How to Fall in Love with a Man Who Lives in a Bush

I love taking part in market-research surveys. And filling out questionnaires. The knowledge that my life can be divided up into simple categories relating to how much I earn, what kind of place I live in and how many foreign holidays I take a year gives me a sense of security and satisfaction. The fact that there are no grey zones, that everything really can be broken down into black and white. Once, after I’d had a particularly difficult student at Berlitz, I went into the nearest bank and filled in a withdrawal slip just to calm myself down.

‘Thank you very much,’ says the woman. ‘Have a nice day.’

‘Was that all?’ I say, trying to hide the desperation in my voice.

But the girl has already approached another couple.

I go to one of the few cinemas in Vienna that shows films in their original language. The film doesn’t start for another hour and a half so I read Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast in the foyer, and realise I’m in the wrong European city for becoming an author. I should immediately move to Paris, drink cheap red wine and spend all my time wandering around hungry. After the film I rent a DVD on the way home, and buy some food.

On Sunday I try to sleep in, but fail. Instead, Optimus and I lie in bed and stare at one another. I go to a Kokoschka exhibition in the Museum Quarter and then the cinema again. I eat dinner at McDonald’s and hope none of my students will see me. I make a constant effort not to look at the time to see how many hours I have to endure before I can go to bed and begin my working week again.

While I’m eating my Big Mac I start thinking about how I ought to write a historical novel set in England. It would be about a young orphan girl who becomes a governess at a big spooky mansion. Slowly, she and the dour master of the house fall in love, but there’s a big twist: the master’s wife is still alive – locked up because she’s batshit crazy. Locked in the attic! Once again, the hairs on my arms stand on end when I think what an incredible story it’s going to be.

6 (#ufdc6ca50-8079-536d-a306-47315ce5c654)

Fuck you, Charlotte Brontë.

I pour sugar into my coffee cup a little too fast and some lands on the table.

‘Oops,’ Stephan says, smiling.

I brush the sugar off the little round metal table and smile back. You should always smile on a date. And be sexy. And fun. I try to think of something fun and sexy to say about sugar, but my head’s empty. Brown sugar – like sensual little sun-kissed grains of sand – hahaha! This is the first date I’ve been on in almost a year. On my last date, I went out with a doctor who I never heard from again.

‘I’m so sick of the warm weather,’ Stephan says, nodding at the blue sky outside. His accent is so strong it sounds like ‘ze wuarm wezzer’.

The café is in one of the museum galleries and it’s pleasantly cool. Around us, the muted voices of the other customers can be heard. Outside it’s so warm that the tarmac on the streets has turned soft and the air is vibrating. Over the last week, two of the horses and one of the drivers of the coaches that always stand in front of the Hofburg have collapsed from the heat. One of the horses even died.

‘Me too,’ I say. On a date you should always agree with the other person. If you don’t, you should come up with charming-yet-convincing counter-arguments that show you are independent but not – God forbid – dogmatic.

‘The whole of Vienna gets so dusty and suffocating,’ Stephan continues. ‘You can’t breathe.’

‘A bit like … a gas chamber,’ I mumble, as I realise my cultural faux pas halfway through the sentence. With Austrians you are, after all, only two generations from some pretty terror-inducing events.

The man sitting in front of me is a prince. Not symbolically, and definitely not in terms of appearance: Stephan really is a prince. Even though the Austrian aristocracy was officially abolished after the First World War, Austrians have continued to use their titles as if to show how meaningless the rest of the world’s opinions are to them. Stephan is descended from the house of Deyn-Hofmannstein, and his family own a castle in Steiermark. We started talking to one another when Leonore and I were at Loos Bar last weekend and after three days I rang him even though I only had a vague, alcohol-blurred memory of him. But because I’d typed ‘Prince Stepfam! PIRNC!!!’ and his number in my phone I saw it as a sign I should make a little more effort with my love life.

It was my idea to meet at 11 a.m. at the Natural History Museum to show how alternative and spontaneous I am, rather than in the evening at some bar. But now I’m regretting my decision, and wishing this coffee in front of me were something alcoholic and that it was quarter to twelve at night rather than in the morning. So far, our date hasn’t been the slightest bit alternative and spontaneous, just clumsy and uncomfortable. The Natural History Museum is normally one of my favourite places, but with Stephan at my side, suddenly everything looks both old and childish. He’s shown most interest in the meteorite room, while I mostly wanted to look at the enormous coelacanth and the crocodiles on the second floor.

