Darling, I know the paper’s rubbish, Cole says. I was only ever buying it for you.
Well, don’t, you snap, I don’t like it anymore.
OK. Whatever, Cole responds lightly and walks over, and opens his dressing gown and invites you in. It’s an old gesture you’ve always loved. All your tension is released by it, your whole body relaxes into him.
Lesson 52
cheerfulness is a great charm in a nurse
November flinches into winter and two red patches stain your cheeks, often now. Your heart catches in your throat every time Gabriel’s voice is on the phone, your stomach churns and after the phone clicks in its cradle you run around the room and leap to the ceiling and bat the hand-made paper globes covering your lights and squeal to the sky. It’s delicious and mortifying to be living like this again; so young, so gone. You never thought this belly-fluttering would ever come back into your life, that it would lie waiting for a waking no matter how old you got.
You have coffee with him. You go to the cinema at two P.M., theater matinees, National Theatre talks. He’s gleeful that you have a car, wants to do London like a tourist; let’s play in history, he says. You go to Kew Gardens and Alexandra Palace, Chiswick House and Hampton Court. He wants to drive; you let him. He’s like a child with a toy, he’s never owned a car. He takes you to his favorite space, the Rothko room in the Tate Modern, and after it you drag him to the Body section—come on, just a look!—and there’s a Duchamp painting on glass and he watches your intrigue as you stand in front of the work: it’s so odd, you can’t make it out.
What, you ask, to his stare, go away, stop it, you laugh. Well, do you know what it’s about?
Nope. And he walks away, laughing, his hands raised in abandon.
He’s always leaping up for elderly men on the tube and engaging in chat with café staff and helping mothers with pushchairs down the steps. All the things you should do, but don’t; all the things Cole would never contemplate. He’s so compassionate, unhurried, relaxed. People aren’t like that. It seems, almost, a naivety. How can he survive in the world? He’s a man without scorn, and Cole, of course, is anything but. It’s as if all the hardness that comes with living in London hasn’t claimed him yet.
Sometimes, guiltily, you have afternoon tea in your flat and Gabriel takes out the rubbish at the end of it, without being asked, a small courtesy and yet enormous, for Cole always has to be nudged to do that. It felt so strange to have him in your space for the first time, you just watched: his lean, exotic darkness, his suit with his shirtsleeves poking out, his scuffed shoes with a piece of cardboard over a hole in the sole because, he said, Charlie Chaplin used to do it and it worked. He roamed the living room with his hands contentedly behind his back, peering at framed wedding photos and CDs and books; gathering evidence of how you lived your life. And how Cole did. He asked questions about him, as if he was endlessly curious about this marriage business.
Do you cook dinner for him?
Not much.
Do you ever wear an apron?
No.
He’s enjoying this, he’s smiling, his eyes are disappearing into slits: you love it when he smiles as completely as that.
Do you iron his shirts?
No.
Do you send him off in the morning with a peck on his cheek?
No. No. No, you shake your head, you laugh.
He opens doors for you, buys your tube ticket, pays the café bills, wouldn’t think of anything else. It’s days and days of small kindnesses, each with a tiny erotic charge, and they’re returned all the time now—holding his hand, tugging him along, hugging him with delight—for the young child in you is skipping back. And sometimes there are no underpants under your knee-length skirt and this gives you a charge. It’s just a small thing, for you, but enormous; unimaginable, a year ago. A private trespass, but no less arousing because of that.
You don’t have a hunger for the book project now. You have no desire to ring your old girlfriends from work, despite your promise when you left. Nothing sings but this time with Gabriel. You’re loving the silkiness of distraction, of flirting with possibility and relaxing into play. When you do make it to the library there are diversions and rambles that stretch into chapters plucked off bowed shelves and sometimes, in one golden afternoon, an entire book of fairy tales or a novella you’ve always meant to read. You’re drawn to the library’s shadowy recesses, to old cookery manuals and strange, instructional texts for Victorian housewives accompanying their husbands to the colonies. You’re drawn to Gabriel, at his desk, distracting him from his own languorous work.
You don’t have a world you share, apart from the time together. There are huge gaps in his life you know nothing of, he always turns away from your questions and shines the light back upon yourself. He uses your own tricks, you recognize them too well. He’s endlessly curious but will not satisfy your own curiosity.
What is it about bullfighting, you ask after an Almodóvar film, and you take both his palms and search them again for the secrets of his life.
Come to Spain with me, come and watch a corrida.
I’d love to, but how?
A helpless shrug. Both never daring to speak of what binds you, the insistent tug like the pull of a stream, determined, unstoppable, fast. When he leans to you there’s a shivery sense of the nearness of your skins, of his energy, his difference. The different foods he eats, the different sun he was brought up in, the different sky, it’s all stamped into his skin. It’s like the exhilaration you get when you arrive in a country for the very first time and step from the airport and the strangeness of it all assaults your senses, for Gabriel seems so fresh and fascinating and unique, a new territory to be explored; if you dare to slip your fingers on his hips when he stands before you, if you dare begin.
