The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker

by Suzanne Portnoy

  8. THE LIVE-IN

  On Wednesday evening, the phone rang. ‘Have you found my mobile?’ It was Daniel.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sure one of your kids hasn’t hidden it or something?’

  ‘It’s not here, Daniel. Is that the only reason you’ve rung?’

  ‘Mmmn’, I heard on the other end.

  ‘Didn’t you want to tell me how much you enjoyed being with me on Friday night,’ I continued, ‘and that you’ve realised it was love at first sight?’

  ‘Mmmn. Well, maybe. I could be thinking that too. What about you?’

  ‘I’m thinking, if you weren’t such an alcoholic cokehead, you’d be just perfect.’ We’d had just one fuck, the weekend before, but already I was on to him.

  A week later, I’m meeting his parents. And he’s meeting mine. And my kids.

  I knew he’d passed the test when my elder son, Alfred, told him, ‘You know, my mum has a lot of boyfriends. And, when she farts, it smells really bad.’

  ‘Yes, I know,’ Daniel agreed, presumably to both statements.

  ‘And a year from now, you won’t be around.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ said Daniel, ‘because even if I’m not, I know where you live and I can track you down.’

  The first few weekends visiting him at his parents in the country were great, until the novelty of getting out of London wore off. I’ve never really been much of a country girl. I don’t really care about trees, fresh air, birds. The only aspect of the country that appeals to me is curling up under a down duvet, in the dead of winter, with a log fire burning, a glass of brandy by the bedside and someone else cooking dinner.

  I resisted his moving in as long as possible. I didn’t want a live-in boyfriend, having just seen my husband off just over six months earlier. And I knew he was still doing coke because often, after spending the night with his friends (he sometimes stayed with them, saying he didn’t want to overstay his welcome at my place) he’d tell me he hadn’t slept at all. I knew what that meant, just as I knew where the constant talk, talk, and more talk came from. Coke chat has always done my head in.

  After eight weeks, I thought, Fuck it, he might as well move in. It was not so much because I wanted him to, but because I couldn’t stand the commute to his parents’ house.

  I was playing angel more than girlfriend. As with David, whom I’d saved from the dole, and Frank, whom I’d hoped to rescue from his dreary life and negative outlook, I had now, in Daniel, another puppy to rescue. He was homeless. He had a coke problem. And a drink problem. And he hadn’t worked in months. A four-star disaster. I told him he could move in – just for a while, I said, until he sorted out his career and his life. It wasn’t so much about getting regular sex, although that was a nice side benefit, but because I thought I could help get him back on his feet.

  I’ve never felt fully validated unless I’m needed. Frank had been the first person to recognise this need in me. One day, after I’d researched ways he could find work in London, he told me I didn’t have to do everything for him, that he could look the laws up for himself, that it was enough just having me there for him. ‘Be selfish, Suzanne. Do what you want to do,’ he said. ‘You take care of you.’

  It had come as a revelation. I always thought the word ‘selfish’ was derogatory. Thinking back on my life, I saw the pattern. Step one: Find a guy who has a few problems. Step two: Love him and make him feel really secure. Step three: Watch him get back on his feet at the same time as I lose all sense of self and end up miserable. Frank hadn’t meant his admonishment in a bad way. He had meant that I should stop thinking of others all the time and stop being a control freak. Just acknowledging I was one was a start.

  So I had acknowledged it, and here I was starting the process all over again, this time with Daniel. Nobody’s perfect. I had taken on the world-class challenge of trying to turn around his entire life. Perhaps I should have gone into nursing instead of PR.

  One of the rules we negotiated early on in our relationship was that we both could carry on fucking other people as long as we were in the same room together. All of my gay male friends had told me that, when they entered relationships, one of the first things they did was set the sexual ground rules, recognising that monogamy wasn’t a realistic option. That in mind, I explained to Daniel that, although I really liked him and the sex was good, I wasn’t quite ready to give up fucking around.

