The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker

by Suzanne Portnoy

  He was looking down at his lap. ‘Well,’ he began. He was silent for a moment. ‘I might be.’

  ‘You’re actually turned on by the thought of me with another man?’

  ‘I might be,’ he repeated. It seemed more an admission than a theory.

  Now it was my turn to be shocked. I realised that after ten years I didn’t really know my husband at all. The man who I thought was shy in bed was secretly turned on by the thought of me with another man. It was something I couldn’t have foreseen. We’d never spoken about sex, about our desires or fantasies. We just did it. And, like so many young couples, we’d quickly settled into a pattern whereby one initiated and the other acquiesced, except it was always me who made the first move. Beyond that, I knew nothing about his sexual cosmology.

  ‘Now that you’re having sex with another man,’ he continued, ‘maybe you’ll want to have sex with me again, too.’

  I wondered about his motives. Did he really want me? Or did he think of sex as the price to keep his personal chef, laundress, errand-runner and caretaker? The one thing I was sure of was this: fucking David wasn’t an option. My affair finally forced us to communicate, but it was too late for the two of us.

  ‘It doesn’t work that way, David. I can’t just push a button and turn on, like a machine. I’m in love with this man. That’s why I have sex with him. I can’t fuck you. I’m sorry.’

  He was silent for a moment. ‘So what do you want to do?’ he asked.

  ‘I want a divorce.’

  Again, he didn’t look stunned or upset. He just said, ‘OK. If that’s what you want.’ And then my husband became a businessman again. ‘But I don’t want to have to do loads of paperwork. If you want a divorce, you get the lawyer, you do everything. And if you want to see this guy in the States,’ he added, ‘go ahead, but just don’t tell the kids.’

  We played out the happy-family rituals until the paperwork was complete.

  I saw Frank one more time. His wife and children’s annual visit to Texas, and my new openness with David, freed us finally to spend more than the brief snatched weekends we had endured over the past year. I booked my children into an Upstate New York summer camp, figuring I’d see Frank while the boys were in the countryside. The camp calendar required I fly to New York a day early, so I asked Frank if the boys and I might stay at his place for the night. Our meetings always took place in hotel rooms that I paid for. This was his opportunity to pay me back.

  ‘Do you really think it’s a good idea?’ he asked, reminding me that my children still did not know about the two of us.

  I figured we could be discreet and, since it would save me about $300, I thought, yes, it was a great idea. But I told him I’d book a hotel if he felt it wasn’t.

  ‘No, no,’ he assured me. ‘It’s fine. The apartment is empty except for me anyway. The boys can take the bunk beds; you can have our, er, my bed; and I’ll sleep on the sofa. I’ll find a way to fuck you.’

  In retrospect it was a lunatic idea. I saved money, but it cost me the relationship. We had acted out our fantasies in a number of romantic hotel rooms. Now we’d be dealing with reality.

  I was confident the care and originality Frank put into his tattoo would be reflected in his home. I was wrong. His apartment building was a red-brick tower on an anonymous block like so many others in Queens. Besides some of his wife’s paintings on the walls, domestic touches were minimal. There was no dining room, and the only table I saw was in the entry hall and wasn’t large enough to seat all four members of his family at once. The kitchen was tiny and betrayed no evidence anyone there cooked. In the master bedroom was a white dressing table and a queen-sized bed with a blue padded headboard pushed into a corner. The furniture was in the same style as the plastic pieces I used to play with in my early-1970s Barbie Dream House. I did not feel like Barbie there, and I was not in a Dream House.

  How could a successful Manhattan lawyer live like this? I wondered. And what kind of woman would tolerate it?

  It shouldn’t matter how someone you love decorates their world. Yet my professional life revolves around selling people’s image, and I was stunned by what I saw. I knew it was a superficial reaction, that I was being a judgemental bitch, but the visuals provoked me to reconsider the man.

  In the middle of the night Frank crept into my room and we made love, slowly and silently, so as not to disturb the children. It was good to be in his arms again. I was having my period, just as on our first night together, and some blood ended up on the sheets. Months later Frank told me he could still see a faint stain even after he’d washed the sheets a dozen times.

