Peaces, Helen Oyeyemi [best life changing books TXT] 📗

I’m thinking of the ways your Přem bridged supply and demand. There he was as the son who was a credit to his father, the kidney donor who couldn’t have been a better match if he’d been tailor made. There he was as Allegra Yu’s social gatekeeper. There he was sending Mr. Lin to Laura at the exact moment she felt she needed to meet someone … well, someone just like Mr. Lin. And so on. And when I look at matters in those light … as arrangements rather than relationships, the primary mover starts to look … familiar.

Four years ago, I met an acutely alluring man, and we got attached fast. There wasn’t really enough mutual support for me to call it a relationship, but there wasn’t anything illicit about it, so I can’t call it an affair either. Anyway, we were together for four months. And a matter of days after we broke up, I met another man—a cutely alluring one this time, and embarked on a similarly brief yet heavy fling that lasted four months. I’d never had a year like that and hopefully never will again … when Christmas came around, I was practically a nervous wreck and had to give myself the gift of a period of solitude and chastity.

Ava, I believe the two men who left me in that state were the same person.

I’m not talking about a personality type. I’m stating that the second man was the first man revisiting me with a different approach. Until convinced otherwise, that is what happened.

I met the first man, Raúl Mateus, on the very first day of May 2015. This was at the wedding of two friends, one of whom I’d been in unrequited love with for years. Lovelier still: the friend who was not my unrequited love had asked me to help write his wedding speech … which had turned into me writing the whole thing. I watched that friend saying almost everything I wished I could say to the only man I would ever love, and the other guests laughed and went “awww” at the appropriate points. As for the fucker who should have been marrying me but was marrying a nice, nurturing boy who didn’t even know what to say to him on the first day of the rest of their lives together, only planned to be there and keep on being there, steady pom pi pi … I couldn’t even look at my stolen groom’s face. I was drunker than I’d ever been, and I remember quite openly patting myself on the shoulder and saying, “It’s OK, Xavier, you’re doing well, and it will all work out in your next life.” A bearded Mr. Short, Dark, and Handsome sat down next to me, handed me some mint tea, and kept his arm around the back of my chair while I sipped the tisane and started to sober up. He had very striking hazel eyes and had accentuated them with turquoise eyeliner and black mascara. When he looked at me birds, bees, butterflies, dragons, bats, every winged thing you can think of got together and threw a debutante ball in my thorax. I think I dribbled wine.

Raúl asked me if I’d written the wedding speech, and I neither confirmed nor denied, but asked why he was asking. He said that during certain passages my mouth had moved in unison with the speaker’s. He said I was a good writer. I advised him not to say such things; I said if he kept it up, I might end up going home with him. His response: Did I say a good writer? I meant a very good writer. Back at his place a couple of hours later, he kept up the consoling assertions as I removed his three-piece suit. He was about ten years older than me and had this Buenos Aires accent that lent a tone of good-humoured irony to almost everything he said. But he wasn’t bullshitting me with that opinion that I could write. He ghostwrote biographies himself and put me in touch with a commissioning editor at the publishing house he most frequently published with. Krakamiche Press … the one founded by Karel Stojaspal. I sent in a portfolio of writing samples and was finally able to detach myself from the payroll of Do Yeon-ssi’s company, where I’d been drawing a salary for playing the half-secretarial, half-ambassadorial role of Decorative Nephew. I still work with that editor, and the classical-music-world names he pairs me with, even though Raúl doesn’t anymore.

Raúl … my relationship with him burned out fast. We were both stunned, Raúl and I, when I blurted out that I loved him. I did, I think. At least, I remember why I thought so. When we spent time with the newlywed banes of my life, I hardly felt a pang and was mostly focused on Raúl. I took that as a sign of something profound.

Raúl told me he loved me too, and immediately proposed marriage … which was much too much. I told him I’d think about it and immersed myself in what I thought of as writerly life. Mostly holing myself up in my room working on my own (very bad) novel and hobnobbing with any literary types who happened to be around. I almost neglected the ghostwriting project I was actually under contract for, going through the motions with these lacklustre interviews with this ninety-something-year-old conductor whose life story I was supposed to be writing. We were quite fed up with each other, the conductor and I. She was frustrated at not being able to organise her thoughts well enough to write the book herself, and I had such an inflated view of my own abilities I felt they were wasted on trying to channel this conductor’s voice. Eventually, with deadlines breathing down my neck and the editor expressing grave reservations regarding the pages I’d sent in,