by Mason, Carol
I roll my eyes, wanting to say, yes it is, so stop. But I don’t say anything, so she continues. ‘Well, he made me straddle the side of the tub so my lower body was, well you know—’
‘—Not really.’ My heart hammers while we hold gazes.
She grins that grin again. ‘Well… you know how cold the side of the bathtub is when you sit on it. And you know what that does. The contrast of hot and cold…’
I give her my best encouraging blank face.
‘Well we had one foot in the bathtub and it was the way he…’ she whispers, ‘you know, entered me, from behind.’ She looks at me then does a double take. ‘My God, your face! You look like your head’s afire!’
I touch my cheek. ‘It’s the drink.’ I try to act casual, bored even, like I’ve been there and done that a million times before. ‘Go on. You were saying.’ I pretend to look around the room, as though I am only half interested.
‘What you having then?’ a busy waitress in a thigh-high split skirt interrupts. Something I’m not, I feel like saying, suddenly aware that this story has turned me on. Leigh grabs the drinks list off the table, scans it distractedly while I gobble her up with my gaze. Now I know how eunuchs feel. Nobody is pulling me into the bathtub for a bit of straddled ecstasy. Certainly not Rob. I look around this bar: the fit guys and girls and all the throbbing sexuality. I feel old, and staid, and like I’ve massively missed out. Why did I never dress in navel-grazing skirts? Hold men’s gazes until they had to be the first to break away? Be a self-aware, sensual young woman, like a bud before the bloom. Why was I always a good girl? A boring old Wordsworth’s daffodil that’s dead at the end of spring. Live! I want to scream at the world. Live! In case it all dries up when you hit thirty-five.
Leigh orders a crantini. I feel like so many degrees of separation.
‘You won’t believe Jill,’ a gloating grin sets on her face again. ‘He’s big too.’
Kill me, go on. ‘But they say size doesn’t matter. It’s what you do with it that counts.’ Rob always says he’s eight inches. But then again, Rob claims he’s six feet two. She just gives me that Go Tell it On the Mountain look. I reach for my wine glass, can’t pick it up. I tell her I have to go the toilet. I bolt into a stall, plant myself against the door. My heart thrashes like the propeller of a helicopter. I stand like this for ages, not sure what the feeling is that’s coursing through my body. When I come out I have to hold my wrists under cold water to cool my engine again.
When I go back outside I can’t find anything to say. It’s like sitting here with a different person, one I’m not sure I have much in common with anymore. ‘You did use protection…?’ I ask. I’d hate to think where he’s been.
She grimaces. ‘It happened so fast. But he says he’s clean. He’s always been faithful.’
Oh yeah, right. Mr. Gymnast of the Bathtub who took her to his house! Panic for my friend flies in me. I can’t believe how naive she’s being! But neither can I bring myself to say the famous last words, Well he would say that, wouldn’t he? Because if I felt like this I wouldn’t want somebody spoiling it for me either.
‘Another thing you’re going to hit me for,’ she grimaces again. ‘I came off the pill, remember? Because of all the headaches I was having. But I think that was just all the stress, when Cliff and I weren’t getting on, before Lawrence left his job when his OCD was really bad. So I’m going back on it.’ She sees my look of horror. ‘Look, Jill, don’t be my mother. I know what I’m doing. Besides, now’s a safe time. I just got off the rag. Stop being so practical.’
‘Well sorry.’ She’s going to get pregnant. I just know it.
She titters a bit. Then she looks at me, unseeingly. ‘He’s nice Jill. We just click on so many levels.’
‘What? Stair levels?’ I try to keep the eye-roll off my face.
She doesn’t seem to hear me. ‘You measure yourself by who you’re fucking you know, Jill. That’s why men always want the pretty young things. Besides, he’s alive and charismatic, and he’s masculine and he’s daring, and he doesn’t give a shit. That’s why he does so well in his job. And there’s something very sexy about that.’
There is, admittedly. I stretch a smile. He sounds horrible. Yet I’m eaten with envy. I look at her knobbly knees and I wonder if she’d have showered before she went back to the office. ‘You’re going to fall in love. I just feel it in my water.’
‘Get out! I told you this is a fling. I’ve given it an expiry date. End of the summer, that’s it.’
