“You OK?” she says.
I nod. “You?”
“For now. But I wouldn’t be if I thought this was the end of the evening.”
When I was seventeen, I used to lie awake at night hoping that women would say things like that to me; now, it just brings back the panic.
“I’m sure it isn’t.”
“Good. In that case, I’ll fix us something else to drink. You sticking to the whiskey, or you want a coffee?”
I stick to the whiskey, so I’ll have an excuse if nothing happens, or if things happen too quickly, or if blah blah blah.
“You know, I really thought you hated me,” she says. “You’d never said more than two words to me before this evening, and they were real crotchety words.”
“Is that why you were interested?”
“Yeah, kind of, I guess.”
“That’s not the right answer.”
“No, but … if a guy’s kind of weird with me, I want to find out what’s going on, you know?”
“And you know now?”
“Nope. Do you?”
Yep.
“Nope.”
We laugh merrily; maybe if I just keep laughing, I’ll be able to postpone the moment. She tells me that she thought I was cute, a word that no one has ever previously used in connection with me, and soulful, by which I think she means that I don’t say much and I always look vaguely pissed off. I tell her that I think she’s beautiful, which I sort of do, and talented, which I definitely do. And we talk like this for a while, congratulating ourselves on our good fortune and each other for our good taste, which is the way these post-kiss pre-sex conversations always go, in my experience; and I’m grateful for every stupid word of it, because it buys me time.
I’ve never had the sexual heebie-jeebies this bad before. I used to get nervous, sure, but I was never in any doubt that I wanted to go through with it; now, it seems more than enough to know that I can if I want to, and if there was a way of cheating, of circumnavigating the next bit—getting Marie to sign some sort of affidavit which said I’d spent the night, for example—I’d take it. It’s hard to imagine, in fact, that the thrill of actually doing it will be any greater than the thrill of finding myself in a position to do it, but then maybe sex has always been like that for me. Maybe I never really enjoyed the naked part of sex, just the dinner, coffee and get-away-that’s-also-my-favorite-Hitchcock-film-too part of sex, as long as it’s a sexual preamble, and not just a purposeless chat, and …
Who am I kidding? I’m just trying to make myself feel better. I used to love sex, all of it, the naked parts and the clothed parts and, on a good day, with a fair wind, when I hadn’t had too much to drink and I wasn’t too tired and I was just at the right stage of the relationship (not too soon, when I had the first-night nerves, and not too late, when I had the not-this-routine-again blues), I was OK at it. (By which I mean what exactly? Dunno. No complaints, I guess, but then there never are in polite company, are there?) The trouble is that it’s been years since I’ve done anything like this. What if she laughs? What if I get my sweater stuck round my head? It does happen with this sweater. For some reason the neck hole has shrunk but nothing else, either that or my head has got fat at a faster rate than the rest of me—and if I’d known this morning that … anyway.
“I’ve got to go,” I say. I have no idea that I’m going to say this, but when I hear the words they make perfect sense. But of course! What a fantastic idea! Just go home! You don’t have to have sex if you don’t want to! What a grown-up!
Marie looks at me. “When I said before that I hoped it wasn’t the end of the evening, I was, you know … talking about breakfast and stuff. I wasn’t talking about another whiskey and another ten minutes of shooting the shit. I’d like it if you could stay the night.”
“Oh,” I say lamely. “Oh. Right.”
“Jesus, so much for delicacy. Next time I ask a guy to stay the night when I’m here, I’ll do it the American way. I thought you English were supposed to be the masters of understatement, and beating around the bush, and all that jazz.”
“We use it, but we don’t understand it when other people use it.”
“You understand me now? I’d rather stop there, before I have to say something really crude.”
“No, that’s fine. I just thought I should, you know, clear things up.”
“So they’re clear?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’ll stay?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.”
It takes genius to do what I have just done. I had the chance of going and I blew it; in the process I showed myself incapable of conducting a courtship with any kind of sophistication whatsoever. She uses a nice sexy line to ask me to stay the night, and I lead her to believe that it sailed right over my head, thus turning myself into the kind of person she wouldn’t have wanted to sleep with in the first place. Brilliant.
But miraculously there are no more hiccups. We have the Durex conversation, as in I tell her I haven’t brought anything with me and she laughs and says that she’d be appalled if I had and anyway she has something in her bag. We both know what we’re talking about and why, but we don’t elaborate any further. (You don’t need to, do you? If you ask someone for a loo-roll, you don’t have to have a conversation about what you’re going to do with it.) And then she picks up her drink, grabs me by the hand, and takes me into the bedroom.
Bad news: there’s a bathroom interlude. I hate bathroom interludes, all that “You can use the green toothbrush and the pink towel” stuff. Don’t get me wrong: personal hygiene is of the utmost importance, and people who don’t clean their teeth are shortsighted and very silly, and I wouldn’t let a child of mine, etc., and so on. But, you know, can’t we take some time out every now and again? We’re supposed to be in the grip of a passion that neither of us can control here, so how come she can find time to think about Neutrogena and carrot moisturizer and cotton balls and the rest of it? On the whole, I prefer women who are prepared to break the habit of half a lifetime in your honor, and, in any case, bathroom interludes do nothing for a chap’s nerves, or for his enthusiasm, if you catch my drift. I’m particularly disappointed to learn that Marie is an interluder, because I thought she’d be a little more bohemian, what with the recording contract and all; I thought sex would be a little dirtier, literally and figuratively. Once we’re in the bedroom she disappears straightaway, and I’m left cooling my heels and worrying about whether I’m supposed to get undressed or not.
See, if I get undressed and she then offers me the green toothbrush, I’m sunk: that means either the long nude walk to the bathroom, and I’m just not ready for that yet, or going fully clothed and getting your sweater stuck over your head afterwards. (To refuse the green toothbrush is simply not on, for obvious reasons.) It’s all right for her, of course; she can avoid all this. She can come in wearing an extra-large Sting T-shirt which she then slips off while I’m out of the room; she’s given nothing away and I’m a humiliated wreck. But then I remember that I’m wearing a pair of reasonably snazzy boxers (a present from Laura) and a cleanish white T-shirt, so I can go for the underwear-in-bed option, a not unreasonable compromise. When Marie comes back I’m browsing through her John Irving paperback with as much cool as I can manage.