Husband Replacement Therapy

by Lette, Kathy

  The range of sound effects available to me as a human seemed inadequate, and I wished I were a bell so I could ring and chime and peal out my pleasure.

  I awoke, mid-afternoon, to find myself entwined with the doctor, our bodies warm and luxuriant beneath the sheets. I poked my head out of the blanket.

  Brody, a blur of messed hair and briny bed smells, smiled and reached over to smooth my hair back from my face. Then his hands moved down onto my breasts, ever so gently.

  I’d always thought that my sex life with Harry was good. He was quite sensitive in bed, meaning that he hugged me afterwards – well, until his arm went numb and he rolled me off – which was practically a Byron love poem in the Insular Peninsular.

  But this – this was something totally different. Parts of my body that I didn’t even know I had were speaking to me. I was like a pinball machine of pleasure, with lights and whistles and bells and flippers going off frantically all over.

  I sighed with longing, but suddenly broke free from his kiss.

  ‘Wait! I’ve got to tell you the truth.’

  Brody looked at me with wary intensity. ‘Oh, Christ. You’re not really estranged from your husband?’

  ‘No. Not that.’

  ‘Phew, okay . . . You caught herpes on that one-night stand – the gift that keeps on giving? Or crotch critters? This is a floating STD zoo, you know.’

  ‘No. And, yuck, is it?’

  ‘Um . . . you’re really a bloke?’ His eyes glimmered mischievously.

  ‘No! The truth is, I don’t write for a major national newspaper. I write for a local rag. I pen groundbreaking pieces about a kitten that choked on a mouse, a man who got stuck in a toilet or a patient who was given a pillowcase instead of a hospital gown.’

  ‘Okay. Time for me to tell you the truth,’ Brody said, with equal fervency. ‘I didn’t lose my leg jogging. I was staggering home, pissed, from a staff party, and wandered off the path into an area that hadn’t been de-mined. So, it was my own stupid fault. Mind you, if they instigated random drug and alcohol testing of medics in conflict zones, there would be no Doctors Without Borders left.’ He reached for me again. ‘Moving on . . .’

  ‘Wait,’ I said once more. ‘Orgasms this great deserve a good soundtrack and a swipe of lipstick. Here, choose a song.’ I handed him my iPhone while I leapt out of bed to reapply lip gloss.

  ‘Hmm . . . The Doors, “Light My Fire”? What about “Sexual Healing”? No, it’s gotta be “Whole Lotta Love”, Led Zeppelin.’

  ‘I was thinking something classical . . . Zeppelin are a bit, well, pedestrian.’

  ‘Pedestrian? Sure – and the pyramids are just a pile of rock.’ Brody was going to expound on this theory, but just then I slipped back into his arms. ‘I would pick apart that pathetic prejudice of yours, but I’ve never won an argument with a naked woman . . . So, you choose.’

  As I fiddled with my phone to find the soft, wafting Ravel I craved, Brody did a little light tuning of his own. Forget Spotify – my nipples were soon so erect I could have picked up Classic FM. His mouth then moved slowly down my body, and stayed there for a long time. Clearly, if Brody ever gave up the medical profession, he could definitely win a medal for breaking the world underwater endurance record. And, I was pleased to note, there was nothing cheap about the doctor’s aftershave.

  The next time I woke, the sunset had turned on its dimmer switch and the day was dying slowly, turning from gold to russet to an aubergine bruise. The sea shushed on the side of the boat – shh, shh, shh, as though conspiring in our secret.

  I felt so contented and happy that even the palm fronds on the hills outside the window seemed to be waving in a friendly way. Hell, even the bend in the bananas in the bowl on the coffee table made it look as though they were smiling.

  ‘Wow,’ was all I could say. ‘Is it like this for you every time? I mean, is this . . . normal? It’s not normal for me. But maybe you make every woman feel like this?’ I blathered, intrigued and overwhelmed.

  Brody raised his head and met my eyes. His eyes were wide and seemed to shine with delight. ‘No. It’s not normal at all.’

  Then this is something, I thought. This is really something. I smiled too, a big, radiant beam, like a cartoon of a besotted teenybopper.

