Nikki Gemmell’s Threesome: The Bride Stripped Bare, With the Body, I Take You (7 page)

provide yourself with a good stock of well-made underlinen

The café in Soho. The Friday before the August Bank Holiday. Hot, festively so. A man is at the table beside you, reading a newspaper,
The Times.
You notice the nape of his neck: how odd to be attracted to someone just by a glance at their neck. The hair’s black, like the night-time deep in the country.

You’re outside on the pavement. A water main has burst nearby and water’s spreading lazily across the street. No one seems bothered, yet. Two men and a woman shout and laugh into the water and kick it about, they’re in their twenties, they shouldn’t be doing this. They’re oblivious to their audience and soon drenched.

You smile. Your folded into your bag, you’ll finish it on the tube – God, rush hour, you’ve left
Evening Standard
is
it too late, you’ll be standing all the way. You’ve left it too late because you don’t want to be in the flat by yourself, in the silence like a skull. You hate the emptiness when Cole’s there and yet when he isn’t, too, when he’s deliberately out; it’s like nothing, now, is quite right in your life. You stand, ready to step into the stream of commuters with their faces anxious for the cloistering of home, and a car careers round the corner and carves through the water, veering away from the trio, and a fan of water arcs up: you’re hit. You’re stricken, can’t move, your mind blanks as if someone has told you a joke and you’re meant to get it quick.

You look across to the man next to you. He, too, is wet. You blurt a laugh; here at last is the joke. So does he.

You need some help, you say.

So do you.

You look down. Your white cotton dress is triumphantly wet in a huge patch at the front, it clings like a piece of recalcitrant silk slicked about a tree. You throw back your head and grimace: oh God. And then a man’s jacket is wrapped round your shoulders, a man’s leading you back to the table, he’s holding you in a way that only a husband should hold you: with ownership.

It is, of course, your man with the beautiful nape.

hooks and eyes

Everything is changed.

Gabriel Bonilla, that is his name. You repeat it; the sound is all mealy in your mouth. You smile in apology at that. You must wait until your dress has dried to decency; it may take some time and this Gabriel Bonilla asks if you need to get home straight away – no, it’s all right, there’s nothing to go home to – and you laugh, too loud, and as it comes out it’s as if something within you has cracked.

Well, hello.

So there you are, an hour or two in that greasy spoon of a café and you’re both talking about everything and nothing, voices tumbling over the top of each other, learning lives.

Shaking free.

You’d never talk with this freedom, this lightness, if you were unattached. Being married gives you a bloom of certainty, a confidence. But it doesn’t stop the blushing. Gabriel Bonilla blushes too, just like you, fully, completely, ridiculously and you dare to think it means something. You’re hesitant to ask about a partner and a family, you want to know, must know, but fear the effort of asking will reveal too much, that you’ll redden once again. Like after the water splash when you realised he’d seen your body so vulnerably, too many things, the thighs too fat and the nipples through your bra, God, all of it, and your hand flies to your mouth at the recollection but he drops his eyes as if he doesn’t want to intrude, as if he’s opened a door by mistake to your thoughts.

There’s something fascinating about this man sitting before you in his summer-weight suit. You can’t quite put your finger on it but it’s something decent, old-fashioned, polite. Wrong for this world, for this cram of sex shops and neon lights where a girl languid by a doorway has a junky’s spots. This Gabriel Bonilla shouldn’t be here. He’s from another time, another place; the type of person who wouldn’t expect a woman to be driving a car if there was a man in it. There’s his Spanish name and yet fluent English – my mother is English, my father Spanish – and again there’s your laugh, bursting out; ah ha, so that explains it.

What do you do, you ask.

Guess.

You lean forward, cup your chin in your palm: a teacher, doctor, spy?

I’m an actor, he says.

You sit back. Retract, just a touch. You don’t know any actors, you’re not sure you want to.

I don’t recognise you. Should I?

No, no, he chuckles. No one does, any more. I was famous once, for about a week, in my late teens. I did a dreadful soap – and he holds up his hand at your question, he’s not going to divulge – and then two Hollywood films that bombed, and I haven’t done much ever since. I now live in terror of appearing on one of those ‘Where Are They Now?’ shows.

You laugh. You’ve always been distrustful of actors, have suspected that they’ve never really muddied their paws in the mess of life, they’ve lived it second-hand. This is unfair but you’re suddenly brisk. How on earth do you live, you ask.

Voice-overs. Ads. Foreign video rights. The occasional guest role. And I was sensible when I was young. I bought a flat.

What happens in between? How do you fill up your days?

