best not to sound too appalled.
‘Yeah, I think so. Well, I left them somewhere anyway. But because we were having such a brilliant time it didn’t feel slutty. Just seemed like it would be a funny story we could tell people when they asked how we met.’ Ah, the insane mental time travel. Like Doctor Who on HRT, Jenna always catapults through time to the hordes of rosy-cheeked grandchildren she’s destined to have with the latest nonstarter. Hang on, isn’t that exactly what I was doing over the Gruyère? Can’t go there.
‘Then what?’ I ask, needing rapid distraction from my own pathos. At least I didn’t leave my bra hanging off a cheeseboard.
‘Well, my hotel was nearer, so it made sense to go back there.’ So she asked him back to her room. Fatal error.
‘And we did it, like, three more times. So he obviously really fancied me, but he had to get back to London first thing. We swapped numbers and everything, and he said he wanted to take me out for dinner on Tuesday.’
‘And?’
‘Well, we hadn’t made an actual plan, and he doesn’t call all Monday, but I know he’s super high-powered, so –’
‘Please don’t tell me you called him?’
‘I’m not like you, Lulu, I can’t play games.’
Damn. The last thing I wanted was to engage in a tactics conversation. I was meant to let the monologue wash over me, make a few sympathetic noises and then barricade myself in my bedroom.
‘I’m not saying you should. Just that men like a bit of a chase maybe.’
‘Yeah, well I didn’t want to just sit around waiting. It’s very disempowering. Besides, I wanted to book in for yoga if I wasn’t seeing him.’
Jenna’s got a brilliant line in pseudo-feminist justification. Desperate is as desperate does.
‘What did he say?’
‘I didn’t actually speak to him, I just left a message. I got his voicemail twice and I thought it would look a bit weird if I didn’t leave one.’
‘What did you say?’
‘Kind of “Hi, it’s me. Haven’t heard from you, and I was just wondering what the plan is for tonight. Call me.” I kept it very light.’
Light? That ‘haven’t heard from you’ will have told him everything he needed to know. ‘Did he not ring back then?’ I’m trying for sympathetic rather than pitying, but I’m not sure it’s quite coming off. Where the hell is Alice anyway? How long can it take to buy a bottle of wine from a shop that’s a hundred yards away?
‘I didn’t hear a peep till Tuesday afternoon,’ she says, voice rising. ‘Then all I get is this text.’ She holds out her phone like it’s a grenade.
Going 2 NYC 4 a conf. Weekend woz GR8. C U soon xx.
‘I mean, I just don’t think I will see him now.’
‘I’m sorry, Jenna,’ I say, feeling genuinely sympathetic. That’s the problem with her. By this stage in one of her stories you’d have to be the iron man not to get drawn in by her obvious distress. ‘You’re probably right though, it sounds like a bit of a dead loss.’
‘But he was so great, Lulu, and it felt so right when we were together. Maybe that’s why.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, he’s had this horrible divorce. Maybe he’s just frightened of falling in love again. Because he’s known heartbreak.’ She looks at me earnestly, hoping I’ll validate her insane theory rather than crushing her with the truth: that sex on the first night is always a disaster, let alone the kind of sex in which your underwear gets reclassified as a chamois leather; that ‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?’ has lost none of its relevance fifty years on.
‘Either way, Jenna, I think you’ve got to let it go. Chalk it up to experience. You’ve had such a bad run recently: maybe you should take some time out.’
‘I haven’t got TIME for time out!’ she roars, just as Alice mercifully reappears. ‘You wait till you’ve got forty within spitting distance. You don’t know how hard it is.’
With Jenna, misery can turn to fury in the blink of an eye. I wouldn’t want to be a boy pupil on one of her down days. Five years old or not, you’d still be held responsible for the sins of the entire male race. ‘I’m sorry, Archie, I know you only dropped your rubber, but I’m afraid you’re on detention till 2025. That should give you just enough time to write “all men are fucking fuckwits” seventy thousand times.’
Alice immediately