Affection (16 page)

My skin was twitchy tingly. I dragged his head toward me and kissed his open mouth and whispered love into him.

It was difficult to stay removed from my body, the vibrations called me back into myself. I wanted it to last, but of course it didn't and I tripped into the disappointment of an early conclusion.

Evan finished university while I was struggling into second year. He found a good job, and a job meant money which was something I seemed to have less and less of. He went out to pubs with our friends who had also started to earn a wage. They went to movies that I could not afford. I found myself excluded from any aspect of his life that related to recreation. In the evenings he watched television with our flatmate. I could hear their laughter as I hunched over my assignments and my novel in progress. I began to look at other people. Passing strangers aroused me.

We fucked regularly, but it had become something he did to placate me. I wanted sex and therefore he roused himself from whatever else he was doing and gave me sex. The hollowness of the act echoed. “You always want sex. Sometimes it's okay not to have sex.”

But it was true, I did always want sex, and sometimes I saw it everywhere. I remember one bus journey particularly. A group of schoolgirls, all giggly and blond and fine tanned skin from a bottle, their uniforms too short at the waist and the little indentations of their belly buttons marring the perfectly flat surface of their stomachs. I was barely older than them: in my early twenties, but they were teenagers as I had never been a teenager.

You could smell them, the high school smell of cheap perfume and sweat and heat. The heat was something else, I could feel it through my knees, which were closer to them. When the bus lurched and one of them fell toward my lap there was heat in there, too. I wanted them to be naked. I wanted this more than anything in that moment. I was appalled at myself, but I wanted it. They were ripe. They were peach fuzz and perfect sweet flesh. I wanted to bite down into them before the flesh was spoiled by their slow trudge toward death.

I became a monster in that moment of longing. They would look at me if they knew and curl their lips back in disgust. They would look at my flesh, which was never beautiful, and smell my damp earth muskiness and make hideous squealing noises in disgust.

 

 

I started to walk again. It would happen in the evenings, when the boys were settled down to bad American TV. I would hear them laugh as I shut the door behind me and they would barely notice I was gone. I would walk and then sometimes I would be overtaken by a wave of
panic and I would run, as if something was chasing me. Sometimes I thought something was actually chasing me. Sometimes I heard it behind me and I glanced around and it was nothing but traffic.

I had felt this before. I remembered my days at the Country Women's Association and I remembered, also, a nostalgic scene in our backyard, waiting for Dragonhall to be built. I remember telling my sister about it—something is wrong. Something is terribly wrong. I don't see the point anymore. I can't find a good enough reason to keep going. I had felt this before and therefore I would feel this again, and the day-to-day of it all was not enough to keep me trudging on.

I stopped at a chemist thinking I would buy sleeping pills, but I didn't know what to ask for. I pointed to the largest packet of extra strength aspirin and paid for it with the last of my Austudy money. I half-walked, half-ran back to our home.

The boys barely glanced up from the television screen. I slunk through to the bathroom and I heard them laughing and I was invisible. I took the whole packet of tablets because I thought that might do it. I could go to sleep then and the strange sense of panic would be gone. I lay on our waterbed and it was the rocking I think, the rocking and an odd dizziness. I was up as quickly as I could struggle out of the sagging bladder of the bed and vomiting into the toilet, a little onto the floor and there were tablets in it. A scatter of half-dissolved tablets all over the tiles.

“Stupid girl.”

Evan held my hair back from my face as I vomited, and he cleaned up after me. He made me drink so much water that I vomited again and even then he forced my head back and poured water down my throat.

“Stupid girl.” He stroked my head on the pillow and I was terribly tired and couldn't stop crying. I remembered the CWA, and I was thinking, this will get better and then it will happen again and right now it feels like the end of the world, and even if tomorrow is a brighter day, there will be another and another, and the army of days stretching ahead made me hoist a white flag and lie back in the bed and hope that I had ingested enough tablets to ease me away from the world.

I hadn't. I woke late the next day. My eyes were finally dry and the light was too bright and my head ached so badly that I could barely think. One thought bobbed to the surface and floated there.

