So. Her place is very much like my place, a boxy first-floor flat in a north London three-story house. In fact, it’s so much like my place that it’s depressing. Is it really as easy as this to approximate my life? One quick phone call to a friend and that’s it? It’s taken me a decade or more to put down roots even as shallow as these. The acoustics are all wrong, though; there are no books, there’s no wall of records, and there’s very little furniture, just a sofa and an armchair. There’s no hi-fi, just a little audiocassette and a few tapes, some of which she bought from us. And, thrillingly, there are two guitars leaning against the wall.
She goes into the kitchen, which is actually in the living room but distinguishable because the carpet stops and the lino begins, and gets some ice and a couple of glasses (she doesn’t ask me if I want ice, but this is the first bum note she’s played all evening, so I don’t feel like complaining) and sits down next to me on the sofa. I ask her questions about Austin, about the clubs and the people there; I also ask her loads of questions about her ex, and she talks well about him. She describes the set-up and her knock-back with wisdom and honesty and a dry, self-deprecating humor, and I can see why her songs are as good as they are. I don’t talk well about Laura, or, at least, I don’t talk with the same sort of depth. I cut corners and trim edges and widen the margins and speak in big letters to make it all look a bit more detailed than it really is, so she gets to hear a bit about Ian (although she doesn’t get to hear the noises I heard), and a bit about Laura’s work, but nothing about abortions or money or pain-in-the-arse simultaneous orgasm women. It feels, even to me, like I’m being intimate: I speak quietly, slowly, thoughtfully, I express regret, I say nice things about Laura, I hint at a deep ocean of melancholy just below the surface. But it’s all bollocks, really, a cartoon sketch of a decent, sensitive guy which does the trick because I am in a position to invent my own reality and because—I think—Marie has already decided she likes me.
I have completely forgotten how to do the next bit, even though I’m never sure whether there’s going to be a next bit. I remember the juvenile stuff, where you put your arm along the sofa and lee it drop onto her shoulder, or press your leg against hers; I remember the mock-tough adult stuff I used to try when I was in my mid-twenties, where I looked someone in the eye and asked if they wanted to stay the night. But none of that seems appropriate anymore. What do you do when you’re old enough to know better? In the end—and if you’d wanted to place a bet, you would have got pretty short odds on this one—it’s a clumsy collision standing up in the middle of the living room. I get up to go to the loo, she says she’ll show me, we bump into each other, I grab, we kiss, and I’m back in the land of sexual neurosis.
Why is failure the first thing I think of when I find myself in this sort of situation? Why can’t I just enjoy myself? But if you have to ask the question, then you know you’re lost: self-consciousness is a man’s worst enemy. Already I’m wondering whether she’s as aware of my erection as I am, and if she is, what she feels about it; but I can’t even maintain that worry, let alone anything else, because so many other worries are crowding it out, and the next stage looks intimidatingly difficult, unfathomably terrifying, absolutely impossible.
Look at all the things that can go wrong for men. There’s the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there’s the size-doesn’t-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem … and what do women have to worry about? A handful of cellulite? Join the club. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank? Ditto.
I’m happy to be a bloke, I think, but sometimes I’m not happy being a bloke in the late-twentieth century. Sometimes I’d rather be my dad. He never had to worry about delivering the goods, because he never knew that there were any goods to deliver; he never had to worry about how he ranked in my mother’s all-time hot one hundred, because he was first and last on the list. Wouldn’t it be great if you could talk about this sort of thing to your father?
One day, maybe, I’ll try. “Dad, did you ever have to worry about the female orgasm in either its clitoral or its (possibly mythical) vaginal form? Do you, in fact, know what the female orgasm is? What about the G-spot? What did ‘good in bed’ mean in 1955, if it meant anything at all? When was oral sex imported to Britain? Do you envy me my sex life, or does it all look like terribly hard work to you? Did you ever fret about how long you could keep going for, or didn’t you think about that sort of thing then? Aren’t you glad that you’ve never had to buy vegetarian cookery books as the first small step on the road to getting inside someone’s knickers? Aren’t you glad that you’ve never had the ‘You might be right-on but do you clean the toilet?’ conversation? Aren’t you relieved that you’ve been spared the perils of childbirth that all modern men have to face?” (And what would he say, I wonder, if he were not tongue-tied by his class and his sex and his diffidence? Probably something like, “Son, stop whining. The good fuck wasn’t even invented in my day, and however many toilets you clean and vegetarian recipes you have to read, you still have more fun than we were ever allowed.” And he’d be right, too.)
This is the sort of sex education I never had—the one that deals in G-spots and the like. No one ever told me about anything that mattered, about how to take your trousers off with dignity or what to say to someone when you can’t get an erection or what ‘good in bed’ meant in 1975 or 1985, never mind 1955. Get this: no one ever told me about semen even, just sperm, and there’s a crucial difference. As far as I could tell, these microscopic tadpole things just leaped invisibly out of the end of your whatsit, and so when, on the occasion of my first … well, never you mind. But this disastrously partial grasp of the male sex organs caused distress and embarrassment and shame until one afternoon in a Wimpy Bar, a school friend, apropos of nothing, remarked that the saliva he had left in his glass of Wimpy cola ‘looked like spunk,’ an enigmatic observation that had me puzzling feverishly for an entire weekend, although at the time, of course, I tittered knowingly. It is difficult to stare at foreign matter floating on the top of a glass of cola and from this minimal information work out the miracle of life itself, but that is what I had to do, and I did it, too.
Anyway. We stand up and kiss, and then we sit down and kiss, and half of me is telling myself not to worry, and the other half is feeling pleased with myself, and these two halves make a whole and leave no room for the here and now, for any pleasure or lust, so then I start wondering whether I have ever enjoyed this stuff, the physical sensation rather than the fact of it, or whether it’s just something I feel I ought to do, and when this reverie is over I find that we’re no longer kissing but hugging, and I’m staring at the back of the sofa. Marie pushes me away so that she can have a look at me and, rather than let her see me gazing blankly into space, I squeeze my eyes tight shut, which gets me out of the immediate hole but which in the long run is probably a mistake, because it makes it look as though I have spent most of my life waiting for this moment, and that will either scare her rigid or make her assume some things that she shouldn’t.