Джулиан Барнс - The Only Story

You know already that there is good sex and bad sex. Naturally, you prefer good sex to bad sex. But also, being young, you think that even so, all things considered, taking the rough with the smooth, bad sex is better than no sex at all. And sometimes better than masturbation; though sometimes not.

But if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn’t, as you might have guessed had you heard about it before, merely a subcategory of bad sex; and that is sad sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

Sad sex is when, the toothpaste in her mouth not fully disguising the smell of sweet sherry, she whispers, ‘Cheer me up, Casey Paul.’ And you oblige. Though cheering her up also involves cheering yourself down.

Sad sex is when she is already doped by a cheering-up pill, but you think that if you fuck her, it might cheer her up a bit more.

Sad sex is when you are yourself in such despair, the situation so insoluble, the pre-history so oppressive, the very balance of your soul in doubt from day to day, moment to moment, that you think you may as well forget yourself for a few minutes, for half an hour, in sex. But you don’t forget yourself, or your state of soul, not for even a nanosecond.

Sad sex is when you feel you are losing all touch with her, and she with you, but this is a way of telling one another that the connection is still there, somehow; that neither of you is giving up on the other, even if part of you fears that you should. Then you discover that insisting on the connection is the same as prolonging the pain.

Sad sex is when you are making love to a woman while thinking about how to kill her husband, even if this is something you would never be able to do, because you are not that sort of person. But as your body continues, so does your mind: you find yourself thinking, Yes, if you discovered him in the process of strangling her, you can imagine hitting him on the back of the head with a spade, or maybe stabbing him with a kitchen knife, though you realize that, given your hopelessness at fisticuffs, you might end up with the spade or the knife skidding off him and striking her instead. Then this parallel narrative in your head gets even madder, proposing that if you were to miss him and hit her instead, then it might be that you secretly wanted to harm her, because she – this woman now naked beneath you – has got you into this insoluble morass so early in your life.

Sad sex is when she is sober, you both desire one another, you know that you will always love her regardless, just as she will always love you regardless, but you – both of you, perhaps – now realize that loving one another does not necessarily lead to happiness. And so your lovemaking has become less a search for consolation than a hopeless attempt to deny your mutual unhappiness.

Good sex is better than bad sex. Bad sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than bad sex. Self-sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than self-sex. Sad sex is always far worse than good sex, bad sex, self-sex and no sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

At college you meet Paula – blonde, friendly, direct – who has switched to law after a short-service commission in the Army. You like her handwriting when she shows you a case summary from a lecture you missed. You invite her for coffee one morning, then start having sandwich lunches in the nearby public gardens. One evening you take her to the cinema and kiss her goodnight. You exchange phone numbers.

A few days later, she asks, ‘Who’s that madwoman who lives in your house?’

‘I’m sorry?’ Already there is a chill spreading through you.

‘I rang you up last night. A woman answered the phone.’

‘That would have been my landlady.’

‘She sounded as mad as a hatter.’

You take a breath. ‘She’s a little eccentric,’ you say. You want this conversation to stop, immediately. You wish it had never started. You wish Paula had never phoned the number you gave her. You very much don’t want her to be specific, but you know she is going to be.

‘I asked when you’d be back, and she said, “Oh, he’s very much the dirty stop-out, that young man, you can’t rely on him from one moment to the next.” And then she came over all genteel and said something like, “If you will excuse me while I fetch a pencil, I shall pass on any message you may choose to leave.” Well, I put the phone down before she came back.’

She is looking at you expectantly, sure that you will provide her with an explanation that will satisfy her. It doesn’t have to be much; a joke might even do it. Various extravagant lies cross your mind until, preferring the quarter-truth to the self-interested obfuscation – and also feeling stubborn and defensive about Susan – you repeat,

‘She’s a little eccentric.’

And that, unsurprisingly, is the end of your relationship with Paula. And you realize that such a pattern is likely to repeat itself with other friendly and direct girls whose handwriting you admire.

Around this time, you stop thinking of her family by their nicknames. All that Mr Elephant Pants and Miss Grumpy stuff was fine and funny at the time, part of the first silliness and proprietoriness of love. But it was also a facetious minimising of their presence in her life. And if you are beginning to think of yourself as grown-up – however forcedly and prematurely – then they should be allowed their own maturity as well.

Another thing you notice is that you no longer fall easily into the private, teasing love language that used to pass between you. Perhaps the weight of what you have taken on has temporarily crushed out love’s decorativeness. Of course, you still love her, and tell her so, but in plainer terms nowadays. Perhaps, when you have solved her, or she has solved herself, there will be room again for such playfulness. You can’t be sure.

Susan, however, continues using all the little phrases from her side of the relationship. It is her way of maintaining that nothing has changed, that she is fine, you are fine, all is fine. But she, you and it aren’t, and those familiar words sometimes cause a prickle of embarrassment, more often lurching pain. You let yourself into the house, deliberately making enough noise to alert her, and as you come down the short flight of stairs into the kitchen, you find her in a familiar pose: red-faced by the gas fire, wrinkling her brow at a newspaper as if the world really does need to sort itself out. Then she looks up brightly and says, ‘Where’ve you been all my life?’ or ‘Here’s the dirty stop-out’, and your cheerfulness – even if briefly assumed – drains like bathwater. You look around and take stock of the situation. You open the store cupboards to see if there is something you can make into something. And she lets you get on with it, while offering occasional remarks designed to convey that she is still well capable of understanding a newspaper.

‘Things seem to be in a frightful mess, don’t you agree, Casey Paul?’

And you ask, ‘Where exactly are we talking about?’

And she replies, ‘Oh, just about everywhere.’

At which point you might throw the emptied tin of plum tomatoes into the bin with some force, and she will chide you,

‘Temper, temper, Casey Paul!’

By months of manoeuvring, you get her first to a GP and then to a consultant psychiatrist at the local hospital. She doesn’t want you to come with her, but you insist, knowing what will probably happen otherwise. You turn up at a quarter to three for a three o’clock slot. The waiting area already contains a dozen other patients, and you realize it is the hospital’s policy to book everyone in for the same time, which is when the consultant’s session begins. You can see their point: mad people – and at your age you use the term pretty broadly – are presumably not among the world’s most punctilious timekeepers: so it’s best to summon them all en bloc .