Coming Clean

A CATERED AFFAIR

“Wickedly funny. . . . I laughed until I hurt while reading
A Catered Affair
. It’s a delightful romp with a theme lots of women can empathize with, but it’s got a lovely message too.”

—Pop Corn Reads

“A guilty pleasure . . . bawdy and fun.”

—The Romance Reader

“British chick lit at its finest. Sharp-witted humor with warm, breathing characters . . . [a] unique love story.”

—
RT Book Reviews

PERFECT BLEND

“Frothy, perky . . . titillating fun.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“A fun story full of an eccentric cast of characters. . . . Amy is an endearing heroine.”

—
News and Sentinel
(Parkersburg, WV)

“Laugh-out-loud funny, passionate, sexy, mysterious, and truly unexpected, Sue Margolis has created the
Perfect Blend
of characters, romance, and mystery. Read it!”

—Romance Junkies

“A fun, sassy read. . . . The romance blooms and the sex sizzles. This is a hilarious and engaging tale. Sue Margolis has whipped up a winner.”

—Romance Reviews Today

FORGET ME KNOT

“A perfect beach read, with a warm heroine.”

—
News and Sentinel
(Parkersburg, WV)

“A wonderful glimpse into British life with humor and a unique sense of style. . . . If you’re looking for a lighthearted romance with original characters and lots of fun, look no further. . . . This is one British author that I’m glad made it across the pond, and I will definitely be looking for more of her books.”

—Night Owl Romance

GUCCI GUCCI COO

“A wickedly prescient novel. . . . Likable characters and a clever concept make this silly confection a guilty pleasure.”

—
USA Today

“[Margolis’s] language . . . is fresh and original. . . . [This] is a fast, fun read [and] a great book for any smart girl who has ever had to attend a baby shower.”

—
Chicago Sun-Times

ORIGINAL CYN

“Hilarious. . . . Margolis’s silly puns alone are worth the price of the book. Another laugh-out-loud funny, occasionally clever, and perfectly polished charmer.”

—
Contra Costa
Times

“Has something for everyone—humor, good dialogue, hot love scenes, and lots of dilemmas.”

—
Rendezvous

“A perfect lunchtime book or, better yet, a book for those days at the beach.”

—Romance Reviews Today

“Delightful. . . . Fans will appreciate this look at a lack of ethics in the workplace.”

—
Midwest Book Review

BREAKFAST AT STEPHANIE’S

“With Stephanie, Margolis has produced yet another jazzy cousin to Bridget Jones.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“A comic, breezy winner from popular and sexy Margolis.”

—
Booklist

“Rife with female frivolity, punchy one-liners, and sex.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“An engaging tale.”

—
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

APOCALIPSTICK

“Sexy British romp. . . . Margolis’s characters have a candor and self-deprecation that lead to furiously funny moments . . . a riotous, ribald escapade sure to leave readers chuckling to the very end of this saucy adventure.”

—
USA Today

“Quick in pace and often very funny.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

“Margolis combines lighthearted suspense with sharp English wit . . . [an] entertaining read.”

—
Booklist

“A joyously funny British comedy . . . just the ticket for those of us who like the rambunctious, witty humor this comedy provides.”

—Romance Reviews Today

“[An] irreverent, sharp-witted look at love and dating.”

—
Houston Chronicle

SPIN CYCLE

“This delightful novel is filled with more than a few big laughs.”

—
Booklist

“A funny, sexy British romp. . . . Margolis is able to keep the witty one-liners spraying like bullets.”

—
Library Journal

“Warmhearted relationship farce . . . a nourishing delight.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“Satisfying . . . a wonderful diversion on an airplane, poolside, or beach.”

—Baton Rouge Magazine

NEUROTICA

“[A] screamingly funny sex comedy . . . the perfect novel to take on holiday.”

—
USA Today

“Cheeky comic novel—a kind of
Bridget Jones’s Diary
for the matrimonial set . . . wickedly funny.”

—
People
(Beach Book of the Week)

“Scenes that literally will make your chin drop with shock before you erupt with laughter . . . a fast and furiously funny read.”

—
The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“Splashy romp . . . giggles guaranteed.”

—
New York Daily News

“A good book to take to the beach,
Neurotica
is fast-paced and at times hilarious.”

