Chapter 18 - The Pilots Party.

Casseroles, Costumes, Countertops, Consent.

*** Contains descriptions of sexual assault; skip if that’s not where you are today.

After the night with Brie, I started to feel less like a woman and more like a shell shaped like one, going through the school run and the dinners and the small talk at the letterbox with a version of my face that did the job. I wasn’t planning anything. I wasn’t deciding anything. Somewhere in me a resignation had settled, unspoken but efficient, that this was simply what we were now, and I’d deal with the next bridge when I was standing on it.

For a few weeks we were tentative around each other. Quiet. Two people sharing a house who no longer knew how to handle the other. What finally broke the impasse was not a conversation, or an apology, or any of the approved instruments of marital repair. It was one of the kids, asleep in the back seat on the way home from Mexican, producing a burst of flatulence so emphatic it woke them from their own sleep. There is no dignified way to remain estranged from a person while this is happening. We caught each other’s eye in the front and giggled like idiots, and something loosened, and we were back to normal. Or he was back to normal. I went back to performing it.

I know this next part doesn’t make sense. He got it. We talked about the night with Brie, a proper conversation, and he listened. ‘Tell me what you’re feeling,’ he said, and I did, and he didn’t argue or defend. He said of course I’d felt threatened. That there was no way he was attracted to her. ‘You’re everything,’ he said. ‘You’re the woman of my dreams. You’re beautiful and funny and smart, and she’s not even close.’ He said he’d make sure something like that never happened again, that he’d be more careful with his words, that he’d check in with me first. The apology came a week or two after the wound, which was becoming his timing, long enough that I’d already done most of the forgiving myself just to survive the silence. But it came. It sounded real. I believed it.

And then came the good stretch, and the good stretches were genuinely good. It wasn’t just that he was loving toward me. He was lighter with everyone. The black cloud the whole family had learned to read and steer around simply lifted, and in its place was a man who was optimistic, funny, asking about my work, mucking around with the kids. The house breathed differently. Though even then, at night, it was still - tell me a naughty story, still the pressure for sex that never paused even when he was sulking, and the crude jokes had started leaking into daylight, said within earshot of the kids, a general coarseness moving into the house like a smell. I noticed it and filed it. Filing things was becoming my main skill.

The pressure was never constant. I want that understood, because it’s the thing I couldn’t see from inside. If it had been constant I might have recognised it. Instead it moved in a cycle: the push, the blowup, the wounded weeks, the apology, the tenderness, the reprieve. Each time, I thought the understanding was the real him and the pushing was the aberration. It took me years to consider it might be the other way around. Or worse, that both were him, and the tenderness was what made the pushing possible. It never announces itself, this thing. It buys back its ground with kindness.

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So when the invitation came from Jack and Danni, I was inside one of the good stretches. Which is the only reason the rest of this chapter exists.

We’d met them before, been to their house even, a regular suburban house on a regular suburban street. Jack was a pilot, fifty-something, grey but looking younger than his hair, neither fit nor soft, just regular, the kind of man you’d never pick out of a crowd until he opened his mouth. He was a lad, properly. Jokey, charming, openly sleazy in the way some men are once they’ve worked out that saying exactly what they’re thinking gets read as confidence. Danni didn’t seem to care what came out of him. She was half his age, big lips that had been bought rather than born, and a ditziness about her that I couldn’t tell was personality or protection. She was drunk from the moment we arrived, bubbly in a way that never quite landed as real. Present in the room but somehow not in it.

She had stories, though the stories were mostly his. When Jack’s mates got together they’d hire hotel rooms and bring strippers in, rowdy nights, boys being boys, and Danni’s role was to survive them cheerfully, which she seemed to have made a whole philosophy out of. She was bisexual, apparently, in the way women in that world were so often apparently bisexual. I got the feeling it was less a fact about her than a feature she’d learned to offer. I caught myself building a story for her, the way you do when someone unsettles you. A hard life, maybe. A string of dodgy blokes, then a pilot, older, established, with kids only five years younger than her. Perhaps to her that was safety. Perhaps it was even love, whatever they had, though standing in their kitchen it certainly didn’t feel like it.

Then again, I thought I had love. So what would I know.