  What was happening? This was supposed to be a transient, fleeting, you-make-me-feel-alive-again fling thing, not a proper romance. He kissed me once more, and I slipped into the moment like a warm bath.

  Oh, fudge, I thought as I went under. Oh, fuckity, fuckity, fudge fuck.

  21

  ‘Attention: woman overboard!’ That was the announcement I kept waiting to hear over the ship’s public address system, because I’d dived in the deep end, with no life jacket. It was as though my vag had its own private sat-nav system – a twat-nav, which kept leading me back to Brody against all my better judgement.

  The following week was a nonstop sexual gymkhana. We had sex everywhere and anywhere – standing up, backwards, on the shuffleboard deck, on his surgery gurney, in my cabin, in his cabin, once in a lifeboat and twice in the morgue. ‘It’s too public. I couldn’t possibly . . . I couldn’t . . . I can’t . . . Okay, I can . . . Oh, right, I clearly am!’ became my catch cry.

  Time ceased to exist between us. All I could think about was the spicy, delicious smell of Brody’s skin. And all he could think about, he said, was unwrapping me with all the breathless anticipation and excitement of a kid on his birthday.

  I felt haloed in happiness. When Brody kissed my neck, I floated so far above cloud nine I could have waved to the International Space Station.

  Who had I become? I didn’t know myself. I was making love like a wild hippie girl, with my hair flinging around. I was also sneaking around behind my sisters’ backs. If they thought I was behaving oddly, they put it down to my ‘condition’ – which I still hadn’t got around to debunking. I know. Bad, bad sister! I wanted to confess but had left it so late now that it was doubly embarrassing – ‘Sorry dearest sisters. But you know me! I was going to procrastinate but didn’t quite get around to it.’

  Justifying my behaviour to myself required contortionist levels of cognitive flexibility – let alone being able to explain it to anyone else. Mind you, my sisters didn’t seem perturbed. That’s because they were blissfully busy with their own pursuits – Emerald swinging from the chandelier with a toy boy between her teeth and Amber obsessing over both the quiz and the cuisine.

  After breakfasting with Emerald and Amber I would pretend to have spa appointments, then would meet Brody between his patients. After dinner with my sisters, I would feign a yawn and stretch luxuriously, all the sooner to get back to him. Boris and Flabba (whose real name, I had discovered, was Joshua), the loyal crew members Brody had saved from public humiliation at the hands of the creepy entertainment officer, happily acted as lookouts and decoys when needed.

  After having sex all night, I would creep out of Brody’s cabin at dawn, vowing not to have sex with him again until I’d sorted my life out – I was, after all, still a married woman – then, ten minutes later, I’d be back, knickers at half-mast, legs wrapped around his waist, my whole body a quivering wreck. Self-discipline, that’s what I’m famous for, I’d chide myself while nibbling his neck. But somehow all that mattered was that Brody keep on doing what he was doing. And then do it again.

  When we weren’t together, we texted like infatuated teenagers.

  Brody: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways: 1. From behind. 2. From the side. 3. . . .’

  Me: That was mind-blowingly good. I’m coming straight back to give you a standing ovation.

  Brody: Meeting you is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I feel as if I’ve been shot in the backside by a rainbow. Jesus, Ruby. I think I’m falling for you.

  Me: Thank god. I was beginning to worry that all of this hot sex was for nothing.

  My reply to this message was flippant, but when I read that he was ‘falling for me’ my heart did
such a massive leap I thought either there was a kangaroo hiding out in my bra, or that I was having palpitations and needed an air ambulance. Or that I was falling for him too.

  Of course you’re not in love, I lectured myself. Not in the least. I’m not discombobulated in any way, shape or form. After all, I always floss my ears, run a comb through my teeth, spritz my pits with hairspray and bouffe up my hair with a spray-on deodorant offering twelve-hour protection.

  But, if what Brody and I were doing was so, so wrong, then why did it feel so, so good? Falling in love is like going to the doctor and being told that you need to put on weight. And who wouldn’t love that?

  In the tender light of Brody’s gruff adoration, I felt luminous. The doctor seemed to treasure me, despite my pathetic journalistic career writing stories more likely to litter the ground than break it. He seemed to cherish me despite my citing the ‘five ingredients’ cookbook as my culinary bible. He liked me even though I was a paid-up member of Underachievers Anonymous. He even liked waking up next to me in the morning, when my hair was sticking up in all directions, with yesterday’s mascara smeared under my eyes. The deranged idiot seemed to adore me in spite of everything.

