Day before yesterday I spent my drive home thinking. I do that a lot. My favorite places to think are the shower and the car because, for the most part, there's not a whole lot going on in those places. I have to pay attention, but it's not mind bendingly complex at every moment.
Earlier that afternoon, a writer friend of mine and I got into a conversation about our stories. We're both in the midst of editing, so we commiserated. Then he asked me a question about my storyline which led me down the path of character motivation. What drives my character to do as she's doing. Along the way he asked a good, solid and pertinent question about my MC and her potential actions.
In brief, he asked, 'Why not?' and I really didn't have a good answer to give him, in the moment. I tried. I gave him what I thought was a good answer but thinking about it afterward, on my drive home, I realized it was only a partial answer, one that didn't really address the core question.
That realization resulted in my thinking about it some more, and here's what I've concluded:
Melanie, my character, is in London being interviewed because she's written a book that includes a character with traits similar to someone rich and famous. The interviewer brings the man out on stage, surprising (stunning, shocking, horrifying - pick your adjective) Melanie. They get to talking and hit it off (see Monday's post too). Before dropping her back at her hotel, this man, named Gordon, asks her to dinner and she accepts.
That evening, as a surprise, he orders up his private jet and flies her to the south of France where he drives her up to his villa in the hills above the Riviera. This villa was featured in a television show she had been watching when she got the idea for her story and, because it is integral to her book, she talked about it during her interview. While they're there, he charms her and she's more than willing to go along because he's attractive, he's attentive, and 100% everything Melanie's husband isn't.
In her 'real life', Melanie no longer loves her husband, Patrick. She doesn't even like him and, if they met in her now, he's not someone to whom she would give more than the time of day.
He's a dead-weight, but she can't divorce him for very good reasons. They sleep in separate bedrooms and, in the framework of my story, have nothing in common except an address, shared bank account, creditors, last name and the comfort of familiarity. There is no marriage left. It has been eroded by her disgust of him and his attitudes toward her.
Patrick calls her stupid and lazy. Whenever anything doesn't go quite right or pokes his 'Anger' button, he goes off on long rants about whatever it is. There's no conversation, no back-and-forth - it's a straight one-sided diatribe to which she is expected to pay attention, and respond, even though it's all opinion and nothing to which she can respond, except by an 'uh-huh' or nod.
When it comes to her writing, her one creative outlet and passion, he tells her, at every turn, that the stories she writes are garbage and worse. It is, in short, a one-sided and somewhat abusive marriage, and she's stuck in it.
Back in France with Melanie and Gordon. Before their evening ends, I'm caught in my dilemma.
He seems to be attracted to her, at least physically (since this is all her first-person I can only allude to and hint at what he's thinking). He's attentive, charming, and appears to be interested in something more about her than her bulges and curves.
They're talking together, having an honest to God conversation - something she never gets at home, and she's enjoying it. Beyond the simple pleasure of sharing ideas and thoughts and opinions, she's attracted to him. Before they finish their dinner, she wants nothing more than to explore the space under the blankets on his bed.
Okay, okay, and a little more. She wants to jump his bones, get down and dirty with him. Okay? But she can't.
Or can she?
At home, Melanie has an empty marriage. It has been dead for almost all of it, but she has her pride, her ethics and a commitment she made, no matter how empty it has become.
If she goes to bed with Gordon what would she have after it was over?
Pride would be gone, along with ethics and her commitment to something that once held promise and hope.
Even if she didn't feel guilty, all she would have would be memories of a time out of time and, most likely, remorse for what could never be (as far as she knows).
It would be a pointless exercise, physically pleasurable but without meaning. An act as empty as the exercise of her everyday living. Since she already has empty in her marriage, she doesn't want more of the same in her memories of what should be a special time.
Melanie's dream is to meet someone as an equal, to engage with them on more levels than the simply physical or the purely subservient. She wants to share interests and goals, to be able to converse and participate in a back-and-forth supportive relationship where she cares for and about her partner at least as much as her partner cares for and about her.
In the moment, the time of deciding and waiting for things to change enough for her to strike out on her own, her dearest wishes are first, to stand on her own two feet for a time, to discover who she is, apart from her identity as Patrick Taylor's wife. She wants to recover and rediscover the Melanie that's been subsumed by her wife-to-Patrick role, and find out who the person she's been kept from being by her family's demands really is.
She wants to travel, for herself, to go to the places Patrick has already said he has zero interest in seeing. After having been burdened by a man who shares no interests with her, she wants to take time to do, exclusively, what interests her without the weight and drag to which she's been subjected.
Then she wants to meet someone new, someone who will meet her halfway and share at least some of her interests and appreciate her passions, even if they are not his. She doesn't want to live on the terms someone else lays out one-hundred percent of the time. She is willing to compromise, a lot at times if necessary, but she wants to be able to live on or by her own terms at least occasionally.
She would like the freedom, within a partnering relationship, to be able to pursue her interests - writing, the theater, travel - without having her partner pooh-pooh or deride those interests, or flat out say she 'can't' do things she wants to do.
At home, with Patrick, there is no conversation. There is only one-sided dissertation. Patrick wants to hear nothing from her but assent and agreement. They have no interests in common. He talks only about what interests him, and spends hours of time each day talking about how screwed up the world has become while Melanie stands by as a captive audience.
She is not asked or expected to participate in his diatribes. She is not allowed to dispute or disagree. It is strictly a smile and nod participation unless she wants a fight - at which point he will always accuse her of 'not being on the same page' and, all too often, throw out the threat of divorce. Because of things he has done within the finances, that would leave her bereft of almost all that she has worked for her entire life.
Patrick talks a good game about the future, but she knows that her future with him is, at best, bleak. He's an alcoholic. He doesn't take care of himself to the point that at less than sixty years old, he can't walk more than about three hundred yards without everything threatening to explode or fall off. When he does walk or stand for any length of time, he's just about incapacitated for hours or days after.
Her picture of what's coming is not encouraging. By the time she's ready to retire and do the traveling they have talked about for thirty-plus years, he's going to be in either a scooter or a wheelchair. Which will restrict her even more. From being a wife, she will devolve further - to being his nursemaid. A role she has already fulfilled to his mother who lives with them. She doesn't want to spend however many years she has left being an unpaid, unloved and unappreciated nurse. She wants more.
Given that background, and the current moment on the lawn of a virtual stranger's villa in the south of France, what should she do?
Realistically, she has no future with this man. It would be a physical act of a moment with nothing ahead of her. More like dogs rutting on the sidewalk than the kind of deeper relationship she craves and dreams about. If she does as she wants to do, gets naked with him and climbs into his bed, what she's going home to will be commensurately more bleak. She will have those memories, and nothing else - mist in a bottle that leaks - and profound regret for what cannot be.
If she doesn't, then nothing fundamentally changes. She can cling to her pride and her morals, the vacant promise of 'cleaving' given what her marriage has become. There will be remorse for what was missed, but no regret for what could never, to her certain knowledge, be.
And there are the horns. To be or not to be, that is the dilemma.
To be faithful, despite misery and emptiness, or to be brazen and then have to live with the knowledge of empty.
It's a tough call and, because of this dissertation and what I know in my story, I'm going to go with it as it is. She's going to give in, to take a goodly swipe at the golden ring of momentary happiness because, then, she will at least have the memories. Even if it isn't right or moral or whatever, she'll take the leaky bottle of memory as validation that she does have worth.
Now I have to get writing, to explain all of this to my readers so they don't get knotted up and offended. In the meantime, I wish you guys and gals a lovely day!
Best~
Philippa
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