Exciting Times(36)

No student had ever reminded me of Julian. Despite my speculations about his background, I’d never been able to picture him as an actual child. He didn’t want me to see him any way other than how he was now. He liked me because I didn’t know him before he was on a six-figure salary.

*

I asked Edith over to the flat a week after our first date. Unusually, she wore jeans and a cable-knit jumper. She presented me with a diamond-patterned crystal bowl for the coffee table and said to fill it with fruit or flowers. At face value it was obviously a gift for me, but the fact that Edith had hand-picked it for Julian’s apartment made me uncertain what to say. Were we grateful, or just me?

We ate fruit and watched an old film with Judy Garland. I wondered if other people watched movies when they asked someone around to do that, or if our actually doing it meant things were going horribly wrong.

‘I find Judy’s brow intriguing,’ said Edith. ‘It’s owlish.’

We were less taken with the plot. Judy was a dowdy farmer whose wayfaring actress sister set up camp in her barn to rehearse jaunty musical numbers with her troupe. There was a predictable dalliance with the sister’s dashing fiancé, but we forgave him for being formulaic because he was played by Gene Kelly. Had the technology existed, I was sure Gene would not have got this far into a movie when he asked a woman around to watch one.

‘Do you think she’s pretty?’ said Edith.

‘Judy?’

‘Of course.’

Edith could have meant ‘of course’ because who else could I possibly find attractive, or ‘of course’ because Judy, as both an LGBT icon and person of a gender I’d broadly said I liked, was a woman I was especially likely to have opinions on.

‘I see where you’re coming from about the owlish brow,’ I said. ‘And she’s got a good profile on her. She and Gene have a great pair of noses.’

There were better things I could have said – I regretted involving Gene, who really had no stake in this – but she kissed me anyway.

‘Judy’s great,’ she said. ‘The studio made her wear prosthetics on her nose, you know. But I don’t think she has them on here. She put her foot down in the end.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t kiss me and then go off about Judy Garland’s prosthetic nose.’

‘I told you, it’s not prosthetic, it’s her actual one.’

‘Look,’ I said. We started kissing again and I forgot what I’d wanted her to consider.

There was a Pavlovian moment where I started leading her towards Julian’s room, but I stopped and brought her to mine instead. We went down on each other. She grabbed at my hair and said: yes, right there. Afterwards we compared our bodies, and I realised that I had never actually felt calm doing it before. Now I could relax. Our limbs didn’t seem to belong to either of us in particular. Edith had longer arms, we agreed.

‘I’m so happy,’ I said.

‘Me too,’ she said.

I asked if the taste was all right. I’d always wanted to ask Julian, but knew what he’d say: ‘Fine’, which would make me worry more, or: ‘Like Pinot Noir, but I’m not sure if that’s because you’ve had some or I have.’ Edith said she couldn’t describe it. I found myself breathing artificially slowly, as though to placate someone else, and realised it wasn’t the answer I was interested in. It was being able to say I felt anxious.

She had to go. Her parents expected her home. I told myself this had nothing to do with my question potentially being weird, then recollected that if she’d said something odd then I would almost certainly wait a bit and say other things before leaving.

There was no record of what had happened. I couldn’t fully believe in it when it hadn’t been committed to paper. Maybe that was why Sappho wrote poems – but when she died, they wrapped her papyrus around corpses to keep maggots off.

It was fortunate Edith had left before I’d started waxing existential. I told myself: this is why you’re single. This is how you can be having sex with two people, tell neither about the other, be living with one of them, and still be single.





28

June

At the start of June my nine-year-olds finished irregular plural and compound nouns, and moved on to collectives: a flock of sheep, a clutch of eggs, a shower of wankers. The latter I kept to myself, but I did wonder what the English said, because it couldn’t be a ‘shower of’, but as a fundamentally onanistic nation they surely had some way to cluster it. I thought about how to ask Edith and make it funny as opposed to weird, and then Kendrick Yang asked what you said for grapes and I lost my train of thought. ‘Bunch,’ I said, ‘– no, cluster,’ and then I doubted myself again. He’d already written ‘cluster’, so I left it there.

Sometimes I wondered if I was actually a native English speaker. As a kid I’d daydreamed about having been secretly adopted from a foreign country. Russia was the leading candidate since I’d read a historical novel about a family fleeing the October Revolution, though I knew if I revisited the book now I would think it had terrible politics. Books about people who lost their money, or had none and got some, appealed more to my childhood imagination than ones where everyone stayed put – though that was far more common in real life. And characters who didn’t consider class at all were boring. I couldn’t believe those people existed. Everyone in school knew who had the biggest houses and whose parents were barristers.