“Fuck. Do you think I care?” Dianna said. “People think I killed my husband.”
There are lilies in the pond. I trail my fingers in the water. We both look over at the shore, where the party is in full swing.
“What I like about you,” Dianna says, “is that we’re both outsiders. Neither one of us fits in with this . . . society crowd.”
“Society is dead,” I say, for what I think is the second or third time this year.
“My mother was a prostitute. She doesn’t even know who my real father is.”
“Marriage is prostitution.”
“But my mother . . . wasn’t married.”
“Oh so what,” I say. “My mother was a fucking drug addict.”
“I’m going swimming,” Dianna says. She basically falls out of the boat, and for a moment, as she flails in the water and I realize she probably can’t swim, I wonder if I’m going to have to rescue her. Luckily, the pond isn’t deep, only about three feet, and she finds her footing and wades to shore.
I watch her with some degree of relief.
I sit there alone.
After a while, I begin to row back to the dock in the charmingly beat-up old rowboat. I have a cigarette between my lips and I’m aware of my short blond hair, a slight pink blush on my cheeks and my bare shoulders.
And when I’m almost at the shore, Patrice shouts, “Hey Cecelia,” and I look over my shoulder and he fires off as many pictures as he can in five seconds.
The following week, this photograph is beamed all over the world. In it, the expression on my face is: frowning slightly, yet a little surprised; still young, and I’m wearing the nearly see-through baby-blue Bentley dress, the lines of my slim yet shapely figure clearly visible. The caption reads: RICH, BEAUTIFUL, AND FIERCELY INDEPENDENT, PRINCESS CECELIA KELLY LUXENSTEIN IS THE LEADER OF THE NEW MILLENNIUM SOCIETY.
And I realize: This is my life.
SMILE.
SINGLE PROCESS
I
We have a saying in New York: English girls who are considered beautiful in London are merely “pretty” in New York, while American girls who are called “attractive” in New York are beautiful in London. And this sums up one of the biggest differences between Life in New York and Life in London. In London, if you’re an attractive, nice girl with some personality and a career, you can meet a man, date him, and—if you want to—marry him. On the other hand, in New York, you can be a beautiful woman with a body like Cindy Crawford’s and a high-powered career and you cannot even get a date.
Maybe because Englishwomen can actually snag a man—and can do so with ratty hair, unpolished nails, and flabby thighs—they possess a certain sort of annoying smugness when it comes to relationships. Recently, I had an encounter with one of these women in New York. As she sat there eating a smoked salmon sandwich and interviewing me about my life (which was sounding, to my ears, more and more pitiful by the moment), my eye was inevitably drawn to her large sapphire engagement ring topped by a sapphire-studded wedding band.
It shouldn’t have made me hate her, but it did.
“Let’s see,” she said, checking her tape recorder. “Is there any man in your life right now?”
“Noooo,” I said, although I had just broken up with a man who refused to marry me after six months of dating. I believe his actual words were “I do want to get married someday, but I don’t want to marry you.”
Okay, maybe I did rush him a little. But on the other hand, he used to sit at home in the evenings watching Kung Fu movies. And when I tried to talk to him, he would say, “Shhhhh. Grasshopper is about to learn an important lesson.” After this happened a few times, I realized that “Grasshopper” had indeed learned a lesson: By the time you get to Grasshopper’s age, there is absolutely no reason to be with a man who watches Kung Fu movies unless you are married to him.
But there was no reason to tell the English journalist this.
“How . . . interesting,” she said. “I’ve been married for six years.”
“Is that so,” I said. I took a sip of my Bloody Mary and wondered if I was getting drunk. “Well, if you lived in New York,” I said, “you wouldn’t be. In fact, if you lived in New York, you’d probably be living in a small one-bedroom apartment, agonizing over some jerky guy you slept with three times.” Ah yes. Grasshopper was just getting warmed up. “You’d think that maybe you were going to have a relationship, but then the guy would call to tell you that he didn’t want any obligations. He would actually say, ‘I don’t want to check in.’”
I ordered another Bloody Mary. “Commitment is a mystery here,” I said.
“Not in London,” the English journalist said. “Men in London—Englishmen—well, they’re better than American men. They’re rather. . .” Here her face took on a sort of disgusting look that I could only call “dreamy.” Then she continued, “Steady. They’re interested in relationships. They like them. Englishmen are . . . cozy.”
“You mean like . . . kittens?” I asked.
The English journalist gave me a superior smile. “Now, let’s see. You are . . . how old now?”
“Forty,” I whispered.
“That’s right. So you must be at that point where you’ve realized that you’ll probably be alone for the rest of your life.”
And so it was that a month later, Grasshopper found herself on a flight to London. In the tradition of many American heroines before her, she was off to England in search of something she hadn’t been able to find in New York: a husband.
That, of course, was my secret plan.
Being one of those clever American women who are so clever that they manage to trick themselves out of having relationships. I naturally needed some kind of cover-up. And I’d found it: This big English newspaper was paying me a ridiculous amount of money to find out about sex in London. If there actually was such a thing.
It was the kind of assignment that would involve copious amounts of alcohol and quite a lot of late-night bar crawling, the kind of activities I specialized in. Which was probably the reason I didn’t have a husband in the first place.
