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Gothic sex?
“I slept with an aristocrat once,” he said. “And she could only come if she pretended I was her horse.” Crispin drank my cocktail. “I didn’t neigh or anything, but I had to go along with it.”
“Well, I’m supposed to have sex with someone, so I might as well have sex with one of those Chelsea men.”
“They’ve all got small willies and they’re impotent,” Crispin said. “It’s something in the water. The entire water system in London is polluted with female hormones.”
“Aha,” I said. “So that’s why Englishmen talk so much.”
And that was why, secretly I suppose, I was walking around Chelsea on Good Friday. I was looking for one of those Chelsea Englishmen—a guy who had sex with his socks on, possessed a microscopic willy, and came in two minutes. Or less. Not that I was really looking forward to it or anything.
I was walking by Joe’s Café when I bumped into Charlie, a man I’d met a couple of days before at the bar Eclipse. Which was also in Chelsea. Charlie was one of those Englishmen who was divorced but still wearing his wedding ring.
“I’ve been trying to reach you for days,” he said. “You must come and have lunch. I’m meeting The Dalmatian.” The Dalmatian was not a dog but a person, a freckly English lord. “And this other chap might come too,” he said. “Rory Saint John Cunningsnot-Bedwards.”
“One of the long-names,” I said.
“What’s that? Oh right,” Charlie said. “He’s a very, very funny chap. Very, very English. I don’t know him that well, really just met him last night at China White, but he’s very amusing. I thought he might be good for your research. He’s so very English, you see.”
“How perfect,” I said, for some reason picturing this obviously horrible St. John Cunningsnot-Bedwards person as being short, fat, bald, and somewhere around the age of fifty.
I was only about half wrong.
Charlie and The Dalmation and I were sitting, drinking Bloody Marys and smoking cigarettes when the Rory chap made his entrance. He swaggered into the restaurant with that kind of self-absorbed energy that forces people to look at you. He was in his thirties, slim, dressed in jeans and an expensive suede coat, and even though he was a little bit bald, he was beautiful in the way that Englishmen can be and Americans never are. Okay, he was damn good-looking, but also horrible.
“Right then,” he said. “You must be the American.”
“Yes,” I said. “And you must be the Englishman.”
He sat down. “And what are we talking about?” he asked, lighting his cigarette with a silver-encased Bic. He was very precise in his smoking.
“What do you think we’re talking about?” I said.
“I have absolutely no idea,” he said. “I have just arrived and wish to be informed as to the content of the conversation.”
As it just so happened, The Dalmatian was in the middle of a story about how he once had sex with his old girlfriend in a steam room in Germany, and there were other men in the steam room, but they couldn’t see who was having sex and it was driving them crazy.
“Sex,” I said.
“The most overrated activity in the universe,” he said. “I mean really. I find sex so boring. The repetition of it. In. Out. In. Out. You’re in and then you’re out. After two minutes, I want to fall asleep. Of course, I’m known for being terrible in bed. I’ve got a tiny will
y, about half the size of my little finger, and I come almost immediately. Sometimes before I say hello.”
“You’re perfect,” I said.
“I know that, but I have absolutely no idea why you should know that.”
I smiled.
“I’ve heard you’re doing research on Englishmen,” he said. “I shall tell you everything you need to know right now. The English are a fierce warrior race . . .”
“I wasn’t aware that the English were, exactly, a race,” I said.
“I think you two should have dinner,” Charlie said.
“YOU’RE GAY!”
The Dalmatian offered to drive me to my friend Lucinda’s house after lunch.
