When it came to men, I learnt early to take advantage of what was on offer, starting the day I lost my virginity.
I was seventeen, studying at an American school in London, and on a field trip to the Old Vic. My drama class was invited backstage to meet the cast and crew after seeing Derek Jacobi in Hamlet. We were introduced to Jacobi and the other players, plus a few stagehands.
‘And this is Michael,’ said our guide, pointing to a dramatic-looking man wearing black leather trousers and a velvet cumberbund over a flouncy white blouse. He was the lighting technician and, I thought, very glam: about ten years my senior, with sandy-blond hair like Bowie, just shy of six feet tall and quite skinny. And cute. Once I caught his eye, I stopped paying attention to Jacobi and the other stagehands. I chatted with Michael about his job, although I wasn’t interested in his job.
As my classmates continued the tour, Michael quietly invited my girlfriend Laurie and me upstairs to the wig room to get stoned. We felt honoured. Then, as we were leaving, he invited us to meet him a couple of nights later at the pub next to the theatre. The opportunity to hang out with real theatre people was about as good as it got for starstruck teenage drama groupies like the two of us. And, for me, there was the promise of more on offer.
Laurie and I showed up, as arranged, and found Michael and another guy sitting at a small round table in the corner. It was a typical old-fashioned London pub – smoky, with dark-wood panelling and tobacco-stained walls, and reeking of fags and booze. We all got a little drunk, and, when Michael suggested we go back to his flat, Laurie and I readily agreed. I was excited. At last, my big night had come.
The previous year most of my girlfriends had begun talking about sex. They bragged about having lost their virginity and about sexual exploits with boys at school. They made it sound a lot more fun than shopping. There was so much emphasis on losing your virginity, I felt constrained by mine, as if not having done so set me apart as a bit of a loser. I just wanted to get rid of it.
Michael had a basement squat in a crumbling Georgian building facing Regent’s Park. Inside, all the walls were painted black. We sat on the floor on Indian cushions and snogged and smoked hash. I got very stoned and found myself kissing Michael passionately. His hand reached under my top to feel my breasts, and I felt my knickers getting damp. Laurie didn’t fancy Michael’s friend, a long-haired hippy with spots. But I was thinking about Michael and about having sex and hoping he wouldn’t notice I was still a virgin and hoping there wouldn’t be any blood.
He led me to a tiny room with a large unmade double bed. I don’t remember anything else about his bedroom. In my head, all I see is Michael, me and the bed. He unzipped my Brutus jeans, then pulled them down to my ankles. I unbuttoned my cheesecloth top, feeling a little scared but more excited, the adrenalin coursing through my body.
If there was any foreplay, it was minimal. I remember being kissed deeply, but I don’t recall whether Michael went down on me or if I sucked his cock – that, too, would have been a first for me. What I do remember is the penetration. Michael got on top of me and thrust his cock in, hard. It hurt.
Soon it wasn’t un pleasurable. He must have fucked me for an hour but I didn’t come – that wouldn’t happen for a year, until I went up to Cornell to visit an old school crush named Tony, who, in a memorable night for both of us, fucked me in his dorm room and gave me my first orgasm while losing his virginity. But, the night I lost mine, I was so excited, coming didn’t matter. It felt good to be filled up. And to be free of my virginity.
I was sore the next day but felt great as well. I wallowed in the same relief that had followed my Bat Mitzvah a few years earlier. At thirteen, I had to study Hebrew and the Torah passage in preparation for the big day when I’d take command of the Torah. There was so much studying, so much anticipation, and then the Bat Mitzvah came and went, and I just thought, Thank God that’s over. Now I can go back to hanging out with my friends.
Michael turned out to be a two-night stand, the second being a five-minute fuck in his front room while watching a BBC documentary about rabbits. He never called again. I was totally devastated. But there were other boys in whose arms I found consolation, a string of grope sessions with school classmates after one too many rum-and-cokes. They were followed in my early twenties by guys who’d ring in the middle of the night when they were drunk and horny.
