The Bride Stripped Bare

by Nikki Gemmell

  You’re not sure what to do with the book, it’s like walking under water when you try to find a way in. But it will come. And there are many distractions—magazines and newspapers and the Internet and the looking for Gabriel, always that.

  Especially in the Reading Room, at lunch hour, just in case.

  The space is joyous with light from tall windows and hushed with cerebration, thick with an atmosphere of scholarship and sleep. Several old leather armchairs are in a line, in stately repose, their bellies now grazing the floor. You get to know the regular visitors. The beautifully dressed elderly man who places a white linen handkerchief on a seat before taking a very long time to lower himself into it. The large man always asleep, head thrown back, mouth agape, hands crossed protectively over a book on his chest like a dead man’s Bible placed by a widow. The mousy woman who arrives promptly at noon every day and kneels on the floor by a reading man and rests her head on his knees. His fingers sift, absently, through her hair and they don’t speak for half an hour and then they leave and your heart fills with tenderness for what they have together as a couple—for you had it once—and then tightens for what, perhaps, they’ll become.

  The library gives you a feeling of industriousness, props your life. You dress as if going to work; you’re not the only one doing this. A middle-aged man in a pinstriped suit does nothing but read The Times every day from cover to cover and you guess an unsuspecting wife is behind the creamy stiffness of his collars and cuffs, and wonder how long he can sustain it.

  Soon you’re frequenting the library ravenously, you want it every day, just as you needed your café, once. In the cram of London, amid its grubby, muscular energy, the narrow building is a refuge and a tonic. And always, you’re searching. For you’re infected by the idea of Gabriel and you feel, with an odd certainty, that he will come.

  Lesson 46

  lazy, stay-indoors persons frequently have diseases

  The library’s computer room, where you write e-mails to your friends and trawl the newspapers for show business gossip: the latest marriages that have crumbled, the best and worst gowns from recent award ceremonies, Hollywood pregnancies, arrests. You’re sitting at a desk with your shoes flipped off and knees drawn up—it has something to do with wanting to be young again, with living a more vivid life.

  A man peers playfully over your shoulder, trying to read what you’re reading and you look up, startled. He asks if you’d like to come for a drink with some of the regulars after work. You look around the room, at the six other people in it and realize they all know each other, it’s a gang. Instinctively you begin to say no, it’s always your way to refuse the second cup of tea, the seat on the tube, the drink after work. But something, this time, makes you stop.

  Yes, I’d love to.

  The man smiles. He glances at your wedding ring, perhaps, among your jumble of rings. You look at him as if for the first time. Prematurely balding, with his hair clipped close to his scalp. Wearing luxurious black velvet trousers that sit oddly with a striped shirt. Younger than what you’d first imagined, weeks ago, from a distance, better-looking than what you’d dismissed him as. You know in a second you’d never sleep with him, it’s a mental game you play with every man you meet. It’s not just the velvet, he’s not your type. He won’t make your lip tremble, won’t draw a blush, won’t make you seize up. You smile at him warmly; you can relax.

  Lesson 47

  every girl can dance and should learn to do it well

  There are three men and a woman at the pub and swiftly you’re telling them more than you ever intended, eager for contact, slightly drunk. They know nothing of you. It’s exhilarating, like moving to a foreign country where no one knows of your past; you can make yourself up as you go. As you explain your book you become authoritative, confident, witty, brisk, and plans for the project spark as you speak. You talk of the obedient wife writing secretly, late at night, galloping her pen through page after page and hiding it away when she hears her husband at the door and opening her Bible and stilling her face with her fingertips on her flushed cheeks. Hinting to her lover that she’s writing a book, for she has to have a lover; yes, yes, she must.

  Her husband finds out. He drags her by the hair to the cupboard and locks her in, he shuts his hands over his ears at her cries; she begs him for mercy, he does not speak. Eventually, over many days, her screams become whimpers, they die out. The lover never knows what happens. He’s told by her maidservant the wife has been sent to a harsh and distant nunnery; he can’t find her, he searches the breadth of the land. And he never knows if she really loved him, or if she was making it all up. He dies a broken man. As does the husband.

