Chapter Text
Gemini (May 21-June 21)
You will risk being seen as foolish, and therefore you will be seen as powerful. Only the truly powerful are brave enough to throw social consequences to the wind.
As a forecast of the future, it offers no immediate insight into his success with the weekly crossword puzzle. Perhaps he can cram into the boxes any old word that will fit and still claim that foretold sense of power; but he doubts that’s what it meant. Though he never puts much stock into his horoscope, he checks it every week regardless. Even an atheist might start their morning with a Bible verse just for a laugh, or to keep themselves well-rounded. Flipping to the back of the paper, his first glance at the clues leaves him feeling confident enough without intervention from the stars anyway.
Over coffee and cornflakes he works in silence. The curtain shields the early sun from blinding him while preserving the pool of light where Martha sunbathes by his feet. Absent-mindedly, he scratches her with his toes between answers. For years now his Sunday mornings have involved this leisurely mental exercise. It’s a slow start to the day, but one that sharpens his mind for whatever else it may have in store. In fact, had he been able to finish his puzzle before the phone rang, maybe he would’ve been more equipped to handle the disruption that rang along with it. But it wasn’t written in the stars.
Called away from the breakfast table, he picks up the phone. The voice on the other end of the line is deep and unfamiliar. “Yeah, ‘lo there…,” it begins, and ineloquently for what must be a telemarketing pitch. “I came across your ad in the paper this morning and thought I’d phone about it.”
Paul frowns. “Sorry?”
An amused scoff. “Don’t tell me you’re off the market that quick.”
“I’m sorry, you must have the wrong number. I’m not selling anything.”
“Really? Have I dialed it wrong?” His voice trails from the receiver, lost in some distant shuffling, then clearly again, “You’re not forty, attractive, and charming? Seeking love or excitement?”
Jaw slack, Paul darts his eyes around the room with mounting confusion. He steels his voice from any of the disconcertion he feels at the correct knowledge of his age. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“Was your ad in the paper a joke?”
“My ad in the—?” Dragging the phone cord with him across the kitchen, he snatches the newspaper from the table, his coffee mug sloshing precariously. Hurriedly, he flicks through pages of trifolds and columns. All the while his romantic pursuer turned mystery informant is still chattering away: “Yeah, in the Personals. You wrote it, mate, I dunno why yer askin’ me. I’m just followin’ up on it.”
On the fifteenth page, three submissions below the timeless heading, Lonely Hearts, there reads:
Male bachelor, 40, attractive, charming, works in marketing, leads a quiet life, seeking love or excitement - whichever comes first. Serious inquiries only.
Signed with his telephone number like a kiss. Such a personal punctuation to a most public declaration of loneliness. His stomach sinks.
His first instinct is to call the columnists and report some sort of mistake, until their given mailing address sparks something familiar—something he recalls written in his own script. A night, several weeks ago, suddenly meets him at his memory’s doorstep. The gifted bottle of Pinot Noir from a business deal, how seamlessly it vanished between slower and slower blinks of his eyes. And a midnight showing of The Shop Around the Corner, was it? Those sappy, nostalgic films always have an uncanny ability to multiply even the minutest virus of loneliness into a full-blown case of incurable isolation. Flashes of white from the television had exposed the rushed handwriting of a drunken whim. As the fragmented details return to him, the broader emotional context remains elusive. The man inspired by wine and James Stewart that night was not a man he knew. Was there genuine hope in his heart when he crafted a submission, or did a spiral of depression leave him feeling desperate enough to take a bold leap? Contemplating it now, he can almost taste the bitter glue of the envelope when he dragged his wine-stained tongue across it. He just doesn’t remember the man who sealed it.
“Shit,” he breathes.
“Hello? Now I’m starting to think you’re takin’ the piss.”
The voice waiting on the line abruptly pulls him from his reflections. The phone has grown warm and imperceptible like another appendage against his ear. Shaking his head, he stammers, “I…I’m sorry,” and walks it back to the receiver on the wall. The unintentional force startles Martha into lifting her head.
