How to Be Famous

  “Oh, my darling,” John said, taking my hand. “I have never been under the impression that you are anything other than the most amazing, amusing, singular, determined woman I have ever met. That much is empirical fact. Even the blind could see it.”

  He paused for a minute—clearly about to say something, but wondering if he should.

  He shifted on the sofa, so that he was still holding my hand, but facing me. “But watching you, tonight, up there on the stage, utterly alone, breaking down all that is wrong with the precision of a High Court judge, made me realize something more. You are the new religion. You are the new craze. You are the next stage in evolution. You are so palpably my superior, in every way, that I tremble like a child in your presence. You make my head spin. You make my heart burst. You make my soul explode, every fucking minute I am with you. What I am inescapably heading toward, in this monologue, which might be the last thing I ever say, is: Dutch, I’m in love with you.”

  His face was as open and wondering as a child, looking at snow.

  “I love you, Jo.”

  A kiss, I sometimes think, isn’t really instigated by one person, or another. A kiss is a third party that floats through the room, if the atmosphere is correct, and just involves whoever’s around in its mad kissing schemes.

  One second before, we were not in a kiss. We were in the pre-kissing world.

  A second later, and my old life was over, and I know—as I had always suspected—that kissing John Kite is the greatest luxury there is.

  “Your mouth is so soft,” he said, at the end of the first kiss; before he began the second.

  This kissing was clever, and intense—it was like finding a new way to talk. He did . . . this, and I did . . . this back, and we were both delighted, and then thought of a new thing to do.

  “Oh sweetness! Sweetness!” he said, burying his head in my hair.

  And I was saying to him, “You are so beautiful; you are so beautiful,” over and over, because men are never told they are beautiful, are they? And he was. Handsomeness does not look soft-eyed when it kisses; handsomeness does not kiss the palm of your hand. He is beautiful.

  In bed, we started again. There were suddenly too many clothes involved in this kissing now—I made him lie down while I unbuttoned his shirt. He lay there, staring at me, smiling.

  “Why are you smiling?” I said. I had never seen anyone smile when they were being kissed.

  “I’m happy,” he said. “I always smile when I’m happy.”

  He smiled like a stoned dolphin.

  I said: “Tell me—what do you want me to do?”

  I was ready to find out what sex John wants. I was totally up for it. I took his shirt off. I kissed his chest. I felt like the Pope kissing the airport tarmac, after he’s landed. Thank you, God! Thank you for this!

  “I want you to . . . talk,” he said.

  “Talk? Like—dirty talk?”

  “No—like, talking talk. I want you to tell me everything you’re thinking.”

  I was still confused.

  He started to unbutton the rest of my dress, now. Oh! Fingers on collarbone! His fingers on my collarbone were the most perfect thing—I jolted so hard at his touch that he laughed.

  “Darling, we have talked our stupid bloody heads off since the day we met. There is no one I find more fascinating. Why—when I finally have you in bed; when I finally get to take your clothes off, and make you jump like that—would I suddenly want you to stop telling me what you’re thinking?”

  I looked at him. He was staring at me so intently that I felt I could, now, finally, tell him what has really terrified me about sex, all these years.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he said again, cajolingly.

  “Okay,” I said. I looked him right in the eye. “Okay—here’s the deal. Here’s what I really think about sex. No man has ever made me come. You know that. But I am too scared to let anyone try to make me come.”

  “Why?” John said, wonderingly.

  I let out a painful sigh. “In case it takes too long. So long that your hand gets tired, and you get a terrible cramp, and stop, because you’re in pain, and you’ll think I have a greedy vagina, and leave me. I’m worried,” I said, “that I need too much. I’m worried that I’m too much.”

  John looked at me. All through my speech, he’d been smiling at me in a happy, lazy way, which was also, at the same time, quite intent.

  “Is that everything?” he asked. “Is that everything you’re worried about?”

  I thought.

  “Yes,” I said. “Those are the sum total of my fears, right now.”