  The next morning, while on the bus together en route to the boys’ camp, I realised it was more pleasant to be on a cramped bus than inside Frank’s apartment. The bus ride back to the city was an even better experience. Frank put his coat across both our laps, and I gave him a hand-job. Until the woman sitting behind us interrupted us and suggested we move to the rear of the bus, I was back in fantasy land.

  Then we took the subway back to Frank’s place for dinner. He had promised to cook, having said, in one of our phone conversations, ‘I know how to make a mean spaghetti.’ I looked forward to a romantic dinner for two.

  Standing in the kitchen, I watched him boil a pot of water and then throw in some dry spaghetti. After ten minutes he grabbed a jar of marinara sauce from the cupboard, heated it, then poured the sauce over the drained pasta that was sitting in the pot. He took two paper plates out of their cellophane wrapper and served the spaghetti, along with a slice of cold Italian bread.

  ‘What happened to your real plates?’ I asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘These are real plates.’

  To me, paper plates are for barbecues. ‘Don’t you have china plates, Frank?’

  ‘No, this is it,’ he said casually, oblivious.

  I later told Bernadette about the paper plates. ‘Maybe he and his wife had an argument about doing the washing-up, and decided the only way to solve the dispute was to eat off paper plates,’ she said. ‘Did he use plastic cutlery as well?’

  A later boyfriend, Daniel, pointed to the paper plates as proof that internet relationships were a sham – glorified one-night stands. ‘How can a Jewish girl like you, who thinks about food as often as she thinks about sex, hang out with a guy who doesn’t understand the importance of china plates?’ he asked. His evidence was pretty damning. ‘You can’t sponge up sauce with the bread, because it soaks into the paper. They go all bendy and damp, like a limp cock, when anything wet is placed on them. Only a guy who doesn’t like food would eat off paper plates all the time. Face it, Suz, it’s not normal. You didn’t love Paper-plate Man.’

  Daniel was right. In the real world, Frank and I would have been a one-off, and I would have been telling my friends about a guy I’d met who ate off paper plates. Perhaps it was the paper plates that brought me back to earth. Or perhaps it was the gradual realisation that – way out of practice after so many years off the market – I’d overestimated Frank. I’d spent fifteen months projecting my own fantasies on to him, but on that last trip to New York I learnt how set in his ways Frank was, and how trapped.

  I had to admit to myself that he was never going to leave his wife, and I was never going to move to New York. I also had to admit I had been watching the calendar. In a few months my divorce would come through, and I’d become increasingly conscious that soon I would be free to see single men anywhere in the world and would never have to sneak around again. I loved Frank, but my feelings had evolved into a different kind of love – one based on gratitude, perhaps. I had invested great hope and imagination into the affair, but the truth was different. Ultimately Frank proved a disappointment. For a while, particularly during our online courtship, he was what I wanted him to be. But the reality didn’t live up to my expectations. He had taught me to think of myself as desirable, though. And he had reawakened my sexuality. His gift to me was confidence, and that’s what I used to th
row myself back into my single life.

  4. SINGING FOR MY SUPPER

  The day my husband moved out, my au pair moved in. His name was Josef; he was a nineteen-year-old from Slovakia, and adorable – but, then, he was a teenager and so many of them are. He had short brown hair, was about 5’10” and showed signs of a fit body under his Bratislava T-shirt. God, I thought, I’d forgotten how adorable a nineteen-year-old can be. Not that I thought about fucking him – he was, after all, my employee, here to take care of my two sons, not me – but I wondered if my eyes betrayed my appreciation since he looked scared shitless. Maybe it was that Josef wasn’t expecting the mother of his new charges to meet him at Victoria Coach Station in a miniskirt and a pair of four-inch Sergio Rossi heels. Or maybe it was that he was completely incapable of communicating.