  ‘I don’t want to settle down so soon, Daniel,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a good two or three years of fun left in me.’

  He said he understood. ‘As long as we’re in the same room, that’s fine,’ he said. ‘Because I don’t trust you.’

  It wasn’t an ideal situation; I’d have preferred to be off on my own. But I thought it a reasonable compromise, and I recognised why he wouldn’t want me going behind his back for sex – there was always the possibility I might fall in love with someone else. Six weeks into our relationship we were standing in my kitchen when I blurted out, ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you, Suzanne,’ said Daniel. And I knew he meant it.

  Daniel had participated in plenty of threesomes over the years. He was a seasoned player. So his acquiescing to my request for a semi-open relationship wasn’t solely altruistic. We had our first swinging episode soon after our conversation. It was with Baz, a Dutch doctor Daniel knew from Soho House. They’d had threesomes before. The three of us were talking when Daniel turned to me and asked, ‘What do you think of Baz?’

  ‘He’s handsome,’ I said.

  ‘Do you want to fuck him?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Daniel turned to Baz and said, ‘Would you fancy coming back to ours and fucking my girlfriend?’

  We walked into my front room and the three of us sat down on the sofa, me in the middle. I was wearing a leopard-print wraparound dress, no knickers, and a pair of black high heels. Daniel always insisted I wear no knickers. ‘What women never understand,’ he said, ‘is that the biggest turn-on for men isn’t skimpy panties but no knickers at all.’ Ever since he’d told me that, I never wore knickers under dresses or skirts.

  I put my legs on the coffee table in front of the sofa. Baz and Daniel each did a line of coke. Then I spread my legs just enough to expose my pussy.

  ‘Isn’t she absolutely fantastic?’ said Daniel.

  Pulling out his cock, Baz said, ‘Yes. She is . . . wonderful.’

  ‘And she gives the best blowjob you’ll ever have,’ Daniel predicted.

  I was already sucking Baz’s cock, while Daniel was wanking off watching.

  ‘This feels fantastic,’ said Baz.

  It was fun enough for me. Baz was tall and blond and good-looking and well hung, my type in every way except that he was humourless. He didn’t get my New York wise-ass humour. But I didn’t give a shit. I wasn’t auditioning prospective boyfriends. All I wanted that night was a cock in my pussy and another in my mouth, and that’s exactly what I got. We went up to my bedroom to continue the fun until about three in the morning, when Daniel said to Baz, ‘I think you better go now,’ just as the three of us were falling asleep together.

  I looked at Daniel as if to say, ‘What’s all this about?’ but Baz was already getting dressed.

  ‘Too intimate,’ said Daniel, with Baz within earshot.

  The next morning our evening was Daniel’s sole topic of conversation, even though in my head I’d already moved on. It wasn’t memorable enough to dwell on.

  That’s the way it always is with me. Adult fun is just that. Though it’s more interesting than bowling with friends or having a good barbecue, I don’t attach the same value to sex that other women seem to. Sex is just another way to pass the time.

  Perhaps this is a consequence of having been around the block a few times. When girls are younger, we all think every man who fucks us is a potential husband. It took me a long time to figure out that most of them just want to get laid – and nothing more. Now I feel the same way they do.

  While
Daniel was talking about Baz, I was reminded of a conversation I once had with a part-time sex worker at a friend’s party. She said the only way she could do her job was if she forgot about her customers as soon as they walked out the door. She was always amazed when one would ring her up months later and say, ‘Hello, how are you?’ without saying their name first. She couldn’t believe any of them would think themselves that memorable.

  Daniel said, ‘Wow, that was some night. Baz is pretty handsome, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, he’s handsome enough. If a bit boring.’

  ‘But you liked him, didn’t you?’

  ‘Liked him? Yeah, I liked him. He seemed like a nice guy.’

  ‘And he has a nice cock. Does it feel nicer than mine?’

