Aline, by the pool

Aline came last Saturday. We spent the day napping by the pool. My laziness – and nap – are easily explained by my poor health and my old age; but hers can only be explained by her physical exhaustion. She works very long hours; and she commutes huge distances in bad weather; and sleeps three nights a week outside her house. And she does all of this for lousy pay.

She was invited to a job interview last month, but it was in another city, the prospective employer did not offer to pay for her to fly, and she had neither time nor money to go by bus. Thus, she’s chained to her present job: it keeps her too busy to prospect for another.

It is a classic economic trap: the job throws off barely enough cash for her to buy an i-pod or a pair of jeans: mere bones thrown her by the system to keep her alive and working; the things she can buy are but a few of the many substitutes for happiness which our system develops with so much genius: ersatz pleasures to feed an ersatz life, a life lived hurriedly in the small interstices between work and sleep.

Which is perhaps why Aline is so sad and quiet: a blown-out candle of a girl.

It hurts me to see her that way: the rambunctious, happy-go-lucky girl, a coffee with whom was once such a balm to my soul, has lost all her exuberant ebullience, all her innocent hope. She has become like all the other girls of her age, polite, dull, sad and -- numb. By now – Aline is 29 – the facts have sunk, her future has been revealed to her; she now knows everything she can expect from life; and it isn't much. What she has is the best she can ever do.

Her only hope now lies in falling in love. And failing that (as it usually does for those who seek in it their salvation) she will in turn, in the natural course of things, begin to think of having children. (And when she does, she will not know, as no one does or ever dares admit, that that is of course, the very end of life: research shows that happiness drops dramatically when children at long last arrive).

(Or perhaps she won’t. We talked a little by the pool about it, and she observed how unhappy those of her friends were who had reproduced: Aline is no Einstein but she is no dummy. But that is now; and we all have a way of forgetting important life lessons, or ignoring them to our own detriment; so who knows if she will not forget herself, eventually).

For now at least, though, Aline does not think of children and pins her hope – unvoiced – on love. Unvoiced, for she does not say it; and since she does nothing to go out and meet men, perhaps also unrealized. But it is there, I can tell. Since her job prospects offer no hope, perhaps love would?

That is a difficult call for her: she has entered, a little early, that phase in life which most northern Thai women enter about 10 years older than she is now, that phase in which they undergo a broadening of faces, neck and shoulders and a general thickening of stature, turning them from reed-like nymphs to bantam-weight boxers. She still has her former swaying reed-like figure, but her face and neck already presage the inevitable things to come.

Aline may have missed her best chance for a great love; and with every day she grows thicker and her chances more remote.

Perhaps this is what happens to all women around late twenties or early thirties: the realization of their limits and the attendant sadness and disappointment. Perhaps this is why older men my age have so much liking for the very young: not so much on account of the youthfulness of their bodies but on the youthfulness of their minds. Like kittens, or puppies, they are so much fun to play with, even when one derives no sexual gratification from the encounters. Every little time we can afford in their company is pure pleasure of life; their joy, totally silly of course, like gold dust rubs off them and onto us and we bask in it for days.

But then they grow up and become women, as the politically correct parlance has it; and seeing them grow up brings on reflections like this: how sad and cruel is life, and how hopeless it is.