he volume of her orgasm made the objets dart—lean mahogany phallic things collected by the therapist on her travels to New Guinea — rock precariously on their bookshelf perches.
‘A few months of my classes and you too will be able to orgasm at will!’ the couples counsellor promised in a velvety voice. This didn’t seem to reassure the pear-shaped woman with dry flaky skin, lank hair and defeated, astonished eyes sitting next to me, who was surveying the sex therapist with horror.
The spontaneous orgasm had emanated from a curvaceous thirty-year-old redhead who was wearing emphatic lip-liner, a push-up bra and a nametag which read Bianca. This Life Coach, Clinical Hypnotherapist and Marital Healer had the endless vitality usually associated with cruise-ship directors. Bianca stood up from her chair behind her desk . . . and then she kept on
standing up for what seemed like hours. Her long legs were finely shaped and fishnet clad.
‘So, how many months have you and your wife been sexually dysfunctionah’ She sashayed towards Rory, who was smouldering in a beanbag the shade of dog poo. She flicked her tangerine-coloured tresses over her shoulder, took my husband’s hand in hers and smiled. This woman smiled as the sun shines over the Aussie outback of my childhood — relentlessly.
Rory glared savagely in my direction. When I’d suggested therapy, he’d told me he’d rather have steel spikes jack- hammered up each nostril. But after I threatened to deny him sex for the rest of his natural life, he’d sullenly relented — although driving to Muswell Hill in rush hour with an angry husband on the wrong side of the road was probably not the kind of marital therapy we needed, actually.
My beanbag, which was attempting to eat me alive, was so tatty and cheap it could only be made of imitation vinyl. My thighs stuck to it in pools of nervous sweat.
‘Dysfunctional, yes . . .’ Bianca checked her clipboard. ‘Your Significant Other feels you haven’t noticed that she takes longer to reach arousal. What’s your reaction to that. . .’ Bianca peered at the crayoned name tag I’d stuck to my husband’s chest, ‘Rory?’
Rory turned his prisoner-of-conscience countenance in my direction and glowered even more angrily.
‘Well?’ Bianca insisted, squeezing his meaty palm.
‘Well, ugh . . . um. According to my wife, our marriage has . . .’ Rory sank further into his sludge-coloured beanbag as he groped for the right words ‘. . . blown a gasket. Got a flat. Needs a tune up.’
The therapist’s mint-green eyes, hard as peppermint
candies, glittered. A husband who talked of emotions by using car terminology? She was mentally reaching for the speed dial number of her accountant to inform him that she would be able to afford that gazebo, after all, as this was obviously going to take years]
Bianca sidled around the rest of the group introducing herself. There was a pallid pair of newlyweds. A bloke whose John Lennon specs were overwhelmed by his jowly face and lugubrious expression, and by his large librarian wife, who announced that he could only get an erection when wearing her underwear. In the beanbag beside them was a client who was in the middle of a third hysterical pregnancy . . . and he was male. The man whose toupee resembled a dead animal which had just happened to pass away on his head, had brought an imaginary friend.
In other words, just the sort of people with whom you’d like to share your most intimate sex secrets.
As Bianca put on her Enya CD, lit her essential oils in the infuser and made her little introductory jokes (i.e. ‘How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? One — but the light bulb has to really want to change!’) I took the opportunity to examine my surroundings.
The Therapy Centre, a utilitarian, two-storey brick building in North London, had the decor of a shabby motel lobby on a motorway. It was all exhausted pot-plants, worn, grey carpet, cheap beige desks, fluorescent lighting and unwashed windows. The room had the friendly ambience of a concentration camp.
I could see it was also the kind of place where you needed to look at your shoes a lot, because when I tuned back into the conversation, my husband was telling Bianca that, yes, his wife
took a little longer to reach arousal, ‘Say a day and a half]’
‘Um, you can shut up any time now,’ I interrupted, embarrassed.
But no matter how squeamish it made me and how much
Jazz would disapprove, to agree to pay £35 an hour to have my
sexual shortcomings paraded in public proved beyond a doubt
that I really did need therapy.