It was six weeks before. It’s grown by a month.
‘Besides, he’s cheating on his wife, isn’t he? You know me, I could never be with a man I couldn’t trust. I’m far too much of a psychological screw up for that. Why d’you think I married Lawrence?’
‘I thought you told me it was because you looked at his kind face and could instantly see having a flock of babies with him. You were thirty. You were done with the boyfriends, the break-ups, the one-night-stands. You wanted steadiness and something real.’
‘And he’d never cheat and he’d never leave me.’
‘And you loved him.’
‘I did and I do. But I’ve always known Lawrence felt lucky to get down my knickers. And at first you sort of get off on feeling like you’re doing them a big honour. But that’s only good for so long. Then you just think maybe he doesn’t deserve to be there.’
God, she sounds so mean! Has she always been this nasty, and I’m just seeing it now? Or has this affair given her confidence to be her true self? I wonder if she ever did love Lawrence. Or did she just marry thinking it would relieve her of all her psychological baggage?
‘You know I’d forgotten what I was capable of with a man until I saw how I was with him today.’ She does that dazed stare again. ‘It’s so different you know, sex without love, without arguments, without shared history. Just a carefree bonk with somebody you really fancy.’
She misreads my glum face as disapproval. ‘You don’t understand me do you?’
‘I do. I understand wanting. I just don’t understand doing.’
She stiffens, crosses her arms. ‘Well maybe I’m just different. I can’t take things too cosy or too much the same for too long. What I’m doing with him is just vital to who I am. And I don’t have to be proud of it. But I can’t deny it either. And I’m certainly not going to be ashamed. I’ve not murdered anybody.’
It feels like we’re brewing to have words. But as though she senses it too, she says a light, ‘Roll on tomorrow lunch!’
‘At his house again? You can’t keep doing that Leigh! You’ll get caught. His wife’ll come home. His kids…’
‘I told you… she won’t.’ She takes the martini glass off the waitress unsettling her drinks tray. And as she doesn’t offer to get out her money (an occasional bad habit of hers that Wendy and I frequently bellyache about), I pay our bill. ‘Although I have to say, the chance that she might… it certainly adds to the excitement. Danger is the best aphrodisiac.’
‘I thought oysters were,’ I say. Her eyes do that saucy dance with me. ‘A lot safer, don’t you think, Leigh? A few little oysters.’
‘Unless they’re contaminated. Then try talking horny to the toilet bowl.’
She chuckles and, despite my roaring disapproval, I do too. I’ve never known anybody who’s had an affair. I just want to sit and stare at her. ‘Your neck.’ I point to the flush on her. ‘How will you explain that when you get home?’
She runs a hand exotically down her throat. ‘It’s been so long since Lawrence gave me a flush he’d probably think I’ve got rosacea or something and want me quarantined. He’d read the Doctor’s book three hundred times.’ She does another one of those fling-a-leg-over-the-other-leg things and I catch another glimpse of her underwear. The underwear that I imagine this Nick peeling off with his teeth. ‘I don’t know if Rob has ever made me change colour.’
She wiggles her eyebrows. ‘Well I bet I know someone who would.’
; ~ * * * ~
Walking in my door, into my faithful marriage, feels like coming into a snug harbour after all that. Kiefer comes running, tail wagging. I stroke him and he wees and I mop it up with a hankie. The TV is on loud. ‘Hiya treasure,’ Rob says from the sitting room. Treasure. All’s forgiven and forgotten about now. He’s not even put out that I went out with Leigh. Suddenly I brim with the desire to salvage us, to make us deliriously in love again. Rob’s not having any affair; I don’t care what Leigh said. He’s suffering, and I regret our awful fight so much. I stand in the doorway looking at him lying on the settee watching the telly. Blobbed out. But handsomely so.
Then I think, does he look all that excited or keen to see me? If it were a choice between me and ER, whose life would he save?
I tell him I’m going upstairs to get changed. My voice sounds strained. I move his shoes, then flop down on the white duvet and just lie there staring at the ceiling. Leigh’s having an affair. Part of me still can’t believe it. I wonder if a promiscuous past makes it easier to cheat in your marriage. Funny though, it was nice believing that a person’s wild and wanton ways could be tamed with the right love. It seemed to make anything possible. Now it all just feels like a rather large load of bull crap.
