The Marriage Diaries Read online

  The root cause of the incompatibility was, I think, Sean's need for “mastery” (the terminology is Raymond's). It's not that he strives to dominate in company—that would require too much effort—it's just that whenever he doesn't dominate effortlessly, by right, then he simply retires from the fray. He won't bother to charm or amuse, or even look interested—and he's perfectly capable of all those, because I've seen him do it—and instead, it's all dark rages and uncomfortable silences and a general ruining it for everyone else.

  I always found his civil service friends perfectly acceptable. I wouldn't want to be trapped in an elevator with any of them, but they were usually amiable enough to make five minutes of chitchat bearable, on those rare occasions when I was permitted to meet them. (Okay, not quite rare enough for my taste, but I never showed it.) The leaving drink wasn't anywhere near as horrendous as he paints it. There were still half a dozen stalwarts in cheap suits and polyester ties when we arrived, none of whom bore any relation to the description of “Humbert.” We stayed for a good half hour, which I think was duty fulfilled. It was, as Sean says, my very first night out after weeks of nurturing, and can he blame me if I wanted to leave that nasty smoky pub to go to a lovely smoky bar?

  We drank sea breezes till two in the morning, and I even agreed to share a couple of lines with Galatea, just to be companionable, and anyway, it was business of a sort, as she's helping with some of the detailing on the new shop in Bond Street. Luckily I'd expressed and frozen enough milk to keep Harry going till it was out of my system, so I didn't have to worry on that score.

  Everyone was there—it was still when people went to the Met, because that's where everyone went; a month later, and nobody went to the Met anymore, because that was where everyone went. People thought—or at least said, which is as good or better—that I looked incredible, and for once, I knew I did. I was wearing a pair of Bella's antique emerald earrings and a cleavage-maximizing jade green wrap dress in silk jersey that I'd reclaimed from my earlier, slightly rounder self, and I don't believe that anyone would have guessed that it was only two months previously that I'd been relieved of ten pounds of baby boy. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young and free (for a while) and stoned and smashed and flirted with by the gay and the straight was very heaven.

  And screw Sean if he didn't think I'd earned it.

  SEANJOURNALFIVE.DOC

  HOME ALONE

  So we had our time together, the three of us. Days filled with cold sunshine and hot coffee. We spent whole hours just gazing at the little man, breathing him in like nicotine, humming and thrumming with the sheer joy of having made a thing so beautiful.

  I think the best bits were the mornings after his six thirty feed. He'd usually go back to sleep again, and we'd chat and snooze, and then he'd wake between us and turn his head from one to the other as we spoke, his huge eyes watching so intently, as if his life depended on catching every movement of our lips.

  But then, bud by bud, winter began to open into spring, and Celeste went back to work.

  Her first job was to go to Paris at the start of the buying season. I've never worked out how fashion seasons mesh with the real ones, but it meant three days and nights alone with Harry.

  “Will you be okay?” Celeste asked, trying her best to look concerned. The taxi was waiting downstairs, which inhibited any desires I might have for a long discussion. She was wearing a hat with a wide brim and had on a beige leather coat, made from dolphins.

  “It'll be fine,” I replied, hoping to get the message across as succinctly as possible that we probably wouldn't be fine, no not fine at all, and she'd better not even think about having a good time in Paris because we wouldn't be having one here in London, no sirree. True, we'd survive, but the emotional scars would run bone-deep, and any future irresponsibility on my part along the lines of excessive drink, football, and loud music would be justifiable, perhaps even necessary. Got that?

  “Oh good,” she said. “I knew it would. Bye.”

  And of course, it was. Or at least, the things that might have been difficult weren't really very difficult. Harry took to the bottle like a dipso. I blame Celeste's breasts. You see, the girl I had first courted had been whittled down by diet and exercise to the bare essence of a woman. And if she had lost some unnecessary (though, in my eyes, nothing was superfluous) baggage—a little something above her hip bone, a parabolic smidge beneath her chin—gone also were those glorious orbs of yore. Yes, I'm afraid the new slimline Celeste had nothing like the firepower up top she once possessed. There was, is, nothing to be ashamed of in the new models: they don't droop forlornly or flap like leathery bat wings, but nor are they the staggering, genuinely life-changing breasts that I'd first fondled, leaping like salmon, springy, vibrant, B-I-I-I-I-I-I-I-G. When I first saw them, I swear to God I heard music, and not just any music but the miraculous fanfare from Monteverdi's Vespers: a fanfare so good he had to use it again in his opera Orfeo. And I'm sorry if that makes me sound like a big ponce, but you'd only think that if you've never heard the music and, more particularly, if you haven't heard the fanfare and also seen Celeste's breasts, back in their glory days, boundless in their joy.