I just can't drift along like this. Something has to change. Something has to change.

Every day I come back to my computer. I trawl through my sex life, one post at a time. I begin to find the patterns, the back and forth clacking of the ping pong ball. I have bounced between one lover and another and I remember the sex. Most of my other memories are vague, a watercolor wash of people and places I only half recall. The sex remains strikingly clear. Visceral: I remember the sex in my body. I smell it on me when I have finished a blog post and emerge, tired and a little confused back into the real world, in my aging body. Who am I now, I wonder. Where have I left myself?

My blog posts unearth a pattern. I am growing older and the fear that I might lose my sexuality to the passing of years is palpable.

We all grow up to be somebody. We make ourselves up, one
piece at a time, from all the possibilities around us. When I grow up I want to be as warm and cuddly as my mother. When I grow up I want to be as kick-ass as Batgirl. When I grow up I want to be Catherine Deneuve.

And then we grow up and we become the same person we were as a child, only with affectations gleaned from comic books and movie stars and real-life heroes. Underneath the various masks nothing much has changed.

Approaching my fortieth birthday, I look at my dirty laundry, aired publicly on my blog posts, and I know suddenly that I will not grow up to be Catherine Deneuve. I will not magically become the refined but impossibly sexy French superstar despite the hours of watching, pressing rewind, watching, longing, watching.

When I am forty I will be the same unsettled, scatty child who grew bored of climbing a tree halfway up; who could weep for the loss of a toy and, a matter of days later, not remember the toy at all. Who could turn around and start a book again from the beginning, and come to the ending as full of wonder as if I had never visited it before.

I am a middle-aged married woman. I sometimes glaze through my days in a cloud of forgetting, swept up in a hungry tide of wanting. I allow myself to wander freely amongst all of this romantic possibility forgetting that, one, I am old; two, I am not particularly attractive; three, I am married.

I am beginning to realize that when I grow up, which surely
must be any day now, there will be no satisfying turnaround where my ordinary life crashes against my fantasy realm and I finally become the real me.

Christopher invites me for a beer after work and I sit with him and I try my hardest, but I can't even conjure up a sliver of attraction toward him. I have been chatting to Paul on the Internet and now Christopher has been usurped. I don't even remember what Paul looks likes, just a vague impression, but we talk every night. I feel like his voice is my own voice, and I feel an attraction built on disembodied words.

“Do you know that boy, Paul, your writer friend? The one we met at that festival?”

Christopher nods.

“Should I invite him for a drink with us one day? ”

“We can go for a drink,” he tells me, but his eyes have narrowed down to a suspicious squint. “If you want to, we can go for a drink with him.”

I look at Christopher now and I feel the warm glow of my fondness. I say, “You know I think we'll be friends till the day I die.”

He looks at me cautiously and orders me another beer.

I lay next to Evan and we were holding hands, sticky with our sweat and juices. I could hear his blood pounding through his wrist.

“Why didn't we have sex like that when we were together?” he asked, and I turned away because I was afraid I might cry.

I was there when he opened the door and not a word was spoken. We kissed, a gentle kiss with the door wide open behind us. A pause to close it, and an irresistible descent into the kind of passion that we never managed when we were together, and a lurching sensation which I realized was our love for each other surfacing briefly, bobbing up and falling away again. The corpse of it, sinking.

The sex we had that night was not the comforting kind that we had grown used to. We stole pieces off each other, samples of skin secreted away under our fingernails, the taste of sweat, the bitter burn
of his semen that I would taste at the back of my throat for days. He pressed his thumb into my skin so fiercely that I felt the flesh give and his fingerprint is still on me, a lasting scar.

We didn't speak of the bad times, but they were there, too, in the way we tugged at each other's hair and in the tears that streamed from our eyes into each other's mouths.

We lay in the ruin of our relationship and the glory of our sex, all contradictions, loving each other and hating that there was nothing left to do but part.

“Why didn't we have sex like that when we were still together? ”

“Because we were still together.”