by Kathy Lette
As a way of bringing a dinner party to an abrupt end, it was fantastically successful. Under the circumstances, I could only refer to it as premature social ejaculation.
At the door, while I waited for Rory to collect me after his veterinary call-out, Jazz took my arm.
‘If you do have sex tonight I bet you it’s from behind so you don’t have to worry about not kissing . . . Or face the truth – which is that you don’t want to.’
‘Our sex-life is fine,’ I told her emphatically, flinching from the cold January draught. ‘In fact, it’s fabulous.’ I felt sorry for her. Her disappointment and humiliation were understandable, but I wouldn’t be contaminated by her rage. Rory was a kind, genial man with a big heart.
‘Sexual freedom?’ Jazz scoffed drunkenly as I fled down the steps and into Rory’s warm car. ‘Ha! Well, for married women do you know what that means? THE FREEDOM NOT TO FUCK THE BASTARD!’
Her voice echoed around the Georgian square. ‘Bastard . . .! Bastard . . .! Bastard . . .!’
‘I told you we should have roped ourselves together for safety,’ Rory grinned as I buckled up.
I squeezed his hand as we sped home. Jazz was wrong. Our sex-life was intimate and loving and tender and orgasmic. It truly was – wasn’t it?
3. The Hand – A Modern Gothic Horror Story
It was a dark and eerie night. With rain thrumming on the windowpane and the wind nagging in the treetops, our heroine was just curling up against the shadows into a cocoon of sleepy contentment when her skin pinpricked in dread as she felt The Hand. Her heart thudded against her ribcage and she stifled a scream in her dry throat. She flinched. She winced. She wound herself up tighter than the white lace nightie twisted around her quivering frame . . .
It is the stuff of horror movies. Every woman’s worst nightmare.
Men make horror movies about The Blob or The Alien or The Thing. What terrorises men is Wolfman, the Zombie, Dracula, Frankenstein. What terrorises women – well, weary mothers, that is – is The Hand. The Hand groping over the sheets for you when you’re on the cusp of sleep. You shrink from it. ‘No! No! Not The Hand, I’m a sleep-deprived mother!’ You feign catatonia, pneumonia, death. Anything to get away from those wandering digits.
The Hand creeps stealthily over from its side of the marital bed and clamps demonically onto your tit, tweak, tweak, tweaking. The Hand, that most predictable of matrimonial gestures that signals conjugal rights are being requested despite your bone-achingly deep state of exhaustion. Forget The Silence of the Lamb’s cannibal Hannibal. The Hand would be the scary movie which I would make. Cue creepy music, the goggle eyes of the terrified heroine. ‘Tie me to the railway tracks! Lock me in a tower! Anything but leave me to the mercy of The Hand.’
It was my own fault. When we got home from Jazz’s dinner party I’d kissed Rory goodnight on the ear. How could I have forgotten that husbands invariably interpret the smallest act of affection as foreplay?
As Rory ran his tongue around my upper molars, once, twice, around and around and around until the titillation became so intense that I was tempted to flick on the telly to watch the Darts final, I realized with dismay that Jazz was bloody well right. A wife will do everything to discourage her husband, bar stretching razor wire around her bed and setting bait traps. While men want the tumbling in the hay to recommence six weeks after childbirth, mothers want to tie up the sheaves and put them in the barn. Sure, I’d joked with my girlfriends about how my favourite position in bed was the doggy position – ‘where he begs, and I just roll over and play dead’, but I hadn’t admitted to myself that it was actually true. As Rory climbed aboard and pounded away at me as if I was his latest bit of DIY, I made a mental list of all the excuses I’d concocted to get out of sex in the last year.
WAYS TO GET OUT OF SEX WITH HUSBAND:
Contagious flu. Nobody could have as many cases of influenza as me in the last year and not be in an iron lung.
Thrush, from the taking of imaginary penicillin capsules to cure the fabricated flu.
The yoghurt up the fanny to cure the imaginary thrush.
Addressing him in baby talk. ‘Who is Mama’s iddy, biddy baby boy then?’ whilst trying to put your nipple in his mouth.
Taking a child into the marital bed because of a nightmare. The playing of scary videos before bed greatly helps in this department.
