Today, for no reason I can think of, I remembered the time Jack didn’t meet Amy. I’ve mentioned Jack’s tendency to un-meet women before (see the stories The one-lion cure for depression and A formula for distance), but I somehow forgot about the first and most telling example of this.

At the heart of Jack’s trouble with women lay the insurmountable problem of touching. The idea that a woman might want to touch him was at variance with his assumption that women were abstract versions of men who never became violent and smelled better. Once a would-be girlfriend became touchy, she became concrete. At that point, Jack left skid marks.

Then came Amy. Jack was sitting at his usual table in the far corner of our favourite coffee shop, brooding over a poem he was writing. The way he related it to me, he was furiously writing, minding his own business. But I’ve heard from others that he was staring into the distance while he slowly destroyed a plastic plant that stood nearby. Amy appeared out of nowhere and sat down at his table. She began to talk. She was a philosophy student, she said. She delivered a monologue about Derrida and Chomsky and modern physics and Zen and music and artificial intelligence. She asked no questions, and Jack never said a word. Then she left.

“She’s perfect,” Jack told me.

He returned to the coffee shop for the rest of the week but Amy didn’t show up. In her absence, she became even more perfect. Jack carefully constructed the details of their future relationship using the evidence of her talking and what it implied.

“We’ll be unsullied by vulgar physical details,” he theorised over the weekend. “There won’t be sex or anything like that.”

He resolved to seek her out in the coming week and get to know her. On Tuesday she came to the coffee shop but his nerves failed him and he did nothing. He sat in his corner and watched her having coffee at another table with friends. After an hour or so, they left.

“Nothing stopped her,” Jack fumed. “Is she testing me? Am I to take my turn now?”

“That’s how it works,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s crap,” he seethed. “It’s just a fucking game.”

“Exactly—”

He moved around in his small kitchen, picking things up and putting them down again.

“I hate games,” he said at length.

“Remember when you told me that there wouldn’t be sex or anything like that?” I said.

“Yes—”

“You’re right. There won’t be. There won’t be anything, for that matter, if you don’t do something.”

“But it’s crap.”

“What do you want? A cosmic connection?”

Jack kicked his dustbin.

“Well,” he said, “I don’t want this primitive shit. It’s what animals do.”

The next week he returned to the coffee shop, sat in his corner, and waited for Amy to show up. When she did, he ignored her, but he furtively noted her body language, the movements of her hands, the way she tossed her hair, and the way she and her friends glanced at one another’s shoes.

“It was all bullshit,” he told me. “She knows nothing about physics.”

“And you know nothing about chemistry,” I said.

“She’ll be needy,” Jack countered. “And she’ll want a lot of touching.”

When I flopped into the only comfortable chair he owned, Jack summarised everything. “I’m done with love,” he declared. “It’s crap.”