Peter and Sharlie

“Hi Peter.”

“Hi Sharlie, how’s things?”

“Not good, I just can’t go on any more with my engagement to Denis.”

“Oh Sharlie, that’s terrible. Are you home? I’ll come round, this is not a conversation we should have over the phone.”

“Yes I’m home. But Peter it’s alright, it’s not your problem.”

“Well maybe so, but you’ve sort of become a mate. See you in 15.”

Denis and Peter had been mates for a while, and Peter had come to know Sharlie because of her relationship with Denis. This year he had got to know her a lot better because they were both ended up doing the same Majors. Exams on this particular day were over for most students, and those few still in the student accommodation were all in the ‘let your hair down’ mode. Clearly Sharlie was not part the frivolity because of her apparent relational despair. “I’ll just be a good listener,” thought Peter as he pulled up outside, she will just need a buddy right now, and not endless advice. While Peter and Denis were mates Peter was a little suspicious that Denis might have had some old-fashioned chauvinistic tendencies. He’d heard him say some things along the way that made him cringe a little but he had always kept his mouth shut because he saw it as none of his business. Peter had kept a kind of detached distance when Denis’ first marriage to Ingrid had failed. Out of fairness, and because he quite liked Ingrid, he’d tried to keep his friendship with both of them. But over time because of distance Ingrid had dropped off his radar. Also Denis had been pretty forthcoming in sharing everyone as to what he saw as her many faults. This of course made Peter and some others feel uncomfortable, and made contact with her a bit more troublesome. But now because of the shared classes with Sharlie, Denis had remained very much on Peter’s radar. Denis had moved away in the last 6 months for a new job, but Peter really had no idea that there was anything wrong in his relationship with Sharlie, let alone that things had got so bad for her that it was at an end.

It was a beautiful warm sunny summer afternoon as they sat on her room balcony sharing coffee and chatting. She was hesitant at first to disclose too much and Peter was ok with that. But as the noise from a building full of very relieved students got louder and louder Peter suggested that they go for a drive and escape the racket. In the quieter environment of his car, her tongue began to loosen and an increasing stream of ‘home truths’ began to flow. Once again because Peter was friends with both of them he tried to remain as independent as he could. He kept referring everything back to Sharlie by asking her what she thought it all meant. He was very careful not to offer an opinion. He did all this to show that he was really listening to her at this difficult time, but was not wishing to be judgemental of either of them. At the same time he was starting to hear things from Sharlie in these disclosures that reminded him of much of what Denis had said about his failed marriage. Peter wondered that if he’d taken the time to hear Ingrid’s version of events in the same detail, like he was hearing now from Sharlie, would his private opinions become more sympathetic to her than they had been? There seemed to be consistent patterns to it all. And Denis was the common denominator. And of course how it all looks depends on your initial presuppositions. Listening to Sharlie was turning out to be a little unsettling to Peter. He was starting to feel he might have been a bit quick to accept Denis’s rendering of events and form an opinion on Ingrid. But right now Sharlie just needed a sympathetic ear.

After an hours of driving they agreed to have a student-type budget meal at the local pub. As they sat there Sharlie commented about how sympathetic and helpful he was being. She said she felt he was such a good listener that he should be studying Psychology instead of Arts Education. He confessed to her that he’d tried that but dropped out because he felt it was a waste of time. She said she was feeling much better and all the talking had really help clarify a lot of things in her mind.

“Thank you Peter. I’m much more certain now that I’ve made the right decision. I’ve just got to get through the unpleasantness. You’ve been so helpful. I think I’m going to appoint you my full-time personal adviser and counsellor.’’

Peter was reminded of his Counselling 3001 classes and his former psychology student days, and the so-called ‘Egan’ method. It was all about directing the focus of any problem back onto the client and what they wanted to achieve, or what they felt they needed to do. As a result psychologists should see themselves not as advisors but rather as empathetic helpers, because in most cases the solutions to most problems lay within the client. That’s all he’d done with Sharli and it seemed to have helped.

As they sat there they ended up consuming almost all that bottle of Chardonnay. Peter said that before he got over the limit they should buy another bottle and head back to his place away from the noise of the pub and the rabble that was her student residence.

Well, surprise surprise, when they got there it turned out she really felt stressed in her neck and shoulders. Maybe a hot bath would help her relax. Then she had a headache from all the unhappy talk and could do with a gentle massage. The other bottle of wine somehow disappeared while all this was happening. Now, whether she was good at getting what she wanted, or Peter was a typical weak male who was just a sucker, is not relevant, although it was most likely a combination of both. Peter does remember thinking at one stage during the proceedings, “I’ll have to worry about the implications of this sometime later.” As they both lay back in the bed afterwards she asked if she could stay the night, and hey, what do reckon Peter said in reply?

