The Bride Stripped Bare Set: The Bride Stripped Bare / With My Body

Lesson 36

happiness and virtue alike lie in action

On the tube hurtling home your fingers worry at the slip of paper like an archaeologist with a snippet at a dig. Connections like this happen so rarely, once or twice in a lifetime perhaps. You would have seized it once, when you were young; you would have dreamt it was the kernel for a big, consuming love, perhaps. But now? A tall, shy, out-of-work actor who’s about your age and yet seems somehow unformed, as if he hasn’t quite stepped into life. A drifter and a dreamer, hanging by the phone, hostage to his agent, always living by the will of someone else.

Everything Cole is not.

With his days to himself.

You smile. You hold the paper to your lips as if you’re anointing it. You’ll call tomorrow, just hello, as a friend, just that. You feel like you’ve dived into the shallow end of a cold pool in one foolhardy zoom but it’s all right, you haven’t cracked your spine; you can smile as you power through the resistance, your body peels away from the danger, you’ve survived the risk.

Everything is changed and you feel shawled by that, anticipation wraps itself around you, a thrill at the secret, secret thought of him.

Lesson 37

upon girls and women depend almost entirely the domestic happiness of men

Where were you all night?

The movies.

What did you see?

Some Iranian thing, you’d hate it.

Hmm.

Cole’s eating a bowl of Heinz tomato soup at the kitchen bench, a weekend jumper over his business shirt. The fridge is now a tomb for items with strange smells and growths: mouldering cheese, blue-speckled bread, jars of tomato paste hosting a soft pale fur. Neither of you has cared enough lately, the oven’s used to store pots and pans, it’s been a long time since a Sunday roast. There was such a tenderness to your little home, once: Theo used to drop in often, unexpected, as if she was cleaving herself to its warmth.

Now, Cole and you have stopped trying. You dreaded that once, that as a couple you’d stop the offers of a bath run or a cup of tea or the dishes done. Actually, it’s survivable. The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference. Indifference emotionally, indifference physically. You haven’t made love since the hotel room of fresh roses every two days, but tonight you kiss him on the crown of his head and let your lips linger and it wakens something in your groin.

I’m going to bed, you say.

Hmm, again; deep in The Simpsons and the soup.

He doesn’t seem to notice your gesture, or doesn’t want to buy into it right now: The Simpsons has ten minutes to

You smile. You don’t care. For you’ve walked back into the sun, it’s warm on your back. You have a new friend in your life, to play with, to be young again with, to wake you up.

Lesson 38

a cold bath will enable a person to sleep who otherwise cannot

Cole stays up late, it’s not unusual, he’s often gone to bed at a different time from yourself. He’s at his laptop most likely, trawling for porn. He was embarrassed when you first caught him, several years ago: he snapped down the screen. Now all he does is turn the computer away. The stutter of a courtesy, and it’s not enough.

Cole told you once, early on, that he stayed up late because he liked the bed warm, you’re my hot-water bottle, he’d said and you’d giggled and licked him behind the ear. You used to think your husband wasn’t near as churning and smudged as yourself but even: clean, open, uncomplicated. Now you know there’s a secret life you know nothing of and never will, and no one knows anyone’s secret life.

You see him more clearly now. A man who’s glided through his adulthood with the serenity and distance of someone who doesn’t want any questions too close. He hides behind a mask of absolute calm, it gives the impression that he’s always reserving his energy for someone else. He seems comfortable with his lot, maybe he’s happy, maybe not. No one ever really asks him. He’s happy to maintain a slight gap between himself and the world and not give himself away too much.

You, now, want to be pushed up close. You no longer want the marriage retreat, the little bubble of togetherness that was so cosy once.

You’d visit Cole’s studio in the early days and sit on a high stool among the easels and palettes and harsh, blue-white lamps, the bottles of white spirits and surgical gloves. The room smelt of oil paints and varnish and turps, and had the clutter of a cobbler’s shop. You loved the man hidden underneath who emerged so spectacularly in this private space. His apron over his business shirt, sleeves carefully rolled, was always spattered with plaster and paint.

He was working at the time on an early nineteenth-century portrait of Madame Recamier, a renowned French beauty of her day. The canvas was flat on a heated table, to soften the surface, and he talked you through it as he bent over it. She was brought up in a convent and married off at sixteen to a wealthy banker. The union was never consummated; there was a rumour that her husband was really her father. Cole told you, as he worried her pale cheek with a cotton-tipped spatula, that to compensate for the desert of the marriage she used her looks to snare dozens of men, but remained a virgin her entire life.

She was cursed by every single bastard who fell in love with her, he said, standing and assessing the bright square of his work. She had this incredible calm about her. They all fell for it.

I can see it, you said. In her smile.

