"Boyfriend Material"

A fluffy read with nice banter and the de rigueur quirky supporting cast. Like "The Hating Game", behind every paragon of virtue are over-exacting parents who provide the villainy to overcome in the third act. The hug with posh dope Alex almost made me 站错 cp for five confusing seconds, but then again, how many writers would be as adventurous as Heyer and go for Freddy. (Ms Alexis Hall, please prove me wrong.) Extra bonus for narrator's energetic performance.

• “At least it’s interesting. The most scandalous thing my dad’s ever done was shake a bottle of ketchup without realising the lid was off.”
  I laughed in spite of myself.
• They, of course, are not all homophobic, and I think rather enjoyed having a delightful young gay wining and dining them. That, however, was rather predicated on you being essentially nonthreatening.”
  My anger, like every man I’d ever been with, didn’t seem inclined to stick around.
• “Alex,” I said slowly. “You know how I’m gay, and this whole conversation has been about me being gay?”
  “Well, obviously I mean a boy heiress, not a girl heiress.”
  “I don’t know any heiresses of either gender.”
  “Don’t you?” He looked genuinely confused. “Who do you go to Ascot with?”
• To his credit, Alex seemed entirely unperturbed by this. “There, there. I know Dr. Fairclough can be a bit of a rotter, but worse things happen at sea.”
  “Alex.” I sniffed and surreptitiously attempted to wipe my nose. “People haven’t said ‘worse things happen at sea’ since 1872.”
• “You remember that my dad is a recovering druggie on reality TV and my mum is an ’80s recluse with exactly one friend?”
  “Yes, but I assume they still have a club?”
• “You know there are people who went to neither Eton or Harrow?”
  “Well yes, obviously. Girls.”
  I was in no state to explain the socioeconomics of modern Britain to a man so posh he didn’t even think it was weird that you pronounced the t in Moët but not merlot.
• “In her place, I would mind. I would mind a lot.”
  “Well, maybe that’s why you don’t have a boyfriend.” He gave me a faintly wounded look. “You sound very demanding.”
  “Look. I appreciate the offer. But don’t you think if you can’t remember you’ve got an actual girlfriend, you might have trouble remembering a fake boyfriend?”
  “No, you see that’s the clever thing about it. I can pretend that you’re my boyfriend, and nobody will think it’s strange that I’ve never mentioned you before because I’m such an utter nincompoop that it could very easily have slipped my mind.”
• But none of those things, either together or individually, were really the problem here. They were just a few more dead seabirds bobbing on the outskirts of the oil spill that was my life.
• He made a be-my-guest gesture, and I wriggled gracelessly onto the banquette. Silence stretched between us, as socially discomforting as mozzarella strings. Oliver was much as I remembered him: a cool, clean, modern-art piece of a man entitled Disapproval in Pinstripes. And handsome enough to annoy me.
• The waiter returned and, while I sat in sulky silence, Oliver placed our order. The whole experience was slightly strange, since I still hadn’t figured out how demeaning I should be finding it. I definitely wouldn’t have wanted it to happen regularly. But there was also some pathetic, lonely part of me that enjoyed being so publicly possessed. Especially by a man like Oliver Blackwood. It felt perilously close to being worth something.
• “Your…your job?” I asked with all the smoothness of a bowl of granola.
• “The question that everyone asks when you tell them you work in criminal defence.”
  This felt uncomfortably like failing an exam. In a blind panic, I blurted out the first thing that came into my head. “Do you have sex in the wig?”
• “I mean I don’t mind.” Was he going to make me beg? Who was I kidding? I was probably going to.
  This was why relationships sucked: they made you need shit you’d been perfectly happy not needing. And then they took them away.
• I would have been happy to live my entire life without having to look my dad in the face. Unfortunately—as with so much else—he wasn’t giving me the choice. And I will tell you now, it was the weirdest fucking thing. Because the way someone seems in a photograph and the way they really are is this horrible uncanny valley of recognition and strangeness.
• He sighed, sad and noble in a way he had no right being. That was the problem with being old and having good bone structure. You got this giant whack of unearned dignity.
• “Are we really bad at this?” I asked. “We’ve been fake dating for three days and we’ve already fake broken up once.”
  “Yes, but we fake resolved our difficulties and fake got back together, and I’m hoping it’s made us fake stronger.”
