Unreasonable Women

Rupert believes himself beset by unreasonable women. The last one pummeled him with her fists, shocking his old-school sensibilities by requiring him to use force to defend himself. Then there was the former girlfriend he visited in Los Angeles who swooped and shrieked, her pashmina extended like a pair of black wings, until he was more than glad to pack her off in his chauffeur-driven car, back to the ghetto she claimed was bohemian but in his eyes was just grotty.

She called him, still furious. “You are attracted to romantics, girls who want to believe the best of people, because they are the only ones who could overlook your behavior. But eventually your manipulation and deviousness show through and they realize they haven’t found a savior, someone to protect them from cruelty and ugliness, but that you embody, make a skill even, of the very cynicism and selfishness they detest. That’s why they leave amid tears and recriminations.”
“Preposterous!”
“You see a hard-headed girl, someone who’s a little more skeptical would immediately see you for who you are and give you a very wide berth. Or maybe they’d be willing to make a deal with the devil, but they’d certainly never LOVE you!”
“I’ve obviously upset you.” This line works well for him. Moral high-ground in the sense of sounding willing to take the blame but actually just accentuating the distance between his high place of moral certitude and the groveling emotional display at hand.

Really, he can’t understand all the fuss. A bottle of vintage champagne had caused the misjudgment of informing her about the women he had been rogering while she was living with him. One of whom was now the mother of his illegitimate child.
“You didn’t use condoms!”
Clearly.
“You might want to play Russian roulette with your life, but you had no right to do that with mine!”
“I had to do something! You were refusing to sleep with me.”
She seemed to consider this, then grabbed her pashmina from the back of the chair and proceeded to prance around in what appeared to be a Red Indian war dance.

He chortled at the memory. Women! Totally unreasonable. It’s the hormones. Nutcases every last one of ‘em.