A Certain Chemistry (20 page)

“Um . . .” George took a long draw on her cigarette and looked up at the ceiling, considering my question. “I found you a bit
intriguing
on that very first day, but I didn’t really find you attractive—not physically.”

“Cheers. Did I mention that you’re a massive bagful of money?”

George laughed. “Not
then,
” she said coquettishly, and she lifted up my hand again, this time sucking on my finger, sliding it in and out of her mouth.

“So, when?”

“I’m not sure. I just sort of found myself attracted to you, after the event. It happened slowly. I
knew
I fancied you when I decided to ask you to come to the Benny Barker show, but I can’t think of any big moment when it started.”

“Why did you know when you asked me to come to the show?”

“Oh, because it was
obvious
. There was no need for you to come, none at all. What were you going to do? Shout prompts from backstage if I got an awkward question?
And
I couldn’t even bear to call you myself and ask you to come; I made Paul call your agent.
God,
it was like being at school and having your mate ask someone out for you.”

“Ha. I just thought you were being aloof.”

“Aloof? Did you? I thought I was being so obvious that I must look absolutely
desperate
. I was too scared even to see you before the show. I hid backstage and just popped into the greenroom at the last minute—so I’d got an excuse to leave again quickly. I imagined you standing there with a glass of wine and a knowing smile . . . ‘Hi, George—you’ve clearly brought me here to shag me, haven’t you?’ I was more nervous about you than about a live TV interview.”

“You didn’t show it.”

“An actress, me, pal.”

“So, then what?”

“What do you mean? So then, we came back here and did all those
disgraceful
things.”

“We came back here after you jumped on me in the cab.”

“Thanks, Tom. Nice. Letting me keep my dignity. Cheers for that.”

“I simply meant: what changed between the show and the taxi?”

“Oh, I was buzzing with adrenaline after the interview, and that canceled out my nerves a bit, I suppose. And then, in the cab, I just looked at you and knew. I knew that you wanted me too.”

“How?”

“I just
knew
.”

“Yes, but
how
? I can’t remember doing or saying anything, so it’s obviously a message I was unaware of sending. I’d simply like to know what it is so, you know, I don’t accidentally send it out to the man who reads our gas meter or someone.”

“I
just knew
. I can’t say what it was. Maybe it was lots of tiny things, or magic, or telepathy or something . . . I just knew.”

We talked on and on. Talked for many times longer than we’d spent having sex, and in its own way, it was better than the sex.

Jesus. What
am
I on about? No it wasn’t—the sex part was fucking
stupendous
. I appear to have started talking bollocks: sorry—that’s the writer in me coming out, that is.

But the talking
was
wonderful. So wonderful I didn’t want it to end. It was also—and this
is
true—it was also the part that made me feel the most guilty. Sex is . . . well,
sex,
isn’t it? A powerful, primal, natural force. I’m not saying I couldn’t help being unfaithful to Sara, that it was beyond my control, but it did . . . I mean, it’s like you might say someone is a bit clumsy for falling over through not picking their feet up properly, yes? But you don’t blame them for
hitting the ground:
that’s gravity. You see what I’m saying? Good. So, the sex part you can kind of excuse, can’t you? But the talking—and my
enjoying
the talking so much—well, that was an unforgivable betrayal of Sara. Doubly so, because how often had she lamented that I never wanted to just sit with her and have a long, long, long talk? That three or four sentences after we’d finished exchanging strictly factual information she’d see my eyes start to drift in the direction of the TV guide? It wasn’t that I
never
talked with Sara, you understand, and certainly not that I didn’t enjoy it. It’s just that, well, Sara and I had been together for years. I didn’t need to ask what she thought about most things—I already knew, or could guess. And I didn’t feel I needed to keep telling her that I loved her either—we were beyond that,
deeper
than that. She could rest assured that I loved her. She could be so confident of it that she didn’t need to have me constantly restate it, night after night. That was true love, in my opinion. And Sara and I were together too, completely together; if I didn’t talk to her much one day, well, I could talk to her the next. There was no urgency about it, was there? Still, I couldn’t help thinking about how Sara would regard all this talking I was doing, and how I was enjoying it. Talking to George like this now was bad enough, but my finding it so intoxicating felt like an outright declaration of contempt for Sara, a slap in her face. It was, quite simply, appalling.

George and I talked until after 4
A.M
.