Heaving a sigh, he scrubs his palm over his eyes. On his way back to the table the phone rings again. Reflexively, he turns to answer it, but stops himself short. The machine can take it and save him the embarrassment of explaining himself. Dropping into his chair, he waits out the shrill rings until the kitchen returns to its former silence.
“What the fuck was I thinking?” he mutters himself.
Snatching up the paper—consumed by disbelief and denial—he skims the ad again. “Leads a quiet life,” he reads aloud in a critical tone, as if peer-reviewing a paper. “God, could I have sounded less enticing?”
He can barely bring himself to look at it for more than a second without wanting to chuck it in the bin. More offensive than anything might be the unoriginality—the absence of humor. At least then he could write it off as a bit of drunken amusement and share in the laughs of his sloshed self. But all it has is honesty. The vulnerability of the late hours in which it was written darken the page itself. In the broad daylight such a virtue reads like a fault.
He stares at his unfinished breakfast with an appetite too fed by shame to feel hungry. What brought him a sense of normalcy less than ten minutes ago is now a pathetic scene. The breakfast of a bachelor. Every Sunday the same coffee—cream and two scoops of sugar—served with the same bowl of cereal, beside the newspaper folded along the same vertical crease. He always believed everyone could benefit from some routine in their life; but the only thing separating a routine from a rut is one bad day. Some mornings he imagined a nameless and shapeless figure at the stove frying bacon, humming a tune. Phantom sights and sounds showed him what love could look like in his home.
Shoving these fantasies aside, he stands from the table with a loud scrape of the chair legs across the floor. Martha scatters onto her feet, his consternation a contagion. In an effort to keep busy, he cleans up his mess and any evidence of a morning gone south. He decides to make that call to the column after all and requests them to pull his ad. The secretary informs him the best they can do is prevent its circulation in next week’s paper, but the damage has already been done for the week of May 29th. If it were feasible to round up every issue in the city for a massive bonfire, he’d start gathering his firewood now.
Unwanted callers he can easily ignore, but a week is plenty of time enough for the eyes of friends or family to happen upon his telephone number among the other Lonely Hearts. He could’ve weaseled his way out of any questioning if he hadn’t practically left breadcrumbs for those who know him best. It might as well have read: Paul McCartney, loneliest man the 80s have seen yet, sole inspiration behind the Three Dog Night single, and he’d like all of Merseyside to know it.
Gripped by these anxieties, he decides to set aside as much of his day as necessary for manning the phone line. He’ll intercept any incoming calls to control the situation as much as he can.
* * *
An hour passes this way before the anticipation begins to chip away at his sanity. A mouse couldn’t fart without him knowing in the house’s dead silence. He feels himself on the edge of a precipice without a gust to send him over, the instability somehow worse than the fall. Some time away from the house sounds more and more appealing, and, before he can think twice about it, he’s out the door. It’s a miracle Martha is even attached to the end of the lead in his haste.
His feet carry him in an aimless direction with more restlessness in their heels than purpose. Martha, on the other hand, has enough wits about her for the both of them, and presumes any trip together to be one to the park. Her excitement is palpable and, like the sun on his face, a gentle reminder that the world outside indeed remains intact. It isn’t all rubble and ruin as it felt within the confines of his walls. The sky is clear with scarcely a cloud. A gentle breeze stirs the summer air, fresh and fragrant. Without a doubt he prefers to be anxious outdoors.
After a few attempts at a one-sided game of fetch (Martha has decided it’s her stick now and she isn’t keen on sharing), he waits on a nearby bench for her to chew, sniff, and explore to her heart’s content. Apparently everyone else had the same idea of taking advantage of the pleasant weather. Children run ahead of their parents as they pass him; the occasional curious dog approaches him before scampering back to their owner.
