I am becoming known. I have found the courage. I am ready. I trust.
Lesson 118
Perhaps she makes a pride, and her husband a joke, of her charming ignorance in common things
But then other days: a souring. A falling away. No, not today, you just want to read a newspaper, rest, in stillness and laziness; put it all aside like the richest of chocolate cakes you have gorged upon too much.
And then.
The whisper behind your ear.
‘I want to do so many things with you. Before it’s too late.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Explore.’
He turns you around, he kisses you tenderly, once.
‘Please,’ he says. ‘Will you let me,’ he says. ‘For a lot of women experimental sex is associated with pain. Coercion. Fear.’ His lips, a flutter of a butterfly against your ear. ‘But it doesn’t have to be like that. It can be a gate opening to an entire other world of … bliss. If you want it. Enough.’
You say nothing. You give him nothing. You squeeze your legs on your bareness. Gasp, just.
The grand and meticulous experiment.
Lesson 119
Ladies, ’tis worth a grave thought – what would the most of you leave behind you when you die? Much embroidery, doubtless, various pleasant, kindly, illegible letters; a moderate store of good deeds and a cartload of good intentions. Nothing else – save your name on a tombstone, or lingering for a few more years in family or friendly memory.
He brings out a small leather suitcase.
‘We’ve only just begun,’ he smiles. ‘But it all, of course, has to be on one condition: everything we do is of your own free will.’ You nod. ‘Just remember that pleasure is all about surrendering ourselves, and accepting pleasure is a big leap for a lot of people. No one’s born a lover – we all have to learn.’
‘Even you?’ You tease.
‘Oh yes. Me most of all.’
He opens his suitcase. Takes out a blindfold. The softest velvet, as black as midnight. He ties it around you; his cock in readiness, firm into your back. Gently, so gently, he turns you around. He slips something flat and heavy into your hands.
A book.
The surprise of it.
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise.
Written eight hundred years ago.
‘Don’t return to this house until you’ve read it. Until you’re ready for the next step. They were medieval lovers. And this is to show you that these things have always been done, and will always be done. If you dare. If you want it.’ His voice drops to a whisper. ‘And I think you do.’ He kisses you on the lips, once, the moth’s kiss. ‘With someone you trust …’
Late, at home, you devour the words, hidden under your blanket as if not even the walls or the night air can bear witness to what you are reading; midges hovering and you slam the book shut on them as you come – your fingers between your legs – and come, with anticipation.
Our desires left no stage of lovemaking untried, and if love could devise something new, we welcomed it. We entered on each joy the more eagerly because of our previous inexperience and were all the less easily sated.
The key word: joy.
Those two deeply religious, searingly intelligent people were having a huge amount of fun.
JOY.
Written in your notebook, in readiness.
You are a foreigner in his country, a child in his nursery; all is new, wondrous.
You are ready.
For anything.
Because you are doing this to learn.
It is, after all, what you asked for in the first place.
VII
‘… he forgets his mother and his brothers and all his comrades, couldn’t care less if his property is lost through neglect, and, in disdain of all those proprieties and decorums whose beauty he once cherished, he is ready to be a slave, to sleep anywhere he is allowed, as close as possible to his desire.’
Socrates
Lesson 120
Women’s work is, in this age, if undefined almost unlimited, when the woman herself so chooses
He is ordered, he is ready. Before the two of you can proceed there are two things you must know.
‘I want you. You. No one else. Believe it. And secondly, stop worrying. About everything.’ He taps your head, his voice lowers. ‘Trust me.’
The softness of his cheek against yours.
You have been reading, preparing, priming, learning. For this moment, the next step. You no longer angle yourself during sex as if you’re viewing the scene from the ceiling, no longer direct yourself into the most flattering positions. You’ve learnt to accept your body, with all its faults, don’t care what you look like.
‘I just don’t notice, alright,’ he’s admonished more than once. ‘I’d much prefer you relaxed.’
You nuzzle in gratitude, breathing him in deep, and you open your body wide, wider to him, wanting to offer yourself for his pleasure and his alone, wanting to snare him forever with infinite sex.
And lo and behold, you feel more womanly than ever before.
He is right.
You are ready.
Thrumming with it.
The day is stretching into lengthening light, soon you must go. He asks you to stand. Naked, still. He says he wants to prepare you for next time. When it will start. Give you a little taste.
He slithers off the silken grey ribbon from its black box, kneels, slips it around your waist like a tailor at a dummy and ties it just above your belly button, in a bow.
A present, to be unwrapped.
‘Close your eyes,’ he whispers.
The long trails of the satin are teased over your bareness, goosebumps spring to life under their coldness. Gently, so gently, he instructs.
