Chapter 2

Meaningful Sex

That night – Lying with this man I’ve known for a decade (longer if you count being acquainted with him for two years before we even touched one another). He smells the same, the feel of him in the bed beside me is the same but instead of being here, whole and strong and with a sense of belonging, I’m here with a heart that’s been through the log-splitter. The pain of it is real, not a metaphor for some troubling emotional state. When I breathe, my left side hurts. Throat’s constricted, lungs feel smaller, blood pumps erratically, as if an on-going state of physical emergency exists.

     I remember his passion when we first got together, I remember our struggles to make a living and to manage pre-existing family relationships, ex relationships, the new baby when he arrived, our worries about the future. The passion had held us close. It was how we’d made it this far. Can it keep us together through this sort of difficulty? Right now, it’s hard to imagine it can, it’s hard to imagine it hasn’t all been lost, thrown away, no, ejaculated away into a stranger’s vagina while I planned a re-location to the continent armed with a fresh understanding of phrasal verbs.

     Talking isn’t easy (understatement!). Still, he offers no apology for what he’s been doing. The air of arrogance persists, born, I suppose, of having two women on the go at once. I detest it but, for reasons I can’t explain, find my disgust tempered with a certain detached curiosity. It’s weird but I think I’m actually intrigued. The same question over and over again - why is he here at all? Perhaps, just perhaps, he wants me to pull a rabbit out of the hat and make it possible for us to put everything back together again? Perhaps he knows he’s made a terrible mistake but an abject apology at this stage would rob him of too much, too soon?  How the hell do I know? I always thought we’d be able to talk anything out. Never, ever guessed the activity could manifest as something as terrifying as having to land an F1-11 - blindfold.

     “I can’t tell you the details – they would only hurt you…” he says.I ask  my brain to perform a translation and decide that what he really means is he can’t tell me the details because he’s too ashamed of them. Nevertheless, hurt is a distinct possible accompaniment to over-detailed confession, so my stressed metabolism and I decide to try and confine conversation to the subject of Us.

     This works. A few genuine tears about ‘The Way We Were’ (literally a few weeks ago) and we’re holding each other. Conversation begins, whispered in the dark. A few bricks fall out of the wall he’s been trying to build between us so that he could share intimacy with someone else and not die of guilt. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, he drags us both into murkier waters. “Haven’t you ever wanted to sleep with another man while we’ve been together?” he asks.

     What kind of question is that? Is he asking me because he really thinks I’ve cheated on him? Is he asking for my sympathy? Or does he want me to lie very convincingly, swear he’s the only man I’ll ever want even after this unsavoury episode and thereby win back his heart? I just don’t have a clue. I am stunned and clueless. This means I have no choice but to fall back on The Truth. Shitting hell.

    “No! No, of course not! Well, well maybe – oh, yes. Oh well, probably,yes…” I mumble. “I mean, well, I have. Yes, okay. I admit, it’s a powerful urge when it comes and they look back at you suggesting it could even be possible. But (and this is the absolute truth Kev) I couldn’t do that to you. Not after everything we’ve been through and not knowing how it would make you feel. Doing that, to you, it would change how I felt about myself. I would feel well, greedy and untrustworthy.”

     Unfortunately, my total honesty is received less than gratefully. He appears to interpret my reluctance to do him wrong as a symptom of, wait for it, sexual repression. While I lie rigid in the dark, mentally wrestling my bewilderment, “Maybe you should sleep with other men?” he says and bewilderment is replaced by prickling indignation.

        “I should sleep with other men? Oh,” (the words are hard to find). “Oh well, ok. It’ll be that easy I suppose. You can go from the interested-eye-contact phase to falling into bed with one another in a flash - that is, if there’s a bed in the vicinity of the Garden Centre car park, or the French Coffee Shop, or the hairdressers...”

