A Night In With Marilyn Monroe

‘Yes.’ I swallow, hard. ‘Did you know he was gay?’

‘Libby, come on. I only work with the guy. And barely even that, really. He dropped into the restaurant this afternoon for the first time in a week. I mean, I don’t remember pondering, as we pored over some thrilling spreadsheets together, what his sexual orientation might be …’

‘Fair point.’

‘And it’s not like I was looking out for anything in particular, one way or the other.’ Olly changes gear as we finally move up a little way in the traffic. ‘I mean, I didn’t even know you were seeing him, Libby. You kept that one pretty close to your chest.’

I wince, inwardly, at Olly’s mere mention of my chest, given that he’s seen more of my chest this evening than I’d have liked him to do in a lifetime.

‘It was pretty recent,’ I mumble.

‘You could have mentioned something over the weekend.’

‘I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to shout it from the rooftops in case … well, it didn’t work out. Which has turned out to be pretty prophetic of me, really.’

‘You’re not pathetic.’

‘Prophetic,’ I say.

‘Oh … well, you might be that.’

‘Yeah, except I thought the reasons we might not work out would be because we were both too busy with our jobs, or because we didn’t like each other’s families … I never stopped to think that it might be because he was using me as a beard to hide his true identity from his Orthodox Jewish parents.’

This is based on something that Adam muttered at me, by the way, a few minutes before Bogdan and Olly and the tool kit got there: I’m really sorry, Libby … my mum and dad … it’s an Orthodox thing … they wouldn’t approve …

Which, you know, I can sympathize with. I’ve endured the disapproval of my own mother for the majority of the last thirty years. But I still don’t think it’s reasonable to drag someone else into the middle of it. Someone unwitting. Someone ignorant.

‘I’m just such an idiot,’ I say, miserably, gazing out of the window as unidentifiable bits of southwest London slide by in the gathering midsummer dusk. ‘How did I not realize he was gay? He couldn’t have made any more excuses to avoid having sex with me!’

‘He made excuses?’

‘Dozens of them.’ I never usually talk about sex with Olly, but I feel we’ve crossed that barrier tonight. Actually, not so much crossed as smashed through it. With a ten-tonne truck. ‘He was busy with work. He was tired from the gym. He had a headache … I don’t know. There were a lot of different explanations. And I fell for each and every one of them.’

‘So the … er … dressing up in … er … sexy lingerie was—’

‘My embarrassingly misguided attempt to reverse the situation.’

Olly nods. ‘Got it.’

‘I mean, what’s wrong with me,’ I go on, ‘that I have such crappy awful judgement about the entire male species?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’

‘All right, then, maybe there’s just something wrong with men.’

‘OK, well, that’s a bit of an unfair generalization—’

‘I don’t mean you, Ol,’ I say. ‘I just mean all the others.’

‘Come on, Lib, just because it’s all gone a bit pear-shaped with Adam, and just because you had a hellish experience with a total wanker like Dillon O’Hara—’

At this moment, there’s an angry grunt from the back of the car: it’s Bogdan who, I have to confess, I’d completely forgotten was sitting back there.

He looms forward now, to jab Olly in the shoulder with a large and paint-spattered finger.

‘Do not be saying the impolite things about Dillon,’ he tells Olly. ‘Libby is not having the hellish experience with him. Libby is having the heavenly experience with him. And not just in the bedroom.’

‘Bogdan!’ I turn round and glare at him. ‘That’s none of anyone’s business!’

‘Is being the business of mine,’ Bogdan mutters, darkly, ‘when am hearing the untrue things about the people I am liking.’

(Bogdan is being slightly disingenuous here. He didn’t so much like Dillon as nurse a colossal, simmering, unrequited passion for him, in a tragic, balalaika-accompanied, Moldovan sort of way. Many was the time, in the course of those few heady months with Dillon, that I half expected to open my suitcase in some glamorous hotel room only to find Bogdan stowed away amongst my shoes and my tops and my sexy underwear, all ready to clamber out and hang on Dillon’s every word for the duration of our dirty weekend. I got so paranoid that I even stopped taking the big suitcase, and started cramming everything I might need into the smaller of my two canvas holdalls instead.)

‘My mistake, Bogdan,’ Olly returns, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘There’s obviously nothing at all hellish about being abandoned in Miami the day before a major hurricane, with no passport and no credit cards.’

‘Being abandoned in the Miami the day before the major hurricane with no passport and no credit cards,’ Bogdan echoes, ‘by Dillon O’Hara.’

Olly actually takes his eyes off the road for a moment to turn round and stare at Bogdan.

‘I’m sorry … you’re saying that this is some sort of privilege?’

‘Am saying,’ Bogdan says, in the overly patient tone of one who’s decided he’s talking to a complete imbecile, ‘that Libby is being lucky to be involved with man as handsome and charming and funny and—’

‘And coke-addled,’ Olly interrupts, ‘and womanizing—’

‘OK, that’s enough!’ I hold up a hand. ‘Look, I’m incredibly grateful to you both for coming and getting me out of a tight spot – literally – but can we just stop talking about Dillon O’Hara for the rest of the journey?’

‘It would make me a happy man,’ Olly announces, ‘if I never had to so much as hear his name again for the rest of my livelong days.’

Which puts Bogdan into a right old grump, because he inflicts a wounded silence on us all until Olly drops him at the top of his road in Balham a few minutes later. And then thumps on Olly’s window just before we drive off and yells, ‘Dillon O’Hara!’, petulantly, through the glass.

‘Probably not a good idea,’ I say, a moment later, ‘to have made your painter and decorator quite so angry with you four days before your big restaurant opening.’

‘Oh, he’ll be all right. Besides, everything’s on track over there.’

‘Really? Because I feel really awful, Ol, about accidentally dragging him – and you – away from the place this evening …’

‘Honestly, Lib, don’t worry about it. Like I say, we’re right on schedule. And I know you’d do the same for me.’

‘If you got your head stuck in between some iron railings at your secretly lesbian girlfriend’s house while wearing skimpy undies and having cooking oils rubbed on you by a famous television actor?’

‘In that exact scenario,’ Olly says, solemnly, ‘I know you’d leg it across town with your sharpest hacksaw and your trustiest blowtorch.’

‘Well, that’s what friendship is all about,’ I say.

Olly falls silent for a moment, which is a pity as I’d thought we were well on the road to it All Being OK between us again, until he suddenly swerves on to the other side of the road, and into the drive-through McDonald’s on the other side of it.