• “Do you really think I have nothing better to do with my time than web-stalk the e-list children of c-list celebrities?”
  “Again, with the…mean comforting. What the hell is that about?”
  “I, well, I wasn’t sure you’d accept any other kind.” He looked slightly abashed, chasing a blueberry round and round his plate.
• “You either trust the judge to know what they’re doing—which they usually do, even the mad ones—or you very politely say something along the lines of ‘M’lud, I believe the honourable counsel for the prosecution is testifying.’”
  “And to think”—here I heaved a deep sigh—“I was imagining you leaping up and laying the legal smackdown on the smug suits from the AG’s office.”
  “Do you mean sterling public servants from the Crown Prosecution Service?”
• “That sounds like him. Talks about it round the dinner table all the time. Says they cost the government a huge amount of money, that people are only in favour of them because of silly sentimentality, and they spread tuberculosis.”
  “I’m not sure,” said Oliver, “but I think you might be getting jury trials mixed up with badgers.”
  Alex snapped his fingers. “That’s them. He can’t stand the things. Little black-and-white furry bastards causing unnecessary delays in our already overstrained criminal justice system.”
• “Hello, boys.” An immaculate gift box of a woman—mostly eyes, cheekbones, and cashmere—was gliding towards us.
• Maybe, and I’d suspected this for a while now, I was fundamentally unhelpable. Because somewhere along the line, I’d turned getting ahead of the story into a lifestyle.
• My apology window had closed an aloe vera ago. So I was basically stuck with sort of pretending I hadn’t been awful, even though I blatantly had, and trying to find the mythical middle ground between making it worse and overcompensating.
• “You’re beautiful, Lucien. I’ve always thought so. Like an early self-portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe. Um”—I practically heard him blush—“not the one with the bullwhip in his anus, obviously.”
• At nine thirty-six on Tuesday, I came abruptly to the conclusion that this had been the worst idea ever. I’d started trying to put things in places, but the places where I wanted to put the things were already full of things that weren’t the things that were supposed to go in those places, so I had to take the things out of the places, but there were no places to put the things that came from the places, so then I tried to put things back in the places but they wouldn’t go back in the places, which meant now I had more things and nowhere to put the things, and some of the things were clean and some of the things were very much not clean, and the very much not clean things were getting mixed up with the clean things and everything was terrible and I wanted to die.
• As in most conversations with Rhys Jones Bowen, I really wasn’t sure how we’d got here. “Anyway, back to you saving my vegan bacon substitute.
• And was briefly really excited until I found myself staring into the kindly, twinkly eyes of the late Sir Richard Attenborough.
  Wtf is this? I sent back.
  A dick pic.
• We all flopped down and waited semipatiently for James Royce-Royce to introduce the food. I’d never quite figured out if it was a chef thing or a him thing, but he got borderline huffy if you tried to eat something he’d made for you before he’d told you all about it.
• Suddenly, with the exception of Theresa—who was looking very slightly confused—everyone had their phones out. And my own lit up with notifications from the WhatsApp group, which had just been renamed Don’t Luc Back in Anger.
• A sigh gusted over the line. “What are you doing, mon caneton? This is not normal behaviour, even when your parents are estranged rock stars from the ’80s.”
• “Is he even really a gay? Probably you are going to fall for him, and then it is going to turn out he is engaged to this duke, and you are going to try and steal him away from the duke, and the duke will try to have you killed, and he will have consumption and try to make you think he doesn’t love you when really he does and—”
  “Mum, is that Moulin Rouge?”
• I spent the rest of the day taking twice as long to do everything—since now doing anything in my flat required me to tidy up afterwards or else undo all my friends’ hard work.
• The problem was that being on public transport with someone for more than a couple of stops on the Tube fell down the uncanny butt crack between necessity and social occasion.
• “I know, right? And what especially grinds my gonads is that it’s not even my, I will admit, real and extensive personality flaws they object to. It’s that they think I might have casual sex sometimes. Which, ironically, I’d be doing more of if I was in a healthier place emotionally.”
• My working theory was that getting a dessert from a vegan restaurant was like having sex with someone less attractive than you—they knew it was a tough sell, so they tried harder.
• “Okay,” I told him, “can we add This American Life to the no-fucking-way list?”
