Idiopathy

which thoughts made Daniel uncomfortable and gave him a sense of being on the back foot, which he attempted to counter by going on the offensive and asking when the idea of him enjoying or admiring something had become so repellent that it then prevented Katherine from enjoying it herself, as if appreciation were finite and he’d used it up ahead of her. It was more like, he said, someone leaving you a biscuit in the packet, and offering it to you, and you then refusing it because you’d already seen the person enjoying their biscuit too much. He said he felt this whole difficulty Katherine seemed to have with other people’s enjoyment went right to the heart of their relationship and constituted a major flaw, since it seemed to prevent them ever enjoying the same thing at the same time. He cited other incidents. He said it seemed like if he told Katherine she’d enjoy something she was bound to hate it, and to practically crucify him for building her expectations to the point where disappointment was the only foreseeable outcome. However, if he calmly, and usually quite reasonably, predicted she’d hate something, she’d shoot him down for being negative. He said he felt pretty much like he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.
    Katherine said that was his whole problem. Why did he have to make a prediction either way? Why did he have to throw his opinion into the ring before she’d asked for it? It was like receiving a running commentary on things that hadn’t happened yet. It left her with the feeling that she didn’t know if something was happening as it appeared to be happening or if in fact it was only appearing to happen in the way he’d already told her it would happen because he’d filled her head so full of predictions she couldn’t tell reality from prophecy any more. She said she got the feeling that it wasn’t about her enjoying or not enjoying anything at all, it was just about Daniel being right, which was so bloody important to him that he had to pre-empt everything just so he could enjoy being seen to be right. Daniel said she was right, this was all about him being right. Naturally, he was being sarcastic. Then he said what it was
really
about was her total inability to accept the times he was right, so she’d cut off her nose to spite her face (Katherine sneered at the cliché) and waste precious time and energy proving him wrong. What was it, he wanted to know, about him being right that was so difficult to take, and didn’t she think there was something malignant going on in their relationship if she couldn’t bear him enjoying or being right about anything, because what, really, did that leave him with? Then Katherine asked him how
he
felt when
she
enjoyed something and he said he didn’t know because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually seen her enjoying anything, which pretty much immediately upped the hostility level of the whole exchange.
    Both Katherine and Daniel argued by continually defining and redefining what they called ‘The Real Problem’. Whenever either of them said it they gave it heavy stress. If Katherine said it after Daniel had just said it she waggled her middle and index fingers in the air to indicate inverted commas. The Real Problem was never really agreed upon, and so was a mutable term that could be loosely used to stand in for the
real
Real Problem, which was that, just as they couldn’t agree on what might constitute the Real Problem, they actually couldn’t agree on anything and were making each other miserable.
    Daniel deployed the Real Problem Tactic at this point by suggesting that the Real Problem was that Katherine was so hell-bent on being overwhelmingly original and unpredictable that she’d somehow managed to completely divorce the things she genuinely felt from the things she wanted to feel or thought it would be cool or interesting to feel. The end result, as far as he saw it, was that she didn’t feel anything at all but just responded in a calculated fashion to given situations and stimuli. If she wanted to be unpredictable, he said, she should try actually feeling things rather than thinking about them and then artificially constructing her feelings as a response to what she thought other people felt.
    At this point, Katherine smiled: a pretty strong indicator of upcoming aggression.
    Katherine said that she couldn’t actually believe that
he
,
Daniel
, had the audacity to accuse
her
,
Katherine
, of not