Love by the Book (9 page)

I totally get the point of having as many men in your life as possible. When there are lots of different possibilities on the horizon, you don't get too invested in any one person. God knows I'd been too invested in one person in the past, so you'd think this would be a good thing. All those months ago, when I decided I couldn't stay in Portland a minute longer, the prospect of an endless array of men to choose from felt like Narnia. But now that I'm here, I sort of just want to crawl back through the wardrobe and go to sleep. It's overload—I don't have the time or brain space to get attached to any of them, and I'm starting to resent each one's tug on my attention. In a way, this is good, because if one falls off the radar or blows me off or turns out to be a massive Meatloaf fan, I can easily forget about him and move on. But on the other hand, I don't feel great about seeing a cache of men whose names I could easily forget tomorrow. (Adrian being the obvious exception, mainly because he was around preexperiment so was the subject of a whole Google-stalking campaign. I could probably lead a guerilla warfare–style ambush in his neighborhood considering how well I studied those streets.)

It sounds odd, but I find myself wanting to blow
ALL
of them off. Popeye's text messages are too banal, the Running Man will probably want to discuss protein shakes and energy gels, Adrian will probably cancel . . . Faced with the prospect of dating three men at once, I want to cancel all upcoming dates and devote myself to reading every book I never get the chance to read and finally giving myself a proper facial.

Of course, in terms of the experiment, the month has been a resounding success. I absolutely loved this book—the author was sharp, witty and completely uncompromising about what women should expect (and what they must demand) from men. Women aren't encouraged to pander to men or make them the central focus of their lives. The point of having a love affair isn't to find a husband; it's to have fun and test out your powers of persuasion. It was all strangely empowering, if exhausting.

Works best on . . .

As with
The Rules
, alpha males are probably the most susceptible: the relentless flirtation will fuel their competitive streak. But, really, most of us are susceptible to jealousy, so showing that you're sought after is likely to pique anyone's interest.

To be used by . . .

All women! Or, at least, all women who are looking to have a grand old time and flirt and feel desirable. Probably not a good idea to use this if you're looking for something long term and serious though, as all the jealous-making and suitor-balancing could backfire pretty easily. But the bottom line is that everyone could use a bit more flirtation in their lives.

(or, as I like to call it,
Close Your Legs, Open Your Heart
)

June 1

Ah, a book on abstinence! Fantastic. I'd been looking forward to this one
so
much. That said, I felt I'd been involuntarily following some sort of abstinence guide for some weeks now, so I might as well do it officially. As having sex was pretty integral to my seduction strategy, I figured I had to try out a method that actively eschewed sex . . . but that didn't mean I had to like it.

I wasn't in the best of spirits when I walked into the bookshop to pick this one up, so you can imagine my displeasure when I was greeted not by the crinkly-eyed smile of the sweet, elderly bookseller, but by the inhospitable grumble of a youngish man sporting a shock of curly auburn hair and a tattered old cardigan. He would have been cute if it wasn't for the scowl deeply embedded on his face.

“We're shut,” he barked as I walked through the door.

“Evidently not,” I said. “Where's Hamish?”

He gave me a dark look. “He's gone.”

I stopped in my tracks. Hamish, gone? But I only saw him the other day, and he looked like he was in rude health! Surely he wasn't . . .

“Gone?”

“Yes, gone! Retired to Tuscany, the lucky bugger.”

Well, at least he wasn't dead. Still, I wasn't sure I liked this new situation. “Uh . . . and who are you?”

“I'm his grandson. I've taken over the place,” he said, gesturing toward the dusty shelves and the precarious spiral staircase that led to the attic. “Now, what can I do for you? You've got five minutes before I lock the door. It's your choice which side you end up on, though I warn you that this place does get a bit cold at night.”

“I'm Lauren Cunningham,” I said, smiling what I hoped was a charming smile. “I think your grandfather had a book on hold for me?”

“Oh,” he said, pushing an unruly lock of hair out of his eyes and looking at me more closely now. “You're the American.” He didn't say this in an encouraging way.

“That's me!”

“Right. Hang on a sec. I'll get your little . . . romance book out of the cupboard.” He cast a critical green eye over me, shook his head and walked into the back room, returning with my copy of
Not Tonight, Mr. Right
.

“What a load of old cock,” he muttered to himself. He sat down at the desk and set about studying the cover with unbridled disgust. The guy had a lot to learn about customer service.

“Look, just tell me how much I owe you and I'll get out of your hair.”

“Why do you want to read this pile of shite?” he said, tossing the book across the desk. He bent down and started rummaging beneath the desk, surfacing with the collected works of John Dos Passos. “Read this instead,” he said, handing the tattered paperback to me.