  ‘I feel like a rescued mountaineer clinging to a Saint Bernard dog, with its brandy barrel,’ he said, one day, post coitus.

  ‘A dog. Thanks. That’s an analogy I’ll treasure,’ I taunted. ‘I’m also very handy for sniffing luggage at airports.’

  ‘No, what I mean is, you’ve rescued me from cynicism. I’d stopped believing in people. I’ve been betrayed too often, and by people close to me. I’ve seen too much. Man’s inhumanity to man and all that. The fickleness of fate on the front line is grim – cuddling dying babies, or stitching up mutilated bodies only for them to be put back into the battlefield to get blown up all over again. It takes its toll. I kept a kind of mask on at all times. But somehow you got under my defences, Ruby Ryan. I don’t think you realise what a huge thing it is for me to trust you.’

  Something cracked open in him then, and I saw straight through to his heart.

  ‘I dunno,’ he continued. ‘I feel as though life is making something up to me; that the universe is apologising, sort of. It sounds self-absorbed, I know, but it’s as if god’s kinda quickly glanced up from all that warmongering in Syria and Afghanistan to throw me a bone.’

  Fondness spilt and rippled across his face. With his tender fingertips, he then played me like a keyboard.

  ‘I am awake, right?’ I whimpered, surrendering to the pleasure.

  But was I? It was just all so magical – sailing through the opalescent ocean, phosphorescence flashing in the bow waves, the Milky Way sprawling above us, moonlight shimmering on the waves . . . It was a midsummer’s night dream. Perhaps I was drugged, like Titania? He did have access to the pharmacy, after all. Was the doc spiking my drinks? Was that the explanation for how I’d been hijacked by my libido?

  But our attraction wasn’t just physical. We talked about everything, delighting in shared favourite music, authors, films, poets and box sets, as well as alike politics and world views. Both ‘recovering Catholics’, we swapped memories from our church-dodging, free-range childhoods, me running wild by the sea, Brody running wild in the bush. Our conversation thrummed and trilled around us – it was a symphony of chat. I just had so much I wanted to say to him, and vice versa.

  He made me laugh, too, with his medical anecdotes, like one about some kids who had broken into a house and snorted a white powder they found, then fell ill because what they had thought was cocaine turned out to be the cremated remains of the house owner’s father and his two Great Danes.

  And then there was the couple rescued from floods outside Brisbane after surfing down a swollen river on an inflatable sex doll. They thought it’d be fun, until the doll snagged on a tree and they were marooned there overnight, clinging to its deflating plastic appendage. Brody treated them for cuts and bruises and hypothermia, while also explaining why blow-up dolls are not an approved flotation device.

  Even better, his death-by-cunnilingus tale. Brody had saved a woman who had tried to kill her husband by putting poison in her vagina and then asking him to perform oral sex on her. The intended victim said he became suspicious when he noticed an unfamiliar odour emanating from his wife’s coochie. The woman, clearly a criminal mastermind, didn’t know that vaginas are porous. Realising that his wife was probably absorbing a majority of the poison intended for him, the husband very kindly brought her to the hospital.

  ‘And they say chivalry is dead!’ I laughed.

  I reciprocated with tales of my less-than-illustrious journalistic career, with its many comedic mishaps, concluding candidly – ‘Trouble is, I thought that by now I’d be getting helicoptered in to book festivals, dashing on stage to give the keynote address while still maintaining salon-perfect hair. I thought I’d have an access-all-areas pass, a bodyguard, a restraining order against a stalker fan, a scandalous libel lawsuit and everything!’ I joshed. ‘But what have I actually achieved? Zilch. An unfinished novel in a bottom drawer.’

  ‘Yeah, well, during high school I believed my true calling would be representing Australia in tennis at the Olympics, and, if that didn’t pan out, I could always fall back on winning the Nobel Prize for curing cancer. Now look at me. Sitting on my arse, pensively considering my future. I’ve had to abandon many of my former career ideas – lead guitarist, astronaut, trapeze artist – though I still have high hopes for one-legged pole-vaulting and sit-down comedy.’