—
Boston’s Weekly Digest Magazine

A Catered Affair

Perfect Blend

Forget Me Knot

Gucci Gucci Coo

Original Cyn

Breakfast at Stephanie’s

Apocalipstick

Spin Cycle

Neurotica

New American Library

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

New York, New York 10014, USA

USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com.

First published by New American Library,

a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright © Sue Margolis, 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA:

Margolis, Sue.

Coming clean/Sue Margolis.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-101-62772-3

1. Married people—Fiction. 2. Marital conflict—Fiction. I. Title.

PR6063.A635C66 2013

823'.914—dc23 2012038750

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

    The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

“S
o,” Greg says, getting even more irritable as he tries and fails to front into the parking space. “You’re determined to tell this therapist woman about the tank and make me look like a complete nob.” Our fender makes contact with the one in front. “Shit.”

“It’s all right,” I say. “You only tapped it.” But I can’t resist the scolding add-on, “I told you the space was tight. You should have reversed in.”

“Thank you. I don’t need your advice.” Realizing he needs to back up a couple of feet before he can pull out, he rams the gearshift into reverse. Only it isn’t reverse. He revs the engine. The car doesn’t move. I point out that he’s in neutral.

“Yes, I know I’m in effing neutral.”

Two gear changes later, he edges out of the parking space and draws parallel to the car whose fender we just bumped.

“Do you get a kick out of trying to belittle me?” he says, twisting around and looking over his shoulder as he prepares to reverse the car back into the space.

“What, you’re so insecure these days that I can’t even point out you’re in neutral instead of reverse?”

“I don’t mean that.”

I realize that we’re back to the subject of the tank and my decision to “rat on him” to our therapist. Her name is Virginia Pruitt. Apparently she offers sex therapy as well as couples’ counseling, which is good because neither of us is entirely sure which service we require—probably both. I found her through my best friend, Annie, who has a friend who knows a couple who saw her last year and said she’s brilliant. We’re about to have our first session—if we ever get parked.

“Greg, I am not trying to belittle you. The way I see it, you buying the tank was totally out of order and there’s no doubt that it’s put even more strain on our relationship. Surely that makes it a legitimate subject to bring up with our therapist. Before the tank our sex life was pretty dismal; now it’s nonexistent. I can barely remember the last time we did it.”

“That’s right—blame it all on the tank. Like you always do. Can’t you accept that you’re at least partly to blame for our sexual decline?”

He’s not wrong. Of course I have a role in all this—that’s one of the reasons we’re here, to examine my contribution—but right now we’re discussing him and sodding Tanky and I’m determined to stay on topic.

“Greg, most men make do with a den or a garden shed.”

“I’m too young for a shed. A tank’s cool.”

Meet my husband, the forty-year-old adolescent.

I should point out that the tank isn’t the sort you fill with guppies and rainbow fish. Greg didn’t go out and buy an aquarium. (I wish. The kids would have loved it.) No, we are talking military vehicle here: thirty tons of Second World War military vehicle. Three months ago—having promised he was going to Tanks for the Memory merely to window-shop—Greg became the proud owner of a genuine Sherman tank. He tried to sell it to me on the grounds that he’d got it cheap (being a rusty, clapped-out fixer-upper, it had “only cost three grand”). “Plus,” he said, “the Sherman possesses the first ever seventy-five-millimeter gun, mounted on a fully traversing turret.”

Even though Tanky—my mocking, less than affectionate pet name for the killing machine—does up to thirty miles per hour (or will do when Greg has got it going), he was forced to agree with me that it didn’t make the ideal inner-city runabout, so presently he has it “stabled” on his mate Pete’s five-hundred-acre farm in Sussex. The kids and I have met Tanky once, when the whole family called in at Pete’s one day on the way to Brighton. Ben immediately started clambering over it, making loud machine gun noises. He asked if it had killed real Nazis. (The child is eight and he knows what Nazis are. I still haven’t forgiven my dad for letting him watch
The Great Escape.
) His sister, Amy, who is two years older and more of a Hello Kitty tote bag with rhinestones kinda gal, took one look at the rust heap in front of her and curled her lip. After which she put her iPod buds back in her ears and carried on listening to her Miley-Justin Radio Disney music. I prefer to call it muse-ache.

I think I might have said something noncommittal re the tank, like: “Oh my God, Greg. I cannot believe you spent three grand on this pile of crap.”

