The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker

by Suzanne Portnoy

  I looked at the growing list of names and didn’t know where to begin. Should I sort them alphabetically and work my way from Aaron to Zahid, or go by location, job, hobby? I thought back to my late twenties, to when I got married. Back then, David would have been the only name on the list. How times had changed.

  Would a carpenter make a better lover than a banker? I wondered. Should I get to know the tax-avoidance lawyer? He might come in handy. One respondent said he worked in the City. I’d never been out with a man who worked in the City before; in fact, I’d never been out with a man who was loaded. That, I thought, would be a novelty. Then, I told myself, You’re a media chick. Think outside the box. That’s when I hit on the idea of sorting the list by generation.

  Confounded by so many possibilities, I contemplated how each age group had its own advantages. Younger guys could keep it up all night, but lacked the intellect and experience of an older man. Older men came with baggage, usually ex-wives and children and, consequently, debt. In between were guys in their thirties, many of whom were headhunting a wife or devoted to climbing the career ladder. I’d competed with a job before, and lost.

  I decided to fuck one guy from each generation – twenties, thirties and forties. I drew the line at fifty – wrinkles and spare tyres don’t appeal; I’ll deal with them when I get there myself. I’d date one from each group for three nights in a row and, using that as my yardstick for future dates, decide which generation to target.

  My first choice was Tom, a thirty-two-year-old web geek off Nerve, chosen because he (a) lived a half-mile from my house and (b) had a passion for expensive classic racing cars. I thought he sounded cool. His picture showed a slim angular guy with cropped bleach-blond hair and pale skin. We arranged to meet in Queen’s Park at a pub midway between the two of us.

  He looked like his picture, only smaller. He wasn’t much taller than me, and had the kind of pale skin that comes from spending too much time indoors at the computer, like Frank had. I was not exactly turned off by him, but neither was I turned on. After two drinks however, I was feeling frisky and thinking he looked a lot better than before and I began to fancy sucking his cock.

  ‘So,’ he asked, ‘you want to come back and see my place? It’s not very big.’

  Your cock or your place? I wondered. ‘Sure, let’s go.’

  Tom lived three minutes down the road in a small cramped room in a flat that he shared with another guy. His bedroom consisted of a double bed and all the contents of an electronics store – mixing boards, turntables, computer monitors, plus wires everywhere. It was a mess and I don’t do mess. Then I saw a bulge in his pants and thought, Well, I can do mess for one night.

  We fumbled around on the bed for a while. He had a good-sized cock and knew what to do with it, and he could use his tongue as well. He went down on me for about twenty minutes and I sucked his cock, and, for a change, here was a man who didn’t come in five minutes. Then I put a condom on him and fucked him, me on top, until I came. Afterwards I sucked him off. He came in my mouth. Like most of the guys off Nerve, he enjoyed sex and was good at it.

  Geeky guys are like fat girls – they are so happy to actually be getting any, they learn early on how to please a partner and spend a lifetime devoted to doing so. I should know. I had once been one of those fat girls – with pimples. With geeky guys, if you get past the conversations about hard drives and RAM, you’re in – and they’re in you. I got the feeling Tom would have gone down on me or fucked me all night if I’d wanted him to. He wasn’t selfish. This is why my friend Emily only dates web geeks.

  We lay together after coming, snuggling on his messed-up bed. I left at midnight, about four hours after we’d met at the pub, explaining I had work the next day and didn’t want to be tired. ‘That was fun,’ I said.

  He gave me a lingering kiss. ‘I had a good time too,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and give you a ring later in the week.’

  I kept Mr Thursday Night’s number, because he was local and I thought, In a weak moment, I might want to get laid. He never called.

  Mr Friday Night turned out different to how I had planned. I’d anticipated a date with a handsome, sophisticated middle-aged Frenchman I’d met in the real world a few weeks earlier. I’d gone out to celebrate my girlfriend Michelle’s forty-fifth birthday. We were at the Light Bar in the St Martin’s Hotel, a long, narrow dark room that’s members only, but Michelle knew someone at the door and had arranged to take us there as a special treat. We were drinking mojitos and talking, as we usually did, about men.

