Dolfie was in for the rest of the week and on Thursday night, after deadline and calling the old man, the managing director happened to come down from upstairs and asked whether anyone had a corkscrew. Shunt had once bought me a Swiss army knife because she, like me, had no idea what I really wanted, but I’d started carrying it around with me, of late, noticing that it was very handy for things like, well, bottles of the alcoholic variety. The old man also always had various pocket knives, along with his Parkers and Montblanc, so perhaps I’d osmotically started absorbing that habit. Anyway, I offered my tool and Jay and I were invited upstairs for a drink.
I couldn’t think of any white MD who would have invited two lowly subs for a drink, so I was hugely impressed with this exunionist who always greeted me when he glided by in a BMW that resembled a glossy U-boat. But I instantly disliked his accountant, a short, big-headed, shrivelled-eared shit in a too-large leather jacket expensive enough to buy my drinks for a year. He quickly made us understand that he had been an exile and couldn’t help mentioning that his parents wouldn’t hire whites to do their housework in London because they didn’t clean properly.
Jay was now hitting the bottle with a vengeance and telling the new MD about the general unhappiness on the work floor. I thought this was equally rude: the man invites you to have a drink with him as an equal and you start getting all workerist and repetitive. Jay was too far away for me to kick, and the more I tried to divert the discussion the more he dug in.
The MD said, very reasonably, that he didn’t mind dealing with the discontent, just like he wouldn’t mind reverting to an old Toyota (like Les Makhene’s) if he had to, but I could see he was mildly peeved. So I got us out of there as fast as possible, regretfully, and gave Jay a piece of my mind in the lift. He wasn’t interested.
Friday passed in its usual way, as did Saturday, but stumbling back from Jay and Veron’s I saw Dolfie was out and stepped into his and his wife’s living room and her arms. Something had changed. She was holding onto me with a kind of desperation and we went straight to the spare room’s bed and there was something she was trying to tell me as we tried to do everything simultaneously. I could feel that there was some line she wanted to cross and asked her what it was after losing myself for quite a while.
“You don’t understand that women see these things differently.”
“What things?”
“You’re just here for sex.”
“What are you here for?”
But she wouldn’t say, though it was clear to me that she was falling for me and she was right: I was just there for the sex and had always been very clear about it. But then I’d been thinking recently that maybe there was something like sexual love. You could want someone so desperately, so obsessively, all the time, that it became a kind of love. That was certainly the case for me. I wanted to fuck her from morning to noon, midday to midnight. I had never been so close to anyone sexually in my life before. She could talk about anything and I’d have an erection. Why couldn’t that be love? I didn’t care what she said and I wasn’t interested in it. I had never been this predatory before and I probably never would be again. I was convinced we could screw ourselves beyond all social and emotional needs and sense. I could literally lose myself in her and come back wanting more. Obviously there was a degree of titillation in the fact that I was cuckholding her limp dick of a husband, but it went way, way beyond that. You got soul mates and you got sex mates and for me she was the latter. Pure, hot, grunting, sweaty, decadent fuck sex. She had no idea what I meant by the fact that my desire for her was purer than most kinds of love and neither did I, but I meant it.
Obviously there was some kind of Freudian angle to the fact that she was more than a decade older than me, but I wasn’t particularly interested in analysing it too closely. I didn’t care what might transpire ten years hence. Telling her I’d be the son she never had during coitus was enough of a turn-on in itself. Who cared what it meant? Psychologists perhaps, but not I. She obviously wanted more than that and I, if I understood her position, wanted nothing to do with it. Was I supposed to go through her divorce, set up house like I had with The Ex and act like my love for her was anything but physical? What would we talk about? Her boring bookkeeping clients? I would have to liven things up with my subbing and cinematic stories, which also had their limitations. She knew – or sensed – that I wouldn’t be able to live like that. But she couldn’t bear the thought that she was cheating on her Dolfie without something concrete coming from my side, and I couldn’t give her that.
Straddling her, I said it wasn’t only women who could be penetrated, you know, and for such a “stupid” woman – her word – she knew exactly what I meant and duly gave me a firm peasant’s middle finger.