[efficacy of romance] the whole is greater than the sum of the parts

Does this pic make you sigh or feel nauseous?

A recent correspondence suggests itself as a blog topic so here goes nothing.

I was recalling a time in Paris [where we'd impulsively flown for a few days] and we went to the far end of l'Avenue des Champs-Élysées, furthest from the Arc near le Place de la Concorde, on the right side of the road, down a side lane and on the 2nd floor, where we had a table overlooking the main road.

It was just a cafe but in France, 'just a cafe' can still be exquisite.

There are many images still in the head about that luncheon - one was the food [the sauces in particular] and another was the way the waitresses came over in our direction and 'hovered', clearly wanting to talk. I tried my French which made them giggle and so they used English. No one knew what anyone wanted to talk about but something had dragged them over.

Later, we analysed it and agreed that if I had gone in on my own, I would have been allocated a side table and virtually ignored. No one wants a single man who's not in his 20s. She would have had the chief waiter come on to her because she was a 'come-hither' type, my ex but that would have been all.

No, it was the combination of the two of us and the chemistry which was far more than the sum of the parts and at one point resulted in the owner himself bringing us a second complimentary liqueur. My ex then went all shy and it was not an act because she was genuinely very shy under the spotlight she'd worked so hard to be in.

Now there was clearly something the two of us had done or the way we'd acted or whatever but it definitely moved the French in that part of that cafe that day. Which made me think really hard, not about the chemistry between two people but the chemistry two people together might exude.


Cut to an episode I described in my book, which took place in Tenerife:

I hate dancing and disguise it with over-done moves but my ex was a good dancer. We noticed a Spaniard of about 70, a small, debonaire chap, over the other side of the dance floor and he had a slip of a girl of about 60 in his arms and they moved beautifully - my jaw dropped. Later, I saw him dancing with a 35 year old and my ex thought this woman must have been the other one's daughter [clear as mud?].

I decided there and then that I wanted to move like him and look like him the rest of my life. At one point, we found him suddenly near us and he first complimented me on the beauty of my girl [which I hardly thought was my doing] and then on my dancing, which was rubbish but we all love compliments, don't we?

All I'd done, I recall, was to try to emulate Gomez of the Addams family and the way he once took a rose and put it between his teeth [or was that Lurch?] and dropped into the three-step or whatever. That's what I did now, prancing up and down the floor and embarrassing her but he came up again later and spoke in faltering English.

The central theme of his comments was the combination of two people, both seen in terms of the other, not as two separate individuals on their own, doing their own thing.