Anyway they talked and talked some more, and then engaged in some more of that ‘implication creating’ activity. Then as the evening was coming to a close Sharli dropped the following bombshell.

“I guess now I’ll just have to work when and how I tell Denis what I’ve decided.”

Peter kept his decorum externally, but internally things were very different. He was in a state of shock. He quietly thought to himself, “Didn’t she say that she’d ended the engagement, or did I just think I heard her say that? Or did I just want that to be the situation? Was it in that context I simply allowed her equivocal speech to sound like something more than it was to suit me? Someone did once say to me that a rising prick has no conscience? Particularly when it had been unused for a while. Oh no, what the hell have I done?”

He then gently enquired as to whether the engagement was actually still in tact. And when she answered ‘sort of’ he asked her that if that was the case, how did she feel about what they’d done this evening?

“Oh god, don’t worry about it Peter,” was her casual reply. “I was with Calvin on Wednesday, and Adam most of last weekend.”

Peter actually knew Calvin and Adam reasonably well and actually thought they were better friends and way closer to Denis than he was. He wondered if they both felt wracked with guilt in the way he was currently doing so. “I thought they were long term buddies of Denis. Such a status must mean something different to them,” he mused to himself. He wasn’t sure in retrospect if it was the way she so completely played on his weakness to seduce him (even though he never put up anything remotely like a fight). Or was it the casual way she referred to her recent history with the other two, and what that meant for her lack of respect for Denis, that troubled him. He hardly slept that night and did some serious soul searching as she lay soundly sleeping beside him. She seemed very relaxed and didn’t appear to be troubled by anything. His quasi-affection for her was now slightly in question. His former respect for her was gradually ebbing away. He did take some comfort from the fact that he was not the only one who had cuckolded Denis, but that was no excuse. He knew now he’d done the wrong thing. His pseudo-ignorance of her current status, if he was truly honest, was no more than that. It was very convenient for him to hear only what he wanted to hear. He dropped back at her residence the following morning on his way to work with all this agitation still whirling through his mind.

Several days later, after more soul searching, he confessed it all to a fellow student who was also a work colleague, a good mate, and a bit more mature than those other two aforementioned young bucks. More importantly this guy was also friends with both Denis and Sharlie. His response was quick in coming and was simply, “You lucky bastard, I wish it was me!” At this point Peter realised he was going to have to take his own counsel on this one because he felt he was surrounded by quite a bit of moral ambiguity. So when she rang him the following evening to find out if he wanted to hook up again, she was quite shocked that he said he was busy all that weekend. Many years later they bumped into each other unexpectedly and after a long absence. As they reminisced over a coffee and old times, she informed him that during her many dalliances and sexual escapades around this time Peter was the only one who had ever knocked her back. At that time he took some momentary comfort from this revelation. For this is the point isn’t it, we all make mistakes, but it’s the wilfull repetition of them that creates bigger problems. As he later waved goodbye to her for the last time he thought to himself, “If only my moral compass had been so finely tuned when it was needed that couple of days prior, all that time ago.” Because that one-off night of indiscretion was not to be the end of it all for Peter.

During the following uni holidays Peter worked full-time as he did every break at his previously part-time job. One morning, and about two months after his ‘implication creating’ activity, as he was organising the day’s schedules for the installers he was called to the phone. On the other end was Denis and he didn’t beat around the bush.

“Cut the crap you bastard, I know you’ve been f***ing Sharlie. You’re a piece of shit Peter. You’re worse than a dog. And don’t worry because I’m going to tell everyone who knows you what a lousy f***ing excuse for a man you really are!”

Peter was busy at work and didn’t have time to debate the truth or other of what Denis was saying. He said he would call him back later when he was free. The enraged Denis told him not to bother because he wasn’t going to listen to any more of his ‘pathetic bullshit’. Later that morning during his break he did ring Sharlie. He had kept in touch with her over the uni break and had rung every fortnight or so to check up on her. She seemed quite fragile about the impending finale of her relationship, and just how Denis would take it. In the aftermath of their ‘moment’ he was concerned for her – although her fragility didn’t appear slow down her levels of promiscuity. Peter felt that it was all masking something but he was not going to get too involved. He felt he’d contributed enough damage already.

