Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker

by Portnoy, Suzanne

  Patrick said, ‘You sure you wouldn’t like to go to the bathroom and inspect the damage?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to kiss you.’ I had waited a long time to get Patrick alone. I touched his cheek with one hand while pulling out clumps of hair with the other.

  By one-thirty a.m., almost four hours since I’d met Harry and three since I’d hooked up with Patrick, I wanted to go home. ‘Do you fancy coming back to my place, Patrick?’ I told him I had a bottle of vodka there and suggested a nightcap.

  ‘Sounds good,’ he said.

  We walked back to the China Town Car Park and got into my car. Suddenly I could smell Patrick, and it wasn’t cologne. It was a mixture of tobacco and sweat, and it was not appealing. The first thing I’m going to do when we get back, I thought, is get this guy into the shower.

  Patrick carried on talking about his desire to be a rock star. He might make a better gigolo, I thought. Especially if he bathed more frequently. I wondered if perhaps he did turn tricks. He seemed to have no money – or at least no willingness to spend it (I had picked up our drinks) and those expensive suits had to come from somewhere.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong. We got back to my place and I suggested we take a shower together. He declined, saying he was all right, didn’t need one, was tired. ‘Could we just have that drink and go to sleep?’

  That was what he meant, too – sleep. He explained he’d been on a three-day bender and was just coming down. Then, adding as an aside, perhaps as a hint, he said he’d had so much sex in the previous two years he was bored to death of it all and just wanted to sleep. I believed him. His beauty exuded the atmosphere of someone who had got everything, and everyone, he wanted – except, perhaps, a record deal. But now it just exuded exhaustion. I pointed to my bed.

  As I watched Patrick sleep, my interest in him waned. He was too young and too fucked up, I decided. At least I finally got this one out of my system, I thought, as I rolled to my side of the bed.

  Fortunately, I had a lunch date the following day to look forward to, with a guy off Nerve. When I got up the next morning, I made Patrick some eggs and bacon, and thanked him for the evening. ‘It was fun, Patrick, but I’ve gotta shoot off,’ I said. ‘No doubt I’ll see you at the House sometime.’

  Patrick gave me a quick kiss on the lips and was off. I was part disappointed, part pissed off and one hundred per cent horny. I had counted on more than the bed-and-breakfast routine. If my Nerve date is half-decent and sexy, I thought, I’ll suggest an afternoon delight.

  The kids were with their father; I’d done the laundry and tidying up, and I was free. I hoped after lunch I’d be spending the afternoon in bed.

  I met Ian at the Westbourne, a gastropub in Westbourne Park. It was very crowded with shoppers taking refuge after their pricey morning on the Portobello Road. I saw Ian walk in. He was my type: over six feet tall, blond, slim. His hair was messy, and he walked in a casual way that he probably thought was cool but that reminded me of guys who smoke too much pot and take too much E. His pace was so languid, so slow, that, even though he was almost a foot taller than me, he walked at half the pace. Everything about him was slow and relaxed.

  We talked a little about our history. Somehow it wasn’t a surprise when he said, ‘I used to have a smack problem, a really bad smack problem.’ He said all his friends had done the stuff. They were into the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses.

  ‘I had a friend in one of the bands,’ he said. ‘We used to hang around, get wasted. I was in a pretty bad way, then I just got lucky and through a friend got this great job.’ He was a copywriter for a huge natural beauty-products company that had shops around the world. ‘Now I write all the stuff you read on the bottles.’

  Wow, that’s some story, I thought, looking at him and trying to work out whether I really did want to fuck him. I also wondered if he’d really got off the smack or had just said that for my benefit. He was about thirty-three, so a bit young for me, but, after a couple glasses of wine and a satisfying baked trout, I was in a good mood and he was getting sexier and sweeter.

  ‘Do you fancy a walk around Portobello, Ian?’ I asked.

  He said he did, so we walked towards the Westway and wandered around the market. I didn’t plan on buying anything, but thought it would kill time while I decided what to do with him. I’m always conscious when shopping with men that most view it as punishment. Ian was well behaved, not in a rush, so he passed this impromptu test.’