  I soon discovered, as I attempted to explain the day’s busy schedule, that Josef’s English was minimal. Using the simplest language I could muster, I explained that movers were coming, my ex-husband was moving out and the kids would be spending the night at their father’s new flat. I left out the part about the guy who’d be coming by later that night to cook me dinner and fuck me for dessert. Some things are best left unsaid. The boy had only just landed in the UK and I didn’t want him running back to the station to hop on the next bus to Eastern Europe.

  Josef was the focus of my day; Søren, the focus of my night. He was a gorgeous Danish chef I’d met two weeks earlier at a party celebrating the relaunch of the Hempel in Bayswater, formerly a dowdy, traditional hotel that the designer Anouska Hempel had transformed into a cool, minimalist Zen retreat.

  Søren was the only good-looking straight guy there. I spotted him standing by the right side of the bar while I was crossing the lobby for another free cocktail. I was on the other side of the room but thought it worth squeezing through the fashionistas and liggers to get to the other side.

  As I got closer I saw he was wearing Levi 501s and a white button-down shirt that blended with the all-white interior. He was tall and very fit, his muscular legs straining the seams at the thighs. The five-o’clock shadow lent character to his round face and, with his clipped blond hair and radiant blue eyes, he looked like the cover of an A-ha album.

  When I got next to him, I said the first thing that came into my mind. ‘God knows what they put in these things. They’re lethal.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ he said in a charming accent. ‘I am on my third of these things.’

  I was on my third, too, but chose not to share this information.

  Mine wasn’t the most brilliant chat-up line, but it worked. Soon we were standing together in a corner, leaning against the walls and getting smashed on raspberry martinis.

  He said he was a chef at a West End restaurant called the Sugar Club. I knew it – a fash place where getting a table meant enduring a three-month waiting list if not privy to the secret number reserved for VIP guests. He also had a lucrative sideline, he said, concocting private dinner parties for a middle-aged gay man in Kensington who liked the idea of being served by a beefy blond in tight jeans and a tight T-shirt.

  ‘Sometimes I let him slap my ass. I get a bigger tip,’ he said. ‘It means nothing. I like girls.’

  I could tell. His sentences were short but his body talked plenty.

  His dream was to run a bakery. Cooking was a pleasure, he said, but baking was his passion. I knew he had to be an excellent chef to score a job at a top London restaurant. Diners want good food; they don’t care, or even know, if the chef’s biceps bulge tastily as he grinds steak tartare in the kitchen.

  I asked him his name.

  ‘Søren.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Søren.’

  ‘Well, I really think you’re going to have to change that, for a start,’ I said. ‘How do you expect to become a famous baker if people can’t pronounce your name?’

  By midnight I was as drunk as I was going to allow myself to get, at least on a school night, so I got right to the point. ‘I’m sorry, but I really must kiss you,’ I said.

  Before he had a chance to respond I had my tongue in his mouth, and that was the start of our relationship.

  The great thing about going out with someone who cooks is that I don’t have to. My ex-husband couldn’t boil an egg, so when it comes to seeking out new partners I tend to look for the things I missed out on during my marriage – cooking, oral sex, two-way conversations.

  Søren rang me three days later and we arranged to meet at Soho House, a members-only club popular with media folk and actors. I drank four vodka martinis, straight up with an olive, then offered to drive him home to the flat in Notting Hill he shared with friends. I was wearing spray-on black PVC trousers. Whether it was the martinis or hormones, I was feeling frisky. My hot Danish pastry couldn’t come back to my place because this was not one of my kids-free nights; his place was out because I didn’t fancy meeting his flatmates – I wanted to fuck, not fraternise.

  I pulled the car over on Ladbroke Grove, a fairly busy main street connecting Holland Park to the Harrow Road. And then I unbuttoned his fly.

  I tried pulling my trousers off in the car but, between the PVC, my body heat and the tight fit, they weren’t budging. So I opened the car door, stepped into the road and peeled them off there. Then we carried on.

