He has sullied your idea of passion. You have lost all sense of love as rescue. You are becoming desiccated and crabby without love, can feel the sourness. Cross and short with people, losing grace. Once, the more sex you had the more you wanted; now the less you have the less you want until desire has stopped, entirely.
For years, the flatlands.
For years, the soft patter of rain, from your heart.
Lesson 157
She should be judged solely by what she is now, and not by what she has been
A dinner party. In raffish lovely seedy Darlinghurst – Darling it Hurts in local parlance. The intense curiosity of the boy opposite. Firing questions, rat tat tat, drinking you up. You lean back and smile a crooked smile at his enthusiasm, feel so old within it. You used to be him once, vivid with curiosity, eating up life.
‘So, do you have a boyfriend?’ He’s asking playfully, greedily. ‘Have you ever had one?’
You bite your lip. He thinks you’ve never had one. Good grief. Because there’s something so closed about you now, demure, shut off, in your fifties cardigan and dress.
You are twenty-two. Something snaps in you.
Once, you were a collator of experiences.
Once, you were conducting a grand and most exhilarating experiment.
You smile at him, a new smile.
Ready to begin again. Just like that. To unlock the more dangerous side of yourself, to take her out, to drink his enthusiasm up.
You cross your legs, wet.
Lesson 158
The happy duty of helping others
‘I bet you don’t even fart,’ he says, working his finger into your arse. You wince. ‘Real closeness between people is when they can fart in bed, don’t you think?’ He’s a talker, he giggles, wants you loosened, wanton, he’s roughing you up.
You let him go on.
You use him.
Ask him to shave you. To bind you to the bed post. Blindfold you. Later he asks if he can get out his video camera. You just look at him.
He’d never get close.
You knew this from the first kiss.
You get up. You leave. Without saying anything, without looking back.
As you have learnt.
But he has served his purpose. You are woken up.
Lesson 159
Counting-house, shop or college afford him a clear future on which to concentrate all his energies and aims. He has got the grand pabulum of the human soul – occupation
It feels as if you are being returned to the world in a wheelchair, crippled and bowed but ready – you have survived. Suddenly it is different, the way you look at men. Every one a prospect. The old carnality back. Curiosity is how you began and you still have it in you and you smile at that, slipping it out like a long forgotten book that woke you up, once; thrilled you into life like a golden varnishing washed over a painting.
So. Other men, viciously now, other sexual experiences.
You have developed a laugh that could be described as filthy, at odds with your image of containment. It is an invitation. You use it often.
It works.
Lesson 160
These chapters do not presume to lecture the lords of creation
What you learn, what you jot down in your Victorian notebook that you vowed you would never write in again, in another life:
Example One: The shopping centre executive twenty-two years older than you. Because perhaps he, too, can teach.
He fucks you from behind with your legs clamped together by his as if he wants you a virgin again, wants you snug and tight. Cries take me, take me as he comes. You don’t want to. He tells you confidently you have not yet discovered your sexuality. You don’t tell him that with him you’ve shut your sexuality down like a snail in its shell, everything in retreat. He does not like women, you sense that from the start. It will never work. You walk away, you do not look back.
Example Two: The perfectly decent, gentlemanly, engineering flatmate you are not remotely interested in, who blackmails with generosity.
O worst kind! Crowding in, hovering, leaving roses by the bedroom door, chocolates and favourite books. You can’t ever hurt him but you will never sleep with him. You can’t bring yourself to say this. Don’t they realise that this knowing comes within the first seconds of meeting? He is not a possibility. You can’t be veered into that path. Love is an energy between two people – a recognition, a likeness – you catch something of yourself and it is there or it is not. As simple as that. It cannot be manufactured.
Example Three: The colleague. Almost.
His touch an echo of Tol’s, the tenderness and the expertise in it and you think, perhaps, oh my goodness, is this love, yes, and you open out, become younger for him, shed years, shine up. Fuck like a teenager again, abandon yourself.
But my God that vulnerability of saying you love someone – and feeling stripped. The solitude of love. Not hearing from him for a week and you’re going to pieces: unknowing fells you. Just tell me, you beg on his answerphone, so you can have your strength back. When he finally calls he tells you he’s slept with men, occasionally, and something contracts. So. It will never be. Because he may go back at some point, maybe you’re just an experiment, a one-off, and you can never compete with that thought. You walk away without looking back.
Example Four: The college boy into anal sex.
His reasoning – it’s quick and easy, and there’s no risk of pregnancy. He tells you of a Uni Drinking Society toast – ‘To anal sex!’ – and that it’s the girls always cheering the loudest.
‘Because if they’re tired they can just turn over and let the guy get on with it.’
They have a point.