★ ★ ★ ★
‘And then. . .’ said Jazz, kittenishly brushing her hair from her eyes, ‘he ate strawberries out of my fanny. They were halfcooked and well marinated by the time he devoured them!’
‘I’m so pleased to see you’re both looking after your nutrition,’ I replied, trying not to sound flummoxed.
It was later the same night and we were sitting around my kitchen table, listening in awe to details of Jazz’s erotic adventures with her Internet toy boy. It was like a sexual tutorial.
‘And then, after we’d drunk champagne in the bath, I let him fuck me gently with the neck of the bottle. The bathwater was so hot and the bottle neck was so cold . . .’
‘Oy veh! Obviously dignity is the only thing alcohol doesn’t preserve,’ Hannah put in primly, but nothing was going to interrupt Jasmine’s epiphany.
‘And then, he took some of the ice cubes from the champagne bucket and slipped them inside me, while he licked me. Oh, the sensation of my hot juice and his hot tongue and the melting ice trickling down my thighs,’ she reminisced in a sighing staccato, before concluding with breezy impudence, ‘So, how W3is your day, Cassie?’
‘Oh great,’ I replied dispiritedly. ‘I learned to put a condom on a cucumber.’
The second worst thing about therapy is the communal waiting room. The compulsive gamblers invariably make the sex addicts wager bets with the passive aggressives about who can make the bulimics throw up first.
The worst thing about therapy is the therapists. Early on in our treatment, about late April, Bianca decided I had a ‘hostile vagina’.
‘Excuse me?’ Surely something was being lost in translation?
‘Erom everything Rory has told me in our one-to-one, I think you have an arousal disorder, Cassandra.’
‘No,’ I countered, ‘what 1 have is a job, kids, an angry spouse, high blood pressure, an overdraft and a promotion in the offing.’
‘Hostile vagina, eh?’ Rory rocked back in his beanbag and cocked one leg over the opposite knee. His face broke into a smug smile. It was the first time I’d seen him cheery for weeks. ‘You know what, Cass? I’m beginning to think maybe there really is something to this therapy malarkey after all,’ he gloated. ‘It does seem to explain your lack of horniness.’
‘Hey, how horny would you feel, having worked all day then coming home to spend your time cooking, cleaning . . . and teaching small people to construct oil derricks out of coat hangers? And what about your hostile penis, hmmm?’
Bianca, who obviously didn’t like to be interrupted, clapped her hands to regain the attention of the class. ‘Right. Who knows the basic ways to please a woman?’
I put my hand up. ‘Stacking the dishwasher. Not snoring. And telling a woman she doesn’t look fat in stretch Lycra.’
It was Rory’s turn to speak. ‘To become more cliterate, right?’
Cliterate? God, I thought. Where had he got that one?
Bianca bestowed a ‘go to the top of the class’ beam at my cunning hubby.
‘I’d just like to say that ninety-nine per cent of men give the rest of us a bad name,’ Rory chirped shrewdly, flashing our therapist his most endearing grin.
Bianca’s reciprocating smile was so intense I felt sure it could irradiate soft fruit. ‘Well, I’d just like to say that I’m sure we can help your wife overcome her inhibitions,’ she assured him in her honey-buttered accent.
‘My inhibitions!’ I scorned. ‘Huh! We’re talking about a man who can calculate the total surface area of every room in our house, determine the exact mile-to-the-gallon ratio of a trip from Calais to the South of France — where he effortlessly locates the remote fishing village that’s not even on a map — yet he can’t find my clit^ No, the truth is he just can’t be bothered to find it!’
The women in the room barked laughs of recognition. The men grumbled about women demanding too much. Bianca’s embarrassing solution was to make us sit through a sex video, depicting ‘willing’ couples in acts of intercourse which were so graphic and badly lit, that it made my legs go to jelly. Classmates whose legs still functioned properly rose shakily to their feet and fled, leaving human-shaped holes in the walls. One thing was for sure. I would soon be over my sexual inhibitions. Mainly because I would now be celibate for the rest of my life.