The isolation emanating from content couples around him is nothing new. Its stench clings to his clothes all day so that, alone in his home hours later, it smells most pungent—stifling, right under his nose. One couple in particular draws his attention with their giggling when they stop near him along the path. The mess of a shared ice cream has occupied them enough to pause their stroll. Smiling with their tongues out, heads bowed together, they try to lick it faster than it can drip down the cone and onto their fingers. Paul’s heart drops like a scoop that has fallen entirely off the cone. He looks away and searches for Martha among the open grass.
This effort to ground himself in reality now leaves him more adrift than ever. Lately it’s becoming more and more evident that his thoughts need an anchor. Too often they’re tossed by tides of doubt, beached onto islands of despair or ennui. To sink or swim is an oversimplification that never considers an oft overlooked threat: to be stranded. He can try all day to outrun the consequences of a drunken mistake, but he can’t outrun the feelings at the root of it.
His twenties were a turnstile for unserious flings while his thirties matured into a fixation on his career. At the dawn of his forties he can already feel the crick in his neck from a life spent looking back. Should he have settled down with his teenage sweetheart like most of his schoolmates did? What would life look like had he stayed with that London artist and his bohemian scene? Every year he holds out for The One. He holds out for that someone who will make the lost time worth it. And every year the blood-stained hands of the clock within his heart rust more and more.
With that acute empathy natural to dogs, Martha comes prancing and panting towards him when he needs her most. “Ready, girl?” he asks, picking pieces of a chewed stick from her fur.
Around two in the afternoon, they return home to the light on his answering machine flashing. Like a bad dream, he can practically hear the dozens of strangers who found his number, their fabricated voices speaking over one another for their own shot at love. Minutely, he shakes his head, unraveling black ribbons of tape in his mind.
Sitting on the edge of his bed, he presses play and bites the edge of his nail as the answering machine beeps:
Yeah, this is John again—the bloke who just called. Not sure what happened there, but maybe I have got the wrong number after all? In that case just ignore this message, I guess. I’d consider phonin’ the paper, though, ‘cos some sexy single is out there usin’ yer number. But if that was you I was speakin’ to, and you’d be interested in dinner or something—piña coladas, gettin’ caught in the rain…y’know, that whole thing?—then give us a call back.
It was the message left after their abrupt disconnection this morning. Now that some time has passed, that familiar voice which initially incited panic, brings a faint smile to Paul’s lips. It lingers yet at the irony of a suggestion to call the editors, and the fact that this stranger makes a wiser soothsayer than his weekly horoscope. He should call him back with the number left at the end of his message, if only to thank him for drawing his attention to something that could have unwittingly persisted for weeks. But he thinks it better to end their game of phone tag here.
Admittedly, Paul does wonder: What does the man who would ask for a date from the brief description in a paper alone even look like? Is he an absolute mongrel with limited success in the real world? Paul can’t say that this John bloke sounds ugly, as daft a thought as that may be. His voice was pleasant and enveloping, like new carpet on bare feet.
In the silence following John’s voice, he realizes no other messages have played. The machine has turned off and the red light has disappeared. With a hum of surprise he presses play again to double-check, only for John to reintroduce himself. The taut line of his shoulders loosens in growing relief.
“Well then,” he mutters to himself, satisfied enough. His steps lighter now, he heads to the kitchen to prepare lunch for Martha and himself.
* * *
The irony isn’t lost on him. He drunkenly bore his soul for the attention of potential suitors only to recoil from the first interested caller, and now he has the audacity to find offense in the vacant phone line. In four hours it hasn’t rang once. The calm that its silence afforded him earlier has given way to a curious and unexpected feeling—something between insulting and disappointment. Rejection has filled the silence, and loudly.
He retrieves the paper from the bin (out of sight, out of mind had been his solution after too many compulsory glances in passing) and scrutinizes his submission with fresh eyes. He’d made a career out of knowing how to advertise, albeit with a musical hook. Apart from submitting it at all, where did he go wrong? What was scaring off anymore takers?
