Love by the Book (21 page)

“What is this party, anyway?”

“Are you familiar with the Torture Garden?”

In exchange for helping Lucy choose the perfect outfit for the Torture Garden party last weekend (we went with a classic black leather corset and pencil skirt with thigh-high
PVC
stiletto boots in the end—apparently it was a big hit), she agreed to come with me to Frisco's big shark reveal at Broadway market today.

We'd been texting all week, so I knew just how excited he was, but I wasn't prepared for what we saw when we got to his stall.

In truth, we smelled it way before we saw it. It was a blend of three-day-old diapers, teenage boy's bedroom and pure evil. It was like running an olfactory obstacle course.

There was Frisco wearing a fisherman's sweater, overalls and knitted hat (despite the fact that it was boiling out), presiding over a crowd of fifty or sixty hipsters all clamoring for a taste of his putrefied shark.

“Fucking hell,” Lucy said, “I didn't know it would be such a bun fight.”

“Neither did I,” I said, watching a lithesome twenty-two-year-old with Rapunzel hair and the nation's smallest denim shorts attempt to choke back a bit of hakari. She swallowed—with some effort—before batting her eyelashes at Frisco and smiling appreciatively at him.

In fact, pretty much the entire line consisted of lithesome twenty-two-year-old women trying not to vomit while eating pickled shark.

Frisco spotted us and waved us over.

“Hey, bud! Glad you could make it! And you must be Lucy! Great to meet you.” He kissed us both on the cheek and I felt fifty-three pairs of young, lithesome eyes glare at us.

“Look at you!” I said. “God, I had no idea it would be so popular!”

“Just wait till you try it,” he said. “It'll knock you out.”

“Possibly quite literally,” Lucy whispered.

“Excuse me? Sorry, excuse me!” The three of us turned to see a Cara Delevingne–alike in a playsuit standing in front of the stall expectantly.

Frisco leaned over the counter, displaying a stretch of impressively muscular stomach. “Hey, babe,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

“Sorry to interrupt, but I just had to tell you that that was the absolute
best
hakari I've ever had.”

“You've had it before?” he asked.

Cara nodded emphatically. “I've been to Iceland loads on shoots. I did one for
Wallpaper
last winter and they did part of it on one of the trawlers. The fishermen were all desperate to feed it to me.”

“I bet they were,” I muttered.

“Yours is seriously the best, though. I just had to tell you.”

Frisco smiled a smile I'd never seen before and leaned farther over the counter toward her. “That's so awesome of you to say. Hey, I'm swamped here but I'd love to talk more about Iceland. Can I give you a call sometime?”

Cara smiled back at him. “Tell you what, I'll come back around sixish and we can go for a drink once you've packed it in for the day.”

“Sounds great. See you soon.” Frisco watched her walk away, a wistful look on his face.

I tugged on his sleeve.

“Hey, sorry, Lauren! I'm being so rude—let me get you and Lucy some hakari. On the house.”

I glanced at the tray of hakari and, beyond it, at the crowd of fawning young women clamoring to get a piece. It was then, over a pile of noxious, putrid shark flesh, that I knew Frisco was never going to have sex with me.

“Actually, I think I'm all set,” I said, tugging at Lucy's arm. “I had a pretty big meal before this and I saw a whoopie pie with my name on it over there, so I wouldn't want to fill up on shark and spoil my appetite.”

Frisco looked momentarily crestfallen. “You sure? You're missing out!”

“Yeah, I'm sure. Congratulations, though—looks like your dream is totally coming true.”

He gazed at his surroundings and smiled. “I guess it is.”

Lucy and I left him to his adoring fans and went and stuffed ourselves with baked goods before getting hugely and satisfyingly drunk on tequila.

“Thank God you didn't eat that rotten shark,” Lucy said as we stumbled home. “It looked
vile
.”

“Yeah, fuck that shark! And fuck him and his billion dollars!” I felt momentarily sobered. Just goes to show: you can give a guy a billion dollars, a perfect apartment and an adorable pug, but at the end of the day all he wants is someone who will appreciate his pickled shark.

The book cautions that there are several reasons why a boy might not be interested in dating a particular girl. It could be that he's shy, or that he hasn't noticed her, or that he has other, more pressing interests (like spending his billions on pickled shark, for instance).