Let me see, I sleep until one p.m. Have a Scotch for breakfast. Do a line of coke. You both laugh. No, no, I go to the gym and do classes as the Actors Centre, go to casting, that type of thing. Read a lot, travel a lot, row, go to the movies, drink too much tea.

You can’t grasp a life like this, none of your peers lives as loosely any more. This Gabriel Bonilla answers your questions as if he’s answered them a thousand times before and he couldn’t care less. The lack of concern over welfare and career path and what he’s doing with his life is intriguing, silly, odd. He strikes you as a man who’s not hungry for anything, he has a flat and enough money to get by; there’s no need to grasp or to rush. It’s not unattractive, this lightness. Then he says he’s working on a script about something else he’s addicted to and you lean forward: what, come on, tell me?

Bullfighting.

The gulp of a laugh. You stuff the little girl down, sit on the lid of her box.

Bullfighting?

He’s laughing too, his father was a matador but he was never much of a success because he wasn’t suicidal enough, he liked his life too much. His father only ever fought in provincial rings but he’s got an idea for a film, he’s told his family he’s finally embarking on a proper life and he’s burying himself in London’s wonderful libraries, the world’s best, and he’s up to his ears in research. He’s writing in them, too, because he’d go mad if he didn’t get out. You examine his hands, long and lean, like a priest’s, you take them in yours and he tells you the strength in a matador’s wrist is what they rely on to make their mark and your hands slip under his and try to encircle them like two rowlocks for oars and you feel their weight, clamp them, soft.

Are your father’s anything like these, you ask.

Absolutely. The spitting image. I also have his cough. And his laugh.

But they’re so thin, you tease, they couldn’t kill a bull!

It’s not about aggression or force. Oh
dios mio,
you have so much to learn, and his head is bowing down to his palms still in yours.

How did it get to this, so suddenly, so quickly? You sit back. Look at him. The lower lip puffy, pillowed, ripe for splitting. The long, black lashes like a child’s. The tallness in the seat, the slight self-consciousness to it, as if he was mocked, perhaps, at school. The body kept in shape. There’s a beauty to him, to his shyness, his decency, you’ve never been with a man who has a beauty to his body, it’s never mattered, you’ve never cared about that enough. You imagine this Gabriel Bonilla naked, your palm on his chest, reading the span of it and the beating heart, and you cross your legs and squeeze your thighs and smile like a ten-year-old who’s just been caught with the last of her grandmother’s chocolates.

I’ll take you to a bullfight some day, he says. You’ll love it, I promise.

You feel the heat in your cheeks, you try to still it down, you see the heat in his too. You recognise his shyness for you’ve always been shy yourself. You rarely see shyness in a man, it’s always disguised as arrogance, abruptness, aloofness. You’re too alike, this Gabriel and you. You recognise it in the way he doesn’t sit quite comfortably in the
world, can’t quite keep up. A jobbing actor, still, and he’s OK with that. He smiles, right into your eyes, you’re distracted and all your questions are suddenly wiped out. He turns the conversation back upon yourself, interviews you as if he’s trying to extract the marrow of your life: your marriage, flat, family, job, colleagues, boss. You answer openly, easily, talk slips out smooth, it’s all ripe with a dangerous kind of readiness, a lightness is singing within you.

But you tell yourself you will never spoil it all by sleeping with him, will never have the connection stained by that. You don’t want sudden awkwardness, don’t want sour sleeper’s breath in the morning or unflushed toilets and smoker’s breath or farts. It took you a year to fart when Cole was in an adjoining room, two to fart in the same room. You sometimes bite the inside of your mouth so furiously that blood’s drawn and the rabbity working of your lips is a private, peculiar thing that no one but Cole ever sees. You cut your toenails in front of him, wear underwear that’s falling apart, defecate, piss. You open yourself to your husband in a way you don’t for anyone else but perhaps he knows too much: all the magic’s been lost.

Cole.

You used to talk like this with him once, when you were lovers just starting out. You don’t want Gabriel Bonilla ever to be disappointed in you, to drift before anything’s begun. So the situation will be preserved just exactly as it
is, like a secret document that’s tucked deep into a pocket of your wallet, always hidden, always close, that you can take out and dream about at will, a safe’s combination, a treasure map, a prisoner’s plan of escape.

Gabriel takes out a fountain pen that opens with a click as agreeable as a lipstick. He scribbles down a number on the back of the bill. A man hasn’t given you his number for so long. What does it mean, what comes next, is he playing with you, is it a game? And when your fingers brush you draw back, too quick.

He
knows
you’re married. He says he’d like to meet Cole. Which throws you.

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.

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.

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.