Chapter 20 - The Perfect Performance

Nightmares, Cocktails, Choreography, Applause.

It was around then that sleep began to lose its neutrality.

Almost every night brought the same visitation: a dark figure positioned beside the bed, initially inert, simply present, as if waiting for permission. Then, without drama, its hands would close around my throat. I would remain pinned beneath it, aware, mute, incapable of protest. I woke myself screaming, properly screaming, and Caleb would stir beside me and murmur it’s okay, it’s okay, and pat some part of me, and be asleep again inside a minute. In time the nightmares became so routine that he barely surfaced at all, a hand finding my arm out of habit. I blamed stress, an answer sufficiently vague to feel responsible without being revealing. Only later did I understand that the body is often a far less polite communicator than the mind. It tells the truth early, insistently, and without regard for whether we feel ready to hear it.

And in the middle of all that, we decided to move house. It sounds mad, laid out like this, but the house we’d spent ten years renovating was finished, beautiful, nothing left to do, and Caleb had found a block of land going cheap, well under what it should have been, and a plan to match: sell up, build the new place himself to keep the costs down, live in it two years to dodge the tax, sell it for a healthy profit, buy the next block, build again. Property as a ladder, and him supplying the labour. A whole future, sketched on the back of the swinging life like it wasn’t there. And I was excited, I want to be honest about that. This was my oldest reflex wearing its newest outfit, the belief that the right project would finally absorb whatever was driving him, and a house was the biggest project I’d ever been able to offer. So we designed and planned and packed ten years into boxes, and for stretches it really did feel like moving toward a future. He was happy a lot. One of our boys had thrown himself into footy and was flying, and Caleb drove him to a club forty minutes away for training, day after day, proud and present and exactly the father I remembered. That’s what made the maths so impossible. The family life wasn’t a lie running alongside the swinging. It was real, and it was often good, and the swinging sat inside it anyway, unmoved. The new house didn’t slow those conversations by a single week. It just gave us one more thing to organise around them.

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We saw Justin again in that stretch. I had written the letter by then, signed my confession, been forgiven, and a woman who has just been absolved of ruining her marriage arrives at the next opportunity with something to prove. Caleb wanted another chance at it, another go at mastering whatever kept failing him in those rooms, and Justin was easy by then, familiar, the two of them texting through the week like old mates planning a fishing trip. It was simpler with Justin, Caleb said, and he wasn’t wrong, though I don’t think either of us looked hard at why. There was no couple to manage. No wife to read. Just two men and me, which meant the entire evening had one job, and the job was my body.

The night came with instructions. Caleb had a fantasy he’d been carrying for a while and this was its debut: I was to arrive at the bar in a little khaki-coloured dress, long hair down, nothing at all underneath, and I was to sit up at the high table beside Justin and let him touch me, right there, in public, while Caleb watched. I’d had a spray tan the day before, and I remember dressing in the mirror, the gold jewellery against all that new brown skin, a woman assembling a stranger out of her own body. I got ready like an actress getting into wardrobe, because that is what it was.

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Justin was waiting at the high table and ran his routine the moment I walked in. Up off the stool, hands to my waist, a kiss like we were long-term lovers. “How lucky am I, I always get what I want.” he boasted. He had a drink already poured for me. He leaned in and kissed me again, slower, and said he just wanted to taste what I was drinking, and I laughed the laugh I’d developed for lines like that. Everything about him was smooth, the words coming out of him like warmed honey, a man doing James Bond at a suburban hotel bar and landing it, mostly, because he’d never once doubted himself.

“I want you tonight in every way, Eva”, he breathed into my ear. And then his hand was on my thigh, and then it wasn’t on my thigh anymore, and I sat in a crowded bar with the jazz loud and the lights low, wearing nothing under that little dress, while a man I did not love moved his fingers inside me and my husband watched from across the room. I won’t pretend it was one thing. It was heady, that’s the honest word, the music and the danger and the sheer transgression of it humming through me. And it was terrifying in a way that had nothing to do with desire, my eyes going to every stranger in the place, certain that someone would see, someone would know, someone from school or work or the real world would look over and the two lives I was keeping apart would collide in a bar with my skirt riding up. Excitement and dread turn out to run on the same wiring. I couldn’t always tell you which one I was feeling. I’m not sure that wasn’t the point.