  ‘You really should get yourself a real boyfriend, Suzanne,’ she said. ‘All this fucking around isn’t good. You’ll get a bad reputation. People will talk.’ Her tone was so judgemental.

  ‘What people?’ I asked.

  She offered no specifics.

  ‘Anyway, I’m having fun. I’ll find a boyfriend when I want to find a boyfriend.’ That’s when I noticed a handsome guy sitting next to me on the banquette. I could tell he was eavesdropping, or maybe hearing the words ‘fucking around’ perked his ears.

  ‘So, you like casual sex?’ he said with a strong French accent.

  ‘From time to time,’ I said. ‘With the right person.’

  Michelle glared at me.

  He introduced himself as Philippe and asked if I’d ever been to a Paris swinging club. I told him I had not. I looked at him more closely. He was the proverbial tall, dark and handsome man. The tea lights on the table caught the grey flecks in his jet-black hair. He told me he’d just turned forty.

  ‘You’re looking pretty good for forty,’ I said, and I meant it.

  ‘It helps not drinking and smoking,’ he said. ‘My vice is women.’

  I was intrigued.

  ‘I love women,’ he added. ‘Young women.’

  Oh, well, I thought, I’m out. ‘So, these young women,’ I said, ‘where do you meet them?’

  He mentioned a couple of bars I never went to because they were full of skinny young model-types on the lookout for sugar daddies. I knew where I didn’t stand a chance. ‘We could meet up sometime, if you’d like.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like older women,’ I said.

  ‘I think we could have some fun.’

  ‘So do I,’ I said, and gave him my number.

  ‘This is supposed to be my birthday party, not yours,’ said Michelle.

  I thought she was joking but she was not joking at all.

  My French gigolo rang me up the day after we met and we arranged to ‘have some fun’ for that weekend. A few days later, he was ringing my front door; we kissed and went straight to my bedroom. No hanging out, no chit-chat. He was focused. He just wanted to lick my pussy for a half-hour until I came. So I let him. He kept his boxer shorts on, but his hard-on was evident. I asked if I could suck his cock.

  ‘Another time,’ he said. ‘A woman like you, she gets bored easily. I want to save something. I will give you a little bit at a time. Then you will want to see me again.’

  He’d misjudged me. I enjoy my starter, main course and dessert all served at the same time. Still, he looked like a movie star and made me come without demanding any satisfaction of his own. Guys like that deserve a second date.

  We arranged to meet the following Friday night at Soho House. As I drove to our rendezvous, I wondered what he had in mind for the next course. The previous night, I’d been with Tom, the web geek. I wondered how Mr Friday Night would compare.

  He was already in the Circle Bar when I arrived, drinking a mineral water. I was wearing a short Burberry kilt, a black crop-top sweater and high Patrick Cox shoes. I ordered a vodka and orange and propped myself up against the bar.

  Just then, Philippe’s phone rang and he went out in the hallway to answer it. ‘I’m really sorry, Suzanne,’ he said when he came back. ‘I’ve got bad news. My girlfriend, she is at my apartment.’ He explained that she’d lost her keys and would be staying at his flat for the night. And now she wanted to know when he was coming bac
k.

  ‘That really fucks things up, doesn’t it?’ I said.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ll make it up to you.’ He kissed me once on the left cheek and once on the right and left the bar.

  This is why I don’t go out with middle-aged guys, I thought. There’s always someone in the background. I made a mental note to scratch anyone in their forties off my list.

  It was now eleven p.m. I looked around the bar and spotted Lance, the magazine editor I’d fucked a couple of months earlier, who had the ratty apartment and bad taste in bedding. I didn’t want to go home alone. ‘Hi, Lance. What are you doing later on?’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Yes, tonight.’

  ‘I’m going to visit my grandmother early in the morning, Suzanne. You can’t come home with me tonight.’

  ‘The woman who gave you the duvet cover?’ He didn’t know what I was talking about and I didn’t explain. ‘OK. Bye,’ I said, and walked to the other side of the bar towards another familiar face.