Should he have been more superficial and placed greater emphasis on his looks? Comparing his own to the other ads in the column offers no insight, with some emphasizing their aesthetics more than him, and others barely at all. And if he insisted on being humble, it wouldn’t have killed him to sprinkle some personality in there. He mentioned his charm yet utilized none of it. So desperate and bland. If ever there was such a thing as being too honest, he’d managed it. Wine sometimes leaves him sad and horny, and in the same shade of burgundy it bled into his words that night. Hell, he wouldn’t call himself either.
The humor is absent because there’s nothing funny about this empty space in his life. And a man should be as realistic about love as he is optimistic. If that means settling for what comes his way—casual or consuming—he’ll take it. Even sloshed beyond reason, he’d felt the urge to be forthcoming about his expectations. Approaching the midline of his life, he has less privilege to be choosy; selectivity is a luxury of youth.
Suddenly, the deciphering of his love life begins to feel like another crossword with higher stakes but lower sense of accomplishment. With a sigh he returns the paper to the bin.
In a less frenzied recreation of the morning, he’s compelled to the message on his machine again. He hasn’t heard another voice today—directed specifically to him—that didn’t come from the telly or strangers in conversation at the park. Come to think of it, John is the only person to whom he’s spoken today. What harm was there in one more playback of his one-sided chat?
His cheeky “Escape Song” quip earns a small smile this time. God forbid he were to ever attempt a rewrite, but he can at least take some notes from John’s message and its emulation of a pitch for the mystery bachelor on The Dating Game. He sounds unusually natural and comfortable to be phoning a stranger for something romantic—sexual, even. Is he innately charismatic or has he done this enough times that it’s muscle memory? Thinking about it now, how did he even guess that men were eligible candidates? Had he taken a gamble or was there something in Paul’s writing, unbeknownst to himself, which clued him in?
Impulsively, Paul replays the message a third time. When John begins to repeat his phone number again, he grabs a pen and jots it into the pad on his bedside table. He makes no decision one way or the other what he’ll do with it yet. For now, it remains on the page like a dream scrawled in the middle of the night to be analyzed later.
* * *
For someone who checks their horoscope every week (albeit ironically), he never puts any genuine faith in the atmosphere and its power over his life. Even when it predicts him a fool—and accurately so—he’s more than capable of being one without cosmic intervention. That being said, there’s a certain magic in twilight. There’s evidence enough in its being the very troublemaker that got him into such a strange predicament; but then there’s something more emotionally charged. He senses it every time the sun sets, and with it the distant chill that gathers in his chest. Climbing into a cold bed at night, the chill is at its iciest. A freezing pain.
As he shovels out Martha’s kibble for her dinner, he realizes that he’ll be off to bed soon. He still has to dig through the pantry for something to eat himself. Naturally, it’ll be something quick and effortless—a meal for one. He’ll pick through it in silence while he clicks around for some mindless distraction on telly. All the while, that crystal of frost in his chest will be branching and branching itself like stalactites; and he’ll never give it a name, because that would mean giving it power. He’ll crawl into bed with it—sleep with it, but he’ll never know its name.
A faint whimper snaps him back into the present. Martha shuffles on her feet as she stares with withering patience at him and the food balanced on the scooper. “Sorry, ol’ girl,” he apologizes, and leaves her waiting no longer.
This same mentality sends him straight to his bedroom and the open notebook. He draws a deep breath and scratches a hand through his hair. He wants to contemplate it no longer. He assumes the worst of it is over anyway. Just because he has no recollection of writing the bloody thing doesn’t mean he has to maintain his ignorance now. What has he got to lose that isn’t already missing?
He dials.
He nibbles on his lower lip while it rings. A similar wave of emotions sweeps over him like every other hour of the day; anxiety seizes the muscles in his neck before the lack of reception deflates him like a balloon. After the fourth ring he considers hanging up. He waited too late and missed his opportunity. Reluctantly, he removes the phone an inch from his ear to hang up when the other line connects.
“Yeah?”
All at once he has no idea what to say. Something as insignificant as bypassing a proper “hello” tips him just off-center enough to feel awkward and insecure. It reminds him that he doesn’t know this person. He only knows he turned his world so upside down during breakfast that it somehow seems all too logical to resume at night what they began this morning.