The party was a costume party, and the invitation had said to bring a plate, and I, being me, brought a casserole. I want that on the record. Somewhere between agreeing to attend a swingers’ costume party and actually arriving at one, I had stood in my kitchen browning meat, because whatever else was collapsing, a good guest brings food. It sat on their counter all night among the wine bottles, warm and sensible and entirely of another world.

My period had arrived that day too. Caleb’s disappointment, my quiet jubilation. I’d had the jitters all afternoon and thought it was the perfect out, and floated exactly that, giving the night a miss.

He humphed. ‘Can’t you just get enthusiastic about it? Can’t you just be horny anyway? We can still do stuff.’

I said I was trying my best, I wasn’t trying to be a downer, but it was what it was and I felt pretty cruddy. What I remember most is his irritation, as though my body had scheduled this on purpose. As though cramps were a position I was taking. But I could no more manufacture desire than he could maintain an erection, and neither of our bodies was consulted further. He still wanted to go, so we negotiated on the drive over, in the ordinary tone of two people ticking chores off a list, that there’d be no sex for us at this one. Fooling around, fine, and we even defined it, the way we’d learned to define things by then: flirting, kissing, nothing below the waist, no touching of anything private. Nothing more. And with that settled, we drove our boundary, willingly, to the one house in the world where it was least likely to hold.

Their place was a party before it was anything else that night, ten couples eventually through the door, and the ordinariness of the house is the detail that’s stayed with me longest. Family photos up the hallway. A kid’s drawing on the fridge. Keyrings hanging on one of those little holders shaped like a surfboard. A completely regular lounge room, waiting to become something else. And the guests were the opposite of what you’d imagine, which is to say they were exactly the people you’d trust with everything else in your life. A lawyer. A musician. A woman who worked as a school librarian. A librarian, for God’s sake. Doctors turned up at these things, teachers, corporate high-flyers, and their presence did something to my thinking that I only understood much later. If people this respectable were here, then this was respectable. And if this was respectable, then the problem, once again, was me.

Jack met us at the door already in costume, a cowboy, hat and boots and all, and I remember exactly the look that crossed his face when he saw what I was wearing. Some innocuous going-out top I’d agonised over for twenty minutes. His hand drifted to himself, unhurried, unembarrassed, as though this were simply the correct response to a woman arriving at your home. He’s ready to go, Danni laughed beside him. I laughed it off. I’d got very good at laughing things off.

The costumes were half the theatre of the night. Danni was providing them for the women, which was how I ended up downstairs with four others in her spare room, in a red lace jumpsuit, see-through top to toe, feeling every one of my forty-something years while women I’d known for less than an hour told me I looked incredible. We paraded back upstairs for the men like it was the most natural thing in the world. Professionals and school mums, doing a kind of performance none of us would ever have agreed to individually but had somehow all agreed to together, the way crowds do. I giggled. It pains me to say that, because it’s the part that still makes my skin crawl more than almost anything else, but I did, I giggled and joined in. I’d even practised being flirty in the group texts beforehand, badly, self-consciously, never quite landing it, like rehearsing a phrase in a language I didn’t speak. I could never make the first move on anyone. I just went along with whatever was already moving, and everyone read that as easy-going rather than what it actually was, which was the closest thing I had left to a survival strategy. I told myself I was choosing this. I’d promised myself I’d stay and give the marriage a real go, and giving it a real go apparently meant becoming a woman who could stand in someone else’s spare room in red lace and call it fun.

Later I changed into my costume proper, a little pilot’s skirt and a white top with no bra, high heels, tanned legs, Jack’s own cap sitting crooked on my head. Upstairs the men had transformed too. A surfer. A cowboy. One man, and I promise this is true, came as Colonel Sanders. I have no memory at all of what Caleb wore, which tells you something about where my attention had gone by that point in the night. I remember adjusting the cap in the mirror and thinking it was a strange thing to be wearing. A stranger’s uniform, as if I’d been issued it.