  He was wearing a pair of natural linen trousers with a drawstring waist, a white Katherine Hamnett linen shirt, untucked, and a loose brown suede blazer. He reminded me of Johnny Depp, or a forty-two-year-old three-stone-heavier version of Johnny Depp. His name was Daniel and I’d seen him at Soho House many times before. He was a piece of their furniture. I’d never been there when he wasn’t.

  I’d met him twice before. The first time, I was standing at the bar with beautiful stinky Patrick, who was nagging his friend for neglecting his girlfriend. The friend turned out to be Daniel.

  Our second introduction didn’t leave a great impression either. I was sitting at the bar with my friend Gill, the editor of a women’s magazine and Daniel was standing on my other side. Gill and I weren’t close friends, but we had a lot in common. Our children had at one time attended the same local nursery, and her ex-husband was an old acquaintance from my days running nightclubs in the mid-80s. We were both feisty media chicks in our mid-forties, both single mums, and that night was a long-overdue girls’ night out to catch up, have a bitch and get drunk. Except the bar was fairly full and both of us kept running into people we knew or who knew us. So our little group of two soon became two more with Gill talking to an old boyfriend she hadn’t seen for ages, and me getting roped into a corner with Daniel.

  ‘Would you like to read the first paragraph of my novel?’ he said. ‘It’s the best first paragraph ever written.’ He then produced about two hundred pages of loose paper from what looked like a record bag, and dumped it on the Circle Bar, not waiting for a reply. He had a worn-in face and the air of someone who’d slept in his clothes once too often and didn’t mind. I couldn’t decide whether he was bohemian or alcoholic, or both.

  What kind of novelist carried their novel in a bag? Gill and I suspended our conversation and listened as he read the first paragraph aloud.

  Jesus got nailed when he was about my age. He should have used a better lawyer than his dad. Big mistake, that. The old man didn’t even turn up at court. Better things to do.

  He was right – not a bad start. But that night I wasn’t in the mood to make any new friends or to talk to a virtual stranger about his prose. Besides, this stranger looked drunk. His eyes were yellowish and cloudy. Plus, his pick-up line exuded an unsettling combination of arrogance and desperation, a real turn-off.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘not a bad paragraph.’ I turned my back.

  Gill was giving me a look that said, ‘Watch out, he could be a nutter.’ She hadn’t even engaged him.

  Daniel quickly changed tack and said, ‘Nice ass.’

  Yeah, well, I thought, after six and half thousand lunges and three years’ work with a personal trainer, it better be nice. ‘Thank you,’ I said, and turned my back again. He left the room. That was meeting number two.

  I hoped third time lucky.

  I’d struck out twice already, with Philippe and Lance. The clock was creeping past midnight, and, standing with his back against the wall facing the Circle Bar, Daniel looked OK. I knew the likelihood of his rejecting me (or anyone else) was zilch, and I just wanted an easy in-and-out.

  ‘Do you want to fuck me?’ I said.

  I pushed him into the wall and gave him a deep hard kiss. His mouth tasted like Stella Artois and Hamlet cigars.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, and lifted up my skirt for everyone to see, saying, in a loud baritone, ‘Look at the great ass I’m taking home tonight!’

  We took a cab home to mine, because he was unemployed, and was living with his parents in Somerset now. If I hadn’t asked him to come back to mine, it would have been some other girl.

  We got back to my place at about three a.m. and immediately he plopped a line of coke on my coffee table. I didn’t do the stuff, but watched as he snorted it. I took all my clothes off and sat on the sofa, waiting for him to finish with his coke so he could concentrate on me. I lay down on the sofa, my head on one of the armrests and my legs spread apart, and looked at him. He couldn’t get a hard-on. He was back hovering over the coke. Then he lifted his nose from the table and dived straight into my pussy, every once in a while lifting his head to tell me about this great novel he was trying to get published. I really wanted to get fucked but I could see that wasn’t going to happen, not with a coke dick, but he really loved giving oral, I discovered. I think he must have eaten my pussy for about two hours, until I said, ‘It’s OK, you can stop now.’ At least he does oral sex, I thought, and this hasn’t been a complete waste of time.

