The New Mrs D

The New Mrs D

By Heather Hill

‘There is a word in the Greek language for which there is no English equivalent. It is ‘meraki’ and it means ‘doing something with soul, creativity or love – when you put something of yourself into what you are doing’.

–
Translating the Untranslatable
, NPR Books.

For David Dando

This is all your fault; and I will always
love you for it.

Shine on you crazy diamond.

TOY x

Preface

‘I remember clearly and will never forget the golden moment when I revealed my truth. Out through the locked up and suppressed little voice hidden deep down within, I allowed myself to say, “I always feel as if I need to give people what they want.”

It was almost as if lightning struck and the clouds parted at the same time. I sat there comfortably in the chair of my therapist’s office, and with a deep breath I knew that “it” was over. I did not know what “it” was or the amount of work and change that would follow, but I knew that I was ready and willing.

I grew up co-dependent. From the influence of an alcoholic and narcissistic father to the string of narcissistic relationships formed afterward, my identity evolved through who I was to others and what I had given to them.

A relationship with a narcissist defines your existence as not your own but as a part of theirs. Others saw me as shy and nice, but I did not realise that I was lost and without balance.

I wanted others to be their authentic selves, truthful and free, but I could not do that for myself so I continued giving up and giving in. Not all was bad—life is beautiful in each form—but I knew I would need to learn something different, as I always dealt with fears and anxieties.

So I have learned something different. I had to dig down to reveal my true, authentic, beautiful self.’

− Anna Puchalski

Chapter One

Bearded lady, 41, slightly used, with squishy, puffball belly subtly disguised by low-lying nipples, seeks man with GSOH, porn allergies and willingness to share razor.

A
s I finished the last pistachio and gazed over the blue Aegean Sea, a promise of marital happiness glinted back at me in the form of that annoying bastard – the romantic evening sunset.

‘Oh sod off!’ I told it. It didn’t.

Neither did the couple on the next balcony. They continued to suck face with even noisier gusto than I could muster while stripping a Magnum ice lolly of its crackly shell. Ooh, Magnums. Before I ate one, usually after one of my frequent moments of relationship misery, I would separate the chocolate from the creamy vanilla inside. A marriage made in heaven, destroyed in my hands. Funny that.

A dark figure on waterskis appeared, ripping across (and ruining) the previously smooth, ‘let’s stand close and drink this all in together darling’ Aegean stillness.

‘Good!’ I thought, my mind a delicious, wine-fuelled haze.

Then, ‘I wonder if he’s single?’

If he could read my thoughts from afar I’m pretty sure waterski guy, who I had already decided was a Hollywood-smiling, Gerard Butler looky-likey, would say, ‘Actually, I’m on my incredibly romantic honeymoon having the time of my life, just like you.’

Sighing, I picked up my faux lonely-hearts ad scrawl and added:

Enjoys expensive dining funded by proceeds of very recently pawned jewellery.

So, Devastation, we meet again. And I can’t
wait
for you to meet my mother, who is about to find out the £8,000 she spent on my wedding had maybe not been her best investment. All thanks to the love of my life, David Dando.

Mrs Bernice Annabel Dando. Christ. Why hadn’t I spotted beforehand the hidden warning in my new initials? Mrs B. A. D. Idea. We had been just four days into our honeymoon when I’d picked up my new husband’s mobile and snuck off into the bathroom as he slept,
hoping to search for the taverna a tour rep had told me was the most romantic spot on the island. But instead of the eatery I was hoping to come across, I found an internet history full of video ‘eat me outeries’ which David had almost certainly cum across.

I’d only half-glanced as the first page flashed up, my eyes distracted by the reflection of the newly-wed vixen in the mirror. ‘It’s now; it’s time,’ I had told myself. ‘Today, I’m going to knock his damn socks off.’ I’d squirted my neck with David’s favourite perfume (the one I hated), pushed my boobs back into the cups of my nightie and winked at my reflection.

It had been four days since we were married, yet in all that time he just hadn’t quite been able to get in the mood.

‘It’s just all the stress from the wedding, Binnie. It’ll be alright after I’ve chilled out and released some tension for a day or two.’

I’d flattened my bed-head hair and admired myself in my new, semi see-through nightie; all the while playing out a sexy, early morning seduction in my mind as David lay snoring in the next room. I’d whispered a husky, ‘Hello, Mrs D,’ and blown myself a kiss before my gaze fell back down to the screen. Which was where I met the naked, stretched out, legs akimbo torso of ‘Josephine − the Nymphotast’. I’d blinked and stumbled backwards, stunned and disbelieving. Not again; not now! It was as though the phone had delivered a short, sharp electric shock. Scrolling the web page up and up, because surely this must be some mistake, I’d felt a familiar pain. Only this time I had an overwhelming rush of anxiety too. I’d just got married. I’d just said, ‘till death do us part’ to this man in front of everyone! The phone had clattered off the floor tiles as my legs gave way, sending me sliding down to a broken heap beside it. Somewhere in the dizzy distance, there had been a dull
thud, thud, thud
. Someone calling my name.

