Authors: Roberta Latow
He saw happiness shining in her eyes, and felt a twinge of sadness for her when she told him, ‘How can you have any idea what a joy it is for a woman to be filled by the cock of a man she loves? To grip it inside her, vice-like … that for me is being alive and one with you.’ This was the kind of talk she knew seduced him, set him free to explore the depths of his sexuality. He still liked her for that, but as one would like their favoured hooker, the mistress one kept but never married. Once more Robert felt relieved that he was already finished with her as wife or mother of his children.
‘I adore you, Robert, and our life together. This is the best of us, right here and now, when we are in lust, and the world falls away. Every time we make love, I always feel you are fucking me for the last time. That’s why I can never go too far, never want to stop, why I savour every drop of your come. Now take me to bed.’ And she kissed him once more as passionately as he had kissed her.
‘What if it is for the last time?’ he boldly asked. Hoping it might stop her, make her think, listen.
No such thing. All he received was that wickedly
sensual smile. ‘You’ve said that before.’
‘Have I?’
‘Yes.’ And she laughed and pulled him along through the library, the hall, and up the stairs. Once she turned round, looked at him and said, ‘The sex is too good, and in that you are a very greedy man, Robert. I tie you to me with it, and since we love each other and are bound together there is no last time for us.’
‘What about dinner?’
‘It’s in the oven. What about me?’ They were just outside their bedroom door. She flung her arms around his neck and kissed him. Before they entered the room, she began to undress him.
‘Once again, Anoushka, I’m telling you that I hadn’t planned this. Sex is not what this evening is about.’
‘It is now,’ was her retort.
He had seen her like this before. Anoushka at her most seductive. The usually introspective, somewhat remote woman exposing her most intimate self to him in lewd and base expressions of her sexual hunger. Honest in her sexuality to the very core of her being, in that she was the rarest of women. Anoushka pushing all the sexual buttons that she knew he would not resist because of his own sexual lust. He went down on her, a taste of Anoushka to begin the last ride they would ever take together into the land of sexual oblivion. This was the first time Robert could admit to himself that lust, not love, had been the foundation of his happiness with
Anoushka, and it was no longer enough. They were finished, dead, over. But that didn’t stop him. This, their last sexual encounter as husband and wife, was fierce and thrilling; the little death of many orgasms for her, his parting gift.
Anoushka could hear the sound of a cello; the music of Villa Lobos drifting up from the drawing room. She cut the sales tag hanging from the cuff of her new satin blouse, straightened the skirt over her hips and adjusted the belt of black jet beads. It suddenly seemed very important that Robert thought she looked perfect – beautiful and perfect. He was angry with her. Though he had not said so, she sensed his anger, had experienced it in the sex they had just experienced together. There was always a little anger in Robert when he was out of control sexually. At those times he turned his anger to passion and uninhibited sex, sex with no boundaries. Base and lewd and so exciting. That was why she drove him to it, used her sexuality to seduce him into streams of orgasm they both enjoyed. There was nothing else like sexual bliss with Robert, that and to hear him tell her how much he loved her.
How she revelled in his protestations of love during their orgasms together. But not this time, not once had
Robert used his sexual rage to call out his love and passion, and tell her, ‘I love you, my wife,’ or ‘I love you, Anoushka.’ Once spent, it was always the controlled, kind, generous Robert asking, ‘Happy, babe?’ or telling her, ‘Something special. You deserve something special in your life. Go and treat yourself to something you want.’
Some little thing he was too much of a gentleman to make an issue of, that was it. The button missing on her coat? She had seen him take notice of that. Something she should have done and had let slide? She was more curious than concerned. She knew her Robert. Something must have happened at the hospital. But he never brought the hospital home and into their personal lives. Anoushka shrugged her shoulders and tried to put Robert’s anger out of her mind.
She took a long steady look at herself in the mirror, and what she saw gave her confidence that Robert would be much pleased with her. Just out of a dress box elegance, everything in place and shining. He liked his women to look as if they had stepped directly from between sheets of crisp white tissue paper or walked off a fashion runway. Once again she vowed to herself to keep up her standards for the man she loved.
She could smell the casserole, lamb and lemon, rosemary and thyme, wafting through the house from the kitchen. She turned from the mirror, and as she passed their four-poster bed Anoushka found Robert’s absence from it disturbing in the same way she had done when she had awakened and he had not been
there. She left the room immediately and blocked all worries from her mind.
