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Happily watching Peter Cushing go about his vampire-slaying business when I recieve a three a.m. phonecall. Not unusual, but unpleasant in the middle of Horror of Dracula. Oh, it's a lovely wonderful person, though, so I answer. It's not, though, it just says that on my phone's read-out, because it's their phone. Their boyfriend has taken that phone, apparently, and decided to call me to alternate between a tense whisper, an insipid whine, and yelling barking orders at me.
Our mutual acquaintance decided she didn't want to have sex, earlier tonight, apparently. The bf is, he assures me, owed sex. Because they're together, and they saw each other earlier in the evening and, well, he wants to have sex. It's this not having sex that's putting a strain on their relationship (whereas, I'd thought it was all the stuff she complains about when we talk - mostly that he admits to playing the good boyfriend because it's supposed to get her to capitulate to whatever he wants the rest of the time, that he's insulting and belittling - and excuses with a line about it being better to be in a relationship than not at her age).
I can practically hear cheap booze coming through the phone, but what the hay, he's stressed out and though we hardly know each other, I figure I'll stay on the line and try to talk some calm into him or something. He knows we talk a lot, his girlfriend and I, and apparently, the idea is that she listens to me, so I could get her to understand what it's like for this man, this man who has done everything he's supposed to and she just kicks him out for the night and says she's got work in the morning. I tell him 'nobody listens to me, they just humor me', which is at least partly true, and hope he's going to calm down any minute. Instead of calming down, he catches the 'nodody listens' and runs with it. I unintentionally validated some notion that women never pay attention to men, never listen, and have to be made to understand.
The conversation quickly turns to 'teaching' women, and how sometimes - and he's very clear he doesn't mean her - but just sometimes, some women, you just have to knock some sense into them. After about the seventh example of violent reeducation - always posed in a purely hypothetical sort of way - and beginning to suspect he's not really drunk so much as just in a very violent mood and patently not a good person, I sort of set the phone down on the desk and after a few deep breaths, pick it back up. Maybe, he says, he should go over to her place right now. They have a lot to work out.
As soon as he hangs up, I dial her number and after apologizing for waking her, suggest she not deal with him, tonight. I feel like an overprotective idiot telling a grown woman not to let her lover into her building, but I make the suggestion anyway. She's pissed at him, but she's pissed at me too, for presuming to call on her and warn her. So there's three of us pissed at me, and two pissed at him, with him being pissed at her. Argh!
She hung up on me. I missed the mid-section of the movie, and probably couldn't have got back into the swing of it, anyway. I'm going to spend several hours now, feeling very paranoid, being alternately upset at myself for not handling it better, upset for presuming I could 'handle it' or that it's really any of my business, and worried something thoroughly unpleasant is going to occur if she lets him inside tonight to work out their issues. As I'm halfway across the country, I'm thinking of asking a mutual friend to check on her, tomorrow, but... it's not really any of my business and the only thing it can do is involve someone else in the mess and give me some small closure, knowing if my friend's alright or not - a selfish, busybody thing to do, then. |
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