Now we’re sitting in the café, trying not to let our legs touch under the table. Stephan is tall and white-blond, but his head is too large and too oblong. Every time I look at him I think of those stone statues on Easter Island. He’s wearing light-blue jeans, a pink Tyrolean shirt and a non-ironic Janker, the jacket people wear with Lederhosen.

‘What do you do? In the day I mean?’ I ask.

To show how cool I am, I’m not planning on making any reference to the fact that he’s a prince.

‘Mostly I deal with the administrative side of our place in Steiermark,’ Stephan says. ‘But I try to get to Vienna as often as I can.’

‘Is the … the place open to the public?’

‘Yup, that’s our primary source of income these days,’ Stephan says. ‘We organise conferences, weddings and parties there. There’s a lot to be done. And what do you do?’

Up to now, the tone of our date has been similar to the one I generally have with my students during their first lesson. A dialogue consisting of a question, an answer, question, answer, question, answer. Although Stephan has shown a polite interest throughout, it’s as though we have a pane of glass between us.

‘I teach English at Berlitz,’ I reply. ‘At the moment I’m doing a lot of “out of house”.’

‘What’s that?’ Stephan asks.

‘It means I don’t teach at the school. Instead I go out to various companies and teach at their offices. All over Vienna.’

‘Sounds exciting,’ says Stephan.

‘Well, not really,’ I say. ‘And sometimes I feel a bit like a call-girl. Though I’m selling English instead of sex.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with prostitutes,’ says Stephan. ‘I go to brothels a lot.’

Because I’m alternative and spontaneous – The Natural History Museum! Crrrrrrazy or what?! – I pretend this doesn’t shock me.

‘Oh right,’ I say. ‘Are there lots of brothels in Vienna?’

Stephan nods. ‘I’d imagine there are at least twenty,’ he says. ‘But I never go to the ones the Tschuschen or the Turks go to. Just the classy ones.’

Tschusch is racist Austrian slang for people from the Balkans. Once, an AMS student asked me if I knew what a Tschuschen handbag was. When I shook my head – already slightly panic-stricken about what his reply would be – he said it was a supermarket carrier-bag. The same student complained angrily in another lesson about there being ‘too many turkeys in Austria’.

‘Oh,’ I say, staring at Stephan. For some perverse reason I find it kind of arousing that he goes to brothels. I wonder briefly if I should sleep with him just for the experience of having sex with someone who goes to brothels, but the sight of Prince Stephan makes me feel as aroused as a bit of sandpaper. I already know we won’t be meeting again.

‘I’m a regular at one place,’ he goes on. ‘Sometimes I even get a discount there.’

Stephan sips his coffee as nonchalantly as if we were still talking about the weather.

‘And what kind of discount do you get at a brothel?’ I ask. ‘Do you get two for the price of one?’

Stephan nods. ‘It’s a bit like that. They have one girl who can suck you off for forty-five minutes. I see her a lot.’

‘Wow,’ I say. ‘Forty-five minutes? That’s, wow, that’s a really long time. I didn’t even realise you could suck someone off for that long. Amazing she doesn’t get cramp.’

My lessons are forty-five minutes long, I think, and sometimes I can hardly handle that.

Stephan takes another sip of his coffee.

‘So you go to brothels even if you’re in a relationship?’ I ask.

‘It has happened,’ Stephan says. ‘But now my mother wants me to think about settling down.’

‘So you’re looking for a princess for your kingdom? Do the girls have to undergo some kind of challenge first? Like catching a dragon’s tail? Or is it the princess who can give the longest blow job that wins?’

Stephan looks at me without saying anything. Since this date has now unmistakably died, I don’t have to be charming any more. Instead I roll a few grains of sugar between my fingers and wish I was at home with Optimus and my books. I don’t want to be with men like Stephan Deyn-Hofmannstein. Actually, I don’t want to be dating. I don’t want to pretend. I’m OK with being alone. I like my life. I like my quiet flat, clean kitchen and my shelves full of books. I like the fact that everything’s just where I left it. I don’t need anything more, and my solitude makes me neither unhappy nor pathetic.

Despite this, when we’ve finished our coffees we go on to a temporary exhibition about Chernobyl on the ground floor and look at pictures of kids with missing limbs, dressed in knitted woollens.

Outside the museum we stand on the stone steps and compete to be first to come up with an excuse to end the date. It’s Stephan who wins.