  True, there was a temporary renaissance, a late flowering of breastly magnificence, during and just after the pregnancy; but the necessary transience of the phenomenon gave the breasts a poignancy that somehow forbade lasciviousness. There was something in them of the overripeness that tells of the decay to follow, the engorgement of Hellenistic art after the unassailable rightness of the classical, the trying-too-hard-to-please of Bollywood, that melancholy we find in all fading civilizations facing the barbarism that will engulf them.

  Not to mention the issue of seepage. No, call me old-fashioned, but I like my breast, as it were, black. Yup, hold the milk. Nope, not frothed or foamed or creamed, not full-fat, semiskimmed, or even skimmed. I don't care what anyone says, it's pervy.

  Milk's where I came in, wasn't it? Yeah, you see, the slimmed-down tit, howsoever bulked by maternal processes, didn't seem to have the storage capacity to sate the boy. Like a good performer but a bad mother, she always left him wanting more. So the transition to the bottle, so endlessly replenishable, so free from all that annoying, style-cramping breastly matter, was painless, although it did mean that I had to start getting up for night feeds rather than just hunkering down and waking Celeste with a hip thrust at the first growl from Harry at two in the morning.

  Celeste's departure did not, therefore, mean starvation. Nor did it mean, for Harry, a deterioration in personal hygiene, as I'd always taken charge of matters excretory; yes, I got the bum deal.

  Do you mind if we discuss poo for a while? You see, poo was one of the things that I was worried about. I mean, in everyday life, it— other people's poo—is not something you have to deal with or even think about. But suddenly there it is, often quite literally in your face. One of my earliest diaper-changing experiences featured a spectacular vertical spurt from a faceup position (one of the trickiest of all defacatory maneuvers to pull off), which showered my spectacles, hair, and mouth with liquid shit the consistency of a good, thick milk shake from Ed's Easy Diner.

  But this is where my point comes in. Changing a baby's diaper— proviso to follow—changing a baby's diaper is not anywhere near as disgusting as you'd think. And my proviso is not that it has to be your baby, although that may well add a smear of Vaseline to the lens, but that the baby be milk-fed and, even better, breast-fed. A breast-fed baby's poo smells of almost nothing: just the merest hint of butterscotch or perhaps a whiff of the sugar jar stashed with a secret vanilla pod. Would I go so far as to say it's nice? No, not quite that far. Agreeable hits it on the head. It's agreeable.

  Freshness, as with all dairy and dairy-based products is, naturally, the key. If it's not fresh, the situation changes. One of my grimmest discoveries was the encrusting of dried matter I found that had seeped its way between the cracks at the end of the useless IKEA flatpack changing
table with handy drawers I had insisted upon rather than the antique mahogany (or was it Bauhaus-influenced chrome and plate glass?) piece that Celeste would have preferred. Occasionally she'd let me have these little victories to create the illusion that the contest was equal. Anyway, after four hours of bitter struggle, I'd erected something with enough gaps, holes, fissures, and crevasses to very nearly count as netting rather than a piece of furniture, and Harry, over the next few months, managed to fill most of them with well-aimed fecal squirts and sprays. It was a friend who first noticed the smell—I supposed we must have grown too used to it. Perhaps even become part of it. I pulled away the loosely attached piece of laminate at the foot end of the table to find, well, several months’ worth of caked-on shit. Yum-yum. Cleaned it off with an old toothbrush. Can't remember which one, but I'm pretty sure I threw it away afterward.