‘Binnie, are you okay? What happened in there? Let me in!’

I’d lain there staring into space, my stomach threatening to throw an early morning cup of hotel room coffee back out. I’d heard heavy, rasping breaths. Mine. As my heart had hammered, I’d turned my head to one side and caught my reflection again in the floor to ceiling mirror. The seductive temptress had vanished, and all that remained was a pathetic, love-starved blob in a pink nightie. The woman that nobody wanted.

He’d found his tension release on our honeymoon alright, it just hadn’t been with me. But then, why should I be surprised? I’d already discovered – countless times during our six-year relationship – that he’d been viewing porn when he could have been making love to me.

As I’d sat on the cold, hard, bathroom floor, my heart was bursting, yet the tears just wouldn’t come. I’d willed myself to cry, but inside I felt cold, like somehow I had known this was coming. I
had
to know; he’d done it all before. Of course,
this
is what he’d been doing. This explained what he’d been getting up to each morning while I strolled to the local shop for our day-old English-language newspaper. On our bloody honeymoon! He’d joked about my leaving him in the room for a while so he could have a shit in private . . . But he’d just wanted to
be
a shit in private.

Stupid, gullible me.

Now, as it turned out, ours had been a marriage of convenience. He’d conveniently forgotten to tell me that, despite all his pre-nuptial promises, he hadn’t in fact given up populating his internet browser with a video library of his many and varied kinks. And
I
had conveniently forgotten that, as a somewhat weathered 40-something mother-of-two who no longer wore her tits up to her chin, I was unlikely to keep him interested in me ‘till death did us part’ anyway. Life begins at 40DD. Period.

But he’d made me believe he could change. There had been a year of nothing to worry about. A whole year! No internet history filth stumbled upon, no finding him creeping into bed, spent, at 2am and no elongated showers after another repeat episode of
Baywatch
.

Yet in all that time he had continued to ‘suffer’ from impotence, though only with me it now transpired. With ‘Slutty Josephine, the Nymphotast’ I imagined he’d been a veritable Colossus complete with accompanying fireworks. The scrunched up, crusty contents of the wastepaper basket in our honeymoon suite said it all. Yesterday, those tissues were testimony to a bout of hay fever brought on by Greece’s glorious flora and fauna. Today they were evidence of my new husband’s betrayal.

After what seemed like an hour of him swearing he was going to ‘find out who had been doing all this rubbish on his phone’ he’d finally given in and admitted guilt.

‘I was watching it for us, Binnie,’ came the excuse after this latest find. ‘It was just a means to perk myself up a bit.’

With the benefit of embarrassing hindsight I realise my screamed reply had most likely been heard by Suck-Face couple next door.

‘
Thanks
David. Thanks for explaining that you have to ogle some perfectly sculpted 20-year-old before you can face having sex with me! Only, you’re forgetting one teeny, tiny detail.’ (I even did that awful wiggly thing with my pinkie finger, just to emphasise the point.) ‘We haven’t actually had any sex, remember?’

That had made him wince. Even I couldn’t believe I’d been so cruel. I was hurting, I was angry, yet, unbeknown to him, deep down I was lost.

He’d spent the next hour trying to convince me how sexy I was to him, just like before. I felt almost inexplicably numb.

‘You promised to love me in sickness and in health,’ he had cried. ‘Well, this is my sickness! The only thing that gets me off is porn. It’s just . . .’ At this point his face had screwed up and he’d been unable to meet my gaze as he delivered a final blow to my heart. ‘I love you, Binnie, I do. This is not about you. This is just something guys
do
.’

He’d reached for my hand, but I pulled away.

‘Something guys
do
?’ I’d said.

‘Well . . . come on, Binnie. It isn’t personal. It’s not like I’m messing about with a real woman.’

‘You’re not?’ I held up his phone again, revealing Josephine in all her banana-toting glory. ‘So this is an object to you, not a person?’

He fidgeted and lowered his eyes. ‘Well, yes, for want of a better way to put it. She’s real to someone but to me, sure, she’s an object to get off on.’

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘David, where is the man I love?’

‘I’m right here for you, where I’ve always been. This is nothing. It means nothing.’

‘YOU HAVEN’T BEEN HERE FOR ME,’ I yelled, throwing the phone at him. ‘You’ve been getting off with HER!’

Six years of bottled up fury and anguish were unleashed from a place inside me I hadn’t known existed before that moment. I’d told him he was, quite literally, a jerk-off. Then, I’d told him to something-else off before heaving his suitcase at him. There would be no forgive and forget, unlike every time before. Maybe he was right; this was just something men do. Yet, I just knew I couldn’t stand it anymore. If that meant being alone for the rest of my life, so be it.

