Thursday, December 27
‘Jane? Where are you, sweetheart?’
‘I’m just on the computer!’
‘Oh, Jane.’ My mother stands at the door, comes in.
Mom looks OK. Not great, but OK. She’s holding two cups of coffee. ‘I thought you’d be ready for another one,’ she says. Sits down beside me on the sofa. Looks at the laptop. ‘You work too much.’
‘I only do as much as I am willing to,’ I say with a shrug.
‘Thank you,’ she says after a long pause.
I really don’t think ‘You’re welcome’ is the right thing to say.
‘Of course,’ I say. Give her a pat on the knee.
‘You’ll head straight to the gym from here?’ she asks. Dad’s gone, but life and our weekly routine go on.
‘I’ll leave early, and swing by Alex’s office on the way, if that’s all right? Deliver him his dessert.’
‘You’re such a good wife. And mother. And daughter,’ says Mom. And bursts into tears and runs from the room.
I log out of Facebook.
Fucking hell.
Good wife. That’s me.
I swing by the house quickly to grab my workout clothes and a change of clothes for the kids. Then downtown to Alex’s office with cheesecake, whipped cream and a bottle of Lactaid pills.
‘God, you are a fucking dream wife,’ he tells me. Kisses me. Pulls me into his lap. I flinch. ‘Too bad I have a meeting in ten minutes.’
‘I need to be at Jesse’s in fifteen,’ I tell him. Kiss him back, moving very slowly. ‘Text me if you’ll be late for supper. I’ll try to make something sensational to make up for yesterday.’
At the door, I turn around.
‘Well, probably not sensational,’ I amend. ‘But, you know. Hot. And not out of a box.’
I don’t like to lie.
Nicola’s in the changing room when I get there. She looks god-awful. And she knows it. Our other friends would hug her.
‘Do you need to talk?’ I offer. I don’t want to. God, I don’t want to.
‘Know what I need, Jane? Do you know what I need right now? I need a man – any man – hell, I’ll take a manly woman at this point – to just tell me that I’m attractive and desirable and not gross and yucky and…’ She takes a breath. ‘I’m sorry. I’m just so tired. So tired of looking for solutions and finding the positive and talking to therapists and lawyers and accepting people being kind to me and…what do I need?’
‘An orgasm?’ I ask. This is not a me-and-Nicola kind of conversation. Except for that one time I inappropriately asked her about the rat-fuck bastard’s anal sex fetish.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Preferably one facilitated by a real live human being. Whatever. Not gonna happen while I’m this psychotic mess. You don’t have to tell me – self-pity is not sexy.’
And she storms out, slamming the door.
I follow shortly, and Jesse and I both watch as she exits the gym, head down, arms swinging.
‘She wasn’t focused at all today,’ Jesse sighs. ‘I’m not sure I did her any good.’
‘Did you grope her ass, by any chance?’ I ask. He’s shocked. Aghast, actually. I don’t care. ‘Because really that’s the only thing that would have done her some good.’
‘Push-ups,’ Jesse says, and I know he’s saying that just to punish me. Push-ups. Fucking hell. One…
‘Do you know how hard I work to maintain proper professional conduct and contact with all these women?’ Jesse hisses in my ear as I rise. Two…‘My entire clientele – I think I do three men. Four. The rest – women. Women in their twenties. Thirties. Forties. Fifties. Oh, and the occasional jailbait fifteen-year-old that her vain, uptight mother thinks needs to lose weight or tone up. I don’t know which are worse. The ones in their twenties – or the teenagers – who think any man who looks at them or, God forbid, touches them, even though it’s his fucking job, wants to do them. Or the ones in their fifties who just don’t care what you think or anyone thinks, they just get off on being touched, they want it to be slightly inappropriate. And I have to not see any of it. Misread all of it. Maintain this…’
‘Jesse? If I do one more push-up, I’m going to vomit.’
‘Rest.’
I stop. Sit and hug my knees to my chest.
‘Maintain what?’ I ask.
‘A professional distance,’ he says. ‘At all costs. It’s all – muscle and bone, and tendons and ligaments. It’s all…business.’
‘Mmmm,’ I nod. ‘I get that. Is it hard?’
‘Not any more, not most of the time,’ he says. ‘It’s part of the job, right?’