Lesson 53
every womanly woman, who truly realizes her mission, desires to be a pleasant object of vision for her fellow creatures
Cole knows of him.
He’d insisted upon meeting the new library friends at one of the drinking sessions after work, he wanted to tag along. As if he just wanted to keep tabs on your new life; the price of the gift, perhaps. You had to say yes.
The actor one is creepy, he said, as you sat side by side on the tube on the way home.
Why?
He’s in love with you, he said.
What makes you say that? Sweat shimmering across your brow like it does after too much chocolate.
I don’t know, just a look, perhaps.
And Cole had returned to his Standard. Secure in his fiefdom, knowing implicitly the type of man you like and do not. He’s always assuming he knows you so well: orders your drink without consultation, insists you try a particular dish he’s sure you’ll like, tapes you television shows he feels you should watch. And he always considers these gestures a kindness.
Gabriel never assumes, he wants to learn.
Two red patches on your cheeks, often now.
Your nails are painted for the first time in years and you keep on forgetting and catch in the corner of your eye the octopus fingers, it’s as if they’re weighed down with a life of their own. You write neater with them and eat neater and less. You’re losing weight, there’s a reason to now, and you’ve cut your hair short for you want people to see the new lightness in your face. You get contact lenses. You feel taller with them, bolder. You’d become lazy in so many ways, you’d stopped trying. You feel sleeker all over, walk with a subtle shine.
Your Elizabethan book takes on a new urgency as you dip into its pages:
She decked her selfe bravely to allure the yes of all men that should see her. And who knows not how this deceipt of hers prospered and how much she is magnified and commended for the same.
You shut the volume, tremulously, you smooth your palm over its surface. You tuck the tiny book away in your drawer, suddenly not wanting Cole to see it lying around, to flip through the cocoa-colored subversion of its beautiful handwriting.
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You’re readying your life, but for what? You don’t know where all the flirting and phone calls will end up. Does Gabriel feel the same as you? You don’t dare to think ahead too much, for you don’t want this melted under the heat of your attention, don’t want it gone from your life.
Lesson 54
in some cases it is necessary to change stockings and flannels every day
Hey, you whisper, poking your head over the wooden desk divider during a long library afternoon. I’m starving.
Go away, I have to work.
Come on.
He throws his pen at you, several heads look up, someone tuts. The café, you say, holding his arm with both hands and pulling tight.
Where are you up to?
The big scene. The bullfight. I have to get back.
Does the matador die?
Hardly ever now.
But I thought it was like Spanish roulette—someone always gets decked.
No, no, the sport’s changed, there’s not the tension that there used to be. The bull’s no longer brave, and the matador’s even less so. All the beauty in it is being lost.
The beauty in it, an erotic charge from that.
So, how should the bull die, you ask.
Like this, and Gabriel leans across the café table and caresses the back of your neck, he finds the vulnerable spot and whispers to you that that is where the dagger slides in, feel it, just there, it has to be clean, severing the spinal cord, he tells you there’s a magnificence to the perfect thrust and as he speaks goose bumps sprint across your skin. You sit back. Rub your neck. You’re shuddering for him, pressing your knees tight. There’s an innocence to your face still, at thirty-six you could pass as twenty-six, as still needing to be taught, in your cropped cardigan and ballet slippers and knee-length skirt. The ribbons of muscle in your upper legs tighten, often now, at Sunday brunches with Cole’s clients and dinner parties and in-law drinks; you’re distracted by a want, achingly, for Gabriel to touch your cunt. Cunt. You’ve always hated that word and yet suddenly it arouses you; you smile, secretly, dirtily, when you say it in your head.
And yet you cannot imagine it ever coming to that for the one time you kissed—a cheek peck that strayed, a good-bye that went too far after a soaring afternoon—he jerked like a mustang being broken in. And whenever your skin brushes a touch he will retract, you can sense it, the pulling back.
Lesson 55
at the end of the year you must see that your window box is tidy and in good order
Darkness is greedy now, it crowds into the afternoons. The year is galloping toward Christmas. Cole’s away a lot, networking at festive functions: drinks parties in creamy Belgravia drawing rooms and St James studios and private Soho clubs. For the first time since you’ve known him he hasn’t asked you to accompany him. He recognizes, now, that he can’t get you to do things quite so easily any more.
Gabriel’s in Spain, with his extended family, he’s not sure when he’ll be back. He might do Prague afterward, and then Greece again, to visit a friend. You don’t feel abandoned for you’re secure in the knowledge that he’ll return; the situation will resume exactly as it left off. There’s a glamour to Gabriel’s existence because he doesn’t do the everyday. His contentment with few possessions is glamorous, and his lack of striving with his job, and his winging off constantly to some other place; it’s all so brazen, flippant, audacious, light.
You tell yourself there’s no crime in a cup of tea or a gallery visit or a skipping heart. You tell yourself your husband deserves your unfaithfulness because it keeps you with him, it keeps your marriage together, which is what you both want.
It will go no further. You don’t want guilt like a sickness.
