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“You’re late, boss,” Jason said.
“Late? Late? I’ll give you late,” The Fox spluttered. “My life is a fucking nightmare. Doesn’t anyone understand that? Miranda’s following me again. I had to run all the way around Picadilly Circus to get her off my tail.”
It seemed that The Fox was being stalked by his most recent ex-girlfriend, a woman named Miranda who was an actress in one of his plays.
“Look at this!” he said, brandishing a creased piece of paper. “She faxed this to me this morning. She says if I don’t comply by midnight, she’s going to have me arrested.”
I removed the piece of paper from his hand and examined it. It was a list of items she’d left in his apartment and wanted returned. It contained entries like “kitchen sink,” “lightbulbs,” and “Julia Roberts videos.”
“Like I want those fucking Julia Roberts videos. Doesn’t she know I can’t stand Julia Roberts?”
“Lightbulbs?” I asked. “Why can’t she buy her own?”
“Exactly!” The Fox said. “Finally, someone understands why I had to break up with her!”
THE CHATTY ENGLISHMAN
That night, I went to Titanic for The Fox’s birthday party, where Grasshopper learned Lesson #1 about Englishmen: They won’t shut up. The Titanic is a perfect London restaurant—loud, full of drunk people, and so large that you basically have to scream to have a conversation. Of course, this isn’t a problem for the Englishman. Let me explain: In New York, women have to “entertain” straight men. We have to read newspapers and magazines or go to movies so we can have “conversational gambits.” Otherwise, the man will a) just sit there, b) talk about his psychological problems, or more likely, c) winge on and on about his career. On the other hand, American men are great in bed, and Englishmen supposedly are not. In fact, I’m convinced there’s a direct correlation between talking too much and being bad at sex.
At the bar, I met a man named Sonny Snoot, an extremely good-looking hairstylist.
“Great color,” he said. When I looked at him blankly, he said, “Your hair. You must be American. From New York. They just seem to know how to do that great ashy blond.”
“I’m just happy that I have all my hair,” I said. And then I laughed, “Har, har, har,” and he laughed, “Har, har, har,” and before you could say “blowjob,” he was yapping about sex.
“This is the way it is,” he said. “If sex is number one in Italy, it’s number seven in London. If sex doesn’t fall a man’s way, he’ll go off and do something else. But men talk about sex all the time. In fact, one of the reasons to have sex is to talk about it the next day. And we talk about it in minute detail and make the story really good.
“Sometimes,” he continued, “you get the urge to talk about sex while you’re actually doing it. For instance, if you’re doing a weird position, you kind of want to call your mates on your cell phone and say, ‘Guess what I’m doing now?’”
“Oral sex,” I suggested.
“Oh no,” Sonny said, shaking his head. “The Americans, they’re all very horny. But we don’t do that here.”
At dinner, I sat next to Peter, a magazine editor. Peter’s girlfriend had just moved in with him, and he couldn’t stop talking about how happy he was. “We’ve known each other for ten years, of course,” he said. “But one morning, when she was going back to her apartment, she just said, ‘I think we should move in together.’ And as soon as she said it, I knew she was right. So now we’ve bought an apartment together. Englishmen don’t patently object to marriage or commitment the way American men do,” he said proudly. “It’s very easy to find a relationship here.”
Yeah, if you’ve got ten years.
“Of course, I don’t know what it would be like for an American woman,” he continued. “You know, American women are neurotic about their careers, while Englishwomen are only neurotic about sex,” he said, as if this were a good thing. “Englishwomen don’t like it. Well, maybe they would like it, but they think that men are only after the one thing.” Maybe it was the champagne, but Peter seemed to be getting what the English call “stroppy.” “Englishwomen suffer from this half-baked feminism. They think they’re really open about sex, but then—aha—they find out they have the same hang-ups their mothers did.”
“Well, maybe there’s a reason for that,” I ventured. “Maybe if you’d stop talking—”
Peter cut me off. “Women here think that any adventure in the bedroom is only for male pleasure!” he said triumphantly.
The chatty Englishman problem continued to plague me to the nightclub China White, where I attempted to take refuge in one of the private Moroccan-style rooms with my friend Sophie, who worked in documentaries and lived in Notting Hill. I had just settled against the cushions with a bottle of vodka when I looked up and noticed a tall, dark-haired, shockingly good-looking man. Although these kinds of things supposedly don’t happen in London, the man came over and sat down next to me. And then—so much for “English reserve”—I swear to God, he immediately launched into a conversation about sex.
“Everybody thinks it’s the man’s fault that women don’t have orgasms. Why can’t they just have them like . . . like men?” he demanded.
“Actually, they can,” I said, wondering if perhaps this was a come-on, and if so, what I should do about it.
“Oh yes. They’re always saying they can, but then you’re in bed with a woman, and she’s just lying there like she’s doing you a favor. . . .”
“Now, where I come from, we sort of got over that in the sixties,” I was saying, when suddenly Sophie jumped in.
“Oh please,” she snapped. “Don’t listen to him. The first thing an Englishman does in bed is to try to flip you over. Because that’s how they’re used to having sex. And they all say Englishwomen can’t give good blow jobs. But it’s only because they’re used to getting them . . . from boys!”
Sophie and the good-looking, dark-haired man sat glaring at each other. I wouldn’t have minded this, but I was sitting between them, and I really wasn’t in a mood
to get clocked by a wayward punch. Luckily, at that moment The Fox poked his head in.
