PURE DELIGHT: Gael Garcia Bernal

'O he has such a sexy mind!” she began, “Just the right mix of difficult and frivolous! So learned, but never takes himself too seriously! And how splendidly his hair is greying! And those bored, naughty eyes!”

My friend — Eng Lit, but theory-phobic — has just discovered Roland Barthes.

She is the sort of woman who responds to male brilliance with instant lust. We are eating freshly fried samosas under a banyan tree outside our office. Hmm, I find myself saying after each of her exclamations — partly because the samosas are hot and a long Hmm cools them discreetly without interruptions in the conversation, but also because I can see what’s coming and feel hopeless.

She half-notices the changing tone of my Hmms. “Is he single?” Hmm. “Is he dead?” Hmm. And then, realisation dawns. “Is he… gay?” she asks in death-defying present tense, her pitch rising. Hmmmm! I say, and find myself adding “I’m so sorry…”

At that moment, my face must have looked its fakest ever — like the emoticon one uses after writing Aww while chatting. “Why should you feel sorry about it?” she retorts.

Why indeed? This has happened so often with my women friends who are helpless brilliantophiles. A series of conversations about Shakespeare, Proust, Henry James or Vikram Seth that end with that exasperated, female DHYATterika! The fact that most of these people are dead causes much less chagrin than does their sexual orientation.

Vikram Chandra is my usual consolation prize for these despairing women. But his best novel is 900 pages long, and he is too happily married. Think of Gael Garcia Bernal, I tell them, how sad that he is straight and about to be a father. Almodóvar has made an entire film about this tragedy. What else is Bad Education about but the terrible unnaturalness of this bright and beautiful creature being quite incontrovertibly straight?

Besides, Shakespeare is pre-gay and Seth is bisexual, I hastily add, so there is hope. But the women remain inconsolable. They fling Keanu Reeves and Rupert Everett at me. Thank god most of Bollywood is in the closet.

Under the glass on my bedside table there is a lovely ad, which I had cut out once, for a new cocktail lounge. It shows the picture of a chicly bored-looking young woman in a Little Black Dress sitting alone with her drink. And the copy says, “It’s true. All the best men are married or gay. (Or both.)”

Her boredom has many faces. A friend who has recently published a set of books that gathers together some exquisitely sad photographs asked me with hilarious, and heart-felt, bafflement, “Why is it that only women and homosexual men see the sadness of my photographs?”

Another old friend was once known as The Litmus Test: if you were not sure about a man, then you simply had to introduce him to her, and if she felt immediately attracted to him, then he was definitely gay. Sadly, she has lost this knack with age.

But, to come back to the question I started with, why did I say sorry at the end of that conversation about Roland Barthes? Why does that apologetic tone creep into similar conversations with women about heterosexually unavailable men? It is a bit fake, but why not entirely so?

I have always taken a sort of unholy pride in being incapable of feeling guilt. Remorse and regret, yes, but never that delicious confection called Guilt (What is your guilt du jour?).

Homosexual guilt, in particular, is a bus that I may have missed for life. But, perhaps I am savouring a version of that guilt when I allow myself to feel this bizarre, semi-fake sorry-ness each time I have to make a terrifically intelligent woman face the fact that a terrifically intelligent man she fancies may not fancy her back.

Yes, Wittgenstein…I know …so drool-makingly difficult and gaunt and cruel-looking… I know…but I’m afraid, darling, you don’t quite happen to be a working-class English lad in your early teens… O I am so sorry… so terribly, terribly sorry… Let me think…Yes! There is still Derrida…Imagine being able to say, Je t’aime, Jacques …Oh! (I am still too anti-American to bring myself to say Aww …)

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