The Bride Stripped Bare

by Nikki Gemmell

  Maybe she never had a lover, maybe it was all in her head.

  You wonder, suddenly, if she was unmarried, in a convent, perhaps; celibate, and so much stronger because of that.

  Maybe her isolation was something she reveled in, for it enabled her to work.

  Was the author contemptuous of the married state? Wanting to shake it up? Perhaps the book is even more subversive than you thought. You suspect she was writing it for any woman but herself.

  Not women be in subjection to men but men to women.

  How had she been released?

  Lesson 66

  happiness and virtue alike lie in action

  May. The weather is unclenching, there’s a lightness in the air.

  The library stacks. The light’s buoyant outside but gloomy inside. It’s been a long time since you’ve come here. Each narrow passageway is illuminated by tugging a string at the end of it and your footsteps ring out on the cast-iron grates with the deadening clang of a jailer. A librarian returning books glances up from a floor below and you remember, too late, that you shouldn’t be wearing a skirt in this place, it’s an old Library lore: the wide spaces in the grates allow people to look up. To give you a shot of erotic courage you’ve not worn underpants but it feels suddenly wrong, you being here, in this state; trying to work but wondering if you’ll see Gabriel by chance, trying to erase one obsession with another and in a place so soaked with them both.

  He’s not here. You just want to talk, to put your mind at rest. As you walk from the grills some of the grates shift slightly underfoot and the effect’s dizzying and unpleasant and you’re hating this ragged need in you that doesn’t sit at all comfortably with your public face.

  You sit at a desk. Grip its edge. Breathe deep. You have to concentrate on your own book, you must make it work: you need a spine to your life.

  And then it comes to you, as beautifully and obediently as a tangle of necklaces that you’ve spent so long trying to unpick, and with the simple looping of one set of beads through another the knot of them magically comes apart.

  You will respond to your mysterious seventeenth-century author.

  You will write a book in secret, just like her. Why not? All writing is revenge, is it not. Yes, yes. You lick your lips. Reach for your notebook. And in an afternoon lost within the deep, deep peace of solid, consuming work, you produce three lists:

  Men you have slept with, what you remember most.

  How they seduced.

  And on what.

  Lesson 67

  feather beds are a greater luxury than mattresses but are said to be less healthy

  Beds, of course:

  A stained futon on the floor. A sister’s bed that smelt of grass. An attic eyrie mattress. A caravan bed that was vaguely damp. Your parents-in-laws’ stern spare bed with sheets so slippery you fell off. A deliciously broad hotel bed in Hong Kong, wider than its length. Two single mattresses zipped together and you felt they’d break apart at any moment, they’d swallow you up.

  And the non-beds:

  A car bonnet. Shag-pile carpet that burned. A field of curious cows. A swimming pool at three in the morning, with the water buoying you under a circus tent of stars. There was the quiet as you fucked, you remember that so clearly, just the water’s soft trickle and swish as you clung to each other and didn’t speak, not a word, focusing on the intensity of the touch and the water’s caress.

  A hire car. Sand. A kitchen table at a maiden aunt’s.

  All the clichés. It’s remarkable how similar most of the men’s techniques were and yet how distinct each one is in your memory even if the name is not. You remember the unpleasant experiences more vividly than the pleasant ones; you remember why they didn’t work. And your let-down. That it wasn’t better than what you’d hoped, at the start, as your clothes were coming off. You always masked it.

  It’s a shame, that.

  Lesson 68

  April is the hopeful month for gardening

  You visit the library again and again. You walk the bold iron skeleton of the beautiful building, your building as much as his. Just because he comes here doesn’t mean you can’t, and you slip off your shoes and arch your soles and your stockinged feet thrum on the iron. Strips of fluorescent tubing cast baubles of brightness here and there; above and below you readers sit or squat, isolated in their little circles of light. Old wooden desks wait at the ends of the passages like rest bays on a highway and there’s the intoxicating smell of paper and leather, of words, waiting. You begin, finally, to tackle the book. To ask questions:

  Why are women so constrained about pleasing themselves, why are they so focused on everyone else’s pleasure at the expense of their own?

