They Don't Love You Like I Love You

Hugo was a practical man who could ascertain things, diagnose nearly anything, and fix most of that which he diagnosed. He was an old-fashioned fixer. He was both mechanically inclined and stubbornly optimistic. The novel complexity of engines and motors gave him little trouble. He was a man who simply understood the broken better than he did that which wasn't. 

He was also a psychiatrist and it was a large part of his occupation to tell other people what was wrong with them and how they could fix it. That is why people came to him. Not to hear what was right, rather, to learn what was wrong. Or what was wrong with their automobile, shortly before their inevitable lament of the obsolescence of the horse. 

Hugo loved a very beautiful woman, who in turn loved him. She loved him because he loved her and that was enough for she would never be capable of loving anyone any more than that, or independently so. He knew this, all along, though it didn't stop him from loving her for a person can fool himself in such a way to nearly believe that his love is enough for both of them. It is the sort of thing that cannot be helped, and love can never be stopped with reason.  

They were very different from one another. Colette was a porcelain skin beauty who no one could regard with indifference. She was a singer and songwriter who played guitar, though in the early 1910s it was considered improper and uncouth for a lady to do so, especially the songs of which she sang. Those dreadful love songs in which she pined for more than what life had given her. Those of the discontented or the unsatisfied female lover. 

She wrote beautiful hopeful songs as well and often she played them for Hugo who sat eagerly in his nightshirt in bed and stared at her as she played, entranced by her mesmeric beauty. Sometimes she was naked when she played. Other times she wore one of his dress shirts. Her hair cascading upon her milkish-soft shoulders. Her face and body free of any blemish or defect. This serenade happened after they made love and her voice was raspy because of thirst or the soreness of lovemaking. 

Hugo adored the way she bit her lip between lines as her thin fingers strummed the guitar that was in perfect tune. The candlelight that she favored to the gaslight licked her face, and her black hair seemed lost in the night as though it belonged and she was more than simply human. Hugo stared into her eyes that were flecked with gold as though in each there was a haram of beautiful naked women dancing, each one more beautiful than the last, but none more beautiful than her. Or it was as though her eyes were truly the windows to the soul and in her soul, there he found home and burrowed. 

It was an affair more than anything else, he knew. One that began with his infatuation with her when he saw her in a bar and she was drinking absinthe at a table alone. He didn't speak to her that day, but she noticed him looking and inquired with someone as to his name and profession. 

It was only a dressed up and polished affair masquerading as something more. Colette never gave Hugo her heart for fear of being so vulnerable. It was a possession that she would give no one. She loved Hugo, as he loved her, but she did so only under contract and when her time with him was over, other men came and went. She played guitar for only him, however, or between the other men. Otherwise, her guitar was in the corner standing alone watching the parade of buffoons undress and dress. 

Colette had ambitions greater than the world and being in love with one man wouldn't do. She needed money to live and working a traditional job wouldn't do, either. Not in some dusty bank or doing factory work of some sort. Slave labor or exposure to some poisonous metal such as what happened to those unfortunate girls at Brighton. 

Laying with men afforded her time she wouldn't otherwise have. She practiced her songs between them. And after two hours, two or three men made her more in a day than a legitimate job would in a week. She could afford an apartment in the merchant district, one free of rats, domestic squabbles, and bawling children who cry all night in hunger as they do where she lived before. And she had Hugo, who knew how she afforded it, and loved her regardless. 

A young Colette Swan visited Dr. Hugo Swift in his office one year prior, only a few days after their fortiutous encounter at the bar. She said she sought a remedy for melancholy and anxiety. Dr. Swift listened to her complaints to find the root cause, diagnosed her as he would a misfiring engine, made the appropriate recommendations, which involved a change of profession, as Colette had been brutally honest about her harlotry. Dr. Swift was equally honest, in kind. 

"You cannot fuck your way out of depression, darling. And there is not enough attention in the world anyone can give you that will ever make you happy. That is my prognosis. Make of it what you will." 

Colette was speechless. Never had anyone been so blunt with her. It may have been then that she fell in love as she did, or as she could. As much as she was capable. Dr. Swift was yet to be so stricken, though infatuated he was. 

He diagnosed her with female hysyeria and recommended a therapy popular in America called "hysterical paroxysm" in which he would use a tool, a vibration device, to induce orgasm that would greatly affect her mood. Only "orgasm" wasn't the word he used. He called it "vestibular spasm."

