Chapter 43: Does She Not, To Put It in a Nutshell, Fuck?

Here are a collection of moments that I have not described in detail because I have had other things on my mind, but which I was mulling over during the two hours I spent on the sofa watching nuclear bomb news with Johnny Depp. They did not occur to me in this neat chronological order, but by the end of the two hours, that is how I had sifted them in my mind.
***

When Cathy Calloway revealed herself as my archenemy by shagging Rollo Price loudly in the room next to mine, and I sat drinking embarrassed tea with nice big Canadian Harley, I grew mortified and angry, but also frustrated. When Harley went to leave, I kissed him and asked him to stay. It was my first time, and Harley was not particularly gentle, but he was very sweet. I thought of making my own loud cries for Cathy and Rollo’s benefit, but even at the time I realised that would have been too ridiculously obvious for words. I was drunk and angry, and what I did, while maybe not particularly kind to Harley in the short-term, though I doubt he ever minded much, was a normal sort of thing to do, under the circumstances.
***

When I came upon my husband shagging Cathy Calloway, and she saw me and pretended to come, I knew she was faking it, because Gavin was not very good in bed. I had taught him enough about me that I didn’t have to take matters into my own hands, and it was often very nice, but it required him to be dutiful. He needed specific teaching. He had no instinct at all. There was not a way in hell he could have achieved success shagging someone standing up. Underneath my horror and betrayal, the knowledge that Cathy was faking it made things very slightly less awful. This is a completely normal reaction, on my part.
***

When I went back to work while Gavin took Cathy on my honeymoon, my gloomy neighbour who I’d always fancied came to see if I was alright. He brought a small latte with an extra shot, which was my regular, and an orange which he had cut up into cute little eighths. He sat in my clients’ chair, and a fantasy flashed into my head that he was about to say that he had also discovered his wife was unfaithful, and it was like fate, and was there any point waiting for a discreet amount of time to pass when this thing between us was so strong? This is absolutely not how I felt or what I wanted – I liked him and his wife, and what there was between us, if anything, was far in the past, but I had no viable dreams of a better personal life, and this one jumped into my mind fully-formed. This kind of thing happens to everyone all the time, and it’s perfectly normal.
***

When David Tennant came into my office a few hours after that, I had some very different instant fantasies. They were easily accessible and relocatable to my office, since they were part of the regular fantastical apparatus that anyone engaged to Gavin would need to have available to enhance that side of her life. It’s not that I haven’t had a normal amount in my life, with normal people, but I’ve always refused to regard it as the bedrock of a relationship or anything, since obviously no sex life will be great forever (people say), and if you built on that alone, you were building on sand, so you built on something solid (like I had with Gavin, ha ha ha). When I had sex with Gavin, which was fine, I thought of David Tennant, and other people I could never even possibly have sex with. I did NOT think of my gloomy neighbour. I didn’t think of Rollo, even. That would have been wishing for a different reality, whereas daydreaming about David Tennant had nothing to do with life. It was just for fun, and it didn’t feel unfaithful. When I had the momentary fantasies on seeing David Tennant in the flesh, they suddenly felt new. They didn’t feel unfaithful, exactly, because I didn’t have anyone to be unfaithful to, but they felt somehow sullied, like pornography or something. Embarrassing, actually, is what they felt. This was a man who was a figure of my joking fantasy life, and also my secret real fantasy life, but I could hardly tell him that, because it would objectify him, and he was a real person with real feelings, and… This was a ridiculous train of thought, obviously, but getting cold feet on encountering one’s fantasy: perfectly normal.
***

When I was standing with Rollo Price on the roof of the police station, I could not remove from myself how much and how desperately I had once wanted him. When he chose Cathy, I told myself and everyone who would listen that this proved how incompatible we were, which won’t have fooled anyone except me (I am very easy to fool). I even tried to pretend I was unmoved by Cathy going on and on about how amazing he was in bed. None of the men I ever slept with (eight, if you’re desperate to know) were amazing in bed. They were mostly perfectly ok – I mean, they had all read enough furtive copies of Cosmo, and ‘accidentally’ watched enough Sex and the City to know that orgasms are important and they would be judged harshly for not providing them – but I basically began to think that there was no such thing as ‘amazing in bed,’ and orgasms were all basically the same after all (even though I knew very well, deep down, that this was not so, so who was I trying to kid?). This kind of thought is perfectly normal when your sex life is in the doldrums.
***


When I found out David Tennant was my father, I was mortified. I could pretend that this was because I felt icky about having fantasised about my father, but it was really because he had entered my real life, and although you get cold feet when your fantasy enters your real life, you also reshape your fantasy to fit the new circumstances, and I couldn’t help myself from having wondered if, just possibly, I mean, here he was, asking me for help, and he was so gorgeous, and, etc. But if he was my father then that was that, and another fantasy bites the dust. This also feels like a normal and plausible reaction to this set of circumstances.
***

When I was having sex with Johnny Depp, therefore, and realising that there really IS such a thing as amazing sex, I was thinking to myself that, on the many occasions when I had given opinions about sex while I chatted with my friends, it must have been ludicrously obvious that I didn’t know what I had been talking about. This is why, a day and a continent later, when Johnny Depp rolled me off the sofa, it was a perfectly normal reaction that I pantingly ignored the fact that that the Teacher had told us in no uncertain terms that us having sex would be a disaster. Why was that? How could it be? I mean, Johnny was so masterful!