Anoushka was aware that her marriage was the sum of many little rituals. Dressing for dinner was one of them. It kept an edge on their togetherness, their making an effort for one another and leaving the day and the outside world behind them, to be viewed with a degree of emotional detachment as a voyeur might. It was one of the rituals they both enjoyed whether dining at home or out in some smart restaurant before going to a concert, the theatre or cinema. Had they not planned to go to the country club for dinner this evening, Mrs Cooper would, as she did most of the evenings they were at home, have been serving them a splendid meal. It was neither laziness nor not wanting to be home alone with her husband that prompted Anoushka, on entering the kitchen and seeing Robert dressed in his dinner jacket and black tie, to suggest, ‘It’s not too late for us to change our mind, Robert. I think I would like to go to dinner at the country club.’
He ignored her words. He was standing at an angle to the cooker, tending a saucepan. ‘Your timing is perfect. The rice is done. I used the Basmati, butter and black pepper. Another fifteen minutes and the casserole might have dried out.’
‘We can eat it tomorrow. Let’s go to the club,’ she insisted.
Robert placed a lid on the saucepan and turned from his cooking to gaze across the kitchen at her. There was something in his eyes that she had never seen
before. It was unnerving. And his silence – she felt something hostile in his refusal to answer her. That strange sense of fear that had seized her earlier in the day returned. She shivered. Robert turned his back on her. There seemed something terribly exacting in the way he turned the knobs of the cooker off. From the warming oven he removed a handsome porcelain soup tureen containing the lobster bisque. He walked with it past Anoushka to the dining room.
She followed him, trying to tell herself nothing was wrong. It was just Robert changing his plans. The candles were already lit in the dining room and the table set for two. He at the head and Anoushka on his right. After placing the tureen on the table, he went to Anoushka and took her by the hand.
‘You’re a very beautiful lady, and the clothes are marvellous. You would have made a dazzling impression at the country club.’ But his voice was as cold as stone.
He held the chair back from the table and, zombie-like, Anoushka sat down. Robert sat down in his. ‘There’s something very wrong this evening,’ she commented.
‘Ah, you’ve noticed.’ He poured a serious and grand old style claret, a La Mission-Haut-Brion into each of their glasses.
‘What’s going on, Robert? You’re frightening me,’ she told him.
‘There’s no point in being frightened or anxious about this. We are going to be civilised and deal with
this rationally. As much as I would like to make this easy for us, there is no way to be kind and get the job done. It’s
over
, Anoushka. I want out of this marriage as quickly and with the least harm to the children as is possible.’
‘What
are
you talking about, Robert?’
‘Divorce.’
She all but jumped out of her chair and in the process knocked over her glass of wine. It smashed and the wine soaked in a pool of red into the white linen cloth. She quickly stepped back from the table to stop the wine staining her skirt. Robert rose from his chair to cover the ugly red mark with his napkin and to take Anoushka by the arm and lead her away from the table, through the dining room into the drawing room. ‘I think something stronger perhaps,’ he suggested as, still gripping her arm, he walked her to the table where they kept a drinks tray.
‘Is there another woman?’
Robert looked away from the drinks tray and met his wife’s eyes. How blind Anoushka could be when she chose to! So many years living with him and not to have known that. He felt no sympathy for her. Incredibly, her question angered him. ‘There has always been another woman,’ he told her.
‘What are you talking about, Robert?’
He splashed two large measures from the bottle of vodka he had earlier removed from the freezer into small crystal glasses. He knocked his drink back in one swallow and Anoushka followed suit, closing her eyes
and trying to catch her breath, shocked yet still not believing what she was hearing.
Robert took her by the arm and once again walked her to one of a pair of French Directoire round chairs, sitting her down in it. He grabbed the other by its elegant arm, carved in the shape of a swan, and drew it from its usual place to sit opposite his wife. He could see it in her face. She was blocking out the reality of the situation, just as she always did when something threatened the peace and happiness of her life. She was trying to minimise the damage. But this time he would not make the slightest concession, as he had done all their married life to date. Not for her, the children, nor their marriage. Even he was shocked to find that his marriage to Anoushka was quite finished. How indifferent he was to the years or even the pleasure he had had with her and family life.
‘Anoushka, we can do this the easy way or the hard way, but it’s going to happen.’
‘I can’t seem to take this in, Robert. If there is a problem, let’s talk about it, work it out.’
‘Anoushka, the problem is this marriage, and I don’t want to work it out. It’s over.’
‘Why?’
‘Don’t do this to yourself.’
‘Do what?’
‘Ask me the whys and wherefores.’
‘Oh, I’m just to remain silent and make it easy for you to destroy my life!’
‘Talking about why I want a divorce will only hurt
you more, and not make this any easier for me. It’s over, we have to go forward with our lives.’
It was as if Anoushka had not heard his words. Once more she asked, ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘I want to live my life differently.’
‘Then we’ll both live our lives differently.’
‘Stop! I don’t want to live with you. This divorce is all about not wanting to live the remainder of my life with you. We’re both still young enough to make other, more rewarding relationships for ourselves. Ones that will make us really happy.’
‘I
am
really happy.’