  ‘Care to come back to my house for a cup of tea?’ I asked. He deserved a reward for good behaviour, plus it was tea-time now. I’d spent enough time in public spaces with this man and could just as easily serve him tea at home, in bed, as take him to a café.

  ‘Tea? At yours? Do you have a car?’

  We were back by four and in bed, with our teacups, by four-thirty. The sex was surprisingly good – languid and sensuous. Ian had an unusual oral technique that was new to me and really turned me on – licking my pussy, pausing, and then licking again, building anticipation for more. It was a real departure from most men’s technique, which tends to involve licking so hard it brings pain, or roughly thrusting their fingers up the vagina as if unaware there are sensitive nerves there. Then there are men whose mistake is to use continuous pressure; they end up with a numb tongue and a woman asking for more time and more variety and frustrated by his inability or unwillingness to provide either. Worse, in a sense, are those who spend so little time down below the gesture hardly counts as foreplay. Too many men treat the female organ like they do their own, unaware that, although theirs responds to the aggressive approach, the female requires a lighter touch. The clitoris has just as many nerve endings as the penis, but they’re concentrated in an area a fraction of the size.

  Ian’s technique involved continuous movement and steady pressure. His tongue was very deliberate. He would start licking my pussy, then stop, start again, then stop. It was arousing because I never knew when he was going to start or stop, and so I hovered between pleasure and the expectation of more pleasure. He was incredibly intuitive, leaving me waiting for more, but not for too long, and therefore always satisfied. I’d never had anyone eat me like that. Clearly, to Ian, providing this service was not a duty. I sucked his cock for a while but, for a change, that Saturday afternoon the focus was on me. A half-hour later I came, without worrying about pleasing him at all. He was satisfied to jerk himself off . . . in my mouth.

  Afterwards, we lay in bed a while, then took a shower together. Ian picked up the creams and lotions he saw on the shelf and quizzed me about them all. Did I actually like that stuff? Did I ever read the directions? He read the labels on my shower gel and conditioner, comparing his own copywriting with Vidal Sassoon’s. Poor guy. Even after a good lay, he couldn’t leave his job behind.

  7. A VISIT TO THE CLINIC

  A few weeks after I’d last seen him, I got a call from James, asking if I wanted to meet up for lunch that day. My Action Man had just come back from a couple of months in the Middle East. We’d been seeing each other whenever he happened to be in London, which was not very often.

  ‘What did you have in mind?’ I asked.

  ‘Your place.’ I had told my receptionist I’d be taking a long lunch.

  At one p.m. he pulled up outside my house.

  We went straight upstairs to my bedroom. Throwing off my clothes, I said, ‘Good to see you.’ I looked at his hard cock and then knelt down and put it in my mouth.

  ‘Plenty of time for that later,’ he said. ‘You know how quickly I come. Sit on my face instead.’

  He lay down on the bed and I squatted over him. Facing my headboard, I grinded on his mouth, until twenty minutes later I had my orgasm. I grabbed a rubber and slipped it on his still-hard cock. He took me from behind and as usual came in about two minutes.

  ‘Do you fancy a tuna sandwich?’ I said after, laughing. ‘It doesn’t feel right, you coming over for lunch and not getting any.’

  I made t
he sandwiches and we sat down at the kitchen table. Then he told me his wife would be away for the weekend. ‘If you’re free on Saturday night, I can bring my camera over and take some pictures of you,’ he said. ‘I can stay the whole night.’

  ‘A whole night?’ I said archly. ‘That calls for a celebration. Should I order a cake?’

  ‘Why don’t we go to a fetish club instead,’ he suggested. ‘I’d love to see you in rubber.’

  During our many long-distance phone-sex sessions, I’d learnt that James was a voyeur. He fantasised about going to fetish clubs and, as a photographer, he liked the idea of taking hot photos of his play pals. Until he met me, most of his fantasies had gone unrealised. His wife wasn’t interested. I figured that, since a whole night with James came along so rarely, I had to make the most of it. I suggested Torture Garden. It was a club I’d been to a couple of times before, with another guy I’d also met off the web. He looked dreadful in rubber – it takes a certain confidence and physique to carry it off, and he had neither – and I’d stopped seeing him shortly after that fiasco. James, I knew, would look hot in a pair of PVC chaps. And, knowing how much he liked to watch, I thought it would be fun to dress up and be photographed by him.

