雨水 [33] / [35]
“At first when I got to know her, I liked her attitude towards work. Confidence, passion, an indomitable personality. She was like a warrior. You already knew that, right? I told you, remember?”
“I do, yes.”
John smiled bitterly.
“But I should have known that those sort of character traits that I like were just work-related. She was indifferent about everything else, and there was no more passion she could pour into life since she used up everything for work. I thought she was just always tired. I consoled myself that she would be different eventually.
But she was always like that, in that indifferent way. Always. And it got worse when she witnessed her coworker's death right in front of her nose. It was worse because she started to drink alcohol.”
Alexander didn’t know all of this. He thought Cynthia loved John deeply, and he her. That’s why he could give her up so willingly. For her, and for his friend. Besides, he didn’t have any confidence he could make her happy. He always thought that he was not suitable for her. He was still timid like a shy boy, but she wasn’t. She was a leader whom everybody wanted to follow. The more John and Cynthia got closer to each other, the more Alexander was naturally estranged from them.
Alexander stared at John while John talked to him. John was a very handsome specimen. Tall, with a body shaped like a sculpture, good at both work and sports, cheerful with a manly attitude. He was very popular even among his female co-workers. How could he compete with John?
“I started to stay out of the house late, and regularly. On the one hand, I wanted to make Cynthia rouse herself. Sometimes I really just slept alone, but sometimes I wasn’t alone. I slept with random girls. But you know what? She asked me nothing. Even when she was in the hospital because the baby died in her womb. I didn’t visit her, specifically to provoke her, but she didn’t try to contact me. That made me insane.”
Alexander said nothing. It’s a story that was hard to believe. He couldn’t easily imagine it. There never seemed to be any problem, at least on the surface.
“One day, after her discharge, I talked to her. I could feel she didn’t want to. But I needed to. I asked her what the problem was. And told her to rely on me if she suffered from some mental issue, that we could visit the doctor together, etc.
She just stared at me for awhile and said that she doesn’t love me. She has never been happy with me. All the feelings she felt about me before marriage were a delusion. I was gravely shocked. I anticipated that of course. I already knew, implicitly, what she would say. We didn’t have any choice but divorce. Neither of us had the will to recover something that had clearly collapsed between us. I know that I behaved like a shit, and I was sneakily dating Nicole. So I was not going to suffer the inconvenience of being without her.”