So she agreed to the procedure and he lifted her skirt and placed the device appropriately and turned it on. She stood and gripped the metal examination table behind her, white knuckling it, shuddering, her eyes shut and her lips parted offering a triumphant exhalation, a breath of life that became common air. 

As a result, she indeed felt better. Rather than being fucked by twelve men a week, or whatever it was depending on what season, expecting happiness to lay itself upon her with one, odds being what they are, she no longer looked at her profession in such a delusory way. It was merely a temporary means to an end. She vowed that she would enshrine no more men in her hallowed hall when she no longer needed the income for no magic man of the like could offer her happiness. She may as well have been searching for him in mud puddles. 

But every Tuesday at 2, this went on. Her appointments with Dr. Swift. She asked for medications of which he gave her an elixir with morphine that helped "in the by," as she said of the time between her appointments. Then she asked if he made house calls with the slightest of imploration in her tone. Dr. Swift twirled his handlebar mustache and exhaled as he washed her off his hands, carefully daubing them with a thick‐white towel.

"Usually only for the severely stricken," he answered. 

"But Dr. Swift. I am severely and most — horrendously stricken. Bedbound, really. Only I force myself to make this jaunt for the remedy only you can procure me. Please, do have pity."

Dr. Swift thought over the offer and reluctantly agreed. There was a café near her address he favored, after all. His former wife had died only two years after their marriage of cholera and she was a cold woman, anyway, so what he knew of the tenderness of a woman's heart was that which he learned as an infant and that which came from his hysterical mother who died when he was 6. He felt a certain and immediate tenderness in Colette that he hadn't ever in anyone else. 

He was spellbound by her small apartment near the river. It was beautiful. It felt like something of a gyspy wagon, yet it was on the second floor above an well-respected apothecary. The walls were a peacock green and adorned with an orgy of elaborate decorations which were all mostly gifts from former or present suitors, to be polite. A vast and collective hodgepodge of eccentricities. Pieces of men's souls, the hard and unrelenting side of Hugo initially critiqued. Silks, ivory horns, gold-framed portraits of famous artists, porcelain trinkets, music boxes, jewelry, furs, and a tiger's head from some Indian tobacco broker. Colette stood behind him and giggled giddily amused by his perusing of her things like a lost man in a museum. 

Initially, Colette went on and on about some English statesman that Hugo would surely know, some member of parliament, but when she could see that it didn't impress him in the least, she disposed of the conversation and let silence do its work, creating mystery between them, wonder. Much more is said without words than with them. 

She had more books than she could ever read. The guitar, she said, she bought herself. Her mother had taught her to play piano and she always wished to own one. Hugo smiled still holding his doctor's bag. Gripping it tightly as though if he let go it might find itself part of this eclectic collection upon a wall or shelf as though to remember him by before he was ever gone. 

Then he turned and regarded the poor French mademoiselle in the faint and inadequate English daylight of an open window and there was something so sympathetic and woefully improper about her standing there half-dressed in a white satin gown, smoking a cigarette. Her bare feet on the ruddy slats of the hardwood floor, the comfort of a rug not far from her pink-painted toenails. There was nothing that wasn't delicate about her. Yet nothing that was safe. She reminded him of an advertisment he once saw of a girl in a glass of champagne. Half-drowning. Otherwise, bathing in the bubbly deterioration of the alcohol. That was a proper metpahor for her life. To look at her was to be drunk and to be without her was to be hungover. 

It was precisely then that Hugo was in love. He was in love with a very broken young woman. One he had not a chance in this world to fix, but that he would endeavor to as though she were some engine of flesh, blood and bone. Something that, with enough tinkering, he could cure. 

"Colette," she introduced herself with her French accent suddenly very noticeable as though they were previously unfamiliar. She extended her tiny bare hand and smiled waiting for him to take it. The cigarette was out of sight but a cloud of smoke made a perfect halo about her head. He had never seen hair so black before or skin as pale. Lips as sensual or eyes as seductive. Nor a body as shapely. He shook her limp hand and in so doing he sealed something inside of himself. It was far too late to reconsider. 

