Lesson 14
be respectable girls, all of you
Dinner’s dared in the square on rough wooden benches at a smoky stall. Cole and you pick at the couscous but ignore the gnarled-looking meat on kebabs and gritty salad, and have your photo taken as proof of your courage. Cole’s tetchy and irritable and wants to get back to the too-quiet hotel but you feel like you’re at the center of a vast meeting place of African tribes from the south and Arabs from the north and Berber villagers from the mountains and you hold your head high and drink in the smells and heat and smoke. All these wondrous people! You look across at your husband and stroke his arm, his thin, sensual wrist, and there’s a stirring of desire: you want him, really want him, in that way, in this crowded place. You do nothing but hold your lips to his skin in the clearing behind his ear and breathe in. It’s usually enough, some small gesture like this, just to touch him, to inhale him, to remind you of what you’ve got.
But here, now, something dormant within you is stretching awake, is arching its back. You think of the hotel room and the expanse of the bed. For just a fleeting moment you imagine yourself naked with your legs wide and several anonymous, assessing men and their hands running over you. You imagine being filmed, being bought.
You smile at Cole.
What are you thinking, he asks.
Nothing, you murmur.
Lesson 15
there are few wives who do not heartily desire a child
As you laze on your deckchairs a heavily pregnant woman strides to the swimming pool like a galleon in full sail, robust and proud and complete. You’ll be trying for a baby soon, once the first year of marriage is done.
Let’s just enjoy ourselves for a while, Cole has said.
But thank goodness a pregnancy is secure in the plans. Man, house, child: such happiness is obscene in one person, isn’t it? There’s such an audacity in the joy you now feel. How could anyone bear you? You glance across at Cole: he looked too young for so long, not fully formed, but now, in his late thirties, when a lot of his peers are losing hair and gaining weight, it’s all starting to work. He’d been in a state of arrested adolescence but now he’s filled out and he’s handsome, at last. He has the potential to age into magnificence and you’re only just seeing it.
Shouldn’t it be wearing off, this fullness in your heart fit to burst? When’s it meant to wilt? You throw down your Vogue and place your body on Cole’s, belly to belly, and breathe in his skin like a mother does with a child. Will that scent ever sour for you? You can’t imagine how. He pushes you off, mock grumpy, and slaps you on the bum. You shriek and settle again on your lounger. A young waiter walks by. You narrow your eyes like a cat and laze your arms over your head and tell Cole that if you’re not treated properly it’s the waiter you’ll be marrying next.
Yeah, and all he’ll have to do to get rid of you is say I divorce thee three times. I wish it were that easy for me.
You laugh; you’re filled up with joy, it’s all bubbling out. The pregnant woman steps out of the pool. People have begun asking when Cole and you are going to start a family and your husband always replies that he’ll have a child when he considers himself grown-up, and God knows when that will be. You tell them soon.
All women must want children eventually, you’re sure, that furious need is deep in their bones, you don’t quite believe any woman who says she doesn’t. The urge has begun to harangue you as your thirties march on, it’s an animal instinct grown bold. Your heart will now tighten whenever you see the imprint of a friend in her child’s face. It’s something that’s in danger of overtaking your life, the want.
Lesson 16
all nature is lovely and worthy of our reverent study
On a day trip to the Atlas Mountains you hold your head out the car window, to the sky, the scent of eucalyptus on the baked breeze. Cole reads the Herald Tribune and dozes and snaps awake.
He works extremely hard as a picture restorer, specializing in paintings from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. He now travels the globe, preparing condition reports for paintings to be sold and working on site, for since September eleventh the insurance premiums have skyrocketed and it’s often cheaper to fly the restorer to the job. Cole’s days are long but the rewards are great—you no longer have to work. Indolence is something you’ve always wanted to try and this is your second month of doing nothing. Cole encouraged you to quit your job as a lecturer in journalism at City University; he’d bulldozed your trepidation with his enthusiasm. Redundancies were on offer and the sum cleared the mortgage for you both. None of your colleagues wanted you to go; you were a stabilising presence in a temperamental faculty, you kept your head down, worked hard. But you’d been worn thin by years of teaching, the relentless routine of work eat sleep and little else, it had become like a net dragging you down. Theo said you’d been so noble, so selfless as a teacher that it was bound to take its toll. You didn’t tell her it felt cowardly that you’d never actually left university and entered the real world; you just teased that she was a teacher also and every bit as noble as yourself.
