How to Be a Husband. Tim Dowling

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ I’m honest, she scares the shit out of me. But by the end of the evening I very badly want the English girl to be my girlfriend. My plan is to engineer this outcome as quickly as possible.

      There are a few flaws in my plan: the English girl lives in London, and I live in New York; I already have a girlfriend of some four years’ standing; the English girl does not appear to like me.

      Nevertheless, at a New Year’s Eve party a few days later, after several hours of the sort of unrelenting flirtation that might better be characterized as lobbying, I convince her to kiss me. She doesn’t seem terribly flattered by my persistence, but I suppose a man who arranges to spend New Year’s Eve apart from his actual girlfriend so he can try it on with a comparative stranger is, first and foremost, a heel. She has every reason to be circumspect.

      I’m not normally this decisive, or resolute, or forward. A born torch-bearer, I managed to keep my feelings completely hidden from the first three girls I fell in love with: Sarah, aged eight, who eventually moved away; Paula, aged ten, who also moved away, and Cati, aged eleven, who refused to do me the kindness of moving away. I’d come to understand love as an exquisite private pain by the time Jenni, aged fifteen, cornered me long enough to become my first girlfriend.

      It’s not that I’d never pursued anyone before; I just normally did it in a way that took the object of my affections a very long time to notice. I preferred to play it cool: waiting around in places where the girl I fancied might possibly turn up later, that sort of thing. This way I left myself an exit strategy whenever rejection presented itself – the paper trail of my courtship was non-existent – although in most cases the girl in question simply found another boyfriend while my long game was still unfurling.

      I don’t have time for any of that now. I have just two weeks to break up with my girlfriend and convince the English girl that she should not only like me, she should take me back to England with her.

      It is a difficult fortnight. The English girl’s lacerating wit makes her a very hard person to have a crush on. We go out together several times, but we drink so much that I often have to reacquaint her with our relationship’s forward progress the next morning. You like me now, I tell her. It’s all been agreed.

      I also discover I have rivals, including a guy who engineers sound systems for nightclubs and who, she tells me, has a gun in the glove box of his pick-up truck. I can’t compete with that. I don’t have a gun, or a glove box to put it in.

      I break up with my girlfriend one evening after work, in a bar called the Cowgirl Hall of Fame, an episode of shameful expediency I hope won’t haunt me for the rest of my life, but it does a little. I have to ask for the bill while she’s crying, because I have a date.

      This is not how I usually break up with people: directly, implacably, while sitting on one hand to stop myself looking at my watch. In fact I don’t have a usual method; I’ve never needed to develop a technique. Girls break up with me. That’s what happened the last time, and the time before that, and the time before that.

      After hailing a cab for my weeping ex-girlfriend, I walk to a bar – the same bar as that first night – where the English girl is waiting for me. We are meeting here because our mutual friends do not approve of our burgeoning romance. They see me, not without cause, as an opportunist. The English girl has only recently come out of a long relationship – not quite as recently as eight minutes ago, mind – and it is generally acknowledged that I am being reckless with her affections. I only that know I’m being reckless with mine. In any case, I am currently unwelcome at the apartment where the English girl is staying.

      So we meet at this bar most evenings. We drink martinis and laugh and then go back to my basement apartment, which is dark and generally grubby, except for my room, which is squalid. I leave her there in the mornings to go to work, and at some point during the day she comes and drops off my keys. Occasionally, for a change of pace, we meet at a different bar. Sometimes we go out with English friends of hers. They like to drink – a lot – and they don’t seem very interested in eating.

      One thing we have failed to do over the course of the fortnight is go on anything approaching a proper date. Finally, towards the end of her visit, we arrange dinner in a cosy and unhygienic restaurant in the Bowery. Our mutual friend Pat is our waiter. The hard living of the past two weeks, combined with full-time employment, has taken its toll on me. During the meal I begin to feel unwell. My stomach churns alarmingly and I break out in a cold sweat. I’m trying to be lively and charming, but I’m finding it hard to keep track of the conversation. I push the food around my plate. I manage a few glasses of wine, enough to realize what a terrible idea drinking is. Finally, the plates are cleared. I pay the bill. She offers to pay half, but I refuse. When I stand up from my chair, I feel something deep in my bowels give way with a lurch. I excuse myself and nip to the toilets, which are fortunately close at hand.

      I do not wish to go into too much unpleasant detail. Suffice to say I needed to spend about ten minutes in the loo to deal with the matter at hand, and found it necessary to part with my underpants for ever. On lifting the lid of the wastebasket I discover that I am not the first customer to face that problem this evening. Even so, I decide to throw them out the window.

      I come back to the table with all the nonchalance I can muster, but I know from looking in the toilet’s scarred mirror how pale I am.

      ‘Are you OK?’ she says. ‘You were in there for a very long time.’

      ‘Yeah, fine,’ I say. Our mutual friend approaches, no longer wearing his waiter’s apron.

      ‘Pat’s finished his shift,’ she says, ‘so we’d thought we’d all go next door for a drink.’

      ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘OK.’

      I only need to drink two beers in a seedy bar to complete my charade of wellness, before our hugely successful first date comes to an end.

      In the end the English girl flies back to London without me, but I have her phone number and her address. I write to her. I pick up a passport renewal application. Without telling anyone, I quietly lay plans to extricate myself from my own life.

      How do I know the English girl is the one for me? I don’t. And I certainly don’t know if she thinks I am the one for her. Separated by an ocean, I begin to speculate about how I would feel if my holiday fling – an underwhelming American guy with a basement apartment and a dead-end job – kept ringing me to firm up what were supposed to be empty promises to visit. I would be distant and terse on the phone, I think – just like she is. I wonder if I am spoiling what we had by trying to prolong it.

      Before I have even got my passport photo taken, she rings: she’s found a cheap flight, she tells me, and is thinking about coming back for the weekend. It takes me a moment to process this news, which is slightly incompatible with her general lack of enthusiasm for our long-distance love affair. I know she hates flying. I can only conclude that she must like me more than she’s been letting on. I’m a little stunned by the realization.

      ‘OK,’ I say.

      ‘Try not to sound too fucking thrilled,’ she says.

      When I catch sight of her at the airport I feel my face go bright red. I’m suddenly embarrassed by how little we know each other. Two weeks in each other’s company, on and off, plus four phone calls and a letter apiece. We’ve had sex, like, eight times. We’ve been apart for a month. She doesn’t even quite look the way I’ve remembered her. That’s because I have no photo at home to consult.

      There wasn’t much time to prepare СКАЧАТЬ