So much energy expended now trying to make unsuitable men suitable, so many wasted fucks. The bleakness of it. The astonishing emptiness of one-night stands where naked, with another person, you’ve never felt more lonely in your life and the trembling never comes again and you’re faking so much and they never know it. It’s easy, just as Tol said; you’re becoming precisely what he didn’t want.
Inauthentic.
Searching, searching. For something to wipe away Tol, to release you into the light.
Example Five: The actor.
Textbook handsome. The remoteness, the bloodless sex. As if he’s never had to try too hard, never got his hands mucky in the mess of life. He never engages too deeply, leaving you cleaving to him. He says absently one night he doesn’t have a passion in life, for anything, and he’s right.
But then you. A world apart.
At night, late, after every one of them, taking out your little Victorian volume and flipping through the pages crammed with handwritten notes from both Tol and you, among rain spots and sap and bicycle grease and snail’s trails and the knotted remains of clamped ants. So much text, from all those years ago – duelling, fuelling, itemising – that you have to scribble any new notes up the sides and in between and then leak them through all the Victorian declamations of the anonymous woman who would have applauded, once, long ago – for what you had, what you learnt, what you felt.
Then Tol’s hand, strong at the end of it:
‘Sex pleasure in a woman … is a kind of magic spell. It demands complete abandon; if words or movements oppose the magic of caresses, the spell is broken.’
Simone de Beauvoir
Did your Victorian author ever experience something of that?
You are sure. It is in her voice. You envy it.
Lesson 161
All the rest are a mere atmosphere of nobodies
It was love at first sight. A spiritual recognition you knew instantly and it cannot be cultivated, it is there or it is not.
‘Don’t talk. I don’t want it. Just be quiet.’
Your command to them again and again. So you can be alone, in your head. So they don’t crash into it. The movie that is bringing you to orgasm, that they know nothing of.
Reliving his tongue as thrilling as a trickle o
f water; reliving his touch springing you open like a trap released. You can’t expunge him no matter how hard you try, he is like a stain on a favourite dress that cannot be removed and has spoilt it now, you can never wear it again. Can never recover that girl from long ago, in her cheongsam.
Except in your head.
Lesson 162
A very large number of women are by nature constituted so exceedingly restless of mind
Graveyard sex.
Lune’s expression for sex with an ex. She’s the only person you have ever told about Woondala. Had to tell someone, as if to anchor it in reality; it wasn’t a dream, it did exist.
‘If you went back to him, sweetie, it’d be graveyard sex. There’d be something so sad, so deadening, about it.’
You laugh, shaking your head. It could never be that with Tol.
‘Don’t even think of finding him,’ Lune warns.
You hear rumours, in literary pages and from bookshop owners when you enquire about his next book. He’s disappeared, he’s still writing. He’s given up. Is changing tack. He’s working on the great Australian novel, a love story; has crippling writer’s block. There’s occasional speculation that he’ll publish something soon, next year or the year after, but eventually it dies out as new successes bloom for the media to gobble up. He’s vanished from the face of the earth. You have no idea where he’s living. Your worlds never collide.
You had nothing in common except love.
‘Stop thinking about him,’ Lune snaps.
Can’t. Imagining the coming together again after so many years – the matey, laughy, fragile tenderness of old lovers, the intense familiarity. The strangeness. Wrongness. He harasses your dreams but you cannot tell Lune that – how you hold and hold him, stirring him just as you used to, urge him deeper and deeper and wake up gasping, wet.
He is holding your life hostage. You do not know how to escape.
He is the roadblock on any experience of love you’ve had since.
Lesson 163
Men may laugh at us, and we deserve it: we are often egregious fools, but we are honest fools
Lune despairs she’s being ‘flattened’ by her divorced lover, Luca, who she has brought back from France, yet does nothing to extricate herself.
‘He is the rock upon which I break, and break, and break,’ she sobs, one red-wine-fuelled night. She’s given up her Economics degree for him, the first man she’s loved in her life; is becoming dependent, fragile, weak. It’s as if she now has an obligation to succumb and there’s nothing her friends can say to stop it. She who was so striking once. Losing all ambition, confidence, strength.
You become a shoulder to cry on. A wise one. Yet she will not listen to reason; is throwing away her future for this one thing only – a man, an unsuitable one at that.
You can see it in another person but could never in yourself. Tell Lune we mustn’t let ourselves be dampened by the confidence of men, their unquestioning sense of rightness; we mustn’t ever be the yes girls Tol hated so much. We won’t capitulate, alright? We must never have that gulf of loneliness as we make love, in a marriage; that poison of never feeling more alone in our lives than within the thick of a relationship. Which Lune will, if she stays with Luca, you just know. So easy to say.
What you cannot tell her is that you crave connection on the profoundest level. Wildness, madness, edge. Again. A holiness fluttering in both Tol and you – no one else – and it is a weakness you can’t bring yourself to articulate. You need obliteration, cleansing, a wiping of every memory of his touch. It was a spiritual intensity and it could never be replaced cheaply; this is the lesson you are learning.
