Ten
FACT: Over three million men in this country have slept with ten or more women. And do they all look like Richard Gere? Are they all as rich as Croesus, as charming as Clark Gable, as preposterously endowed as Errol Flynn, as witty as Oscar Wilde? Nope. It’s nothing to do with any of that. Maybe half a dozen or so of that three million have one or more of these attributes, but that still leaves … well, three million, give or take half a dozen. And they’re just blokes. We’re just blokes, because I, even I, am a member of the exclusive three million club. Ten is not so many if you’re unmarried and in your mid-thirties. Ten partners in a couple of decades of sexual activity is actually pretty feeble, if you think about it: one partner every two years, and if any of those partners was a one-night stand, and that one-night stand came in the middle of a two-year drought, then you’re not in trouble exactly, but you’re hardly the Number One Lurve Man in your particular postal district. Ten isn’t a lot, not for the thirtysomething bachelor. Twenty isn’t a lot, if you look at it that way. Anything over thirty, I reckon, and you’re entitled to appear on an Oprah about promiscuity.
Marie is my seventeenth lover. “How does he do it?” you ask yourselves. “He wears bad sweaters, he gives his ex-girlfriend a hard time, he’s grumpy, he’s broke, he hangs out with the Musical Moron Twins, and yet he gets to go to bed with an American recording artist who looks like Susan Dey. What’s going on?”
First off, let’s not get carried away here. Yes, she’s a recording artist, but she records with the ironically titled Blackpool-based Hit Records, and it’s the type of record contract where you sell your own tapes during the interval of your own show in London’s prestigious Sir Harry Lauder nightspot. And if I know Susan Dey, and after a relationship that has endured for over twenty years I feel I do, I reckon she’d be the first to admit that looking like Susan Dey in L.A. Law is not the same as looking like, say, Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind.
But yes, even so, the night with Marie is my major sexual triumph, my bonkus mirabilis. And do you know how it comes about? Because I ask questions. That’s it. That’s my secret. If someone wanted to know how to get off with seventeen women, or more, no less, that’s what I’d tell them: ask questions. It works precisely because that isn’t how you’re supposed to do it, if you listen to the collective male wisdom. There are still enough of the old-style, big-mouthed, self-opinionated egomaniacs around to make someone like me appear refreshingly different; Marie even says something like that to me halfway through the evening …
I had no idea that Marie and T-Bone were going to be in the pub with Dick and Barry, who had apparently promised them a real English Saturday night out—pub, curry, night bus, and all the trimmings. But I’m happy to see them, both of them; I’m really up after the triumph with Laura, and seeing as Marie has only ever seen me tongue-tied and grumpy, she must wonder what has happened. Let her wonder. It’s not often that I get the chance to be enigmatic and perplexing.
They’re sitting round a table, drinking pints of bitter. Marie shuffles along to let me sit down, and the moment she does that I’m lost, gone, away. It’s the Saturday-night-date woman I saw through the window of the cab who has set me off, I think. I see Marie’s shuffle along the seat as a miniature but meaningful romantic accommodation: hey, she’s doing this for me! Pathetic, I know, but immediately I start to worry that Barry or Dick—let’s face it—Barry, has told her about where I was and what I was doing. Because if she knows about Laura, and about the split, and about me getting uptight, then she’ll lose interest and, as she had no interest in the first place, that would put me into a minus interest situation. I’d be in the red, interest-wise.
Barry and Dick are asking T-Bone about Guy Clark; Marie’s listening, but then she turns to me and asks me, conspiratorially, if everything went all right. Bastard Barry big-mouth.
I shrug.
“She just wanted to pick some stuff up. No big deal.”
“God, I hate that time. That picking-up-stuff time. I just went through that before I came here. You know that song called ‘Patsy Cline Times Two’ I play? That’s about me and my ex dividing up our record collections.”
“It’s a great song.”
“Thank you.”
“And you wrote it just before you came here?”
“I wrote it on the way here. The words, anyway. I’d had the tune for a while, but I didn’t know what to do with it until I thought of the title.”
It begins to dawn on me that T-Bone, if I may Cuisinart my foodstuffs, is a red herring.
“Is that why you came to London in the first place? Because of, you know, dividing up your record collection and stuff?”
“Yup.” She shrugs, then thinks, and then laughs, because the affirmative has told the entire story, and there’s nothing else to say, but she tries anyway.
“Yup. He broke my heart, and suddenly I didn’t want to be in Austin anymore, so I called T-Bone, and he fixed up a couple of gigs and an apartment for me, and here I am.”
“You share a place with T-Bone?”
She laughs again, a big snorty laugh, right into her beer. “No way! T-Bone wouldn’t want to share a place with me. I’d cramp his style. And I wouldn’t want to listen to all that stuff happening on the other side of the bedroom wall. I’m way too unattached for that.”
She’s single. I’m single. I’m a single man talking to an attractive single woman who may or may not have just confessed to feelings of sexual frustration. Oh my God.
A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners, a two- or three-page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time, although Barry, being Barry, went one stage further: he compiled the questionnaire and presented it to some poor woman he was interested in, and she hit him with it. But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.
If I’d given Marie a questionnaire, she wouldn’t have hit me with it. She would have understood the validity of the exercise. We have one of those conversations where everything clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement. Nanci Griffith and Kurt Vonnegut, the Cowboy Junkies and hip-hop, My Life as a Dog and A Fish Called Wanda, Pee-Wee Herman and Wayne’s World, sports and Mexican food (yes, yes, yes, no, yes, no, no, yes, no, yes) … You remember that kid’s game, Mousetrap? That ludicrous machine you had to build, where silver balls went down chutes, and little men went up ladders, and one thing knocked into another to set off something else, until in the end the cage fell onto the mouse and trapped it? The evening goes with that sort of breathtaking joke precision, where you can kind of see what’s supposed to happen but you can’t believe it’s ever going to get there, even though afterwards it seems obvious.
When I begin to get the feeling that we’re having a good time, I give her chances to get away: when there’s a silence I start to listen to T-Bone telling Barry what Guy Clark is really like in real life as a human being, but Marie sets us back down a private road each time. And when we move from the pub to the curry house, I slow down to the back of the group, so that she can leave me behind if she wants, but she slows down with me. And in the curry house I sit down first, so she can choose where she wants to be, and she chooses the place next to me. It’s only at the end of the evening that I make anything that could be interpreted as a move: I tell Marie that it makes sense for the two of us to share a cab. It’s more or less true anyway, because T-Bone is staying in Camden and both Dick and Barry live in the East End, so it’s not like I’ve redrawn the entire A-Z for my own purposes. And it’s not like I’ve told her that it makes sense for me to stay the night at her place, either, if she doesn’t want any further company, all she has to do is get out of the cab, try to shove a fiver at me, and wave me on my way. But when we get to her place, she asks me if I want to break into her duty free, and I find that I do. So.