Setting off the smoke alarm. Talk about dampening his spirits.
Asking him what position he’d like to do it in, then laughing hysterically when he answers.
Being too demanding. ‘Hey, I feel like stripping each other naked with our teeth, wrestling in Jello, hiding strawberries up my twat which you have to retrieve with your tongue, slathering ourselves in chocolate, and then executing the Kama Sutra for seven hours before climaxing outside on the pavement for an added erotic frisson. Then we can recover for ten minutes and do it all over again! Are you up for it?’ For added effect you then squeeze his balls as though testing the air in a tyre.
If these usual contraceptive ruses don’t work, there are the regulation insults to the penis. A wife can always take to saying loudly, ‘Is it in yet?’ Followed by ‘They always say that men with tiny equipment have great personalities. And you do, darling! You really, really DO.’
Or you could try a variation on this theme: ‘It’s not the size of a man’s penis, it’s the . . . no, it’s the size.’
Of course, there are more tried and tested detumescents like –
1) ‘What am I supposed to do with it . . . floss?’
2) ‘A toothpick! Why? Do I have food in my teeth?’
3) ‘You know, love, I saw an episode of Nip/Tuck where they performed surgery to fix that.’
If more imagination is required, one day simply explain to your husband that you can only really enjoy sex if you bring along your best friend and just when he’s getting excited, wondering which of your girlfriends is up for a threesome, drop in the fact that your best friend these days is a gay manicurist called Merlyn.
If you’re really desperate for a good night’s sleep, you can employ my tiptop favourite sex-stalling technique. Warning: this must be used sparingly so as not to induce heart failure. Just when hubby’s snuggling up and you feel the prod of his penis in your back, mention casually that the Inland Revenue telephoned and want to audit his accounts. Not only will he lose the inclination for sex, he’ll also lose the desire for sleep, which means you won’t have to put up with his snoring either.
As I ruminated on the above, I noted how the bedsprings were mourning beneath us as if mocking my misery. Having stopped contemplating new colours for the ceiling, I took to wondering exactly how many shoes I owned? Twenty-eight pairs, I deduced. Oh, the things you can fathom when time is on your side!
I sucked in air in alarm. What had happened to me? I wasn’t even faking orgasms, I was flunking them. On those official Name/Address/Age forms, after it says Sex – I would have to write ‘NOT IF I CAN POSSIBLY HELP IT’.
Predictably, Rory then rolled me over on my side without a nuzzle or a kiss. Jesus. Come to think of it, there never was any kissing any more. Just as Jazz had predicted. When had we stopped kissing during sex, I wondered. Rory thrust away once, twice. As usual, each move was so mechanical, I could draw a diagram of it. He’d never asked me my favourite position – which is, by the way, Deputy Head Teacher. A promotion I’d never achieve if I didn’t get some bloody shut-eye. I was just about to point this out to my husband when he began groping round for my clitoris. And groping and groping and. . .
Why is it that men can assemble a hand-held rocket grenade launcher off the Internet, and yet they can’t find . . . Oh wait. Yes. Houston, we have lift-off! But as a feeling of pleasure began to spread through me, I stayed quiet. God knows I didn’t want to encourage the man! That would delay sleep even further. Then he might want to keep going. It used to be that women faked orgasms. Now we faked NOT having them! But I didn’t need to pretend that I wasn’t being pleasur
ed for long because Rory then began prodding at me as though he was running late for a meeting and my clitoris was the elevator button. Prod. Prod. Prod. Oh, just take the stairs! This lift only stops at one floor, anyway. The pelvic floor and, God knows, that needs some work. But hell, so did the rest of me. My hair, full of nit napalm, was encased in a plastic shower cap. As if that weren’t unattractive enough, I was also wearing saggy, baggy flannelette pyjamas and airline bedsocks. Flannelette pyjamas are the sexual equivalent of soldiers laying mine-fields across the entrance to their tunnels.
When, I speculated, did this slow-drip sexual ennui set in? Exactly when did sex become more dutiful than enthusiastic? We used to do something that involved a fair bit of nestling and stroking – I couldn’t remember what exactly, but I do remember that I liked it. What happened to those sex-surfeited days we once had where we dinged furniture, took headboard divots out of the wall, broke beds, destroyed mattresses and ran up chiropractic bills? Nooky nostalgia, that’s all I had now.