  I began to suspect this was not the normal morning-after chit-chat. ‘Look, what’s with you? He’s a nice boring Dutch doctor with a decent-sized cock. End of story.’ I wasn’t planning on dissecting the previous night. ‘Are you jealous?’

  Then Daniel said something that took me by surprise. ‘I like the jealousy,’ he said.

  ‘You’re weird,’ I said and made breakfast.

  What a complex man he was. He had had early success as a TV and print journalist, until one day he got sick of it, packed it all in and moved to Spain to write a novel no one wanted to publish. When he returned to London, he had been all but forgotten. New blood had come in; the internet had taken over, and no one wanted a drunken cokehead who scoffed at the net and refused to learn even how to send email.

  In just a couple of years the whole industry had changed, and he had not. Daniel was a journalist from a different era. He had specialised in financial journalism, and claimed that in the pre-internet days journalists got half their stories from hanging out in the City pubs and talking to the traders over their lunch hour. ‘Everyone who was a City journalist in the eighties has liver damage,’ he told me. He made it sound as common as owning a Ford Fiesta.

  Writers can put a story on the page, a skill that doesn’t always transfer orally. Daniel, however, was a fantastic storyteller and had a reputation as Soho House’s resident raconteur. He told me more than once about the time he and Rufus Sewell sat in the Drawing Room at the House one miserable December evening when, all of a sudden, a booming Welsh voice said, ‘Is there anyone serving around here?’ They turned and saw Tom Jones, alone, waiting for a drink. They asked him to join their table and by the end of the evening Rufus was at the piano accompanying Tom as he belted out the Welsh national anthem and some of his own songs, while Daniel sat watching. I was never sure whether to believe Daniel, if only because I’d never seen anyone play the piano at the House. But Daniel swore it was true and made it sound magical, even if it was a complete load of shit.

  And he was sexy. He looked like an old-fashioned musketeer with his gaucho moustache and shoulder-length wavy brown hair. He had massive shoulders and a huge stomach that somehow he carried off. He was my Renaissance man: a good cook and a willing housecleaner, who enjoyed a bit of DIY, loved gardening and wanted to fuck me all the time. He used to fuck me over the kitchen table while the kids were upstairs playing with their GameBoys. Had Daniel been born about two hundred years earlier, he’d have been Lord Byron’s sidekick. He was good with the kids, who liked him a lot, but he prefered to consider himself a man’s man. There was absolutely nothing sissy about him. He was so heterosexual he wouldn’t even let me touch his bum. ‘Only gay men go up there,’ he said, though he was happy to go up mine every day.

  Together, we were the proverbial terrible twosome. I’d been honing my predatory skills in the months that followed my divorce, and now I had an accomplice. A typical Friday night consisted of going to Soho House, taking our place by the side of the Circle Bar, where it was impossible for anyone to walk by without having to squeeze past us. Typically that would lead to an introduction, and by the end of the evening Daniel would say, ‘Why don’t you come home with me and my girlfriend for a threesome?’

  Daniel must have had a reputation among the women there. They always came by to say hello to him, and I always wondered if this had something to do with Daniel’s mastery of the oral technique. He had lost four of his bottom teeth (and never replaced them) from a marathon round of oral sex back in the early 90s.

  ‘I’d been at the House and taken too much coke,’ he told me. ‘I was with a mate who worked for Saatchi’s at the time. We met these two tall blonde birds and asked them if they wanted to go off with us to do some coke. We all went to the Saatchi offices and snuck into this boardroom with a fifty-foot-long table. I lay on the table licking coke off this girl’s clit. She was grinding her cunt on my face for about three hours. I woke up the next morning and my teeth felt a bit funny and wobbly. They’d been loose from when I played rugby as a kid, but this was different. So I checked into the dentist and he pulled out a pair of pliers and yanked them all out. No anaesthetic, the bugger. They just came right out. But that was some night!’

  Despite his public bravado, Daniel never kissed another woman after that night. He was too self-conscious of the missing teeth and never had enough money to get them replaced.