In that moment, he could no longer dismiss her as a simple trollop, despite the large clock that looked as though it had been stolen from a railway station and placed purposefully on the wall above her bed. One that he could imagine her tilting her head back as it lied on the pillow in a conflagration of hair to tell the time upside down so to inform the poor fellow on top that he must hurry and finish as his allotted time was soon to expire. 

"I charge by the hour as well, madame," he noted, hoping to absolve himself of the trap of this sudden amore through a subtle yet direct and unmistakably abrasive insult.

"Then may I consider us — colleagues of a certain — shared profession, if you will. Therapeutics."

Hugo tried to rally a harsh response to her apparent joke, but he could not muster anything except a faint and feeble chuckle that seemed to only agree with her before it died in the vapors of the warm and fragrant room that smelled of perfume and peaches. Then he realized he had forgotten to take off his hat and he hurriedly did so along with his overcoat and set them on a gold ornate chair that had witnessed God knows what, he pondered. 

"If these walls could talk," he pined aloud.

Colette smiled and answered his rhetorical sentiment. "They'd speak of both the ecstacy and the grief of man. Before and after they pay. It's a strange dilemma, sir. The man who comes in is a boy, as giddy and carefree as one is ever, but the one who leaves does so with the pallor of gloom cast upon him as though my humble flat hosted his very dear mother's funeral. Not all, though are that way. That is the casual married visitor who still has dignity and guilt inside him. Things life has yet to flush out entirely. The more seasoned man comes and goes with the same heft. He leaves with his chest puffed out like a goose and sends gifts in the by as though I might forget him if not. Female hysyeria, you say, Dr. Swift. There is something more of interest, I submit, in the paradox of man."

"Hugo. Please, call me Hugo. I am inclined to agree, madame. But it isn't often men I study."

"Why is that?"

"For lack of interest, mostly."

"Well, since you've orgasmed me on three occasions, and soon to be a fourth, I think you can call me Colette. Or Paulette, if you prefer. Paulette is my actual birth-given name, but I do prefer Colette. Either way, we can surely dispense of formality."

Hugo chuckled uncomfortably. How he had become a spider in a beautiful web so quickly without realizing it all would astonish him if he knew that which he didn't in the moment. If he was that gold chair looking on, or a fly on the yellow wallpapered wall. Colette had seen it all before. Many a man stood where Dr. Swift stood in such a state of uneasiness and uncertainty. Flies waiting for the lovely spider to descend whose web they playfully toiled in. From each man she extracted something. She wasn't sure as of yet what she wanted from Dr. Hugo Swift. More than the rent. More than trinkets or furs or expensive chocolates. Yes. Perhaps a box seat at the opera. Or an address in Hyde Park. 

She regarded him as he lit a pipe and sat his bag upon the table. He unbuckled it to retrieve his famous vibrator. He was a handsome man. Not too tall or too polished. Not too handsome. Just right. Just handsome enough. Despite her malady, she still could find pleasure in men and she felt it in him. He coughed and asked her if she was ready to proceed with this week's therapy. He had a schedule to keep after all. But so did she. She erupted for him like Vesuvius and it flooded down her thighs and she collapsed into his arms. 

"I'm unable to stand," she gasped. So her carried her to bed. 

A year passed and Hugo and Colette continued their affair. In that time they made love 266 times, Hugo noted as they laughed in bed. He said he kept detailed notes of all his appointments with her. And on each page on a day he saw her, he put a cursive "B" because his pet name for her was Birdy. It never got old. Not one time did either not look forward to it for in that small amount of time each was someplace else. Someone else other than who life allowed them to be. They were their true selves. Colette was not impoverished or with strange men, and Hugo was not a loveless widower. 

They made plans to leave England and move to America. They bought tickets on a luxury British steamship and would settle in Boston, to be specific. Colette would have a fresh start. She read books and magazines about America and was excited for the day. She stopped seeing other men and Hugo saw her more than just on Tuesdays at 2. He paid her rent and begged her to move in with him, but she smiled and said she would only when she was properly married. That thing she hoped to extract from him was that which she hadn't had the whole of her life — real love. That which had avoided or elluded her one way or another since she was born. Either by death or circumstances that were out of her control. But here it was, at last, presenting itself. 