But there were two things that worried me: Sex and Death.
You see, years ago, I had actually dated a couple of Englishmen. Unfortunately, both had tried to kill me—one by “wave-jumping” ten-foot waves in Australia in a twenty-five-foot Chris Craft, which he then crashed into the dock (he was drunk); and the other by suffocating me with a pillow (he was sober). Indeed, when I called Gerald the Suffocator to tell him that I was coming to England, his response was “Good. Now I can finish the job.”
My second fear was, naturally, sex. Over and over again I had heard how horrible Englishmen are in bed. The conventional wisdom was that they failed miserably on three counts: One, their willies were really small. Two, foreplay didn’t exist. And three, they came in about two minutes. In other words, they were all premature ejaculators, and if they lived in New York, some sensible woman would have put desensitizing cream on the tip of their willies and then made them have sex for three hours, which would probably cause the poor man to go running to his shrink—but, hey, that’s not our problem. But maybe they don’t have desensitizing cream in England. Or maybe they don’t really care that much about sex.
I decided to begin my “research” by staying at the home of a man known as The Fox. The Fox was one of London’s most prominent theatre directors, and also one of the most notorious womanizers in London. Years earlier, The Fox’s wife, whom, I was told was known in London as The Saint for putting up with him, had divorced him for something like egregious adultery and outrageous behavior. The outrageous behavior including turning up at four in the morning naked and clutching an American Express card over his privates. And so, on a Tuesday afternoon, I arrived at The Fox’s house with three Louis Vuitton suitcases, stuffed, rather inexplicably, with Prada, Dolce & Gabbana, and Gucci evening clothes, plus one pair of combat pants. The Fox wasn’t there, but his housekeeper, a woman who didn’t speak English an
d was ironing towels, was. Through a series of hand motions, I began to understand that, as there were only two bedrooms and the “guest” room was, at that moment, occupied by a large man and an even larger case of wine, I was supposed to sleep in The Fox’s bed.
Aha.
Luckily, as I was about to open a bottle of wine and proceed to get drunk in order to deal with the situation, The Fox’s assistant, Jason, arrived. Jason was twenty-five, cute, and of some sort of inderminate nationality, although he claimed to be English. When I quizzed him about the so-called “sleeping arrangements,” he grabbed me and said, “Don’t have sex with The Fox. Have sex with me instead. I’m sure I’m much better in bed.”
“Jason,” I said patiently. “Have you ever even had a girlfriend?”
“Well, I’m having some romantic trouble right now,” he said. Then he proceeded into a long-winded story about some girl he was in love with, whom he’d had sex with once, nine months ago. He met her at a pub, and even though she was a lesbian and with her girlfriend, he had somehow convinced her to go off to a hotel room with him, where she handcuffed him to the bed and had “amazing” sex with him. The next morning he realized that he’d never felt this way about a woman before, had fallen madly in love with her, and since then, hadn’t even looked at another woman although the object of his affection refused to take his phone calls and refused to see him. And then she’d changed her cell-phone number.
“So what do you think I should do?” he asked.
For a long time, I just stared at him like he was insane. Then I said patiently, “Jason. You had a one-night stand. You don’t fall in love after a one-night stand with a lesbian sadist.”
“You don’t?” Jason said.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because,” I began, but at that moment, the door flew open and The Fox himself arrived. He ran across the room to the window and looked out fearfully.
“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.
“Ooooh. Hello, Simon,” he said, as his eyes narrowed. “Haven’t seen you for a while.”
“Right. Well, I’m . . . I’m having a baby,” Simon said.
“Good for you. Then maybe you can stop chatting up my date!” The Fox grabbed my arm and pulled me out of there. “Listen,” he said. “I spend most of my life with people who know fuck-all about fuck-all and deserve to be kicked to death. Most people are complete scum. Most people need someone to explain to them that their very existence is a nuisance!”
The Fox continued in this vein until we reached his house, where he insisted that I stay up with him until six in the morning, listening to obscure American cowboy music. And talking about it. At this point, I realized I needed to sleep. I also realized that the only way to get The Fox to stop talking was to drug him.
Yes, I’m very sorry to say that I actually tried to slip Xanaxes into The Fox’s glass of wine. Unfortunately, it all got mixed up, and I ended up passing out instead.
When I woke up the next afternoon, there was a note at the bottom of the bed: “Darling, never mind Shakespeare, I’m in love. Still crazy after all these hours. Love, The Fox. P.S. I didn’t touch you.”
Englishmen are just . . . so . . . sweet!
CASUAL SEX? I DON’T THINK SO . . .
I spent the next few days going to lunches and dinners and nightclubs. The thing that’s kind of weird about London is that even though people say they have jobs, no one ever seems to get any work done. I mean, how can they, when lunch begins at noon and goes until four o’clock? And usually involves several cocktails and a couple of bottles of wine?
And then that Miranda person snuck into The Fox’s apartment and really did steal all the lightbulbs. So when I had to get dressed to go out at night, I had to do it by feel.
And then there was no hot water.
And then I remembered that I was actually supposed to be doing something, like working, so I called my friend Claire.