‘So…could you consciously, professionally, callously – thinking of it as therapy, as part of the work you do for a client – just, you know, build Nicola up a little sexually?’ I ask.
He looks at me as if I am insane.
And I probably am.
‘What?’ he looks at me again. I’m hot, sweat trickling under my hoodie. I pull it off.
‘I just can’t imagine how much it sucks for her right now,’ I say. ‘Well, and you see it, too. But it’s just the worst thing. You were talking about the horny twenty-somethings and the menopausal matriarchs. But in the middle are women like me and Nicola. She’s a little older than me, and her kids are older, so I bet this is even more pronounced for her – I’m not sure if it’s an age thing or a life-stage thing – but, you know, late thirties, early forties, with the strength of motherhood and experience behind them, with the release and freedom that goes from those intensive years of caring for babies behind them, the reclaiming of the body, coming into the height of our power…This is when we get our testosterone surge, you know? This is our time to be sex goddesses. Not as bumbling, awkward adolescents, not as anxious twenty-something bar-hoppers – we’ve done that, we’ve found ourselves, paired up, then lost ourselves in motherhood, and then found ourselves again…And so, for Nicola, at what should be this glorious moment, to get dumped by a rat-fuck bastard …a rat-fuck bastard she always assumed she’d be the one to walk out on…’
Jesse stares.
‘Look at her,’ I toss my head in the direction of a pretty twenty-something…runner, I bet, she has the lean body of a runner. She’s not wearing much, and she’s lovely. But self-conscious. Exposed, but self-conscious. She keeps on sucking in her non-existent stomach, looking at herself critically in the mirror. ‘Do you think she’s sexy?’ I ask Jesse. It’s a rhetorical question, but he bristles.
‘I’ve just told you, I practise not thinking like that,’ he snaps.
‘Fine.’ I shrug. ‘I think she’s lovely. But look at her. She doesn’t know the power of her body yet. And I remember being like that – I wish, in retrospect, that I had appreciated and loved and been confident of my young body more. It certainly had some advantages over this one…But I think maybe you can’t. Maybe you need childbirth. I created life, Jesse, is there anything more powerful than that? And I watched my body grow life, and transform itself so totally. And transform again. And there are the stretch-marks and the loose skin on my belly, and no one will ever say I have porn-star boobs again…But my sexual awareness, my sense of self – on every level – what it is now, it is so much more than it used to be. And for Nicola…’
I’m not sure what my point is any more. I pause.
‘Frog-leg sit-ups,’ Jesse says in an odd voice. I lie down. And groan. I’ve forgotten the tenderness.
‘You OK?’ he asks.
‘Fine,’ I mouth. And start curling. Oh, fuck. I think it’s the hips. I feel hot hand imprints on them slamming me down into the bed, into the floor. The wall. Or my ass. My back, frankly, doesn’t feel so great either. Fucking heels. And…
‘Side plank,’ Jesse says. I arrange my body, paying attention to its tenderness. The wrists, they hurt. The shoulders, ditto. The core’s OK. That I owe to Jesse. But I still grimace.
‘Rest – and other side,’ Jesse says. His eyes are on me still, odd.
I decide to continue the exposition. Talking takes my mind off the pain.
‘So there we are, or rather, there Nicola is, a woman hitting this stage of life – blossoming sexually in a way that makes puberty looks like some prairie church choir dress rehearsal. And just as this is happening, your rat-fuck bastard of a husband dumps you – for a pert-boobed intern who doesn’t need to dye her hair blonde to hide the grey – but does anyway, to make it, I don’t know, shinier – with a fetish for anal sex. And he tells you all this. In grotesque, open detail. He tells you how much he wants her, and why – and when you draw the line, when you force him to choose, he chooses this new thing over you. Actually, he doesn’t even choose the new thing, does he? Just the potential of the new thing, a taste of the new thing, because in the end the new thing doesn’t want to be his thing at all, just one of his things…’ I trail off. I reach the stage of planking where talking is impossible and grimace more, groan and start to shake.
‘How does that make you feel?’ I gasp out. And collapse before Jesse says ‘Rest.’
Which he doesn’t say. He just stands there, staring at me.
