The Men in her Life

around. She liked the straightforward way he talked about food and films and football with no sense of what he ought to be thinking, or what other people thought. She couldn’t imagine taking him to a work party even though part of her longed to, just to hear his views of the London media world afterwards, and to witness the perplexed shock on the other guests’ faces when he gave his critical assessment of the latest movies he had seen: crap, alright or brilliant. He probably thought Almodovar was a Columbian footballer, or the name of one of those ready-made freezer cocktails.
    Were parties so very important to her, she asked herself, twirling idly round on her seat, questioning the very foundations of her social life. Had her life become a meaningless whirlwind of business and parties and drinking, with nothing at its core? Even if it had, the existential vacuum was hardly going to be filled by obsessive sex with a vain and sulky teenage boy, she told herself.
    The night before he had brought back the video of 9½ Weeks and they had watched it together. Afterwards, Matt had tied a scarf round her face as a blindfold and led her to the kitchen to re-enact the fridge scene, but apart from a couple of trays of ice-cubes and half a bottle of Frascati, there was nothing in Holly’s fridge. The jar of chocolate spread had all gone in the first few days of their relationship.
    ‘How did you know I would respond to you this way,’ Holly had asked him in conscious mimicry of Basinger’s sex-laden voice, as she lay on the kitchen floor beside him.
    He ran a rapidly melting ice-cube down between her breasts to her tummy-button and left it there like a jewel. His face had the concentration of a small boy pushing along a toy train.
    ‘You look dirty,’ he replied simply.
    He was totally honest, totally charmless, but it was one of the best compliments she had ever been paid. She was becoming dangerously fond of him.
    With other men she had found that the better the sex, the more reluctant their willingness to be friendly to her. They behaved as if having given too much of themselves away in bed, they had to guard what was left preciously. She always associated love with worry and pain, but now people kept remarking how happy and well she looked and other men seemed to smell sex on her and smile at her in the street. Matt’s undisguised enjoyment of her made her feel beautiful. She loved holding hands with him as they walked through the parks, and he could be sweetly chivalrous, although sometimes she wondered whether opening doors for her was his equivalent of giving up his seat for someone who needed it more. When they travelled together on a crowded tube she found herself pushing him down in the last available place, demonstrating that she could strap-hang as nonchalantly as the coolest teenager.
    Holly began to leaf through her in-tray. Since the euphoria of making the deal for The One , things had been pretty flat at work. Perhaps it had been the zenith of her agenting career, she thought. As zeniths went, it wasn’t bad to achieve a quarter-of-a-million-dollar deal for a virtually unknown scriptwriter whilst being fucked by a man half her age. She couldn’t for the moment think how she could better it, and yet she felt vaguely dissatisfied with everything.
    The summer was always quiet, with people away on holiday. She knew she should be using the time to catch up on all the novels she had not read, and reading all the unsolicited scripts that were piling up in the corner of her office, but she couldn’t work up the enthusiasm. She had found that there was almost no point in coming into work if she did not feel like it. There was a lightness of touch that made difficult conversations a breeze and negotiations click into place, and if she didn’t have it, problems that should have taken an afternoon to sort out took a week and still remained slightly unresolved.
    She remembered thinking that if she sold The One for a lot of money to Hollywood her job would almost rate ten out of ten, but now that it had happened, in spectacular style, it didn’t seem to have made a great deal of difference. It was still pretty good, as jobs went, but it still wasn’t enough. The trouble with being an agent was that your success was measured in terms of your clients’ success, and so it always felt slightly second-hand. Idly she jotted a calculation onto her notepad.
    Job: 7 and falling.
    Men: 9. Sex was definitely 10, but