Luuk and Olivia

 

There was a small altercation in their relationship when Olivia discovered that Luuk had been writing an erotic novel online with a woman she did not know from a foreign country somewhere in Europe. Three chapters had been produced and put on Luuk's blog and the woman had published them also online elsewhere. Luuk had quietly started a smaller, hidden section on his main blog. There it was open to the world, a named collaboration between Luuk and this woman. There were three chapters staring out at her from the screen; Luuk had said nothing to her about it. Well is it difficult to say to your wife “By the way darling, I am going to be directly communicating in an erotic way with another woman, you don't mind do you ?”.

Olivia was very confused: did now know how to respond. How did Luuk get to the stage with a woman online where they wrote erotic stories together? Her mind went overtime trying to work out the many different ways this could have happened. They must have had online discussions, you don't just talk to an unknown person online and then just say “Hey! How about we write an erotic story together!”. How do you start a conversation like that: there had to have been background discussions, online liaisons, toing and froing, exchange of emails containing the text and exchange of ideas and ...well what else? Was he getting his rocks off on this? Luuk was supposed to be her husband, her lover – would he walk up to someone, anyone, a stranger in the street and say “Hello let's write an erotic story together!”. No that wouldn't happen. So what makes it any different or easier online. What sort of private life did he have here? She felt small, ignored and insignificant; her husband was treating her as if she didn't exist and had no value to him; she didn't matter.

Olivia felt the need to talk to Luuk  about it. But he said it was nothing, and the whole thing had turned into a disaster as he had to write most of it himself because his writing partner could speak hardly any English and sent her contribution in French. He had nothing else to add. That was it. He was insensitive to her feelings and spoke in a matter of fact way way, dismissing the whole thing as trivial and insignificant. This didn't seem enough explanation to her. If the woman couldn't speak much English how could the conversation between them have ever got to the stage where they were discussing sex together. The whole matter was floating in an empty pit of unanswered questions that he simply dismissed as easily as he hid his writing. Olivia put it to the back of her mind. Their real life relationship was fine, harmonious and stable and she really loved him: they had great times together. She would have been stupid to ruin this for the sake of an invisible liaison tentatively floating over the empty, anonymous darkness of the internet which she didn't truly know anything about at all. The matter died down but she could not help but sometimes taking a private look back on screen on what he had done. The questions were still there unanswered, the doubts did not go away, and the knife was still cutting her; it hurt and she tried, she really tried, but she could not forget.

Olivia wanted to fill her time more creatively so she bought a keyboard. She had learned a little music at school and had played violin in an orchestra and taken exams which she had passed with some merit. She had asked for piano lessons as well but the school would not give these to her as she had already had free violin lessons and her parents then would have definitely not paid for more. So now she had more time on her hands it seemed a good time to have a go. The keyboard and stool came recommended from Amazon and she stocked up on tutorial manuals, scale manuscripts, song scores and Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music Grade 1 exam papers. It was fun to start with, notes on the treble staff with the right hand above middle c were easy as she knew this notation from playing the violin, but the bass staff played below middle C was a lot harder. She didn't know these notes at all; they had different names on the manuscript and went on different lines to those above middle C; it was hard to get her right hand to do one thing while her left hand had to do something differently reading off the notes below middle C which she didn't know. Her brain just didn't work like this. Instead of structured and stepped daily practice she played what and when she felt like doing which wasn't very often. Her enthusiasm fell exponentially.

With Luuk invariable sitting at the table in his own world, tapping away at his keyboard and her playing, shut away within her earphones she felt isolated. She didn't want Luuk to hear her mistakes and the keyboard idea drifted downhill. The furthest she got was managing the melody of Imagine with the right hand and filling in the bass notes with the left hand when she could, and it wasn't always successful, maybe hardly ever; so she never played openly without head phones except for once when Luuk seemed interested and she played an AMRSM Grade One piece for him, right hand only, and it wasn't perfect so she went red in the face. But as he remarked, he couldn't do it all and was amazed that she could play even a little. His remark boosted her ego somewhat but she still felt a little bruised. All Olivia wanted to do was love Luuk and impress him, present an interesting image, intrigue him. She wanted his love back; his opinion was important to her because she loved him so much, so very much, a precious love.