  He got in his car to go back home, and I skipped up the road, all the way back to my office.

  When James arrived on Saturday night, he pulled two suitcases out of the boot of his car. We went up to my bedroom and he unpacked tripods, lights, cameras and lenses, as if he were prepared to shoot Kate Moss for a Vogue cover and not just a few dirty snaps of me.

  ‘How long’s this going to take?’ I asked. I knew he took his photography seriously, but we had lots to do that night.

  ‘It’s your photo shoot,’ he said. ‘What do you have in mind?’

  I told him I wanted soft, erotic nudes that would show off my newly toned body. ‘Something I wouldn’t be too embarrassed to hang on the walls one day, after my kids move out.’

  I took off all my clothes and posed on my bed naked, occasionally masturbating. Having a camera aimed at me brought out my exhibitionist tendencies. I found the whole thing a big turn-on.

  ‘How would you like me to pay for this?’ I asked after an hour.

  In reply he put down his camera, approached the bed and buried his head between my legs. Afterwards, he said, ‘I think we’re even.’

  We went to Torture Garden a little later, and I got fucked a million different ways in the Couples Room. James thought all his Christmases had come at once.

  The next morning over breakfast, he said, ‘So. What have you been up to since I last saw you? Have you been a busy girl?’

  ‘I haven’t been sitting at home twiddling my thumbs, if that’s what you’re implying.’ I told him about an architect named Keith I’d fucked, who’d wanted to tie me up; he was studying Japanese rope bondage and wanted the practice. And I mentioned a graphic designer named Graham I’d arranged to meet in the health club at One Aldwych, where I’d given him a blowjob in the hotel’s quiet steam room.

  Sounding concerned, James asked if I’d ever been checked for STDs. ‘I know you use condoms, but there’s always a slight risk of catching something. It might be a good idea to get checked out, considering how sexually active you are.’

  I wasn’t offended. I thought he was probably right, that it wasn’t such a bad idea. And then I thought, I wonder if he knows something I don’t. I hadn’t been tested for an STD since my early twenties, after I’d gone out with an Italian hairdresser who, three weeks after our last date, phoned me up to say, ‘Suzannahhh, I’m so sorry to tell you, my darling, but I have the gonorrhoea.’

  ‘Have I given you anything?’ I asked James. ‘When was the last time you got tested?’

  ‘Me? About six weeks ago. I’m clean,’ he said. ‘It’s just that, since we last met, you told me you’ve been fucking around.’ He was stating the obvious. ‘I don’t want you to take it the wrong way.’

  Suddenly feeling paranoid, the next morning I made a few phone calls and learnt the only nearby walk-in clinic was St Mary’s, in Paddington, a large NHS hospital off the Edgware Road. I’d given birth to my younger son there and remembered it as a gloomy place with faded yellowish walls and stale hospital-smell air.

  I phoned my receptionist to tell her I had a doctor’s appointment, dropped my kids off at school and then drove to the hospital. I arrived at nine a.m. and already the waiting room was completely full, with a crowd representing the full range of humanity. I saw university students, obvious prostitutes, Eastern European immigrants and a few postmenopausal women who looked like they may have wandered into the wrong part of the hospital. What united us was our nervousness and displeasure at being found out.

  ‘Know you’re gay and feel alone?’ asked one poster on the wall. ‘Come to the teenage gay group this Wednesday.’ Another advertised: ‘Teenage STD Clinic Walk-in Every Tuesday 10 a.m.–1p.m.’ The brochures in racks each spotlighted a different disease – chlamydia, herpes, hepatitis C, AIDS, gonorrhoea, syphilis. Graphic designers must be making a bomb producing so many STD brochures for the NHS, I thought.

  I sat on an uncomfortable plastic chair shaped like a bucket. I was wearing a black-and-white pinstripe Paul Smith skirt, Baldinini high heels and a pink fitted Thomas Pink blouse. I was overdressed for the occasion. If I’d known what a shithole this place was going to be, I’d have worn my Juicy tracksuit, I thought.

