Chapters Five & Six
Chapter Five
It was difficult to find psychologists to speak to - most of the people I reached out to by email or via their websites didn’t reply. I told the first of my cheats this during our interview, and she suggested TikTok: ‘everything happens on TikTok now,’ she told me.
Sure enough, I found thousands of sex therapists and infidelity counsellors on the platform. They sat in their offices giving quick, confident capsules of advice to camera. One of them even posed suggestively while written aphorisms appeared over the video in bright pink, digital ink.
I approached a woman who seemed to have qualifications and to be speaking some sense in her videos. She sent a friendly reply, and once again I found myself on a video call. She was warm and jovial, and was seated in the blandly upscale office of her home in Connecticut. She looked a little like a friendlier Ann Coulter, but with tiny, blinking eyes. At one point, she admitted to me that she was a ‘hugger.’
‘A hugger?’ I replied.
‘Yes. I hug,’ she told me. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this, because it’s strictly against the rules.’
A more serious therapist in Los Angeles replied to me, a woman with strong qualifications. I drove to Culver City to meet her on a Monday morning.
In the pictures on her website, I’d noted that she was a youngish Hispanic woman, but in person she was strikingly attractive. She wore tight jeans and high heels and had long, glossy black hair. She recommended the famous infidelity expert Ester Perel’s book to me, and asked some questions about what I wanted to achieve.
She told me about a case that had some similarities to mine. A man who was doing well in his rise as a politician had begun sleeping with a 22-year-old colleague. He got a thrill out of being great at his work, and then fucking this 22-year-old in an alley outside a bar. The therapist had suggested he come to a session with the lyrics of a song that spoke to him.
When he did so, the lyrics were about swimming down into the ocean towards gold lying on the seabed. The narrator’s family were standing on the beach, calling desperately to him to come back, but he had to keep diving towards the gold even though he knew it would kill him.
‘I don’t know if you can get all the therapeutic aspects in that?’ she asked me. She had a light, beautiful voice. I couldn’t believe that the politician had chosen such a painfully trite example.
I told her that I always found sex with a new partner the most exciting. She leaned forward towards me, and there was a strange, elastic moment in which the rest of the world slipped away as she looked me in the eye and spoke.
She told me that if two people are really, deeply intimately connected and they have sex, it’s a form of transcendence: ‘Super beautiful, and exciting… Almost, like, spiritual sometimes. It can be really, really transcendent...’
I thought about her for days afterwards, but not because of any advice she’d offered.
Giving in to my prejudices, I decided to try and speak to some English psychologists, to see if I could trade Californian looseness for British intellectual rigour.
There was one more video call, with a youngish man in the Home Counties who was a qualified psychologist. He charged me half of his usual rate. During the interview-cum-session, I saw a satisfied look come over his face when I told him about my family and upbringing. But I hadn’t set out on all this to end up explaining myself through my mother.
I hadn’t had time to transcribe the interview before I travelled back to England for a summer break with my children. When I was there, I spent a day in London and met my agent, and he put the book idea out of its misery. It came as a relief. It hadn’t been working anyway.
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Chapter Six
After Christmas, I went down to London for three days. I met my agent, and we came up with yet another proposal idea. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We will triumph.’
On the Thursday evening the rain was torrential. I did the last of my meetings, then went to meet my old friend Tom. He and I have slept together over the years, the only man I ever feel desire for. I was going to see him with our group of friends the next day, but had engineered this meeting in the hope something would happen, that he might suck my cock in the toilets, as he’d done so often before I left London. I’d even refrained from masturbating in case this happened, so that I could fully enjoy the blowjob and give him a really good load. He didn’t like having come in his mouth, though he never told me not to finish there. Usually, he just made a show of how gross it was and spat it out, grinning ruefully.
As it turned out, he couldn’t stay out for long, and nothing happened. I went home and had the cocaine delivered that we’d all decided to order for Friday night.
—
We met in a pub and began drinking and snorting lines. Tobias had ordered a bag of MDMA, and because of the size of the order the dealer had given us two. We all dabbed at it, and things became blurry and time sped by, and soon we were walking back to Tobias and Becka’s house in Blackheath.
When we got there, one of the bags of MDMA was missing. It had apparently been in Becka’s bra, but was now presumably lying in the street somewhere.
I had planned to stop this session at one AM, and take one of the Xanax Tom had brought with him to induce sleep. As ever, I failed. We sat up late, talking and drinking.
Somehow, perhaps because of my life in America, George Floyd came up. These were my oldest friends, and so I felt able to tell them that I didn’t believe he’d been murdered. Becka reacted with outright shock. Rob seemed unsurprised, and Tom took the chance to be outraged and pour scorn. Becka kept saying emotive things, as though they were arguments. Why, they kept asking me? I did my best to explain, but they just gaped and looked at me as if I was mad. ‘What’s happened to you?’ Becka said. ‘You’ve been radicalised!’
Suddenly it was 4am and I said: ‘oh shit’ and rose and said goodnight and we were all parting.
I texted Tom and got him to come down to the basement flat that Tobias and Becka rented beneath their house – they have a lot of money. I’d already put porn on, after trying to navigate the new UK online safety procedures, stupefied from drugs and drink. Unfortunately, this involved taking a selfie, and seeing my reddened, exhausted, ageing face in the camera.
Tom arrived and we undressed and began sucking each other’s dicks. I’d already taken my Xanax and neither of us got fully hard. I’d opened a QuickTime player video of me shoving anal beads up Vanessa’s asshole, shot fifteen years earlier, and it was now hidden behind the porn browser. I briefly considered showing it to Tom, but something told me not to.
He kept breaking off from sucking me to masturbate my cock, but I could feel that I was going to come despite being half-soft, and I kept whispering, urging him ‘suck it, suck it,’ and he did. I came over his cheek and chin and saw him wiping it away with the back of his wrist, examining it. He smiled, a for-fuck’s-sakes-smile. And then I wanted him gone and he called an Uber and I ushered him out and fell asleep.
In the morning, Becka and Tobias came down to say goodbye.
‘I think you need someone you can talk to about all this stuff,’ Becka said, referring to the George Floyd conversation. I had told her that there was no one in my life in LA I could do so with. ‘They’re all fucking liberals,’ I said.
Now, I told her that I thought it was good for me to live around progressives, even though I completely disagree with them on everything. I don’t want to go and surround myself with people who think like me, I told her.
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