Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

High Fidelity
http://www.fictionbook.ru/author/hornby_nick/high_fidelity/hornby_high_fidelity.html
Page 43 of 112
6/20/2006
I’m happy to be a bloke, I think, but sometimes I’m not happy being a bloke in the late-twentieth
century. Sometimes I’d rather be my dad. He never had to worry about delivering the goods, because he
never knew that there were any goods to deliver; he never had to worry about how he ranked in my
mother’s all-time hot one hundred, because he was first and last on the list. Wouldn’t it be great if you
could talk about this sort of thing to your father
One day, maybe, I’ll try. “Dad, did you ever have to worry about the female orgasm in either its
clitoral or its (possibly mythical) vaginal form Do you, in fact, know what the female orgasm is What
about the G-spot What did ‘good in bed’ mean in 1955, if it meant anything at all When was oral sex
imported to Britain Do you envy me my sex life, or does it all look like terribly hard work to you Did
you ever fret about how long you could keep going for, or didn’t you think about that sort of thing then
Aren’t you glad that you’ve never had to buy vegetarian cookery books as the first small step on the
road to getting inside someone’s knickers Aren’t you glad that you’ve never had the ‘You might be
right-on but do you clean the toilet’ conversation Aren’t you relieved that you’ve been spared the
perils of childbirth that all modern men have to face” (And what would he say, I wonder, if he were not
tongue-tied by his class and his sex and his diffidence Probably something like, “Son, stop whining.
The good fuck wasn’t even invented in my day, and however many toilets you clean and vegetarian
recipes you have to read, you still have more fun than we were ever allowed.” And he’d be right, too.)
This is the sort of sex education I never had—the one that deals in G-spots and the like. No one ever
told me about anything that mattered, about how to take your trousers off with dignity or what to say to
someone when you can’t get an erection or what ‘good in bed’ meant in 1975 or 1985, never mind 1955.
Get this: no one ever told me about semen even, just sperm, and there’s a crucial difference. As far as I
could tell, these microscopic tadpole things just leaped invisibly out of the end of your whatsit, and so
when, on the occasion of my first … well, never you mind. But this disastrously partial grasp of the
male sex organs caused distress and embarrassment and shame until one afternoon in a Wimpy Bar, a
school friend, apropos of nothing, remarked that the saliva he had left in his glass of Wimpy cola
‘looked like spunk,’ an enigmatic observation that had me puzzling feverishly for an entire weekend,
although at the time, of course, I tittered knowingly. It is difficult to stare at foreign matter floating on
the top of a glass of cola and from this minimal information work out the miracle of life itself, but that is
what I had to do, and I did it, too.
Anyway. We stand up and kiss, and then we sit down and kiss, and half of me is telling myself not to
worry, and the other half is feeling pleased with myself, and these two halves make a whole and leave
no room for the here and now, for any pleasure or lust, so then I start wondering whether I have ever
enjoyed this stuff, the physical sensation rather than the fact of it, or whether it’s just something I feel I
ought to do, and when this reverie is over I find that we’re no longer kissing but hugging, and I’m
staring at the back of the sofa. Marie pushes me away so that she can have a look at me and, rather than
let her see me gazing blankly into space, I squeeze my eyes tight shut, which gets me out of the
immediate hole but which in the long run is probably a mistake, because it makes it look as though I
have spent most of my life waiting for this moment, and that will either scare her rigid or make her
assume some things that she shouldn’t.
“You OK” she says.
I nod. “You”
“For now. But I wouldn’t be if I thought this was the end of the evening.”
When I was seventeen, I used to lie awake at night hoping that women would say things like that to
me; now, it just brings back the panic.
“I’m sure it isn’t.”
“Good. In that case, I’ll fix us something else to drink. You sticking to the whiskey, or you want a
coffee”
I stick to the whiskey, so I’ll have an excuse if nothing happens, or if things happen too quickly, or if
blah blah blah.
“You know, I really thought you hated me,” she says. “You’d never said more than two words to me
before this evening, and they were real crotchety words.”