You want to stand and make your way to him, to break into his tight little group, but there are too many knees to climb over. You keep looking across to him as he drinks the fight up. You’ve seen his intentness before: in his London flat, as you pushed up your shirtsleeve for his mouth, as you unbuckled his belt.
The matador lures the animal, forcing it to turn closer to him, to almost brush him. They’re communing with each other, he speaks to the bull and you lean forward to catch it, God knows why, you won’t understand. The band on the benches beside you strikes up an intermittent commentary like a lazy pianist at a silent film. The bull wheels, slower, and you can see starkly now its age. Gabriel told you the animals are never more than four years old but this one looks older, tireder than that; maybe they’ve cheated a little for this country event. The bull can sense defeat, it’s worn out. The matador hides a small pointed sword behind his back and swirls, beautifully, and the animal stands and charges again and Gabriel roars with the rest. It seems so one-sided; you feel sick. You rub your belly and think of the life brewing inside you and imagine it panicky, defenseless, the odds stacked against it. You’re not enjoying this. Gabriel had conveyed to you another world entirely when he spoke of the corridas: a world of discipline and daring and beauty, but what’s here before you just seems desperately sad and you’re stunned by that. It’s cowardly. Tedious. There’s so much stillness, watching, waiting, sizing up, panting.
The matador sights down the sword and plunges it into the bull’s broad neck and then he arches his body, as bold as a calligrapher’s brushstroke. The bull’s enraged, it struggles, its big heart is bursting. It crumples to its knees. Flops to its side. Raises its head with the agony.
You’ve seen enough.
The animal’s flank still heaves, its eyes roll, it has a look of utter astonishment: who are these barbarians? A dagger’s plunged behind the crown, severing the spinal cord and finally, finally the straining head drops. The kill has been difficult, there’s been such a big, fighting spirit to stop.
You look across to Gabriel. You stand, tall, you crane behind the nuggety men, you will not sit. He does not see you at first, he does not see you, he’s talking and laughing and his arm is loose round another man’s shoulder, an uncle or cousin perhaps, he does not see you. And then he does.
His talking stops.
He blushes, deeply.
A quiet, gentle nod of acknowledgment. Unbearable in its intimacy, as if you and he are the only people there. It tells you all you need to know: you won’t have to work hard, he’ll say yes.
He’s holding the moment too long, the people he’s with are looking at him and trying to see what he’s focusing on.
Slowly, slowly, you sit.
Trembling. Wet.
Lesson 118
never buy anything you cannot pay for
There are five more fights. You can’t bear to watch even one more. You wanted something else entirely, the bullfight of your imagination: the thrilling sense of competition between man and beast, the beautiful cunning of the matador’s dance, the bull’s invincible strength.
Why do you feel so let down?
Were you expecting the secrets of men and their machismo, perhaps, the secrets of Gabriel, unlocked? The matadors have made it all too easy for themselves and you never anticipated that.
What is the shocking weakness in virtually every man you know well? The whimpering like children when they’re ill. The need for women to ask directions for them. Help shop for their clothes. Book appointments for their hair to be cut because they don’t care to speak for themselves. The inability to pick up the phone if they want a relationship to stop. Are the weaknesses you see again and again a symptom of men of this age, or have they always been there, and women, secretly, have always known?
It is not wine nor kings but women that are strongest.
You know one thing, as Gabriel gazes at you from the other side of the ring: he’s not over it yet. A stopping and a blush told you that. But he doesn’t know you’re pregnant, he can’t have seen it as you stood behind the men in the crowd.
Suddenly it seems so unthinking and reckless to act on the impulse to have him back; and just once. Men lure ex-lovers all the time—why, now, in the thick of it, are you suddenly so uncomfortable? You can’t just walk away from your nature, it’s following you here, yapping at your heels, calling you home.
You should leave right now.
He’s looking across at you.
Lesson 119
all people, very properly, like to be considered respectable
You make your way along the bench, indicate you’ll be out the front. He’s out almost as quick. Your heart brims at that: the eagerness.
He flushes, at your belly, he stops. You step forward and say nothing, take both his hands in yours, then move, hesitantly, to touch his cheek. He pulls away like a child from a mother’s hand with its cleansing spit; he doesn’t touch you back. He looks again at your belly.
Well, I wasn’t expecting that.
It’s not yours, it couldn’t be, you laugh awkwardly.
I know, he says, too quick.
He takes your arm, he doesn’t look at you, he’s propelling you away from the arena as if he’s shamed by all this and you’re shaking inside, at his response, you’re faltering suddenly, anxious, chastened. First-date nervous.
Gabriel, too, feels distracted, changed. Not as inky-haired as you remembered, worn. You see him now as a man who’s stepped suddenly into that queasy time when he’s not yet middle aged but no longer young. A time of uncertainty when mothers stop asking when their sons will find a nice girl and settle down, but begin asking others, what’s wrong with him? And as you walk with him through the dusty, jostly fiesta streets you feel another presence between you. A new woman perhaps, or just his moving on, you don’t know, but something has been snuffed.
