The Aftermath of Valentine's Day
A few days after Valentine’s Day, I found a gift in my pigeonhole at the Lodge. It was a paperback copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. I looked at the half-title page. There was an inscription from K.P. “My dearest, Lynn, when I saw your red roses outside my door, my heart . . .” What roses? I had not left any roses for K.P. When Victor came over that evening, I asked him if he knew anything about the roses. He said that there was a woman at Queen Elizabeth House who had a crush on K.P. So, we concluded that she must have left the roses. I felt sorry that her gift had been attributed to me.
The problem that I faced was: What do you do when someone loves you, but you do not feel the same way about them?
This was not a new problem for me. In fifth grade, a boy in my class had sent me a large, inappropriate Valentine that was clearly designed to express adult love. It started out, “Darling, I love you far more than you know . . .” His proclamation of love for me brought out additional confessions of love from four other boys in the class. To ward off the attention of the five boys during recess, I gathered a group of girlfriends to surround me on the playground. And just to make my position clear, I wore a large badge that said “I hate boys.” To respond to love with hate is not right. I feel bad about that now. Fortunately, those boys eventually found love and ended up married.
In junior high and high school, I found a solution to the problem—I always had a boyfriend. But as soon as I went to college at Michigan State, leaving my high school boyfriend behind, the problem returned. I started spending time with a friend of my roommate. One day he wrote on a coffee-stirrer stick, “You are beautiful, my friend.” This was followed by a confession. “I am falling in love with you, and I don’t know what to do.” Since he did not know what to do, I took the initiative and ended our friendship as gently as possible and refused to see him again. I was getting a little better at handling the situation. He too eventually found someone else and got married.
I reunited with my high school sweetheart at Indiana University and we got engaged. But unlike before, this did not stop one of my coworkers from falling in love with me. I quit that job. But he did not give up. On Valentine’s Day, I received a stunning bouquet of roses and baby’s breath with an unsigned card. When my fiancé came over, I thanked him for the flowers. He was surprised, then furious. He had not sent the flowers. Suddenly, his trust in me was irrevocably destroyed and he left, which I assume was the intention of the coworker who sent the flowers. The problem of “being loved by someone that you do not feel the same about” had taken on a darker aspect. This situation of him pursuing me and my resisting continued for three years. One day, I was walking down 10th Street in Bloomington, Indiana, when he pulled up in his sports car and jumped out. He had a banana cream pie in his hand, which he threw in my face. I was shocked and embarrassed as I wiped the pie out of my eyes. He sped off and that was the end. I can laugh now. Honestly, I am not making any of this up.
I didn’t really need the copy of Ulysses. For my dissertation, I had to use the Hans Gabler et al. edition of Ulysses, which had corrected more than 5,000 textual errors in previous editions. Sound scholarship has to be based on the most authoritative version of the text. The Gabler edition was available at the Bodleian Library and could not be checked out. So, it would be useful to have the paperback version to mark-up. I decided to keep it.
What could I do about K.P.? I could not use the strategy of having a boyfriend because Victor and I had agreed to keep our relationship a secret. I could refuse to see him because he was married, but I was already feeling very bad about how I had treated my other married friend at the Lamb & Flag. So, I decided that I would go out with K.P. once a week to a public place and that our relationship would be strictly a friendship and nothing more. I hoped that in time his feelings of love would go away.
Afternoon Tea at the Randolph Hotel
One of the things on my Oxford Bucket List was to have Afternoon Tea at the 5-star Randolph Hotel on Beaumont Street, across from the Ashmolean Museum. The hotel was built in 1864 in the Victorian Gothic style and the cast of Inspector Morse stayed there during the filming of an episode in 1987. They were not around on the day that K.P. and I had tea there.
In fact, nobody was around. We were seated in the elegant drawing room, where two elderly ladies were having tea on the far side of the room. Perhaps Afternoon Tea was really just an American tourist activity, and Oxford in mid-February had few tourists. Maybe it was the price, which is £40 per person in today’s prices, or maybe it was because it was a weekday during business hours.
We chose Earl Grey tea. The waitress brought an ornate three-tier tray with white paper doilies. On the bottom tray, there were crustless sandwiches of cucumber and crème fraiche, smoked salmon and cream cheese, and egg salad and cress in both white and brown bread. On the middle tray, there were plain and fruit scones, and on the top tray there were some fancy Battenberg cakes and jam tarts. There were dishes of clotted cream and jam for the scones.
K.P. was at ease. He had come from London where he had been interviewing some members of Parliament. I did not know what to say to him. I was neither interested in politics nor impressed by his connections to important people. So, I said nothing and just listened to him. This left me as a blank slate, which was ideal for him. He projected an image onto me that bore no resemblance to who I was—and this was the woman he was in love with. When I tried to contradict the image, he said that he could see tremendous potential in me that had not been realized. What if he was right? Should I allow him to bring out my potential or shape me into something better than I was? Was I Eliza Doolittle, the flower girl in My Fair Lady, and he Henry Higgins? I wondered if I had put the cream and jam on my scone in the correct order.
I decided no. Whoever I was had to come from me, from deep inside, and not be constructed or limited by someone else’s image.
When I was in second grade, I gave a heart shaped box of Valentine chocolates to a girl named Linda. After accepting the chocolates and putting them aside, she promptly slapped me on the face. Hard. I had no clue what as going on, and was totally dumbfounded......