I strip off, get into my dressing gown, go into the bathroom, stand there and gaze at the side of the bathtub. I still can’t picture what the hell they did.
The adverts blast on downstairs. Rob turns the volume down. ‘Did you have a good night?’ he shouts up. ‘What was Leigh’s big news?’
‘Oh nothing much,’ I shout back down. It’s weird lying to Rob. Yet I can’t tell him. Leigh told me, not Rob and me. And I hate how married friends tell their husbands things they’ve no right knowing. Besides, Rob would be furious if he knew what Leigh was doing or that I was in any way involved. Even though he’d probably think Lawrence had it coming by wearing flowery shirts and believing that in his past life he was a reindeer. ‘Room for me?’ I ask him when I go back downstairs, having brushed my teeth, combed my hair, put on a bit of perfume for him.
Simultaneous affairs, as she put it. That’ll never be me.
He looks up. ‘Gaw! Something reeks like a tart’s boudoir.’ The no-frills side to my husband makes me smile. Jill, I think, this is real. Rob is real. Your marriage is real. I worm my way beside him on the settee. Rob opens his legs so I can snuggle between them. The dog drags his cushion to the middle of the floor and starts humping it. ‘So is ER good tonight?’ I ask, trying to blank out a picture of Leigh and some man with a lovely body and a large never-mind going at it on the stairs.
‘Oh this is an old one I taped. I’ve seen it before.’
There we go. Me, or a re-run. It’s a hard choice.
He tickles my ear and down my neck, and a slow sigh comes out of me as I lose myself to his touch. ER goes off after about twenty-minutes. ‘What are you thinking?’ Rob asks.
I’m thinking please just tickle me and let’s not talk in case it spoils this. ‘Oh nothing really.’
‘So what did the two of you talk about? It must have been something, for all these hours.’
‘Nothing major.’ I uncover a bare shoulder. Rob’s hand goes there somewhat keenly at first, but then his rhythm gets absentminded. ‘I love that,’ I tell him, ‘when you touch me there.’ His fingers stop moving. I sneak my dressing gown down a bit more, inch up a tad so his stilled hand now finds itself by my breast. The cold air makes my nipple stand out. Not so long ago he’d have got an instant hard-on and we’d have done it doggy-style over the settee. I will him to do something that a normal man would do with a bare breast near his hand. It doesn’t have to lead to anything. I just want something to remind me that he’s my husband not my brother. He seems to mind-read. His big hand cups my breast. I look down at his bashed-up, working man’s knuckles. I am gridlocked with tension as I wait to see what he’s going to do. But still the hand just stays still. It’s a disinterested hand—making a valiant effort but failing.
Then he says, ‘So were the bars very busy?’ Then he pushes me up and slides out from under me. I freeze there, half sat up, with my poor begotten breast rejected, while he goes through to the kitchen and opens the fridge door.
I can’t even chirp a ‘Not really,’ like I might have done in the past to save face. Jesus, Rob. Jesus! Kiefer is now in manic humping mode. Even the dog has got a better sex life than me.
I get up, and go upstairs smarting from the shame of his rejection. I sink onto the bathmat, hug my knees, listen to him turning through TV channels again. If I go back down there and say anything, he’ll say, ‘Oh well you can’t just expect me to get horny, just like that, when I’m in the middle of watching the telly…’ And I can’t argue with that. Because somewhere in our past I’ve said similar lines myself. But part of me lives in this dream world where marriage is for lovers, and married sex shouldn’t need its slot on the TV Guide. And I should be able to want intimacy from him without feeling like he must take me for some mad sex pest.
Maybe my ego’s too fragile or I’m too obsessed with sexually keeping up with the Jones’s. I rub my aching head. If he’d just say, Look Jill, this is just a spell. We’re going to be okay. I take my glasses off and wipe tears away. I run the bath, turn the lights off, feeling like I’m setting the scene for some very intimate encounter with…myself. I climb a leg over, sit in it, lie back and sigh at the touch of water. I prop my feet on the green tiles above the taps, gaze down my shapely curves to my newly varnished toenails. This body that I try so hard to keep nice for him. Why do other men fancy it and the one man I want to fancy it doesn’t? Then my mind goes back to Leigh. I’m suddenly ragingly jealous. It barges in, rattles through me, leaving me stunned from its force. My mind goes to the picture of a man’s head under Leigh’s skirt. My friend is a good person, yet she can hang her conscience on a coat hanger in a strange man’s house.
