The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs (22 page)

“Hmm,” Mitzi said. “He’s been to see
Chicago
twice. At the theater.”

“But did he do that thing that gay men do, when they make sure they incorporate it into conversation at the earliest opportunity, you know, mention ‘my boyfriend’ or refer to ‘us gay men’ or something like that?”

“He says his perfect Sunday would consist of going to the farmers’ market to buy some obscure cheeses before having lunch with his mother.”

“Ah, that’s nice. Did you know his mother is Ursula Tennant, the feminist writer? Still, that’s not exactly conclusive.”

“He knows the difference between merino and cashmere.”

“Don’t you think your definition of heterosexuality needs broadening, Mitzi? He doesn’t look very gay.”

“Now who’s got a narrow definition of what gay men are like? He’s what they call a bear. Very popular these days, all my gay friends want one. Honestly, Mary, do you think I don’t know if someone’s gay or not?”

By the end of the day, all the women in the office had muttered one or all of the following phrases: “What a shame,” “All the best ones are,” or “I knew he was too good to be true.” He was still sought out, but now only for his wise counsel on shopping and haircuts.

“Didn’t you realize that’s what everyone thought?” I asked Joel some time after we’d got together. “The fact that all these girls kept on telling you how great you were to talk to and what a shame you were off limits.”

“I just thought they all knew that I only had eyes for you.”

“But Karen even asked you how to do the perfect blow job.”

“I assumed she was asking me from the point of view of a recipient rather than as a recipient and donor.”

Mitzi and he continued going on their cozy lunches and Mitzi continued to fund us with tales of his man-loving proclivities. His being gay gave me the freedom to admit to myself that I had joined the rest in finding him attractive. It felt so unoriginal of me, especially coming to the Joel fan club so late when I had always prided myself on being into bands long before their first hit. The fact that he was gay spared me from entering and losing the competition with Mitzi. It was comfortingly adolescent to have a crush on a gay man. My youthful obsession with George Michael had continued long after he came out; in fact, the knowledge of his unavailability to all women had almost strengthened my love for him. Of course, Joel was irritating in a way that George Michael never had been, so arrogant and entitled, waltzing around the office and saying things like “My godfather, the head of commissioning at Channel 4” and “When I went to school in California.” Freed from trying to impress him, I’d mock him for these comments, which he’d take in remarkable good humor. I enjoyed the little I saw of him, especially now that I knew he was not to be claimed by Mitzi. Brotherless and educated at a girls’ school, I tended to react to straight men with either aggression or awkwardness.

“Do you know,” he said to me one morning as we had coincided, yet again, at the kettle, “my best friend at school and I had a thing for the Pre-Raphaelites? We called ourselves The Brotherhood and used to hang around the nineteenth-century bit of the National Gallery and at the V & A, stroking the William Morris wallpaper.”

“Blimey,” I said. “How old were you?”

“First year of senior school, you know, thirteen.” I realized
then that he’d gone to the sort of expensive school that starts at thirteen, not eleven. As if it wasn’t obvious by the fact that he had been a boy with a thing for the Pre-Raphaelites.

“I think I was into Wham! and buying hair accessories at the time,” I said. “But you know, Millais versus a hair grip with a butterfly on it, same thing really.” He laughed. I loved to make him laugh.

“Somewhere at my mother’s house, I’ve still got a box filled with all the postcards, with Blu-Tack on the back.”

“And what became of The Brotherhood? Your one?”

“It’s really quite sad. Tom, my friend, wanted to become an artist, but got into crack at art college. I don’t know what he’s doing now. I rather lost touch with him when I got into my band, and all that I have left of The Brotherhood is the postcards and a penchant for redheads.”

I blushed and couldn’t stop myself running my hands through my hair. He’s gay, obviously, I told myself. Around where I grew up, straight teenage boys did not get a thing for Victorian painters.

I liked these conversations. They seemed to transcend the usual trivia and “What did you do last night?”s. He was the only person who’d ask you what you were reading rather than what you were watching. P. G. Wodehouse, I replied one day, and he became very excited.

“That’s amazing,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a girl who’s read P. G. Wodehouse.”

