Chapter 16 - Rules Made To Be Broken

A Dress on a String, a Frosted Glass Screen, a Whisky and Coke, and a Trick Learned in the Shower.

What are rules for, really? I have turned that over a lot since.

The closeness we found on the gravel shoulder, the night with Justin, held for about a week. Then the gentle talk started up again, the way it always did, and it turned out Justin had not been the end of anything, only a door, and Caleb wanted to go back to couples. We drew up new rules the way architects draw a safety net, calm and technical, going over every place a person could fall and fitting something underneath it, as though we had not already fallen once and were stringing the net while still lying at the bottom of the drop. No move to kiss anyone without a shared look first and the okay sign. A squeeze on the thigh or the arm to say I have had enough, take me out of this. No sex with the other person unless we had both agreed to it out loud, beforehand. And above all of them, said last and meant most, the one we treated like a load-bearing wall. Nobody leaves the room.

We thought we had a sophisticated plan. A system, a vocabulary, hand signals like a third base coach. I felt safer for it, and that was the trick of it, because I believed the rules would hold us. I believed a latch could hold a door that two people were leaning on from the other side.

Every one of these nights began the same civilised way, drinks first on neutral ground, as though we were two couples thinking of going in together on a beach house rather than what we were actually auditioning for. Somewhere around the second drink the evening tipped, without anyone naming it, into the thing it had always been going to be.

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We had met Kate and Lucas at the wine tour. They were the couple who had circled me at the end of that night, the night I stood at the bar watching Caleb’s mouth find Brie’s. Kate had been drunk and flirty then, all hands and flattery. They were younger than us by about ten years, and on the texts since they had been dry and funny and not too keen, which by the standard I was working with had read like a glowing reference.

At the rooftop bar Kate was a different woman, or maybe just a sober one. She was a horse person through and through, a long face and a high handsome forehead and a wide mouth full of teeth, plainly more at ease with a thousand pounds of animal than with a conversation over drinks. Lucas was loose and faintly flirty, and early on, flexing one arm in a way that was meant to be a joke and was not entirely, he leaned in and said, ‘You’ll find out later how good I am in bed,’ and winked. Something in me recoiled at the flat certainty of it. I should have listened to that. I had stopped listening to that part of myself months ago. The two of them were more like mates than husband and wife, a sarcastic, jokey back and forth that never once opened into anything, no real talk under it, nothing to take hold of. Pleasant. Not a thing in either of them I could feel my way toward.

When I asked how they had come to all this, Kate told me the way you would give a stranger directions to the carpark. ‘He cheated on me at the Races,’ she said, ‘and I was still breastfeeding the youngest.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, because there is nothing else a person can say to that. Lucas took a long pull on his whisky and Coke and produced a sheepish grin and filled the silence for her. ‘We worked out we could stay together this way,’ he said, ‘without having to leave each other, and we both get a bit of fun.’

I looked at Kate while he said it and thought I understood her a little better, the flat eyes, the way she already seemed to be running the table. A woman betrayed while she is still feeding a baby does not, it turns out, always leave. Sometimes she stays and makes herself the one who decides. If she was the one arranging every night, choosing the couples, writing the rules, then she was never again going to be the woman crying at home in a milk-stained shirt while her husband had his fun somewhere else. She had not escaped the thing that was done to her. She had simply moved to the other end of it.

There is something I have never properly admitted, even to myself, about what I was doing in those rooms. I never once thought about the man. Not Lucas, not any of them. At every meet the whole of my effort went one way, to be the most beautiful, the funniest, the easiest woman in the room, so that at some point in the night Caleb would look across at me and think, what on earth am I doing this for, my wife is the best thing here, I just want her. That was the entire game. Not pleasure. Not adventure. A competition I had entered against women I had never met, for a prize I already owned, or thought I did. I went in each time hoping only that the other woman would not turn out to be better than me, and that when it was over he would still choose me most. I never felt the smallest flicker of excitement about who I would be with. It was survival in a cocktail dress. Because the sum underneath it was very simple, and I did it every time without once saying it out loud. If I lost Caleb, I lost the children, the house, the history, the whole shape of a life. So I competed. For my own husband. And I called it letting go.