This left me with the book's final explanation for a boy's lack of interest: he's too popular. If this is the case, the book advises the girl to seek out “some pleasant, shy, interested fellow rather than wistfully pine for an inaccessible man about town.”

I guess I'll never know what Frisco's intentions toward me were. Maybe he was just lonely in a new city. Maybe he was looking for an ego stroke. One thing was for sure: my pining days were over.

I got home and jotted down my findings while nursing a large tumbler of bourbon.

Name: Frisco

Age:
32

Occupation: Billionaire, pickled-shark impresario, tech hero, heartbreaker

Nationality: American

Description: Stubbled, dimpled perfection

Method:
The Art of Dating

Result: Nice girls (who don't look like Cara Delevingne) finish last

Being kind to my date (for once) had its good moments, and I wasn't as filled with self-loathing as I was following other guides, but all the research and relentless positivity about his interests (not to mention the time spent pin-curling my hair) wasn't all that rewarding. Plus, it didn't get me anywhere. In the end, guys don't necessarily want a girl to be their best friend (though what they do want still eludes me . . .).

Works best on . . .

Probably the pleasant, shy, interested fellow the book suggests you go out with. Definitely not one for the alpha males.

To be used by . . .

Women in the market for the boy-next-door. Thrill-seekers need not apply.

 • • • 

I wasn't quite ready to settle for the pleasant, shy fellow though. Which is why, next month, I'd be harnessing my inner sex goddess with
Belle de Jour's Guide to Men
.

September 1

I charged into the bookstore with a new sense of purpose. Gone were the fifties, gone were the American billionaires who just wanted to be friends and gone was the nice-girl-next-door act. It was September and I was going to get laid this month if it killed me. And I knew just who to help me.

I crept past the bookseller, who was engrossed in a tattered copy of
Women in Love
, hand wrapped around a mug of tea and hair curling haphazardly across his eyes, and climbed into the attic, where I unearthed exactly what I was looking for:
Belle de Jour's Guide to Men
. For the uninitiated, Belle wrote several bestselling books about her sexual adventures as a high-end escort in London. She was later revealed as a research scientist who put herself through graduate school with her earnings as a call girl. So an expert in both sex
and
science: just what I needed.

I have to admit, I've never wanted to be a call girl. I've always wanted to be a stripper—just for a night—but never a call girl. I've also always wanted to drive (or is it conduct?) a train for a day and live in a lighthouse for twenty-four hours. Stripping, train-conducting and lighthouse-keeping are three things I would like to try. Prostitution: not so much.

First of all, moral and ethical problems with the sex trade aside, it feels like a lot of pressure. Sex can be stressful enough, never mind if someone's paying good money for it. Can you imagine how mortifying it would be if someone asked for a refund? I mean, I guess I could get my pimp to break the guy's kneecaps, but it would still dent my confidence.

Secondly, there's a lot of upkeep involved in high-end prostitution. A lot of grooming. Normally I work off the assumption that if I turn up, get naked and have sex with a man, he will be grateful regardless of the state of my bikini line. Not so if you're an escort: it seems you've got to be as plucked as a Christmas goose.

But desperate times called for desperate measures, and it was time to pull out the big guns in the form of Belle. If she couldn't get me laid, what chance did I have?

I clattered down the stairs with my prize, startling the bookseller in the process. He looked up from his book with a start and nearly knocked over his tea. “Oh, it's you,” he said, turning his attention back to D. H. Lawrence.

“I'm here to make a purchase!” I said, presenting the book with a flourish.

He picked up the book and let out an enormous sigh. “
Belle de Jour's Guide to Men
?” he read with impressive incredulity. “For fuck's sake. What are you buying these awful books for? You seem like a sensible girl—”

“Woman,” I said. “Girl is patronizing.”

He rolled his eyes. “Fine, fine. You seem like a sensible
woman
. You know a bit about football. And yet here you are again, buying some load of old bollocks about dating.”

I felt a little spark of anger flare up in me. “You see, this is exactly why people don't come into bookstores nowadays: because people like you stand around all day with your tweedy jackets and your old copies of Dickens and you judge people like me on our choice of books!”

“One of the only perks of owning a bookshop, apart from a lifetime of penury, is indulging in a level of curiosity and—yes—judgment about the literary preferences of our all-too-few customers. So I am well within my rights to tell you that this book is a fetid pile of shite and should be burned.”

