High Fidelity (9 page)

“I left because we weren't really getting on, or even talking, very much, and I'm at an age where I want to sort myself out, and I couldn't see that ever happening with you, mostly because you seem incapable of sorting yourself out. And I was sort of interested in someone else, and then that went further than it should have done, so it seemed like a good time to go. But I've no idea what will happen with Ian in the long run. Probably nothing. Maybe you'll grow up a bit and we'll put things right. Maybe I'll never see either of you ever again. I don't know. All I do know is that it's not a good time to be living here.”

More silence. Why are people—let's face it, women—like this? It doesn't pay to think this way, with all this mess and doubt and gray, smudged lines where there should be a crisp, sharp picture. I agree that you need to meet somebody new in order to dispense with the old—you have to be incredibly brave and adult to pack something in just because it isn't working very well. But you can't go about it all halfheartedly, like Laura is doing now. When I started seeing Rosie the simultaneous orgasm woman, I wasn't like this; as far as I was concerned, she was a serious prospect, the woman who was going to lead me painlessly out of one relationship and into another, and the fact that it didn't happen like that, that she was a disaster area, was just bad luck. At least there was a clear battle-plan in my head, and there was none of this irritating oh-Rob-I-need-time stuff.

“But you haven't definitely decided to pack me in? There's still a chance that we'll get back together?”

“I don't know.”

“Well, if you don't know, that must mean there's a chance.”

“I don't know if there's a chance.”

Jesus.

“That's what I'm saying. That if you don't know there's a chance, there must be a chance, mustn't there? It's like, if someone was in hospital, and he was seriously ill, and the doctor said, I don't know if he's got a chance of survival or not, then that doesn't mean the patient's definitely going to die, does it? It means he might live. Even if it's only a remote possibility.”

“I suppose so.”

“So we have a chance of getting back together again.”

“Oh, Rob, shut up.”

“I just want to know where I stand. What chance I have.”

“I don't bloody know what bloody fucking chance you have. I'm trying to tell you that I'm confused, that I haven't been happy for ages, that we got ourselves into a terrible mess, that I've been seeing someone else. These are the important things.”

“I guess. But if you could just tell me roughly, it would help.”

“OK, OK. We have a nine percent chance of getting back together. Does that clarify the situation?” She's so sick of this, so near to bursting, that her eyes are clenched tight shut and she's speaking in a furious, poisonous whisper.

“You're just being stupid now.”

I know, somewhere in me, that it's not her that's being stupid. I understand, on one level, that she doesn't know, that everything's up in the air. But that's no use to me. You know the worst thing about being rejected? The lack of control. If I could only control the when and how of being dumped by somebody, then it wouldn't seem as bad. But then, of course, it wouldn't be rejection, would it? It would be by mutual consent. It would be musical differences. I would be leaving to pursue a solo career. I know how unbelievably and pathetically childish it is to push and push like this for some degree of probability, but it's the only thing I can do to grab any sort of control back from her.

 

When I saw Laura outside the shop I knew
absolutely,
without any question at all, that I wanted her again. But that's probably because she's the one doing the rejecting. If I can get her to concede that there is a chance we'll patch things up, that makes things easier for me: if I don't have to go around feeling hurt, and powerless, and miserable, I can cope without her. In other words, I'm unhappy because she doesn't want me; if I can convince myself that she does want me a bit, then I'll be OK again, because then I won't want her, and I can get on with looking for someone else.

Laura is wearing an expression I have come to know well in recent months, a look that denotes both infinite patience and hopeless frustration. It doesn't feel good to know that she has invented this look just for me. She never needed it before. She sighs, and puts her head on her hand, and stares at the wall.

“OK, it could be that we sort things out. There may be a chance of that happening. I would say not a good chance, but a chance.”

“Great.”

“No, Rob, it's not great. Nothing's great. Everything's shit.”

“But it won't be, you'll see.”

She shakes her head, apparently in disbelief. “I'm too tired for this now. I know I'm asking a lot, but will you go back to the pub and have a drink with the others while I'm sorting some stuff out? I need to be able to think while I'm doing it, and I can't think with you here.”

“No problem. If I can ask one question.”

“OK. One.”

“It sounds stupid.”

“Never mind.”

“You won't like it.”

“Just…just ask it.”

“Is it better?”

“Is what better? Is what better than what?”

“Well. Sex, I guess. Is sex with him better?”

“Jesus Christ, Rob. Is that really what's bothering you?”

“Of course it is.”

“You really think it would make a difference either way?”

“I don't know.” And I don't.

“Well, the answer is that I don't know either. We haven't done it yet.”

Yes!

“Never?”

“No. I haven't felt like it.”

“But not even before, when he was living upstairs?”

“Oh, thanks a lot. No. I was living with you then, remember?”

I feel a bit embarrassed and I don't say anything.

“We've slept together but we haven't made love. Not yet. But I'll tell you one thing. The sleeping together is better.”

Yes! Yes! This is fantastic news! Mr. Sixty-Minute Man hasn't even clocked on yet! I kiss her on the cheek and go to the pub to meet Dick and Barry. I feel like a new man, although not very much like a New Man. I feel so much better, in fact, that I go straight out and sleep with Marie.