  What happens if they try to live selfishly?

  But then a pool of light, philology, one vaulting spring day.

  Your heart somersaults.

  He is sitting on the ground with his back to a wall, reading and jotting on a notebook by his side. You do not go to him, you just look: his nape, his hair flopping into his eyes, his hand curled round the pen that clicks as agreeably as a lipstick, his watch from the forties with its broad, age-spotted face.

  Something makes him glance up. He catches your eye.

  His smile, like an umbrella whooshed inside out.

  Yours back.

  You’re both trapped in this, you can see that. It’s in his face.

  Lesson 69

  always say your prayers

  A new café. He’s holding your hand across the table, he’s cupping it like a turtle’s shell, he’s not letting go; as if he’s reluctant to abandon contact now it’s been made. A cup of tea is in front of you, it’s cold, a milky, spotty scum has tightened on its surface.

  Gabriel, are you a virgin? Straight out.

  Yes.

  Just like that. You weren’t expecting the confession so quickly. His smile has all the honesty of a desert sky in it; it’s as if he’s never uttered the affirmation to anyone and it’s a relief, such a relief, to have it said. He says yes, again, yes, and his fingers are stroking yours absently, they’re stroking your knuckles, they won’t stop. And then he says I think I need some help, I’ve been thinking about this night and day and you’re nodding, you’re saying nothing of your own nights and days.

  How come, you ask, soft.

  He sits back, he laughs. Well, he says, slow, he’s struggling to begin, he goes to say something, changes his mind. And then he starts. There was a girl when he was fifteen. Her name was Clare. They were in a musical together. It was a joint production with his boys’ school in north London and the local convent school. He’d just moved there, from Spain.

  What was the musical?

  You don’t want to know. Salad Days.

  You both laugh.

  She was American. Her parents were Spanish but she was from California. She was different from all the rest. Gorgeous. Warm. It was like, I don’t know, she stored the sun under her skin or something. I was … gone.

  You nod, you smile, it’s a tale you can almost second-guess: that they fell in love, madly, sweetly, consumingly. That a teacher found them in a storeroom, during a rehearsal. That they hadn’t got far but their clothes were off and you see the two of them: their hands, their faces, shy, shivery, wondrous, focused, scared. They were dragged apart. Clare’s parents were very strict; she was withdrawn from the production; she never saw it. Gabriel was told not to phone, he wasn’t allowed to see her, he sent a letter telling her he’d wait for her and he wouldn’t look at anyone else but he never knew if she’d received it. She moved schools. He couldn’t trace her, she was lost.

  My family says I fixated on her, he says. I guess I did, I don’t know. Not a single day went by without me thinking about her, and what I’d lost. Is that fixation?

  I think so, yes, you smile. You turn your palm beneath his so that they’re facing each other, flat.

  Well, my mother says I have an addictive personality. He grins ruefully. Anyway, I was de
termined to be an actor—maybe, on some level, it was to find a way back to her, I don’t know; I spent so much time pretending and imagining, it was all in my head. Anyway, one day when I was twenty I was walking down Charing Cross Road and she was just there, in front of me. He’s nervous, there’s a little cough through his talk, a clearing of his throat, you remember it from moments when he’s been thrown off balance: when he has to query a waiter’s bill, perhaps, or respond to a madman’s belligerence on the tube. I’d been waiting for so long, he continues. We went back to my flat. Your hand tightens around his. Gabriel is silent, he licks his lip, he looks straight at you. I told her she’d have to be gentle, he says. I didn’t know what to do. I’d never been with a woman. In my mind, I was still in the relationship with her. I’d been waiting so long.

  You are holding his cheek, you are holding your breath.

  She laughed. She just … laughed.

  The anger in him still, after all these years.

