The other morning my boyfriend asked me what I was doing that evening.
“I’m going to a reading. You wanna come?”
My boyfriend grimaced a little. “You’re a really great girl in a lot of ways, Jacinta,” he said politely. “But you go to too many readings.”
“It’s in English,” I said, persuasively.
“Nah,” he said. “I’m going to meet up with Gert and have a few drinks.”
So I went to the reading, and it was really good. Excellent. One of the texts really shocked me though. It was about this boy who’d been going out with a girl for over three years. One day, she got in from work at 2:30 p.m. and they fucked solidly until after six. My eyes fairly popped out of my head, they really did.
I got in before my boyfriend, crawled into bed and started reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries. When my boyfriend got in, he was real drunk and stank of kebab.
“We’re going to watch Heat on DVD,” he announced at the door of our bedroom, in exactly the same voice you offer somebody cocaine on their birthday.
“I can’t get out of bed now,” I said. “I’ve got my night-things on. Gert will think I’m a weirdo. You boys watch it.”
“I will come to bed soon,” said my boyfriend. He sounded slurry but decisive. I nodded encouragingly. When he did finally come to bed, leaving Gert asleep on our sofa, I told him all about the reading.
“It was really good. It was great. But there was this one text, yeah, that really shocked me. This guy from Liverpool had been going out with this girl for three years and then one day they had sex, for, like, three and a half hours.”
My boyfriend lay next to me, blinking slowly, like a newt in the sunshine.
“Three years?” He said.
“Three years,” I said.
“Three and a half hours?” He said.
“Three and a half hours!” I said.
“He must’ve been including breaks. They must’ve had sex, like, three times, and in between they were, like, stroking and talking and that.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Because at six o’clock they met in the bathroom and she looked at him and said that they hadn’t spoken at all that day.”
“Oh,” said my boyfriend.
“I know.”
“Three and a half hours?” My boyfriend was almost scoffing with disbelief. But not quite.
“It must’ve been his lyrisches-Ich,” I said.
“His lyrisches-Ich must be addicted to viagara,” my boyfriend said.
And then we had sex – and I know exactly how long we were because we put on a YouPorn clip – but not a really REALLY misogynistic one, but a fairly nice, almost politically correct one, where a girl just masturbates and she’s got all this arty eyeliner on. I mean, you still have a bit of a guilty conscience for watching porn but it’s not half as bad as when there’s Eastern Europeans at bus stops or auditions involved. It’s a bit like eating Bio-Fleisch. The clip was eight minutes and thirty-seven seconds long, and we were done with a minute and a half to spare. We’ve been going out for four years now.
I looked at the clock and set the alarm. It was 3:30 in the morning.
“I’m glad you’re not like that lad from Liverpool,” I said. “We wouldn’t be done until seven and Rico’s getting back from his dad’s at nine.”
My boyfriend yawned and made me swap pillows with him. I like a really hard pillow. I’d probably sleep on a slab of concrete if I could.
“Gert’s really drunk. He’s much drunker than I am. I just hope he doesn’t throw up in his sleep and choke to death on his own vomit,” said my boyfriend, thoughtfully. “That would be terrible.”