He is the only one you want. If not him, no one else: you will wander the earth crazed, celibate, lone. Riddled by his ghost, a luminous light.
The price of love. So be it. You had it once, and so many don’t.
Lesson 164
From his silence she had been driven to go desperately and sell herself to the old fool opposite
As your twenties gallop on you feel like you’re swimming against the waves of a cold, choppy lake; the waves are slapping and butting you sideways and you’re getting nowhere. Your world encompasses enormous stretches of alone and the bleakness of one-night stands and relationships never quite right that peter out after three months. How easy-perfect the lives of some of your friends seem. Everything, for them, is falling neatly into place.
Saturday night, late. Racking sobs into the dark. How has your life come to this? You’re a bush girl who hauled herself out, became a lawyer in Australia’s largest metropolis. You’re strong, independent, self-sufficient – and swampingly lonely.
Couples, all around you. Reading their weekend papers, holding hands as they walk across a city street, piggy-backing in play in the park. But you.
‘Live audaciously,’ you tell yourself. London then New York, the dream, don’t lose it.
You have to get out of this.
Walk away from these years infected with their sourness.
Lesson 165
Have faith in the wisdom of that we call change
After all the broken days, your face is returning.
Well hello again, you.
You still wear your armour – the vintage dresses, severe hair, glasses – the carapace of the respected lawyer. But you’re rangy now, for out. You’ve always had sunshine at your core and you’ll find it again. Sydney is too small for the two of you; one day there’ll be a party and your paths will converge and you never want to come across him, now – betraying the trembling and the blushing of the life held in limbo, the weakness of it.
It’s time to crash rupture into your life.
Too often now, the feeling of being trapped. At weddings, engagement parties, birthdays. Placed next to someone you barely want to talk to, having to endure endless speeches, unable to pop in for just twenty minutes and then scat. Weighted by obligation, every weekend and most weeknights. Weighted by your stepmother, who betrays her jealousy and bewilderment of the life you have forged for yourself with her silence – she never once asks you about your work, never feigns an interest. Weighted by your father, who just wants you settling down and giving him grandkids, it’s all he can tease you with now. You have a terror of this life closing over you and at dinners you don’t want to go to you step outside for great gulps of clean night air, and space, and quiet. Needing to get away from all this. A world too known.
Lesson 166
The sufferer has learnt that God never meant any human being to be crushed under any calamity like a blind worm under a stone
When you hand in your resignation at the law firm your middle-aged boss tells you that the readiness to have children is oozing from you, that you must have them, to complete yourself. You laugh it off. You’re going to London to be a lawyer. Just that.
But your periods are becoming heavier, your body is urging you to hurry; there’s the prick of the Saturday afternoon couples as you wander the city alone, in your final weeks, all-seeing, all-alive, in your singleness.
What you have learnt:
The importance of not giving all in a relationship, of retaining something of yourself, for yourself.
What you have learnt:
Love should be empowering not eviscerating.
What you have learnt:
You will always make sure the other person loves you more.
From now on. It is the only way to survive.
What you have learnt:
The authority of distance, removal.
You feel like you’re extending a hand – calmly, strongly – to destiny. You need to, to feel alive again.
Lesson 167
Bid a woman lift up her head and live
And always you flick a glance as you drive past the gate and always it is locked. As if no one ever goes near it, it was a mirage, a dream, he was a ghost. It never happened, it was all in your head, you were so young, addled by hormones, delirious. Occasionally you stop your car and ge
t out, bow against the chain and bounce your weight into it. It doesn’t give. It never gives. Never spills its secrets. You stare through the fence, your fingers looped in the hurting steel that your bare feet couldn’t climb once.
The cairn of him before you.
The shudder beginning in your bowels and travelling deep to your breast, almost hurting, thinking of him and of everything that went on beyond this gate and you squeeze your thighs tight. He is not here, it is obvious.
No one goes in.
Or out.
You turn away, you will never come back. It is time to hold your face high to an unknown sun. To allow forgetting into your life.
That night, as you fall into sleep, you put out a hand to God.
Lesson 168
Rescue, then, is possible
With Tol your name was Ripe.
In the years that followed: Husk.
Your name now: Ready.
Because as your twenties gather pace you know that women have to go after what they want. It’s no use waiting for the phone to ring or the email box to ping – you have to make it happen yourself. Have you ever acted as you’ve honestly wanted? You need a recalibrating. You will make a living in a new world; forge your own life, your own way. Not with anyone else’s expertise or money but with what you have earned yourself. You have your father’s work ethic for that. You will act with audacity. Take full possession of your life. The experience with Tol and its aftermath has taught you one thing: bravery.
Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You Page 41