And through all of it, past Justin’s shoulder, there was Caleb at his table by the window, not moving, just watching, and I kept wondering what was happening behind his face. Whether he was aroused or wounded or both at once. Whether he was seeing his wife, or a scene from one of his films finally rendered in a woman he owned. I never found out. That might be the loneliest sentence in this book.

Eventually Caleb came over, flushed, wearing one of those faces, the can’t-believe-this-is-actually-happening face, the face of a man who has just watched his best fantasy performed live and is still somewhere between the applause and the encore. He was looking at me like I was the angel on a Christmas tree. He didn’t say anything at first. He just shook Justin’s hand, and the two of them exchanged a look, a slow, knowing look that travelled over my head like freight, and something in it told me the whole night had already been agreed between them in that handshake, and I was the terms.

Then Justin’s stories started, his conquests, his favourite couples, his best-ever blowjobs, and his rating scale. He had an actual scale, out of ten. And then he told us about his ten. A woman he’d been with who was a unicorn, the word that world uses for a single woman who plays with couples, a lesbian, he said, who’d never once given a man a blowjob, and she’d given him one, and he’d scored it a perfect ten. He was still marvelling at it. And then, like a man recommending a restaurant, he picked up his phone and sent Caleb her number. Right there at the table. ‘You two would love her,’ he said. I watched it land in Caleb’s phone with a small chime, and I felt something in my stomach go cold and keep going, because I already knew what that number was. It wasn’t a contact. It was a countdown. Porn turned into conversation, everything reduced to flesh and performance, and I sat between them wondering where I sat on the scale. Then I caught myself wondering it. That was the moment I’d have liked to leave, not the room, the whole life, because a woman at a bar silently auditing her own ranking on a stranger’s scale is a woman whose sense of herself has already been outsourced. I put it somewhere I didn’t have to look at it, and ordered another drink.

At the hotel, everything went to plan. I want to say that plainly, because it’s the whole point of this chapter. Nothing went wrong. Nobody wept, nobody stormed out, no line was crossed that hadn’t been agreed. If you had asked Caleb the next morning, he’d have told you it was our best night in the lifestyle, and by every measure that world uses, he’d have been right.

They sat side by side on the couch, the two of them, and asked me to stand in front of them and undress. So I did, slowly, piece by piece, in a room gone so quiet I could hear my own zip, two seated men watching with the stillness of an audience after the lights go down, until I was standing in nothing but high heels. Then Caleb told me to go and sit on Justin. Justin eased his pants down and I sat back against his chest, his breath at my neck, his hands sliding to my hips, and then Caleb did something he had never done before. He stepped in close, right in front of us, and helped lower me down onto Justin with his own hands, and then he knelt and put his mouth on me while I moved, his face inches from another man’s body, his hand at the base of Justin, at the place where Justin and I met. I remember the jolt of it, how confronting it was to watch my husband that near to a man, nearer than watching had ever taken him, and I remember not having anywhere to put the thought, so I left it where it fell and kept moving.

Then the bedroom, and the full repertoire. They directed me, that’s the honest verb, position to position through the whole playlist that men learn from screens, and I hit every mark, because I’d seen the same films they had. Justin on his back and me astride him facing away while Caleb came in from the front, the two of them attempting what the films make look simple and bodies make complicated. Me on my knees between them, one and then the other, then the trade, then both. At some point they pinned me down and brought out the vibrator, and Justin held it on me and said, come for us, baby, the way a director calls action. And I did. On cue, on command, the first orgasm in that world, and it had all the intimacy of a door closing. My body, it turns out, can be operated. That discovery has taken me years to forgive. Justin finished on my back, and somewhere in the middle of all of it Caleb had excused himself, more than once, slipping out of the room while his own fantasy ran on without him, and returning, and struggling, and watching. When Justin finally said his goodnights, he was laughing, loose, delighted. “Can’t wait to do it again.”, he said, like a man leaving a barbecue. And then Caleb, alone with me at last, managed easily what he couldn’t manage watching, and finished the night the way he always needed to finish it, with me, reclaimed.