‘Now put on your clothes and pedal away tall, on your bike, and imagine all that is ahead. In two days. Don’t undo this ribbon until you’re home. Think of everything we’ve learnt so far. Anticipation. Secrecy. Imagination. Surrender. Trust.’
He kisses your lids, first one, then the other.
‘Love.’
The moth’s breath against your ear.
‘Restraint …’
The trails of satin whisper between your thighs.
‘And release.’
Lesson 121
‘To know’ gradually becomes a necessity, an exquisite delight
It is the weekend. Two days – two churning days – of waiting ahead. You’re like a horse straining at the starting gate, kicking out strong in your box.
You drive past Woondala with your father.
The gates are locked. Locked.
Your head whips back.
‘What’s up? You alright?’
‘Nothin’.’
But your groin. Squeezing in want as it bears down on the car seat. Still feeling those slices of satin lingering, teasing, electrifying; long after they’ve gone.
What you have learnt:
We love the things we are not meant to.
What you have learnt:
Love is a restless absence.
What you have learnt:
You shouldn’t be doing this.
What you have learnt:
You are enslaved, you can’t stop.
Lesson 122
Published or unpublished, this woman’s life is a godly chronicle
‘I need your notebook.’ First thing he says.
‘Why?’
‘I have to write something down.’ He smiles. ‘One last time.’
‘But it’s all my notes now.’ You hold it protectively at your chest. ‘I don’t want you seeing it anymore. Anyone …’
He laughs. ‘Give me my page, you. I’m not looking at anything else. Trust me.’
Reluctantly you hand it across; he turns obediently to the back.
‘Just one more thing, alright. To mark the next stage, to frame it.’ He looks up; a roguish smile.
RELEASE
Ted Hughes wrote in the f
oreword to Sylvia Plath’s journal that even though he spent every day with her for six years, and was rarely apart from her in that time, he never really saw her show her real self to anybody. Including him. Ever.
‘I think we can improve on that.’
You bite your lip.
A nervousness has stumbled into your love.
Lesson 123
To many, truth comes only after the self-control, watchfulness, and bitter experience of years
‘But do you really love me?’
The guarantee that is needed to proceed.
‘Yes yes, come on.’
You’re holding back. ‘Sometimes, I don’t know, I think you’re too clever to love anyone. That your type only ever love so much.’ You squint and pinch your fingers as if they’re holding a pair of tweezers.
Because he has learnt survival and you have not. Because you fear it.
‘Do you love me, Tol, as much as I love you?’
He hesitates.
‘I don’t know.’ Sincere. Honest. Matter-of-fact.
You stop. Look around. In something like panic. You’ve been colonising his world ever since you set eyes on him and you’re still not convinced that he likes it, enough; are never sure.
‘I could make this such a beautiful home.’ You smile, testing, a game, turning to a wall and sweeping your hand across it.
He doesn’t reply.
‘I said –’ you repeat, louder.
He doesn’t reply. He’s making you feel soiled, suddenly, with his silence.
You snap away. Cut the session short.
The piracy of indifference, and you will not stand for it.
Furiously you cycle home, the light dappling the dirt road in zebra shadows like strobe lighting flicking across your eyes as you wonder how this all ends – it won’t, it must.
Feeling as vulnerable as a fontanelle, suddenly, with all this.
Lesson 124
There is no anguish like youth’s pain – so total, so hopeless, blotting out earth and heaven, falling down upon the whole being like a stone
For four days you do not go back.
Riddled with frustration, hesitation, doubt; shielding yourself against future hurt. You can’t give him what he wants because you’re not sure he’ll ever give you the equivalent in return. He wants so much from you: your deepest thoughts, your truth; but you don’t have his and suspect you never will. You are not an instrument by which he will work things out here, you will not let him hone his skills on you for something – someone – else. Someone in the past or the future or even, God forbid, the present. Who exactly is in the city, waiting, that he’s always running back to? Who’s in his other life?
Everywhere, now, little barriers are shooting up.
You try to focus on your school work, finally; you’re nearing the end of the holidays and the study’s banking up. You’ve been existing in a golden morass of sex that is slowing you, killing your thinking, you’ve got nothing done. The pleasures of Woondala have been making you weak, interfering with your focus and calm; it’s like a magic spell binding you, swamping you now, snatching your ambition and your strength.
Him, too. You can tell. This is for the best, this being apart, yes. Because something is falling away – sometimes, recently, he hasn’t been looking out on the verandah near enough for you; sometimes you’ve had to wait too long after throwing a pebble at his study window, until finally he emerges as if dragged from his desk.
You, the intrusion.