  She’d changed so much. There was such a hardness to her, she was so … cynical, knowing. All the sweetness was gone. And she’d dyed her hair and had too much lipstick, and this horrible, thick makeup on her face. She didn’t need it, any of it. I don’t know what happened to me. I grabbed her by the shoulders and I just shook her, I shook her as if I was trying to rattle the laugh out of her. I couldn’t stop.

  You press his hand between both of yours like a beautiful, smooth stone that you’ve found on the beach.

  And then, I don’t know, I lost focus, I couldn’t concentrate, it was like some virus of insecurity was eating me up. Everyone knew me; girls, for God’s sake, had posters of me on their walls; and as he talks he slips his hand from yours and his fingers worry at a paper napkin and begin tearing it into little holes. I couldn’t say that I’d never actually slept with someone. I was paralyzed by it. I said to myself that by the time I was twenty-two I’d have been with a woman, and then it was twenty-five and then I was thirty and God, how could I tell anyone then? And weirdly, over the years it just became easy to say no. To pretend. It was like living behind a pane of glass and looking out at everyone, and not being able to touch. And he’s laughing, soft. And then I met this woman, in a café.

  Your breath catches in your throat.

  I liked her, very much. He speaks so slowly; you can scarcely hear him over the hammering of your heart. And she was married, which meant, in a weird way, that she was free. There’d be no complications, no messy aftermath. I thought about it a lot. She was someone I could trust. And she was a teacher, too. It’s funny, that.

  Your mouth is sapped dry.

  And yet I can’t ask her to help me, it’s impossible. I could never ask her that. She asked me once but I just blanked, freaked, I wasn’t ready. And then… I couldn’t face it. I’m sorry.

  You look at him sitting before you, utterly naked, with such a helplessness on his face and his forehead all crinkled up and you’re moved, so moved, by the courage of his honesty. You think of the contrast with Cole, the set of his jaw when you’d asked him again and again about Theo, the tightness in his hands as he’d pushed your questions away. Gabriel’s making an enormous leap with his words, you’re sure no one else has heard them. There was always a strange kind of absence to him, some piece of the puzzle you didn’t have and now, suddenly, he is present, in such an endearing, transparent way and a tenderness is falling over you like a wave. You won’t judge him or condemn him. In fact, you respect him; for not succumbing to all the pressure and panic about losing one’s virginity, for resisting, holding out. It’s so old-fashioned and disciplined, so austere, noble, quaint. No one does this any more.

  Gabriel suddenly cringes and bows his head in his hands as if he can’t believe what he’s just confessed. This is a moment he will never forget in his life: tread softly, you must. Don’t hurt him, don’t scare him off, don’t thicken that pane of glass. He’s closer to you now than he’s ever been, he’s all vulnerable, stripped, and you know that you’ll also remember this moment for the rest of your life, like a too-bright fluorescent light in a communal corridor that’s never switched off, this moment of Gabriel sitting before you, naked, when all the nos that have been stopped up within you for so long become one enormous

  yes.

  Lesson 70

  you had better have a millstone tied to your neck and be thrown into the deepest pond than become a taker of opium

  Walking to his flat. Not daring to talk; holding hands, tremoring, wet.

  His rooms are spare and neat, like a monk’s, with a few beautiful objects from his travels here and there, and small stacks of paperbacks and some black-and-white postcards on the walls. He does not intrude heavily upon the space.

  His bed’s surprisingly big. You turn off the lights. Where to begin, you are the teacher and before you is the blank slate: God, the responsibility of it. You gather your thoughts, you mustn’t rush. You don’t want him experiencing anything of the hurt or disappointment you’ve so often felt. How many women get the chance to do this, with a man, to break their virginity? It must be utterly memorable for him, something to savor for the rest of his life.