  Perhaps, perhaps.

  Tonight works, magnificently. The group doesn’t have to know you’ll be going home to a very still flat. You watch, astounded, the woman you’ve become, insisting on the next round and then asking when they’ll be meeting next.

  Tomorrow, says your man in the velvet trousers. Most nights, in fact.

  I’ll see you then; and you’re out the door quick, as if you’re off to something else. The sense of the illusion, triumphantly executed, buoys you down the street.

  Lesson 48

  to know right is well, but to do right is better

  The following Sunday.

  You flick through the newspapers’ magazines. Stop at Theo’s column. Since Marrakech you’ve not been able to read it, until now. You’ve been slipping that section into the bin before Cole gets a chance to look.

  This week, it’s the usual kind of queries:

  Dear Dr. Theo, my new boyfriend’s getting frustrated. He loves me on top during sex but I feel so self-conscious; it just makes me freeze. It’s driving him crazy as he says he’s the only one making any effort.

  Dear Frozen, ah, yes, sex on top. It can be wonderful, but only if you’re completely uninhibited with how you look. If you’re at all body conscious, it’s an extremely vulnerable position for a woman to be in. So, what to do? Well, girl, you need to get used to some friendly, relaxed nudity with your boyfriend. If that’s too big a step for now, why don’t you try wearing one of his shirts? Men usually love that.

  Dear Dr. Theo, my ex-husband took forever to climax and I worry I didn’t provide him with enough grip. Could it be possible that my vagina is just too big?.

  Dear Worried, you know what, maybe your ex just liked to savour the whole experience. Did you ever ask? We girls just don’t ask enough, you know! But some simple exercises can strengthen your pelvic floor muscles—to find out where they are, try halting the flow when you’re on the toilet. If you do them regularly, you’ll be able to grip your men deliciously tight!

  You always read her columns because she expected you to but never really applied them to your life; they were good for a giggle, that’s all. Your mother looked out for them voraciously. It always seemed slightly obscene to you that a postmenopausal woman would enjoy them so much. She was devastated when you told her that Theo made up most of the letters. But then, but then, to a question about a lover who’s providing great sex, and is that enough to leave her husband and two kids, Theo writes in stern, condemning response:

  No, it’s not enough. And just remember, its a strong person who has the courage to end a relationship that isn’t working, before embarking on a fresh one. Its a weak person who cheats on someone.

  Your heart pounds as you read. You push the magazine into the bin. How dare she write that; how dare she publicly pretend she’s squeaky clean; someone else. And whom is she writing that for? Cole? You, to throw you off the scent? Women are so accomplished at battling in subtle, ingenious, covert ways; at clothing their betrayers’ fingers in the smoothest of kid. And it’s usually other women they’re competing with, not men.

  Lesson 49

  paraffin is highly inflammable

  You ration your evenings with the writers to once, perhaps twice, a week; it doesn’t seem right, as a wife, to be out every night. Cole was amused when you’d
told him of the gatherings; he felt it was a new hobby for you, a way to open out your life. You’d been careful to tell him all the men were attached, with boyfriends or girlfriends or wives.

  A Friday night. There are eight of you in the pub; you’ve all come from the library with your laptops and papers in shoulder bags. And then another man appears and the group exclaims and arms reach out.

  He reddens, to see you, and the rest of them look at you afresh. The new persona dissolves in an instant, in that moment of seeing him, you’re back to your old self: your top lip trembles in its greeting.

  We know each other, Gabriel says, quizzing you with his eyes.

  How’s it going? Your voice is hoarse, the three words are all you can push out.