•   •   •

“B
ut why is it out of order?” Greg is saying now. “I still can’t see what’s meant to be so wrong with buying a tank. I could understand if I was into war games or I’d become a survivalist with a mullet and a bunker full of AK-47s and I’d started indoctrinating the kids about the New World Order. But I’m a pacifist who just happens to think it’s a bit of a lark to ride around the countryside in a tank. And it’s not like we couldn’t afford it.”

Despite my original outburst about the cost of the tank, lately I’ve come to see his point. Last year, just before Christmas, Greg’s gran died. She left him twenty thousand pounds in her will. Once it’s restored, the tank will end up costing around four and a half grand, maybe five. Not cheap, but I guess everybody deserves to indulge themselves occasionally. “Plus,” he said, “it will be something to remember my gran by.” I told him that I could think of no better memorial to this sweet, gray-haired old lady who always smelled of Estée Lauder Youth-Dew.

Greg insisted I had a few treats, too, so I splashed out on a couple of new outfits and a posh handbag. The rest of his inheritance was put into a savings account, which we’d opened a few years ago to help with the kids’ secondary school fees.

Had our marriage been jogging along OK, I don’t think I would have begrudged him his ridiculously over-the-top übergadget. I would have laughed and taken pride in my husband’s eccentricity. “God,” I’d have said to my girlfriends, “you’ll never
guess
what Greg’s been out and bought.” I might even have found it sexy.

But because our marriage wasn’t “jogging along,” his buying the tank seemed—and still seems—like the ultimate selfish indulgence.

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you buying a tank,” I say, stabbing the air with my index finger. “It lives fifty bloody miles away and you insist on visiting it practically every weekend. During the week you’re working all hours. Now you spend all day Saturday tinkering with your Tanky. The kids really miss you. What’s more, you’re absenting yourself from our marriage and you know it.”

“That’s such bollocks.”

“It isn’t bollocks.”

“And stop calling it Tanky. Why do you always have to take the piss?”

“Because I’m angry.”

“You’re always bloody angry.”

Even though I’m still determined to raise the subject of the tank with Virginia Pruitt, I can see how under attack Greg feels and decide to offer a compromise. “Look,” I say. “Instead of me mentioning it, why don’t you bring it up. That way you get to put your side of the story first and you won’t feel belittled.”

My generosity is met with a grunt. “She’s bound to side with you. Women always gang up against blokes over stuff like that.”

Finally, Greg pulls down hard on the steering wheel and eases his foot off the brake. In one perfect maneuver, we’re parked. I decide against saying “well done” as I’m not sure how he’ll take it.

“Oh, and another thing,” Greg says, once we’re out of the car. “If this Virginia person gets onto the subject of sex and starts asking us to give our genitals ‘safe, nonsexual names,’ I’m out of there.” Clunk of the electronic door locks.

He’s never forgotten that cringe-making episode of
Sex and the City
, which he half watched with me one night while he was waiting for some soccer game to appear on Sky Sports, in which Charlotte and Trey go for sex therapy and the therapist suggests they each name their bits. Charlotte decides to call her vagina “Rebecca” and Trey starts referring to his penis as “Schooner.”

“OK,” I say, “I’m with you on that.” I feel myself grinning. “But if you absolutely had to name your penis—I mean, purely hypothetically speaking—what would it be?”

Greg grimaces. “I really don’t want to talk about this.”

“No, come on . . . what would it be?” I don’t know why I’m pushing him—trying to lighten the atmosphere, I suppose.

“I dunno.”

“You must have some idea.”

“OK . . . Doric, as in column.”

“Ooh, very phallic, I’m sure.”

“Well, you did ask.”

He doesn’t ask me what I would call my vagina, so I tell him that I’m considering Miss Moneypenny . . . because Bond-wise she never saw any below-the-waist action. I think it’s pretty clever of me to come up with something so witty on the spot, but he barely responds beyond another grunt.

I can’t believe that Greg and I are about to start couples’ therapy. When we first got together, eleven years ago, we were crazy about each other. We laughed at the same things, shared the same worldview. We both insisted on extra olives and anchovies on our pizza. It was the perfect match. It wasn’t long before we were mapping out our future together. If I’m honest, we were pretty smug and we probably annoyed the crap out of our friends with our plan to get pregnant as soon as we were married, take sabbaticals from our jobs and schlep our infants around India and Nepal.