I shrugged and said, “They’re all too busy reading Nancy Mitford instead. Fools.”

“I wouldn’t say that, I have a bit of a weakness for her, too. And some of her sisters.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever met a man who’s read Nancy Mitford.”

“There you go,” he said. “The man who reads Mitford and
the woman who reads Wodehouse. A match made in heaven. We could go on holiday and only have to pack half the number of books.”

This easy banter ended one Monday morning.

“Hi, Joel,” I said brightly.

“Oh, hello,” he said and walked off. I could have sworn it was a snub.

Later I bumped into him in the line at the sandwich shop. “Did you have a good weekend?” I do this when I fancy someone, I sound like somebody’s mother. I was worried that any minute now, I was going to start asking him what A levels he’d done.

“Fantastic. In fact, I think I’m still hungover. Two of your very best bacon sandwiches, please.” Joel, as I subsequently discovered, has the zeal for flesh that only a former vegetarian can muster.

“What were you doing?”

He looked quizzical. “I was hosting the party. You know, at my mom’s place. She’s on a book tour in the States.”

“A party?” I tried to keep my voice bright. Maybe it was some sort of man-only thing. “Did you get lots of people turning up?”

“Yeah, loads.”

Oh. “That’s great.” I was thinking, it’s quite rude of him to be boasting about his well-attended banging bloody brilliant party to someone who wasn’t invited. I felt my cheeks burn with indignation. I could tell that he had noticed my reddening and an unreadable expression flashed across his face before he quickly escaped, clutching his calorific cargo.

“Did you go to Joel’s party?” I asked Mitzi on returning to my desk.

“Yes. Shame you weren’t there. He didn’t want to invite everyone from the office. It was no big deal.”

“Fair enough.” Arse. Stupid, posh boy, metropolitan,
everything-on-a-plate, unfairly promoted arse. That was that, I decided. I wasn’t going to be civil to him anymore.

I maintained my
froideur
for a whole week. Coolness does not come easily to me and inside I was ablaze. These days I don’t give a monkey’s whether or not I’m invited to somebody’s party, though I do get furious on behalf of my children. Only last week, Rufus wasn’t invited to Flynn’s sixth, despite the fact that they sit at the same reading table. I still entertain fantasies of pushing the little tyke off his scooter in retaliation.

The following Monday, about ten of us were sitting in an ideas meeting. Joel, despite his lowly position, was of course allowed to attend due to his family connections to the managing director.

“It’s been done before,” I said to the first of Joel’s pitches.

“That’s one of those formats that’s expensive to produce yet makes for cheap viewing,” I said of the second.

“Meh,” was all I managed for the third.

I went into the tiny kitchen soon afterward to find myself trapped in there with him. I couldn’t very well walk out, but the kettle seemed to take an age to boil. He’s gay, he’s gay, he’s gay, I told myself. He’s horrible, too. He’s gay and he’s horrible. In fact, he’s gay and horrible and he doesn’t even like you enough to invite you to his “loads of mates” party. And he’s fat. I felt my whole body prickle with heat. I thought I might be sick. “How do you take your tea?” How do you “take” your tea? I seemed to have landed in a costume drama all of a sudden. Soon I’d be asking him how he found the weather at this time of year and tell him that I myself found it most agreeable. The more flustered I felt, the more amused he seemed to be. He later told me that amusement is his defensive position, just as anger is mine.

“Milk, one sugar,” he said.

We both went for the same mug, our hands touching. It could
have been the moment when we looked into each other’s eyes and saw the truth, but instead I reached quickly for the chipped one featuring a woman in a bikini that came off when you put hot liquids into it.

We both stared at the still non-boiling kettle. “Have you got a problem with me?” he asked in a way that suggested nobody had ever had a problem with him before.

“No.” I pulled a face to try to emphasize my rebuttal. Damn my flushing cheeks once more. “Sorry, I don’t know where you might have got that idea.”

“In there. In the meeting—you kept shooting down my ideas.”

The kettle finally boiled and I watched him put the sugar in his tea. Even now I remember the little circle of granules that was left on the peeling vinyl of the kitchen worktop. “Maybe they weren’t very good.”

“True,” he said. “Well. I’ll be seeing you.”