A year later, at eighteen, I was wandering around Regent’s Park one day, half-hoping I might run into him. I walked down his street and tried to recall the exact place where it all had happened. I couldn’t remember. All the flats looked the same.
By the time I was twenty-nine and about to get married, I could have added another forty names to the list of men I’d fucked.
I called my friend Martha one day and asked what had happened to that list we’d drawn up back at university. ‘I hope you didn’t keep it to blackmail me, because I’ve met a guy. His name is David.’
Martha said we’d probably tossed the evidence, and was now very sad we’d done so. ‘I should have held on to it,’ she said. ‘You’d have paid a lot for those historical documents, I bet.’
I assured her David knew that I had a history with men, but I didn’t tell her that, like me, he just didn’t know the number.
I met David at a party hosted by the actor-musician Richard Strange. It was Richard’s annual Burns Night dinner and I went with my girlfriends Adair, a journalist who had interviewed Richard for a music magazine, and Lola, a costume designer who lived next door to Richard’s girlfriend. I was working in video production then, back in London after finishing university in the States, so felt it was my rightful scene and came as a tagalong.
Most of the other revellers were musicians, artists or journalists. At that time, Brixton and Herne Hill were exploding with artistic energy, and Richard Strange was the epitome of their cool.
We were hugely impressed to see the writer Kathy Acker walking out as we walked in. Inside, we discovered there was an A-list group and a B-list group. The A list included a couple of well-known writers and actors and they got the haggis. The B list was so large it seemed Richard had invited pretty much everyone else he knew, however vaguely. B-listers like us weren’t invited for the dinner but came along afterwards for leftovers and drinks.
Music from Richard’s band, Cabaret Futura, was blaring on the speakers. I was standing against a wall holding a glass of cheap plonk when I saw a spectacularly handsome man standing on the opposite side of the room, alone, with a beer in his hand. He was wearing a long-sleeved cream-coloured shirt with a busy pattern of swirling circles, straight-leg jeans and lace-up ankle-length Doc Martens. His hair was black and spiked on top. He was the best-looking guy I’d ever seen. And Lola was speaking to him.
I walked over to manoeuvre an introduction.
‘This is my friend Suzanne,’ she said. ‘Suzanne, David.’ Then she graciously walked away, leaving me to shake with nerves.
I was wearing a vintage black dress with a high neckline. I felt good, but I didn’t feel hot. This guy is so out of my league, I thought. Yet he seemed genuinely interested in me and in no rush to leave.
David later said it was because of my breasts. ‘They were tumbling out of your dress!’ he would say, despite my protests. ‘They were clearly visible, practically popping out of that low-cut dress you had on, that white thing.’ Prophetically, from the start, even basic info was in conflict. Our shared memories didn’t match.
We seemed to have a lot in common. We both were from the States – he grew up outside of Detroit; I was from New York. We both were in the media – I was working for a production company developing a series for Channel 4; he was managing an indie band. We both had eclectic taste in music, liked travelling and loved London.
We talked for a couple of hours, until Lola interrupted us. ‘We’re going now,’ she said. ‘I’ve called a minicab.’
I was staying at her place that night, so told David I had to leave, hoping he’d ask for
my phone number. He did.
I looked into David’s eyes and said, ‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’ Then I stuck my tongue down his throat before he had a chance to answer. It had to be a memorable kiss, not a generic peck on the cheek.
I got the sense that was not what he was expecting. He pulled away slightly at first, then relaxed into me, and we played tongue-tag for a couple of minutes. When I heard Adair’s voice telling me the minicab had arrived, I pulled away. ‘Bye.’
‘I’ll call you,’ he said.
I hoped he would, but resisted the desire to look back as I walked out the door.
David rang me up a few days later and invited me to a Glenn Branca concert at the Royal Festival Hall. It was an original choice, I thought. Most first dates consist of a quiet dinner in a romantic restaurant, not a thousand decibels of electric guitars, all nine instruments playing simultaneously. It was an intriguing start to our relationship.