Though, to be fair to myself, it wasn’t quite as bad as that—because we did have sex again too, so that took up part of the time.

Finally, I said, “I’d better be going.” We’d just smoked the last cigarette; George had crumpled the empty packet and tossed it onto the table. Obviously, I’m not suggesting that I was cynically staying until I’d smoked all her fags—it’s just that the end of the cigarettes is always a watershed, a sign that the evening is over. George went to put a dressing gown on and, thankful that she wasn’t there to watch (I was, ludicrously, self-conscious), I got dressed. Then, very slowly, we walked to the door. Arms around each other, like moony adolescents. I opened it and stepped out into the hallway.

“So . . .” I said.

“So . . .” agreed George.

I was getting a little choked. I’m not sure there’s a word for the precise emotion, or mixture of emotions, I was experiencing. If you force me to pick one, though, I’d probably have to go with “frightened.”

“So . . .” I said. “What happens now?”

“What do you
want
to happen now?”

I looked away down the corridor. At nothing.

“I love my girlfriend . . .” I began. There are times when someone
really
ought to hit you across the head with a shovel. “But . . . the thought of not seeing you again is just unbearable.”

George didn’t say anything. I assumed she was simply appalled speechless by my trite dialogue.

“I . . .” I started again, but I didn’t have anywhere for the sentence to go and I just—and I’m not kidding here—“hung my head.”

I felt George’s hand under my chin. She raised my face and it lifted up to find her mouth waiting there for mine. She kissed me so perfectly that when she’d finished there wasn’t any of me left. I’d dissolved and left only my shell.

“I’ve got a book signing tomorrow,” she said. “Two
P.M
. I’ll be at Waterstone’s in Princes Street.”

“Okay.”

V

Well.
I’ve got to be honest with you here. I feel like a bit of a jerk right now. Kind of like when you play a practical joke on someone, thinking everyone will get a blast out of it, only it goes wrong and people get upset. I mean, sure, I feel responsible—I’m God, right? It comes with the territory. But I got to assure you that, for what it’s worth, I had only the best intentions. You got to believe what I’m telling you when I say that I never intended things to get messy like this.

Oh, I don’t mean for Tom or Sara or George, obviously. I knew about that—
that
’s the very reason I’m showing them to you now, so you can see what I’m talking about. No, I mean not for
anyone
. Because, like I say, Tom and Sara and George could be
anyone
. I have to check that you understand me here. It doesn’t matter, for example, that George is a famous actress, okay? I know you people are built to understand complex stuff and be able to see patterns and meaning—and that’s good. But the trouble is, it makes you
want
to see patterns and meaning, and
hate
to think you’re not complicated. If that terrible Fiona chick had been willing, then Tom might easily be in a hotel with her now. And later he’d think that maybe it was some indefinable connection they had—both being English in Scotland or both working in publishing or whatever—that was the critical thing. But that ain’t it. Remember: filter out the scenery. Remember: Sara or George or Tom or A. N. Other or
you
—it’s all the same thing, okay?

Look, when I set this universe up, I was kind of making it up as I went. There was no “Creation 101” I could have attended beforehand, you know what I’m saying? Sure, so I could have done a few things better—I’m the first to admit that. No one can say I’m not prepared to stick up my hand and say “mea culpa” when I screw up, ’cause that just isn’t right. And I’m at least trying to make up for things as best I can—I mean, that’s why I’m here now, okay? We got to deal with the situation we’re in; we can’t go back and rewrite the book, but I can at least read you the rules we have, so you know where you stand. Should have done it a long time ago, I admit—strike two against me—but you know how you put these things off.

Okay, enough with the beating myself up. Let’s get on with business.

You remember what I was saying about the whales? How I just kind of thought up all this stuff and went at it? Sometimes I got a bit carried away, got into a groove and kept pumping out these ideas. I’m like, “Yeah, that’s good! Whoa—and I know what else would be cool . . .” and I don’t know when to stop. They call it plenitude; I just kind of thought of it as “being on a roll.” Well, I don’t want you getting the idea that I simply threw you guys together, okay? I was really on the case, thinking about all these angles and stuff, all these possibilities. Like I say, though, like with the whales, I don’t really know
how
I do stuff; I just, you know,
want
badgers and—there you go—badgers. Which suits me, by the way. If I have this great idea for a plant, I don’t want to have to figure out cell division and invent osmosis and stuff first—who has the time, right? But like I told you earlier, I’m totally into all these scientists of yours getting out their microscopes or whatever and working out how I did everything. That gives me a real kick. And—I’m guessing here, but I figure I’m right—I think it helps you to understand what’s going on if you look at it like that. So, that’s how I’m going to explain all this to you, okay? So you kind of hear it in your own language, you know what I mean? And also, so you can check up on it and see I’m telling you the truth here. I’m showing good faith by making sure you can do that.

