The Talking-To

My friend is an ugly girl. She wears thick-lensed glasses of an unfashionable design. She wipes her nose upwards with the palm of her hand. Unsurprisingly we copulate early every time we meet. It's not because of her ugliness that I do not love her - no, I wish to make this clear to you; it's important that you see things as they are, not as you imagine them to be. I do not love her because I find her uninteresting. She knows the reason of course. How could she miss my averted gaze as she talked, in the early days? My grunts of replies? Indeed I had hinted at it quite openly yet respectfully, sometimes. I assure you of this. We used to sit quite silently, holding one another. Then after that we'd copulate. And after that, she'd look at my averted face and ask me for my opinion about some pop-star gossip in her woman's magazine. She pursued my averted face with her face, forcing me to wag my head in a panic to get away. Of course I knew what her game was. Or thought I did - for one afternoon, at an inconvenient time, she rang my doorbell, walked straight in pulling me by the chin until we had reached a comfortable chair, then laid her hands on my shoulders, sat me down, and said  "Listen. I am going to tell you what I am not, and what I am, trying to do. My hope is not that I interest you: I stopped wanting you to love me a long time ago. My friend, I am gaining practice. There will be others after you - it is them I want to interest, when they arrive. Before that time, I need practice. That is what you're for." Now that she has laid bare her motives, I feel strangely at peace with my worries and with her. We are, now, really very happy together and perhaps will be so for the rest of our lives.