Triangles

by Andrea Newman

  When he wakes he denies being asleep. He says, ‘Make me hard,’ and she takes his cock in her mouth. She loves it so much, this part of him, hard or soft. Usually her tongue and his hand and a little fantasy talk work the magic and it rises from the ashes. But sometimes it won’t obey. She feels his shame and anger acutely: it is far worse than her own disappointment. And there is the extra burden of having to pretend it does not matter. He apologises; she is embarrassed. They both want him to be powerful. ‘I’m sorry. My cock’s not behaving itself,’ he says.

  She thinks it a miracle it ever does when they have so little time, trying to eat, drink, sleep, talk and make love in less than three hours once a fortnight. At his best he is the greatest lover she has ever had and she has told him so in the past, but this does not help them now.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you’re not a machine.’

  His reply amazes her so much she forgets to ask him what he means. ‘Yes I am,’ he says, ‘and so are you.’

  Sometimes he comes in her mouth and she swallows it. The warm spray flowering on her tongue like sparklers on the hand, soft and piercing, gentle and sharp. Before, with other people, lesser loves, she has always spat it out. But usually he comes inside her, needing to enter her as she needs to have him inside. ‘I’m past my prime,’ he says.

  ‘What a good thing I didn’t meet you any sooner,’ she says, half meaning it, although in her heart she wants all his life. He would have been too much for her. If she finds him intoxicating now, what must he have been like when his cock always obeyed him, when the dark hair that covers his body also covered his head, before it started greying, thinning, before he put on weight, before he had responsibilities? Did he like himself any better when he was young, she wonders?

  Sometimes he won’t even kiss her. ‘Don’t I taste nice?’ she asks fearfully.

  ‘I’m not feeling very kissy at the moment,’ he says. ‘Nothing to do with you.’

  She wonders if anything is to do with her. Sometimes she feels she is just servicing him. Often they make love without him even stroking her. She can do it for herself, which he likes, or do without. Then she feels lonely, angry, that he is destroying the only thing they have. He says he is lazy, she thinks he is nearly dead. Her compassion is greater than her anger. He has very little left to give, but she wants it, whatever it is. Everything could be resolved if they had more time, she thinks. She sucks him, strokes him; they work together on the magic mushroom, and then they fuck for a long time. Often she comes gloriously but sometimes she is too tense and anxious, too worried for him. Advice from sex manuals whirls through her head: relax, squeeze, fantasise, enjoy. Above all, don’t let this powerful, fragile creature feel inadequate. Hearing his cries at the end and feeling the waves of his semen inside her, she feels privileged, set apart from ordinary mortals, joined to a god. She holds him while he sleeps and imagines a life where they could live together, knowing it will never happen. Each time he leaves she feels exhausted and bereaved.

  She takes out insurance: she finds herself another lover, Paul. She doesn’t believe in fidelity to a married man any more, no matter how much she loves him. It makes no sense; she had learned the hard way. In her experience they eventually give her up for a new woman or for their old wife. They get bored by familiarity or scared of intensity and they run away: it is only a matter of time. Paul is married too, but more happily than Lionel: it shows in his face. ‘I don’t want to be unfaithful to my wife emotionally or financially,’ he says at the beginning, very clear, ‘just sexually.’ She understands: he means he will bring cheap bottles of wine and discourage her from phoning him at the office. His wife’s name is Christine and he often mentions her casually as if to remind Naomi of her existence, or as if she were someone they both knew, as if it reassured him to bring her into the conversation.

  ‘That’s all right,’ she says. ‘I’m in love,’ and she tells him about her beloved. He listens sympathetically, a rare gift, they have good sex together, and she thinks of him as a friend. She likes the perfect balance of it, the fearful symmetry: him with his wife and her with her lover. She hopes he will make her feel more relaxed, less desperate for Lionel, better able to survive the intervals between meetings. He is short and wiry, smooth-skinned, cheerful and energetic, and he makes love generously, doing everything she wants. He is content with his life and therefore he has more to give. ‘Tell me what you want,’ he says, as if offering her a menu. The luxury of it. She feels safe with him: there is no danger of her loving him. Each time she is pleased to see him arrive, smiling, kissing and hugging her as soon as they meet; each time she watches him leave with a light heart, feeling replenished.