The night thickened fast once the drugs came out, pot and coke passed round loosely enough that nobody bothered hiding it. The music got louder and the room got looser. Everyone drunk, dancing, smoke drifting, couples peeling off and reforming. A woman lifted her top to a small cheering audience. On one of the couches, a couple had stopped pretending to be at a party at all. Colonel Sanders was dancing with somebody’s wife, which is an image I have never successfully removed from my head. And through all of it, hands. Hands at my waist, hands up my skirt, men arriving beside me with compliments and fingers, assuming I was free to touch because I was there and smiling. I wriggled away, over and over, said no thank you in the bright, practised voice I’d built for exactly this, found another reason to visit the bathroom, took another drink. I drank steadily, the way you drink when some animal part of you already knows what’s coming and is trying to get the rest of you numb before it arrives.

Somewhere in the middle of all that wriggling away, a thought surfaced that I didn’t have anywhere to put. In all our time in this world, at every gathering, every party, every meet, I had never once heard anybody say the word consent. No conversations about it, no rules read out, nothing agreed beyond whatever couples had privately negotiated in their cars on the way over. It was all loose, all assumed, all improvised through a haze of alcohol and drugs by people in costumes. An entire world built on the premise of permission, and permission was the one thing nobody ever actually asked for. I had the thought, and then somebody’s hand was at my waist again, and I filed it. The way I filed everything.

Late in the night I went to the kitchen for another drink. Laminate counter, someone’s keys, a bowl of crisps nobody was eating, my casserole dish cooling by the sink. Across the room, Caleb was on the couch with a woman I’d noticed earlier mostly for her size. A miner, FIFO, taller than him, and Caleb was tall. Built like she worked outdoors, a mullet she wore without a trace of self-consciousness, one of the only guests who hadn’t bothered with a costume at all. Cargo pants and work boots, no less. Her hand was working him, unhurried, and he was hard. Properly hard. So it didn’t take a girl like Brie after all. I remember the specific, useless thought I had, that I should feel something bigger than I did.

I was still holding that thought when Jack came up behind me.

‘How about you let this cowboy take you for a ride,’ he said, close to my ear, drunk and delighted with himself, and before the sentence had finished landing he’d pushed me down over the counter, one hand flat and hard between my shoulder blades so I couldn’t lift myself, and moved my underwear aside, and was inside me. I felt the tampon shove up hard as he pushed in. An ordinary bathroom object, suddenly the only thing I could think about, because thinking about it was easier than thinking about anything else. It hurt. ‘No, Jack. No,’ I said, trying to wriggle out from under his hand, and he laughed. He laughed. That’s the part I’ve had to make peace with in the years since, because he thought I was playing. In his world, at his party, a woman wriggling and saying no was part of the game, the same game as the costumes and the flashing and the hands up skirts, and my husband was occupied on the couch, so what could I possibly be except available. It wasn’t malice. It was worse than malice. It was the complete illegibility of my no, in a room where no had never been given a meaning. It went on for what was probably only a few minutes, and it was painful, and I managed a ‘Jack, stop,’ and he was oblivious. It was Caleb, in the end, who ended it. He’d stood up from the couch, seen, pushed the woman’s hand away, and called across the room, ‘Hey, mate, whoa, whoa. We said we weren’t having sex tonight, just fooling around.’ He was looking at me while he said it. Jack backed off with his hands up. “Ah mate, sorry, sorry.” The tone of a man who’d taken someone’s parking spot.

Caleb crossed the room and pulled me aside by the arm, his grip tight, his voice a furious whisper. ‘I can’t believe you let him fuck you, Eva. What the hell?’

‘I didn’t let him,’ I managed. ‘He just came up behind me.’ My eyes were going. I said I needed the bathroom, and I did, urgently, in every sense. I was sick into the toilet of that ordinary suburban house, then sat on the edge of the bath and cleaned myself up with shaking hands, dazed and teary. A couple of the other women found me not long after, kind in their drunk, chaotic way, assuming I’d simply overdone it. Fussing. Pressing another drink into my hand. Somebody turned the shower on and bundled me under it, clothes and all, to sober me up, and then, because nothing at that party could stay one thing for long, it became something else. The other women climbed in too, shrieking, laughing, and within a minute it had turned into a wet t-shirt competition. Four drunk women under a stranger’s shower, men gathered in the doorway to watch, laughing, some already touching themselves. And me in the middle of it, soaked, holding a drink I hadn’t asked for, being cheered at, thirty minutes after a man had held me down over a kitchen counter. That is the thing about a world without boundaries. It cannot pause, even for its casualties. It simply folds them into the next game. I slipped out while the shrieking was at its loudest, found the bedroom we’d been given, peeled off the wet clothes and got into the bed alone. I just needed to sleep and be nowhere. Caleb didn’t come. I lay there wanting, more than anything I have ever wanted, for the day to simply not have happened, and at some point that wanting became sleep. I don’t know what time he came in.

