I find the lobster couple in a shop on a dead-end canal called Kitsch Essentials, and I buy them for Bor. Since the start of the summer, he’s been fascinated by lobsters. He started writing an essay with the working title “A Martyr in Armour: The Lobster in the Popular Imagination.” Research is piling up by his side of the bed. The cornerstones of his piece are a novel by an eccentric Dutch writer that features a Lobster Liberation Front, an essay by an American author who died tragically young about the cruelty of boiling lobsters alive, and an iconic scene from the TV show Friends in which the lobster is portrayed as being fundamentally monogamous. “Lobsters mate for life,” says Phoebe (a fanatical vegetarian). “You can actually see old lobster couples walking around their tank, you know, holding claws.”
According to Bor, what these sources have in common is that they all use the lobster as a symbol of noble values. “The lobster is the martyr of our ethical primitivism,” he tells me as he carefully scrubs mushrooms for his famous Quiche Borraine, “both our inability to empathise with other life forms and our stubborn tendency towards infidelity.” I’m not sure if he knows that he’s really talking about my stubborn tendency towards infidelity (which, technically speaking, isn’t infidelity: we have clear agreements on the subject).
When I come home with the imitation lobsters, we immediately find ourselves disagreeing about what to call them. I say their names are Thelma and Louise, but Bor insists on Tristan and Isolde. “They’re my lobsters, aren’t they?” He pulls them out of my hands, more aggressively than he needs to. I bought the lobsters as a joke, to tease him about his endearing obsession. But the obsession is a sore spot with him. “Lobsters are highly sensitive animals,” I hear him say to a blonde undergraduate at a faculty drinks party, all the while watching with one eye as an attractive red-haired Ph.D. student lights my cigarette. The redhead has offered to show me her apartment later. Bor isn’t interested in the blonde, and yet he does the same thing he’s been doing for weeks. He uses his lobster expertise to flaunt the qualities he thinks make him desirable: his solid theoretical background, his empathy, his progressive attitude—a lecturer in cultural studies who cares about the natural world; a scholar, but also a sensitive soul. A thinker and a lover. Someone able to see the bigger picture. “A few decades from now,” he says to the student, who is gazing at his chest hair, “we”ll come to think of what we’re doing to animals right now as genocide. Or slavery.”
I have to stop myself here for a moment, because this detached staccato—I’m not entirely sure myself why I’m taking this tone—is making Bor sound more cold-blooded than he is. What’s missing are details. Slivers of information. Bor has exceptionally soft hands and feet, for one thing. He has a tattered Harry Potter scarf with red and gold stripes that he clumsily ties around his neck. Bor has miniature, beautifully even handwriting, and before he heads off to the library in the mornings while I’m sleeping off my hangover, he scribbles messages on ruled index cards for me to find when I wake up: “You’re my little dormouse,” or “Sorry about yesterday. My affection for you is infinite and sometimes it hurts.”
Slivers of information, incidentally, are also where Bor is looking to find answers about his lobsters. The lobster communicates via pheromones in its urine. If a lobster is not caught, it can live to be anywhere up to a hundred years old. In rare cases, the lobster is capable of “self-amputation” of its own claws (if it chooses fight over flight). With each new sliver of information, a diffuse sympathy for the strange creature begins to grow. Boris is getting more and more of an idea of what it’s like to be a prehistoric crustacean with an exoskeleton—and I’m along for the ride. One night after his yoga class, he drops by the bar where I spend my unenlightened life serving drinks and tells me he’s had a mystical experience. “I’m lying there on my back,” he says, “defenceless as a newborn baby, my eyes closed. Suddenly I’m at the bottom of the ocean. I’m a lobster. I see my claws in front of me, big and strong. My antennae are telling me another lobster is nearby, and I explore the area around me, but I can’t see them or feel them.”
Bor does yoga because it keeps him in the Now—“something you have no trouble with,” he says to me—and because he’s interested in detachment. But when it comes down to it, attachment seems to be more his thing. Of course, the two are related. Towards the end of our relationship, he gives me two books: Attachment, by the famous psychologist John Bowlby, and Electra vs. Oedipus, by a descendant of Freud who makes astonishingly far-fetched claims about narcissistic women with penis envy. “Interesting intellectual history” is his excuse. But I sense that he’s trying to teach me something about him and me. I’ve just told him about the red-haired Ph.D. student and what I did with her. Penis envy—sure, if you like. In the fights that we’ve been having just about every other day these past few weeks, he uses the word “attachment” as a weapon, flinging it at me like a ninja star. Attachhhment! Whoosh! As Bor goes off on me, my mind wanders—I can’t help it—to the coral cut in my foot that I got when I was nine, and the eleven sloppy black stitches that a Spanish doctor used to sew it up as I squeezed my mother’s arm so hard it left a purple bruise. The next two weeks, Mom kept laughing about it and calling it my “Frankenstein foot.” That was her last summer, I think.