We continued seeing each other, if not each other’s body, over the next six weeks. We got together every few days and took it slowly. I’d cook dinner, or we’d hang out at my flat watching television. We went to movies, drove up to Cambridge to wander around the colleges, hung out on Brighton beach – we did everything but have sex.
It was like an old-fashioned courtship. I’d never met anyone who hadn’t wanted to fuck me on the first or second date. Unlike my school grope partners and the three a.m. fuck-buddies who followed them, David treated me with respect. I thought it weird that after several dates he still hadn’t made a move on me, but he made up for the lack of physical affection by being amusing and sending me little postcards every few days that went straight to my heart – ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, I’m bringing red wine on Friday, yahoo!’ And so good to look at. He seemed to really like me and, from what he had told me about his past, he wasn’t exactly a player. He’d had just five girlfriends, each of whom had lasted at least a year. It was actually refreshing to meet someone who didn’t fuck around.
Still, three weeks into our relationship, I began to wonder if he was gay. Three weeks after that, I decided to find out. After drinking a bottle of wine, alone, I made a pass at him. We were on the floor, watching the telly. Enough of this, I thought. I got on top of David, ripped off his shirt and unzipped his jeans.
He was not gay – far from it. My boyfriend had a hot body and we had a very pleasant night together. We fucked for an hour or so. It was fairly straightforward stuff, a couple of positions, but, for a change, sex was intimate. And, even though I’d slept with lots of boys, I still didn’t know much about sex. I came easily and I thought that was what it was all about.
Six months later David moved in with me. We tossed my futon out on the street and invested in a new king-sized Vi-Spring Herald Supreme mattress, figuring, for the price, it would last us a lifetime.
The sex was fine during our first six months together but, as on the first night we slept together, I was always the one making the first move, and after a while being the initiator ceased to be fun. And, because the positions were always the same, sex became boring. I wasn’t really bothered. I was just happy to have found someone who wanted to settle down. I shrugged off the lack of sexual fireworks, figuring I’d had enough sex in school, college and all through my twenties to last a lifetime.
Shortly after David moved in, we booked a last-minute package to a small Greek island called Spetses. Neither of us had much money then, but we shared the desire to escape the sticky summer heat of London. Another thing we had in common was that neither of us had ever heard of Spetses before – for good reason, as we later discovered. It didn’t matter where we went. I secretly hoped a romantic holiday would break the routine and rekindle our sex life.
The trip was a disaster from the start. Indeed, just leaving the UK was a challenge. Our afternoon flight out of Gatwick was delayed and, after waiting three hours, David announced he wanted to cancel the trip and go home. ‘This is ridiculous,’ he said, eyeing the harried rep at the gate. ‘This is unprofessional. I’m going up there to demand a refund – a full refund.’
‘Hold on,’ I said, and looked at our travel ticket. The fine print promised refunds, but only on flights delayed more than fifteen hours. ‘Twelve hours to go, darling. Sorry.’
After we arrived at our seaside hotel, the bed collapsed as David sat on it. The next morning, the toilet broke. The beaches, which had looked so magnificent in the brochures, did not make up for these little irritations, as they were cluttered with empty water bottles, beer cans and tubes of suntan lotion, discarded, we decided, by previous waves of disillusioned tourists, most of them English. We had come to experience Greek life and instead found an English resort on the Mediterranean. There were British pubs, British accents and British people everywhere we went. Other couples might have laughed it off and stayed in their hotel rooms to fuck away their disappointment. But the stress of the holiday failed as an aphrodisiac, and by the end of the trip we were barely speaking.
David exploded on the last day, while arguing with me over directions. His rage was so inappropriate it spooked me and made me wonder if a relationship with him was worth the stress. Feeling I had few other options, I stuck it out.
I often wonder how different my life would be had I walked away back then. I was twenty-eight and still young enough to find another life partner, maybe even one who would also be a sex partner. But there were no other guys in the queue. So I signed on to the usual routine: got married, had a couple of kids, gained weight.