By mid-May, the only thing on my mind was whether or not I was going out of it. Why else would I ever have insisted on dragging Rory to therapy? Hannah was adamant that I must persevere. All therapy was confrontational and difficult, she assured me as we had our heels pumiced at the local Chinese
nail bar. Things would turn a corner if I just stuck with it. ‘And whatever you do, don’t mention your misgivings to Jasmine, dah-ling. She hates you seeing a shrink.’
‘Oh sweetie, I don’t hate you seeing a marriage therapist,’ Jazz said, wafting late as usual into the nail bar. ‘I’m seeing one too.’
‘WhatT I nearly fell off my stool into a bucket of pedicure shavings.
‘. . . and a Pilates instructor and a dentist, and a yoga teacher and a dog walker.’
Hannah jerked so violently she accidentally kicked over her foot-soaking bucket. ‘What happened to your Internet toy boy? Don’t tell me you’ve contracted some kind of CTD — Computer-Transmitted Disease.’
But Jazz remained immune to goading. ‘Well, my main squeeze is still my divine little toy boy. But I do have this small, emergency back-up Love God called Zen who trims my trees. We had sex for the first time yesterday morning, then the second, third, fourth and fifth time during the afternoon.’
‘Um, Jazz, I think you’ll find that running two or three simultaneous relationships for more than a month and you stop being an adulterer and officially qualify as a Mormon,’ I told her. ‘And what about Studz? Is he still cheating on you?’
‘Well, I’m not stalking him any more, sweetie. But last night he told me he was out with our neighbour, the dentist. And well, that was impossible. Because I was — but obviously I can’t say anything, can I? A rather modern situation, no? Love thy neighbour, but don’t get caught. That’s my motto.’
‘Jasmine,’ Hannah said seriously, ‘all these one-night stands, no matter how much you deny it, are just a shelter, however fragile, against the terror and despair of a broken heart. You do realize that?’
Jazz’s face crumpled for a second, before she steadied herself. ‘I’ve never had a one-night stand, Hannah,’ she corrected airily. ‘Just a few one-night relationships.’
My relationship, meanwhile, had no idea what side its bed was buttered on. It seems to me that there are very few aphrodisiacal bonuses to being able to visualize the 8,000 nerve endings in one’s cervix contracting during orgasm. This is what I thought as I stood before eight strangers holding my crutch and moaning in an effort to liberate my sexual chi. Blushing and sweating, I was suffering from a performance anxiety I hadn’t felt since those hedonistic hours of enforced folk dancing in Kogarah Bay Primary School.
‘Are the nerves in your vulva sensorium quivering?’ Bianca demanded of me.
‘Urn. .
‘Fewer than fifty per cent of women actually achieve orgasm during intercourse.’ Bianca’s voice was syrupy with sincerity. ‘And I am going to show you how to fix that. Class, open your eyes.’
We were greeted by the sight of an anatomically correct inflatable woman lying, legs akimbo, on the floor before us. ‘Now, I’d like a volunteer.’
I stifled a laugh. Finally we had a partner for the toupeed man’s imaginary friend. Our ‘therapist’ had at last pushed the boundaries of reality too far. But to my amazement, all the men put their hands up to volunteer. A minute later I watched in a state of dazed disbelief as my husband was instructed on how to stroke his inflatable date to orgasm. He was advised on what pressure and rhythm and digit to use. Having mastered the finger, thumb and palm techniques, Bianca then instructed him
on when to apply pressure to the pubic bone, when to pull on the plastic clitoris and when and how to rub her rubber labia. ‘Manual over other forms of stimulation are preferred,’ Bianca advised. ‘You don’t drive a car with your tongue, now do you? Once we’ve mastered manual stimulation, we can move onto cunnilingus. Now, if this doll were me, my genitals would be swelling with blood, my pulse would be racing, my muscles contracting involuntarily. My feet would be arching and shaking. My breasts would heave . . .’ As her voice crescendoed, Bianca’s cleavage, which was levered up near her chin by her lace underwear, jumped up and down. ‘Sweat would be surfacing on my breasts. My heart would pump frantically as my breathing becomes fast and shallow. Oh yes. Faster, harder, faster. Ffarder!!’
