He walks hand-in-hand with her, his lover. She, who has no face. He worships her, his faceless lover, for she can do no wrong in his eyes. She smiles when it pleases him, laughs at his jokes, and most certainly never dares to contradict his universe. She is perfect.
Within her lies that which he never got from his mother, the adoration his father was not available to provide, the vivaciousness of his first love, the kindness of the great saints he learned about in school, the beauty of images seen during his lustful youth, the enduring devotion of his church’s priest to the Savior, the meekness of a shy schoolgirl, the confidence of a heroine, the divinity of a goddess, the servitude of his childhood nanny. She is a collage — a compilation of ideals and ideas gathered over his life.
This faceless lover is with him always, filling the God-sized hole in the center of his being. With each new woman who comes into his life, he temporarily assigns her face to his faceless lover, holding them up, side by side.
And each new woman pleases him, for a while, until the humanity of her clashes so violently with his faceless patchwork of ideals that his image of the woman turns rotten in comparison to his beloved’s perfection. And when the pain of this contradiction is too much for him to bear, he casts the woman aside, and goes on in search of a new woman, whose face he can borrow until she, too, forces the veil from his eyes.
And so he walks, in a circle, perpetually seeking and finding only temporary intoxication.