  Whilst still looking me in the eye, he put his hand inside my tights.

  “May I?” he said, with great courtesy.

  “You may,” I said, jaw dropping open the second he started touching me. He was straight to the place that aches most. I was so slippery for him.

  “The thing is,” he said, with unbelievably hot, slow resolve, “is that I can do this all day, honey. My hand will never tire.”

  His hand started moving.

  I suddenly realized why I had always loved boys who play guitar. All that delicate repetition. All that timing. I watched his hand. The precision was astonishing. He’d been touching me for less than a minute, and yet very, very soon, if this continued, I would be shouting out his name.

  Then he stopped. There was a small hole in my tights. His attention was drawn to it—he kissed the tiny burst of thigh pushing through it, before sucking it all into his mouth. That dislocated the remaining 20 percent of my brain. It was the single hottest thing to have ever happened to me. Oh, he was so good at sucking on tiny skin! He looked up at me—and the expression was, “You know why I’m doing this, don’t you?”

  “My worries are really waning,” I said, weakly.

  “Good. Because I am a lifelong fan of ‘too much,’” he said, putting his fingers in the hole, and ripping it, until it was the size of his hand.

  “Those were three ninety-nine from Boots!” I said, outraged.

  “Baby, if you don’t think what happens next was worth it, I’ll personally refund you at the end of the night,” he said, ripping them right up to the crotch, and burying his head between my legs.

  The reason the next eight hours of fucking were so amazing is because we never stopped talking. John had a lot of great ideas, which I was very enthusiastic about, on how we could come as many times as possible—but it was very much a collaborative effort. We would both describe to each other what was happening, while we did it—a technique which, for two very verbal people, makes everything so dizzyingly intense, it feels like you’ve set the world on fire, and are busily fucking your way to another planet.

  “I’ve got my cock inside you, and my fingers in your mouth, and it feels like you’re eating me alive,” he said at one point, as I sucked down on his knuckle, almost crying with how feverish it felt.

  Twenty minutes later, and I was on top of him, hands in his, pinning them to the pillow, and crying out, “Never stop, never stop, never stop, never stop,” whilst he said, with solemn assurance, “I promise you, I absolutely promise you, I will fuck you for as long as you need it.”

  That was a lie, because he suddenly came two minutes later—“Sorry baby. You’re just too hot for me not to”—but he made up for it by gently eating every drop from me, and then continuing to eat me out so slowly, and with such precision—almost stopping, and then starting again—that I couldn’t talk anymore.

  “I’m going to talk to you,” he said, looking up. “I’m going to tell you what’s happening. You are hot, and slippery, and swollen, and that is because I’ve fucked you very, very hard. Because I have wanted to for a long, long time.”

  Those words made me levitate.

  “Say it again,” I said. “Please.”

  “You are hot, and slippery, and swollen,” he said, very slowly, “and that is because I’ve fucked you very, very hard. Because I have wanted to for a long, lon
g time.”

  Oh, those words! There is nothing else!

  “And now,” he said, climbing back up, and easing himself in, “I’m going to fuck you again.”

  I suddenly understood what people meant when they say, “You should always fuck as if it’s the first time.”

  I’d always got it wrong. I thought they’d meant you should fuck as if you’re a virgin—slightly afraid, and unknowing.

  But what they really meant is that you should always fuck like it’s the first time in the world. As if you were inventing it, right then. And, when you’d finished, you’d want to go out and tell everyone what you’d just discovered.

  “What do you like, sweetness?” he asked, quietly, right at the start, face buried in my hair, unbuttoning my velvet dress. “What shall we do?”

  “I don’t know, yet,” I replied. “But: everything.”

  It’s amazing how easy it is to have great sex when you’re doing it with someone you really want to fuck. As I held on to John’s thighs and kissed the underside of his belly—gently rounded, like Silbury Hill—I realized I hadn’t wanted any of the people I’d fucked before. Not like this. Not like every minute means something, and every millimeter of them is a prize, and you want to drink the sweat from their temples, and turn them inside out to make them come. To drive them like you stole them.