“The hairdressers? You fancy your hairdresser? Why don’t you just ask him to…”

      “Kev! He massages my scalp with scented, soapy hands is all! Ok, so he’s into working out as far as I can tell – and maintaining a year-round, healthy tan beneath his strong, dark, curly hair… “

      “Who did you meet in the French Coffee Shop?”

      “No-one! Well, I didn’t meet him, exactly. He was younger than me, dressed in denim, had a guitar (not that I noticed very much). He overheard me discussing the paradoxes of time travel in a totally-lacking-any-scientific-knowledge sort of way with the boys and he was laughing to himself and then we made eye contact. He was still smiling when I saw him standing by the wheelie bins outside. I just wondered what it would be like to have sex with someone who found me that amusing.”

     There’s a moment’s silence. Then “What about women?” he asks.

     Another twist. Women? What about women? We all know it’s there as a possibility, I suppose. We all know it would probably be very nice indeed and, let’s face it, we’ve all had the odd fantasy. Ok, maybe more than the odd one. So what does he want? Names? Well let’s think about this. Yep, I can come up with a few if I have to. He’s quiet for a few moments, moments I spend wondering what the nice lady serving teas at the Highland Antiques Centre would do with the knowledge that her glossy plait and candy-pink fingernails had led to her being named as one of my potential lesbian sex partners.

      Now Kev and I haven’t actually had sex since my return from Edinburgh. No, I tell a lie, it’s been longer than that. During the Course, those weekends when I was home, well obviously he’d been distracted by the fact that he’d been getting it elsewhere and I’d been exhausted after hours of intensive conjugation with a roomful of foreign students.

      “The thought of you having sex with someone else, especially a woman, gives me a hard on,” he says and pressing against my right leg I can feel an erection like a broom handle. This is more than a little disturbing. In the dark, as emotionally distant from each other as we are, it feels like it belongs to some nameless stranger. Now I know there’s many a ‘sex-blog’ out there, in which this kind of episode is the entire point of putting index finger to keyboard, but I am not a sex blogger. Frankly, I’m not that interesting. Stop reading now if that’s a disappointment. Maybe I’m a freak, but I don’t get turned on by excess, or maltreatment, or thinking I’m being bad, or fetishistic indulgences, or pretend implements of torture, or animal noises, or being smothered in warm lard. Yes, I know, I am a freak. Freakishly dull. I once got off on being in a hotel bedroom with the window wide, holding Kev against me, drinking in his scent, both of us naked, no kids, no customers and the sound of the street rising up, close by, in the soft warmth of an early summer afternoon. Sorry.

Moments later things get so much worse. After only the briefest precursory exploration of  my labia with the index finger of his left hand, he pushes my legs apart, rolls on top and (I’m sorry but accuracy demands the term) fucks me like there’s no tomorrow (which of course, for us, there might not be).

      Oh God. How utterly depressing and, at the same time, very uncomfortable. A small muscle just above my pubic bone feels like its going to snap. Complaining seems pointless, weak and pathetically feminine. Something I don’t believe I am. This, I suppose, is the first real evidence that something of a definite rift has developed between my man and me. Kev’s sex-drive has mutated. He’s coming from a very different place, so to speak. Sex for us was a love-fuelled fire ignited by a chemical spark, that man-woman thing arising out of talking and relating and uncovering one another, soul-touching, emotional bonding, getting into one other and opening up to share. The earth used to move. A lot. Right now, the Gates’ ancient bedstead is rhythmically shuddering like its frame might split but that’s as far as it goes. When I try to move (a little oxygen being necessary for continuance of life) he pushes me impatiently back into place, hard as steel or concrete inside me and just, I have to say, as cold. I have never experienced it before (thank the Lord) but this is most definitely, for sure and certain, piece-of-meat sex.

      He has an orgasm without me. Leaning over the side of the bed, I feel around to locate a sock (mine or his - don’t care) and wipe semen off my inner thighs with it.  I feel insulted. Insulted enough to grab this opportunity for complete ‘honesty’ and swing it in his direction like a baseball bat.

