Ships That Pass in the Night – Relationships We Have Lost

In the summer of 1959 I discovered a book, Bonjour Tristesse that radically altered my idea of relationships. Françoise Sagan, a young eighteen year old author, spoke about what it felt like to give yourself over to love, in this case, not a lover, but her father. Hers was an obsession which led to jealousy, and a shattering experience that broke her heart, and sent her on a dangerous course.

A vulnerable and impressionable eighteen year old myself, I devoured her book, and allowed it to colour my relationships with other people, male and female. Until then, my main relationships were my sisters, my parents, and my schoolmates. After reading Sagan, I allowed myself to think in terms of having a deeper relationship—possibly a love affair.

But that wasn’t what turned up. Essentially shy, I resolved to open myself up to anyone who drifted into my sphere. I began to relate to others, to let others in, and I found that people began to reach out to me, and include me in their conversations and lives.

I was working at the Hudson’s Bay Department store in Calgary at the time, and each morning took the escalator to the credit department, where I worked. Coming down the escalator each morning, as regular as clockwork, was a large, swarthy-looking man, who was like no one I had ever seen. He had shoulders that seemed six feet across, thick black eyebrows, and pitch black hair that rose from his forehead in a savage brush cut. He always wore a bemused expression, sort of, “What’s going on here? What’s this all about?” I was feeling the same, and one day as I was going up, and he was coming down, he called out, “Wait up there,” indicating the top landing, “I’ll come up.”

He was Philipe D., he said, and he wanted to talk to me about his wife, who was new to Calgary, and very lonely. “You look like a nice girl,” he said, “You’re young and pretty, and so is she. I want you to meet her. You will like each other.”

It wasn’t what I had in mind, I now know, but in the spirit of leaving myself open to new relationships, à la Sagan, I followed up, and met Elizabeth, Philipe’s wife. She was English, very lonely, but mostly homesick, having dismissed Calgary as a hopeless backwater where nothing was of any interest or importance.

But she was wonderful to me. She was a few years older and seemed worldly and sophisticated. We were close to the same size, and she shared her wardrobe of wildly “mod” clothes with me, some which she gave to me to remodel for myself on my sewing machine, which she found amusing and very “frontier”-like.

She bought everything ready-made. She and Philipe ate out or brought dinner in—meats from the deli, pastry wrapped sausages and potted pies. So that left plenty of time for other things. Elizabeth and I met each day for coffee at places new to me, and spent many, many hours shopping—Elizabeth buying blouses, sweaters and trinkets, and me buying nothing, but enjoying it all the same.

Life changed quickly that summer, as it sometimes does. Philipe had an affair, and Elizabeth returned to England in a swirl of anger and recriminations. I was left in the ruins of two promised relationships: the one with Philipe, which I hoped to have, and the one with Elizabeth, which I had—for a moment.

I saw Philipe from time to time, but it was over for us. We had both lost a great deal. He descended into a spiral of loss and depression, and I moved on to nurse my wounds and grow into an adult. Like the title of the book by Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse, I now had my own tristesse, and savored it, along with my memories of Elizabeth. It was a valuable lesson to learn at eighteen—that I could feel so much, and lose so much, and still go on. I now know that all of these early experiences prepare us for the losses we elders face as we grow older and our circle of loved ones inevitably diminishes.

“It’s funny. Looking back, none of it seems to matter now, those moments of yearning, craving to belong with people I thought mattered. No more fragments of glass, pieces of a broken mirror you can’t put back together and wouldn’t want to even if you could.”
― Rebecca Harris, Be the Death of Me (2013)