Now, first off, I thought you’d mostly all be dead by forty. Let’s get that straight right from the start. That was the time frame I was working in, and I don’t think anyone can accuse me of not doing enough to make this reasonable. Natural disasters, disease, wild animals, cold, starvation—the list goes on. So, I don’t think that any charge of negligence is going to stick, you know? And until fairly recently, it worked. How was I to know you’d start coming up with all this stuff to keep yourselves alive? Flood warnings and antibiotics and office work. You think it’s reasonable to blame me for not guessing that some wise guy would go and invent a
dialysis machine,
eh? So, for a start, any problems with your love life when you’re over forty: not my fault, okay? Past the warranty. Stuff you do beyond thirty-nine you do at your own risk, you know what I’m saying?

So, I’d got this sex stuff—which, I think you’ll agree, is kind of neat—and my only problem was how to . . . um, how to
implement
it. You have fourteen years to get a chance to stop being stupid (Okay, okay, third strike, there—let’s push on anyways), a bit of finding your feet, then all the sex while you try to defy the odds against dying for a decade or so. Now, it was kind of important you had sex. I was worried you might not do it enough to keep yourselves in offspring, so I put a lot of work into getting you to go for it. (Well,
yes
—I went over the top, obviously. Everyone can be smart in retrospect, can’t they?) First I made you want it—badly. How? “Gonadal steroids,” apparently. As I say, I’m just using your words here—if
I’d
been naming stuff, you can bet I’d never have come up with “gonadal steroids.” I mean, ugh, right? Anyways, you have these gonadal steroids—estrogen and testosterone—to get you all fired up and looking for sex. Off you go.

Now I need to refine it a bit or . . . well, I’ll let you picture what happens if I don’t—but the queues would move even slower at the post office, if you know what I’m saying. So, I get you to be attracted to someone, rather than absolutely
everyone
(I’m going to come back to this later, so remember it, okay?). I’m pretty clever here, if I say so myself. I throw in a bit of that brain chemistry that you people call psychology—basic stuff, but I do it real smooth like, so you don’t notice.

For example, I make you most attracted to faces that are similar to your own. That’s to say that, if you’re a man, you like your own mug, only in a more feminine style, and the same if you’re a woman—you go for the structure you see in your mirror but with the manliness turned up. (You didn’t even know that, did you? You think I’m making this up. I’m not—ask the people at the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, if I’m just making this up; they’ll smack you right in the face.) Better, I thought, that you’re drawn to faces like your own than if you’re drawn to faces like your dogs’. Tell me I’m wrong. Mostly it’s very simple rules that I come up with. You don’t know about them, but they’re pretty formulaic. Symmetry: you prefer physically symmetrical people. Smell: women prefer the smell of men whose immune systems are different from theirs. Oh, and they go for male pheromones pretty reliably too. (I got a bit carried away with women and smelling, to be honest. Ended up with women being a
thousand
times more sensitive to some smells than men. No need for that, really. Just on a roll again.) And all the time I’m seeing to it that you get really excited about this by doling out the monoamines.

You remember the monoamines, right? Remember I mentioned them a while back, just so you wouldn’t start giving some kind of spiritual agenda to the woody that Tom got while he was interviewing George? Yeah, sure you do. Well, let me clue you in on the monoamines.

Monoamines are a collection of chemicals—neurotransmitters—and they, well, they
are
sexual attraction, basically. What happens when you feel attraction? Nah, don’t give me any of that, “Oooh, I go all tingly” or “It’s like tiny little bunnies are hopping around in my stomach and my mind starts twinkling” stuff. Not only are metaphors part of the trouble here, but I asked you what happens, not how you interpret it. Attraction isn’t controlled, it couldn’t give a damn about your morals or your worldview, and it
definitely
isn’t the work of Cupid, tiny pink fairies, or magic of any kind. It’s monoamines. You’ve got your serotonin, your norepinephrine (that’s adrenaline to you and me), and your dopamine washing about in your head. Your brain’s lighting up around the medial insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, the caudate nucleus, and the putamen, while it’s “good night” to the posterior cingulate gyrus, the amygdala, and, right-laterally, the prefrontal, parietal, and middle temporal cortices. What the hell does all that mean? It means you’re as mad as a crab, basically. I’m not kidding here—you’re
clinically
barking; you really shouldn’t be allowed to drive. Monoamines are the ruthless, amoral storm troopers of sexual attraction; these things really do take no prisoners—dopamine alone buys your entire better judgment in exchange for a warm glow—and together they make the kind of cocktail that can, say, lead to you ending up in a hotel room on top of a soap star.

