You’ve set my frozen heart to “thaw,”
Though your talk is hardly erudite,
Of calories and cellulite,
With each flaw I endure I love you more.
You’re obsessed about your weight. Pathologically late.
Permanently in a state of disarray.
But don’t start reading Proust and Poe.
OK’s OK and so’s Hello.
All I want’s your warmth and honesty.
Don’t change at all, just marry me.
He couldn’t really sing, but he’s normally so buttoned up that everyone was quite emotional and Mark lost all control and kissed me on the lips at a public occasion. I honestly thought I’d never be so happy again in my entire life.
Later, indeed, things went rather dramatically downhill.
Resolutions
If anything ever almost works out again I will not have anything to do with either of the following:
a) Karaoke
b) Daniel Cleaver (my ex-boyfriend, Mark Darcy’s arch rival, old friend from Cambridge, and also the person who broke up Mark’s first marriage by being on Mark’s kitchen table, having sex with Mark’s first wife at the moment when Mark came home from work)
I was just stumbling down from one of the tables, after my rendition of “I Will Always Love You,” when I noticed Daniel Cleaver looking at me with a haunted, tragic expression.
The thing about Daniel is tha
t he is very manipulative and sexually incontinent, and unfaithful and does tell a lot of lies, and can be very unkind, and obviously Mark hates him because of everything that happened in the past, but I do still think there is something really lovely about him.
“Jones,” said Daniel. “Help me? I am tortured by regret. You’re the only living creature who could possibly, ever have saved me and now you are marrying another. I find myself disintegrating, almost as if falling to pieces. Just a few kind words alone, Jones, please?”
“Yessuvcourse, Dansyul, coss,” I slurred, confusedly. “I juss wan’ everyone to be as happy assme.” In hindsight, I may have been the teensiest bit drunk.
Daniel was taking my arm and steering me in some sort of direction.
“I am tortured, Jones. I am tormented.”
“No. Lisssten. I really, really sink that…happiness is soooo…”
“Come in here, Jones, please. I really need to talk, alone…” said Daniel, leading me unsteadily into a side room. “Is my life now doomed, forever, truthfully?”
“No!” I said. “Snow! Daniel! Yous WILL be happy! Defsnut.”
“Hold me, Jones,” he said. “I fear I will never…”
“Lissen. Happiness IS happy because…” I said, as we overbalanced and crashed onto the floor.
“Jones,” he growled, hornily. “Just let me have one last look at your giant mummy pants I so love. To make Daddy happy? Before my life disintegrates into ashes?”
The door burst open and I looked up in horror to see Mark’s face, just as Daniel was lifting up my skirt. There was a flash of pain in Mark’s brown eyes, and then total, cold, emotional shutdown.