Free Therapy by David Lodge Page A

except in the bath, and even then I bet she covers herself with foam. Divesting Amy of her clothes would be a slow and exciting business, like unpacking an expensively and intricately wrapped parcel, rustling with layers of fragrant tissue paper, in the dark. (It would have to be in the dark — she told me one of her problems with Saul was his insistence on making love with the lights on.) Whereas Sally’s clothes are loose and casual, and so few and functional that she can strip in about ten seconds flat, which she frequently does after coming home from work, walking around upstairs stark naked while doing humdrum domestic tasks like changing the sheets or sorting the laundry.
    This train of thought is proving rather arousing, but unprofitably so, since Sally is not here to slake my lust and Amy wouldn’t even if she were. Why do I only seem to get horny these days in London, where my girlfriend is contentedly chaste, and almost never at home in Rummidge, where I have a partner of tireless sexual appetite? I don’t know.
     
    “You should try it, Tubby.” How does Jake know I haven’t tried it? It must show in my body language, somehow. Or my face, my eyes. Jake’s eyes light up like an infra-red security scanner every time a pretty girl comes within range.
    I suppose the nearest I came to trying it in recent memory was with Louise, in L.A., three or four years ago, when I went out for a month to advise on the American version of The People Next Door. She was a “creative executive” in the American production company, a Vice-President in fact, which isn’t quite as impressive as it sounds to a British ear, but pretty good all the same for a woman in her early thirties. She was my minder and intermediary with the scriptwriting team. There were eight writers working on the pilot. Eight. They sat round a long table drinking coffee and Diet Coke, anxiously trying out gags on each other. As the company had bought the rights they could do anything they liked with my scripts, and they did, throwing out most of the original storylines and dialogue and retaining only the basic concept of incompatible neighbours. It seemed to me that I was being paid thousands of dollars for almost nothing, but I wasn’t complaining. At first I used to attend the script conferences and brainstorming sessions dutifully, but after a while I begin to think my presence was only an embarrassment and a distraction to these people, who seemed engaged in some desperately competitive contest from which I was happily excluded, and my participation became more and more a matter of stretching out on a lounger beside the pool of the Beverly Wilshire and reading the draft scripts which Louise Lightfoot brought to me in her smart, leather-trimmed canvas script satchel. She used to come back at the end of the day in her little Japanese sports coupé to collect my notes, and drink a cocktail, and more often than not we would eat together. She had recently split up with a partner and “wasn’t seeing anybody” and I, marooned in Beverly Hills, was very glad of her company. She took me to the “in” Hollywood restaurants and pointed out the important producers and agents. She took me to movie previews and premières. She took me to art galleries and little theatres and, on the grounds that it would help me understand American television, to more plebeian places of resort: drive-in Burger Kings and Donut Delites, ten-pin bowling alleys, and on one occasion a baseball game.
    Louise was small but shapely in build. Straight bobbed brown hair which always shone and swung as if it had been freshly washed, which it invariably had been. Perfect teeth. Is there anybody in Hollywood who hasn’t got perfect teeth? But Louise needed them, because she laughed a lot. It was a resonant, full-bodied laugh, rather a surprise given her petite figure and general style of poised professional career woman; and when she laughed she threw back her head and shook it from side