His fingers brush across Connie’s bared and readied labia, she gasps, writhes, glancing at the menacing hole-puncher on the steel table. Of course. Dr Ahmed picks it up. The stirrups move again, forcing her into the first position that she was left in for seeming hours, forcing her still, utterly bared. Her eyes search the audience for Cliff … he must be in the shadows … somewhere near a door … discreet as always … knows it is what he wants … has requested … the logical step …
‘You will not wear underpants after tonight,’ he had whispered in the car, ‘for me, for my associates, for all of us.’ Now she knows why. ‘Do you love me, do you?’
‘Yes,’ she is murmuring now, ‘yes, yes.’
Because everything has been building to this moment, of course, this moment of the attaching of a coldly explosive little object that is to become part of her from now on, her flesh, her very existence, as much as a scar is, a pacemaker, a metal pin. Every time Connie thinks of it, its weight, its grate, its drag and its coolness, she will be reminded, thrilled, addled, snared; she will shut her eyes upon it and squeeze tight. His, his alone. Totally submissive to him. Unlocked only by him, for others of his choosing, whenever he deems it is time.
How has it come to this?
9
There was a star riding through clouds one night, and I said to the star, ‘Consume me’
Dr Ahmed smiles, doctor-kind and knowing, straight at Connie. Holds up a syringe. ‘To ease the pain,’ he soothes. Someone in the audience gasps. Is that her Cliff? She does not know; still she tries to find him, cannot. He cannot have abandoned her, at this crucial moment, he cannot be leaving her here. This is terrifying, she wasn’t expecting anything like it, she feels so cruelly exposed, wronged, humiliated; the spell is snapped. ‘Show us all how brave you are,’ the doctor whispers close, just to her, holding high the instrument for all to see. ‘It’s just like getting your ears pierced. Show us how much you want this.’
And at that moment Connie catches sight of Cliff, by the door the servant entered, smiling, willing her on and needing this and she succumbs once again, latches onto the surrendering, grabs at it; pushing her cunt out, out, as far as it can go, ready to receive, for him, yes, the magnificent depths of her love … for this has brought them both alive … she will be consumed by it, transformed, someone else entirely … for him … his creation, toy, fascination, his means of being flooded with life; she shuts her eyes, wills it, the slipping into something else. For after all, she is the good wife, everyone knows this.
A local anaesthetic first but still the pain is searing as the first hole in Connie’s flesh is punched through but she does not cry out, she does not, knowing Cliff doesn’t want that … but at the second piercing, oh God – it cannot be helped: a piercing scream tears the night.
This is not an act.
Blackness … she slumps onto the soft mink … the relief of the oblivion. All soothing, velvety dark, all quiet.
10
Why are women … so much more interesting to men than men are to women?
He has asked her to write it down, all of it, the raw, unvarnished depths; the great and astonishing cistern of her lusts. Cliff needs to know, urgently now, and in a supreme act of love Connie has done so. She has stripped herself bare, violently, with moving vulnerability, just for him; she has unleashed her deepest, innermost thoughts. And to a man. A trusted confidant, when women rarely reveal the rawness of this vivid underbelly. To anyone. This, their secret life. Which is rarely given life.
‘He is a man of decidedly singular and specific wants.’
Clifford is confined to a wheelchair. A skiing accident at Klosters, two years into their marriage. And in the gilded unliving of this feted Notting Hill couple – the ex-Goldman banker and his fragrant, former model wife – this, now, is what keeps them tremulous. Connected. There is no physical sex between them. There cannot be because of Cliff’s condition. It is all, now, in the mind. It is all deeply secret display and withholding and commanding and surprise and play – and truth, audacious truth. And it is better now than it ever was, when their marriage was conventional, when Cliff was whole; it is as if a grainy black and white movie has burst into Technicolor life. Because one night – upon hearing his grief-stricken frustration as he tried stirring his deadened penis into stiffness and could not – Connie took up her husband’s Mont Blanc pen and spilled, courageously, her innermost thoughts.
What she really wanted. What she did not. Because Cliff had asked. Had begged for anything that could help them both.
How to love a new husband whose very manhood has been suddenly snatched? She would not leave him although many in their honeyed west London circle expected it. She’d get a grand payout, she was still young and attractive and could move on to someone else, set herself up in a Portobello mews and open a bespoke chocolate shop – but they all underestimated the Cornwall girl. For Connie has a lapdog sense of good in her. Of decorum, of duty, of Christian respect. There was pity there too, and a desire for sudden usefulness after years of being the trophy ornament to various men, the girlfriend everyone wanted to fuck. She would not leave her crippled husband, she could not. She would become a different type of wife now, devote herself entirely to Cliff, do whatever it took to have him lead as normal a life as possible, with normal wants.
Or abnormal. As she soon found out. Because it worked. Like a match struck into darkness it sprang Clifford back into life. He became a man again, with a man’s vociferous lust. And she was pleased, so pleased, at that.