“This is Paul,” he says, and hopes John hasn’t already forgotten they spoke at all. “From the ad.”
“Oh.” His voice carries a note of surprise, then assumes that natural charm. “Hello again, Paul from the ad.”
“Hi,” he chuckles apprehensively. “Listen, I—I know it’s late an’ all, but I just got your message from this morning. Some…things came up, but anyway, I thought I’d take you up on that offer.”
“Ah, I see what this is,” John says, drawing the words out like he’s onto him. “I’m the slim pickin’s, am I?”
Luckily, he doesn’t sound offended, which encourages Paul to be honest with him in return. “No, actually you’re the only one who called.”
He laughs, punchy but endearing. “Ah, so just the only option then.”
“The only one with good taste, I’d say.”
“S’alright, no need to be polite. I appreciate the honesty.”
Shrugging, Paul smiles modestly. “I’m trying something new.”
Their effortless banter sets him at ease. If they can make two minutes of a phone call amicable without having even scratched the surface of one another’s lives, surely they can last an entire date. Fuck…he’s about to plan a date.
“Sounds like the pressure’s on to show you a nice time now, though.” Like he’s been faced with a dilemma, John weighs their options with great significance: “Now, piña coladas we can do anytime, but if yer lookin’ to get caught in the rain, we’ll have to monitor the weather very carefully first.”
“Why don’t we just start with dinner first?”
“I’m free tonight,” he answers seriously, to which Paul blinks in surprise.
“Oh.”
“Does that not work for you?”
The roll of his stomach has him shuffling on his feet. “I mean, y’know, it doesn’t not work.”
“Doesn’t not work?” John repeats with a smile in his voice.
“It’s sooner than I expected, I guess, but—no, yeah, I can do tonight.”
He shoots a nervous glance to his wardrobe as if he suddenly owns no clothes. Did things usually move this fast in the Lonely Hearts world?
“No time like the present,” John declares. “How do you like Italian?”
“Never had one, but the food’s good.”
“Sorry to say I’m not Italian meself. S’that a deal-breaker?”
He sighs in mock disappointment, and says, “I’ll try to look past it,” but inwardly, he’s trying to adjust to the spontaneity of it all.
They decide on a restaurant off North John St. called Il Capriccio. Paul writes the name and address in his notebook beneath John’s number and tears it out. Agreeing to meet at eight o’clock allows him just enough time to make himself presentable and too little time to back out, which is precisely what he needs.
Before they hang up, John asks, “Who should I be lookin’ for? Aside from attractive, what do you look like?”
“Er, well….” He glances down at himself like he needs a reminder, but the pyjama bottoms and old t-shirt do him no favors. “I’ve got short dark hair, brown eyes. Thin and clean-shaven. Tall enough, I think.” Shrugging, he offers unhelpfully, “Dunno what else there is, really.”
“What’re you wearing?” he asks with call-girl sultriness.
“A black shirt,” Paul decides. “I could wear a nametag if it helps.”
“No need, you’ve painted a perfect picture.”
“What about you then?”
“Guess you’ll have to find out.”
Then John ends the call as abruptly as he began it.
For a second Paul stands dumbstruck, albeit amused, with phone in hand. Strangely, it feels like they’ve made long-distance calls in past lives that have found a clear connection again. Hopping into the shower, he replays their conversation over the spray of the water. It feels seedy of him to be fixating on this mystery man so intensely while naked—seedy, but not untempting. He’s never gone on a blind date before, and his mind tries to construct a visual for him like piecing together magazine cut-outs. As flirtatious as John’s suspense is, it also worries him to commit to a voice alone.
With thirty minutes to spare he dabs on some cologne and dresses into something casual but appropriate: the distinguishing black polo shirt and a pair of khaki chinos. He tousles Martha’s wiry fur, kisses the top of her head, and assures her he’ll be back soon. As an afterthought, he mutters, “Maybe sooner than you think if this goes to shit,” then slips out the door.