You watched your husband bend over the crazed surface of the canvas with the care of a stonemason at the block, clearing away the soot and grime until Madame Recamier’s face and then body glowed pale before you both. You were transfixed by his fingers that fussed with the attentiveness of love, bringing to life the lips, just the lips, in one golden afternoon, the pale swell of her breast in another.

Cleaning is always the riskiest part of the process, he told you. It’s all so unknown. What you find underneath might be magnificent, or something you just want to throw out. You never know.

You could watch him and listen to him for ever in those days: you loved the seductiveness of a man deep in work. You knew, then, it was a reciprocated love and it was a canopy of joy over your life.

You see your husband now. A man who hides in art, and porn, who’s nourished by an interior world you know nothing of. His work is a world you can never really be a part of, he burrows away into it, just as he does with his moated, secret life.

Why did you marry him?

Because he said yes. And you’d reached the stage where you never expected any man to want you that much. And he was such a good friend, right from the beginning, he was a mate; never one of those lovers where you wondered what you had in common apart from sex. And there’s the deep urge within you as your thirties gallop on, the furious want.

Give me children or else I dye, wrote the anonymous Elizabethan author of your old book.

Oh yes.

Cole has a favourite photograph of you, he says it reveals your secret self. It was taken for a magazine article about bright young things, the ones to watch, and their mentors. You’d been chosen by an old student of yours, now an ITV news reader, a hungry young woman who’d straightened her West Country vowels and had a meteoric rise from the local Bristol paper into prime time TV. There was also a celebrated violinist, a geneticist, an architect, a novelist.

You didn’t want to do it but didn’t say no, of course: it was good publicity for your faculty. You’d never actually liked her enough, had been jealous and a little afraid of her steely greed to succeed. She hid her determination within friendliness and flattery but you saw straight through it.

The photographer was Colombian. He was exasperated with you all, wanted the group to relax. He asked you to think of the most sensuous thing you could imagine and yell it out, and there was uncomfortable laughter and then silence.

Skin to skin said your former student suddenly. Someone else, foie gras. The softness of a baby’s thighs. Swimming, naked, at midnight. The smell of freshly cut grass. Fauré’s ‘Sanctus’. A girlfriend’s laugh.

Until there was only you left.

Kissing the back of your husband’s neck, you said, while he was absorbed in his work. Your voice stumbly and hesitant, your blush deep. The photo was taken and when it was published it was all, still, in your face.

Cole loved your look, he knew it well but had never seen it caught.

He had no recollection of you ever kissing his neck while he was at work.

Lesson 39

there should not be overcrowding in bedrooms

Night, bed, alone, and the glare of what’s happened during that meeting with Gabriel is imprinted in your head like the too-bright fluorescent lights that were never switched off in your school’s corridors. Cole’s fallen asleep on the couch in front of the television. You cannot sleep, cannot sleep, and then it’s dawn. Love is attention and you’re not getting any: you’re like a balloon that’s jerked free from the fist holding it down and is now climbing and swerving in a choppy sky.

You think of other things, in bed, alone. They’re with you most nights, to lull you to sleep. A group of men watching you being penetrated by a broom handle. You don’t know any of the perpetrators very well. It’s never intimate or tender. It’s filmed. Sometimes women will be watching the penetration; by candlesticks, by animals, sometimes the women will be participating. And the men. Hands will be running over your naked body, parting your legs, probing, slipping inside. Almost every night you imagine these things to drop you into sleep. The movies in your head were most vivid during your teenage years, you can still remember the effect twenty years later, the intensity of them. And now, following the afternoon of Gabriel, you’re vastly awake and holding your fingers snug between your legs and wanting to feel again with the spark of those teenage years, wanting that combusting under your skin.

You want to ring Theo, you miss your confidante, it’s a huge silence in your life. She was the only person you ever felt comfortable ringing beyond ten. You’d talk sex with her endlessly, what you wanted, what you didn’t; all the things you never said to a man. You loved her expression to describe a good fuck – dirt – meaning it’d be dirty, it’d be sexy sex. A man who’s dirt, you’d always loved the idea of that. And sexy sex.

Now, alone, you’re bound by caution. Have you ever acted, as an adult, exactly as you wished? You’ve been battened down for so long; the good teacher, friend, wife. And you’re most passive in bed, all surrender and wanting to please so much. Your fantasy life has never leaked into your real life. But in bed, now, alone, possibility is putting its key in the lock, like a stream of desert light in the morning, luring you out.

Cole stumbles into the room at five and presses his body into you, as if he’s trying to draw the warmth from your flesh. You shrug him off.

Lesson 40

there are few who wilfully injure their health, but many thoughtlessly destroy it

Ten a.m.