As the doll neared its imaginary orgasm, Bianca helpfully provided the soundtrack and running commentary. ‘Oh yes . . . Yes . . . YES!! Excellent, Rory! Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’
I noted my husband’s flushed cheeks and panting breath. Eor someone who hated therapy, he sure could put on a brave face.
‘My nostrils flare and now my climax, with contractions at consistent 0.8-second intervals, will put me into an orgasmic spasm. Easter! Easter!! Harder!! HARDER!! EASTERRRR . . .’
Rory’s fingers were flying in and out and up and down the plastic pudenda. And then Bianca moaned so loudly it shook the cheap walnut panelling.
‘Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhooooohhhhohohohohoh . .A
As Bianca’s purrs subsided into silence, the only sound was the pinging of men’s fly buttons popping across the room.
‘Very good. Note how a warm glow envelops my waist and chest. Even my toes relax. At my sexual summit, a total paroxysm of pleasure was reached. Well done, Rory.’ Then she
pulled the plug on her inflatable woman. This week’s revision is for you all to try these techniques at home.’
I looked at the plastic woman who was crumpling in on herself with a sad sigh. But we were amateurs! Wasn’t it dangerous? We didn’t have a licence to operate such heavy machinery.
But at Bianca’s insistence, that was how Rory and I spent the next week, just the two of us, cosied up on the bed — a searchlight trained up my fanny. Karma Sutra open on page 362, studying diagrams and consulting the text. What, you ask, could be better? Well, from my point of view, just about bloody anything.
★ ★ ★
‘Just about anything’ was also starting to sum up Jazz’s recreational sexual activities. She had dyed her hair blonder, no doubt so that men could find her more easily in the dark. First came her plumber. ‘He really has sorted out my pipes,’ she chirruped gleefully.
‘I need a man who is good at DIY too — so he can fix my pelvic floor.’ I crossed my legs, needing the loo, and glanced around Sotheby’s auction room. Sotheby’s is like an orphanage for heirlooms. Hannah was bidding on a bulging commode, which looked like a chest of drawers that had over-eaten.
‘And he’s such a man. A real man, you know?’ Jazz added dreamily.
‘Man? He’s not a man,' Hannah scoffed. ‘He’s a marital aid. Getting yourself secretly serviced by a bit of rough is not a fulfilling alternative to a more intellectual relationship.’
‘Maybe not. But by God it’s fun! Look, you can smell him in my hair.’ Jazz leaned towards us. ‘Here, take a whiff.’
‘Ugh! Get away! Can’t you just use hairspray, like any normal
womanT I asked her, appalled. But had to admit to a twinge of jealousy. Fun? What a long-forgotten F word that was.
Her next conquest was an alternative comic.
‘Alternative to what? Being funny?’ I asked, peering at the ‘windswept and interesting’ photo on his flyer. We were making our monthly sortie up the motorway to Costco, the wholesale warehouse on the North Circular, in Jazz’s Volvo estate.
‘Let me guess. He performs a one-man show . . . and there are more people on the stage than in the audience?’ Hannah chortled, crumpling the pamphlet. ‘What on earth attracted you to a putz like that?’
‘Because his opening line was to ask me did I know which two fingers are the most effective for women to use during masturbation. Then held up his own hand and said, “Mme.”
Hannah barked out another derisive laugh. ‘I cannot believe you fell for that.’
‘Yes, Jazz. If only laughter really were the best medicine, we’d be so healthy now!’ I added. But why did I feel sick with envy?
The next man on her menu was her car mechanic, a biker named Jism. ‘Apparently he changed his name to get back into the pubs which have banned him.’
‘Really?’ I asked, intrigued. ‘Now that’s what I call Alcoholics Anonymous.’
It was a Saturday afternoon and I’d brought my kids around for a swim in Jazz’s basement pool while she waited for a man Studz had organised to evaluate the property for insurance purposes.
‘He’s mad about me,’ Jazz giggled. ‘My bikie.’
‘Must be a condition of his probation,’ Hannah retorted.
‘When he wants sex he says that it’s time to “unleash the meat sabre”. Isn’t that adorable? And he’s not kidding. One night
he wore a fluorescent-coloured condom. When I turned off the light, I thought I was going to bed with Darth Vader!’