Her need to impress him inspired her to write again. A few years ago she had written some short pieces and put them on some sharing sites, but the sites had closed down and a continual flow of successive computer breakdowns and replacements had meant that they had disappeared into the clouds and just lay gently in her memory. So she started again, writing short stories and saved them on a blogger site. If she wrote again perhaps she would impress Luuk a little and he would take her more seriously. The tally of her page views gradually climbed so at least some people had liked it she quietly noted, congratulating herself; she popped an internal champagne bottle. Luuk was a willing editor, they used to edit each other's work and this nurtured a mutual ambience; Luuk and Olivia the writing team, Luuk and Olivia the editing team, Luuk and Olivia the entertainers. It felt good to be together in this way.

One black, cold, windy January night they were lying in bed. She lay flat and stared up at the ceiling watching the moving shapes of the spirits moving round, the ouija dances, floating her imagination round with them. She could hear the trees bending violently and was anxious for the safety of the garden fence; she heard it creaking. Last year it had cracked in the strong gusts and it had cost over a hundred pounds to repair it. Her mind was going round and round in circles about everything under the sun and moon; she lived through past situations, this time acting them out in a different way where she was in total control of the outcome so that she came out on top, not on the bottom as before. She said the right thing, did the right action; she was successful, not like in real life. In her head she remembered and talked through past conversations, in hindsight was able to say the right thing. She had an answer to all the bullies, to all the conversations that went wrong. Why couldn't she have said it at the time? It was too late now, far too late. Blackness was everywhere.

Neither of them could sleep. It was two o'clock in the morning. Luuk sat up in bed and put on the light hanging from the ceiling. He knew she was awake because of her tossing and turning in the sheets. They had become completely tangled. He started talking just to make sure she was really awake and suggested that they wrote a story together, a joint collaboration. He had been thinking about it for a long time, he said, and he was just putting out feelers to see her reaction. He didn't sound very enthusiastic; it was just a matter of fact thing of not much importance and little consequence, they could do it slowly and gradually. It could be, perhaps, a novel alternating between two people and structured around how they communicated with each other, perhaps meeting regularly in a certain place, or letters or travelling on a bus, a train. Olivia could not have heard anything more wonderful. This was so good to hear; her heart soared to think that he thought enough of her to propose this invitation. Did he think that she was good enough that he would lower his standards to write with her? He said they should think over what to write about, there was no rush, just take it slowly at a relaxed pace and there would be inspiration when they least expected it.

Then she remembered his sexual writing companion. Was he suggesting this because he had a guilty conscience he wished to spread a cooling salve on? Maybe in hindsight he had felt that his dalliance had been wrong after all; that if he wrote something together with Olivia it would make everything alright again. She then suspected that there had been something between them after all, and that he was doing this to square his own guilty feelings. Now he had suggested this new collaboration it only reinforced her suspicions that something had been going on between him and the mystery woman.

She tested the water.

“Why don't we write about the relationship between a dominatrix in Rotterdam and a sub in Ipswich? The sub could have found her through the internet and we can describe their interaction by the letters they write to each other, you know, one writes, the other responds?”

“No, no, no” he relied, “I don't want to do that, it's not good to write about sex like that, it cuts down on what sort of readership you can get and where you can put the story when it's finished. I don't want to include sex. I just wanted a more ordinary, everyday sort of thing”. Olivia immediately thought that Luuk was showing his true colours; to write about sex with a stranger was okay, but not with his own wife. If writing about sex cuts down in the scope of the readership why did he write about sex with mystery woman but didn't want to write about it with her? Luuk was part of the adult world but he expected her not to be part of that world with him. She thought that he was considering her just as a child. She felt hurt, inadequate and insignificant.

It really hurts when you are deeply in love with someone when they do so much to make you doubt that love.