‘Get out, David. I just can’t look at you right now. You’ve made me sick inside.’

‘But Binnie, this is our honeymoon! We’re supposed to do this together. You’re my wife and I can’t be without you! We can work on this, I know we can.’ He fell onto his knees and pulled me towards him again, hugging my waist and sobbing, ‘Please,
please
don’t do this.’

I pushed him away, still unable to cry.

‘GET OUT!’

It hurt to watch him beg. I’d felt a strange mixture of anger and guilt. Maybe it was my fault for letting myself go. Maybe I was being an insecure prude. But as I had fallen back onto the honeymoon bed, where only yesterday the maid had left a cascade of red rose petals arranged in the shape of a heart, I’d held my head in my hands and at last the tears had come. Suddenly, like some out of body experience a person might have in between life and death, I saw myself as a bystander might: a sad, love-drunk woman believing all her partner’s lies. It made sense to feel that way because right at that moment I
did
feel dead – dead inside. The New Mrs D, with the same old Mr D. I’d been feeling sorry for him and making up excuses in my mind for his terrible behaviour for too, too long. I had allowed him to do this to me. I’d made it all happen. I’d married a man who saw me as undesirable.

‘But . . . what about . . . us?’ David had stammered, his eyes full of tears.

‘I don’t know, honestly I don’t.’

‘Will you just . . . what about our envelopes? Can we at least open the envelopes?’

Again outside of myself, I’d watched a smiling me from the past: an excited wife-to-be writing my secret honeymoon wish before pushing it into an envelope. Sadly for David, it hadn’t been, ‘please turn out to be an arsing liar.’

‘Oh, David,’ I said. ‘It’s all so irrelevant now.
Please, just go.’

‘But when will I see you?’

Looking into his doleful, hazel brown eyes − the same ones I’d fallen for long ago in happier times − had made my heart ache all the more. ‘Soon,’ I’d told him. ‘For now, I just want to be by myself.’

I‘d stood up, pointed to the door and at last, he had left.

Screwing up the empty pistachio bag and tossing it into the waste paper basket with the tissues, I picked up David’s still sealed envelope containing his honeymoon wish and turned it over in my hands before flinging it back in to my suitcase. I just needed to be without him right now. Staring out into space, still in the lacy nightie I’d been planning to seduce him in, I reflected on this latest reason for breaking yet more promises.

‘It was just a means to perk me up a bit.’

Attempting to perk David up a bit had been all I’d thought about these last few years. Just as my own libido reached its peak, I’d found a man in a permanent trough. But there wasn’t a wild, wanton thing I hadn’t been willing to try to get him in the mood and prove to both him, and myself, that I was no prude.

I’d stripped naked in the garden and, despite feeling like a pot-bellied pig, rolled in mud (like the mud wrestling women I’d found in his computer history) – ‘Oh, er, isn’t it a little bit cold for this, Binnie?’ I’d dressed like a prostitute, donning a short skirt, no knickers, fishnets and high heels while waiting for him to come home. ‘What on earth? I mean . . . Wow, you look hot! Just give me a few minutes, I’ve been bursting for the bog all afternoon.’ As he trundled off to the bathroom with a copy of the day’s paper, I had waited but, suffice to say, he hadn’t been able to rise to the occasion anyway. All that if-you-can’t-beat-’em-join-’em effort, only to feel like a very uncomfortable frump in she-wolf’s clothing. Then there was the terrified look on his face every time he found me all dressed up and raring to go. I was always left feeling demanding and silly, when all I wanted was a chance for a normal sex life. Nothing outrageous. No seven nights a week and twice daily. Just
some
sex.

Tossing the envelope he’d begged me to open back into my suitcase, I gave an almighty sigh, and the waistband of my bikini pants rolled below my belly for the third time that day. With no-one here to care, I had stopped sucking in. I argued with fashion designers in my head. ‘Why the hell can’t you make pants your average size 16 woman can sit down in?’

My tears had long since subsided and from my broken self, a bitter, cynical woman I hardly recognised had emerged. It was she who had raided the mini bar before starting on the snacks, leaving her stomach swollen with a confusing concoction of emotions, four mini bottles of wine and a bag of pistachios. That’s why my pants wouldn’t stay up.

Sex with David had usually been a disappointment – almost non-existent, actually – so, why the hell had I married him?

I did it for love.

I did it for love.

That has to be the most devastating phrase in the English language for any woman. Along with ‘there’s no wine left’, and ‘click here for Josephine’s cum shots’.

Every time I’d caught him using porn in the past, I’d dithered over whether this was his problem or mine. Was this a good enough reason to quit on my relationship? My first husband, Michael, had loved me for all of two years before moving on to someone more exciting and yes, this time I wanted to prove I could ‘do’ marriage. There was no sex, sure, but David had a problem and I thought we had been making it better together. David was broken and I had thought I was going to be his saviour – the wife-in-shining-armour to fix him.