When they suggested moving down to our room, Caleb was sitting opposite me, not beside me. So when the moment came I could not reach his leg, and he could not reach mine. The first failure of the night was simple geography. Our whole safety system depended on the two of us being within arm’s reach, and we were a table apart.

It was a one bedroom unit, with a bathroom set between the door and the bed, a frosted glass screen the only thing dividing the two. Lucas came in last, whisky still in his hand. As I stepped through he took the string that tied my little black dress at the back and pulled it, and the dress fell open and slid to the ground, and I made a small sound and clutched it up against myself. Lucas laughed. Kate’s face did something irritated, and she said to Caleb, ‘He’s never done that before,’ the way people tell you their dog has never once jumped up at a stranger, as though it were a compliment to the stranger and not simply a thing they had failed to train out of him. Then, almost in defiance, though perhaps I was reading into it, she took my husband’s head in her hands and pulled it down slowly to hers and kissed him properly, openly, with tongue, and he moved into it and kissed her back. I felt it land under the breastbone, the first flinch. And Lucas was already on me, taking the dress out of my fingers and letting it fall again, and I caught myself wondering whether Caleb was jealous watching it, whether any of this was landing on him the way it was landing on me. What is he thinking. Then Kate took Caleb by the hand and walked him through the bathroom door and pulled it behind them. He went.

And there it went. The last rule, the wall, the one we had said with the most weight. Nobody leaves the room. I watched my husband follow another woman through a door, and a sentence formed in me with the clean cold edge of glass. Fuck you. I found myself wondering whether every move Kate made was a fuck you to a husband who had once humiliated her at the Races, whether I had wandered into the middle of an old argument and been handed a part in it.

The screen was frosted but not blind. Lucas was kissing me and working his trousers off and I kept one eye past him to the glass, where two grey shapes had gone soft, and then the shower came on, and one shape lowered itself to the other’s waist and stayed there, and I knew precisely what I was looking at. I flinched again. Lucas followed my eye, took in the whole geometry of it, and was not troubled in the least. He came back to me, his whisky and Coke breath foreign against my skin. And I let him. I let him because Caleb had walked through that door, and because, furious as I was, somewhere underneath sat a small and mortifying comfort that at least this stranger wanted me. Every second of it was a thing I was saying through the wall. Fuck you. We were having sex and I was watching a frosted shadow give my husband something I was apparently not enough to inspire.

‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Wait.’ Some part of me still keeping the ledger, still certain we had only just gone too far and could reel it back if we stopped right now. ‘Sorry. Let’s slow it down.’ I sat up beside him and reached for my gin while he poured himself another whisky and Coke, and we made the loose jokey talk he was so good at, while my husband stayed behind the glass. He was taking a long time. I sat there getting angrier, turning it over, whether to go in, not knowing what I would be walking into if I did. Lucas was unbothered by any of it, though he was getting impatient now, tired of waiting. ‘Don’t worry about them,’ he said, and drew me onto him to straddle him. We kissed, and I slid onto him, riding him while he told me how sexy I was and held my hips in his hands, and I looked down into a stranger’s face and felt nothing whatsoever. It was mechanical and stupid and I was wearing myself away on it, another man, another stranger, and where in God’s name was Caleb.

He came out at last, beads of water still on his skin, a towel at his waist, and Kate behind him wrapped in another, and his eyes found me on top of her husband and went wide and furious, and no one in that room saw it but me. I was furious too. He had broken the rule. I had broken one back. We were square, and it felt like nothing at all. Kate climbed onto the bed without a flicker, not angry, not flushed, not anything I could name, let her towel drop and came for her husband, who I happened to be sitting on. The message could not have been plainer. My turn now. So I climbed off him, politely, the way you give up a seat on a bus, and went to my husband.

‘You left,’ I whispered. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but you,’ and the rest of it died somewhere in his throat. ‘Come here,’ he grunted, and because the one truly unthinkable act in that room was to make a scene, we tried. We tried to kiss, to find each other, while Kate and Lucas did it easily an arm’s length away. I could feel the anger sitting in his body and the same anger answering in mine.