But, as you’ll have guessed, all of this is no good if, when you manage to
get
sex, you find it’s about as appealing as chewing a truck driver’s sock. So, stage three: neuropeptides. What we have here, basically, are your standard oxytocin and vasopressin. You have sex, oxytocin hits the pleasure centers of your brain, and you think, “Whoa.
That
’s something I’ll be doing again.” But—and this is where I got
real
smart—oxytocin also encourages you to be faithful. I really put in the effort with this one. Did the road work. I tested the idea of faithfulness with prairie voles first—to see if it was possible. Didn’t know I was using oxytocin, of course, but that’s what it was, and I tried faithfulness with midwestern prairie vole males and skipped it with the northwestern ones. I have to tell you, with prairie voles, it was fine either way. But with you I went for the faithful approach—figured you’d enjoy the grounding. So, I hit you with oxytocin when you had sex,
and
I made its release what the white coats call a “classically conditioned reflex.” What that means is you get oxytocin when you have sex, but if you have sex with one person enough it gets so as a bit slips out when you just
see
them. If Tom thinks he feels guilty now, just wait until he sees Sara again and gets a shot of oxytocin to hammer it home.

So, there you go—pretty well planned, I think you’ll agree. You don’t have to bother about sorting yourselves out to reproduce, ’cause I’ve set up everything for you. No thought required on your part.

Then you go and begin moving the goalposts.

I didn’t know you were going to change from small groups to cities of eight million, did I? I thought you’d be very lucky to reach the four-decade mark before you died from the flu or were eaten by a wolf, so why bother about the long-term durability of faithfulness? The effects of the monoamines only hold out for—best-case scenario—thirty months. After that your body becomes “tolerant” to the neurotransmitters and, well, passion fades. That’s the end of the running through parks in rainstorms, laughing—there’s only reflexive oxytocin holding you together now. And how well do you think
that
’s going to hold up when another round of dopamine and serotonin arrives? And I didn’t even think it was important to fix that glitch where women—whatever country and culture they’ve grown up in—have a cycle of about four years from getting together to thinking about finding someone else. Serial monogamy seemed to be fine; chances are that within four or five years either she or her partner would have succumbed to appendicitis or been carried off by an avalanche or something—and even if that didn’t happen, well, there’d hardly be
four million
other people hanging around within an hour’s drive for her to move on to, would there? And why not give men an extra helping of testosterone to keep their eyes open? Better to have loved and lost, right?

And this is where it starts to get
very
embarrassing for me. ’Cause I didn’t think infidelity would be a big issue. I
certainly
couldn’t have guessed that more people would be, would even get the
chance to
be, unfaithful than faithful—you really shot me down in flames there, didn’t you? ’Cause I didn’t allow for it, it’s all done really, really badly. I never thought to throw in a bit of sleight of hand to make it look random or varied. I didn’t even give it the thought I put into snowflakes, is what I’m saying. It just runs on the basics, it falls back onto the low-level, unrefined chemistry and psychology (and psychology is nothing but chemistry in a groove, of course). That’s why every affair is like every other affair. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an infidelity between two people who make the same bolts at the same factory, or an English writer living in Edinburgh colliding with an actress from the country’s highest-rated soap . . . it’s always the same. The trivial details vary and the settings are different, but the people go through the same thing time and time again. I know you must have spotted this, which is partly the reason why I felt I should own up here. Admit what you all knew anyway, just to clear the air.

I messed up. But I got lots of other stuff right. Take bananas, for example. Bananas I got dead-on. Okay, okay, I sense the hostility, and that’s fine; best to acknowledge it. If we don’t both acknowledge it, we won’t be able to move on.

And, you know, I think we
can
move on, a little. I’m not going to discuss that now, though. Right now I think you need some time to yourself, a little bit of space.

We’ll talk later, okay?