  “This is the best sex in the world, isn’t it?” I said, happily, during a break in proceedings. John had brought back a mug of red wine, and some cheese, and we were having a picnic in the bed. A fuck-nic. “I mean, can you believe we don’t have to pay for this? That it’s absolutely free? If we had to pay for this, I would definitely go as high as fifty quid. It is enjoyable.”

  “You are humanity’s greatest upgrade,” John said, touching my face. I rubbed against his hand, like a cat, when it is petted by a loved one.

  I lay back on the pillow, resting my mug of wine on my belly. I kept waiting to feel embarrassed about being naked in front of John—to want to coyly wrap a sheet around myself, like ladies in the movies—but it seemed ridiculous to do this with someone who, twenty minutes ago, had their face rammed between my bum cheeks. John’s appreciation of my flesh was so palpable—he had wobbled, grabbed, and buried himself in me—that it would seem like a rejection of his values to now hide my mighty, hog-stopping thighs. He was the hog I’d stopped. And it was brilliant. Also, I had barely six brain cells left. I couldn’t worry about anything. He’d fucked me stupid. It was awesome. I was so, so happy.

  “So,” I asked, reaching out and gently touching his hair. “How long have you wanted to do that?”

  With a hand gesture, I pointed to all the sex we’d had in the last four hours.

  “Oh, since the moment I saw you,” he said, lying next to me, and kissing the top of my head. “In that bar, in Dublin—I looked up and you were standing there, with your cherry-red hair, and your top hat, stolen from a duke, and your blue, blue eyes. You really will have to stop having eyes the color of the sky, woman, because it means I see you everywhere. I’ve gone across the whole world, trying to get on with things, and wherever I go, I look up, and you’re staring down at me. Sky eyes. Once you meet a girl with eyes the color of the sky, you’re doomed.”

  “Why did you fancy me?” I ask. I have my hand on his chest, over his heart, as he tells me he has always loved me. There is no greater joy than this in the world.

  “You were,” John said, with infinite love, “talking such absolute toss.”

  “Fuck you!”

  “Such absolute toss,” John said again, gleefully. “I’d never met anyone—man or woman—who could just talk, and talk, and talk like you do. I’m an easily bored man who wears uncomfortable shoes, and all I ever really want to do is sit down and talk to a bunch of interesting people about everything and nothing. And they,” he said, simply, “were you. You’re a bunch of interesting people.”

  “I didn’t think you liked me!” I wailed. “Not like that! You never flirted! I did flirting! I winked at you several times—but you never responded, so I stopped.”

  “Sweetness,” John said, gently. Since we kissed, I am “Sweetness,” it seems. I am sweetness. “When I first met you, you had never drunk an alcoholic drink. You had never smoked a cigarette. It was the first night you’d ever slept away from home. It was the first time you’d been in a plane. It was the first time you’d slept in a hotel. It was the first time you’d ever interviewed anyone—which would explain why you were so terrible at it. And would I be right in thinking,” he says this tenderly, “that you had maybe never slept with anyone, either?”

  “Oh, I’d never even kissed anyone,” I said, cheerfully. “Unless you count making a hand-mouth out of your hand, and kissing that. I’d done that a lot. With tongues.”

  “Well, there is a word for the kind of man who makes a move on a sixteen-year-old girl like that—however amazing, unusual, and sui generis she might be,” John said, winding a piece of my hair round and round his finger. “Especially if he’s the kind of man who spends most of his time roaming the Earth, on a variety of planes, and buses, and spending quite a while getting very fucked-up, and unhappy. You were a thing I really, really did not want to hurt, or change in any way. There is a terrible narcissism in the kind of man who wants to be the one to be with, and change, a young woman. I wanted you to be you. I wanted you to wholly continue in making yourself.