Kate turned over onto her hands and knees with Lucas behind her and looked back at me over her shoulder like a schoolteacher arranging a demonstration. ‘Copy us,’ she said. She positioned us. She set me facing her with Caleb behind me, and then she leaned across the gap and kissed me, the second woman I had ever kissed, her tongue moving into my mouth, and the strangeness of it sat in me with no heat behind it at all, a sensation my body noted down and politely declined. It sent Lucas out of his mind, which I suspect she had known it would. Behind me Caleb was starting and stopping, soft and then not and then soft again, and I could feel the frustration coming off him in waves. So we slowed once more, and Kate and Lucas slowed for us, patient as you like, and she rearranged the four of us again, because she was the one running this, every decision in the room was hers. She sat astride Caleb and tried to ride him. Behind me, Lucas had no such trouble. ‘Babe, I’m going to come,’ he said, urgent, to his wife, and she was off Caleb and back across the bed before he had finished the sentence, and Lucas was out of me, and she said, matter of fact, ‘Sorry, we have a rule, we only finish with each other.’ And just like that, he did. Caleb and I sat on the end of the bed and watched them, the two of us naked, with nothing to say.

They dressed. They smiled. They thanked us for a lovely night, the way you thank a host for a roast, and they left. The door clicked shut and the room rang with how strange it had been, how clumsy, how empty.

‘We said we’d only have sex with someone if the other one agreed first,’ Caleb said finally, into the quiet, already hard with anger. ‘You left the room,’ I shrieked, the tears coming now. ‘You were in the shower, naked, with her on her knees in front of you, I could see exactly what you were doing.’ ‘So you slept with him to get me back?’ he snapped, and the shame went straight through me, because it was true. ‘You left me,’ I said. ‘You left me alone with him while she…’ He cut across me. ‘We didn’t even have sex. I couldn’t get hard. I can’t get hard, it’s like my body only works for you, and she was getting annoyed it wasn’t working, and then I walk out here and you’re riding him. So he gets to have you and his wife both, and I get nothing, and he gets everything.’

I was winded by it, and underneath the winded part, shamefully glad. Glad his body had refused. Glad that whatever it was still belonged only to me, the one thing in all of this that had stayed mine without my ever having to stand guard over it. ‘It’s not you,’ I told him. ‘There was no one in that room to want. I felt about as much as you did.’ That felt like nothing. That felt insane.

And then Caleb started to cry, and I read it the way I wanted to read it, as grief for the thing we kept doing to ourselves. I softened. ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘It’s all right. It’s stupid, all of it. Let’s not do this any more, it’s too hard to get right, all the dynamics, all the rules.’ We lay in each other’s arms and cried a little and fell asleep tangled together, and for an hour I let myself believe we had finally run out of worse, and run out of it together.

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In the morning he said, ‘Next time will be better. It’s all just practice. I only need to relax, get out of my own head.’ And I understood it then, the way you understand a thing all at once and far too late, that he had not been crying for the rules we broke or the strangers we let in or the wreck of the whole night. He had been crying because he had not been able to perform. He had been crying for himself.

Then, as easy as asking me to grab milk on the way home, he said, ‘Kate did this great thing in the shower, she slipped a finger in while she was going down on me, felt amazing. You should try it on me later.’ And the old liquid pain went down my chest, slow and familiar as anything. Something she had known to do that I had not. Something I would now be taught, second hand, by my own husband, who had been shown it by a woman who had got to him first. The sting of that went somewhere very deep, and I pushed it down where I kept everything, and covered it over with sadness, with this is just what it is now.

‘Let’s take the kids to the beach today,’ he said, and smiled at me, the open easy smile I had married him for. ‘That sounds lovely,’ I said. And I lay there in the grey morning light planning sunscreen and towels and which esky we would bring, and underneath the planning, where he could not see it and the children would never think to look. I wanted to die.

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Next Week - Chapter 17: The Christian Stripper.