‘Okay, okay, enough already,’ Hannah huffed, thin-lipped. ‘The baroque ecstasy, the grotesque compulsion of your conquests is, frankly, disgusting.’
‘Oh well,’ I rationalized to Hannah. ‘At least with a man with tattoos, if the sex gets dull there is always something to read.’
Next in Jazz’s game of relationship roulette was the lead singer of the ‘Suicide Bombers’.
‘A rock star? Ugh,’ I cringed. ‘How can you put him in your mouth? I mean, you never know where he’s been!’
‘Hey, don’t knock unhygienic until you’ve tried it. He won’t let me shower before he goes down on me,’ Jazz divulged, with sassy insouciance. ‘Actually he prefers me not to shower for a few days!’
‘Bravo,’ Hannah countered, with equal cool. ‘You must send away for the Germaine Greer Feminist gift pack.’
We were lurking up the back of our Pilates class.
‘Don’t pretend you aren’t jealous. That man has made masturbation pleasurable for millions of women. He says he loves my ass.’
To be honest, I could understand her excitement. To have your bottom admired by a famous rock star, who not only counts them to get to sleep at night, but has also had more bottoms than hot dinners, often simultaneously, is a compliment indeed. I felt an unsettling twinge of chagrin.
‘It’s sooo exciting, sweetie, don’t you think?’
‘What I think is that you should be put on some register and shunned by polite society,’ Hannah decried.
‘You’re so bland, Hannah, you could dilute water, do you know that?’ Jazz told our mutual friend affectionately. ‘Have you
any idea how lovely it is to feel desired again?’ There was a trace of grief in her voice, which she quickly extinguished. Jazz was like one of those 3-D cards you buy in a gift shop which change depending on how you tilt them. Sometimes she was a femme fatale, other times 1 could see the wounded wife in her. ‘Feeling desired is my new hobby,’ she said, leaving for the changing room. ‘And so much more fun than Pilates.’
And a lot more fun than couples’ counselling, I mused. Jazz may have a rock star, but I was beginning to think that I had rocks too . . . m my head.
Last and most definitely least, was a performance poet she picked up at Tate Modern. The reason he didn’t last was that he lost her keys. When I received Jazz’s SOS phone call to come and pick her up from the Marriott Ffotel, I thought she meant he had lost the keys to her car.
‘No. To the handcuffs.’
‘Jazz, handcuffs are only acceptable if you’re an undercover cop with Scotland Yard,’ I chided.
When Hannah and I collected her from the side entrance of the hotel in Swiss Cottage to drive her to the locksmiths, a coat flung around her negligeed shoulders, her hands shackled before her, Hannah shook her head disapprovingly.
‘Dah-ling, aren’t you afraid you’re going to lose your amateur status?’
★ ★ ★ ★
‘Amateur’ just about summed up my feelings about my counsellor too. By the end of June I had enough advice to see me through several husbands. 1 also had a hunch that if I told my therapist 1 had suicidal feelings, she would have asked me to pay in advance. So far, she had talked me into buying a state-of-the- art vibrator which was ‘totally realistic’. ‘Oh, so it cums, coughs.
farts, goes limp then switches ofh’ I asked bleakly. When I saw the size of the cheque Rory wrote her, I was tempted to insert her slide projector, pointer and maybe even a beanbag into an intensely private part of her own anatomy.
Next, she pressured me into buying testosterone patches to cure my ‘Desire Disorder.’
‘Testosterone?’ I looked at her in disbelief. ‘Oh yes. That’s bound to make me more attractive. To men!’
She also tried to book me in for Laser Vaginal Rejuvenation, a mere snip, literally, at £3,000. ‘A little labial trimming would give you a designer vagina. An Armani Punani would solve all of your sexual inhibitions,’ she purred.
The only inhibition I had now was Baggy Fanny Phobia. I could never again have sex with my husband for fear of losing him in that aircraft hangar between my legs.
