Mr. Right Is Dead: Stories

by Rona Jaffe

Of course, women who are influenced a great deal by men are generally influenced somewhat by everybody, even children and other women, which may be one of the reasons Melba latched on to me as a special friend. She needed someone who was a Nice Girl but totally amenable, and because I had gone to college she seemed to get the idea I was an intellectual.

I felt tired and lonely and embarrassed—I had done everything I had been brought up not to do, except for the one thing that would have made it all right, and there was no way to communicate with these people or make them see that I was a person or even that they were persons, that you didn’t have to play a game with rules every night, that some nights you could just exist. They had never known any other way.

but I also know that the end result makes her feel very secure, and so I am jealous of her. I am jealous of her for being able to be happy with so little.

Life isn’t a process of change, it’s just a series of little decisions, so small, most of them, that you don’t even notice when you’re making them; only when you discover the kind of person you have become.

saw other people in my acting class with far less talent than I had getting good parts (or isn’t that what we always think, that they have less talent than we do?). I went to the doctor, I took my nice sleeping pills, I smoked too much, and I hated everybody.

How many of us, loved after someone’s fashion, never quite believe it, or believe it but wish it was more?

She had all that and more. She had first love and sorrow, she had power and humiliation, she had lies and the deepest kind of frightening truth. For she saw into the secret places of men’s dreams, the dreams that made them forever mortal and forever vulnerable; and so, was she not in a way a banker of something far more precious than money?

Social graces are dead, shyness is dead, chivalry is dead, tact is dead, game playing is dead, necking is dead, Mr. Right is dead, manners are dead, prudence is dead, expectations of any kind are dead. Only the moment lives. The moment is not an investment, it is an entity.

“No one can ever love me enough” means something entirely different depending on who says it, and who to, and therefore it doesn’t mean anything at all.

“That’s the story of my life,” she said. “You say hello and they disappear.”

Love was investigation, search, indiscretion, stimulation, or even, occasionally, embarrassing boredom, but never what she wanted it to be.

This life was not restful; she burned from within, but she looked pale, and she was not pretty.

This burning within the soul does not make a princess of anyone, despite romantic notions to the contrary; the eyes grow dull from gazing inward at the holocaust.

For the first time, the enormity of her loneliness overwhelmed her, and she clenched her fists against her eyes, shuddering, and wept without tears. Useless and lonely, lonely, lonely … dulled with uselessness and habit, waiting without anticipation.

it was four o’clock, too late to begin an expedition in the stores because the salesgirls would be tired and nasty, the customers pushing anxiously to get home with their bundles. She had not even gone out for the newspapers, but it seemed too difficult an effort. She felt detached.

It seemed enormously fair that life should be so unjust, that the wrong person should always suffer for the wrong crime instead of the one he had committed. Those guilty of omission shall be punished, those guilty of commission shall go free.

It was twilight, the true moment when the day is divided in two. Noon does not count as a division, nor does midnight; they are only hours of the clock. But twilight separates the lonely from the loved. The lonely leave their busy offices and go away from people, the loved finish their work and prepare to be with their families or sweethearts.

I was less conscious of the loss than I was of what replaced it, a ferocious need to be loved.

All lovers make near-fatal mistakes in their relationships; it is part of the pleasure of love, illicit or not, to tempt providence.

“Don’t you want a real home?” I did, and I wanted something more, something elusive but wonderful, which I felt must surely be beyond the next corner, or at the next party, or on the threshold of our front door tomorrow night.… It had to be, or I felt I would disappear.

‘Wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye; That’s all we shall know for truth before we grow old and die.’”

What more does he want from me? I can’t be perfect, I need love, I can’t help that. Why can’t he love me enough to leave her? What’s wrong with me that he can’t love me enough to choose me over someone he doesn’t love at all?”

This is real love: planning a life together, being able to help someone, making someone feel alive for the first time.

and I wondered if life would at last be kind to her, she who could never be kind to herself.