You reach for your handbag, hope you’re not ringing too soon, don’t even know what to say, just hello, will that do, and I wanted to say thanks for the other day; you’ve rehearsed it, the lightness in your voice. You’re living more boldly, you’re beginning, and Theo’s words sound in your head: it’s no use waiting for the light to appear at the end of the tunnel, you just have to stride down and light the bloody thing yourself. There’s nothing wrong with a new friend for there seem to be less and less as the years roll over in your narrowing life.

Ten a.m. and your thudding heart, your thudding heart.

The slip of paper isn’t there.

You’re scrabbling through your wallet and searching the floor and the steps and the ground outside but it’s gone and your fingers are dragging through your hair and your teeth are tearing at your nails, there’s no phone number under directory enquiries and you have no address, of course, and then you sit on the hallway floor, your head thrown back against the wall, for a very long time, very still, in the flat, with its silence like a skull.

He’s gone.

As if chunks have been ripped from the book of your future.

You can’t move, your whole life feels slumped: you don’t know what to do next. You sit there for so long, your hand tucked into your knickers, against your bare flesh. When you withdraw your fingers you stare at the glutinous shine on them, the shout of it. You gasp, your hand trembles; a teenager all over again, so abruptly.

But you have no number, no address. And he doesn’t have yours. He is gone.

You feel drained. It took so much effort to get to this point, to overcome the nausea and nerves, to resolve to pick up the phone. You didn’t realise how much you were counting on the possibility of him, a new something to fill your life, until he was lost.

Lesson 41

remember to walk briskly and not saunter about or be forever peering into shop windows

You return to the café in Soho, alone, through September, through October, and he never comes back.

On a Monday of cold sunshine a young woman is beside you. She’s reading the sex issue of The Face magazine; she’s strongly by herself, as if this cafe is her office and she’s been this at ease in her skin her whole life. You wish you could be that. You buy The Face on the way home, flushing as the newsagent takes your money. You’ll never go back to his shop, you’re not that young woman.

That night, alone, in the bedroom, words you’ve never heard before:

Californicate: copulating shamelessly in every possible position. Chili dog: defecating on a woman’s chest, then masturbating with her breasts. Daisy chaining: a number of people connecting through oral sex. Flooding the cave: urinating into a partner’s vagina. Hum job: oral sex given to a man while humming a tune. On and on and you close the magazine and smooth the cover down, you place it in the bottom of your bedside drawer, you check it’s well tucked.

Repelled. Horrified. Wet.

Thinking of the woman in the cafe, and the man who never came back. Thinking of anonymous, uncomplicated sex. Arousing yourself with it all, now, rather than sedating yourself into sleep; wanting it in your life.

Lesson 42

every girl her own dressmaker

The next day at the café you’re like an anemone unfurling within the silky coaxing of the water because you’ve decided that for the next six months you’ll live your life differently from the way you’ve ever lived it before: indulgently, selfishly, wilfully, before marriage and motherhood close over you. You dream of no commitment to anything but your own pleasure, you dream, with renewed vigour, of finding a satisfying fuck. If you’d ever have the courage for that.

You were a serial sleeper once, during your final year of university, propelled by the thought of launching yourself into the world without any experience of men, a virgin at twenty-two and full of shame and self-loathing at the fact.

You had an innocence then, in your early twenties. You could pass as sixteen, as still needing to be taught, your face hadn’t yet settled. So one Saturday night at a friend’s you became drunk and emboldened, you had to get it done. There was a man next to you in the doorway; he was taller than you, had clear skin, he’d do. Everyone else was deep into a double episode of The Young Ones, they’d never notice you’d gone.

You took a deep breath: do you want to go upstairs, you asked.

What, he said, leaning close.

Let’s go upstairs, come on.

You took his hand; he had no idea of your pounding heart. You never saw him again, didn’t want to, his name was quickly lost. There were many after that. They were always snatching the bait, thinking it was you, in fact, who’d fallen prey and not realising that the girl with the face who needed to be taught had become a collector, an archivist of sexual experiences. All disappointing; too dry, painful, anticlimactic, fumbling, bleak.

So you tried something else. An older man. Your neighbour, a graphic designer who’d never settled down. The age difference was nineteen years. It was worse. He was from an era when sex was purely for the man’s satisfaction; he thought a good fuck was just hammering away vigorously while you lay there and thought of England; he thought condoms were a joke. He told you afterwards as he rubbed your flat belly that he could never sleep with a woman over thirty, he didn’t like them enough: the sagging skin on their necks, the lines on their faces, the bodies thickening out. But you know another reason, now; because by then women have lost their docility, they have awareness, they know too much.

And they want things themselves.

So, nothing sparked. Theo, meanwhile, seemed to be sailing her way through men and through life. For you the best moment was always the anticipation, the thrill of giving the men what they wanted and as soon as the clothes were off something was lost. It always seemed to be two people connecting but utterly failing at it, too, and there was a gulf of loneliness in that, and after several years you gave up and slipped into your dream world every single night. So your twenties passed.