     “Well, if you really want me to I guess I could,” I sigh, taking up the conversation as though his deeply penetrative thrusts have barely interrupted my thought patterns. “But not out of sexual repression – more out of desperation for an orgasm. You know, most of the time lately you can’t be bothered to put the effort in. I know you get tired and the days go on and it’s a treadmill and so on and so on… but I never stopped thinking about you, you know? Used to get horny as hell when you were out then you’d come home with that frown on your face, grumpy and critical, too busy all evening in the shed lubricating your power tools to do anything for me.” I’m shocking myself by what I have to say and then I shock myself still further by beginning to masturbate beside him. I haven’t ever done it beside him before. I always did it when he was out in case he was offended or realized he couldn’t make me come as effectively as I could. Oh my God. Will he forgive me?

     He stifles an alarmed snort then, “You should do that more often,” he says, “It’s a terrific turn – on.”

     Bloody hell. Just doesn’t get it, does he? “I do do it often,” I confess. “I’ve been doing it almost every day for the last two years.” This is a slight exaggeration but useful in support of a very important point. Sexual frustration born of the sheer, stress-drenched pace of everyday life seems like a pretty predictable part of any long-term relationship. Just because one partner decides to invest in a squirty bottle of lubricant and manage the situation doesn’t mean it isn’t experienced, equally, by both parties. As obvious as this seems to me, it seems like big news to Kev.   

Knocked off balance, he’s intrigued. For a moment it feels like we might be on the threshold of a breakthrough, but then he rallies his recently honed powers of total self-immersion and demonstrates a determination to stick to his guns. A mis-guided strategy on his part, I reckon.

     ”But I never knew… you’ve never done it in front of me - were you rep – I mean shy?” he asks.

     “What! No! No I was not fucking repressed! What are you talking about? I was frustrated and I was thoughtful about dealing with that. Oh! (Excuse me)I thought it might make you feel inadequate. I thought, Ooo! That, like most men, you had a bit of a sensitive ego when it came to your sexual performance and that my frequently having to masturbate myself to satisfaction would, Oh-my-God! Well, bruise you. That would have made matters worse, wouldn’t it? Can’t talk anymore – wait a minute Ummm…”

     “I don’t think so,” he says moodily, but I know he’s talking rubbish. He’s also tugging himself erect in the wake of my self-induced climax. We fuck again but I’ve already come and still don’t find the situation as exciting as he seems to.

     “You know, non-orgasmic sex is wonderful in the right frame of mind,” I tell him when he’s done for a second time and his brain’s begun to function again. “I was still giving you love even when you weren’t giving me orgasms. Anyway, doesn’t every one in a long-term relationship arrive at a point where, even though it’s still all about love, the sex is not the red hot stuff it was in the beginning? Can’t be sustained that, can it? But if you’ve still got something warm and nourishing, you’re luckier than most. We were luckier than most, weren’t we Kev?”

     Lying here in the dark with this possessed stranger whom I thought I knew, I can’t help suspecting his thought patterns have been disrupted by some kind of malign influence. These aren’t his ideas, his misunderstandings. I know Kevin as an intuitively warm human being, easily distressed by the bad things that go on in the world, eager to help anyone in trouble, a little bit feckless and a little bit prone to self-justification but with a heart firmly in the right place. No, he hasn’t developed this alternative point of view regarding our relationship by himself. Someone has hacked their way into his files and corrupted them. Someone has been feeding him behaviour-justifying garbage and because it meant he got ‘free’ sex if he kept nodding, he’s decided to embrace it. Is it even possible to undo the damage?  It has to be easier to give up and say goodbye. Should I bother to try and save ‘us’, or will the attempt just bring me down?

     “You know you like to write Lizzie,” he says, interrupting both my silent evaluation and a repeat of my tidy-up procedure, this time using his underpants. “Why don’t you go out and sleep with a few guys, experimentally, and write about it?”

