European Beauty III

Mark's Love



On the day of his graduation, Mark went up to the attic of his Delft dormitory,
opened the window, reached far out into the night and nailed his belt onto the roof's
overhang. He stuck his head through the hoop and jumped out. His
danging body was noticed early next morning by passers-by, who had, it's safe to
say, never before seen such a bizarre and terrible sight.

Perhaps the closest anyone ever got to explaining Mark's sudden departure was Paul, a fellow
student who he had met only a few weeks before, and with whom he had
immediately become close friends. As Paul put it:

"... it was not only because Mark had become disenfranchised by love as a possibility,
for this type of disenfranchisement is experienced, sometimes again and again, in
various stages of a young man's life. I believe it was rather due to his natural
willingness and desire to think through the most opaque issues. This was what drove him to what he did."

Yet nonwithstanding these candid words, Paul shook his head at his friend's radical
departure; even he could never comprehend why Mark had chosen to leave his life for
what he thought "was just the way this world worked." "Mark", he continued, "could not
come to grips with the fact that real love cannot exist." Perhaps pretaining to his
science major, Paul plainly concluded: "The love that Mark was looking for cannot
exist in a world governed by physics, brains and logic".

Mark had neither given nor taken away anything of real value to his college; he was consciencious with his work, friendly with his colleagues and very gentlemanly with girls; his idiosyncracies were
relatively harmless if not benign; in short, Mark was an average college student,
sheltered from the hard world of sweat and toil by his parent's kindness and the state's
generosity.

Through the college years at the technical university, Mark had had three short-term,
alcohol-incited relationships, which was, considering his average looks along with the
male-to-female ratio at his school, not a bad achievement. Mark was secretly proud of
this fact, and spoke of his short affairs as "ex-girlfriends". The truth
was that none of the three girls were really interested in keeping the relationship up
for more than (and that was the maximum) four days, but neither was Mark, for that
matter. For no matter how much he tried, he felt that ultimately, he and his
"ex-girlfriends" had nothing in common.

And it was indeed one of life's strange paradoxes that these short, hardly worthy-of-the-name relationships had actually steadfastly convinced Mark of the existence of love; for, he
reasoned, "if there are people that are so incompatible with me", "then there are
bound to be people who are the other way around". Thus did he pass his third year at
college without laying one girl, but in moderate spirit, believing that an end to his
troubles was at least theoretically possible any second.

In the fourth year of his studies, exactly a month before his graduation, Mark came
home from a dime-a-dozen party, terribly excited; he strongly felt that he had
fallen in love.

Paul recalled the conversation he had with his exuberant friend that night. He had also
briefly met the girl, Anna, and found her to be too talkative, with an annoying
pronounciation "of all existing vowels and consonants in the English language". But he wisely kept this
criticism to himself and listened to Mark's jubilant report on Anna and how she had
"created a direct, logical link to his world" which was "truly rare and certainly very
special". Finally, Mark was hasty to add: "this time, I know it isn't just her looks - after
all, she's not really pretty - I can tell, even in my present, exuberant state"... well,
actually, Paul thougt that Anna's looks were basically the only thing "going for her" in
his "book", but decided, again, not to share his thoughts on the matter.

Yes, something had definitely happened at that party, for Mark was spotted having
coffee with Anna the next day, and in the Museum the day after; indeed, Mark
discovered that the two of them shared similar interests, and that "her intelligence,
together with her exotic, female approach" was most "titillating" for his "hitherto
love-starved soul".

However, Paul was not stupid, and neither was he blind (he had in fact been an air
force pilot before starting university). Soon, he had found out that Anna was
one of the most wanted girls on campus - a campus that comprised of 80% males.He knew that Anna had slept with Mark at least on one occasion, so he gathered that
the relationship was truly gaining a bit of impetus; however, he also saw that Anna still
hung around with a lot of men, everywhere, at all times of the day. The fact that Mark
didn't even discern the existence of John, an explosively hansome
postdoc student, was not only attributable to the fact that love is blind; it was also due
to the circumstance that Mark didn't attend the course that John taught. Anna did, however, and
as Paul put it later "did what women usually due in these cases - what she felt like".

Paul suspected that Anna had made a kind of comparison in her head. She probably
vaguely suspected the fact that John had had the formidable amout of 37 realtionships
in his 28 years, including three actresses, two models, and one princess; perhaps it
was, as Paul put it, "some strange equivalent of love, or real-life-love" which made her
decide to be number 38, for even Paul had to concede that "the two probably didn't
have that much in common" (having had the questionable experience of sharing a dorm room
with John for half a year) but, as he put it, "when it came to women, John was
one-size-fits all".

It was this brash, startling turn of events five days before graduation that changed
Mark the way a minus sign negates a figure. "Mark went through all the phases
psychologists probably have on some checklist" "before hitting the floor, like someone
bouncing, falling off stairs". Paul had even had the questionable honor of being home
as Mark was finally, unmistakeably told off. In what Paul considered an absolute and
fitting climax, Anne was asked the teary, supplicating, unworthy "why" question.

"Because" she had said, "I'm in love with him".

"When heard from a woman", Paul concluded, "this is a pretty convincing argument".
Mark, on the other hand, was not convinced. He cited all the things the two of them had
in common, and all the times the above sentence was used with him as the subject. He
talked about common values, invisible bonds, implied connections. Even the passively
eavesdropping Paul would have become slightly confused, had he not understood that
Mark was arguing from his emotional level. So was Anne, for that matter; only the two
frequencies no longer matched. In fact, "the more Mark cited the great conversations, the hand-holdings, the moments of utter intimacy, the more Anna was convinced of Mark being a real pussy". Paul saw proof of this in the phrase that left Mark standing in the middle of his room, utterly drained and
thoroughly perplexed: "pull yourself together". To be fair to Anna, it was probably one of the cruellest things she had ever said to anyone, but Mark's behaviour had really, truly begun to vex her.

In the next days, as John, sitting on the side of the bed, was asking himself whether
number 38 could perhaps truly be his one love (as, it must however be said, he had
done ample times before), Mark was already on his way up the stairs.

"In retrospect", says Paul, "Mark made a logical error, which happens ever so often, even
to experienced scientists. He had believed that this connection he perceived when
looking into Anna's eyes - love, as he thought - had in its formation something
mystical and otherworldly, which would somehow exempt it from the rules of physics and
reason. But unfortunately, this fantastic world does not exist."