The Love Boat

This story contains references to nudity and sexual contact.

The woman sat alone in the bar that overlooked the harbor. She felt quiet and pensive as she recalled her path to this small Spanish island town. Several years before, she had been so excited to move to Germany--to learn the language while living in a multi-family German community. She was given an attic room in the old, renovated mansion. The ceiling was sloped, and the room was small enough to be warm and cozy in the winter. Her window overlooked the wooded parking area and driveway. She had arrived in the summertime, when the community ate meals together outside on the patio. There were the families with small children, the older couple, the single women, and then there was Tom. He was a rugged, spiritual, insightful German man who spoke English incredibly well. He joked when they had first met, so he was funny, too. The first time going out together, they went, in the late summer, to an outdoor restaurant. They had had glasses of wine and talked about this and that. She remembered asking him if she could smell his neck because he had on a fantastic cologne. She had breathed in that wonderful smell and touched his neck with her nose and mouth. Distracted by this intimate evening, he had left his reading glasses there and had never found them again. The woman sighed to remember that lovely memory because that was the beginning of a two-year journey together. She had thought, "This is the best friend I have been wishing for." That someone who would be her equal and who would share costs, dreams, and companionship.

Time passed, and it became apparent that Tom's dream had always been to buy a sailboat. He had been to Florida 30 years ago, and had experienced the kind of life that he had always wished to repeat. He had given up on that dream until, after they had been together for a year, he received an inheritance when his father suddenly died. The woman, herself, had been studying to be a teacher, and she thought she could teach anywhere a boat could go. And so, they started dreaming together about life on a boat.

Meanwhile, the woman thought about how slowly she had learned that Tom was more than a beautiful man. He often talked, especially after a few wines, about the women from his past. He carried a lot of weight inside from past relationships. He would talk about this woman and that woman, this Brazilian girl, and that American girl, this German model, and that childhood love. The woman recalled feeling extremely panicky when an old girlfriend came through a restaurant, and Tom wanted to introduce her to the ex-girlfriend. "Oh, what horror," she sat thinking about that moment. When that had happened, she had run to the bathroom and sat there rocking back and forth to release her dreadful feeling of being exposed to someone else who had slept with Tom. "Oh dear, that was horrible," she recalled.

During their courtship, she also began to see that he had many friends who were women, and they kept in touch. This bothered her, and she thought about her own tendency to like men's company more than women's, and so she tried out having casual relationships with men that she met, as he carried on with his friendships. She had wondered, "Is this what love is? Being intimate with each other, yet open to others around us, and each of us having other close friendships?" It turned out not to work for her to have casual men friends. She sighed. Even so, he had still kept in touch with his women friends.

Tom had the image of a very sexy man. He had a way with words that, as she recalled, made everything make sense. She had felt so fortunate to find a man who would listen to her struggles and bring sense out of them. It dawned on her that his women friends felt that, too.

Nevertheless, they moved forward with the dream of buying a boat. They went on different trips to Greece to look at boats for sale. They had fabulous adventures renting motor scooters and driving through the back roads, with their hair flying in the wind. They would eat Greek specialities in small villages, where the old men sat talking near the town square. They swam naked in the crystal clear waters.

Mixed in with these wonderful times were disconcerting moments, as well. Not only would Tom talk about past girlfriends at random moments, but he would get distracted by other women, sometimes flirting with the waitresses or his friends' girlfriends. He would also make comments about other women; their hairstyles, clothing, or vibes. The woman shook her head as she remembered wondering to herself, "Maybe he just has a lack of social cues and so talks to me as he would a male friend?" Anyway, Tom couldn't control his impulses.

The woman at the bar took a deep breath. It was on their final trip to Greece, where they had sat waiting for a ferry, that the most awful situation arose. They were at a restaurant having a drink when a beautiful, wealthy woman walked by with a small dog on a leash and sat down nearby at a table. Tom had become mesmerized and climbed up onto his chair, sitting on top of the chair back, so he could look over her to watch this other woman.

"Oh, that trip ended badly," the woman thought. In fact, she had escaped the situation and flown back to Germany alone. During that separation, the woman felt confused by her deep, humiliating pain, which was mixed alongside the happy, precious moments that they had had. "Well," the woman reflected, "somehow, we were both driven by an inability to sort it out, so we stayed together."

It was during the time of that short separation that Tom had found a boat on this island where she now sat. She had come here. She had driven all the way from Germany to this small Spanish island. They had moved in together onto the boat. And in that tight space, their differences could no longer be brushed aside. She had finally realized that it was not going to work. And so, here she sat at this bar, moody from the pain of realizing that she had been wrong about the most important thing in her life: loving someone who turned out to be too distracted to love her back.