Rory had settled into his usual metronomic rhythm with habitual grunting. Did all married couples practise this kind of sexual samba, with its well-worn steps? When had things deteriorated? With the onset of motherhood, perhaps. There was no denying that childbirth had wreaked havoc with my sex-life. A little something to do with stretching your vagina the customary five kilometres. Despite the bean bags and the water births and the plinky plonky harp music, giving birth still boils down to a doctor putting a knee on your chest, spreading your legs and diving in with a pair of barbecue tongs. As if that’s not traumatic enough, no sooner have the lactation leakage circles dried on your shirtfront than your husband wants hanky-panky. Needless to say, the woman with the recently stitched perineum does not.
Rory wanted to discuss my waning desire, I remember that. But all I wanted to discuss were my post-partum haemorrhoids. Besides which, by that time my husband’s needs were no longer on my radar. I was in that mind-numbing, mother-baby netherworld. A baby is the greatest love affair of a woman’s life. If you do notice your partner at all, it’s to think, Who is that tall, hairy person hanging around ME AND MY BABY? But once the kids started sleeping through the night, we’d still enjoyed the odd bonk-a-thon, hadn’t we?
Rory was still pounding away. If he were working on a DIY creation, I’d have been a bookcase with built-in music cabinet and television swivel panel by now. I wondered if he’d get the hint that I wasn’t exactly enjoying myself if I took out the nail file Hannah had given me and started pushing back my cuticles?
I realized with relief that his momentum was building up.
Rory always came precisely the same way. A series of identical moans, crescendoing into a sequence of mini-moans which rose towards one giant inflection, concluding in a loss of amplitude on the final surge, followed, a few minutes later, by thunderous snoring.
I lay on my side, looking at the landing light sliding in under the bedroom door. Perhaps I should try harder. Don a filmy gown, get a prescription for She-agra – even make the first move? After all, one good turn – gets most of the blankets, I thought, as Rory lurched and the arctic air groped my body.
With a sickening heart, I admitted to myself that Jazz was spot on. The thought of her gloating was unbearable. Drifting off to sleep, I determined not to tell her that ‘sexual freedom’ was, indeed, the freedom not to have sex with your husband.
4. Is There Life After Infidelity?
‘You’re right. Our sex-life sucks,’ I couldn’t help confessing to Jazz the moment I heard her voice. I was on the phone to my best friend first thing next morning.
‘The only thing in the married boudoir which does, sweetie,’ Jazz replied, her voice thick with hangover.
‘I’ve just been in denial, I suppose,’ I went on. ‘What about you, though? What happened after the dinner party? Did you confront Studz about his little honeymoon at Viagra Falls?’
‘I went to bed in a huff. He followed and tried to have sex. Can you believe that? He said that ever since I’d taunted him at dinner, he’d wanted to make love to me so badly.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I told him he’d succeeded.’
I snorted with laughter down the phone. ‘But did you ask him about the Viagra?’
‘He said it was for me. That he’d been experimenting privately, on his own, and it hadn’t worked. But that he’d now perfected the dosage.’
‘Do you believe him?’
There was a pause. ‘Does Elton John have his own hair?’
‘So what’s the plan?’
‘It’s time to spy.’
‘And exactly how are you proposing to become Commander Jane Bond?’
‘You know that little holiday to Sri Lanka we were supposed to be going on, to celebrate our wedding anniversary?’
David Studlands, humanitarian doctor, only ever took holidays where there were torture reports to be made. The Congo, Algeria, Sudan, Burma, Aceh – these were the poor woman’s holiday highlights. David wasn’t happy unless in some fungal jungle teeming with malaria-riddled mosquitoes or terrorists. Finally Jazz stopped travelling with him. ‘I don’t like to go on holiday anywhere that’s been too recently traumatized,’ she explained. One year, when Studz announced a trip to Disney World, Jazz was baffled. ‘Disney World? Really? Wow.’ What she hadn’t realized is that Florida has the death penalty, and that Disney World is in close proximity to the maximum-security prison at Gainsville. So, once again, she was on her own, traipsing with a small child around the gigantic funfair – a death sentence of its own for any mother. Call Amnesty, she’d texted me. Help urgently needed. Dead Mother Walking.