He’s been lamenting recently that he’s not getting enough done, he’s too distracted, this second book is so difficult; it’s like extracting blood from a stone. Lamenting that he wrote his first book with such an arrogance and an innocence, never knowing if it would be published, but now he has the weight of expectation on him and it’s clogging him up. Lamenting his fear, the writer’s fear, that the urge to think rarely strikes the contented; that he needs the hunger or he will stop.
The wolf-ranginess of the alone. You fear it, that it is deep in him, and it will always win out.
Someone asked Sophocles, ‘How is your sex-life now? Are you still able to have a woman?’
He replied, ‘Hush, man; most gladly indeed am I rid of it all, as though I had escaped from a mad and savage master.’
You wrote the passage down recently while you were waiting for him, flipping through the books by his bed and coming across it. You felt a little whine of frustration blundering between you in that moment, which is growing, now, in this time apart.
Will he break you?
Lesson 125
How the heart leaps up to meet a sunshiny face, a merry tongue, an even temper
But then. A great surging within you, you can’t help it, you must go back, can’t not; shuddering deep inside as you cycle up his driveway on the afternoon of day four with one very beautiful art deco tea cup wrapped in newspaper in a Woolworths bag – from your grandmother, she lost the saucer decades ago and says you can have it, to find a match.
You flit by something glinting in the sunshine. Stop, turn your bike around.
A jar, suspended on a single thread of wire wrapped around its neck.
Inside, a note. On red paper so fragile you could almost eat it, melt it on your tongue.
You soak through and permeate the spirit and skin of my days. It is wondrous, torturous, transcendent, crushing, tender, all at once.
The smile plumes inside you like ink through water. Affirmation – and isn’t that, in the end, what we all want. His writing voice is like a hand reaching inside you and holding your heart and never letting it go. You place the jar back onto its knot of a bark hook and walk on with your bicycle, the slip of paper in your overalls, spreading its warmth like a heated stone tucked into a pocket in the deepest of winters.
Another jar.
Another note.
Green this time, as fragile as the last.
Every conversation I have with you sneaks inspiration upon me. Your honesty, your spark, your enthusiasm for life. I just want to be with you forever, complete and strong, true, moving, growing, binding … my soul mate, my elemental wife.
Another, further on.
The other day I felt as if I had fallen in love with your soul, my feelings were that strong. I am with you. I am always with you. Never forget that.
Another. A scrawl on a eucalyptus leaf.
Your proud, walk tall love!
And gouged deep in the bark of the Scribbly Gum it hangs upon:
‘My spirit so high it was all over the heavens.’
Pound
All of it wrapping you in a gigantic yes.
You drop your bike, you break into a run.
He is waiting on the verandah, sitting on the top step, staring out, as if he has been doing this for four days and nothing else. He calls out your name when he sees you and there is all the loneliness of the world in that cry and you rush up and hesitantly you feel him, like rare china, scarcely believing.
It is as if he will break with your touch.
Lesson 126
When his whole heart and conscience accompanied and sanctified the gift
You bowl into his study without looking back, heart roaring. Take the scraps of coloured paper and the gum leaf from your pocket and open his pot of Clag liquid glue – the glue you used to eat as a child – and stick each torn strip of paper to his wall, one beneath the other, in a ladder of neatness by his typewriter. You varnish them to the old, yellowed newsprint on his wall in a line of permanency he will never forget.
‘What are you doing?’ So quiet behind you that you jump.
‘Trapping them. With you. Forever. Because I can’t have them at home. My dad might find them. And because you need to be reminded of what you’ve written. Every day. Every single day for the rest of your life. You must never forget. Alright? Any of this.’
That last sentence raw, urgent, teared-up.
He turns you around. He kisses you. The moth’s first kiss in your trembling.
‘I won’t.’
He lifts you into his arms and carries you to his bedroom, pausing just once, to kiss again, on its threshold.
Lesson 127
Human life is so full of pain. The mind instinctively turns where it can get rest, and cheer, and sunshine.
Nothing more life-affirming than this, now, as he is poised above you. Something deeply spiritual in it as he moves, in silence, staring into your eyes. A divinity to it. You know now it is the most exhilarating mystery available to us, as humans. You are communicating on the deepest level – in silence. Both of you cracked into vulnerability and honesty, into light.
You have never felt closer to someone in your life.
‘I can just see us in Grandma’s feather bed with the two kids between us,’ he murmurs in the golden quiet of afterwards, as you lie together in his sheets within an afternoon of soft pattering rain. ‘I’ve never felt that before.’
You roll away and wrap his languid arm around your belly. Something here is turning, softening, the rabbit sex has died today into something quieter, more solid. The sweetness of skin against skin. The stillness and sanctity of no talk.
It has come to this.
Lesson 128
Better beg, or hunger, or die in a ditch – than live a day in voluntary unchastity
Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Page 37
