Strange Love

Daily writing prompt

Can you share a positive example of where you’ve felt loved?

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Love does not always turn out to be what you get, want, or expect.

I was on a road trip to see Sophie for a surprise visit in October 1965. I’d hitched up from Boston to Montreal to surprise her at college. Her roommates were in on the plan and told me it was incredibly romantic for me to come all that way for a surprise visit. For me, it was an attempt to deepen a relationship that had started during the summer but became hung up on the long-distance nature of me in Boston and her in Montreal. The trip was an attempt on my part to show that the distance was not that great where love was involved.

The roommates had set up a meet spot at one of the campus coffeehouses. I arrived at the appointed time. An excited Sophie seemed surprised and pleased. After I arrived, the roommates retreated to another table, leaving us to talk, hold hands, and rather chastely kiss. The visit was everything I hoped it would be.

*a young woman with two toddlers in tow and a baby carriage walks in. She begins screaming and yelling, “There you are, you no good bum, you deadbeat dad!” I felt sorry for whoever got this treatment until she rolled the carriage up to our table and said, “I’m talking to you, Wes Carson! Jenny and Mark are hungry, and poor Todd hasn’t seen Daddy in, God knows, how long!”

The furious tirade continued without stopping. I put my hands up to protest and loudly claimed I had no idea who she or her children were. But the abuse continued. It was clear that she was enthusiastic about abusing me. Sophie was looking at me like I was a monster. Behind her, at the next table, her roommates were in hysterics. Sophie now picked up the tirade of how awful a father I was, a bigamist, an adulterer, and so on. I began to look for the closest exit to make a getaway before someone decided to attack me physically. Then the woman with the kids started laughing, the roommates began laughing, and I started getting mad. Sophie stopped amid her accusations, looked confused, confronted her roommates, and laughed.

It had been a terrible practical joke, and the round of apologies started flowing. Sophie seemed incredibly amused. I was just silent. I cinched up my pack, zipped up my jacket, and began to go. “Wait, Wes, can’t you take a joke? It was in bad taste, but nothing was meant by it.”

I turned, pulled out my wallet, and took out a thick stack of fresh bills. It was almost all ones, but it certainly looked like a lot of money. I began peeling them off one by one until a respectable pile was in my hand. Then I loudly stated, “Thanks for everything, Sophie, but your services won’t be needed tonight. Take this for your troubles.” I then tossed the money at her, turned, and walked out.

The screams started immediately; how dare I suggest that Sophie was for hire? I laughed all the way back to the train station.

• As you may suspect, this did not happen to me. But something very similar happened to a friend. The girls had seen something like it on TV and thought pulling it on a friend of mine would be a hoot. You could say that it “remodeled” and reshaped my friend’s levels of trust. It took a few years for him to trust a girlfriend again. We were all part of the gang that hung around at the Harvard Gardens in the old days, and one friend later told me that he always told the story to prospective girlfriends. He cooled the relationship as fast as possible if they laughed too loudly at it. But I’ve always felt that turning it around on the other sex was just as revealing. Reveling in someone else’s misery and discomfort is a plain awful thing to do to anyone.