I let out a harrumph—an actual harrumph!—and said, “Well, not that it's any of your business, but it's actually for a research project I'm working on.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

I explained the project to him and, by the end of it, he was holding on to the desk for support as he was laughing so hard. I tried not to get too offended, but of course I did.

“Christ,” he said between guffaws, “that is the biggest load of horse bollocks I've ever heard!”

“I'm glad you find it so funny!” I said. “I'll have you know that I've made some serious scientific inroads!”

He let out a fresh peal of laughter. “Have you indeed? I'd love to be enlightened about your findings.”

I thought for a minute. “Well, everyone loves a chase.”

“Jesus, woman, it took you five months of scientific study to figure that out? You should have just read that Wyatt poem. How does it go again?

‘Yet may I by no means my wearied mind

Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore

Fainting I follow.'”

“Ah,” I said, “but don't forget how it ends:

‘
Noli me tangere
, for Caesar's I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.'”

I felt very smug.

“You see?” he said, looking suddenly furious. “What's a woman who can recite bloody Wyatt doing taking advice from a bunch of idiots like this?” He grabbed the guide from me and brandished it in the air like a sword.

I grabbed the book back from him. “I told you, it's for science!”

“I can't imagine you'll be appearing in the fucking
Lancet
anytime soon.”

I shrugged. “I just find it interesting, okay?” I said, trying (and failing) not to sound defensive. “Isn't that why most people do things?”

“Most people don't go about selling their soul and acting like a twat just for interest's sake. It's self-sabotage.” He looked at me evenly, and for a moment I felt myself fixed in place by his sharp green eyes like a wriggling little amoeba under a microscope. I looked away.

“Look, Dr. Ruth, thanks very much for the armchair analysis but I'm sure you'll understand my reluctance to take advice from a misanthropic, disheveled, clearly deranged manager of an unsuccessful bookshop, regardless of the number of cardigans you own. Now can I pay for this book or what?”

He smiled to himself, which was unnerving, and took my money without comment. As I was hurrying out the door, he called out to me: “Just don't let the bastards grind you down! And read a real book next time, for chrissakes!”

“Thanks for the wisdom, Yoda.” I slammed the door behind me.

 • • • 

I took myself home via the liquor store, still muttering too-late comebacks for the bookseller on the way.

After a month of
1950
s dating and celibacy, it was a relief (though not necessarily a surprise) to find that getting laid was one of Belle's top priorities. Unlike most of the guides I've followed so far, she doesn't assume everyone's in it for love: there's an entire section on navigating the murky waters of Friends with Benefits.

I was hoping that Belle would at last be able to unlock the key to successful casual sex for me. Turns out her strategy was pretty simple: have lots of sex, casually.

I was filled with righteous indignation. Wasn't that what I had been doing with Adrian all those months ago? Wasn't that exactly what I'd been trying to do all along? Thanks for nothing, Belle.

I went out on the balcony for a calming cigarette and started mulling things over. I guess things with Adrian hadn't been
that
casual. I thought of the texts asking how his day went, the prompts to make plans to see him, those godforsaken eggs . . . Belle's first point of advice when it came to Friends with Benefits was to avoid getting attached. The fact that I was still thinking about him months down the line proved that I'd fallen at the first hurdle.

His good-bye party was next weekend: it was my last chance to show him that I really
was
a goddess of casual sex, a no-strings-attached good-time girl. With Belle's help, I was going to fill that man with regret if it was the last thing I did.

I ground out my cigarette and marched back inside: I had some serious planning to do.

The party was tomorrow, so it was all about final preparations.

Over the past few days, Belle had become my own personal Maharishi. Where she led, I would happily follow.

I'd groomed and preened myself into oblivion: I'd gone to hot yoga every morning to maximize flexibility, had pretty much every hair waxed off of my body, finally used the body scrub Cathryn had bought me for Christmas last year and meticulously combed my wardrobe for the perfect Belle-approved outfit (not-too-short skirt, moderate heels). I spent an entire week's pay in Agent Provocateur despite breaking out in hives in the plush changing room (apparently I'm allergic to velour). I had my first-ever manicure and pedicure, enduring the horror on the poor Korean girl's face as she shaved the dead skin off my feet.

I took Belle's quiz to identify my man-hunting style and was pleased when I scored a seven, meaning I was a “Scary Bitch.” I was officially deemed “not marriage material,” a moniker I seriously considered getting tattooed somewhere on my person (and probably would have if I hadn't spent all of my money on a black lace thong and a push-up bra the day before).

