Morag Joss: The Night Following

All the traditional wisdoms about fidelity, security, even happiness, came loose, too, and went flapping after them. They grew shimmery and fell away to nothing, and when they had gone I marvelled that I had ever thought them real.

This new lightness both exhilarated and relaxed me. I switched off the ignition. I sat with the condom wrapper in my hand and saw what must have gone on like a sequence of illustrations from a story I’d been carrying around in my head, untold, for more than half my life. Look, here are Jeremy and his wife, married all these years. Jeremy is an anaesthetist; his wife is artistic. He rescues human beings from pain, she notices the reflections of clouds in puddles. Here is their tasteful house in Beaulieu Gardens, a leafy cul-de-sac. They do not look unhappy, and why should they? They acquired long ago a lightness on the subject of childlessness and they have no troublesome friends or worries about money. They have everything from a double garage to a self-cleaning espresso machine. But if they are happy they are not ecstatically so. Ecstasy is not in the picture. What’s on the next page?

Ah! Here is Jeremy again, tipped back in the grey suede driving seat of his prized yellow Saab convertible. He is not alone. A woman who is not his wife is stroking a condom over Jeremy’s erect penis, in accordance with the instructions on the packaging, which almost certainly call it that, although this woman is using other words for it. Indeed, she is dallying, taking Jeremy’s aforementioned between her lips, whispering playful threats and promises of what’s going to happen. See here? Jeremy again. His eyes, shiny with joy, are fixed unseeing on the roof of the car. Yes, here it is, here’s the ecstasy now. She’s across him like a crab, claws waving, impaled. And here is Jeremy’s wife, is it days, weeks, months, or even years further along in her married, leafy, cream-carpeted, cul-de-sac life, sitting in the yellow car alone, holding the condom wrapper that Jeremy left in the glove compartment. What does she make of this?

The parade of images faded. I pulled down the sunshield and looked at myself in the mirror, wondering if the calm I felt inside couldn’t be what I was feeling at all and my face might reveal actual distress. Perhaps I wanted to watch myself deciding what to feel. But my face bore no more than a shadow of preoccupation. Should I not feel at least mild consternation? I was surprised. I hadn’t expected it of Jeremy, or rather, of a Jeremy; from a Jerry, from a man of my mother’s type, with many rings and a leather coat, grey hair over the collar, maybe. But this seemed an implausible story for any Jeremy to have got himself into, let alone an anaesthetist Jeremy of fifty-eight suffering from problematic nasal hair and occasional tinnitus, a Jeremy with meaty, antiseptic hands and a quasi-surgical attitude to sex. (Not clinical, exactly, but with a fastidious emphasis on equipment, technique, and procedure: always in bed, straight to the relevant sites, and nothing said-he working reliably, I respectful of his concentration-until afterward, when he would express satisfaction not so much at passion spent or even appetite sated but at a job done. It’s surprising, really, he didn’t talk about outcomes.) At least that was how he was with me, and with diminishing frequency. Was it possible that he had discovered, squashed up with this woman in the yellow Saab, that sex-that he, Jeremy-could be grand and wild and dirty and magnificent?

How much younger than me was she? I ruled out her being a prostitute-Jeremy would never have compromised the dove grey suede on the backside of a common tart-so what made it necessary for them to do it in the car? Simple unstoppable urgency?

I turned the wrapper over and over in my hand and felt traces of the lubricant from the silvered inside soften the pads of my fingers. Did they wrest the condom from it with hands intertwined and fumbling? I checked its torn foil edges for teeth marks. Did he hiss at the sight of her long nails, groan as she eased it on, instruct her, take over? Did they cry out at the ludicrous little pulsating moment of crisis as they came, and afterward, capsized and contorted across the upholstery by the frantic passing squall in their groins; did they smile? Joke about where her knickers had got to? Or did he talk-really talk-to her?

I rubbed my fingertip and thumb together to feel that strange, clingy slip, neither oil nor powder, between them. I dipped my hand in the pool of bright cold slime on the passenger seat and rubbed that between my fingers, too, squashing a handful of raspberries and egg together, letting clear slippery albumen and creamy orange and grainy rags of fruit run down and stain my arm. With the engine switched off the car was already warm, and now the air filled with a new smell that quite overwhelmed the silicone tang of Jeremy’s dashboard cleaner. It was raw, and tight with sweetness, fat with yolk and seed and juice. I thought of heat, of skin licked bare of perfumes and smelling only of itself, salty and animal, and I thought of teeth and saliva and damp hair. I thought of the shoving and sighing, the sucking and shuddering, of sweat and come. And I thought, thanks to her husband, here is the anaesthetist’s artistic wife pausing in the car park after the supermarket shop, thinking so intensely about fucking of a kind she’s never experienced that it is making her wet.

And I felt grateful, if a little envious and excluded. I did not even take any avenging pleasure in the Technicolor ruin of the passenger seat. Normally the raspberry and egg disaster would have upset me to the point of nausea but it aroused no feelings I could put a name to. All I could do was study the colours. I sat and watched them seep into one another for a while. Here is Jeremy’s wife contemplating a major spillage. Jeremy’s wife considers that these marks will never come out.

But then came a realization, and with it a flood of pleasure as pure as anything sexual. The realization was that my calm did not require justification. Quietly and naturally I accepted that I did not mind about Jeremy’s infidelity and so need not pretend to. Quietly and naturally I understood that my discovery severed a redundant bond, not because I cared where Jeremy’s penis had been but, very particularly, because I didn’t. I need not pretend that anybody’s safety or happiness was at stake; nothing at all, finally, depended upon the continuation of our marriage to each other, and this was not a calamity. Rather it should be celebrated; here is proof of a union’s unlooked-for but unmistakable meaninglessness, its sudden, clear freedom from having to go on appearing to have a point. This seemed so simple and unambiguous I did not feel it was something I had concluded for myself. It felt like a truth nesting within our marriage all this time like a late and overprotected egg. Now at last it was hatched, and emerging from it was something perhaps ungainly, but unmistakably itself.

I could not wait to tell Jeremy. I was sure it would be such a relief to him, too, to be let off any more of this. My desire to share it with him was, I think, wholly generous. I was sure that when I saw him and explained it all I would, albeit a little bitterly, thank him. I would go straight to the hospital. I could wait and perhaps catch him between the day’s -ectomies: splen- or hyster- or append-, whatever bits of offal came out on Thursdays, I had no idea. We didn’t talk about his lists anymore.

27 Cardigan Avenue

bed

still 9th May

day after

Dear Ruth

Today is taking much longer than usual. After all the recent coming and going it’s very quiet. They’ve all told me I “must be exhausted.” They’ve all told me I have a right to be angry. They are, they say.