by Nick Hornby
If I’d given Marie a questionnaire, she wouldn’t have hit me with it. She would have understood the validity of the exercise. We have one of those conversations where everything clicks, meshes, corresponds, locks, where even our pauses, even our punctuation marks, seem to be nodding in agreement. Nanci Griffith and Kurt Vonnegut, the Cowboy Junkies and hip-hop, My Life as a Dog and A Fish Called Wanda, Pee-Wee Herman and Wayne’s World, sports and Mexican food (yes, yes, yes, no, yes, no, no, yes, no, yes)…You remember that kid’s game, Mousetrap? That ludicrous machine you had to build, where silver balls went down chutes, and little men went up ladders, and one thing knocked into another to set off something else, until in the end the cage fell onto the mouse and trapped it? The evening goes with that sort of breathtaking joke precision, where you can kind of see what’s supposed to happen but you can’t believe it’s ever going to get there, even though afterwards it seems obvious.
When I begin to get the feeling that we’re having a good time, I give her chances to get away: when there’s a silence I start to listen to T-Bone telling Barry what Guy Clark is really like in real life as a human being, but Marie sets us back down a private road each time. And when we move from the pub to the curry house, I slow down to the back of the group, so that she can leave me behind if she wants, but she slows down with me. And in the curry house I sit down first, so she can choose where she wants to be, and she chooses the place next to me. It’s only at the end of the evening that I make anything that could be interpreted as a move: I tell Marie that it makes sense for the two of us to share a cab. It’s more or less true anyway, because T-Bone is staying in Camden and both Dick and Barry live in the East End, so it’s not like I’ve remapped the entire city for my own purposes. And it’s not like I’ve told her that it makes sense for me to stay the night at her place, either—if she doesn’t want any further company, all she has to do is get out of the cab, try to shove a fiver at me, and wave me on my way. But when we get to her place, she asks me if I want to break into her duty free, and I find that I do. So.
So. Her place is very much like my place, a boxy first-floor flat in a north London three-story house. In fact, it’s so much like my place that it’s depressing. Is it really as easy as this to approximate my life? One quick phone call to a friend and that’s it? It’s taken me a decade or more to put down roots even as shallow as these. The acoustics are all wrong, though; there are no books, there’s no wall of records, and there’s very little furniture, just a sofa and an armchair. There’s no hi-fi, just a little audiocassette and a few tapes, some of which she bought from us. And, thrillingly, there are two guitars leaning against the wall.
She goes into the kitchen, which is actually in the living room but distinguishable because the carpet stops and the lino begins, and gets some ice and a couple of glasses (she doesn’t ask me if I want ice, but this is the first bum note she’s played all evening, so I don’t feel like complaining) and sits down next to me on the sofa. I ask her questions about Austin, about the clubs and the people there; I also ask her loads of questions about her ex, and she talks well about him. She describes the set-up and her knock-back with wisdom and honesty and a dry, self-deprecating humor, and I can see why her songs are as good as they are. I don’t talk well about Laura, or, at least, I don’t talk with the same sort of depth. I cut corners and trim edges and widen the margins and speak in big letters to make it all look a bit more detailed than it really is, so she gets to hear a bit about Ian (although she doesn’t get to hear the noises I heard), and a bit about Laura’s work, but nothing about abortions or money or pain-in-the-arse simultaneous orgasm women. It feels, even to me, like I’m being intimate: I speak quietly, slowly, thoughtfully, I express regret, I say nice things about Laura, I hint at a deep ocean of melancholy just below the surface. But it’s all bollocks, really, a cartoon sketch of a decent, sensitive guy which does the trick because I am in a position to invent my own reality and because—I think—Marie has already decided she likes me.
I have completely forgotten how to do the next bit, even though I’m never sure whether there’s going to be a next bit. I remember the juvenile stuff, where you put your arm along the sofa and let it drop onto her shoulder, or press your leg against hers; I remember the mock-tough adult stuff I used to try when I was in my mid-twenties, where I looked someone in the eye and asked if they wanted to stay the night. But none of that seems appropriate anymore. What do you do when you’re old enough to know better? In the end—and if you’d wanted to place a bet, you would have got pretty short odds on this one—it’s a clumsy collision standing up in the middle of the living room. I get up to go to the loo, she says she’ll show me, we bump into each other, I grab, we kiss, and I’m back in the land of sexual neurosis.
Why is failure the first thing I think of when I find myself in this sort of situation? Why can’t I just enjoy myself? But if you have to ask the question, then you know you’re lost: self-consciousness is a man’s worst enemy. Already I’m wondering whether she’s as aware of my erection as I am, and if she is, what she feels about it; but I can’t even maintain that worry, let alone anything else, because so many other worries are crowding it out, and the next stage looks intimidatingly difficult, unfathomably terrifying, absolutely impossible.
Look at all the things that can go wrong for men. There’s the nothing-happening-at-all problem, the too-much-happening-too-soon problem, the dismal-droop-after-a-promising-beginning problem; there’s the size-doesn’t-matter-except-in-my-case problem, the failing-to-deliver-the-goods problem…and what do women have to worry about? A handful of cellulite? Join the club. A spot of I-wonder-how-I-rank? Ditto.
I’m happy to be a bloke, I think, but sometimes I’m not happy being a bloke in the late-twentieth century. Sometimes I’d rather be my dad. He never had to worry about delivering the goods, because he never knew that there were any goods to deliver; he never had to worry about how he ranked in my mother’s all-time hot one hundred, because he was first and last on the list. Wouldn’t it be great if you could talk about this sort of thing to your father?
One day, maybe, I’ll try. “Dad, did you ever have to worry about the female orgasm in either its clitoral or its (possibly mythical) vaginal form? Do you, in fact, know what the female orgasm is? What about the G-spot? What did ‘good in bed’ mean in 1955, if it meant anything at all? When was oral sex imported to Britain? Do you envy me my sex life, or does it all look like terribly hard work to you? Did you ever fret about how long you could keep going for, or didn’t you think about that sort of thing then? Aren’t you glad that you’ve never had to buy vegetarian cookery books as the first small step on the road to getting inside someone’s knickers? Aren’t you glad that you’ve never had the ‘You might be right-on but do you clean the toilet?’ conversation? Aren’t you relieved that you’ve been spared the perils of childbirth that all modern men have to face?” (And what would he say, I wonder, if he were not tongue-tied by his class and his sex and his diffidence? Probably something like, “Son, stop whining. The good fuck wasn’t even invented in my day, and however many toilets you clean and vegetarian recipes you have to read, you still have more fun than we were ever allowed.” And he’d be right, too.)
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 spun
k,” 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 reaso
ns.) 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.