Oh for God’s sake! I am hugely tempted to rub the soiled underpants in his stupid, insensitive face! Now, let’s see…why don’t I do that? Whoa, it’s a tough one, but how about this - maybe something called self-respect would get in the way? Maybe I just don’t like using people or putting myself up to be used? Once upon a time, like a few weeks ago, he would have known that. It would’ve been important to him to believe it. If he’d thought any differently he’d have been disgusted with me.

     I think back to when we were first together and remember with a pang that he was scared if I even picked up a male friend from the airport by myself. “What’re you scared of?” I would ask him. “D’you think I’m gonna stop the car in a lay-by, shag him behind some bushes and come on home to you?” Never, ever dreamed I’d need to be afraid, or that Kev was the one who was actually capable of the lay-by and bushes scenario.

     Still can’t make up my mind whether we’re worth hanging on to. Feeling shunted into a particularly lack-lustre sexual siding, I picture myself, split-screen fashion, two images side-by-side, sitting alone beside the woodburner wearing a plaid shawl and petting the cat, and sprawled across a stranger’s duvet wearing black, split-crotch panties. I can’t deny it. The shawl, the cat and the woodburner are infinitely more appealing. “Well, you know,” I tell him dejectedly, anger once again beginning to roll round inside me like a thorny tumbleweed. “I suppose it might just be the answer.”

     He reaches for my hand and sighs and I wonder, as my mind does cartwheels in the dark and the little muscle just above my pubic bone throbs, whether or not he believes I’ve come to some twisted arrangement with him that involves shagging my hairdresser.

Sometime shortly after mid-day, though you’d never know it because it’s mid-winter and hardly gets light this far north - Though neither of us sleeps a wink, we both lie in bed until mid-day. I’m aware that I can’t seem to bring myself to get up and face life. Perhaps, I tell myself, he’s in the same condition. He bloody well ought to be.

    When I do finally sit at their breakfast table forcing down half a bowl of sugar-free, organic Grape Nuts, Kev’s parents are kind enough to want to offer their support. It could be just my state of mind, but some of it seems a wee bit contradictory.

    “Perhaps you’re being too understanding?” suggests his father.

    “His French course was very important to him,” says his mother. “You know – burning his books?”

     “I’m doing my best to be reasonable,” I tell her and his father says, “You don’t want to be too reasonable, after all, it’s him who’s had the affair… maybe you’re putting up with too much?”

     “Where would he find the time?” muses his mother. “I would’ve thought he’d be far too busy…”

     Neil Gates grins. “There’s always time for infidelity…”

We decide we’re going back home. Neil and Trisha support us in that decision – a few bedroom walls still need rubbing down, Neil is in the middle of refurbishing the boomerang-production facility and, whatever they may say, who really wants other people’s relationship problems holed up in the spare bedroom? Not really much of a choice for us then, is there? Children, school, a business to keep afloat. Even as we tramp back down the stairs with armfuls of plastic hardware Eldest could be counting the cost of having left the bath taps running whilst he designed another level on ‘Far Cry’, or trying to scrub away the blackened evidence of a left-boiling-for-at-least-an-hour Super Noodle situation. Still, and for the first time in my life, the thought of going home fills me with absolute dread. It’s what we worked together so hard to get and keep, not to mention the fact that my divorce settlement had made the house purchase possible in the first place. Rendering’s peeling in places and the windows are dirty. Poor, uncared-for home. I had always believed it was what we both wanted. Can I really have been wrong? Has he always been just a liar and a cheat but I couldn’t see it? Did he just use me and my resources to get on in life with a view to off-loading me, us, as soon as that was possible? Am I a fool? Or is it a simple, modern truth that this sort of thing happens to everybody in the end, no matter how sure they are when they start out? Is infidelity about taking a wrong turn, or does it just plough into you somewhere along the line like a runaway juggernaut?