God no, I do my job purely for me and no one else. It’s utterly selfish what I get from it.
And what, my dear, is that?
This secret thrill, she grinned, as my clients tell me all their deepest, darkest thoughts.
Your job had stopped being gratifying in any way and you delight in the strange feeling of satisfaction from doing this new wifely life well. You weren’t expecting your days to be swallowed by so many mundanities but you’re oddly enjoying, for the moment, cooking fiddly Sunday meals on week nights and painting the kitchen and sorting through clothes. The days gallop by even though you know that boredom and a loss of esteem could one day yap at your heels. But not now, not yet.
You have little left in the way of savings but Cole pays you an allowance of eight hundred pounds a month. It’s meant a subtle change: he now has a licence to expect darned socks and home-made puddings, to comment a touch too often on your rounded stomach or occasional spots. But his small cruelties are a small price to pay for the luxury of resting. He’s giving you something you’ve never had before: a chance to recuperate and to work out what you want to do with the rest of your life. You’ve been so tight and controlled for so long, always on time and everything just so. During the first month of unemployment you gulped sleep and suspect it’s years of exhaustion catching up on you, all the trying to please, the never being able to say no. Anyway, Cole’s teasing is done in a silly, childlike way and you never mind very much.
On this day trip to the Atlas Mountains he’s here under protest, he wants to go back. He hates activity and the outdoors of any sort, he pretends to be so fusty and curmudgeonly, at such a young age, but you find it adorable, he makes you laugh so much. And there’s an intriguing flip side to his crustiness, the little boy who watches Star Trek and buys Coco Pops. You love the kid in the T-shirt under the Italian suits; you’re the only one, you suspect, who knows anything of it.
On the narrow dirt road the car winds and slows and you want to jump out and whip off your shoes and feel the ochre as soft as talcum powder claiming your feet. You know deep in your bones this type of land, for you visited places not dissimilar, with your mother, when you were young. The Sahara is just over the mountains, the desert of smoking sand and tall skies.
It’s a desert the color of wheat, says Muli, the driver and guide.
How lovely, and you clap your heavily hennaed hands. The sight of them entrances you. You must take us, Muli, you say.
Cole glances across.
Next time.
You smile and lick your husband under the ear, like a puppy, he’s so funny, it’s all a game, and you’re filled like a glass with love for him, to the brim.
Lesson 17
the duty of girls is to be neat and tidy
Cole more often than not dislikes fingers touching his bare skin, he’ll flinch at contact without warning. Your fingertips are always cold: in wi
nter when you want to touch him you’ll warm your fingers beforehand on the hot-water bottle, he insists.
Cole’s life is very neat. He re-irons his shirts after the cleaning lady has, shines his shoes every Sunday night, leaves for work promptly at eight fifteen, jumps to the bathroom soon after sex to mop up the spillage.
There are some things you suspect Cole prefers to making love. Like his head being scratched so hard that flakes of skin gather under your nails, which you detest. And having the skin of his back stroked with a comb like a soft rake through soil, reaping goose bumps. And resting his head on the saddle of your back as you lie on your stomach in a summer park.
And going down on him. This, only this, is guaranteed to make him come. Sometimes you go down on him just to get it all over with quickly. Cole pushes your head on to him as far as he can and then a little further, and when you bob up for air he measures with his thumb and finger how far you’ve gone and duly you marvel, the good wife, and bob down again. You often gag, or have to break the rhythm to come up for air, your jaw always aches, it goes on too long. You hate the taste of sperm, you recoil from it, like a tongue on cold metal in winter.