Not if I see you first, I thought, as then I’ll be diving into the toilets to avoid another awkward conversation like the one we’ve just had.

I looked for assurance from Mitzi, who told me stiffly that she had never heard him say anything negative about me. “Why do you care?”

I successfully avoided Joel until a post-work booze-up in the pub a few weeks later. There, I tried to ignore his presence but found myself aware of whom he was sitting next to and the conversations he was having. The seating would shuffle as someone got up to get a round in, but I never seemed to get any nearer to him—he was like some iconic skyscraper that is visible from all parts of the city but you can never seem to actually reach it. Much drink was drunk, a good proportion of it by me. Our group got larger and louder, irritating to the rest of the pub, but convinced of its own glamour and hilarity. It was back in the
days when we smoked and were allowed to, and I got up to buy another packet. The cigarette machine was in a grubby corridor outside the men’s toilets, which was steeped with the ammonia stench of alleyways. For years afterward, I used to get a little thrill of remembrance when I smelled concentrated male urine. Now I get a surge of irritation and flush it away.

“Damn it,” I said when the machine gobbled up my coins without spitting out a packet in return.

“Need some help?” said Joel, emerging from the men’s. I caught a glimpse into the strange world of urinals.

I was drunk by this point. “All right, Mr. Practical.”

He looked at it thoughtfully before giving it a hard shove. He gave a silent scream and shook his hand out with pantomime exaggeration. I pulled out the cigarettes that this maneuvering had successfully dislodged.

“Thank you.” I smiled at him. The corridor was narrow and we were close. I was too drunk to feel angry at him any longer and, besides, I was grateful to him for getting me the cigarettes.

“You don’t like me, do you?”

I shrug. “What’s it to you, anyway?” I was very drunk. “Everybody else does. Everybody else loves Joel.”

He nodded. “I like being liked. What do you like then, my little fairy Mary?”

“Nobody’s ever called me that before. Scary Mary, that’s what everyone else calls me.”

“Redhairy Mary. No, that sounds wrong. It is beautiful, your hair.” He reached his hand toward it but stopped before contact was made. “What do you like?”

“I like…” I couldn’t for the life of me think of anything I liked. Well, anything other than the feeling of him being wedged so close to me with his huge physical presence keeping me warm and enclosed against the cigarette machine. “Whiskers on kittens.”

He laughed. “And brown paper packages.”

I nodded and tried to say, “Tied up with string,” but no words would come out. I just stared at him, my mouth agape, waiting for my voice to emerge.

Instead of words coming out of my mouth, I found lips coming toward it. He’s gay, I told myself. I felt a delicious contrast between his stubble and his surprisingly soft lips. I immediately found myself thinking of how that contrast would play out elsewhere on my body. He moved away and looked at me.

Finally I heard words come out of my mouth without really being aware that it was me who was saying them. They had a life of their own. “I like this.”

He smiled and kissed me again. He’s so not gay. I kissed him back, hard. I wanted to eat him up, he tasted so deliciously of smoke and crisps and beer and himself. I thought I could kiss him forever but we had to break off to burst into laughter. We looked at each other and laughed until tears came to our eyes, then we slipped out of the emergency exit and into the passageway, where empty kegs and the pub’s rubbish were kept. There, I leaned against the wall and we kissed some more—kiss, laugh, kiss, laugh. I felt him hard against my flimsy dress, harder still when I lifted my legs and wrapped them around that expansive waistline. I felt so drunk and so turned on that I had wanted him to lift up that dress and rip open my opaque tights and plain supermarket knickers and screw me there and then. Indeed, this might have happened were it not for a pub worker throwing out a bag of rubbish that nearly hit us, whereupon he sneered “Get a room.” We laughed some more and then went back into the pub, walking separately back to our party. Separately, but in a similar state of discomfort, my damp pants and throbbing thighs impeding my progress.

Around that pub table there then followed the most ecstati
cally excruciating hour of my life. We were pretending that nothing had happened so convincingly that I began to wonder whether anything had. But then he’d catch my eye and we’d swap those smiles that had been as much a part of our seduction as the kisses. I felt emboldened and stroked the back of his neck when I walked past him on the way to the bar.