Laura is wearing an expression I have come to know well in recent months, a look that denotes both infinite patience and hopeless frustration. It doesn’t feel good to know that she has invented this look just for me. She never needed it before. She sighs, and puts her head on her hand, and stares at the wall.

“OK, it could be that we sort things out. There may be a chance of that happening. I would say not a good chance, but a chance.”

“Great.”

“No, Rob, it’s not great. Nothing’s great. Everything’s shit.”

“But it won’t be, you’ll see.”

She shakes her head, apparently in disbelief. “I’m too tired for this now. I know I’m asking a lot, but will you go back to the pub and have a drink with the others while I’m sorting some stuff out? I need to be able to think while I’m doing it, and I can’t think with you here.”

“No problem. If I can ask one question.”

“OK. One.”

“It sounds stupid.”

“Never mind.”

“You won’t like it.”

“Just … just ask it.”

“Is it better?”

“Is what better? Is what better than what?”

“Well. Sex, I guess. Is sex with him better?”

“Jesus Christ, Rob. Is that really what’s bothering you?”

“Of course it is.”

“You really think it would make a difference either way?”

“I don’t know.” And I don’t.

“Well, the answer is that I don’t know either. We haven’t done it yet.”

Yes!

“Never?”

“No. I haven’t felt like it.”

“But not even before, when he was living upstairs?”

“Oh, thanks a lot. No. I was living with you then, remember?”

I feel a bit embarrassed and I don’t say anything.

“We’ve slept together but we haven’t made love. Not yet. But I’ll tell you one thing. The sleeping together is better.”

Yes! Yes! This is fantastic news! Mr. Sixty-Minute Man hasn’t even clocked on yet! I kiss her on the cheek and go to the pub to meet Dick and Barry. I feel like a new man, although not very much like a New Man. I feel so much better, in fact, that I go straight out and sleep with Marie.

FACT: Over three million men in this country have slept with ten or more women. And do they all look like Richard Gere? Are they all as rich as Croesus, as charming as Clark Gable, as preposterously endowed as Errol Flynn, as witty as Oscar Wilde? Nope. It’s nothing to do with any of that. Maybe half a dozen or so of that three million have one or more of these attributes, but that still leaves … well, three million, give or take half a dozen. And they’re just blokes. We’re just blokes, because I, even I, am a member of the exclusive three million club. Ten is not so many if you’re unmarried and in your mid-thirties. Ten partners in a couple of decades of sexual activity is actually pretty feeble, if you think about it: one partner every two years, and if any of those partners was a one-night stand, and that one-night stand came in the middle of a two-year drought, then you’re not in trouble exactly, but you’re hardly the Number One Lurve Man in your particular postal district. Ten isn’t a lot, not for the thirtysomething bachelor. Twenty isn’t a lot, if you look at it that way. Anything over thirty, I reckon, and you’re entitled to appear on an Oprah about promiscuity.

Marie is my seventeenth lover. “How does he do it?” you ask yourselves. “He wears bad sweaters, he gives his ex-girlfriend a hard time, he’s grumpy, he’s broke, he hangs out with the Musical Moron Twins, and yet he gets to go to bed with an American recording artist who looks like Susan Dey. What’s going on?”

First off, let’s not get carried away here. Yes, she’s a recording artist, but she records with the ironically titled Blackpool-based Hit Records, and it’s the type of record contract where you sell your own tapes during the interval of your own show in London’s prestigious Sir Harry Lauder nightspot. And if I know Susan Dey, and after a relationship that has endured for over twenty years I feel I do, I reckon she’d be the first to admit that looking like Susan Dey in L.A. Law is not the same as looking like, say, Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind.

But yes, even so, the night with Marie is my major sexual triumph, my bonkus mirabilis. And do you know how it comes about? Because I ask questions. That’s it. That’s my secret. If someone wanted to know how to get off with seventeen women, or more, no less, that’s what I’d tell them: ask questions. It works precisely because that isn’t how you’re supposed to do it, if you listen to the collective male wisdom. There are still enough of the old-style, big-mouthed, self-opinionated egomaniacs around to make someone like me appear refreshingly different; Marie even says something like that to me halfway through the evening …

I had no idea that Marie and T-Bone were going to be in the pub with Dick and Barry, who had apparently promised them a real English Saturday night out—pub, curry, night bus, and all the trimmings. But I’m happy to see them, both of them; I’m really up after the triumph with Laura, and seeing as Marie has only ever seen me tongue-tied and grumpy, she must wonder what has happened. Let her wonder. It’s not often that I get the chance to be enigmatic and perplexing.

They’re sitting round a table, drinking pints of bitter. Marie shuffles along to let me sit down, and the moment she does that I’m lost, gone, away. It’s the Saturday-night-date woman I saw through the window of the cab who has set me off, I think. I see Marie’s shuffle along the seat as a miniature but meaningful romantic accommodation: hey, she’s doing this for me! Pathetic, I know, but immediately I start to worry that Barry or Dick—let’s face it—Barry, has told her about where I was and what I was doing. Because if she knows about Laura, and about the split, and about me getting uptight, then she’ll lose interest and, as she had no interest in the first place, that would put me into a minus interest situation. I’d be in the red, interest-wise.

Barry and Dick are asking T-Bone about Guy Clark; Marie’s listening, but then she turns to me and asks me, conspiratorially, if everything went all right. Bastard Barry big-mouth.

I shrug.

“She just wanted to pick some stuff up. No big deal.”

“God, I hate that time. That picking-up-stuff time. I just went through that before I came here. You know that song called ‘Patsy Cline Times Two’ I play? That’s about me and my ex dividing up our record collections.”

“It’s a great song.”

“Thank you.”

“And you wrote it just before you came here?”

“I wrote it on the way here. The words, anyway. I’d had the tune for a while, but I didn’t know what to do with it until I thought of the title.”

It begins to dawn on me that T-Bone, if I may Cuisinart my foodstuffs, is a red herring.

“Is that why you came to London in the first place? Because of, you know, dividing up your record collection and stuff?”

“Yup.” She shrugs, then thinks, and then laughs, because the affirmative has told the entire story, and there’s nothing else to say, but she tries anyway.

“Yup. He broke my heart, and suddenly I didn’t want to be in Austin anymore, so I called T-Bone, and he fixed up a couple of gigs and an apartment for me, and here I am.”

“You share a place with T-Bone?”

She laughs again, a big snorty laugh, right into her beer. “No way! T-Bone wouldn’t want to share a place with me. I’d cramp his style. And I wouldn’t want to listen to all that stuff happening on the other side of the bedroom wall. I’m way too unattached for that.”

She’s single. I’m single. I’m a single man talking to an attractive single woman who may or may not have just confessed to feelings of sexual frustration. Oh my God.

A while back, when Dick and Barry and I agreed that what really matters is what you like, not what you are like, Barry proposed the idea of a questionnaire for prospective partners, a two- or three-page multiple-choice document that covered all the music/film/TV/book bases. It was intended a) to dispense with awkward conversation, and b) to prevent a chap from leaping into bed with someone who might, at a later date, turn out to have every Julio Iglesias record ever made. It amused us at the time, although Barry, being Barry, went one stage further: he compiled the questionnaire and presented it to some poor woman he was interested in, and she hit him with it. But there was an important and essential truth contained in the idea, and the truth was that these things matter, and it’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record collections disagree violently, or if your favorite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.