

and then these lines by Derek Walcott arrive:

"The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self."

He gets up from the bed, and walks to the bathroom and greets himself, his face changed, older now, with eyes a little more aware and forgiving of the follies of the self, and the world of give and take in which this self lives, with this line from Chekov's "Seagull":

"All living things have completed their cycle of sorrow"

He looks up from this novel he is reading over a rare leisurely dinner, which threads meditations on painting (or more generally art and the impulse that propels art, that of love) with the mystery of a murder. And discovers that his gaze is resting upon the face of a woman, less than a foot away, over the low wooden wall that splits his row of seats from hers', in this noisy restaurant.

Startlingly this face seems to contain the essence of the other face - same brow and same eyelashes - he had been trying to summon all day today. Why you ask? Perhaps because it was because the memory of this face's twin - now less hazy - reading to him a poem, in the original language of this novel he had been gnawing for ten to fifteen minutes before sleep for the past week, which hovering over his day like the overcast sky. Perhaps because he has been hoping for days that he can go, if only for a while, to that place, that crevice from which words last flowed.

They say the body tears up the eye to protect it from its own sadness yet he can't tear up now, with words if not water, as he did just recently, in this winter, when for the briefest sequence of days he needed words to hold intact the warmth that was always under his palms. And now this face - now nothing more than just the shadow of that other face summoned from memory's archive, and this line he just read from the book open at the table:

"For if a lover's face survives emblazoned on your heart, the world is still your home."

Unable to sit still any longer, he picks up this book, his dinner half eaten - food hasn't had much taste for days anyways - tips heavily on the bill presented by the congenially cheerful waitress, and walks out into a city besieged by a heavy snowfall, wondering if this world is still his home. He is thankful that he is dressed like a crow, in all black; this way none would notice how his just reopened wounds bleed, not unless they looked down at the snow, and saw his disappearing footsteps briefly outlined in red.

Dear Good Man,

While I don't know the context behind this email, I think you are definitely being hard on yourself. Call me a cynic if you will but it has been my observation - both first and second hand - that most women don't like "good" men like yourself. We can call it the drama syndrome: how much fun or drama can to be had in discussing Plato or Dostoevsky or co-joining with you in going to a play or a concert when the tantalizing options of being swept off their feet/ being seduced/ being overwhelmed/ being well, well lubricated, are ever present, and are ever important on the scale of what they, i.e., most women desire? This in some cases is taken to the extreme of putting up with men who are given to the emotional and physical abuse, not to mention the whole song and dance - or should we call it science - on how men have to act like jerks (Google the terms "PUA" and "negging" sometime for enlightenment) to hold the interest of most women.

Should this lead to you throwing in the towel or even worse lead to despair? I think not for I am sure God (or the Devil) has given at least some of the females of the species the bright bulbs on the top of their heads to spot a good man, i.e., you. Also since this has devolved into an exposition, with your permission, I will make it into a blog post.

Best of luck on your fiction writing - that is something that will, perhaps, endure time.

Best. Sleepy Relationship Theorist

PS: I also realize that the converse of the above theory, i.e., most women don't like "good" men might be true, given the high degree general female angst on this subject. Which of course leads us all to Woody Allen's quip: "masturbation is sex with someone I love".