He woke me in the morning, gently, which threw me. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘Let’s go down and jump into bed with Jack and Danni.’

I had a hangover the size of the room and something much bigger than a hangover underneath it. ‘Are you actually joking,’ I said, whispering as loudly as it’s possible to whisper. ‘I don’t even know what you were doing last night or what time you came to bed. You got angry at me about Jack and then you just left me, and now you want us to get into bed with them?’

He was furious instantly, the way he could be, zero to storm with nothing in between. ‘You’re the one fucking up the relationship, Eva, not me. We had boundaries and you broke them.’

‘I didn’t. He came up and pinned me, and then…’

‘Then you just let him,’ he said. ‘I saw, from where I was. I saw everything.’

‘From where you were getting a hand job from the giant mullet girl,’ I said. ‘We never agreed to that either.’

‘Ah,’ he said, and I could hear the door of the trap closing as he said it. ‘So you were upset with me. Getting back at me.’

‘No. Fuck. I didn’t. It just happened. It was awful, I’m on my period, for fuck’s sake, I was just at the kitchen, I was feeling like puking…’

He cut me off. ‘Yep, there it is. You’re free to do whatever you feel like, but I have all these boundaries placed on me.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, and I genuinely didn’t. ‘That doesn’t make sense. I hate this life. I fucking hate it. I’m doing all of this for you. You keep saying this is what you want.’

‘What you’re saying is the biggest load of bullshit, Eva. I’m blatantly unhappy with my sex life and you’re not the one complaining. We always have to live within the confines of your world. That girl last night was kind and gentle and funny, she made me relax, and I could get hard. But I don’t get to experience things like that, do I. You don’t give a fuck about me. I’m always tiptoeing around you while you just keep getting fucked, and I can’t do anything right, and I’m always in trouble. It’s like you’ve put this noose around my neck.’

I was so angry I could barely find the words in order. ‘I’m not. I’m saying I didn’t want to do that with Jack. It hurt, and it was awful, and I never said he could, and you’re angry with me for doing it, but I didn’t want it. And you’re right about one thing, I don’t want any of this fucking stupid shit in my life. It’s heartbreaking, what you’re saying. I’ve gone way outside my own boundaries so many times, for you, and you still feel like this. I’m just me. And you keep telling me to be dirtier, to be more fun, pushing me, pressuring me. You’re not happy unless we’re doing this shit.’

He went silent. Listened, or seemed to. Then he got out of bed and started dressing, and the sulk came down over him like a blind. ‘Yep. Yep, you win,’ he said, pulling his shirt on. ‘I’m the bad guy. Always blaming me.’ He walked out the door with a fuck you under his breath, and I put the pillow over my head so the sobbing wouldn’t wake the house, because even in that moment, even then, I was managing everyone else’s morning.

Two weeks earlier this same man had held my face in his hands and told me I was the woman of his dreams, and he had meant it, or meant something by it, and I had believed him, and that belief was the ground I was standing on when a stranger pinned me to his kitchen counter. That’s what nobody tells you about the cycle. The tenderness isn’t the opposite of the harm. It’s the delivery system.

I had been drunk, and I had let Jack have sex with me. That’s the sentence as I wrote it in my own head that morning, and I want to leave it there in all its wrongness, because it’s the truest record of where I was. What I knew was that I’d fucked up, big time, and that I was, once again, the problem. The one slowing everything down. The one putting up roadblocks.

It would be a long time before I understood that a woman held down over a kitchen counter has not broken a boundary. She has had one broken on her body. But that morning I only knew how to be sorry, and so that is what I was.

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Next Week: Chapter 19 - Hey My Beautiful

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