I looked at the cover. “Already have,” I said, handing it back to him. “How much do I owe you?” I put on my most haughty face.

He leaned back in his chair, put his feet on the desk and sighed. “Oh, fuck it, I don't know. Three quid?”

I pushed the change across to him and slipped the book in my bag, pausing on my way out to admire the antiquarian section. It was the only clean part of the shop and there, inside the freshly polished glass case, was a beautiful first edition of
Black Beauty
.

It had been my favorite book as a kid—my mom used to read it to Meg and me before bed, and I read it to myself as I got older. I'd been obsessed with horses until I was ten, and Black Beauty embodied everything I loved about them: the freedom, the spirit, the sense of wildness. My edition had been an old cheap hardback, but this one was gorgeous: thick brown leather with purple embossed lettering. I coveted it, hard.

I turned back to the bookseller, who was now in the process of pulling a thread from his cardigan that appeared to threaten the structural integrity of the whole thing, and said, “How much is this copy of
Black Beauty
?”

He let out a little harrumph but didn't bother looking up. “It's not for sale.”

“Are you sure?” I said, leaning closer to the glass to get a better look. “It's gorgeous.”

He got up from the desk with a bang and hurried over to the case. “Well, don't breathe all over it!” he said, shooing me away.

“All right! All right!” I said. “You don't have to get all angry about it. Sheesh.”

“It's quite valuable, actually,” he snapped. “It was mine when I was a boy.” His voice softened and for a minute he looked . . . sweet. He shook himself out of it and looked at me with renewed annoyance. “Now, if there's nothing else you need, it would be marvelous if you would bugger off so I can finally shut.”

I made a swift exit, already dreading the next time I needed a book. The new guy was easier on the eyes, but he was definitely lacking his grandfather's charm.

I made my way to the nearest pub, ordered myself a glass of wine and cracked open my new guide, eager to learn the apparently myriad benefits of chastity. I guessed the first one would be the money I'd save on condoms.

Close Your Legs, Open Your Heart
is meant to be a modern take on abstinence. You choose chastity not because of religious beliefs or moral codes; you choose it because of science. That's right! Apparently sex triggers some sort of neediness love chemical called oxytocin (not to be confused with hillbilly heroin, though apparently it's just as addictive). As yet another example of Nature's little ironies, the more orgasms you have, the more this chemical invades your brain and tells you that the man giving you those orgasms should be clung to like the last remaining life preserver in a cruise ship disaster. (Not that I can really blame my brain for this. There are worse things to cling on to than a man who can produce orgasms.)

So sex is bad because sex leads women to act like slavering, love-drunk possums. Of course, the author purports that this bonding drug is only released in women; men can sleep with a different woman every hour on the hour and never feel the need to plan a four-course meal for them on a Tuesday, “just because.” In fact, the book's premise stems from the idea that somehow men only fall in love with women they are
NOT
having sex with, thus casting aside hundreds of years of reproductive science.

So it seems women aren't built to have casual sex. We just love
too much
! Sure, personal experience suggested otherwise. I'm fairly certain that every woman I know can name at least one man with whom they've slept where Cupid's arrow didn't strike. In fact, I'd be reluctant to share a croissant with at least three of the men I've had sex with, never mind a life. But the book insists that we're delicate creatures who can't handle sex without having our brains reprogrammed, so for the next month I was determined to be as pure as the driven snow.

Apparently, abstinence can have some profitable side effects.

For instance, I would be more assertive in the workplace because I wouldn't be having sex on my desk. Cathryn would certainly be relieved. I would also be more clear-eyed, goal oriented and self-confident. At least there were a few silver linings.

I thought the best way to tackle the prospect of a month without sex was to prepare myself as best I could, so I went shopping. First stop was Holland and Barrett for some valerian root. As I wasn't even allowed to, uh, take care of business myself (as masturbation fuels the sex drive, and my sex drive was now Public Enemy Number One), the author recommends taking valerian root as an alternative way to unwind. I bought a jumbo bottle, plus three bottles of wine from the liquor store next door. I had a lot of unwinding to do.

Second stop was Cos, where I picked up several high-necked white button-downs and a long, light-blue dress. If I was meant to act like the Virgin Mary, I might as well dress like the Virgin Mary.

Last but not least was an M&S bumper pack of extremely ugly underwear. I know it's a cliché of Bridget Jones proportions but I suspected that when push came to shove, I'd be a bit more virginal knowing that any man traveling south would be faced by acres and acres of high-waisted cotton.

I also canceled my Brazilian appointment and hid my box of Durex.

I was ready.

