poisons act in a way which are injurious to life
But then another letter, more beautiful, more urgent than all the rest.
…You help me to live. You soak through the skin of my days, it’s wonderful, torturous, transcendent all at once.
Rubbing and rubbing at the line between your brow. Why won’t he just ring, why is he so opaque, does he always retreat? You’re singed by the uncertainty, can’t be strong in it by yourself, you’ll run from the mess of your world if you have to and be alone, maddened, if you must.
There’s no one to talk to, to ask advice. You want Theo’s blunt opinion, miss the small pop when the cigarette is taken from her mouth and the talking begins, well, this is what you must do, girl. How many times has she said that in your past? She told you early in your relationship with Cole that she wasn’t sure he was good enough for you; she said remember the Madonna song, don’t settle for second-best, baby. But then she changed her tune when she saw over the years his kindness to you; she stopped her doubt after you told her that his capacity for tenderness always floored you and she was very still as you spoke: she had no answer to that. You wonder where she is now and what she’s doing, as curious as an ex-lover and unhinged, hating yourself, lost.
You crawl on your knees in the kitchen, cramming your mouth with chocolate, block-sized bars of it and then biscuits, whole packets of sweetness, and ice cream and peanut butter from the jar, slurping it and sucking it from your fingers in great dollops of crunch, wanting to hurt hurt hurt and forgetting for an instant the power of slim. Unable to think, read, shop, write, to concentrate on anything very much for Gabriel invades all your actions and thoughts. All the efficiency and control of your professional self has been lost, and you’re sleeping until all hours and then lying on the couch and staring into space, trashy gossip magazines unread on your lap. You can’t bring yourself to ring any of your girlfriends, to see them for coffee or lunch, you’re not ready to explain anything, can’t. You don’t want them judging your lank hair and spots, don’t want their rallying or pity or fuss. You’re phoning Gabriel and hanging up after two rings, you’re phoning Theo and doing the same. You can hardly remember the woman you once were, the sensible university lecturer promptly awake, every morning, at six fifty-six.
Is it love, obsession, infatuation? You don’t know. You think of a strange and beautiful word you read about once, Limerance, a psychological term, meaning an obsessive love, a state that’s almost like a drug. Need like a wolf paces the perimeter of your world, back and forth, back and forth, never letting up. You’re in a state that’s focused entirely on the prey, and your fingers, often, are between your legs, stroking, teasing, stirring as Cole sleeps. You’re appalled by the new appetites within you, kicking their feet and clawing to get out.
You find a calming, over the days, within the pages of your little book. The author’s strong, singular voice never wavers, there’s such a rigour to the text and its exquisite borders of red and black. Was she ever crawling on the floor over a man? You can’t see it.
Maybe she never had a lover, maybe it was all in her head.
You wonder, suddenly, if she was unmarried, in a convent, perhaps; celibate, and so much stronger because of that.
Maybe her isolation was something she revelled in, for it enabled her to work.
Was the author contemptuous of the married state? Wanting to shake it up? Perhaps the book is even more subversive than you thought. You suspect she was writing it for any woman but herself.
Not woemen be in subjection to men but men to woemen.
How had she been released?
happiness and virtue alike lie in action
May. The weather is unclenching, there’s a lightness in the air.
The library stacks. The light’s buoyant outside but gloomy inside. It’s been a long time since you’ve come here. Each narrow passageway is illuminated by tugging a string at the end of it and your footsteps ring out on the cast-iron grates with the deadening clang of a jailer. A librarian returning books glances up from a floor below and you remember, too late, that you shouldn’t be wearing a skirt in this place, it’s an old Library lore: the wide spaces in the grates allow people to look up. To give you a shot of erotic courage you’ve not worn underpants but it feels suddenly wrong, you being here, in this state; trying to work but wondering if you’ll see Gabriel by chance, trying to erase one obsession with another and in a place so soaked with them both.
He’s not here. You just want to talk, to put your mind at rest. As you walk from the grills some of the grates shift slightly underfoot and the effect’s dizzying and unpleasant and you’re hating this ragged need in you that doesn’t sit at all comfortably with your public face.
You sit at a desk. Grip its edge. Breathe deep. You have to concentrate on your own book, you must make it work: you need a spine to your life.
And then it comes to you, as beautifully and obediently as a tangle of necklaces that you’ve spent so long trying to unpick, and with the simple looping of one set of beads through another the knot of them magically comes apart.
You will respond to your mysterious seventeenth-century author.
You will write a book in secret, just like her. Why not? All writing is revenge, is it not. Yes, yes. You lick your lips. Reach for your notebook. And in an afternoon lost within the deep, deep peace of solid, consuming work, you produce three lists:
Men you have slept with, what you remember most.
How they seduced.
And on what.
feather beds are a greater luxury than mattresses but are said to be less healthy
Beds, of course:
A stained futon on the floor. A sister’s bed that smelt of grass. An attic eyrie mattress. A caravan bed that was vaguely damp. Your parents-in-laws’ stern spare bed with sheets so slippery you fell off. A deliciously broad hotel bed in Hong Kong, wider than its length. Two single mattresses zipped together and you felt they’d break apart at any moment, they’d swallow you up.
And the non-beds:
A car bonnet. Shag-pile carpet that burned. A field of curious cows. A swimming pool at three in the morning, with the water buoying you under a circus tent of stars. There was the quiet as you fucked, you remember that so clearly, just the water’s soft trickle and swish as you clung to each other and didn’t speak, not a word, focusing on the intensity of the touch and the water’s caress.
A hire car. Sand. A kitchen table at a maiden aunt’s.
All the cliches. It’s remarkable how similar most of the men’s techniques were and yet how