Go home and give him one, Theo said once, after a cinema night. The poor thing, it’s been so long.
God no, please, not that.
If you give them blow jobs they love you for life.
But it’s such a chore.
I see it as a challenge.
You took Theo’s advice: Cole told you, when it was done, that he couldn’t wait for the next movie night with your mate.
Calm down, you laughed, and rolled over and went to sleep.
It wasn’t always like this. In the early days you’d make love almost every single night. Cole would sing and dance around in his underwear and be completely stupid before he dived into bed. Have you laughing so much that it hurt. You’d always be completely naked down to the removal of watches, there was a gentle courtesy to that. You’d have sex, daringly for you both, in sleeper carriages from London to Cornwall, as giggly as teenagers as you tried to be quiet for the children next door. Or in your teenage bed that your mother has kept, with Cole’s hand clamped on your mouth to keep you quiet. You cried tears of happiness and he kissed them up, his palms muffing your cheeks and you still have, pocketed in your memory, the tenderness in his touch.
But those moments, now, seem like scenes from a movie; not quite real. The woman in them is removed, someone else. This is real, now: you’ve shut down, there are other things you’d rather do. It’s such a bother removing all your clothes and finding time to do it and making sure you smell sweet and clean. It never seems to be the best time, for both of you at once, there’s always something that’s not quite right. Either you’re not in the mood or Cole isn’t and it’s become easy to make an excuse. You both, it seems, would prefer to be reading newspapers, or watching TV, or sleeping. Most of all that.
Cole doesn’t protest too much. The marriage is about something else. He’s kind, is always doing astonishingly kind things, it’s as if he’s binding you to him with kindness. There are subscriptions to favorite, frivolous magazines, unexpected cups of tea, frog-marching you to bed when you’re overtired, the gift of a new book that he’s wedged somewhere in the bookshelf and says you must find. All these little gestures force you into kindness too, kindness begets kindness, the marriage is almost a competition of kindness. So there’s scratching his head so hard that flakes of skin gather under your nails, and acquiescence in bed, and blow jobs. These small kindnesses buy Cole time alone, away from you, away from the world, within his halo of light in front of the television or in the bathroom or studio until late. You don’t mind the alone either, you need it too, to breathe again, to uncurl.
It’s a strange beast, your marriage, it’s irrational, but it works. It’s traditional, and how judgmental your mother is of that. She was divorced young and raised you by herself until you were sent to boarding school. She instilled in you that you should never rely on a man; you had to be financially independent, you mustn’t succumb. But it’s a relief, to be honest, this surrendering of the feminist wariness. It feels naughty and delicious and indulgent, like wearing a bit of fur.
Lesson 18
sound sleep is a condition essential to good health
One A.M. You’re reading the first Harry Potter. It’s Cole’s, you found it among the rest of his holiday books, weighty tomes on history and art. You’re in the armchair by the French doors to the balcony, a leg dangling over the arm.
A spider of sweat slips down your torso. You’d love to feel a storm breaking the back of the heat, to hear it rumbling in the floorboards and smell it in the lightning. You look across at Cole, sleeping on the sheet with his shoes still on. You slip them off like a mother with a toddler and roll him over to remove his shirt; he’s stirring, reaching for you, scrabbling at your skirt. Sssh, you tell him, and you hold your lips to the dip in the back of his neck. You don’t want him properly waking, don’t want anything to start. For you’ve begun menstruating and the blood’s leaking out of you, hot, and you know he’d be appalled by this. He doesn’t like blood.
Cole usually sleeps soundly, the sleep of a man content. He’s not a snorer, you could never marry him if he were. How could you secure a decent night’s sleep with a man who snores? Cole laughed when you told him this on your wedding night; it’s the only reason why I married you, you said. Cole responded that if he did snore he’d borrow one of your bras and put tennis balls in it and wear it back to front, to stop him from sleeping on his back, that’s how much he loved you.