As sex wasn't an attainable goal this month, I decided to give myself a different type of physical challenge: I signed up for Tough Mudder.

For the uninitiated, Tough Mudder is a thirteen-mile assault course that includes scaling walls, crawling underneath barbed wire and, as a special treat, being electrocuted in a mud bath. I figured I could capitalize on all the clear-eyed assertiveness I was about to develop.

Now, I considered myself to be in pretty good shape: I ran a couple of times a week and I always ate my vegetables. But when I watched the promo video for Tough Mudder, which was filled with brawny men grimacing as they pulled tractor wheels up an enormous hill and chucking themselves off precipices into dubious bodies of water, I realized I might need to do a little bit of extra training. Especially as the race was at the end of the month.

I decided to start with a few push-ups. I hadn't done them since high school, but I thought I could easily knock out a quick set of twenty. By the third, my arms were shaking like a shitting dog and sweat had started to pool in new, alarming places.

There was definitely work to be done.

So, aside from abstinence, the new additional goal for the month was to be able to do twenty push-ups and at least one pull-up. I'd never managed more than a dangle in the pull-up department, so I knew this would be a challenge. Thankfully, I was going to have lots of time on my hands and energy to burn.

Push-up update: three and three-quarters before collapse

Pull-up update: dangling

 • • • 

Popeye and I went on our final date tonight.

The effects of the petting party had lingered on; over the past two weeks or so, Popeye had bombarded me with texts asking what I was doing, where I was going, who I was with, what I was wearing . . . the works.

At first, it was kind of sexy. The “what are you wearing” question led to me describing a gorgeous Coco de Mer lingerie set I'd seen in the shop window recently. In reality, I was wearing a pair of eighties basketball shorts and a T-shirt so full of holes it was essentially just a loose collection of atoms: such is the magic of our digital age.

But soon, it all started to get a little heavy. One night, when I told him I was having a night in with Lucy, he asked if I was sure no one else was in the flat with us, as though we had men stashed away in closets or under the floorboards. And when I canceled our dinner plans because of a crisis at work, he turned up outside my office with a takeout. I know that sounds sweet, but I had the feeling he was there to check up on my story rather than offer moral support.

Anyway, it started to freak me out. I worried that the petting party and Adrian had broken his brain and that his true nature as a possessive psychopath was about to be revealed.

Still, he did have great arms and I don't like to miss out on a potentially entertaining date story, so I kept our plans. Anyway, under the constraints of the new book I could only gaze at him demurely from across a dinner table.

We met at a sushi restaurant in Notting Hill, best known as a good place to spot Elizabeth Hurley sucking painfully on an edamame bean. I was wearing a long black dress that was so concealing I had an English Defence League member spit at me on the street.

Popeye was already there when I arrived, drink in hand and staring pointedly at the door. He looked relieved when I walked through it, and then annoyed.

“You're late,” he said as he kissed my cheek. “Where were you?”

“Sorry!” I said, instantly chastised. I glanced at my watch. “Actually, I'm only six minutes late.”

“I was worried. I was beginning to think you wouldn't come.”

“Well, that's just nuts,” I said. “What are you drinking and can I have one?”

“Gin and tonic. I'll get the waiter.”

Drinks firmly in hand, we settled into our booth and started discussing the week's events. I was knee-deep into a story about Lucy and me going to the Horse and Groom and ending up in a long discussion about German expressionism with a Russian man and his two mistresses.

“. . . and the two of them even went to get waxed together! Can you believe that? It was like something from the Playboy mansion.”

Popeye didn't seem to be enjoying hearing about the mistresses' beauty regimes. He rolled his eyes and said, “I don't understand how you and Lucy end up in these conversations.”

“Everyone's off their faces in that place. It's like shooting ducks in a barrel.”

“Fish. Shooting fish in a barrel.”

“Well, ducks seem like they'd be easier to hit, and you get my drift. Anyway, the guy said I could come take a look at his Kirchner collection whenever I wanted.”

His eyes darkened. “I'll bet he did.”

“Oh, please. He has not one but
two
freshly waxed twenty-one-year-old Eastern Europeans at his service! I don't think his intentions were untoward. I think he was just happy to talk to someone about his art collection who wasn't mentally adding it to his net worth.”

“You must be more careful, darling. More sensible.”

“I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree if that's what you're after.”

He sighed a long, disappointed sigh. “Lauren, I'm just a little concerned about you. You're nearly thirty—”

“Uh, hang on a second, buster—”

“And you're out running around with Lucy talking to all of these strange men! Like that fellow Adrian who was at your party the other week. And that man who kept reciting those terrible poems.”