  I’d never had sex in a car before, so had to learn where the most comfortable positions were. I quickly discovered there really aren’t any in a VW Golf cabriolet. Eventually, we figured out that, by tilting the seats all the way back, I could straddle his legs without hitting my head on the roof. We fucked that way for a half-hour, oblivious to any people walking by. Soon enough our hot breath steamed the windows, ensuring a privacy of sorts. Søren came; I didn’t, but that was hardly surprising, since one of my knees was jammed against the seatbelt holder and the steering wheel was pressed into my back. It was painful, but I chose to ignore it at the time.

  The next morning I rang up Søren and we compared bruises, the souvenirs of our previous night’s romp.

  Søren said, ‘I have weird marks on my thigh.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘This morning, in the bathroom mirror, I saw the imprint of the steering wheel on my back. In black and blue. Maybe next time we could go somewhere a bit more comfortable?’

  Our first night together taught me two things: first, a VW Golf is just too small for sex; second, drinking four vodka martinis leads to reckless behaviour and pain. I shared these revelations with Søren, who told me that, on a scale of one to ten, the experience rated an eight. Not bad for a first date and enough to guarantee a second.

  A few days later, the movers were carting off the last of my ex-husband’s things and, while the sexy new au pair was upstairs unpacking his bags, I was having a dinner date at my place – with my date doing the cooking. Other than Frank’s ‘homemade’ pasta meal, this was the first time in ten years I’d been at home and not had to cook for someone else. Not being on duty was ecstasy.

  Søren showed up promptly at seven, again in tight 501s and a tight white T-shirt, carrying not just the food but all the cooking equipment he needed as well. I sat on my worktop, dressed in a denim skirt (no knickers) and a tight T-shirt, and watched him cook. He began chopping the vegetables quickly and skilfully, just like I’d seen chefs do on cookery programmes, but which I’d never been able to emulate myself without spending the dinner hour at the A&E. I found it incredibly horny – not so much watching him cook as witnessing the confidence with which he handled himself.

  He had many talents in the kitchen, another of which was the way he smoothly lifted my skirt, pushed down his jeans and fucked me on the worktop, all while waiting for the fish stock to reduce. His timing was impeccable – he came when the stock was ready. He’s the only man I’ve ever met who can keep one eye on the stove, the other on me, and still maintain a hard-on. Some men can multitask.

  After pulling out, Søren finished preparing the dinner – a four-star trout-on-rocket
salad – and, after we’d eaten, cleared the plates and washed the dishes, too. Even if I hadn’t had sex that night, it would have ranked as one of my more memorable dates. My au pair benefited, as well. Søren prepared an extra plate for Josef, whom I suspect was as much cowering as unpacking and watching TV upstairs in the loft, having seen my ex-husband move out, my kids disappear and me welcome a lover, all on his first day in a new country.

  While Josef stayed out of sight, Søren and I went straight from dinner to dessert – in my bedroom. The dessert was anticlimactic. Søren was a great kisser and a spectacular cook, but I discovered he didn’t like to eat pussy. Frank had spoilt me. After sucking Søren’s cock for an hour, I began to suspect he was not going to reciprocate.

  ‘Please lick my pussy,’ I begged.

  He didn’t answer but soon manoeuvred into the same position most men take when they don’t want to comply with that request – the missionary position.

  The next morning I called Bernadette. ‘Is it normal for guys not to eat pussy on the second date?’ I asked.

  ‘Ewww,’ she said, disgusted. ‘Do you really like that?’

  As I hung up the phone, my mother called.

  ‘Hey, want some bread?’ I said. I told her I was dating a baker and that he had given me a half-dozen loaves. I told her he really knew his stuff.

  ‘Great,’ she said, not hugely enthusiastic. ‘Now all you need is a butcher and a candlestick maker, and you’ll be all set.’

  I decided not to pursue the oral-sex question.

  I still needed a second opinion, so later that day, between crunches at Crunches, I sussed out my personal trainer, Anne Marie.

  ‘Give it time,’ she said. ‘Maybe he doesn’t want to give away all his party tricks at once.’

  I wondered if that was how guys really thought. ‘I always give away my party tricks on the first or second date,’ I said. ‘I don’t see the point of holding back. Anyway, something tells me he’s not going to be around that long.’