‘Well, I’m not, Anoushka, and I don’t want to live one more day of a life filled with regrets. Not even one more hour.’
‘I can’t believe this is happening to me. I’m going to wake up and this will have been a bad dream, a nightmare.’
‘You are very much awake, Anoushka.’
‘We’re a family.’
‘Yes, we are at least that. You can see the boys any time you want to see them.’
‘I can’t seem to take this in. You love another woman and always have? And you are giving me permission to see my own sons when I would like to? Have I done something wrong? OK, if I have then I’ll make it right. If you’re unhappy with some aspect of our life, we’ll solve the problem, Robert. I love you and I know you love me.’
She rose from her chair and paced the floor. Angry
now, she confronted him with, ‘How dare you tell me you haven’t been happy, that we haven’t had a good life, a family and home that was everything you ever wanted?’
‘It was everything
you
ever wanted, I always wanted more but made do.’
‘That’s cruel.’
‘That’s the truth, and one we should have faced years ago. Now let’s be civil about this.’
‘It’s difficult to be civil, Robert, when I have been so deceived.’
‘I take full blame for the dissolution of our family.’
‘Oh, Robert, that’s rich! You destroy my life in one swift blow and don’t mind taking the responsibility for it. Who is she? Is she demanding that you divorce me and marry her?’
‘No. She knows nothing about this. And she has never, not once, made a demand that I leave my family for her. Quite the opposite in fact. It was she, many times, who tried to break away from me to save our family.’
‘Taking my husband anyway! How pathetic I must seem in your woman’s eyes. How rotten of her, how rotten of you. How long have you not loved me?’
‘You are determined to have this out, aren’t you?’
‘You bet I am.’
‘I won’t lie to you, so some things are better left unsaid. Believe me, it’s best for us merely to work out some arrangements.’
‘Better for you, but not for me. I want the truth.’
The man standing in front of Anoushka was a Robert she had never seen before. All kindness, generosity, gone from his face; instead anger and bitterness and hatred. She shivered, felt sick and collapsed into the chair where she had been sitting.
‘I never wanted this marriage. I
had
to marry you. Now does that make this any easier?’
‘Because I was pregnant?’ It was more a gasp than a statement.
‘Yes. You trapped me into marriage. I did it for my unborn children.’
‘You loved me!’
‘Yes, for being the mother of my sons, and stayed with you because we had become a family.’
‘We had a good marriage, Robert. You can’t deny that.’
‘A very good marriage, but it’s over.’
‘Over?’ she repeated, and once having said it understood for the first time that Robert did mean to leave her.
‘I made the best of a situation. For years, Anoushka, for so many years. Now I want more than just making the best of a situation.’
‘You’ve been planning this for a long time. Is that why you insisted the boys go away to school? You were setting me up to throw me out.’
‘No. I hadn’t planned this at all.’
‘You can’t just toss us away.’
‘I am not tossing my boys away. We’ll work out an amicable settlement.’
‘I want you, Robert. And my life as it is.’
‘Well, I don’t. And that’s final.’
They remained silent for several minutes. He poured them more vodka. After some time, Anoushka asked, ‘You mean this, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘You’re angry with me?’ she asked, more out of puzzlement than anything else. How unfair Robert was being. What had he to be angry about?
‘I’m angry with both of us. Me for being so weak and not having done this long ago. And you for always closing your eyes to the reality of my unhappiness.’
‘Oh, so now this is all my fault?’
‘Yes. Actually, I believe it is.’
‘This is why we’re not at the country club tonight. It wasn’t love or sexual passion that made you change our plans. Although one would hardly have guessed that by the performance you put on upstairs in the bedroom. Fuck me and leave me! How despicable. Not worthy of you, Robert, to end it with one last fuck.’
‘Do you expect me to defend myself? If you do you will be sorely disappointed. Or would you prefer me to be crude and hurtful and tell you that this evening, like most of the sex during our married life, was predominantly your hunger, your lust? It turned me on, you were too good a fuck to resist, and why not? Sex made you happy, made us both happy. Maybe I even did it as much out of a sense of guilt because I never loved you, so I fucked you well, gave you as much pleasure as I could because I couldn’t really give
you what you wanted. Me and love. Because I was giving that elsewhere.’
‘I can’t bear it. All these years you’ve been playing a role in some cheap melodrama.’
‘A role you cast me in. There’s no point to this conversation. I have done everything for the boys. I always will. I hope you feel the same.’
‘What exactly do you mean by that?’
‘The boys are old enough to understand that we want to go our separate ways.’
‘
You
want to go your separate way. Let’s just get that straight.’
‘All right, I want to go my separate way. I can sell this place and give you half of the proceeds. It will buy you a small place in a less affluent neighbourhood here in Lakeside. You can take what you want from the house.’