  You tell him you want him to lick you, slowly, the inside of your wrist, and you push up your sleeve like a junky preparing for her first shot. Gabriel looks at you. He bends, hesitant. His tongue tip glides up your skin in one even, barely there line. Your eyes close, you let out a small gasp, his tongue stops. You take off his jacket, you unbutton his shirt, you find him, his vulnerability. His chest is cathedral-wide and your hands span its breadth like the vaults of a ceiling and you feel his galloping heart and you place your right palm over it, reading the race of it. He smells clean, pleasantly so, you can’t catch anything of his real scent. His body is young, not quite finished, it feels strangely untouched, maybe it’s the hesitancy in him, he’s all caged up. Your lips walk the softness of his inner arm, slowly, daddy-long-legs-soft, climbing the paleness. You look up and smile reassurance and for some reason you hold his head like a mother with a child and he begins to say something and ssssh, you whisper, no talk and you hold his face in the clamp of your palms and he’s concentrating so much, so intent, ssshh you whisper, ssshh, and kiss him slowly as if all the world’s tenderness is gathered in that touch and as you do it your hands snake softly to the eroticism of his hips.

  You kneel, unbuckle his belt.

  His penis curves gently to one side, it’s large; it always surprises you how big they can get. He is looking down at you, he is breathing fast.

  You hold him, you lick him, soft, so silky soft, the tip.

  He laughs nervously, he can’t relax. He tries to push you off. You propel him, gently and firmly, on to his bed, on his back. Remove your clothes, quick; wet, so wet.

  You sit, very slowly, on to him.

  Ease down, slowly, feel him all the way. And then you just sit, for a moment, you are filled up and you smile into his eyes and very slowly you tighten your muscles and gather him inside you: you feel Gabriel with your skin. He looks at you, all wonder and surrender and shock, and you throw your head back, you can’t look at him any more, you need to savor this moment alone. You keep on moving on him, slowly, rhythmically, with your eyes shut, ssh, you tell him, sssh, as he begins to say something, as you talk to him through your skin, you lean forward, you brush your fingertip on his lips, sssssh.

  And then he comes.

  He’s appalled; it’s so quick.

  You smile, you stay sitting on him, feeling him in you, feeling him go soft. This, too, is delectable. Your hands fan upward on his belly and his chest, savoring his surprisingly soft skin, untouched for so long by any other woman and you bow your head and kiss him, in gratitude, on the cleft of his neck. You didn’t orgasm, you didn’t learn anything new but it’s a start, a lovely one: for it’s the very first time you’ve been totally in control. Women bare rule over men.

  You climb off him. Stretch languidly, your palms turned to the sky as if they want to push it up. You feel like a cat
on a favorite armchair it’s never usually allowed on, thrumming with warmth and sunlight.

  Gabriel rolls over on to his stomach. You walk across to him, lie beside him; your fingertips slip over each bump of his spine.

  There was another time, he says, without looking at you. Your hand stops. It was my twenty-first, he says. I got drunk. My parents had thrown a big party for me. There was this girl, just some girl, a family friend, she was drunk, too, and we went up to a bedroom at the top of the house. But as I tried to go inside her I just … went limp. All I could hear was Clare’s laughter. I couldn’t go on.

  You wing your arm across him, you squeeze his shoulder. Gabriel turns to you, he props his body on one side with his hand on his cheek.

  So … thanks, he says, awkward, shy. Then there’s a pause, and his impishness slipping back. What happens next?

  You shake your head, you cover your eyes, you laugh: no, no no, we have to stop, all right?

  Excuse me, madam, but you are not leaving this flat.

  Lesson 71

  those who eat too much should remember that they are robbing those who have not enough

  Walking by the river to the tube.

  The Thames the color of cold milky tea.

  Feeling intensely alive, as if years have been stripped from your body. Feeling engorged between your legs, plumped, softened, filled up. Smiling into the impatient dusk and flitting your fingers to your nose at the cocktail of smell, at the stamp of two bodies upon them.

  Feeling as exhilarated as a teenager who’s just finished the last of her exams, and the glorious stretch of the summer holiday is ahead of her.