  Lionel would like her to find another man to join them, so she doesn’t tell him about Paul, who would also be delighted at the idea. It is her way of punishing them both for not giving her enough time, for not loving her. Her small rebellion. She won’t allow them such a treat and they will never know that she could. She wants Lionel alone. And she doesn’t want to find out if they could both easily make space in their crowded diaries for such an event when their time with her is so limited.

  Her therapy group want to know why she keeps choosing married men. She is baffled by the idea of choice; she can’t remember when last she met anyone single. She is forty. In her age group most people are married. But they insist it means she is afraid of commitment. Maybe she is, and after two divorces it seems like a sensible fear.

  She works by night, in a casino. Every night she watches men lose (or, much less often, win) in an evening more than she earns in a year. Who would want to go out with a man like that, even if they were not forbidden to fraternise with the punters? But it is only money, whereas she is gambling with her heart. Everyone else who works with her is married or much too young. Besides, married men are house-trained: they carry used glasses back into the kitchen and leave the lavatory seat down. And it is touching, the way they speak lovingly of their children.

  With Lionel she explores the mutual pleasures of violence and the tenderness that follows. Sometimes the marks take a week or ten days to fade and when he telephones he asks if she would like some more. She always says yes.

  She doesn’t tell her therapy group about this: she doesn’t think they could handle it. But she does try to explain to them that sex is magic, that she needs the reassurance of touch, penetration, ejaculation, to take her out of her head, to keep her in touch with life. They say they understand but she doesn’t see understanding in their faces. Some of them are married, some celibate. One of them is both. They think she needs to have her consciousness raised. They think she doesn’t value herself. They ask her to talk about her dead father.

  She tries to explain what it’s like out there in the jungle at her age. ‘It’s a seller’s market,’ she says. ‘And I’m buying.’ They have all got flats or houses, so surely they will understand that. They still insist she could find somebody single, somebody with time for her, somebody who would put her first. They don’t tell her where this miraculous person may be found, or why, since he is so wonderful, he is not already attached to someone else. She knows he doesn’t exist. Single men of her age are a little dusty and unkempt; rusted through lack of use; obsessed with the past. She has eaten enough dinners while listening to their bitter tales of what went wrong. Occasionally she has been asked to analyse their lost wives. ‘What do you think is the matter with Wendy? Why did she behave like that?’ Sometimes they say after a few hours of this that they shouldn’t be talking about the past when they’re with her; then they go on doing it. They are often quite surprised when she doesn’t want to take her clothes off at the end of an evening, her head still full of Wendy’s problems so that she feels like a nanny or a shrink. Undressing in these circumstances would surely be gross professional misconduct.

  The AIDS horror goes public during her affair with Lionel but he is unperturbed. ‘It’s too late,’ he says, ‘we’ve already mingled our juices. Besides, I’ve got a very stro
ng immune system.’ She wants to believe him. It would be unbearable to have nothing of him left behind in her body. But it is something extra to worry about. He is an old sixties swinger, if he is to be believed, with a legacy of lovers, threesomes, foursomes, orgies. It would be ironic, she thinks, if this love affair should turn out to be not merely heart-breaking but also lethal.

  Paul prefers to use sheaths, out of respect for his wife. He is adept with them, so that they are hardly noticeable, but she thinks how sad it is to be back to such primitive technology after all the years of freedom. Once, at Christmas, he doesn’t bother, and it is like a gift.

  Then without warning Lionel leaves her. He says on the phone, ‘I suppose I’ve been putting off ringing you because I seem to have got involved with someone.’