11
Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size
Cliff knew little of Connie until the accident. Their sex life had been uninspired. Connie loathed kissing her husband but had never told him this. It was like he was trying to eat her lips; she hated his breath, how he ate, the clicking of his jaw as he masticated, how he brushed his teeth. He made love with an utter absence of tenderness, as if it had never been shown, taught, as if he had no idea what this was. He took a long time to come, too long, and the whole process veered, often, into tedium and hurt. Connie sometimes thought she could die in that time, as he was grinding away, unproductively, gratingly; she could not bear it, with every pore of her body she could not. She never told him this. He pawed her breasts with an absence of finesse, her nipples remained stubbornly soft. Nothing worked.
Nothing had ever, really, worked. But Clifford Carven the Third was a man set, there was no point in trying to veer him into something else. An American of supreme self-confidence and little self-doubt; a golden boy, an only child from east coast wealth who’d spent a silkily entitled lifetime getting his way and thinking little of anyone else, because he didn’t have to. Handsome, in that robust, blue-blooded American way, of rude, patrician health, as if his entire upbringing consisted of daily vegetables, energy-boosting drinks and the cleansing salt from wooden-decked Cape Cod yachts. Handsome, yes, but cold with it; his face as it aged falling away into hard angles and planes, the leanness and ruthlessness of a competitive cyclist now in him. But for Connie, at the start, he was a promise of something else. For her, for her children. A higher dynamism, perhaps. They were a golden couple and they knew it.
Connie had never come with him. She never told him that. In fact, she had never had an orgasm in her life. Her husband wouldn’t know because he never asked. He made love selfishly, with little thought for the recipient. Always had, because he had the air of a man who had never had a woman say what she really, actually, might want. It was too late, Connie didn’t try, didn’t care enough. And she knew that satisfying sex in terms of a woman was only one small aspect of the fullness of married life, and fleeting or absent for most, so she contented herself with gleaning satisfaction from the other parts. A gaggle of bankers’ wives and girlfriends around her for shopping weekends to Paris, pedicures in a gossipy line at the Cowshed, movie nights at the Electric. A show h
ouse of careful beauty, the former residence of the Portuguese ambassador. A manicured garden of clenched formality. Sushi parties for the girls, book club hostings, charity lunches, church fundraisers. Glittering dinner parties for fifty, Christmas drinks, Guy Fawkes barbecues, work dos, anything and everything to mask the terrible silence of the two of them, alone, like a shroud upon them both.
And then the accident, and the marriage was shifted onto another path. Cliff’s pumped charisma gone, to be replaced by something else: a simmering snippiness and cruelty brought about by a sheer sense of raging misfortune, Connie suspects; it’s something that, pre-accident, never seemed to surface. Her duty: to soften all that, to set things right, however she can. She has a purpose now.
Yet, yet. There is a woman she once knew and she gazes at her occasionally as though through thick, opaque glass; can’t touch her, grasp her, be her. That woman is free, fearless, blazing, bold. She is young, her younger self. The lust for losing her virginity surprises her even now, how badly she’d wanted to be rid of it. Yet ever since she has felt disconnected from the sex act, as if she was looking at it, every time, from the ceiling; observing it, wondering, flinching. This is what it’s all about? Surely not. The horror of sex not her way – not the emboldened way it always was in her head – was the first great shock of her adult life.
The men, again and again, who seemed so indifferent to who she really was; who just didn’t want to know, ask. It’s me, she was raging inside, this is who I am. She grazed upon sex through boyfriend after boyfriend; never gulped it complete, never swallowed it whole. Watched, intrigued, always watched; no one could penetrate her careful, observing, inscrutable shell. Then she married Clifford in the Seychelles in front of one hundred guests they’d flown in specially for the occasion and she stepped into, seemingly effortlessly, a world of ridiculous wealth: of subterranean screening rooms and swimming pools, of separate his and her massage rooms, summer as well as winter walk-in wardrobes, four cars (one just for the motorway alongside three vintage Porsches), of FedExed luggage, multiple help, ordering off the menu, daily blow-dries, museum-quality art. Like many rich wives, she rarely looked happy; no, that wasn’t the word for it: she looked collected, smooth, in a uniformly thin, carefully blow-dried, thoroughbred kind of way.
And it was only when Connie was needed that something like love – as far as she knows what love is – uncurled. The accident tipped their sex life into something else. Because Cliff gouged out – patiently, gently, beseechingly – the very marrow of his impenetrable wife. It had become the trigger that now tipped him into someone else. To see her so wanton, transformed, bared, cracked, made him focus on another, made him forget.
Her girlfriends have no idea of any of this. A listener rather than a talker, a receptacle for everyone else’s angst, Connie is extremely good at maintaining a secret life.
12
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read and haven’t read
‘I want you to read. I want you to tell me what works.’
