Sex and Death (6 page)

At the door, within earshot of several women in the waiting room in various pregnancy or post-birth states, Agatha said to Selene, ‘Now remember. You
must
have sex. It's good for the scar tissue, too. Keeps it flexible.'

Selene imagined announcing to her husband when he got home that evening that he needed to go to the late-night pharmacy to fill an urgent prescription she'd been given by the midwife. ‘A prescription for what?' he would ask, concerned, already elbow deep in their baby's yellow poo that smelled wonderful, like expensive French mustard.

‘For sex,' she would deadpan.

He was always hopeful that the miracle cure had been identified, the potion of potions to put her out of her pain. The first time he'd picked up on her behalf the tub of specially prepared 0.2% nitroglycerine ointment, the female chemist had given him a knowing look and said: ‘Rub a pea-sized amount around the rim of the anus twice a day. Partners shouldn't share this product, just so you know,' assuming he was gay. Unfazed, he'd returned a few days later to ask the same chemist if they sold sitz baths for relief from anal pain, and she'd said, ‘You mean the bucket you put over the toilet to immerse your buttocks in hot salty water?' And he'd exclaimed, ‘Yes, that's the one!', glad that she might have one in stock.

Selene knew that sex was the last thing on her husband's mind too, that his libido had gone into hiding. He was as distracted and exhausted as she was, as engrossed by his adoration for their son. Sex had never seemed more irrelevant to their bond as a couple. He had been there beside her for every minute of the birth, mildly electrocuting himself setting up the TENS machine, dancing with her in their underwear in the lounge, holding her hair back while she puked through the later contractions, gently encouraging her as their baby peered up at him from underwater in the bath, waiting for the next push to free his shoulders. Sex was great, she remembered distantly, but surely its most important function was to re-establish and affirm intimacy between two people? In which case they no longer had need of that. They were more emotionally intimate than ever before as they cared for their son together. Their relationship had evolved beyond a need for sex.

That weekend they drove out to Barrington Tops National Park for Christmas in July with three other couples. They'd kept the tradition for a few years, started by one of the husbands who was British and homesick, and who liked to experiment with different ways of cooking a turkey. It was their first road trip since the baby had been born, and Selene planned to read voraciously in the back seat beside his capsule.

The trip started out well. The baby fell asleep, and Selene plunged into an issue of the
London Review of Books
that her mum had loaned her, and that she'd been working through for what felt like months, reading one dense column at a go before her attention was demanded elsewhere. According to the page crease, she was halfway through an article about the biography of the Buddha, but she had no memory of what had come before. She gave up and read the poem on the page instead. It was by Frederick Seidel, and it began:

‘Jesus H. Christ,' she said, and her husband's eyes shot to the rearview mirror to check she was okay. She didn't explain; the wind was rushing through his window and it was difficult to communicate from the back seat.

Some people might feel better about themselves on seeing life reflected in art or vice versa, but the poet's snoring sphincter was the very last thing Selene wanted to read or think about right then. Early on in her own battle with that part of her anatomy, her mum had in sympathetic jest printed out a short poem called ‘Ars Poetica' and suggested Selene stick it next to the toilet as a way to cheer herself up, or at least as a reminder that one day she would no longer have to be paying such close attention to her body's workings. It went like this:

Selene had read the poem with growing horror. Did her mum not realise that the goose had
died
trying to figure out how its sphincter worked?

She threw the
LRB
to the car floor and opened up instead the biography of the doomed marriage of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, which she'd been dipping into during night feeds. It gave her a special frisson to read about their mutual unhappiness from
within the warm security of her happy marriage. But the section she now turned to was describing Sylvia and Ted's initial and wildly passionate love affair.

Selene looked up from the book, at the afternoon light strobing through the gum trees. They'd turned off the major freeway north now, and the shape of the country road felt more a result of historical accident than planning – its curves paying tribute to old obstacles like lakes and streams and drovers' paths. It was getting chilly. Her husband's silhouette in the driver's seat against the gold-hazed windscreen was so familiar, and filled her with tenderness. She remembered on one of their first encounters following him home in her car from a party, how she had fallen in love with the shape of his head and shoulders in the dark interior of his car and the way he had waited for her on the side of the road when she'd been delayed by a red light. It had always been a habit on road trips to put her hand on his thigh as he drove. Even if they stayed silent, each letting their thoughts unspool behind them, it meant they were connected. She missed him, she realised.
I am here, where are you?
This glancing winter light always made her nostalgic for things she hadn't properly valued in the past. She leaned forward and squeezed his shoulder, and he immediately covered her hand with his own, as if he had been waiting for the gesture.

Near the end of their four-hour journey, long after the sun had set, once the baby had fallen asleep again, Selene realised she needed the toilet. Her husband pulled over, keeping the headlights on, and gave her a grimace of condolence as she picked her way through the bush at the side of the road, looking for a tree to give cover. She squatted with her undies bunched around her knees, not thinking of snakes or spiders. They were the least of her troubles. She tried to do her deep breathing but it didn't work, and she called out in torment.

For the last half hour of the trip the post-spasm pain was too intense for her to sit down. She had to keep herself partly lifted above the seat by clinging onto the coat-hanger handle. At one point she swore at her husband that he was driving too slowly, knowing even as she did it that she was being unfair.