  She isn’t surprised but she’s stunned. ‘My God, what a shock,’ she says.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘it was for me too.’

  The pain in her heart grows till she feels it will choke her: it was on the phone too that she heard of the death of her father. ‘How long have you known her?’ she asks.

  ‘Three weeks,’ he says.

  ‘Are you trying to say goodbye?’ she asks, very brave now, with nothing more to lose.

  ‘I think I’m saying you may find I’m going to be a bit preoccupied for a while,’ he says.

  She digests that in silence: it is like swallowing a stone. She wonders if the new woman is preferred because she is married and shares the pressures of family life or because she is willing to enact all his fantasies or simply because she is new and her very newness can revitalise him. She doesn’t ask: she doesn’t want to know.

  ‘I do actually love you,’ she says for the first time, free to say it now it can’t threaten him. ‘Can we keep in touch?’

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ he says, ‘but you may not want to.’

  ‘This is almost the first real conversation we’ve had,’ she says.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that’s not quite fair.’ And then: ‘Well, I must go, I’ve got people waiting to see me.’

  ‘Keep in touch,’ she says again, heavy with loss. Touch was all they had.

  ‘I’ll give you a buzz,’ he says, an expression she hates. She puts down the phone and picks up the pain, a huge burden of emptiness inside her.

  Her therapy group, when she narrates this conversation, stare at her incredulously and ask how she feels. ‘Sad,’ she says.

  ‘And how do we want her to feel?’ the leader asks.

  ‘Angry,’ they chorus, almost shouting.

  But she can’t find the anger. It is not as if he has broken any promise.

  The next time Paul makes love to her she weeps after she comes. She has done this before but out of pleasure not grief. She can’t tell him Lionel has gone because he has always said it would be a burden to have anyone wholly dependent on him. Anyone except his wife, presumably. But he is warm and affectionate with her as usual. After he has gone she notices that instead of throwing away the used condom in a tissue, he has left it on the floor, its neck knotted like a tiny balloon, so the precious contents can’t escape. She stares at it, this magic elixir, these few pale drops that there is so much fuss about. There must be some spell she could cast, if she were a witch and knew what to do. But she is only human and so she sleeps with it under her pillow to comfort herself, like a child with a teddy bear, and it soothes her, taking the edge off the pain, her little souvenir of life.

  Bliss on Wheels

  The supermarket was crowded but she noticed him at once because he was her type. Not much taller than she was but heavily built, with dark hair curling over his collar and out of his open-neck shirt. He had a sulky, voluptuous mouth and the sort of olive skin that looked tanned even when it wasn’t; he moved with an easy, confident swagger, very sure of himself, very comfortable inside his jeans and leather jacket, as if he owned the world, but didn’t need to boast about it. And he wore dark glasses, like a film star. He must be foreign, she decided: he looked dangerous and self-contained, like a prowling animal.

  Her husband had looked rather like that once, long ago, before all his glamour got submerged in mortgages and children and washing up, though he had never gone so far as to wear sunglasses in Safeways. That was definitely an affectation: she ought to despise the short dark stranger for that. Instead she found it perversely exciting. She ought to be long past fancying strangers in supermarkets, too, she thought, but she clearly wasn’t: she felt definite stirrings of lust.

  She had noticed all these details in a flash, of course, and turned away at once. God forbid he should think she was staring at him, or comparing the carefree bachelor look of his light wire basket, containing only smoked salmon and a lemon, with her own vast trolley loaded up with detergent and potatoes and disposable nappies and biscuits. And she wasn’t wearing any make-up. She was the one, she thought, who really needed the dark glasses. He wouldn’t look twice at her, would he, or if he did, he’d only think she was just another drab boring housewife.