  “Welcome to Night Vale,” said the weirdly sonorous American man.
  I stared at Oliver’s serene profile. “What is happening?”
• Oliver gave one of his little chuckles. “Well, he called his band ‘Rights of Man.’ So I assume he had some interest in the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”
  “Oh fuck.” I thunked back against the headrest. “Does everybody know more about my dad than I do?”
  “I don’t know more about your father. I just know more about the Enlightenment.”
  “Yeah, I’m not sure I’m finding that very comforting. It just means you know more about my dad and more about history.”
• At this, he went very pink very quickly. “It’s true, but I’m sorry I said that to you. Because I do like you. As it happens, I’ve always liked you. I just thought you’d find me ridiculous if you knew how much.”
  “Oh come on”—my head was reeling—“when have I needed your help to find you ridiculous?”
• Bridget let out a long, sad sigh. “I love you, Luc, and that does sound terrible. But I don’t think ‘make yourself miserable’ is the one-size-fits-all solution you think it is.”
• “When you woke me up,” said Oliver, “at a time so unsociable it can’t even be called the middle of the night because that was about two hours back, I’d hoped you might at least be coming to apologise. I didn’t expect that you’d be asking me to do background reading on a wet smartphone.”
  Fuck, I was fucking this up. “I am,” I tried. “I mean, I do. I apologise. But I wanted you to know why I flipped out. For context.”
  “Ah yes.” He gave me one of his cold looks. “The most important part of any apology.”
• “Yes.” Was there anything fucking worse than being called on your own sincerity? “I meant it. Can we please go back to what’s important here, which is that you actually just said ‘hitherto’?”
• “There’s toast.” He glanced up, looking like some kind of weird and highly specific porno for people who are really into incredibly cut men and funny-coloured newspapers.
• We’d talked so much the night before that we didn’t have much to say to each other, but that was good somehow. Oliver had mostly sat decorously on his sofa, reading The Song of Achilles, and I’d mostly sprawled over him napping.
• And I wound up having to buy it every year under a series of increasingly unlikely pseudonyms because nobody else would bid on it. The most recent had gone to a Ms. A. Stark of Winterfell Road.
• Oliver seemed to genuinely enjoy Gavin’s exhibition, although I could have done without his first words as we went through the door being “Ah, so you meant the Merthyr Tydfil Rising of 1831.”
• I’d almost forgotten what it was like for a moment like this to mean something—the first time you saw a partner undressed, how they both gained and lost mystery, the truth of them, all their secrets and imperfections, surpassing any fantasy you could have conjured. The strangest thing was that Oliver had seemed so unreal to me at first. I’d wanted him from the beginning—from that horrible encounter at that horrible party—but the way you’d want a watch in a jeweller’s shop window. A kind of frustrated admiration for something distant and perfect and just a little bit artificial.
  But actually I hadn’t seen him at all. Only a reflected bundle of badly thought-out desires.
• “You mean, the job of not losing the earl?”
  “Yes, that job.” He paused. “Roughly, how inconvenient would it be if I hadn’t a hundred percent discharged it to the full extent of my abilities?”
• But, apart from checking the internet for obituaries, I didn’t have any way of knowing what was really happening with him so I was stuck in this fucked-up quantum state where my dad was simultaneously an arsehole and a corpse.
• “I don’t mean to be. But you had a boyfriend, and he made you happy for a while, and now it is over. And if we let happy things make us unhappy when they stopped, there would be no point having happy things.”
• After we’d had starters, mains, desserts, and Priya had made a point of ordering coffee, we bundled back into her truck and started the journey home—always the worst part of any road trip, especially one with a gigantic anticlimax in the middle.
  “It’s a good sign really.” As ever, Bridge was the first to break a perfectly satisfying miserable silence.
• “Bullshit, James.” Priya had, of course, chosen to ignore me. But she did seem to be broadly on my side. “People don’t believe stuff just because you tell it to them directly. If they did, visual art would be completely worthless. Otherwise I’d go around writing things like ‘Capitalism has significant problems’ and ‘I fancy girls’ on walls.”
• He stirred nervously at my side. “I’m conscious this could be rather burdensome to hear, but you remain the thing I have most chosen for myself. The thing that’s most exclusively mine. The one that brings me the deepest joy.”