Claude

Portrait of a man

Photo by Drew Stock on Unsplash

“There wasn’t much to him,” as my granny would say about a man lacking any particular definition. Those who abandoned their wives and children… she knew that type especially well. She married and annulled her vows twice in an era when doing so branded you with the shame of the scarlet letter D – divorcee.

I wonder what she would’ve thought about some of the men I went on dates with – “too big for their britches” probably. I, however, see the rough-textured hues of their virtues and vices intermixed. None of us can be summed up as all good or all bad.

Claude was an investment banker. I never figured out how he ended up with such a white bread first name when his skin was nut brown from Dubai. I took the opportunity to choose a dark, intimate Italian restaurant in Manhattan. I’d revealed my naiveté by suggesting a 7:30 pm reservation, not yet understanding that junior associates work about 120+ hours a week and often get off past midnight.

I sat down at the white tablecloth with napkin in lap punctually at 8:30 pm. He was late.

Before becoming an economic hitman, Claude had been a mercenary. He was not the first of his kind to spill his secrets to me.

$400k didn’t seem like much to him for the kind of grueling work – the hours, the heat, the destruction, but most of all how senseless and wasteful some part of him must’ve known it was. I wondered how much he pondered the deep meaning of what he was paid to do or if the dollar signs penetrated fully to the back of his retinas. Did the illusion ever crack and let the light through?

I sort of doubted it. He didn’t call himself a mercenary, merely a government contractor. That squares out all the jagged spurs so neatly, doesn’t it?

But, he was deep in the veil. Even at $400k a year, he was a 3-leaf nothing in a field of 4-leaf clovers. I don’t even wanna know how much oppression and violence your family has suffered to pass that much pressure on to their son to perform. It felt like an imperative to him, not a choice. They passed on the dogma to him from birth – performance equals survival.

I didn’t get the impression he had ever been married. Maybe he’d been engaged. He was a gunshy mercenary.

Claude liked public sex. He explicitly stated he didn’t want to get arrested. I knew he wanted to have something of an edge with the possibility of real consequences. When you’ve lived in the density of illusion that long, it’s hard to get your dick hard after a while. You have to push till you hit real danger to get the endorphins to kick.

Men who are as wealthy as him find themselves in such a predicament. If you hire an escort you face the piranha head-on – the truth is this woman doesn’t desire you. She’s faking, even if the orgasms are real. Sure, she cleans herself up afterward and doesn’t call you to share her real tears. That’s what you’re paying for, as they say, you’re paying her to go away.

I don’t know if Claude could’ve brought himself to hire a pro. He seemed like the kind of guy who wanted to buy birthday cards even if he had no idea what to write in them.

I saw the little boy trapped inside. I always do.

If men such as Claude don’t hire an escort, they’re left with the dating marketplace, and I do mean marketplace in these cases especially. Afghanistan offered him nearly no choices in this department. Few women opt for the dick-measuring contest that is government contracting, no matter how high the compensation, and now he found himself in nearly the same situation in steel and glass towers – not a woman in sight who gets him.

It’s hard to find women who see you when you don’t see yourself.

All that cheap sex wears the letters off the keys of the keyboard eventually, and it gets hard to read the message – “I want to be loved for who I really am, not my money.”

Men like Claude hope without knowing they’re hoping for this – that a woman will see them more deeply than they can see themselves. It’s a painful shock to their core when the women who will date them are seeking house keys and private school tuition for their seed. How these men don’t see that they’ve painted themselves into this impossible corner boggles my mind. It’s so obvious to me.

Part of me wants to gather these men into a basket like kittens and find them better homes.

The hours of an investment banker grind, yes – but the relentless religion of capitalism tears down the soul brick by brick. I wonder when the last time Claude cried, probably when he was drunk. I hoped he at least had drinking buddies to console him when that time came once every few years.

One of his profile pictures on Feeld was him driving a yellow and black Lambo. I have to admit it was part of why I swiped on him. I had a hunger to drive a supercar through Midtown and perhaps enjoy the curves of Upstate. I didn’t want to use him, I wanted to see if he did, in fact, know how to have fun. If he did, it was not in evidence.

The toys, the money, the all-granite all-white and grey high-rise flat with very efficient elevators, the shoes that are uncomfortable even when they fit, and still he felt like the black sheep of his family.

We walked to Central Park after dinner. I never go on dates unless I am genuinely intrigued to get to know a man, and he was no exception. Anyway, he was still pouring out his crystalized dark honey in an awkward stream, so we lingered a while longer.

We passed under one of the magnificent stone bridges supported by arches underneath. It was October. I paused to sing him a song in that accidental cathedral to see if he could be enchanted out of his dogma into even one moment of true presence with the beauty of me. His mind was elsewhere – probably wondering what his chances were of a public fuck.

In the months following I got a few sporadic texts. The little boy lost inside wanted to wish me Happy Christmas, but then there were no more. I did not know how to reply then, and I do not know how now.