Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

I am VERY INTENSE!

The voice of experience is instantly recognizable. Dorothea Salo resonated with Jeff Ward’s realization that the same intensity that makes him a “natural scholar” also makes him a “natural asshole.” She responded by explaining that she is not an intense person (though she is often mistaken for one). She outlined certain characteristics of the intense personality, most of which I exhibit (though I can’t, of course, speak for Jeff) then offered some practical tips for maintaining a successful relationship between an intense person and his or her non-intense partner. Dorothea concluded her post by answering my rueful question about whether relationships between people with roughly the same “intensity coefficient” will be more successful than those between couples whose intensities are drastically out of balance:

Jonathon, for what it’s worth, I do not think that two high-intensity people should try to make a go of it unless their avocations dovetail nearly precisely. If not, they will grow apart, because neither of them will put in the effort to pull together. Two low-intensity people are likely to be fine.

And a highly intense person can be happy with a not-intense person, and vice versa. As I said, it’s tough, but it’s manageable. I have found the rewards worth it.

This advice matches my own experience in that my relationships with non-intense women have lasted a lot longer than those I’ve had with intense women—although I can lay claim to plenty of unsuccessful relationships with intense and non-intense women alike. But Dorothea’s post did bring to mind a relationship that foundered on the issue of intensity.

It started like this. In late 1994, at the height of the short-lived CD-ROM boom, I was working as a multimedia producer when my boss—sensing the growing importance of the Net—decided to establish a corporate Web site. Responsibility for building the site fell largely on me and H, the programmer with whom I worked most closely.

I’d almost convinced myself that I liked being a producer, but I realize now that deep in my heart I didn’t truly enjoy it. When you’ve spent most your life photographing or writing, supervising other creative people can be a miserable substitute. Heaving a sigh of relief, I poured all my pent-up energy into learning about HTML, GIFs, and JPEGs.

H and I worked like Trojans for a couple of months and, once the site was up and running, decided to add personal pages. H showed me the page he’d designed. It had pictures and descriptions of himself and everything he loved: his wife, their cat, his car.

We thought it would be neat if the structure of my page mirrored his. But as I sat down to make my page, I realized I was in trouble: I had a cat but no car, no wife, and—though I’d been a photographer for nearly twenty years—hardly any pictures of myself.

I managed to scrape up a snapshot from the period I lived in Japan. I was visiting the the sister of one of my Japanese teachers and she took this picture of me (in the leather jacket) with her husband and two daughters in front of their apartment block at Saitama in northern Tokyo.

She took lots of other pictures too but I liked this one best. In it I am hardly recognizable.

Pudding was originally my parent’s cat; she’d belonged to someone a few houses away before she inveigled her way into their lives. My mother, hoping to travel, didn’t want a pet but my father secretly fed Pudding for three months until mum relented. After my father died, my mother continued to care for Pudding, even though, as she confessed to me: “I like her but I don’t love her.”

I’d always been fond of Pudding and so, when I bought a house, she moved in too. Thinking she was the prettiest little cat, I was astonished when a friend looked at her and said: “Mate, you can’t possibly think that’s an attractive cat!” Well, I always thought she was. Sadly, I had to have her put down a couple of days ago, after the cancer for which she’d had surgery nearly a year ago had started to spread. She was an affectionate little cat, and she had a sweet nature. I’m lucky to have had her.

For H’s car, I decided to substitute my PowerBook, since each catered to our need to tinker with machines.

It’s strange, years later, to look at this artless—and unintentionally revealing—still life: the PowerBook 180 (self-reflexively displaying the Web page under construction) flanked by Genji Monogatari, a stack of CD-ROMs (one about Ozu on top of the pile), a Japanese-English dictionary, magnifier, pen, and mug of coffee.

My life in a stolen moment, to quote the immortal Bob. How little it’s changed.

No wife? No problem. I borrowed Itami Juzo’s wife, Miyamoto Nobuko, star of his comedy A Taxing Woman. Why? Because I’ve always been strongly attracted to women who:

• are intelligent;
• have a sense of humour;
• wear glasses (see item one);
• are Japanese;
• have red hair and/or freckles.

Miyamoto Nobuko represented my ideal: the kind of woman I wanted to be married to. Perhaps the red in her hair owes a lot to the late afternoon sun but as I asked on the Web page, “Hey, who’s perfect?” I uploaded the files to our server and went back to the story I was writing in my spare time.

Around Easter in 1995, quite out of the blue, I received an e-mail from an old friend who was living and working in Lisbon. She’d somehow stumbled across my Web page and sent a message from a colleague’s computer. I replied on Good Friday and went off to visit some friends who lived on an island north of Sydney.

On my return, there was another e-mail—from the colleague, a Brazilian woman. Her name was Lauana.

Within a week we were exchanging e-mail messages of extraordinary intimacy, within a fortnight this virtual relationship had become intensely sexual, and within a month faxes and phone calls were adding fuel to the flames. English was not her native language so she spelt phonetically. In her e-mails I could hear the lovely South American cadence of her voice.

We talked endlessly about moving the relationship into the real world but couldn’t decide where. I suggested Phnom Penh or Vientiane but she, living in Europe, preferred Prague. The time difference meant that our lives were totally out of sync. She would wake me to chat at 3:00am. I would drift back to sleep, wake up and stagger into work, switch on my computer, check my mail, find two or three messages from her, write a quick reply, then try to do my job.

At that time I was reading VOX, the hilarious Nicholson Baker novel about telephone sex. I airmailed a copy to Lauana. She sent me a picture of herself.

We drove each other crazy. Minor issues of emphasis or tone in an e-mail led to massive misunderstandings and flurries of conciliatory messages. I longed for the unspoken understanding and emotional restraint that I’d shared with my Japanese girlfriends.

My phone bill skyrocketed. To save on international phone calls, we communicated via IRC. Thank God the company was paying for my Internet access.

I found myself being snappy with H although we had worked together for over two years—often under crushing pressure of deadlines—without a single disagreement. He behaved towards me with more grace and tolerance than I deserved.

My friends, when I talked about the relationship, took it as further (superfluous) evidence of my craziness. Then, one day, out of the blue, a casual acquaintance said: “You’ll never guess what’s happened to me. I’ve fallen in love with someone on the Internet.”

Tell me about it, I thought.

Eventually it blew up in our faces. A virtual relationship was—paradoxically—simply too intense. People told me this wasn’t a real relationship but that’s not how it felt. At the time, it seemed absolutely real. As real as the lilting tone of her voice, as real as the lingerie on her bed.

A year or so later, reading through the hundreds of e-mails we’d sent, I came across one of her first, in which she’d predicted exactly what would happen.

For a brief time, we continued exchanging e-mails, though the intimacy was gone. Until one day I mentioned that, although we’d never met, I regarded her as affectionately as any other lover. Lauana immediately wrote to rebuke me.

There’d been no intimacy between us, she said. I didn’t know her smell, nor how she kissed. I’d never “toched” her. In fact, Lauana told me, I hardly knew her at all. She was right of course. I hadn’t loved her. I’d been captivated by a technology that fostered a transient—and ultimately false—sense of intimacy. Perhaps our three month “love affair” had been, at best, a virtual one-night-stand.

The day after I received that final e-mail, I was sitting at my workstation, fussing with a page on the corporate site, when H suddenly looked across at me and said: “It’s nice to have you back.”

“It’s nice to be back,” I replied and we each returned to our screens.

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