Maybe I can too.
Chapter Seven
‘Ta-da!’ Leigh materializes from the lingerie changing room in Fenwick’s, her lithe, boyish body clad in a lacy red bra and pants set. She twirls for Wendy and me then disappears again, casting me a sly smile over her shoulder. Mistress Discretion she’s not. Wendy whispers, ‘What’s come over her? Why does she think we care what her underwear looks like?’ Through the gap under the door I watch her bare feet step in and out of an array of lovely knickers. Wendy fingers a lacy thong. ‘And they’re not even on sale.’ We both know Leigh when it comes to shopping. She will only buy a bargain. We’ve witnessed her pull buttons off things to get the assistant to take ten percent off. Yet last year she got a raise and spent three grand on a Rolex. ‘The damned thing,’ she moaned. ‘Leave it off for two days and you’ve got to wind it up!’
Out she comes again, in a purple and black set this time. Flaunting it. Sending me looks that say I know something about her. Leigh is normally not a flaunter. Leigh is the type to stare in a mirror and say, my bags are so big they’re becoming my bottom lip. Or, I could get skin grafts off a sun-dried tomato and you’d never be able to tell. But since she’s been seeing her fancy man she hasn’t made comments like that. She just seems so high on her own fantasticness. It’s almost irritating.
‘I think you look good in all of them,’ Wendy says, then adds under her breath, ‘So does the rest of Newcastle.’ Leigh totters back into the fitting room. Wendy whispers, ‘She’s been like this at work. Too jaunty and happy. And we never go for our fun lunches anymore because she’s out ‘to meetings’. She keeps asking me to tell Clifford that she’s seeing some client. But she never says who. Anybody would think she was having an affair.’ If I told Wendy, I don’t know whom she’d think less of—Leigh for doing it, or me for letting her secret out of the bag.
‘Ta-da!’ Leigh reappears, then troupes off to the till with a hundred pounds worth of new smalls! After that we go to Marks and Spencer’s for a cappuccino in Café Revive. Not like we need reviving.
The following week it’s belly-da
nce. Venus, our instructor, jiggles and jangles and pirouettes, making Egyptian ‘pretty hands’ in the air. Her ample belly trembles and quivers as she shimmies, rustling up the coins in her hip-scarf. ‘Now girls, belly-dance was traditionally a fertility ritual performed to an exclusively female audience,’ she tells us, smiling through her wave of floaty black hair. ‘But you might want to imagine you’re doing it for your special man.’ I feel like telling her, listen petals, I don’t have to imagine. I recently spent two days sewing tassels on a bra, and making see-through Harem pants, then I sat my special man down, lit candles and put on my special Awedounny song. Then with my bottom near his face I started shimmying my bits and pieces for England. When I turned around, he’d vamoosed. I was doing it to an empty chair.
‘I don’t get how you roll your belly. I can only manage the shove your boobs out bit.’ I look at myself in the mirror. I’ve totally lost the seductive knack. Belly dance, or the St. Vitus Dance. It would be a hard call.
‘Well at least you’ve got a chest,’ Leigh says. ‘I’m like a walking ad for life after a double mastectomy.’
‘Oh, that’s not funny,’ Wendy tells her. ‘You don’t make jokes about things like that.’ Despite being more of a sporty-girl than a girlie-girl, Wendy has always been better at belly-dance than us. Something to do with her radiating pheromones that come from having curves that her husband appreciates on a very regular basis, I am guessing.
‘Clench those Kegels,’ Venus instructs. ‘Imagine clamping down on a very large penis.’ ‘Oooooh!’ say all us women and I think yes, chance would be a fine thing.
‘I wish she’d not say that,’ Wendy scowls.
‘I know.’ Leigh winks at me. ‘It makes me envious for what I don’t have.’