Finally they pulled into the driveway of the historic building, an old schoolhouse converted into holiday accommodation. She could hear their friends chatting in the communal living room, and smell woodsmoke on the cold air. Without a word, understanding she needed to be alone, Selene's husband took the baby in his capsule towards the lights and laughter. She slunk off towards the sleeping quarters, claimed a bedroom with an en-suite and ran herself the deepest, hottest bath in the history of bathing. The bath stood claw-footed in the very centre of the bathroom, steam rising from it like a cauldron. Beneath the water, her skin poached pink, then red. She went to bed without saying hello to the others.

After the early morning feed, she went back to sleep, and woke later to find the house empty and a note from her husband:
Gone bushwalking with bubba and the others. Don't worry, I defrosted a bottle of breastmilk for him. Stay in bed all morning if you feel like it
. A fire was still going in the lounge, and there were sausages and eggs covered with a plate, and a coffee pot half full. She had a teaspoon of coffee. It tasted unbelievably good. She took a bite
of the stubby congealed end of a sausage. Then she mashed up berries with psyllium husk powder and water for her liquid breakfast. A trussed turkey was already roasting in the oven, and on the sideboard were the beginnings of various accompaniments: raw stuffing mixture, peeled potatoes and a resting batter for Yorkshire puddings. Somebody had made mulled wine the night before, and she simply could not resist. She reheated a cup of it in the microwave and drank very slowly. She knew that later it would anger her innards and she would pay for every drop. But it tasted like nectar on the tongue.

The corridors were hung with a few sepia photographs of the schoolmaster and his family who had lived in these rooms beside the schoolhouse, now the dining room. Selene stared at the image of the wife, a woman living out her days here a hundred years ago, mother to eight children. Her thoughts turned gloomy: evidently even this woman had managed to have sex again. And again, and again, and again. Selene wished suddenly and recklessly that she had lived at a time when she would not have had a choice in the matter, and no luxury of overthinking. Her great-aunt had once described her younger son as a ‘punishment baby', his conception the outcome of her not having dinner ready when her husband got home from work. Selene's own mother had implied that it was Selene's father who had decided when it was time to have intimate relations again after the birth of her babies. If she could just lower her expectations of sex, if she could think of it as something to be done to her, an act of endurance rather than communion, she might be okay. Her husband would never agree, though. Once previously in their relationship, long before the baby, she'd pretended for his sake that she was in the mood and he had recoiled, hurt that she could think that would please him.

After Christmas lunch, one of the couples – the only ones who did not have children – disappeared to their bedroom to ‘sleep it off',
but there was something sheepish to the way they left the lounge that suggested they were going to do more than just sleep. Selene noticed her husband also watching them leave with a wistful expression, but whether it was for the good old days of weekend napping or for the indolent pleasure of afternoon sex, she couldn't tell.

The remaining couples tried their best to pretend the mood hadn't shifted in the room, but everyone was tired and full and a bit drunk, and the babies and toddlers – who had mostly slept through the lunch itself – were getting fractious. Each couple negotiated some sort of arrangement for the long hours remaining until the children could be put to bed. Selene told her husband he could go lie down; she needed to get out, to get some air, and unlike him she'd had very little of the feast.

She and one of the other wives strapped their babies to their chests – Selene's facing inwards, the other, who was closer to five months, facing outwards with his limbs sticking out like an upturned beetle – and headed down the dirt track beside the neighbouring farm's fields.

Like all new mothers, Selene and her friend were condemned to a relentless confessional intimacy. She sometimes wondered what they would speak about one day when their children were grown and they no longer felt such urgency to brief each other on the state of their children's bodies, and their own. But still it was difficult for Selene to broach the topic that had been preoccupying her. Perhaps since it involved speaking not only of their own bodies but of those of their husbands, and that was mostly uncharted territory.

‘So you know they say six weeks is
the
time . . .' Selene trailed off, trusting her friend to understand her meaning. ‘It's not just about the bum thing. Even if everything was in working order, I just don't know if I'd be able to – contemplate it.'

A mist was settling. They kept walking, eyes forward, each holding their baby's feet in their hands.

Her friend was quiet for a while. ‘I'm embarrassed to admit this, though I shouldn't be,' she said finally. ‘I'm the one who initiated our first sex after the birth. Only at about three months, mind you. I had to talk him into it. I had this need to feel his stomach flat against mine, it had always been our thing. And I think I wanted to make my body private again, take it off the record. The way your body becomes public property, you know? My sister-in-law knew about my clitoral graze, for god's sake. Even my stepdad knew about my stitches.'

They laughed then, and Selene didn't pry any further. She was grateful that her friend didn't ask her for specifics either. But she understood her meaning, and it helped. Sex didn't always have to be about love, or even desire. Sometimes it was about nothing more than marking out the territory of self. It reminded her of the way she'd felt at eighteen, when she'd triumphantly lost her virginity and it had not mattered one iota who the man was; even at that young age she had understood he was nothing more than a placeholder, a significant zero. This had taken her by surprise, her ability to use somebody else's body to make manifest a transformation in her own. She had used him to become a woman, stepped over his naked body to go out to the dark swimming pool at midnight, caught up in her own act of courage and power.