A romantic novel arrives in a relationship looking like leisure. It may have been recruited for something rather more specific.
In one new long-term relationship after divorce, the man was sweet, willing to read together, and apparently a little short on imagination. The search was on for a book that would be enjoyable, romantic, perhaps a little sexy—and give him ideas.
A modest assignment for several hundred pages and a paperback spine.
There is a delicious ambiguity to a book offered in this spirit. Is it a shared pleasure? A glimpse into someone’s private taste? An unusually attractive set of meeting notes? The fictional lover on the cover may have no idea he is being considered for a training role.
Romance heroes do enjoy certain professional advantages. Their hesitations have editors. Their badly chosen words can disappear between drafts. When they finally notice something important, it tends to be at exactly the point where somebody has arranged for it to matter.
A real man can be very sweet and still have no narrator available to explain what he meant.
Yet the interesting possibility in reading together is not confined to whatever the fictional man does. There is also the person beside the book: the one who chose it, who is curious about a particular passage, who may find a scene lovely or ridiculous for reasons that have never come up over dinner.
The supposedly obvious romantic moment might pass without much interest. A minor exchange might be the part that lingers. The fascination could lie in the confidence, the teasing, the anticipation, or simply the luxury of a character having someone’s complete attention for an entire conversation.
On the page, even a silence gets room to develop.
There is comedy in hoping a partner will discover exactly the right inspiration among all that material. A novel can contain an excellent compliment, three disastrous misunderstandings and a man whose principal skill is arriving unexpectedly. Its usefulness as a precise message is open to question.
Its appeal as something to share is easier to imagine. Two people can be reading the same scene and enjoying entirely different things. The book sits between them, looking perfectly innocent, while each discovers a little more about what catches the other’s attention.
In this case, the willingness was there. The book had yet to be chosen.
Somewhere on a shelf, a fictional man was about to acquire responsibilities beyond the plot.