He turns, he laughs, he suddenly kisses you, as if what the hell, after all your indifference, even with a baby large between you. As if just once, on this crazy night, he wants to remember what it was like. You kiss him back. Shocked, drinking deep, not able to read him any more.
You’ve been busy, he says, and you grin, shy, and look down, rubbing your belly.
Oh yes.
You mumble an apology for disappearing, mumble something about needing to sort some things out in your life and he says yeah, yeah that’s what they all say, it’s in his teasing voice and you’re so relieved to have the old Gabriel back, you’re tugging him along, come on, you mad bugger, let’s get out of here, and he’s laughing and tugging in return, saying wrong way, mi amor, down here, I’ve got a room, and you’re both relaxing into that old familiar companionship, it’s as smooth as ice cream slipping down your throat. Then there’s silence as you walk the streets with the tender matiness of old lovers, not sure what’s next.
So what did you think of the corrida, he asks.
It wasn’t what I was expecting. I wanted all the sternness and beauty you’d told me about but it just seemed, I don’t know, cowardly. Sad. I didn’t like it at all.
Where does that cruelty spring from, from what deep seam within you? The cruelty that makes you say to your husband he’s a failure in his life, to your mother that you may love her but do not like her, to your lover that a passion seems bullying and weak? Those who are closest to you are the only ones who ever see it, no one else would believe it exists.
You can never be satisfied, can you, says Gabriel, and his hands, mocking, are at your throat; a little too hard, just a touch.
Lesson 120
modesty is holy and good
Why are you here, he asks, as he turns the key to his hotel room.
I—
You stop, can’t go on, the tips of your fingers press your mouth; you don’t know why you flew to Seville anymore, why you didn’t just walk from the bullring, from his life. This is wrong, this is wrong.
You’re pregnant, he says. This is something I shouldn’t be doing.
<
br /> I know.
But I want to, he says, leaning close.
I don’t think I should be here, you protest, you back off.
But you are here, he says.
He kisses you as soon as the door is shut, he crowds you into the wall. Take off your clothes, he says softly, breathing close to your ear—you’ve always loved it when he does that. You hesitate, look down at your belly, you remove your clothes slowly, your belly looms like a moon, marking you as taboo and there’s a stirring, the baby, but you can’t say no, can’t resist the demand. Gabriel stands back with his hands clasped behind his back, he watches your body, he smiles at it. Then he drops to his knees and smoothes his palms over your breasts and your stomach, now drum tight, he nudges between your legs and suddenly pushes two fingers up, without warning, like a stick into rain-plumped moss. You weren’t expecting that, the violence in it, it’s nothing that you’d taught him. Something has changed, he’s found confidence, he’s surprising; your knees buckle. You hold out your hand for support, you’re almost coming already, he’s slipped from your grasp and you don’t know why but it makes you want him to go on, and on, and on, to see where it ends, to not stop.
And there are three of you in this hotel room. Trying not to think of that.
You curl sideways on the bed, wait for him to take off his clothes. You, now, watch his body, it’s always given you pleasure to savor it. The beautiful hips, the pale scar where his appendix was taken out, the small, silver crucifix round his neck, the pianist’s wrists, the half-hearted hair on his chest, the long, curved cock. Gabriel drapes your body with his and kisses your neck, and you feel his hardness nudging between the crack of your ass and then you turn slowly, face to face and you see for the first time his concentration, you can see in his face that this type of experience is entirely new and strange; emotionally, and physically, it’s an unknown quantity, a performance impossible to rehearse.
Item one: the suburban housewife.
Item two: the heavily pregnant woman.
Item three: God knows what’s next.
You’re beautiful like this, so beautiful, he’s murmuring with his hands over your belly and your breasts and you should be hating it, you should be looking inward, nurturing, instead of raging with want but you’re ready in that greedy moment to hand him your whole life. You can feel strongly through Gabriel’s kissing and stroking that his lovemaking has firmed, he knows what he’s doing now, the lessons have worked. His touch is competitive and creative, it’s as if he’s trying to wipe the memory of every other man you’ve ever been with, to stamp your skin with the permanence of his own stroke. You feel the heat of envy: what other woman has he touched, who’s given him this confidence, this command? And yet the thought of other women thrilled you once. When you had him well and truly caught.
You turn again and Gabriel slips in from behind, you’re thirty-four weeks pregnant, you shouldn’t be doing this but before you have time to tighten against him you come, almost before he’s begun, again and again you come, the orgasms are tripping over each other, they’re seizing you up. You clutch his fingers and he clutches yours and your knuckles are bone-white and the aftershock lingers on and on.
I want to come inside you, he whispers.
It feels like a violation, it doesn’t feel right. It isn’t right.
You don’t tell him that.
Please, he says.
You don’t even feel it.
Lesson 121
our feet should be kept warm and dry
At one A.M. or thereabouts he’s on the hotel couch and you’re sitting in a chair in front of him with your bare feet crossed on his chest and your soles can feel his heart, its beat, and he bows his head and looks up, his eyes red-rimmed, and that’s when all the honesty begins.
