Claire is an interior decorator—has been for five years, ever since her second husband ran off with her best friend. Claire is the only truly single girl I know in London. Meaning she hasn’t had a real boyfriend for three years. Which pretty much makes her an honorary New York woman in my book. But unlike most New York women, Claire has already been married twice. And she’s only thirty-seven. Did she really have that much to complain about? “Let me put it this way,” she said. “I haven’t had sex with anyone new in over a year. I’ve only had sex with old boyfriends. Which everyone knows doesn’t count.”
We agreed to meet at Soho House, one of these private clubs where people go in lieu of restaurants and bars.
I looked around at the clumps of men and women, all of whom seemed to be in their late twenties and thirties, and all of whom seemed to be dressed in varying shades of gray or black clothes that looked like they’d been plucked out of the dirty-clothes hamper. Right away, I realized I just wasn’t getting the clothes bit right—I was wearing a Dolce & Gabbana coat with a cranberry fur collar. Everyone was drinking and laughing, but it didn’t look like people were trying to pick each other up. “God,” I said. “I feel like a desperate single woman.”
Claire looked around wildly. “Stop it. Don’t ever say that. Women in London are not desperate. People don’t understand things like that here. They’ll think we’re serious. We don’t have men because we don’t want to.”
“We don’t?” I said.
“No.” She took in what I was wearing. “And take that off,” she said. “Everyone is going to think that you’re a prostitute. Only prostitutes wear designer clothes. With fur.”
O-kay. “Cocktail?” I asked.
“You know me,” Claire said. “Oh, by the way. I’ve decided to become a housewife. But without the husband or kids. Did I tell you about this fabulous floor waxer I just bought? Secondhand, but it’s lovely. I don’t think you can get things like floor waxers anymore.”
At the bar, we ran into Hamish and Giles, two Notting Hill media types whom Claire knew. Hamish had a sweet face like a baby and was in a dither over his romantic life: He was trying to decide whether or not to marry his girlfriend.
Meanwhile, Giles said that he might have to swear off casual sex because he kept running into women he’d slept with, and things were getting “complicated.”
Ah. Casual sex. Now we were getting somewhere.
Or so I thought.
“The worst thing about casual sex is the cats,” Giles said. “All these single women have cats!”
“Can we talk about my girlfriend?” Hamish asked. “I don’t know what to do. She’s threatening to leave . . .”
“Cats are the ultimate put-off,” Giles said. Obviously, he’d had the girlfriend discussion a few too many times. “Once I was thinking about seeing a woman, and Hamish said, ‘Giles, don’t be ridiculous. She has a cat’ It’s not the cats, so much, but the way they talk about the cats. ‘Ooooh, look at little Poo-Poo.’ It’s disgusting.” Giles took a sip of vodka. “I haven’t mastered the relationship thing. But I’d prefer to have a girlfriend. In London, we don’t have dates. We just go out together. And in London, a snog is a down payment on a shag. Once you get down to snogging, you know you’re in. In New York, that isn’t true.”
I agreed, pointing out that in New York, it was entirely possible to kiss someone and then say, “See ya,” and never see him again. And if you did see him again, it was considered good form to pretend that the snog never happened. This rule also applies if you have gone further than the snog and have actually shagged.
“Oh, here we have this fake kind of chivalry,” Giles said. He seemed a little bitter about it. “The next morning, guys will say, ‘Thanks very much. It was a lovely shag,’ but it doesn’t really mean anything.”
“I’ll tell you everything about sex if someone will please tell me what to do about my girlfriend afterward!” Hamish said.
We all looked at him.
“Well, British men have this bad rap for being crappy in bed,” Hamish said, somewhat desperately. “But I think we’re getting better at it. We try to have some foreplay and we will, you know, perform oral sex. I’ve tried to get better in the sack. I read my mother’s women’s magazines to find out what to do.”
“Yeah, but they don’t show you pictures of a clitoris!” Giles said.