Just when I felt that it was pretty well impossible for my counsellor to be able to counsel me into feeling any worse about myself, she decided that what I lacked was experimentation. I tried to develop kinks, I really did. I wore Rory’s underwear. I even went commando. But, believe me, as a mother of two with no pelvic floor, one must be cautious about not wearing any knickers. On one occasion, one of the Benwah balls Bianca had made me buy, fell out in a staff meeting. I had to pretend to be a player of miniature bowling.
When I complained, Bianca insisted on a one-on-one session during which she pursed her lips before crisply placing crosses in boxes on her questionnaire. ‘Do you like the lights on or the lights off?’ she grilled me.
‘I like to have the lights on,’ Bianca’s eyes lit up for a moment, until I added, ‘so I can read.’
‘Do you like S and M?’ she persevered, pen-wielding.
‘Certainly not! I don’t like to be beaten. Not even at Monopoly.’
‘Well, what about talking dirty?’ Bianca asked exasperatedly.
‘Talking dirty for me is “James, wash your face. Jenny, your room is a pigsty!”’
‘Do you talk in bed at all?’ she asked, in despair.
‘Oh yes — usually about whose turn it is to do the school run and when the plumber’s coming to repair the leaky loo.’
‘Well, do you have any questions for me?’ the therapist asked tetchily, smacking her clipboard down onto the table.
‘Well, yes, my most burning question is . . .’
‘Yes?’ Bianca leaned forward expectantly.
‘Can you use flavoured yoghurt for thrush or not? It’s all I’ve got in the fridge.’
Bianca was not amused. ‘You need to develop an erotic portfolio,’ she announced curtly. ‘I understand that you are not that comfortable with or good at oral sex. You should start by practising fellatio on a phallically shaped organic vegetable.’
I reeled back. ‘My husband told you that?’
‘Well, that’s what he implied.’
‘Did he now? Well, I’d just like to imply that I’m not that comfortable with premature ejaculation either.’
‘Really?’ Bianca, eyes glinting, made a note. ‘I’ll be back in a mo.’ She swept out to the waiting room.
‘It is not premature ejaculation! It’s what’s termed in the popular vernacular as a “quickie”,’ Rory said defensively, surfing into Bianca’s office on a wave of self-justification.
‘Ha! You’re so premature, Rory, that last night I wasn’t even in the room! Who were you fantasizing about, by the way, when I walked in?’ I demanded.
‘Perdita Pendal, if you must know.’
Kathy Lette
'PerditaV It was his turn to score a direct hit.
‘Yes. In her prissy little pinstriped suit.’
‘Ugh!’ I recoiled. ‘ I can’t believe you’d let that woman have sex in my bedroom!’
‘There’s only one way to deal with a premature ejaculator,’ began Bianca, trying to regain control.
‘Have your orgasm first?’ I suggested crossly. ‘And anyway, isn’t it too early in the therapy course to be having this conversation?’ I said to really annoy her.
Bianca shook her head at her wayward pupil, before insisting that I help Rory master the art of the slow build. What this meant, apparently, was logging on to the London School of Striptease Website of Empowerment. My heart sank. Funny, isn’t it? How one woman’s empowerment is another woman’s sleazy degradation.
Trying new things sexually is not my favourite pastime. For one thing, it creates terrible eye wrinkles caused by puckering up into a squint and shouting, ‘You want me to do WHATt'
This feeling was reinforced when Bianca demonstrated the Peek-a-boo home pole-dancing kit which she suggested we purchase from her, complete with choreography manual, fake dance money and a garter to tuck it into. ‘The Peek-a- boo dance pole goes up or down in sixty seconds,’ Bianca assured us.
Story of my life, I sighed dismally.
I’d pushed so hard for Rory to come to marriage therapy and now, as I watched women gyrating on Bianca’s computer screen, all I felt was a profound sense of desolation. Bianca was adamant that she could lay us down beside the still waters — all we had to do was be more patient with each other’s desires. And she was right. Any slight irritation I had from then on was soothed by
How To Kill Your Husband
simply burying my face in the pillow for a few hours and screaming and screaming and screaming.
1 was beginning to think that the only tip a marriage counsellor should give is: not to have any marriage counselling
UNDER ANY BLOODY CIRCUMSTANCES WHAT-SO-BLOODY-EVER.