Back then, I fancied Greg like mad. He was tall, good looking with thick chestnut hair that skimmed his shirt collar, but most of all he had a great sense of humor. I remember the night we met—at my friend Kat’s birthday party. He got me a beer, and as we stood chatting he confessed that he suffered from serious paranoia. I was planning my exit route when he said, face deadpan: “Yeah, when soccer players go into a huddle before the game, I’m convinced they’re talking about me.”

I always said that Greg laughed me into bed. He did brilliant impressions—still does. You should hear his Dr. Zoidberg from
Futurama
. There was a time when he only had to say, “The president is gagging on my gas bladder. What an honor,” and I was his. Occasionally he would try to excite me by playing
The Flintstones
theme tune on his head. He could also play “God Save the Queen” on his teeth.

Greg was always goofing around, but in a cool, sexy way that I found irresistible.

After our first date—the Comedy Store, followed by pizza—we walked to Leicester Square tube. Outside the station, a busker in full evening dress was playing
The Blue Danube
on his violin.

“May I have the pleasure of this dance?” Greg said, bowing before me. Before I could tell him to behave and that there was no way I was about to waltz with him down Charing Cross Road with dozens of people watching, he had pulled me into his arms and we were dancing. He wasn’t half bad—far better than me. We twirled and laughed and people stood and clapped. It was like being in a forties musical. I fell in love that night.

Greg said he fell for me because I was the first woman who had ever laughed at his jokes, plus I had great tits and looked like a young Barbra Streisand. I asked if the Streisand remark was his way of telling me I needed a nose job. He said no, it was his way of telling me I looked like a Jewish matriarch. “So now you’re saying I look like my dead bubbe, Yetta?” I seem to remember he got over his embarrassment by taking me in his arms and snogging me thoroughly.

We couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We would meet at his place or mine and within seconds we’d be tearing off each other’s clothes. We used to have these weekend-long shagathons—breaking off only to order curry or Chinese. Before falling asleep we would lie in bed watching comedy videos. I loved watching
Fawlty Towers
reruns. Greg was into people like Eddie Izzard, Chris Rock, and Jerry Seinfeld. When we went out, it was usually to a comedy club.

Twelve years, a couple of kids, two full-time jobs and a Second World War Sherman tank later, sex has become like Belgium: always there, but we never go.

•   •   •

“N
ice house,” Greg says, pushing open Virginia Pruitt’s wooden garden gate and letting me through first. “Great restoration job. Must have cost a fortune.” This is a most un-Greg comment, since he rarely notices people’s homes, how they’re done up or whether they’re clean or chaotic inside. He rarely notices ours in particular. Or if he does notice, he doesn’t care.

The only thing domestic about my husband is that he was born in this country. He leaves wet towels on the bathroom floor, ditto dirty socks and underwear. Then there are the milk cartons, pots of yogurt and jars of pickles and jam that he refuses to put back in the fridge after use. When he does put jars away, they are always minus their lids, but plus a spoon, fork or knife sticking out of the top.

Before we were married—i.e., when we still had our own flats and were living together only part-time—I found it hard to get worked up about his slobbish behavior. After all, I was in love and everything else about our relationship felt so right. That’s not to say that I ran around picking up after him. I was no surrendered girlfriend. This relationship wasn’t going to start with my sinking into his arms and end up with my arms in his sink.

My plan was to reform Greg and I was determined to succeed. I wasn’t about to turn into my mother, who spent decades nagging, pleading and yelling at my father because he refused to help around the house, only to eventually give up.

I didn’t feel daunted. That’s because nearly all the women I knew were dating “projects” of one kind or another. Compared with my old university friend Beth, who was planning to marry a guy who wore fat white trainers and cropped pants, I thought I’d done rather well. Mum’s experience had taught me that nagging wasn’t the answer. I decided to teach Greg by example. I was always scrupulous about cleaning and tidying up after myself and hoped that he would follow suit. He didn’t.

Six months after having Amy, I went back to work full-time. I did the same after Ben. To give Greg his due, if he got home before me, he would always start dinner. Much as I appreciated the gesture, I soon put a stop to it. The food wasn’t bad, but he turned even the simplest meal into a production number and the chaos was too much. He would leave the kitchen floor awash with vegetable peelings, garlic skins and stray knobs of butter. Then there were the cupboard doors he’d leave open, on which I would inevitably bash my head. If that wasn’t enough, the counters were always covered in umpteen used bowls, dishes and frying pans—not to mention saucepans—full of hard, dried-up food that he hadn’t had the sense to put to soak. It felt like my husband had turned into some kind of utensil fetishist.