So I told him all about my life. About Jacqui, Rachel, Luke, the Real Men, Shake’s air-guitar prowess, Nell, my upstairs neighbor, Nell’s strange friend. I told him about work, how I loved my products, and how Lauryn had stolen my promo idea for the orange-and-arnica night cream and passed it off as her own.
“I hate her already,” he said. “Is your wine okay?”
“Fine.”
“Just that you’re drinking it kind of slowly.”
“Not as slowly as you’re drinking that beer of yours.”
Three times the waitress asked, “You guys okay for drinks?” and three times she was sent away with a flea in her ear.
After I’d brought Aidan up to speed on my life, he told me about his. About his upbringing in Boston, how he and Leon had lived next door to each other, and how unusual it was in their neighborhood for a Jewish boy and an Irish-American boy to be best friends. He told me about his younger brother, Kevin, and how competitive they’d been as kids. “Only two years between us, everything was a battle.” He told me about his job, his roomie, Marty, and his lifelong love of the Boston Red Sox, and at some stage in the story, I finished my glass of wine.
“Just hang on while I finish my beer,” he said, and with admirable restraint, he made the last inch last a full hour. Finally he couldn’t avoid being done and he looked regretfully at his empty glass. “Okay, that’s the one drink you signed up for. How’s the plumbing in your apartment?”
I thought about it for a moment. “Perfect.”
Well?” Jacqui asked, when I got in. “Nut job?”
“No. Normal.”
“Vrizzzon?”
I thought about it. “Yes.” There certainly had been a frisson.
“Snog?”
“Kind of.”
“Tongues?”
“No.” He had kissed me on the mouth. Just a brief impression of heat and firmness and then he was gone, leaving me wanting more.
“Like him?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, really?” Suddenly interested. “In that case, I’d better take a look at him.”
I set my jaw and held her look. “He is not a Feathery Stroker.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
Jacqui’s Feathery Stroker test is a horribly cruel assessment that she brings to bear on all men. It originated with some man she slept with years ago. All night long he’d run his hands up and down her body in the lightest, feathery way, up her back, along her thighs, across her stomach, and before they had sex he asked her gently if she was sure. Lots of women would have loved this: he was gentle, attentive, and respectful. But for Jacqui it was the greatest turnoff of her life. She would have much preferred it if he’d flung her across a hard table, torn her clothes, and taken her without her explicit permission. “He kept stroking me,” she said afterward, wincing with revulsion. “In this awful feathery way, like he’d read a book about how to give women what they want. Bloody Feathery Stroker, I wanted to rip my skin off.”
And so the phrase came about. It suggested an effeminate quality that instantly stripped a man of all sex appeal. It was a damning way to be categorized and far better, in Jacqui’s opinion, to be a drunken wife beater in a dirty vest than a Feathery Stroker.
Her criteria were wide and merciless—and distressingly random. There was no definitive list but here are some examples. Men who didn’t eat red meat were Feathery Strokers. Men who used postshave balm instead of slapping stinging aftershave onto their tender skin were Feathery Strokers. Men who noticed your shoes and handbags were Feathery Strokers. (Or Jolly Boys.) Men who said pornography was exploitation of women were Feathery Strokers. (Or liars.) Men who said pornography was exploitation of men as much as women were off the scale. All straight men from San Francisco were Feathery Strokers. All academics with beards were Feathery Strokers. Men who stayed friends with their ex-girlfriends were Feathery Strokers. Especially if they called their ex-girlfriend their “ex-partner.” Men who did Pilates were Feathery Strokers. Men who said, “I have to take care of myself right now” were screaming Feathery Strokers. (Even I’d go along with that.)
The Feathery Stroker rules had complex variations and subsections: men who gave up their seat on the subway were Feathery Strokers—if they smiled at you. But if they grunted “Seat,” in a macho, no-eye-contact way, they were in the clear.
Meanwhile, new categories and subsections were being added all the time. She’d once decided that a man—who up until that point had been perfectly acceptable—was a Feathery Stroker for saying the word groceries. And some of her decrees seemed downright unreasonable—men who helped you look for lost things were Feathery Strokers, whereas no one but extreme Feathery Stroker purists could deny that it was a handy quality for a man to have.
(Funnily enough, even though Jacqui fancied Luke something ferocious, I suspected he was a Feathery Stroker. He didn’t look like one; he looked like a tough, hard man. But beneath his leather trousers and set jaw he was kind and thoughtful—sensitive, even. And sensitivity is the FS’s defining quality, his core characteristic.)
It was only when I realized how anxious I was that Jacqui might dismiss Aidan as a Feathery Stroker that I saw how much I liked him. It wasn’t that Jacqui’s opinions affected me, it just makes things a bit awkward if your friend despises your boyfriend. Not that Aidan was my boyfriend…
My last proper boyfriend, Sam, had been a great laugh, but one terrible night he’d got tarred with the Feathery Stroker brush for eating lowfat strawberry-cheesecake yogurt, and although it had nothing to do with me and him breaking up—we hadn’t been built to last—it made life a little bumpy.
I’d never seen a Feathery Stroker being decategorized: once a Feathery Stroker, always a Feathery Stroker. Jacqui was like the Roman emperor in Gladiator, the thumb went up or the thumb went down, the fate of a man was decided in an instant and there was no going back.
I abhor the Feathery Stroker test, but who am I to judge because I have a “thing” about nuzzlers. Men who nuzzle. Men who badger you in a hands-free way with their face and head, nudging their head into your neck, polishing their forehead against yours, before finally kissing you—sometimes with accompanying croony noises. I don’t like it at all. At all.