Afterwards he lay beside me glowing. ‘I loved doing that for you,’ he said. ‘Seeing you so free. I’d like to experience that too.’

I didn’t ask what he meant. I knew. The sentence just stayed in the room after the lights went out, the way an unopened bill stays on a bench.

It had been, and I say this with a full understanding of how it sounds, a perfect night. A porn script executed without a single flaw, every scene delivered, everyone satisfied, the star hitting her marks in high heels. Justin was friendly. Caleb was mighty. And I had been acting, the entire time, from the khaki dress to the last cue. I know it should have felt hot. Parts of my body insisted that it was. But the whole of me, the part that added the moments up into a person, was somewhere else, watching a woman perform a role she had never auditioned for and thinking, with a kind of detached professional interest, she’s getting good at this.

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Not long after, we went out again with Kate and Lucas, and that night, too, went down as perfect. And I want to be precise about what perfect meant, because it wasn’t wildness. It was administration. We discussed our boundaries beforehand, all four of us, sensibly, like couples planning a shared holiday, and then everybody kept to them. We swapped, all of us in the one room. Caleb still struggled, the way he almost always struggled with an audience, never quite fully there with her, though he managed enough to call it a win, and he could finish with me, which by our arrangement counted as the system working. Nobody finished with the other’s partner, that was one of the rules, and the rules held, though I’ve wondered since how much of that particular rule was ever really at risk. The night moved like it had been choreographed by an events company: the drinks, the giggling, the lift up through the hotel, the rooftop pool, the change rooms where we spread ourselves across the benchtops and moved between each other, warm and easy, everyone laughing, everyone agreeable, alcohol smoothing every join. Nothing went wrong. Nobody got hurt. Everyone was, within the borders of that night, kind to one another.

And then we’d likely never see them again, and I never thought about them once, and they, I’d put money on it, never thought about us. That’s the thing I keep returning to. They didn’t care about us and we didn’t care about them, and for a few hours we’d handed each other the most private things we had, the way you’d hand a stranger your trolley token. It was the perfection of it that should have frightened me. We had built a version of intimacy with all the meaning removed, sex as a well-run event, people as catering, and we had all been so pleasant about it. I used to think the worst nights were the ones that ended in tears. I’ve changed my mind. The worst nights were the ones that worked, because they were teaching me, smoothly and painlessly, that none of it, the bodies, the people, the act I’d once held sacred, meant anything at all.

Because here’s another thing about that night. I was barely there for it. I had found the switch by then. I could put my body on the stage and take the rest of me somewhere else entirely, up near the ceiling, out past the carpark, anywhere, and nobody could tell the difference. Not Kate, not Lucas, not my own husband. The performance had become flawless at the exact rate that the performer had become vacant, and nobody in any of those rooms ever noticed the exchange, because the whole world we were moving in only ever checked the surface.

And the shame I’ve told you about, the blanket that had started to feel like skin, it didn’t ease after those nights. It thickened. It came in the days after, never during, always after, folding laundry or driving to the shops, and it had a new precision to it now. I’d catch my reflection in a shop window and think, you did those things. Nobody forced your hands. You came when a stranger told you to. The perfect nights were the worst for it, and now I understand: a disaster you can blame on the night, but a success you can only blame on yourself. My work continued to lose momentum, I hadn’t been putting myself into it, and without noticing I’d begun compensating in the one arena I had left, trying to be a better mum, a more present mum, as though I could balance this ridiculous ledger of myself by overpaying one column while the other bled out.

The performances were perfect. That was the problem. Perfect is what it looks like when someone has finally, completely, stopped being there.

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Next Week: Chapter 21 - The Cost

I write Good Wife Confessions in the hope that someone recognises what I couldn’t see at the time, that coercion rarely announces itself, it looks like love, like compromise, like being a good wife. Thank you for reading, and subscribe for free to receive new chapters and support my work.