Rafayel, The Apple Did Nothing Wrong

Rafayel receives a hospital visit in Nightly Stroll and briefly behaves as though the heroine has arrived with an insult disguised as an apple. One apple. The last one she could get so late. She explains this, and suddenly he has been craving an apple all day. Beautiful recovery. I hope the fruit appreciates how quickly its reputation has improved.

This is the Rafayel nonsense I find difficult to resist. His disappointment needs an audience, but his pleasure at being remembered keeps interrupting the performance. He wants to be cross with her. He also wants the apple from her. These are demanding artistic commitments to maintain at the same time.

The visit begins with him pretending not to recognise her, then delivering a complaint about waiting so extravagant that the natural world has apparently had time to reorganise itself. I enjoy the sheer unnecessary effort. An ordinary sulk might fit into a single sentence. He has made room for developments in marine life.

If I were arriving tired, I would probably interrupt him to ask whether he wanted the fruit or a continuation of the argument. This is one reason I enjoy watching the heroine handle him. I can appreciate the performance without being responsible for bringing it to a sensible conclusion before the visiting hours end.

And I don't think laughing at him requires deciding his feelings are fake. You can sincerely want somebody to show up and still be extremely silly about what you do when they arrive. In fact, that combination is much more interesting to me than effortless composure. He has something to lose here, even if he insists on expressing it like the evening has personally offended him.

The nurse has a different version.

The injury story takes this difficulty with proportion considerably further. He claims a heroic rescue. The nurse supplies a paintbrush and a twisted ankle. I am so fond of her contribution to the evening. She has information, and she is prepared to let it ruin his presentation.

A paintbrush, Rafayel.

I would find it very difficult to recover my sympathetic expression after that. Not because a twisted ankle is funny in itself, but because he had an entirely usable explanation and decided it needed a more impressive leading man. You were hurt. She came to see you. That was already enough material. We did not need to commission a rescue scene.

His embarrassment is part of why the joke works for me. The nurse won't let him keep the impressive version just because he would prefer it. He has to exist in the room after the impressive version collapses, which is a much better use of a dramatic character than letting him control every account of himself.

I have a soft spot for romantic scenes where another person can interrupt with inconvenient facts. It makes the world feel pleasantly occupied. The lovers may be having a significant evening, but somebody else still has a job to do. Your feelings are very important, darling. They are also happening during somebody's shift.

He can just ask her to stay.

Then the scene makes room for a quieter request. He wants her company a little longer. That is so much easier to answer than the performance around it, and I like hearing it emerge. I can understand wanting a visit to last. I can even understand being embarrassed by how badly you wanted it, though I reserve the right to giggle at the elaborate attempts to conceal that.

He also admits that her absence and unanswered phone left him worried. When she insists that work comes first, he asks her to let him know what's happening as soon as she can. That qualification matters to my enjoyment. I can be sympathetic to the worry without deciding her entire working life should operate around his preferred visiting schedule.

A message when possible sounds reasonable to me. An expectation that nobody you love will ever be unavailable sounds exhausting. I want the romance to have room for a person being busy without that automatically becoming a betrayal. His fear can matter without being granted authority over every hour she spends elsewhere.

The promise he asks for is bigger than I would comfortably make. Never leaving somebody waiting is a lovely fantasy and a very ambitious calendar commitment. I would rather promise to communicate honestly than promise that traffic, work and an inconveniently dead phone will never exist again.

But when he finally names the anxiety and frustration, I feel much more tender towards him than I did during the grand complaint. There you are. That's something she can actually respond to. Under all the fuss is a person asking not to be forgotten, and I don't need him to become perfectly sensible before that can move me.

I just want him to discover that the plain request is worth making. She brought the last apple. He doesn't have to survive an invented catastrophe to make that gesture count.

Eat your fruit, Rafayel. You can tell me how terribly you suffered afterwards. I suspect the account will be extensive.