Dressing one morning a few years into our marriage, I looked in the mirror and thought, I’ve become everything I said I’d never be. I was the frumpy, overweight, undersexed mother I’d seen all my life in the grocery stores. I was two stone over my ideal weight and wore baggy Marks & Spencer clothes to hide my bulging stomach. When I’d met David, I was vibrant – a pushy New York Jewish broad turned London punkette. I’d never hesitated to flirt with the best-looking guy at a party or stick my tongue down his throat. At university, in the States, I was the chick from London who wore fashions six months ahead of others’ radar, whose purple hair and ripped fishnet stockings and mini-kilts caused more than one student to cross the street when they saw me coming. Now, a generic mother and an ignored wife, I was living my life to ensure everyone else’s happiness and had forgotten to nurture my own.
Had I been getting laid more often, this might have been tolerable. But my unfulfilling sex life was one thing I knew would never change. Six years into our marriage, even the monthly couplings came to an end. It happened the night I orgasmed so loudly David laughed at me. He was on the bottom, as usual, and was about to come when my own orgasm derailed him. It was quite high volume, admittedly. I felt him go soft beneath me. He was looking up at me, laughing. It was a nervous laugh, as if I had embarrassed him after committing a faux pas. Instantly it struck me that my husband saw no beauty in giving me an orgasm and, worse, took no joy in my pleasure.
It was hardly the first time he’d given me an orgasm. In fact, I always came during sex – one lesson I learnt early on was to get as much pleasure from my partners as they got from me. Maybe that night I was more vocal than usual, but David laughed at me, not with me, and his laughter made me uncomfortable. That night I felt a wall come down on my emotions. I knew I would never fuck my husband again. How could I relax during sex? How could I feel desire for someone who laughed at me when I came? Suddenly, I felt nothing for the man with whom I shared my bed. I turned over and went to sleep.
Gradually I lost all desire. More than once I thought to myself, Even if Richard Gere pulled down his trousers and flashed a massive hard-on, I’d say, ‘Not tonight, Richard.’ The uncommon girl had the most common inventory of problems, the kind dissected in all the women’s magazines. And how salt-in-the-wound pathetic that the good-time, go-to girl was now living like a nun.
I have an iffy memory for dates. I can remember my family’s birthdays and the date I got married, of course. I can never remember m
y parents’ wedding anniversary or those of my brothers, though, or the date I got divorced or even the month I graduated university. But 14 May 2000 stands out as if I’d memorised it as a kid, along with 4 July 1776 and 25 December. Nothing particularly novel happened that day: I went to work, as usual; I came home, gave the kids their dinner and put them to bed, as usual. But later that night everything changed for me.
The evening started with cocktails at Groucho’s, a members-only club in the West End popular with pop stars and writers and the hipsters who’d beat its two-year waiting list. I’d never been there before and went with a client, a dance producer named Aidan who was a member of the club; my girlfriend Janie, a journalist; and Aidan’s friend, a man he introduced as Nigel. Groucho’s had a large dimly lit room filled with comfortable sofas and plump armchairs, with walls lined with 19th-century etchings from the Illustrated London News and a dark walnut bar along one side. And – I was happy to see – famous people, in the flesh. It was exciting to be somewhere so glamorous, and so liberating to be out of the house and in the world of adults. Since becoming a mother, I’d hardly gone anywhere except to the office and the babycare aisle at Sainsbury’s.
That night Robbie Williams was hanging out at a nearby table and Keith Allen was at the piano serenading friends, who were laughing loudly at his made-up lyrics to familiar tunes. Janie wanted to run up to Robbie Williams and tell him he was a sex bomb. I told her, if she did, I’d never speak to her again; I hadn’t been out for a million years, but I still knew what was uncool. It was a Friday night and Aidan, Janie and I were celebrating the end of a project with dinner in the club’s restaurant; Nigel was there for the ride. I’d been promoting a well-known dancer whom Aidan had produced and Janie had written about for a national newspaper. The reviews weren’t so great, but the shows had sold out, so everyone was happy and in good spirits.
Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker Page 3