But during those long December nights you wonder why some people have a compulsion to allow chaos into their lives. To get attention? Sympathy? Love, to have it affirmed? Are you doing all this for Cole, perhaps; for him to notice you again, to be attentive, your best mate, like he was once?
Christmas is endured. Swiftly packed away.
I hate this between us, Cole says suddenly, on a very quiet New Year’s night.
So do I.
Nothing else is said, it does not need to be said, there’s just an unspoken acknowledgment that both of you want to slip back into an old way. The night is curiously healing even though nothing, still, has been sorted out. You’re both in bed by ten. Cole wraps his warmth around you and you do not shrug him off. You cannot explain why your marriage works, now, but it does, enough. Enough not to have to set up your life somewhere else, to go back to the grind of City University, to rethink the baby plan. You’ve stopped asking Cole at every opportunity about Theo, the truth of what went on, for you’ve learnt that invading the mystery of each other’s psyche will be more destructive to your marriage than a simple letting go ever is. So, you’ve let go. To reclaim your life. To navigate a way back into calm, if you can.
January. Cole has a job in Athens. It’s for an old acquaintance who’s in shipping, a billionaire who collects pre-Raphaelite nudes. But he’s got something different this time, a portrait from the waist up of an exquisite medieval Venus and he doesn’t want her out of his sight. Cole’s shown you the photographs, he did the condition report, the paint is blistering and flaking off. There are several losses, patches of canvas totally bereft of paint, and Cole will have to take his palette and brushes and create a seamless match. He can’t wait to get his hands on her. Her skin is pale and cold, as if it’s been carved in marble. She has tiny buttons for nipples, like flesh-colored smarties, with no aureole, of course. There’s a snake winding round her elongated neck with scales as soft and luxurious as black velvet.
Cole’s gone for three weeks and your true self uncurls in this time. It makes you wish that throughout the years of knowing your husband you’d let him see more of who, exactly, you are. You can only bring her out when he isn’t at home.
This.
The music up loud, your music, all the secret pop songs from your youth, Wuthering Heights and Blondie and the soundtrack from Grease and Nina Simone at her gravelly best, the type of music he hates, it’s all crammed on compilation cassettes stored under the bed like a dietitian’s secret chocolate box. You’re dancing and singing off-key, too loud, drunk with the alone. You’re rearranging furniture, dragging it in great grating shudders, how perfect you could make this space if it were just your own—out with that overlarge TV, off with the Scotch bottles and cheap detective novels! You’re eating nothing but chocolate biscuits for dinner, a whole packet, or just a slice of toast and a glass of red wine and the dishes languish and the candles burn to their quick and at the end of each night you stretch on the couch and feel young and alive and sated and content. For alone you’re refinding a glittering, a clarity, you’re finding your distilled self.
You feel an intoxicating freedom when Cole is not with you, and yet you don’t want him to be gone. You think of the two types of aloneness you’ve known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.
Lesson 56
nothing impure should be left in a bedroom one minute longer than is necessary
A letter, heavy on the doormat. Thick, creamy paper, watermarked, Italian, its edges feather-soft. A sensuality to it you want to kiss. The words typed, the thud of them as careful as braille.
I want to remove your clothes in the darkness, I want to unpeel you. I want to feel you, inch by inch.
Your fingertips run over the words, deft as a lizard. You’re trembling, you cover the letter with your hand, you have to sit with the strangeness of it.
I feel like you’re helping me to live.
No name, no return address. Your dipping heart, seduced by text. You stand by the lounge room window with one hand holding the letter to your chest and the other spidered wide on the cold pane and your breath frosting the glass and your cheeks are hot. It’s as if you’re entering, tentatively, a s
trange new path and swiftly the trees are closing over you and the sky is gone and the light, you’re lost, and in the thick of it, in a clearing, you’ll be tugged down, drowned, in a bed of silk.
Come away. Start afresh.
The phone. Cole. All fired up. You know what’s coming next: he’ll be a couple of days late, he’s still bent over that painting, can’t drag himself away. He’s always loved telling you the minutiae of his work, you’re a good listener.
You’re looking at your watch and the letter as he speaks, wanting him off the phone. He’s worried about his Venus’s lips, some idiot somewhere along the line has had a go, clumsily, at touching them up and it’s tricky to get them right.
Don’t change them too much. No botox, mate.
Yeah, yeah, and he chuckles.
The point of his job is to work to a minimum, to do the least amount possible of fixing up because he’s tampering with an original artwork. But sometimes, Cole’s told you, he just wants to be let loose.
I want to cover her nipples, he says, she looks so cold. She needs some clothes, poor love.
Maybe she’s blissfully happy, darling. Maybe there’s a man under her skirt.
Oy, Cole laughs. Steady down. What’s got into you?
Nothing, nothing, and you hang up the phone, grinning at the irony of a husband so absorbed in his job he hasn’t seemed to have noticed the changes in his own wife’s face over the past few months.
Lesson 57
do good and lend
How they’ve seduced:
The Bride Stripped Bare Page 9