  He was the only guy I’d had a relationship with who was utterly against type. He was not tall, not blond, not slim like the men I normally went for but, when we lay in bed together and he was wrapped around me, I felt protected by his big strong shoulders and arms. This was a novelty for me. I’d always been the fatter one in my previous relationships, and it was great not to worry about crushing someone if I rolled on to him in the middle of the night. My type was gentle and even slightly feminine. Daniel was a manly man in traditional ways – he drank beer, watched rugby and fell asleep in front of the television at eight p.m. And he snored.

  Although I had my doubts about him being good relationship material, he had other strong points. He loved my children. He had always wanted to have kids of his own and, when he met mine, I gave him free rein to treat them like they were. He would pick them up from the school bus stop (when he remembered), take them to the pub to watch the rugby, throw a ball around with them in the back garden. The kids adored him but were a little frightened of him. Once, when my elder son told me to go to hell after I’d told him to do his homework, Daniel chased Alfred up the stairs, fist in the air. He would never have hit my children but, after that, just raising his hand was enough to keep them in line. It was nice to have a man around the house who took an interest in the kids and wanted to help me out, too, especially one who fixed dinner often enough that I didn’t feel like a slave to the kitchen. Despite him being a cokehead, unemployed, a smoker, overweight and a bit of a fuck-up, I liked having him around and thought, Well, at least he’s entertaining and cooks me dinner.

  Still, though it bothered me he wasn’t scoring a job, it bothered me more he wasn’t writing at all. When he’d read the opening paragraph of his unpublished novel the second time we met, I’d thought, At least he has aspirations. In Somerset one weekend, his dad proudly produced a yellowing newspaper clipping of a column Daniel had written five years earlier for the Sunday Business newspaper. It struck me as somewhat sad that he didn’t have anything more recent to show me. Daniel had obviously once been the family’s golden boy. He carried around a little notebook in his back pocket on which he’d scribble ideas for feature stories, yet in all the time we were together I only saw him write two things: food shopping lists and notes to the bank manager explaining why he needed to increase his overdraft.

  I thought maybe he was blocked. He seemed to invent any excuse to explain why he was not writing. ‘All the newspaper editors are twenty-five years old now. What do they know?’

  After six months together, it started to grate on me. If he was such a fantastic writer, such a brilliant man, why couldn’t he just sit down and write? Given that his was the one career that didn’t require expensive tools or an office, it seemed perfect for someone who had no money.

  ‘Why aren’t you writing?’ I asked one night after coming back
from work, knackered. ‘You haven’t had a single thing published since I’ve met you. What’s the problem? All you need is paper and a pen.’

  ‘It’s not that, Suzanne,’ he said. ‘I’m too old to write for free any more. I’m not going to work on another manuscript and be rejected. If I’m not getting paid, I can’t write.’

  What we really needed to discuss was a strategy for mending the bridges he’d burnt, or finding something else for him to do. Through drinking, drugging and arrogance, he had made himself unemployable by most of the national newspapers.

  So we fell into a pattern of Daniel having sex with me, barking occasionally at the boys and cooking dinner a few times a week for all of us. He never seemed to do much else. After dinner I would find him asleep in bed fully clothed or passed out on the sofa. Many weeks, our Friday-night plans were scuppered when I’d be unable to rouse him from his nap. After a few months of this I got tired of trying. Still, when Daniel wasn’t sleeping, we had a lot of sex.

  Initially, the frequency and quality of the sex was my panacea. Daniel was a pro – as, I learnt on a holiday, he should have been. We were lying on the beach in the Costa Brava, during a two-week holiday that I was paying for. We’d spent most of the morning fucking, first in the bedroom in his parents’ holiday home, then outside in the courtyard, then on the living-room sofa. We were lying together under a couple of towels, as the weather had suddenly got cold, when I said, ‘So, how many girls have you slept with? Fucking seems to be your raison d’être.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe a couple of thousand.’

  ‘A couple of thousand?’

  ‘Well, are you counting the group sex?’