I don’t think I can go on with this, he says. I’m not sure if we should see each other again. It’s like a sickness in my gut, he says, because it feels so good; but you’re pregnant now and that’s sacred to me; I know, I know, he says, despite what I’ve done. But I’ve got to get on with my life. You changed me completely, you were so vital to me and I’ll never forget that. But it’s my life now. The work’s all coming together, I’ve got a producer on board, the script’s starting to work, and then you’re jumping in and suturing all his talk; you just had to see him, that’s all, one last time, and your voice is too quick and light, it’s wanting to get it in first and as you speak you can read his heart racing through the soles of your feet. It’s agony, agony, all this; he wasn’t meant to be moving away at this point. Your voice is repeating itself, it’s wobbling and trailing out: one last time, that’s all, you’re telling him, you’ll be going back to your London life after this, you’ll never see each other again, from this point on any connection between you will stop, it’s over, it’s over, this is it.
The great calm, the anesthetization of the shock when everything slows, even your heart. The shock at his rejection, and at you telling him there’s no going back.
You’re both silent. Your foot stays pressed on his heart. It’s as if the two of you are waiting for something momentous to be said, but neither has the will, or the courage, to give it voice.
You’re both still, so quiet. You hear the traffic outside, a siren’s whine. And then, very softly, he chuckles: well then, I think I might try a Chinese girl next.
It’s stunning; that moment. You smile at his words, it’s an involuntary reflex, like when you hear that someone has died. So, a Chinese girl next, like a different chocolate from the chocolate box, perhaps? You shut your eyes: don’t say that, please, you think, please don’t be like any other man. Haven’t I taught you better than that? His words completely change what you know of him.
You remove your foot from his chest. Because, in that moment, a whole other possibility has been opened up.
That he’d planned it all along.
How to shuffle off his virginity.
The goal: to find, in a café, the quiet suburban housewife. Someone who wasn’t beautiful or arrogant or confident enough ever to make it difficult for his life, whom he’d never be afraid of, who, afterward, could be easily wiped away. Who would never tell anyone. And never laugh. But it all deepened and he hadn’t expected that; his unassuming housewife was meant to be expendable, that was the plan from the start.
So he could move on to what he really wanted.
Gabriel starts to kiss you and you stop him, you push him from your neck, you tell him it’s too intimate, you don’t tell him it’ll hurt too much. So, someone sitting alone in a café who wasn’t too beautiful, because men are more comfortable with imperfection and weakness, it’s less threatening, of course. He cannot see your eyes, the prick of tears that you know will not stop if you let them begin, you don’t want to give him that.
As you step into the lift you hear him calling to you, wait, come back, I was only teasing you, but you don’t turn, the lift shuts, he’s thumping on the door, thumping for it to stop.
But you’re gone.
Falling down the building, down, down, your head to the carpet on the wall, your eyes slammed shut with the anesthetization of shock; everything slows, even your heart.
Lesson 122
girls as a rule should refuse to lend
The sadness, bone-bright, as you walk the scrappy, smelly, morning-after-fiesta streets.
He’ll be a beautiful lover. You were a good teacher, you always have been. And you learned as much as you taught, and you’ll always have that. If you dare to return to it.
You’ll be jealous, ferociously, of any relationship he ever has. It’ll be better if you never find out.
You’ll never stop wanting him.
In your hotel room you lie on your back on the narrow, dippy bed. You’re not meant to lie like this so late in the pregnancy, it squeezes an artery, you’ve been warned by a midwife, but in the early hours of this morning you do not care, not this once, you need to indulge yourself. You stretch out your body and the baby wrig
gles and dances inside you, its hands and legs knead you like dough.
This trip wasn’t meant to hurt so much.
You curl on your side. You feel God wrap his arms round you and tell you sail on, sail on, set forth.
You catch the first flight to London.
Lesson 123
the heart grows both stronger and larger from the additional effort imposed upon it
Home.
You open the door to a strange euphoria. You throw off your clothes and scrub yourself clean and make the space entirely your own. Striding, finally, into the solitude. You feel as if part of your body has been ripped from you, as if flesh has been torn from flesh. But you feel powerful, too, for you’re free, after so long; the great burden of uncertainty, and guilt, has gone.
But then the anger comes.
At all the times in the past you’ve said I love you and felt stripped. All the times they never rang back. All the love affairs that evaporated, bleakly, into one-night stands. All the times they’ve drowned you out. Drained your energy. Your confidence. Stood you up. Walked out. Wanted a Chinese girl next.
The fury spits and sparks as you clean the kitchen cupboards and vacuum every nook. Martha pops in: it’s the nesting instinct turned feral, she laughs, backing off.
Oh no, it’s something else.
Lesson 124
baby clothes have to be prepared and various domestic arrangements must be made
You’re busy at the computer because you have to be now. The baby punches its fist up and you yelp at your desk. It feels like it’ll break through your skin, it’s stretched so thin. Before it felt so cozy-snug in there, as if nothing could get to it. Now at your desk you look down and there’s a lump protruding to the left of your navel, a little head; gently, you push it back.
The Bride Stripped Bare Page 18