So. The good wife, eager to facilitate, is flushed by a new sense of purpose. Reading above and beyond her creamy bankers’ wives book club with their Booker winners and Harvill challenges and occasional star guest who lives close. Reading at home, flushed, in the middle of the day, straddled firm on cool steel. A strumming hand. Drinking from an untapped well of words that tingle her up; that initiate, transform, exhilarate, unlock. It is writing that elicits a visceral response like no other words ever have; speaking directly to her in a secret language, woman to woman. To have such potency, as an artist, to elicit such a belly-churning jolt. Only connect, of course. It is said Renoir painted his pictures with his penis and Connie now seeks the words women write with their vaginas. Needs their vulnerability and their truth: as ugly and thrilling and complex and excruciating and scarred as her own. She finds it. Cliff, too. In a world she would never dare talk about with her friends, for she knows too much of it now; mustn’t give herself away, mustn’t break the spell of it.
And so the two of them began, alone. Tentatively. With blushing honesty. An exploratory spirit. Shared books, the enchantment of them, for it is an enchantment. Connie reads fast, her breath shallow, her belly dipping; breathing in deep the liberation of these new texts like a corset unloosed. The journeying progresses into the reality of words suddenly slammed down – a husband summoned, a wheelchair straddled, a Mont Blanc pen whispered into an anus that has never been penetrated; by night the Box visited and by day Coco de Mer; Brazilians are performed at home by a black man of satiny physique; there are collars and handcuffs, blindfolds and belts. The shame dies fast because the new world unlocked is so spectacularly different, transporting, vivifying; yet Connie had been stolidly sexually active for at least a decade before all this.
It’s as if Cliff senses that this is now the one way to entrap his beautiful, slippery, inscrutable wife, to bind her tight to his new life; it’s as if he isn’t quite confident of anything else. And so Connie is reeled in, resisting, but caught nonetheless. Complicit at every step.
All the stops on her life at such a young age, except this, vividly this. Cliff’s goal: to gouge out the – astonishingly different – woman underneath. I take you to be … but what he discovers over these days following the accident is that she is actually, exhilaratingly, quite someone else. And gradually, over time, dear, sweet Connie Carven of the carefully blow-dried hair and Vivier shoes – faithfully handing out her Bibles at the door of St Peter’s every second Sunday of the month – has slipped beyond her calcified adult life into a glittery, secret new existence that steals, spectacularly, her nights. Her husband found the key, at the height of cruel misfortune; his singular triumph in a time that seemed utterly absent of it.
Connie felt needed with all this. Thrillingly. Gratefully. Don’t we all have a universal desire to be needed in our lives? That basic human want. Cliff had a plethora of helpers – drivers, housekeepers, cleaners, personal valets, cooks – to smooth his way in every other respect. Except this one; the one that plumed him into feeling like a man once again.
But now he wants something else. The logical next step. An overwhelming desire to share his triumph with a select few, to trumpet it. He’s that secure with the velvety ropes now binding this relationship tight.
13
Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour – landing at the other end without a single hairpin in one’s hair!
He puts her to bed like a child. They do not sleep together. They never sleep together. Connie is up high, in the vast attic room, her choice. Her wonder room. Full of twigs and shells and sticks and cones, fossils, bones, sketches, books. Hand-stitched quilts from Victorian Ireland, battered fishing tins of wondrously mottled green, Edwardian rods from the Cornish coast. The windows are never shut so every night Connie can drink the night, the moon, the sky; and by day the melancholy cries of gulls that speak of London’s great maritime past and sing her home. The room has a lift, at Cliff’s insistence, but he never lingers, for this space represents a wild side of his wife he never quite trusts. Because it can’t be bought. She is a woman raw in this eyrie and he doesn’t want this aspect of her anywhere else. No leakage of any of this world – raw, battered, found grubbily off the street – is allowed into the rest of the house.
The rest: a bone house, no warmth. Interior-designed within an inch of its life. Audacious chairs, thick art books (never opened), oatmeal throws and broad, boastful art. This, of course, is what’s photographed.
Cliff kisses Connie on the cheek, kisses his thanks for the magnificence of the night. She turns from him, sleepily; feels the virgin weight raw between her legs. Does not know how many hands inspected as she lay there unconscious, in that theatre; she can feel an ache, a fulsome sullying. Was Clifford watching from the wings? Who, eventually, inserted the padlock? Who snapped it shut? With what sense of ceremony? She does not know. Any of it.
>
But it is there now, securely locked and suddenly, in the quiet, Connie is unstoppably up on all fours, a pillow under her, grinding the fresh, cold heaviness into her. The drug of it, the drug; never mind the bleeding, the six weeks of getting used to fresh piercings, the endless twisting of the hoops, the careful tending of it. She is back. It is worth it. Further and further along the path. She will do it all, all, for moments of exquisiteness like this when her body succumbs so beautifully and magnificently and powerfully and she is in awe of it, all of it; how she becomes, so completely, someone else entirely; forgetting the pain and the terror and the discomfort in the blind, addictive want. Thinking now of a myriad of hands, and cocks and cunts; cool Nika, the coy driver; it is not connected with Clifford in any way; never is, never was. She comes swiftly and collapses on the bed.
Has never felt more primed in her life.
14
For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself
Connie collects Tracey Emin, the brazen knot of her. Cliff lets her because she’s ‘kinky’.
‘She’s not kinky, she’s honest,’ is the retort.
The soft glare of the neon in startling corners of the house.
I Take You Page 3
