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<strong>High</strong> <strong>Fidelity</strong><br />
http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/hornby_nick/high_fidelity/hornby_high_fidelity.html<br />
Page 40 of 112<br />
6/20/2006<br />
“Oh, thanks a lot. No. I was living with you then, remember”<br />
I feel a bit embarrassed and I don’t say anything.<br />
“We’ve slept together but we haven’t made love. Not yet. But I’ll tell you one thing. The sleeping<br />
together is better.”<br />
Yes! Yes! This is fantastic news! Mr. Sixty-Minute Man hasn’t even clocked on yet! I kiss her on the<br />
cheek and go to the pub to meet Dick and Barry. I feel like a new man, although not very much like a<br />
New Man. I feel so much better, in fact, that I go straight out and sleep with Marie.<br />
Ten<br />
FACT: Over three million men in this country have slept with ten or more women. And do they all<br />
look like Richard Gere Are they all as rich as Croesus, as charming as Clark Gable, as preposterously<br />
endowed as Errol Flynn, as witty as Oscar Wilde Nope. It’s nothing to do with any of that. Maybe half<br />
a dozen or so of that three million have one or more of these attributes, but that still leaves … well, three<br />
million, give or take half a dozen. And they’re just blokes. We’re just blokes, because I, even I, am a<br />
member of the exclusive three million club. Ten is not so many if you’re unmarried and in your midthirties.<br />
Ten partners in a couple of decades of sexual activity is actually pretty feeble, if you think about<br />
it: one partner every two years, and if any of those partners was a one-night stand, and that one-night<br />
stand came in the middle of a two-year drought, then you’re not in trouble exactly, but you’re hardly the<br />
Number One Lurve Man in your particular postal district. Ten isn’t a lot, not for the thirtysomething<br />
bachelor. Twenty isn’t a lot, if you look at it that way. Anything over thirty, I reckon, and you’re entitled<br />
to appear on an Oprah about promiscuity.<br />
Marie is my seventeenth lover. “How does he do it” you ask yourselves. “He wears bad sweaters, he<br />
gives his ex-girlfriend a hard time, he’s grumpy, he’s broke, he hangs out with the Musical Moron<br />
Twins, and yet he gets to go to bed with an American recording artist who looks like Susan Dey. What’s<br />
going on”<br />
First off, let’s not get carried away here. Yes, she’s a recording artist, but she records with the<br />
ironically titled Blackpool-based Hit Records, and it’s the type of record contract where you sell your<br />
own tapes during the interval of your own show in London’s prestigious Sir Harry Lauder nightspot.<br />
And if I know Susan Dey, and after a relationship that has endured for over twenty years I feel I do, I<br />
reckon she’d be the first to admit that looking like Susan Dey in L.A. Law is not the same as looking<br />
like, say, Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind.<br />
But yes, even so, the night with Marie is my major sexual triumph, my bonkus mirabilis. And do you<br />
know how it comes about Because I ask questions. That’s it. That’s my secret. If someone wanted to<br />
know how to get off with seventeen women, or more, no less, that’s what I’d tell them: ask questions. It<br />
works precisely because that isn’t how you’re supposed to do it, if you listen to the collective male<br />
wisdom. There are still enough of the old-style, big-mouthed, self-opinionated egomaniacs around to<br />
make someone like me appear refreshingly different; Marie even says something like that to me halfway<br />
through the evening …<br />
I had no idea that Marie and T-Bone were going to be in the pub with Dick and Barry, who had<br />
apparently promised them a real English Saturday night out—pub, curry, night bus, and all the<br />
trimmings. But I’m happy to see them, both of them; I’m really up after the triumph with Laura, and<br />
seeing as Marie has only ever seen me tongue-tied and grumpy, she must wonder what has happened.<br />
Let her wonder. It’s not often that I get the chance to be enigmatic and perplexing.<br />
They’re sitting round a table, drinking pints of bitter. Marie shuffles along to let me sit down, and the<br />
moment she does that I’m lost, gone, away. It’s the Saturday-night-date woman I saw through the<br />
window of the cab who has set me off, I think. I see Marie’s shuffle along the seat as a miniature but<br />
meaningful romantic accommodation: hey, she’s doing this for me! Pathetic, I know, but immediately I<br />
start to worry that Barry or Dick—let’s face it—Barry, has told her about where I was and what I was<br />
doing. Because if she knows about Laura, and about the split, and about me getting uptight, then she’ll