  She turned into the next aisle and added cat food, sausages, orange juice and loo paper to her trolley, moving dreamily, aware of a disturbing warm wet tightness between her legs, a longing to have the short dark stranger’s cock forcing its way deep inside her and making her come. She was surprised: she hadn’t fancied anyone new that strongly for a very long time. She really wanted him: she longed to have him fill her up, to feel him on top of her, heavy like a fallen tree, pinning her to the ground so that she was helpless, unable to prevent him from shooting his juice into her body. She never knew what to call that part of her that wanted sex: cunt was too often used as a term of abuse and vagina reminded her of a visit to the clinic. Neither was very erotic. There ought to be a new, completely different name for something so precious: perhaps she should make one up. It felt like her innermost self, dark and hot and secret, suddenly awake, it seemed, after years of drowsiness. It didn’t know or care about respectability and rules, fidelity and marriage. A zipless fuck was what it wanted, like the one she had read about on her honeymoon in one of Erica Jong’s books (Fear of Flying, just the thing to read on an aircraft), making her joyfully aware that other women felt as she did, that it wasn’t only men who could separate sex from love and take pleasure in both.

  By then it was too late, of course, because they were already married, but for a few days they had had fun pretending to be strangers: picking each other up on the beach or takes turns to knock on the door of their room as call girl or gigolo. She had enjoyed it. But she had always known it was a safe game, far removed from the real thing. Then he had bought her a copy of The Story of O for her birthday and she had read it, sickened but entranced, as a whole new world of bondage and sado-masochism opened up to her, things they had previously joked about, which she suddenly found turned her on. She used to read a few pages at night before he came to bed and they were both surprised and delighted to find her hot and wet and ready for him, begging him to fuck her, hit her, kill her.

  Afterwards they always felt a bit silly, a bit embarrassed, but they slept particularly well and were in a specially good mood for days afterwards.

  Oh well, all that was a long time ago, and the children had put a stop to most of it. It wasn’t easy to have a sexy fantasy life with milk dripping from your tits, or when you ached with exhaustion rather than desire, or when the baby cried just as you thought you might be about to come at last. She loved her husband, of course she did, and she knew he loved her, and they both adored the children, but those early days of fun had gone for ever. They knew each other too well now and they were too tired. Now when they made love it was more affection than lust.

  The next time she saw the stranger he had two large peaches in his wire basket and he was reaching for a bottle of champagne. She was furious with envy for the unknown lucky woman (or man, of course, he might be gay, for all she knew) who was going to share this feast with him. If only she had the nerve to chat him up at the check-out and invite him home. Bu
t she hadn’t, and her next-door neighbour Rosie, who was baby-sitting for her while she shopped, would be shocked if she did, and there was always the chance that her husband might come home unexpectedly, although he had said he was working late. No, she couldn’t risk it, and besides, she might be rejected and then she’d feel foolish and ashamed.

  She turned her back on the stranger and pushed her trolley to the check-out with the shortest queue. As she unloaded her shopping on to the conveyor belt she heard footsteps behind her but she didn’t look round. Then out of the corner of her eye she saw the wire basket containing peaches and champagne, smoked salmon and a lemon. The hand that held it had a few dark hairs curling out of a leather jacket and down the fingers. Her heart banged with excitement so that she was almost afraid he would hear it. If only she were brave enough to turn around and speak to him, make some light-hearted, joking remark, even ask him to help with her shopping. He was standing close to her: she was so strongly aware of his physical presence that she almost forgot to breathe.

  She paid for her shopping, her hands shaking as she piled it into two carrier bags, aware of a tight feeling in her chest and a wet feeling between her legs. How ironic that he was right there behind her – she could have touched him, God, how she wanted to – and he’d never know the effect he’d had on her. She walked away, loaded down with her purchases, and took her usual short cut through the car park, excitement and tension ebbing away, replaced with sharp disappointment that it was all over, she’d never see him again except by chance if he lived locally and often went shopping there. Nothing had happened. It was all in her head. What a fool she was not to have had the guts to speak.