The Last Anniversary

Then she types: GET A LIFE YOU LOSERS.

One of the sales reps walks by her office, taps on the glass wall and calls out, ‘Yo, Soph!’ She calls back ‘Yo, Matt!’ and waves a fist in the air like a homeboy.

She is such a fraud.

She taps quickly on the delete key, thinking with pleasurable horror of the reaction if she had accidentally clicked on ‘send’. Their hurt, earnest faces!

What can Thomas possibly want, after all this time?

She finds herself remembering a sugary-brown smell. It is the smell of cinnamon toast, frangipani blossoms and Mr Sheen–the smell of his Aunt Connie’s house.

Sophie had been going out with Thomas for nearly a year when she decided to break up with him. The decision was the result of weeks of agonised self-analysis. Yes, she loved him, but did she love him for the right reasons?

She knew, for example, that it was right to love a man for his kind heart, but wrong to love him for his bank account. It was fine to love him for his gorgeous blue eyes, but shallow to love him for his tanned muscles. (Unless, of course, they were uniquely his muscles, for example if they were as a result of his profession as a shearer or an acrobat, or from being in a wheelchair.)

But was it right or wrong to love a man for his marzipan tart? Thomas could cook like an angel and Sophie is a woman who likes her food. Watching him chop garlic could make her weak with desire, and eating a slice of his marzipan tart was equivalent to a multiple orgasm. His seafood risotto brought tears of joy to her eyes. But wasn’t that a gluttonous, superficial basis for love? Especially when you sometimes secretly, shamefully wished he could just drop off the marzipan tart rather than having to stop and tell you some long, worrying story about his car registration.

And was it wrong to love someone because he was the grandson of the Munro Baby, and you’d always been just slightly obsessed with the Munro Baby Mystery? Wasn’t that like loving someone because he was a member of the Royal Family, when you were really meant to fall in love with him when he was disguised as a simple peasant and then be pleasantly surprised when he turned out to be a prince?

It seemed to Sophie that she didn’t love Thomas the way he deserved to be loved. He deserved to be with a woman who adored that fraught, scrunched-up expression he got whenever he had to do a difficult reverse park. He deserved a girl who thought it was cute the way he scrupulously read every line of the passenger safety card every time he flew, and took his responsibilities so seriously that when he was seated in the exit row he spent ten minutes asking a bemused flight steward questions about exactly what he’d need to do with the exit door in the unlikely event of an emergency.

Most importantly, Thomas deserved to be loved the way he loved Sophie. Once, she’d found a document on his computer called ‘Sophie’, which she opened of course, to find a list of reminders about how to be a good boyfriend. As if Sophie was a puzzle he could solve if he just followed the rules. It said things like: ‘If S. suggests outdoor activity, don’t mention possibility of rain. Pessimistic.’ ‘Don’t say “whatever you feel like” when S. asks about weekend plans. Irritating.’

Reading it made Sophie cry.

Thomas was good-looking, intelligent, very sweet, and occasionally–when he relaxed–quite witty, but Sophie had begun to feel terrified that she might be unfaithful to him. Once they had been out to dinner and a waiter had said to Sophie, ‘Cracked pepper with that?’ and she’d met his eyes and felt such a jolt of sexual attraction she’d had to look away.

Not that she hadn’t enjoyed their sex life. It was just that sex with Thomas was so very pleasant and…clean. While he was giving her generous amounts of patient, gentlemanly foreplay, she’d find herself thinking wistfully that she’d quite like to be thrown on the bed and ravished. Of course, if she’d ever told Thomas that he would have dutifully thrown her on the bed, carefully so as not to bump her head, no doubt with that same worried expression on his face as when he reverse-parked.

Wasn’t there more to love than this friendly, slightly irritable affection? Wasn’t it morally wrong to stay in a relationship if you didn’t feel weak-kneed passion for your partner? Wasn’t there something noble about leaving a nice comfortable relationship and heading off on a quest for The One?

This was the deluded train of thought that led Sophie to recklessly break up with the nicest man she had ever dated.

Her timing for breaking up with him had been quite bad. Quite spectacularly bad, actually. She had deliberately picked a Friday because she thought that would give him the weekend to get the worst of his shock out of the way. He was a pathologist and she didn’t want to be responsible for him misdiagnosing somebody’s specimen.

Unfortunately, by horrible coincidence, Thomas had his own plans for that particular Friday.

It really wasn’t her fault. How was she to know they were booked on a flight to Fiji that afternoon for a surprise holiday, which would begin with a marriage proposal on a white sandy beach bathed in moonlight while a string band wearing traditional Fijian dress serenaded them? How was she to know that he’d spent fifteen thousand, four hundred and twenty-five dollars on an engagement ring? How was she to know that at least a dozen friends and family members were excitedly involved in this careful, but not exactly covert, operation? There were the girlfriends who had secretly packed her bag with her sexiest lingerie; the various people who had been recruited to water her plants; her boss, who had agreed to give her time off work.

Naturally, all these people who had been sworn to secrecy had sworn at least three other people to secrecy too. It was annoying to discover that so many people knew about her forthcoming marriage proposal before she did, but that, of course, as Thomas so passionately pointed out, was no longer relevant.

‘I need to talk to you about something,’ she’d said bravely, on their way to what she thought was a new seafood restaurant in Brighton, although actually they were on their way to his sister Veronika’s place, who was on standby to drive them to the airport.

‘Well, I need to talk to you about something too!’ said Thomas, rather gleefully she realised later. ‘But you go first,’ he said generously.

So she went first, and his eager face had crumbled and cracked like a six-year-old trying not to cry after he’d scraped his knee, and Sophie had had to look out the car window at the passing traffic and press a guilty fist against her stomach.