There was one thing that worried me, though. According to Belle, if a Scary Bitch had a single thing left unticked on her sexual to-do list, it was her own fault.

I thought of Lucy putting Tristan in Aunt Dorothy's Cupboard, of the shock I felt when Sleepy Eyes tried to . . . defile me, of all the Torture Garden parties I'd never been to—or even heard of—until recently. For all my big talk, I was a prude.

There could be a veritable cornucopia of sexual predilections I'd missed out on all these years. Hell, I didn't even have cable television until I was twenty-three! I suddenly remembered my high school years, when all of my friends would discuss David Duchovny's infamous turn in the
Red Shoe Diaries
and I would just have to nod along, oblivious to what they were talking about.

God, I was so naive.

But no more! I had a reputation to live up to, and a brief window to seduce the man of my occasional dreams. I was a Scary Bitch and no one was going to tell me otherwise.

I pulled out my laptop and started Googling, hoping my firewall could withstand the inevitable pop-ups to come.

By the time Lucy arrived home, I'd smoked sixteen cigarettes and inadvertently learned the evolution of pornography over the past twenty years. The Duchovny
Red Shoe
YouTube clips led me to Jenna Jameson's early work and to Sasha Grey, and then on to the murky world of YouPorn. (For the record, amateur porn is just as unsexy as you'd imagine. Some things are best left to the professionals.) And then I struck gold: Tumblr gifs of every single sexual peccadillo dreamed up by man or woman. From foot fetishes to granny porn to Furries ferreting away at each other in their giant animal costumes: I'd seen it all. And, unfortunately, I could never unsee it.

“Did you know about this?!” I shouted at Lucy as she dropped her keys on the side table.

“Know about what?”

I pointed to my laptop screen, where a man dressed as a giant baby was being paddled by three women in Bavarian costume.

“
THIS
!”

Lucy squinted at the screen and then looked at me with her big blue eyes. “Well, I did see something similar at a party last week, though I think the girls were wearing French maid costumes.”

I let out a howl of agony. How was it that sweet, innocent-looking Lucy was more sexually enlightened than me?

Lucy wrinkled her nose and took a closer look at the screen. “Anyway, why on earth are you looking at that?” She grabbed hold of my laptop and started clicking through the twenty-some tabs I had open. Her cheeks turned pinker and pinker with each click. “Lo, what is—oh my
GOD
!” She had clicked on a particularly disturbing gif and shut the laptop decisively. “Babe, I know I should respect your privacy and all, but do you want to have a chat about all this? Are you having some sort of mental episode?”

I grabbed the laptop back from her. “No! I'm just trying to educate myself so I can be prepared for Adrian's party tomorrow night.”

“Christ, what sort of party is he throwing?” She grasped my hand tightly. “You don't have to do anything you don't feel comfortable with, Lauren. Don't let that sick bastard pressure you into—” she gestured toward the laptop—“God knows what.”

I shook off her hand. “It's just a normal party. It's at some warehouse in Tottenham. But it's my last chance to prove to him that he was a fool to break it off with me. And to do that, I need to be a sexual dynamo.”

I explained Belle's approach and my worries about being a prude. “I mean, look at you! All into the S&M scene and everything! You even knew about men dressing up as babies and being paddled! It's like everyone took some sort of advanced course on kinkiness and I was sick that day and missed it!”

“You're being mental. Being good in bed doesn't mean you have to dress up in a weird polystyrene costume or be some type of contortionist. Being adventurous is fun, and obviously Tristan has his little preferences, but really the best sex we have is when it's just the two of us in bed on a lazy Sunday. Just normal, really.”

I felt mildly soothed by Lucy's words, but I still Googled a few more things after she went to bed. I would be a sexual dynamo tomorrow if it killed me. Which, from the look of some of the positions I'd discovered, it might.

This morning, I went for a run and spent the rest of the day meticulously constructing myself in Belle's image and fighting off occasional flashes of panic and self-doubt, managing to quell them by smoking at least thirty-eight cigarettes over the course of the afternoon.

And so it was that I started the night of Adrian's party the way I did most parties: by downing three vodkas at home while getting ready and then getting very lost on the way. Tottenham was unexplored territory for me, and as I wandered around street after street of knock-off fried chicken places and discount tile emporiums, I felt secure in the knowledge that I hadn't missed much.