One thing you could never tell your husband is that his coming takes too long. And that his penis seems bent, and often goes soft in you, as if it’s thinking of something else. And that the reason he got blow jobs all the time, when the relationship was young, was to butter him up. And to make him think you were someone else.
Lesson 19
good habits are best learnt in youth
You sit by the concierge desk in the vast almost empty lobby while Cole changes some cash. A man passes, he wears the sun in his face, he’s a boy really, a decade or so younger than you and he smiles right into your eyes and you feel something you haven’t for years: it’s to do with university parties with bathtubs of alcohol and the smell of hamburgers on fingers and beer in a kiss. You should have been disgusted by all that but you weren’t. You’d be wet so quick; to get their clothes off, to have their weight upon you, to be rammed against a wall with your leg curled up.
You’re singing inside as you saunter back with Cole to your room of fresh roses. Every second day new roses await you, they’re never allowed to wilt in the heat. Inside, you kiss your husband fully on the mouth, surprising yourself as much as him with the ferocity of it. You taste him, drink him, and you so rarely do that. He kisses you back in his way, as if inside your mouth is the most exquisite, expensive morsel imaginable. You don’t like him kissing you on the lips very much; often you secretly wipe away the track that’s left by his mouth.
The last time Cole and you had made love, before this holiday, was your wedding night. The vintage Bugatti you’d borrowed wouldn’t start and all Cole’s distant relatives had to be met and Theo got too drunk. Cole and you had ended up giddy and sweaty back at your hotel room, ravenous, with just a Mars Bar from the mini bar to share between you. Still, there was a new sweetness to making love, even though it was soaked in a sudden tiredness and a little clumsy, and you didn’t get far: almost an afterthought to the end of a long day. It didn’t matter that the sex on that night wasn’t the best you’d ever had, for you’d been together for so long before that.
The honeymoon had been delayed because Cole was always accepting another commission and getting tied up. He finally found a window of escape four months after you’d tied the knot. You didn’t complain, you appreciate his attachment to his job, it’s so solid, so dependable: he’ll never let you down.
He’s never given you an orgasm. He assumes he h
as. You’re a good actress—a lot of women are, you suspect. You know what you’re supposed to do, the sounds you make and the arching of the back and the clenched face: it’s in a thousand movies to mimic, it’s everywhere but your own life. You’ve never had an orgasm by yourself or with any man that you’ve slept with. You’ve lied to every one of them that you have, that it’s worked. You’re curious about them but not curious enough. It’s like a language you don’t speak; you know you should make an attempt at it but you can get by perfectly happily without it, it’s not going to impede your life. You’re in your mid-thirties and have never even looked down there, at yourself. Cole could tell you about it if you were curious enough, but the intimacies of your own body are for someone else, you feel, not yourself.
Lesson 20
to be delicate is considered by some ignorant people as an enviable distinction
Gin and tonics by the pool.
Cole reads aloud an extract from the historical section of the Herald Tribune. A woman in New Jersey in 1925, a mother of eight, was inspired by Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves to heat a cauldron of olive oil and pour it over her sleeping husband.
Oil, Lovely, can you believe it, oil.
But you’re hardly listening for you’re thinking of the man in the lobby and your very first fuck, with the TV show The Young Ones flicking mute in the background and how tight and dry and uncomfortable it had been. You’re thinking of the boy’s distasteful triumph afterward, with his mates, and the TV turned up too loud. You’re thinking of Theo—but it all sounds so … squalid—as she dragged on her cigarette with uncommon ferocity. How strange you can’t recall her own account of her loss of virginity. It’s something you can’t remember talking about, in fact, with any of your girlfriends. Were a lot of the experiences as disappointing as yours, is that why they’re never discussed; do you all want to move on? You’re remembering that Theo had put copper lipstick in her hair back then to highlight the colour because she’d read it in a magazine but you’re not remembering, for the life of you, the boy’s name.
The Bride Stripped Bare Page 3