FACT:
Over three million men in this country have slept with ten or more women. And do they all look like Richard Gere? Are they all as rich as Croesus, as charming as Clark Gable, as preposterously endowed as Errol Flynn, as witty as Oscar Wilde? Nope. It's nothing to do with any of that. Maybe half a dozen or so of that three million have one or more of these attributes, but that still leaves…well, three million, give or take half a dozen. And they're just blokes.
We're
just blokes, because I, even I, am a member of the exclusive three million club. Ten is not so many if you're unmarried and in your mid-thirties. Ten partners in a couple of decades of sexual activity is actually pretty feeble, if you think about it: one partner every two years, and if any of those partners was a one-night stand, and that one-night stand came in the middle of a two-year drought, then you're not
in trouble
exactly, but you're hardly the Number One Lover Man in your particular postal district. Ten isn't a lot, not for the thirtysomething bachelor. Twenty isn't a lot, if you look at it that way. Anything over thirty, I reckon, and you're entitled to appear on an Oprah about promiscuity.

Marie is my seventeenth lover. “How does he do it?” you ask yourselves. “He wears bad sweaters, he gives his ex-girlfriend a hard time, he's grumpy, he's broke, he hangs out with the Musical Moron Twins, and yet he gets to go to bed with an American recording artist who looks like Susan Dey. What's going on?”

First off, let's not get carried away here. Yes, she's a recording artist, but she records with the ironically titled Blackpool-based Hit Records, and it's the type of record contract where you sell your own tapes during the interval of your own show in London's prestigious Sir Harry Lauder nightspot. And if I know Susan Dey, and after a relationship that has endured for over twenty years I feel I do, I reckon she'd be the first to admit that looking like Susan Dey in
L.A. Law
is not the same as looking like, say, Vivien Leigh in
Gone With the Wind.

But yes, even so, the night with Marie is my major sexual triumph, my
bonkus mirabilis.
And do you know how it comes about? Because I ask questions. That's it. That's my secret. If someone wanted to know how to get off with seventeen women, or more, no less, that's what I'd tell them: ask questions. It works precisely because that isn't how you're supposed to do it, if you listen to the collective male wisdom. There are still enough of the old-style, big-mouthed, self-opinionated egomaniacs around to make someone like me appear refreshingly different; Marie even says something like that to me halfway through the evening…

I had no idea that Marie and T-Bone were going to be in the pub with Dick and Barry, who had apparently promised them a real English Saturday night out—pub, curry, night bus, and all the trimmings. But I'm happy to see them, both of them; I'm really up after the triumph with Laura, and seeing as Marie has only ever seen me tongue-tied and grumpy, she must wonder what has happened. Let her wonder. It's not often that I get the chance to be enigmatic and perplexing.

They're sitting round a table, drinking pints of bitter. Marie shuffles along to let me sit down, and the moment she does that I'm lost, gone, away. It's the Saturday-night-date woman I saw through the window of the cab who has set me off, I think. I see Marie's shuffle along the seat as a miniature but meaningful romantic accommodation: hey, she's doing this for me! Pathetic, I know, but immediately I start to worry that Barry or Dick—let's face it, Barry—has told her about where I was and what I was doing. Because if she knows about Laura, and about the split, and about me getting uptight, then she'll lose interest and, as she had no interest in the first place, that would put me into a minus interest situation. I'd be in the red, interest-wise.

Barry and Dick are asking T-Bone about Guy Clark; Marie's listening, but then she turns to me and asks me, conspiratorially, if everything went all right. Bastard Barry big-mouth.

I shrug.

“She just wanted to pick some stuff up. No big deal.”

“God, I hate that time. That picking-up-stuff time. I just went through that before I came here. You know that song called ‘Patsy Cline Times Two' I play? That's about me and my ex dividing up our record collections.”

“It's a great song.”

“Thank you.”

“And you wrote it just before you came here?”

“I wrote it on the way here. The words, anyway. I'd had the tune for a while, but I didn't know what to do with it until I thought of the title.”

It begins to dawn on me that T-Bone, if I may Cuisinart my foodstuffs, is a red herring.

“Is that why you came to London in the first place? Because of, you know, dividing up your record collection and stuff?”

“Yup.” She shrugs, then thinks, and then laughs, because the affirmative has told the entire story, and there's nothing else to say, but she tries anyway.

“Yup. He broke my heart, and suddenly I didn't want to be in Austin anymore, so I called T-Bone, and he fixed up a couple of gigs and an apartment for me, and here I am.”

“You share a place with T-Bone?”

She laughs again, a big snorty laugh, right into her beer. “No
way!
T-Bone wouldn't want to share a place with me. I'd cramp his style. And I wouldn't want to listen to all that stuff happening on the other side of the bedroom wall. I'm way too unattached for that.”

She's single. I'm single. I'm a single man talking to an attractive single woman who may or may not have just confessed to feelings of sexual frustration. Oh my God.

A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you
are
like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners, a two-or three-page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time, although Barry, being Barry, went one stage further: he compiled the questionnaire and presented it to some poor woman he was interested in, and she hit him with it. But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it's no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn't even speak to each other if they met at a party.

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.)