This comment was so pitiful, I didn’t know what to say.
“I can’t do the casual sex thing because I fail at the post-post-coital portion,” said Hamish. “Should you call? What do you say if you do call? I haven’t gotten to that part of the manual.”
“You pray for an answering machine,” Giles said.
“Inside, I’m really a trembling mess,” Hamish said. “I’m not good about being friends with women afterward, which is stupid, because if you are friends, you leave the door open for a shag six months later.”
“The whole thing is just too fucking complicated,” Giles said. “Now I’m trying to only shag girls I think I might want to have a relationship with. It’s important to be choosy. Besides, I want to have kids. In fact, I’m desperate to have kids. I’ve wanted to have kids since I was about sixteen.”
“That reminds me. I have to go home. To my girlfriend,” Hamish said.
“What’s with this marriage and kids bit?” I asked.
“How should I know?” Giles said. “That’s the thing about Englishmen. We’re not very analytical. We don’t go to shrinks.” He paused, then looked at Claire. “Hey. Don’t you have cats?” he asked.
We left.
“See what I mean?” Claire said. “London is just impossible. I would go to New York, but I’m afraid to fly. Why don’t you come over for a nightcap, and I’ll show you that new floor waxer?”
And then I got the phone call. From this Judy person. My supposed editor at the newspaper. That was paying me to write this stupid story. I had to have lunch with her the next day.
Judy was, to my mind, a “typical” Englishwoman. She had long, stringy brown hair and a pale face and wore no makeup. She drummed her half-bitten fingernails on the table. She was a no-nonsense kind of gal.
“Well,” she said. “What have you found out about sex in London?”
“Mmmm . . . er . . . can I have a cocktail?” I asked hopefully.
She nodded to the waiter. “So?” she demanded.
“Frankly,” I said, “I’ve never been anywhere where the sexes are so disparaging about each other. When it comes to, ah, actual sex.”
“Meaning?”
“Oh, it’s just that. . .” I looked at her and thought, Hang it. “It’s just that Englishmen say that Englishwomen are terrible in bed and vice versa.”
“Really?” she said. “Englishmen say that Englishwomen are bad in bed?”
I nodded. “They also say that Englishwomen don’t know how to give blow jobs.” I examined my naturally perfect nails. “What is this obsession with blow jobs, anyway?”
“Public schools,” she spat.
“They also say that . . . Englishwomen are hairy and don’t care about how they look.”
Judy leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and regarded me smugly. She was scaring the shit of out of me. No wonder Englishmen are a dithering mess.
“Englishwomen are not like American women. That’s true,” she said. “We don’t care about things like coloring our hair. Or our nails. We don’t have time to get our nails done here. We’re too busy.”
Oh, I thought. Like American women aren’t?
“Men and women understand each other here.” She gave a short laugh. “Englishmen understand that we’re all they’ve got. In other words, they’re stuck with us. And if they don’t like it, well, they get no sex at all.”
“That might be a good thing,” I said. “For you, I mean.”
She lit a cigarette. Smoke came out of her nose. “It seems to me that maybe you haven’t been doing your research.”
“Now listen,” I said. �
��I’m perfectly willing to be reasonable about this, but—”
“That’s not good enough,” she said. “You’re going to have to find an Englishman, a real Englishman, and you’re going to have to shag him. And don’t call me until you do!”
Oh dear. All I could think about was my poor bottom.
II
There’s only one thing better than being single, American, and in London over Easter weekend. And that is being single, American, in London, and in love over Easter weekend.
I wasn’t planning to fall in love. Okay, I thought I was, but I didn’t really think it would happen. Especially since I’d met dozens of men, and although they were all very charming and amusing and would talk about things New York men wouldn’t, like novels, I hadn’t found one of them appealing enough to go to bed with. To tell you the truth, they all looked a little . . . grubby. You got the feeling that if they took their clothes off, you might find something you really didn’t want to know about.