  I laughed, but added more sombrely, ‘I can’t believe that I’m fifty. Fifty! The years have stolen by so surreptitiously, it’s as if my life’s been dressed in combat fatigues.’

  ‘I know exactly what you mean . . . But maybe this trip has been the catalyst you needed? This could be the turning point in your life. Your epiphany. Or, at least, a catharsis.’

  ‘I assume they’re medical terms for orgasmic bliss?’ I teased, running my fingertips lightly up his thigh.

  Brody, aroused but also annoyingly ticklish, snorted with laughter; a snort that made me cackle so loudly it set Brody off again until we were both bent double, like kids. Our laughter was a tap we couldn’t turn off. In his small cabin, hidden under the waterline like a submerged cave, we seemed to move outside of reality, in a timeless universe of our own discovery.

  As the ship got closer to Sydney, we embraced so that neither might see the other’s face, and made love with a new and intense passion of impending loss. Two days out of Sydney, the dreamy underwater mood of the cabin seemed more fragile than ever as we spun our cocoon of breath around each other.

  I continued to meet my sisters for meals and cocktails each day. They took my new blissful state as evidence that the cruise was doing me good. It was clearly doing them good. Amber had taken to slobbing around the cabin in her PJs, watching rom-coms, only emerging occasionally to eat her way through the dessert menu. ‘I always believed that the only way to live a long life was to drink what you didn’t like, do what you didn’t want to and eat what you had to. Now I’ve realised that you don’t really live longer, it just feels that way,’ she said when I bumped into her in the gelato bar.

  ‘Oh yes, the heart specialist’s diet – if it tastes good, spit it out. I too refuse to live like that,’ I concurred, spooning salted caramel gelato into my mouth, ravenous after hours of sex with Brody.

  ‘And anyway, who wants to live longer when all your carb-eating, alcoholic, carnivore friends and beloved sisters are dead?’ Amber added, shovelling a chocolate fondant down her throat. ‘I’ve had no desire to check up on my family, either,’ she marvelled. ‘Three weeks ago, if my kids had asked me to pogo to the South Pole on a knitting needle, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid. But if they asked me now . . .’ She shrugged.

  ‘You’d look for a loophole in their birth certificates? Well done,’ I said, rewarding her with a big, happy kiss on her forehead.

  I occasionally glimpsed Emerald around the shi
p, swinging an inflatable penis over her head at a pool party as she danced with some muscled stud whose budgie-smuggler bulge was severely testing the limits of lycra, happily chasing a terrified member of the Sonic Groove Duo around his turntable, or licking whipped cream off a cub’s nipple piercing at the R-rated comedy game show.

  ‘The worst thing about being the oldest sister is having to be a good example. It’s much more fun being a terrible warning,’ Emerald laughed as we sipped sunset cocktails. ‘And I don’t see it as “sleeping around”, either.’

  ‘Of course not!’ I agreed. ‘You’re just having a brief dabble in amorous philanthropy.’

  ‘Exactly. I’m not only in it for the kinky thrills. Although they’re not bad either! But I really wanted to get my confidence back. My sex life with Sandro has been like trying to thread a needle with overcooked spaghetti,’ she confided. ‘On the Love Boat, though, I’ve bedded the type of studs who wouldn’t have looked twice at a nerd like me back in high school.’

  This time it was Emerald I rewarded with a big, happy kiss mid-forehead before the old twat-nav steered me back to Brody’s cabin.

  On our last day at sea, as I dressed, I noticed Brody’s face was fogged with gloom. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘I’m ill, because once we make port, my favourite patient is going to stop coming to see me with fake illnesses.’

  ‘They were not fake!’ I pinched his arm. ‘I really hated you at first.’

  ‘Ditto, darl. I wouldn’t have fucked you if you were the last woman on earth,’ he said, unbuttoning the blouse I’d just buttoned up.

  ‘I hope you at least have the intelligence and self-awareness to know that the feeling was extremely mutual,’ I said, as we ripped each other’s clothes off once more. It seemed that the only reason Brody liked me to get dressed was for the pleasure of disrobing me all over again.