  He’s just popped by for a drink and the rest of the group want to know how he is and where the hell he’s been and when is he going to get a computer and enter the twenty-first century like everyone else. You stand back and watch. You’re struck, again, by the peculiar gentleness, the shyness, still. He’s been in LA, at some castings for pilot season, it’s where all the English actors end up around this time of year, and then he stopped off in Rome and there was Barcelona too, a family wedding, and he speaks politely and affably but he’d much prefer to talk about something else. You recognize it; he’s not good in big groups. You’re struck, again, by the hair washed in night and the small clearing behind his ear, its vivid white. You want to lick it. You tighten your inner thighs as he leans across you to the bar, to pay for his wine, not beer like the rest. Another suit, of course, as if it would never cross his mind to wear anything else, as if he always visits his mother and attends church. No one in your life attends church. The suits have a vintage line to them; maybe they’re his peculiar style, or they’re his father’s, or he’s poorer than you thought. There’s so much to ask.

  He doesn’t bother fitting in with everyone else. Why shouldn’t he wear a suit and write in longhand and disappear for several months? He’s a man very loved; he’s like a rock that’s been struck by the sun for a long time and is warm with it. You see him as the only boy in his family with many adoring older sisters, the late child, the lovely mistake: there’s none of the responsibility or gravity of an eldest child. There’s such a sweetness to him. It’s all in his smile.

  Your breathing is wrong, it’s all jerky and light, you cannot still it. The others joke about the screenplay that’s taking a bloody long time to complete.

  A woman called Martha jumps in. You’ve noticed her a lot: she walks with a heavy brow, as if her fists are clenched. She teases that Gabriel’s finished twenty-eight pages and they’re the work of a genius but they’ve taken eleven months to produce and there’s doubt among the rest of them that another twenty-eight will ever be completed, and you can see in that moment you’re not the only one caught.

  What’s it called, you stumble the words out.

  I don’t know, yet.

  His boyish beam, his shrug. You want to get away from this bar, it’s all stilted and jostly and wrong. He’s blushed upon seeing you and it must mean something and you make an effort to still your breathing and a sip of wine slips into a gulp. One by one the others are drifting away, even Martha, lingering Martha, and finally, finally you’re alone. Silence, for a moment, then laughing from you both.

  Well.

  Well.

  You apologize for not calling, tell him you lost his number and were terribly upset and then hate yourself for revealing that. But he’s flattered, delighted, in fact. I’m glad you were miserable, he says, it makes me feel good. And you look at him, trying to work him out: he’s not interested in shielding himself.

  Then the talking, an hour or two or thereabouts, everything and nothing, the way Cole and you used to talk, in the giddy time following the first fuck when the friendship had burst into something else. The time when you’d fuck greedily, when you’d tail off with exhaustion at the wilting end of one night and pick it all up again the next. When the more sex you had the more you wanted as all the rusty cogs within you were oiled up. Before familiarity and exhaustion and stress wound you down and the less you had, the less you wanted. And you stopped.

  You’d never want that to happen with Gabriel.

  He’s making you feel so alive, just being around him. You’ve always loved people like that: heart lifters, not heart sinkers. He’s making you laugh again, with your eyes. You talk as if this is the last time you’ll ever talk and there’s so little time and you need to know everything, now, before it’s too late.

  How did it go, in LA?

  I don’t know. I never know. I’m always being told I was second-best. The list of failures is very long.

  There’s no anger, frustration, angst; maybe the affability is an extremely smooth defense but you suspect your Gabriel is not very good at pushing his way through life. Is it such a bad thing? Everyone’s so good at seizing now, especially Theo; her life is all about hunting down the best deals, perks, sales, nothing rare and desirable escapes the vigor of her grasp. Gabriel is content to let all the grabbing slip by him. He has a sunniness in his character that makes you want to protect him and preserve what he’s got.

  When he listens, his head leans on one side. He says interesting after your sentences a lot; savoring what you say. He’s hungry to know you. You used to be like that once, with strangers, at dinner parties and weddings and blind dates, you had the zeal of a collector then, firing off questions and hiding yourself. Before it was all buried in the cotton wool of complacency, and Cole, and you weren’t near as interested in anyone else. Gabriel wants to know what you think, he’s giving you space in the conversation: it’s refreshing in a man. You’re responding like a neglected child at the back of the class who has a new teacher and flowers under the attention. And turns into someone else.