  ‘Have you heard about the Sick Million Dollar Man?’ Daniel asked. ‘He would get up and save the planet or whatever, but he’s got a really bad cold. He can hardly get out of bed. Flu. It could be contagious.’

  He had taken so much coke we both stayed up till sevent-thirty in the morning. He’d been talking and eating my pussy on and off since midnight. I realised I liked him. He made me laugh. Despite being tired and a little pissed off that I hadn’t got properly fucked, I hadn’t felt so comfortable with anyone for a long time.

  I kicked him out of bed at two-thirty that afternoon and went to meet some friends for lunch at a gastropub in Notting Hill. I gave Daniel a lift back to the station. ‘I’ll call you in the middle of the week sometime,’ he said.

  ‘That’s OK,’ I responded. ‘I’m really not that kind of girl. Don’t feel you have to say that shit.’

  He smiled and I drove off.

  That evening, I was back to my experiment, this time sampling the twenties generation. A twenty-three-year-old wannabe writer named Nick had left a message in my Time Out voicebox. I told him to meet me at Soho House at eight. I walked in wondering what the staff must have thought, having seen me, and my ass, the night before with Daniel, and now, not twenty-four hours later, with a man almost young enough to be my son.

  Nick was a tall, hunky Australian surfer type, with a mop of ash-blond hair. We’d communicated mostly by text message since first making contact, the preferred communication method for the twenty-something generation, I discovered. He always managed to say a lot in sixty characters.

  ARE YOU AS HOT IN REAL LIFE AS YOU SOUND IN TIME OUT? (fifty-three characters.)

  HOTTER. MUCH HOTTER. WHY DON’T YOU MEET ME AND FIND OUT? (fifty-six characters.)

  I’M PRETTY BUSY AT THE MOMENT. LET ME GET BACK TO YOU. (fifty-five characters.)

  It sounded like a classic chicken-out. But a week later he sent another text.

  YOU STILL FREE TO MEET UP?

  SURE. I tapped into my phone, and now here I was back at Soho House.

  We sat at a small table in the Drawing Room – the same room where I’d burnt my hair a few months previously while staring into Patrick’s pretty blue eyes. There might have been only five years’ difference between these two men, but that was where the similarities ended. Whereas Patrick had been all smooth moves, a modern-day gigolo, Nick was all nerves, constantly glancing around the room as if he thought he might be asked for his ID or told to l
eave. He was thrilled to find himself in such a grown-up exclusive club.

  We didn’t have much to say to each other, but he was nice to look at and, as I contemplated my generation-sampling experiment, I thought, Well, that’s the point of going out with younger boys; they’re nice to look at.

  I let him do most of the talking. He said he was designing websites for an internet company, just filling in time before his Kerouac-style novel was published. He had an agent but so far no publishers.

  The bar was dead. Saturday nights always are at Soho House, so after a couple of drinks I suggested we go to my place. I wanted to check out the merch.

  I hadn’t been with a twenty-three-year-old since I was about twenty-three myself, and now, almost twenty years later, I knew why. It was straight to the main event. No warm-up act. No style. No finesse. No foreplay, no kissing, no nothing, except straightforward missionary-style pounding. His only advantage over men twenty years his senior was that, after he popped, he got hard again. Mr Saturday Night was in the door at midnight and out the door by one. He wanted the old in-and-out, and he got it.

  By Monday morning, I’d weighed up the pros and cons of Messrs Thursday, Friday and Saturday Nights and came to the conclusion that, although none of them was perfect, I should stick to men my own age. At least they can hold a conversation, and they have had enough relationships to know what they want in a girlfriend and in bed. From a financial point of view, I thought that, if they hadn’t got screwed over by their first divorce, they would be more financially stable. I didn’t need a millionaire, just someone who could afford to take a weekend break in Prague and spring for the occasional exotic holiday. Or at least not expect me always to be the one having to pay for the fish and chips and Taittinger. Now all I had to do was find one of these guys. Nagging in the back of my mind was the hope that I would hear from Daniel again.