She cleaned her apartment of the trinkets and furs and curious oddities left to her by all those other men, and she took down the clock on the wall above her headboard. Time was suddenly a much different thing to her than it ever had been. It wasn't something to be counted, rather, it was something to be spent. She was in love and she hoped the doctor would soon propose. What flourished in her was beautiful and clean. She was Eve unbiting the apple. What was once a filthy menagerie of lecherous men of every distinction imaginable was a garden, pristine, of only two. It was Eden all over again.

The stairs to her apartment were dark and creaked in an ominous way. Hugo carried a fistful of flowers and a bottle of wine. He often thought to bring a lantern to help him see the way up, but he never did. He felt his way using the walls and let his feet find each step slowly and carefully. Tonight they would have dinner and he would propose. They would marry in March and set sell to America in April. The feeling inside him welled with such euphoric optimism that he could hardly not smile as he drew closer to her door. He was surprised to see the door cracked open and a lemon-yellow wedge of light in the agape. Music played on the phonograph he bought her, inviting him inside. 

That enormous railway clock was the first thing he saw. It hung like a forboding full moon above her bed ticking and tocking. And there she was beneath some writhing man in a precarious state of undress, twisted up in a shroud of bed sheets, moaning and gasping that familiar dialog unaware that Hugo darkened her door. The bed springs depressing, shrieking madly and this faceless man groaning. The first thought that came to Hugo's mind was murder. But the thought was aborted in a shroud of emphatic disappointment that left no other opposable emotion to be birthed. Dejected, Dr. Swift observed the patient for only a second or two, dropped the flowers in the doorway, and withdrew himself from the room, closing the door behind him and shutting her in it like a coffin. He was suddenly half the man who had entered. 

His legs faltered down the steps. It was as though they had forgotten how to walk. But he stopped for a moment, closed his eyes, and made his leave from that apartment without being detected. The only clue of his appearance would be a bouquet of wilting flowers she would find when the man's time was up. After he had murdered her the way men murder her. The way she let them murder her. One at a time. Over and over. She was a hallway and not a room. A window without a view of anything but what had already been. A doorway to nothing at all.

Dr. Swift packed his bags that night and boarded a ship to America the next day — Valentine's Day. The tickets they had bought for America for April he tore up and threw away when he was told they were non-refundable. By March, he had settled in to Boston and opened a medical practice on Medford Street near the Mystic River. Hardly a day passed that he didn't think of her. How he longed for her in every way a man does in the absence of a beautiful woman he is still drunk on. How he wished for her to ride his face once more with the vigor a rowdy child does a carousel horse. 

He received a telegraph from her several weeks later — on St. Patrick's Day. He resisted reading it until he sat alone and drank in a crowded bar near his office that evening. It said only one thing:

I am sorry. Stop. 

In those three simple words he understood. She didn't ask for forgiveness. She sabotaged their affair intentionally because she was not capable of receiving or giving that which he was giving her. He thought to forget it. To reply back an invitation for her to come. Or to reply back nothing at all. He thought heavily upon it. He went to the telegraph office several times and turned around. Then finally, several days later, he replied with a brief message. 

They don't love you like I love you. Stop. 

Goodbye, Birdy. Stop.

About a month later, Hugo was having coffee in a small café and read a newspaper which detailed, horrifically, the sinking of the SMS Titanic in the icy waters of the north Atlantic. More than 1500 souls perished. He sat back and took a breath folding the paper and putting it on the table in front of him. 

His head spun wildly. It was the ship that he and Colette were to sail to America upon, had things worked out. His life was spared by the treachery of a woman, it turned out. By an ill-fated affair and sudden betrayal. It is, in fact, sometimes good to let go, he concluded. To say goodbye and to let things pass away naturally the way they do and ought. But finishing his coffee he resolved he would have rather been aboard that ship in love than to be alive and loveless, such as he was.  

Hugo sat in his house and stared at the piano he had bought that went unplayed. He thought to learn himself how to play a melody or two. He diagnosed himself accurately and resolved that there is no cure or relief for this sort of melancholy other than that of unrelenting and persistent hope in spite of it. Every broken heart is one broken heart closer to real love, after all. Every ill-fated lover we stumble over is one less until we come upon the one we ought. The one who waits. 

Perhaps there is another woman, he considered in his diary, and all this is simply the way to her. The thorny and treacherous pass I must travel to her heart. There is always another woman until there is not. And so long as one can say "perhaps," life continues on, even for the anguished. Even for the broken-hearted.