The American players began by handing out cans of beer. Apart from showing us what rolicking great guys they clearly are, it also suggested the danger, the sheer havoc they could wreak upon the European canon. Rachel threw up her hand, the yankee Grendel's eyes fell upon her. He chucked a beer- which she passed to me. I thanked her, not mentioning the phial of brandy in my jacket. After a few minutes of academic irony fusing with the jazz, Beowolf  burst from the side. With a sword and a mound of fur on his back, roaring and strutting, he was pure, thick, dyslexic dick. I supped the warm beer...Had Rachel ever worn perfume before? Always clean, always stepping from the bath or the showers at the gym, I loved her subtle, untraceable smells. Sometimes it was only the smell of freshly washed clothes, or shampoo, but never anything as nuclear as perfume. If going to the theatre was my way of taking our liaison to a new level, was wearing perfume hers? I hope not. But I suppose our liaison, having consisted only of sex, has never explored the terrible and fearful terrain beyond her bedroom, occasionally mine. Why leave a lingering scent around your own duvet? We are not...foxes. Foxes? The beer was slipping from my hand. Grendel and Boewolf were squaring up. The American players were doing an ironic machismo, a brief nod to feminist critics. There's always a sadness in returning to the present. It's like being cast out of Eden a hundred and fifty times a day...Hey, you..! Rachel took a gulp of beer, perhaps worried that I would get drunk and turn into an American phallus with no past, no future, forever deconstructing and fucking the present moment of my own jubilant existence. I remembered the phial...No, she was wasn't thinking that...We have good sex, me and Rachel...Saying that, she could have good sex with thousands of people. As the youngest of three siblings, she is at ease in her skin...All relationships begin as triangles. Ours did, too, but what made it intensely sexual was, in fact, a misunderstanding...I could hear a thrumming bass, not unlike the Velvet Underground circa 1969..The misunderstanding...It was this: For the first few weeks, whenever Rachel and I met, we were unduly awkward. I knew her to be a giving, talkative woman, keen on detail. But whenever we met, for the first twenty minutes, it was as if we were starting all over. This went on for six weeks. I would burst in out of the rain, we'd hug, then we'd have twenty minutes of quizzical looks, bitten lips, as if making a cup of coffee were a form of satirical dance. At the time I took it to be the significant gestures of a woman in her mid thirties.In fact, she was simply trying to work out if I'd been reading her Twitter. Of course, I never had. It wasn't because I am nearly a generation older than Rachel ( I have clients in their seventies who have had their hearts broken on Facebook ), it's  simply that I am a dog, and I prefer to sniff for information. Yet, whenever Rachel and I met she assumed my immersion in her hyperventilating world of social media. Inevitably, I let her down. Where I was expected to be curious, I was indifferent. When I was expected to be jealous, I was happy as Larry.  She just didn't get me. So we'd spend twenty minutes in a fierce display of limbs, looks, misunderstanding, and heavy gestures. In short, I inscribed onto her kind but uncertain expression, all my fears, and this made it an imperative for me, as a man with those fears, to be inside her.  And without delay. Or undue delay. And so, whenever Rachel and I met, within an hour we'd be in the bedroom, resolving on our bodies all our expectation, and sniffing for all our information.