High Fidelity (10 page)

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.

“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-
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 Trojan 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.

And then I go to the bathroom, and clean my teeth; and then I come back; and then we make love; and then we talk for a bit; and then we turn the light out, and that's it. I'm not going into all that other stuff, the who-did-what-to-whom stuff. You know “Behind Closed Doors” by Charlie Rich? That's one of my favorite songs.

You're entitled to know some things, I suppose. You're entitled to know that I didn't let myself down, that none of the major problems afflicted me, that I didn't deliver the goods but Marie said she had a nice time anyway, and I believed her; and you're entitled to know that I had a nice time, too, and that at some point or other along the way I remembered what it is I like about sex: what I like about sex is that I can lose myself in it entirely. Sex, in fact, is the most absorbing activity I have discovered in adulthood. When I was a child I used to feel this way about all sorts of things—Legos,
The Jungle Book, The Hardy Boys, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,
Saturday morning cartoons…I could forget where I was, the time of day, who I was with. Sex is the only thing I've found like that as a grown-up, give or take the odd film: books are no longer like that once you're out of your teens, and I've certainly never found it in my work. All the horrible pre-sex self-consciousness drains out of me, and I forget where I am, the time of day…and yes, I forget who I'm with, for the time being. Sex is about the only grown-up thing I know how to do; it's weird, then, that it's the only thing that can make me feel like a ten-year-old.

 

I wake up around dawn, and I have the same feeling I had the other night, the night I caught on about Laura and Ray: that I've got no ballast, nothing to weigh me down, and if I don't hang on, I'll just float away. I like Marie a lot, she's funny and smart and pretty and talented, but who the hell is she? I don't mean that philosophically. I just mean, I don't know her from Eve, so what am I doing in her bed? Surely there's a better, safer, more friendly place for me than this? But I know there isn't, not at the moment, and that scares me rigid.

I get up, find my snazzy boxers and my T-shirt, go into the living room, fumble in my jacket pocket for my fags and sit in the dark smoking. After a little while Marie gets up, too, and sits down next to me.

“You sitting here wondering what you're doing?”

“No. I'm just, you know…”

“'Cause that's why I'm sitting here, if it helps.”

“I thought I'd woken you up.”

“I ain't even been to sleep yet.”

“So you've been wondering for a lot longer than me. Worked anything out?”

“Bits. I've worked out that I was real lonely, and I went and jumped into bed with the first person who'd have me. And I've also worked out that I was lucky it was you, and not somebody mean, or boring, or crazy.”

“I'm not mean, anyway. And you wouldn't have gone to bed with anyone who was any of those things.”

“I'm not so sure about that. I've had a bad week.”

“What's happened?”

“Nothing's happened. I've had a bad week in my head, is all.”

Before we slept together, there was at least some pretense that it was something we both wanted to do, that it was the healthy, strong beginning of an exciting new relationship. Now all the pretense seems to have gone, and we're left to face the fact that we're sitting here because we don't know anybody else we could be sitting with.

“I don't care if you've got the blues,” Marie says. “It's OK. And I wasn't fooled by you acting all cool about…what's her name?”

“Laura.”

“Laura, right. But people are allowed to feel horny and fucked-up at the same time. You shouldn't feel embarrassed about it. I don't. Why should we be denied basic human rights just because we've messed up our relationships?”

I'm beginning to feel more embarrassed about the conversation than about anything we've just done. Horny? They really use that word? Jesus. All my life I've wanted to go to bed with an American, and now I have, and I'm beginning to see why people don't do it more often. Apart from Americans, that is, who probably go to bed with Americans all the time.

“You think sex is a basic human right?”

“You bet. And I'm not going to let that asshole stand between me and a fuck.”

I try not to think about the peculiar anatomical diagram she has just drawn. And I also decide not to point out that though sex may well be a basic human right, it's kind of hard to insist on that right if you keep on busting up with the people you want to have sex with.