He’d asked her on a couple of occasions if she’d told Denis about her decision on their future. She kept saying she was a bit scared to. She’d come to see a side of him that made her uneasy. And for the record she and Peter never did hook up again. On this morning there was clearly no need to ask again the question about whether she’d told Denis. That fact was clear. She had certainly told him something that he didn’t like. When he rang her sister answered and she told Peter she would get her but that she was very, very upset, and would he please be brief, and try not to upset her any more. She was sobbing when she answered and Peter asked her what she’d said to Denis because he was very threatening. She simply replied that she was, “... so so sorry Peter, but I didn’t know what to do!” She then put down the phone and left Peter hanging. Her sister returned, said goodbye and hung up. That was the last time he had anything like a serious conversation with Sharlie until the aforementioned accidental meeting some years later. He discreetly avoided her in classes and tutorials during their next semester. But it certainly wasn’t the last time that memories of her sailed through his consciousness. She was very prominent in that department over the next few weeks and months.

Peter did vainly try to talk again to Denis shortly after, and on one occasion they conversed momentarily, but Peter could see that any attempt to explain just what he knew had actually happened between he and Sharlie was completely futile. And it was all a bit vague because he felt for Sharlie and was careful to not drop her in the shit. Denis kept his word though, and shot his mouth off to anybody who remotely knew Peter. More than just a couple of these contactees were actually quite pissed off with Denis, and rung Peter to tell him just what Denis was saying about him. They mostly said to Peter they didn’t care, it all had nothing to do with them. It was between Peter and Denis and Sharlie. Some even said to Peter that they told Denis that it wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, and no doubt it wouldn’t be the last. They mostly reported that Denis didn’t take this at all well. Through these few contacts Peter started to get a picture of what Sharli had told Denis and just why she was “...so so sorry...”. He pieced together the following from the few scraps he managed to glean over time from the resulting chaos.

Somehow or other Denis, who had been working away at the time, twigged to the fact that Sharlie was not acting like his loyal fiancée any more. Who told him what, or just what, or how, he discovered what he ended up with Peter never found out. But he became convinced that Sharlie was being unfaithful to him and he decided he would confront her about it. Sharlie no doubt knew she was acting in ways that were not good but she felt she was somehow driven to it. Something in her soul was awry, but just what she didn’t know. Well at least that’s how she explained to Peter all those years later. Basically Denis called her one evening and exploded. When she buckled and informed him of her decision to end their relationship he called her everything he could think of. She knew most of what he was saying was probably right but somehow couldn’t face her own truth. So she lied to him yet again. She told him that she wasn’t he slut he was accusing her of being. She hadn’t been totally promiscuous. She had in fact only been seeing Peter all along. In this context the melting phone call and subsequent bad-mouthing that Denis had inflicted on Peter was explainable. But what could Peter do about it?

In the wash up, funnily enough, most the others involved saw Denis as an angry soul who needed to get over what was not an uncommon occurrence. His fiancée had simply fallen out of love with him, and that was that. She was free to live her life how she wanted to. And while it was not pleasant, it was the reality, and all his rage about the hapless Peter wasn’t going to change the fact he’d been rejected. It was something that had happened a million times before. Some even thought that maybe he should look at himself a little closer and see if there was some reason why now two women had gone down this path. A few reported that when they suggested this to Denis he take it at all well. Whether he finally moved on from it all Peter never found out because he moved overseas for work not long after. But in the short term he certainly maintained the rage. On the other hand Peter’s fellow student and work mate that he’d confided in early in the piece always remained jealous, and he came to think Peter was a bit of a cool dude for bonking Sharlie, which of course he certainly wasn’t.

Sadly Sharlie didn’t learn anything in the short term from it all and continued on with her promiscuous activities. On one occasion before Denis’ explosion Peter did let her know that in his opinion if she wanted to be happy once more she was going to have to eventually change her ways. But that of course was up to her. She graduated and took a job interstate so Peter’s immediate memories of her dissipated. It all then came unstuck for her however when she became pregnant to a guy in the new place where she worked who was a complete and total dickhead. It finished her budding teaching career at the time and soured quite a few of her friendships. On the positive side it caused her to do some serious soul searching. She finally wised up, discarded the dickhead, and then moved back to be nearer to her family. The boy she had from that pregnancy joyfully became the love of her life. He may ended up even being something of a saving grace for her. Peter certainly hoped and prayed for that. Peter kept on enquiring from a distance with mutual friends on how she was going, but she and Peter never saw each other again until that chance one-off coffee that they had that one day a few years later.

Peter didn’t lose a single friend as a result of Denis’ attempted smear campaign. He diligently maintained a low profile, soldiered on, and didn’t retaliate in kind. He mostly kept his mouth shut and it all just filtered off over time. In probably six to twelve months the whole hurtful episode for everyone involved lost its heat. But he resolved that would never again have sex with someone whom he wasn’t absolutely 100% convinced were completely unencumbered. This was a value that came from the debacle that he felt has served him very well ever since. And he never again engaged in something, or anything, that made him say to himself, “I’ll have to worry about the implications of this sometime later.” He concluded that it is always better to worry about implications before something happens rather than after.