“I don’t believe it,” I said.
“Hey, don’t bug out,” said Julian nonchalantly. “It’s 1973 for Christ’s sake. Get with the program. Anyway, it didn’t last very long and did nothing for me, so that was the end of that. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Jasper wanted more, of course, but I said no. I told him that I wasn’t a dirty queer and he said he didn’t care if I was or wasn’t, he still wanted to suck my cock.”
“Jesus Christ!” I said, sitting up now, practically trembling in a mixture of rage and desire. “You didn’t let him, did you?”
“Of course I didn’t let him, Cyril. Give me some credit. Anyway, he didn’t seem too bothered, because he didn’t try again. Although one good thing came out of it: he said that if I was going to go around kissing people then I should clean my teeth first because my breath smelled of Tayto crisps. That was sound advice. I’ve stuck with it over the years and it’s got me far.”
“But you were friends with Jasper until the end of school,” I said, recalling how I had always felt a twinge of jealousy whenever I saw them together.
“Of course I was,” said Julian, looking at me as if I was mad. “Why wouldn’t I be? He was a right laugh, was Jasper. I looked him up when I was in Toronto last year but he and his fella had gone off on a dirty weekend somewhere. He’d love this though,” he added, tossing the copy of Tomorrow’s Man on an armchair and returning to the bedroom, where he pulled open my wardrobe and looked inside judgmentally. “But you should get rid of it, Cyril. People could get the wrong idea. Now, let’s have a look at what you’ve got in here. This maybe?” He held up a purple, wide-collared shirt that I’d bought in the Dandelion Market a few months earlier and had never got around to wearing.
“Do you think?” I asked.
“Well, it’s better than that granddad gear. Come on, put it on and let’s get the night started. Those pints won’t drink themselves.”
I felt slightly self-conscious as I took my shirt off, and the fact that he continued to watch me as I dressed filled me with anxiety.
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Well, it’s an improvement. If I’d had a couple of extra hours, I could have taken you into town and got you some proper gear. Doesn’t matter.” He threw his arm around me and I carefully inhaled the scent of his cologne, my lips unbearably close to his jawline. “How are you feeling anyway? Ready for the big day?”
“I suppose,” I said, not the most confident of replies, as we left the flat and made our way toward Baggot Street. I’d been living alone on Waterloo Road for a few years by now, employed as a researcher at RTé, where my workload was divided equally between religious programing and farming shows. I knew next to nothing about either but found out quickly enough that all you had to do was hold a microphone in someone’s face and he’d talk till the cows came home.
We’d arranged to go to Doheny & Nesbitt’s, where some of my colleagues were gathered for the stag party, and I was a little anxious about introducing them to Julian. I’d spoken about him often, describing the many milestones of our friendship, but this would be the first time that these two important elements of my life had come into contact with each other. Over the years, I had created two fundamentally dishonest portraits of myself, one for my oldest friend and another for my newest ones, and they had only a few brushstrokes in common. Revelations from either side could see the whole artifice fall apart and with it the plans I had made for my future.
“I was sorry to hear about you and Rebecca,” I said as we crossed the Grand Canal, trying hard to conceal my delight that Julian had broken up with his latest squeeze. “I thought you and her were well suited.”
“Oh that’s old news,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Anyway, there’s been an Emily since then, a Jessica, and now I’m on to a new Rebecca. Rebecca mark two. Smaller tits but, fuck me, she’s a spitfire in the sack. Not that it will last very long, of course. Another week or two, I’d say, at most.”
“How do you get bored with people so quickly?” I asked, for the concept was one that I simply couldn’t grasp. Had I been lucky enough to find a person with whom I wanted to have regular sex while still being able to walk hand in hand with him on the streets of Dublin without being arrested, I would never have let him go.
“It’s not exactly boredom,” he said, shaking his head. “But there’s a whole world of women out there and I’m not interested in being stuck with the same one for the rest of my life. There’s been a few along the way, of course, that I wouldn’t have minded a longer relationship with but they insist on monogamy and I’m not built for that. This might surprise you, Cyril, but I’ve never once cheated on a girlfriend.”
“No, you just dump them instead.”
“Exactly. And isn’t that a more honest way to behave? But here’s the thing, and I think everyone secretly believes this if they’d just let themselves admit it: the world would be a much healthier place if we allowed each other to do exactly what we wanted, when we wanted, with who we wanted, and didn’t lay down puritanical rules for how to conduct our sex lives. We could live with the person we love the most, for companionship and affection, but we could go out and have sex with willing partners and perhaps even talk about it when we got home.”
“By that logic,” I said, “you and I could get married and live together forever.”
“Well, yes,” he replied, laughing. “I suppose we could.”
“Just imagine it!”
“Yes.”
“Anyway, these things are easy to say,” I told him, trying not to linger on that idea too deeply. “But you wouldn’t like it if your girlfriend slept with someone else.”
“If you think that,” he said, “then you don’t know me at all. I genuinely couldn’t care less. Jealousy is an utterly futile emotion.”