I should probably not be explaining Nicola’s current sexual needs and frustrations to our mutual trainer. I briefly see their next training session, his hand on her ass, uptight Nic letting out a yelp, and Jesse saying, ‘But Jane said you wanted me to!’ I realise that yesterday’s experience has clearly unhinged me mentally and I need to shut the fuck up. I close my mouth, stand up to stretch…and catch sight of myself in the mirror.
My forearms, my upper arms, are covered with bruises, some imprints of fingers, clear hand marks. The marks on my wrists from Matt’s leather belt are raw, scabs starting to form. The thin red line around my neck is probably least obvious; I only see it because I know it’s there, and the memory of him clipping the PVC-covered metal band around my neck (‘It’s engraved. What do you think it says, fuckslave?’) almost makes me cum on the spot. Other than that line, my neck is fine – just that one brush of the teeth delivered at the airport gate. My shoulders, however, barely covered by the workout tank top, are a mess. His palms, right there, as he pushed me – oh, yes…I make a massively conscious effort not to think what my thighs must look like. Or my ass. Fucking hell.
I leap for my hoodie and pull it on. Jesse stands there, staring.
Probably transfixed not by my exposition of a divorcing woman’s sexual crisis but by the evidence of Matt. On my arms. Everywhere.
Oh, fucking fucking hell.
‘You’d feel like shit,’ I supply the answer to my rhetorical question, because really I’ve gone too far now to stop, and I need to distract him. ‘You’d question your self-worth – and certainly your sexual self-worth. And when you were sweating in the gym with your hot twenty-six-year-old trainer, you’d really want him to, accidentally-on-purpose, caress your ass.’
The silence is deafening. And Jesse is redder than he’s probably ever been in his life.
I am a moron.
Mentally unhinged.
‘I should not have said anything,’ I backtrack. ‘I’m sorry. I’m off-kilter, and seeing her so down made me more so, and I’m just saying shit better left unspoken.’
‘You often do that,’ Jesse says after a pause.
I don’t argue.
‘What next?’ I ask. ‘Make me lift heavy shit. So I shut the fuck up.’
‘Boot-strappers,’ he says. ‘Take off the hoodie. You’ll get too hot.’
‘I’ll be fine.’ I start hopping.
‘Take it off,’ he says. I ignore him. One. Two. Three…
‘So,’ he says. ‘You think of me as your hot twenty-six-year-old trainer?’
I choose not to answer. Eight. Nine. Ten. Eleven.
‘The marks on your arms,’ Jesse says deliberately. Repaying bluntness with bluntness. ‘Are they from Alex?’
I choose not to answer. Which in a way is a way of answering, isn’t it?
Fourteen. Fifteen. The burn starts. Sixteen.
‘How do your wrists feel?’ Jesse’s voice is uneven. ‘Right now?’
Eighteen. Nineteen. Twenty. I grind my teeth.
‘This must really, really hurt.’
I break pace for a moment to look at him.
His sweat pants are loose, but not loose enough.
Apparently he’s not gay.
But at this point, I probably can’t ever introduce him to Lacey’s late-blooming seventeen-year-old daughter when she comes to town to visit her mom.
‘Ten more,’ he says. Professional. ‘Maintain your form.’
When I’m done, curled up in a ball on the floor and hurting everywhere, he sits on the floor very close to me.
‘You want me to give your girlfriend an ego boost,’ he says. ‘By…what? Showing her a little extra attention?’
This is my chance to apologise again, to reiterate that what I raised was totally inappropriate, and clearly stemming from the mental disarray caused by my once happily married parents’ divorce. Or the fucking I endured last night at my forever lover’s hands. Cock. Oh, fuck.
‘Yes,’ I say instead.
‘By…what? Doing something like this?’
He puts a hand on my ass. Intuitively, or rather, inevitably, because they are everywhere, over the imprint of Matt’s hand. ‘Like this?’ he asks. And presses.
I fucking yelp.
Leap up.
‘No,’ I say. ‘Not quite like that.’ I pause. Take his measure. ‘You know what? I was out of line. It was inappropriate. As inappropriate as…’ I pause. He’s flushed. And still hard.
I should stop talking. Now.
‘She’s hurting,’ I say. ‘I feel bad.’ And then, I add, ‘And I feel…generous today.’