‘Sri Lanka?’
‘Yes. David chose it so that he could treat tsunami survivors between pina coladas. Well, he’s cancelled, because of work in London allegedly, but he’s insisting that I still go.’
‘And are you?’
‘I shall tell him I’m going, but . . . Cassie, are you busy for the next few nights?’
‘I’ll probably just be sitting around tweezing my stray facial hairs. Why?’
‘I’m going to pretend to leave for the airport then hide at your place and see what kind of house calls the good doctor makes while I’m supposedly away. Will you help me?’
My heart sank to Titanic depths. ‘Stalking? But isn’t that illegal?’ A day-glo orange jumpsuit beckoned. Yet I couldn’t say no. Jazz always backed me up in any emergency. Hannah was the opposite. ‘Oh dah-ling, I’d like to help but I’m allergic to children.’ But, as I explained to Rory later, I did try to put her off.
‘Of course you’re always welcome, Jazz,’ I said now. ‘But you do realize that I’m married to a vet. A vet whose office is next door to our house. A vet who brings his work home. At night, well, I can never sleep in case something has escaped . . . Something with envenomed fangs which it fully intends sinking into your flesh.’
I warned her that my husband Rory thinks a thwack with a tea towel is the best defence. While I, on the other hand, would prefer a SWAT response team.
But nothing would put her off. She was in Miss Marple mode.
The upside was that for an entire week I got what I’d always wanted. A wife. While I was at school teaching, Jazz cleaned my ramshackle little Kilburn terraced house. She corralled various escaped canines, shopped for food, did the laundry and cooked the most spectacular dinners. Whereas Jazz serves vintage champagne in crystal glasses, at my place you’ll be lucky to get some leftover cooking wine in a recycled jam jar with dinosaurs running around it and the label half-peeled off. The kids call my evening meals YMCA dinners – Yesterday’s Muck Cooked Again.
She also helped Jamie and Jenny with their homework – a task which sends me into a coma. While I adore my kids with a primal passion, I actually got morning sickness after they were born.
Kids are like desktop computers. You have no idea how much assembling is required until it’s at home in pieces on the study floor and you and your husband are screaming at ea
ch other about whose idea it was to get one in the first place. Parents, on the other hand, are so simple that even a kid can operate them. My kids have been running rings around me since they were born.
Anyway, the calm Jazz brought to my chaotic home was a small price to pay for a little light stalking. Or so I thought at the time . . .
At first it seemed almost a lark. As I slid into Jazz’s Hertz rental car outside my school gate after a late staff meeting, I noticed she’d dressed for the occasion in all black with a Beanie hat, and had swapped her regulation high-rise heels for some sturdy trainers. She held up her foot. ‘Lesbian shoes, sweetie. Very comfy, actually. No wonder dykes look so happy.’
‘Do you really think this is worth it, Jazz? I do have thirty English compositions to mark.’ I like teaching. Yes, I know, I’ve obviously been working with glue for way too long. And with a promotion on the cards, I really needed to put in the extra effort.
‘Do you know what they call a woman who knows where her husband is every night? A widow,’ Jazz retorted and floored the accelerator.
Winter had come violently. For the whole of January there’d been nothing but this thick, low, leaden sky. London was as cold as a giant meat locker. It had been so bleak that the entire population of Britain was online, chasing availability of last-minute flights to the Canary Islands.
We trailed Studz from his gym in Marylebone to a cabinet minister’s cocktail party, then on to a fundraising banquet for the starving of the Sudan at the Victoria & Albert Museum.
The museum mausoleums on Cromwell Road looked even grimmer beneath the clotted night sky. Jazz and I sat shivering, our faces mashed up against the side windows of the car, me correcting English homework by the glow from the cigarette lighter (‘A conjunction is the place where two railway lines meet’) and blowing smoke rings of our breath in the icy air as we ate something from a fast-food vendor; it couldn’t technically be classified as food, but at least it was hot. Just when I had become so cold I thought it was time to amputate my extremities, Studz sprang agilely down the museum’s marble steps and Jazz fired the engine.