  I waited six hours.

  The first thing doctors do at these clinics, into surprisingly, is ask about your sexual history. ‘When was the last time you had sex?’ asked the doctor, an attractive man in his late thirties.

  I told him about the two guys the weekend before, then answered a series of questions about what we’d done together. Oral sex? Tick. Intercourse? Tick. Anal sex? Tick. Did I use condoms? Tick.

  ‘Regular partners?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And previous to that?’ he asked.

  I told him about the two guys the weekend before.

  ‘Regular partners?’

  ‘No.’

  Oral sex? Tick. Intercourse? Tick. Anal sex? Tick. Condoms? Tick.

  Then he asked me about the weekend before that, and received the same answers.

  ‘Are you working?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yeah.’

  He asked how many men I’d been with in the past two months. I gave a guestimate.

  ‘Well, in that case,’ he said, ‘we can put you on the Fast Track programme.’ I’d be assigned my own doctor, he explained, promising I’d be seen quickly when I came in for my regular visits.

  ‘That sounds great,’ I told him. I wouldn’t have to wait six hours for check-ups with the merely promiscuous ordinary people.

  ‘I’ll just need you to fill in a few forms,’ he said as he began to draw my blood. ‘How many customers do you have in an average week?’

  Suddenly, I figured out what was going on. ‘When you said, “Am I working?” you meant “working girl”, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh. I thought you meant, "Do you have a job?"’

  ‘No,’ he said flatly.

  ‘Oh, in that case, I’m not working. Well, I mean I am working,’ I explained. ‘I run a PR agency, but I’m not working, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Does that mean I’m not eligible for the Fast Track programme?’

  ‘No,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘I’m sorry, you’re not.’

  Driving home – by now, the workday was shot – I thought, Maybe there is something to be said for a steady partner after all. The novelty of fucking around was wearing off. I went through the inventory of men I’d slept with in the six months since my divorce. Most, I concluded, I didn’t fancy enough to pursue anything steady. Those I did like and who appeared to like me, such as Action Man, weren’t available. I was growing tired of negotiating meets with guys who lived south of the river. None of the websites I used let me search by neighbourhood an
d, since I lived north, I had to factor in the distance to a man as much as the attributes of the man himself, since just getting from one end of London to another can take two hours in bad traffic. What I really needed was a nice local boyfriend – nothing too serious but someone regular and fun.

  I still had contenders left over from my newspaper ads, their phone numbers carefully typed on a piece of plain white paper now pinned to my kitchen bulletin board. Though I’d written cryptic notes beside the names, I no longer knew one from the other. ‘Greg, tax lawyer, Australian, 6’, slim, Earl’s Court.’ It wasn’t a lot to go on. I devised a plan.

  I needed to tweak my personal ad to indicate I was up for something steady, not just one fun night. And I needed to cast a wider net. Since I’d met or fucked most of the London-based guys on Nerve who were about my age, I didn’t hold out much hope there. I decided to do a blitz campaign, and posted personals in Time Out, the Evening Standard, the Guardian and the Independent, as well as DatingDirect.com and Match.com. The ads were free so I figured I had nothing to lose.

  Sexy, smart, funny, fit, London-based American media chick, 41, seeks handsome, successful, funny, fit guy for regular weekend date.

  Within a couple of weeks I had more than a hundred replies, and the culling began: John, the East End cabbie who had flexible working hours but lived with his mother; Max, the American banker, who couldn’t see me on weekends because he had a wife but might be able to sneak out of the house every once in a while for some ‘fun’; Patrick, the lighting designer, who had an open relationship with his wife and who left a long message telling me how he enjoyed hearing her fuck other men while he sat in the kitchen reading the Sunday papers; Chris, a cameraman from Lancashire who didn’t mind travelling. I felt like I’d posted a job ad in the Guardian’s Media section. If only I had a human resources manager who could sift through all the applicants, I thought. Trawling through the replies, listening to the messages, writing down the phone numbers, annotating the bios – it was a laborious task.