Plus, this assignment was beginning to drive me crazy. I knew it was, because two days earlier, Grasshopper had apparently checked into the Halcyon Hotel in Holland Park at three in the morning. It’s all pretty much a blank as to how she got there and what happened after she did, but it appeared that she had eaten a hamburger, and that somehow, in the past forty-eight hours, she had become a complimentary member of three private nightclubs. Apparently, she had also done something to the staff at the hotel, because every time one of them saw her, he or she would look at Grasshopper with a terrified expression and scuttle away.
See what I mean?
In fact, I was looking forward to the fact that everyone was going away for the weekend. I was planning to take long walks and look at the cherry blossoms and the short white buildings that were everywhere. Even without a man, London was a romantic city: unlike in New York, you could see the sky, and at night there was a full moon. When you walked down the street, the people in the coffee shops looked interesting, and at the sandwich shop on the corner, the lady behind the counter said she liked my shoes. A young man came in with flowers, and she bought some. We looked outside and a funny car was passing, a car that was half boat that you could drive into the river.
Anything can happen, I thought.
But I still had to complete that stupid assignment.
“I DIDN’T NEIGH”
The night before, I had gone trolling at a party at the restaurant MoMo with The Fox. The Fox had promised that it would be a party crowd, as opposed to a posh crowd, which would be much better. All it really meant was that Tom Jones, the singer, was there with his bodyguards.
A pretty girl with half-closed eyes and a short flowered skirt walked by. Sonny Snoot was following her. “It’s so funny to see a posh girl trying to be trendy,” Sonny said. “Upper-class girls don’t know what style is. They don’t even know about Prada. But you know who’s worse?”
“Who?” I asked.
“Upper-class guys. They don’t know anything about women. They don’t know how to treat a woman.”
“Basically, the longer the name, the worse the person,” The Fox said.
“And the worse they are in bed,” Sonny said.
I had to ask the inevitable question: “Is it true that they keep their socks on?”
“Only in Chelsea,” The Fox said.
Then Claire came in. “I hate the upper classes and I hate the lower classes. I only like the middle classes.”
“I hate anyone who lives in Notting Hill,” Sonny said. “Even though I live in Notting Hill.”
All this was a bit too much for me, so I went to Notting Hill, to a tiny club called World, where there were rastafarians and a really, really dirtylooking Englishman who was dancing by himself. My old boyfriend, Gerald the Suffocator, was there with his friend Crispin. They were drinking vodka out of tiny plastic cups.
“Babes!” Gerald said. “What were you doing at a party in Soho? You’ve got to be in Notting Hill. Or even better, Shepherd’s Bush. It’s all happening in Shepherd’s Bush. We’re the new bush-geoisie!”
“I can’t stand the people in Notting Hill,” Crispin said sullenly. “They live wild lives, and they all say they don’t want to get married, but then they do. And they all say they don’t have any money, but then you see them driving a bloody Mercedes!”
“Excuse me. But aren’t you getting married?” I said.
“He lives in Shepherd’s Bush. So it’s okay,” Gerald said.
“Whatever you do, don’t go out with one of those Chelsea types,” Crispin said. “They’re all upper class, and they engage in Gothic sex.”
Gothic sex?
“I slept with an aristocrat once,” he said. “And she could only come if she pretended I was her horse.” Crispin drank my cocktail. “I didn’t neigh or anything, but I had to go along with it.”
“Well, I’m supposed to have sex with someone, so I might as well have sex with one of those Chelsea men.”
“They’ve all got small willies and they’re impotent,” Crispin said. “It’s something in the water. The entire water system in London is polluted with female hormones.”
“Aha,” I said. “So that’s why Englishmen talk so much.”
And that was why, secretly I suppose, I was walking around Chelsea on Good Friday. I was looking for one of those Chelsea Englishmen—a guy who had sex with his socks on, possessed a microscopic willy, and came in two minutes. Or less. Not that I was really looking forward to it or anything.