We lock eyes. Jesse raises his eyebrows. ‘You are full of surprises today, Jane.’
I shrug. Turn around and leave.
I might need to find a new personal trainer. A new gym.
Fuck.
I want to text Marie, but I’m not quite sure what to say. ‘I just asked Jesse to sleep with Nicola. In retrospect a bad idea. Fuck.’ Nice opening. ‘Also, he’s inferred much too much from the state of my arms.’ Wait, I definitely can’t tell her that. Oh, fuck.
Instead, I text my mom. ‘How are you?’
And then my dad. ‘How was your first night in the new place?’
And then Alex. ‘I love you. But I’m thinking take-out for supper again after all. Sorry.’ And then I start to text, ‘I might need to find a new personal trainer.’ But I delete that one.
And then Nicola. ‘You’re fabulous. In every way. Go seduce an 18-year-old boy.’ It’ll probably make her laugh. Or hate me. I just don’t know.
And finally, I do text Marie. ‘Coffee? Caesars? Come over con kinder in 45?’
My dad texts me back first. ‘Want to come see the new place?’ That’s an easy one. No, not even a little bit. But I’ll have to do the dutiful daughter thing shortly. In the interim: ‘Not today. Soon.’ And, in a sudden return of my anger and resentment, I add, ‘You call Mom today?’ And that’s the end of that conversation.
Marie and I spend the afternoon watching the kids destroy my living room and drinking Caesars. I share nothing. She shares too much. Craig is ‘too too everything’. They’ve set a date for the Charcut-Le Germain meeting, right after Christmas. She’s swooning again, and in the middle of her raptures over Craig I decide that her marriage to JP is effectively over. It’s just a matter of time. The intensity of her attachments and desire for a string of insipid and generally unappealing would-be lovers exhausts me. And I am unfair. I should understand. I should empathise. And I don’t, because…I pause and wonder how badly I want to chase self-awareness, but there is no need to chase it, because it just comes. I don’t empathise because I am utterly selfish. So wrapped up in what fulfils me and its power that I don’t see that Marie’s chasing what I have. That perhaps if I didn’t have it – if it hadn’t come to me as it did – I would be like her. Chasing. And settling for vapid imitations of the real thing.
The real thing. What the fuck is that?
My arms, wrists, back, thighs, pussy, everything hurts.
Each move reminds me. Of the real thing.
I am not jonesing for a Facebook message fix today.
‘Jane!’ Marie snaps. ‘Why do I even bother talking to you?’ She drops her face into her hands theatrically.
‘Tell me,’ I say, mechanically. ‘Tell me.’
And she does. Again. Craig. Craig. Craig. She does not remember Paul’s slight or Zoltan or what’s-his-name who came before. Craig. Craig.
And I wonder if she will meet him at Charcut. And follow him upstairs to a room at Le Germain.
Or if this will be another go-nowhere play.
I wonder if Marie reads too much online porn. Or bad chick lit. I realise I’ve never asked. I start to open my mouth to ask and realise, yet again, that this is not what she wants or needs to hear. And I clasp her hand, and pat her knee.
‘Oh, Marie,’ I say. ‘I understand.’
Fucking liar – me, not her. But what do I say? Do I say I see her heading for a precipice? That I see the end of all of this being an explosive, ugly termination to a marriage she’s been unhappy with for years? That whatever affair she finally manages to execute or confess to JP will be simply an excuse for an exit? That she’s doing her best to provide JP, not the gentlest and most understanding of people in the first place, with a wealth of emotional ammunition in what will be a tremendously ugly divorce?
I want to tell her all of this. And more. How vulnerable she is making herself. What she could do instead. All sorts of things.
But who am I to tell her? How can I tell her anything? I cannot.
I cross my arms on my chest. My palms touch, through my sweater, the places where Matt’s hands dug into me 24 hours ago.
I think I come at the memory.
I accept that I am a total hypocrite.
I listen.
The kids are asleep when Alex comes home. I’m not, but I lie wrapped in covers in the dark, breathing softly, hoping, for the first time in weeks, that he will be too tired to reach for me. I listen to him undress. Slide into bed. His lips touch my forehead…and he rolls away. Sleeps.
I ache. Remember. Dream.