About five days after I bought them, the lobsters—Tristan and Isolde—are lying next to each other, fished up onto the dry land of Bor’s desk, watching the following scene, which marks the end of the laissez-faire policy that our love has become:
Bor and I are lying on the bed, watching The Graduate more or less together. Which is to say: I’m lying on my stomach, my head at the foot of the bed, and he’s sitting there, leaning back against the wall and working on the lobster essay, because he doesn’t like romcoms. Without any warning, he grabs my butt and gives it a squeeze. I feel what I believe I’ve started to feel more often lately: the theory behind his touch—he thinks before touching, he has carefully considered opinions about when, how, how often, and why. Every rejection is turned into scientific data, every approach is a well-considered decision. I sense doubt in his determined squeezing and find myself growing silently furious, just as I grow furious when he tentatively suggests we go for a walk, tentatively suggests he should meet my father at some point, tentatively enquires about the future, our future. I swat his hand away, but he decides to try out a new role, that of the aggressor—earlier today he watched a video on YouTube of male lobsters in the wild, fighting mercilessly for female lobsters—and puts his hand back. I swat it away again and tell him that I’m in a monogamous relationship with Dustin Hoffman right now. Super monogamous. That’s when he gets up, flings his Habermas out of bed, and starts growling. It’s supposed to be comedy: he grabs me by the hips and turns me onto my stomach. “Hey, caveman,” I say, “quit it.” But he doesn’t quit it. He buries his face in my neck, growls more loudly, squeezes harder. “Alright, down boy!” Play along, I think to myself, be diplomatic. He yanks down my shirt, presses his belly against mine, bites my nipple. “Don’t do that.” He does do that. His half-stiff dick, the sudden dictator, is somewhere near my thigh. “Come on, Bor, I can’t breathe.” He grabs my wrists and pins them down against the bed. “Stop, I don’t want this,” I say, more clearly this time, but ideas disguised as wolves are howling in his head—no is yes, violence is passion, strong is hot, bad doggy, a tug on the leash will put her in her place, woof! He presses ahead, forces me onto my stomach—this is the moment when, according to the movie conventions, he should pull down my panties in one smooth motion, and—by George!—the professor does exactly that. “Jesus, Bor!” I clumsily swat behind me, thwack! before I manage to turn back around and grab his chin. He’s drooling, he kisses me roughly; he’s fully hard now, he’s managed to turn himself on with this ridiculous performance. “I mean it—stop.” I look at him and see a glimpse of the disobedient child, hidden like a shy lobster inside the pale academic—and then doubt, disappointment. The same miserable emotions that call him to his desk, where they are sublimated on paper into an eloquent meditation on that ancient creature, sensitive, unseen, prophetic—the lobster. Bor rolls off me and pulls the sheet over his erection. We both freeze. The TV is singing “Jesus loves you more than you will know, whoa whoa whoa . . . ” What right does he have? What right do I have?
“I thought I could handle rejection,” he mumbles. “Guys can handle rejection. That’s our evolutionary advantage. But with you . . . ”
I could tell Boris that I actually appreciate the fact that he has his inner wild animal under control (that’s the convenient half of the truth). I could comfort him, reassure him. Another girl—a more cerebral girl—might have presented him with a seductive theory about her mother and her father and something about attachhhment. But I’m full of anger, anger that rises up out of nowhere, out of a black hole in the sea floor. The kind of anger that can only be kept in check by sitting still and keeping quiet. There’s no room for someone else’s thoughts, someone else’s body parts.
As we try not to listen to Simon and Garfunkel (Art & Paul, of course, that’s what we should have called the lobsters!) we realise in that moment, in that overflowing silence, that we are going to have separate futures.
The number one cause of relationship death, I tell a friend at a café later that day: we want each other because of what we don’t want to be.
We meet again for a civilised divvying-up of our belongings and, just as I’m about to drive away, Isolde is pushed through the car window. “You can call her Louise now,” Bor says. “Or Thelma.” His Harry Potter scarf blows into his face.
“No,” I say. “She’s staying Isolde.”