  “You know why I never wrote a song about you—even though you begged me, a million times? Because songwriters lie and steal, Johanna. You are a writer, too, and you should never, ever let some other fucker steal your you. That’s all you got. Every breath of you is material. I respected,” he says, starting to laugh, “your copyright. I don’t think I will ever say anything more romantic than that. I respected you as an artist. That’s why tonight, I could not wait any longer. I stood there, watching you onstage, and thought, ‘I am in the presence of an actual genius.’ There is nothing hotter than that.

  “Of course, I’m making this seem a lot more thought-out and noble than it was at the time,” he said, reaching past me for the cigarettes, on the bedside table, and kissing me as he went past. “At the time, I simply thought, ‘Do not fuck this weird, bollocks-talking child drinking Coca-Cola.’ The rest I kind of . . . worked out later. I had a lot of time to think about it. Oh, I spent a lot of time thinking of you. You’ve been with me, all over the world. You come into my head a lot. Every seven seconds.”

  And because we were in bed now—because this is the place where we can, finally, say everything, I asked: “How? What do you think of?”

  And he told me. And I see why he did not tell me when I was younger.

  Because, when someone tells you why they love you—someone whose love you want; someone whose love feels like the wisest, most-craved eye—in a way, it’s like attending your own wake. You hear your eulogy.

  He tells you why he loves you, while you lie there—he tells you all the secrets of you; how you walk in a room; how you laugh in the best way; how you say the most unexpected things; how you never give in; that, when your hair is piled up on your head, your neck is a thing he wants to kiss. He tells you of the expression you have when you’re thinking, tongue clamped between your teeth; and the way you say “Hel-looooo, you!” the first time you meet someone, and you look at them so delightedly, like you’re thrilled that they exist. You hear the tributes to yourself. You get to read your reviews.

  And then of course, ever after that—in the minutes, and days, and years ahead—you are never really innocent again: because you know why you are wonderful. You know your best bits. You see the highlights of your set list. You know the value of your presence. You learn the things that you do which work. You become—unconsciously, but unstoppably—slightly calculating.

  You are like a performer who, one night, spontaneously—high, and happy, and wired—throws himself into the audience, and swims across a sea of outstretched hands—and who the next day, makes a news story, on page 4, fo
r having done so. “It was the most exciting thing I’ve ever seen!” . . . “That was her defining moment!”

  And so, the next night, onstage, you know everyone would like to see it again. You smile to the audience—cheers—and throw your arms wide—more cheers—and launch yourself out onto these new hands, and, this time, it is not spontaneous. It’s not a dumb, untested, instinctive moment. It is not naive. It is done to please the audience. Because you want to please the audience. Because why would you not want to do your very best things for this loving crowd? The way you do things has changed.

  I learned there is a dress I have—“With all the buttons down the back”—that John loved the best (I will buy more dresses like this!); that he loves my “cloud” of hair (I will never cut it!); that he is most amused when I have two drinks and launch into a long, impassioned theory about the Beatles, or sex, or Nabokov (I will do more of these! I will order a thousand more rants like these!).

  And so part of the declaring of love means you are working to a commission, now. You are not the sole architect of the person you are building. Someone else is looking over your blueprints—nodding, enthusiastically, over this turret—so you build the turret bigger!—and remaining tactfully silent over an ostentatious fountain, which you immediately and silently scrap. You have entered a new world—in which there are two opinions on what will make the very best you.

  And if your partner is wise, and kind, and has the same taste as you, you will make amazing things together.

  And if your partner is broken, or impatient, or has darker needs—is unknowingly trying to build you in the shape of another woman he once knew, and lost; is trying to lean into your foundations to make his own stronger—you will build something with rotten walls, and impossible angles, which will, one day in the future, collapse.

  But that is all part of becoming an adult. That is the difference between girls and women. That they are finally ready to hear the secret of what makes them them. That they are strong enough—for good, or for ill—to ask someone what is, unexpectedly, the most terrifying, revelatory question, on Earth; one you have to be brave, and ready, to hear: “Why do you love me?”