  He’s making you feel beautiful. Wanted. Confident. Unique. Cole never sees you as any of that, he loves to tell you how you are, what you’re like; to box you up tight.

  At the end of the night you say good-bye to Gabriel—no kiss, just a brush of warm cheek—and you walk down the street propelled by a zinging high, it’s as if you could leap and brush the sky. You have his number and he has yours and on the tube, once again, you anoint his slip of paper with your lips.

  This one you will not lose.

  Lesson 50

  putting damp sheets on a bed is little short of murder

  A light under the front door. You’re usually home first—you sober your face down. Cole asks where you’ve been and you say the library, it opens late on Wednesdays, remember? Good, he says, I’m glad you’re getting something out of it. He looks up from his Evening Standard: he loves the urban, gossipy side of it just as much as yourself. Hey, you’ve got two red patches on your cheeks, he says, like a clown.

  It’s the cold, it’s getting colder, can’t you feel it?

  How easily the lie slips out, it’s stunning, so smooth, so quick. It’s because your husband’s trust in you is tethered like a buoy to a concrete block; you’re the good wife, everyone knows that. Your palms fly to your cheeks to hide the heat and you look at Cole and think in that moment how easy it’d be to do anything you want, and, suddenly, how heartbreaking is his generosity and trust. You think, in that moment, that perhaps he never had an affair with Theo. It’s so hard to imagine, as he sits in his shirtsleeves with his paper and olives and beer. You toy with the thought, for the very first time, that perhaps all along he was telling the truth. He never adequately defended himself from suspicion but maybe he couldn’t: your mind was made up. Time is fading everything and you’re beginning, suddenly, to doubt yourself: what you heard, what you decided upon so quickly. Perhaps, perhaps you were wrong.

  That night you place your palm on Cole’s chest as he sleeps beside you and you cup his heartbeat in your hand like a glass over a leech. You can’t sleep, can’t sleep. If you commit adultery in your head, are you beginning the rejection of your husband and your marriage and your life up to that poi
nt? Or welding yourself to them? And if that’s the case, how does the marriage become, again, warm and rich?

  Do you need an excuse?

  You don’t ever lie. Except to tell lovers that you’ve just had an orgasm or your friends that you love their new haircut and all of that doesn’t count, it’s done to soothe and protect. You don’t steal. You don’t sleep around. But you think about it. It’s always been enough, just thinking about it, imagining sleeping with almost every man you meet.

  What furious need is within you, you wonder.

  Why must we crave the things we’re not meant to, you wonder.

  Lesson 51

  an Inspector of Nuisances may always be found in a letter

  Another Theo column. You’re intrigued and repelled. You shouldn’t read them, you know they’ll just hurt; you can’t stop.

  As expected, there’s something else about adultery. It’s tucked into a query about a boyfriend who’s unfaithful but gives great oral sex, and the reader wants him monogamous and every night, because it’s all too delicious to pass up. And how can she have him all to herself?

  Dear Drowning in Deliciousness, the good news is that any man can be taught how to give great oral sex. Just curl his hand in yours and tell him to imagine the ridges are the folds of your flesh, and then demonstrate with your tongue and breath and fingers exactly what you want. I guarantee it will work. But, dear Drowning, I’m afraid it’s just not worth sticking with your boyfriend. How could you expect a committed relationship from someone who’s been unfaithful in the past?

  A committed relationship. Uh huh. What would she know about a committed relationship?

  You crumple the magazine. Dare to tell Cole that Theo’s column is rubbish, as is the whole paper that she writes for: perhaps this sentiment will be passed on. You wouldn’t mind one bit if she knew she wasn’t being read by you, that her wily messages weren’t getting across.