I was walking by Joe’s Café when I bumped into Charlie, a man I’d met a couple of days before at the bar Eclipse. Which was also in Chelsea. Charlie was one of those Englishmen who was divorced but still wearing his wedding ring.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for days,” he said. “You must come and have lunch. I’m meeting The Dalmatian.” The Dalmatian was not a dog but a person, a freckly English lord. “And this other chap might come too,” he said. “Rory Saint John Cunningsnot-Bedwards.”
“One of the long-names,” I said.
“What’s that? Oh right,” Charlie said. “He’s a very, very funny chap. Very, very English. I don’t know him that well, really just met him last night at China White, but he’s very amusing. I thought he might be good for your research. He’s so very English, you see.”
“How perfect,” I said, for some reason picturing this obviously horrible St. John Cunningsnot-Bedwards person as being short, fat, bald, and somewhere around the age of fifty.
I was only about half wrong.
Charlie and The Dalmation and I were sitting, drinking Bloody Marys and smoking cigarettes when the Rory chap made his entrance. He swaggered into the restaurant with that kind of self-absorbed energy that forces people to look at you. He was in his thirties, slim, dressed in jeans and an expensive suede coat, and even though he was a little bit bald, he was beautiful in the way that Englishmen can be and Americans never are. Okay, he was damn good-looking, but also horrible.
“Right then,” he said. “You must be the American.”
“Yes,” I said. “And you must be the Englishman.”
He sat down. “And what are we talking about?” he asked, lighting his cigarette with a silver-encased Bic. He was very precise in his smoking.
“What do you think we’re talking about?” I said.
“I have absolutely no idea,” he said. “I have just arrived and wish to be informed as to the content of the conversation.”
As it just so happened, The Dalmatian was in the middle of a story about how he once had sex with his old girlfriend in a steam room in Germany, and there were other men in the steam room, but they couldn’t see who was having sex and it was driving them crazy.
“Sex,” I said.
“The most overrated activity in the universe,” he said. “I mean really. I find sex so boring. The repetition of it. In. Out. In. Out. You’re in and then you’re out. After two minutes, I want to fall asleep. Of course, I’m known for being terrible in bed. I’ve got a tiny will
y, about half the size of my little finger, and I come almost immediately. Sometimes before I say hello.”
“You’re perfect,” I said.
“I know that, but I have absolutely no idea why you should know that.”
I smiled.
“I’ve heard you’re doing research on Englishmen,” he said. “I shall tell you everything you need to know right now. The English are a fierce warrior race . . .”
“I wasn’t aware that the English were, exactly, a race,” I said.
“I think you two should have dinner,” Charlie said.
“YOU’RE GAY!”
The Dalmatian offered to drive me to my friend Lucinda’s house after lunch.
The Rory person agreed to come along. The car was a two-seater.
“I hope you don’t mind,” I said. “Obviously, I’m going to have to sit on your lap.”
“I don’t mind at all,” he said. “In fact, I shall enjoy it.”
I sat on his lap, and he put his arms around me. The thing about Englishmen, this type of Englishman, anyway, is that you never know where you are with them. “You can put your head on my shoulder if you want. It’s more comfy,” he said. He began to stroke my hair.
Then he whispered in my ear, “The thing I like about you is that you’re always observing things. Like me.”
Lucinda lived in Chelsea. I jumped out of the car and ran up the steps to her white house. I was shaking a little. “Darling!” I said.
“Oh darling,” Lucinda said. She had just gotten married to a paleontologist and was decorating her house, looking at samples of fabric.
“I think I’ve met a man,” I said.
“Darling. That’s marvelous. What’s his name?”
I told her.
“Oh, he’s lovely. But darling,” Lucinda said, looking at me. “I’ve heard he’s really bad in bed.”
“I know,” I said. “That was the first thing he told me.”
“Well, if he told you, then that makes it okay.” She hugged me. “I’m so happy for you. And don’t worry about it. All Englishmen are bad in bed.”
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