  But my point wasn't to disgust, it was to say that we survived without Celeste quite well, thank you. Toward the end, I may have begun to jabber, and I didn't change my clothes while she was away, or wash, and my red-rimmed eyes told of sleepless panic, but Harry was clean and full and happy. He enjoyed sleeping beside me (Celeste had banished him to his own room as soon as it was established that he didn't need us to help him breathe), and he particularly relished forcing me into remote corners in his quest for lebensraum. He didn't miss Celeste at all. I'm told it's because babies have only a thirty-second memory, and so the past simply does not exist for them, and, as I can't think of a more amusing alternative, we'll have to stick with that.

  I only realized fully how exhausted I was when Celeste came back. I handed her the baby like an ultimatum before she'd taken her coat off and went to lie down. She spent the next hour unwrapping the presents she'd bought him: mainly unwearably delicate garments and the sort of handcrafted wooden toys that bore children but make parents feel like they're doing a good job.

  I didn't get anything, needless to say.

  PRADAPRADAPRADAPRADAGUCCI 6

  I have a problem: how must I deal with Sean's standard technique of comingling compliment and insult? I'm really not sure where my boobs stand at the end of all that. And it isn't just my body that comes in for the treatment. So often he'll begin a sentence with “I do love you, but …,” and what follows is a list of things that make me, one would have thought, entirely unlovable. It's all shorthand for: I do love you, but you have thoughts that aren't exactly the same as my thoughts and that must therefore be wrong or irrelevant.

  For the first time, I feel genuinely hurt, as opposed to annoyed or frustrated, about something he's written. He implies that I had no sadness at leaving Harry, that I scurried from the apartment like a burglar stealing her own freedom. Now I know I'm not the most gushing of women, and that my emotions are not usually for public consumption, but only a fool, or someone trying to squeeze both the maximum amusement and maximum pity out of the situation, could fail to see that my reticence, my haste, was born of anguish. I can't pretend that Paris wasn't a joy, but it was also work, and I longed for my boy, longed for both of my boys.

  The reason Sean didn't get anything was because he'd always complained if it cost too much and put whatever it was away “for best,” never to retrieve it again, or at least not until it had gone completely out of fashion. Or he'd moan about my not making enough of an effort. “Oh, how nice. Another T-shirt from Office [a very nice Parisian shop, by the way, like the Gap but good]. I'll put it with the other nine.”

  So I'm sure you understand.

  As for all that verbiage about poo, all I have to say is, yuck! But at least, he didn't drone on about the frightful Uma Thursday this time.

  Oh yes: must must must get a new toothbrush.

  Yesterday I went to see Raymond at his office in Wardour Street. It wasn't really just to annoy Sean or simply about the sex thing that I went. Besides the sex, I had been having some “symptoms” that my general practitioner thought I might need help with. Sometimes I couldn't swallow. Sometimes I forgot who I was. Twice I was on the tube on the way in to work and I just couldn't figure out what I was supposed to be doing. It only lasted a couple of stops—say, from St. John's Wood to Bond Street. But still.

  Raymond isn't a dream analyzer or a tell-me-about-your-childhood merchant. We sit opposite each other, me in a comfortable lounger, him in an office chair. He's a long, thin man, with lots of carefully combed wiry hair. He has an academic look about him, right down to the leather patches, and the spectacles on the end of his nose. The friend who recommended him to me said he was gorgeous, but I couldn't see that. I did get a vague feeling of sexual interest from him, the idea that he would love to flirt but was too professional to do so.

  “What shall we talk about today?” he began, as he'd always begun.

  “How about why I come here?”

  “That's good. Why do you come here?”

  “Because I'm ashamed to admit anything's wrong to anyone else.”

  “Why are you ashamed?”

  “Because I hate whiners, and now I'm one of them.”

  “You're not a whiner. How about we lose that vocabulary?”

  “I'm afraid of failure.”

  “You're not a failure.”

  “But I'm afraid of it.”

  So it went on. As well as trying to steer me round to talk more about sex, I suppose what he was trying to do was to uncover my insecurities and then gently reassure me. I kept saying what I thought he wanted to hear, that I was under pressure to succeed and that I had trouble balancing work and home, all that stuff. But it was just noise. Nothing I said got anywhere close to what I was feeling. None of the clichés I came out with quite fitted my anxieties or whatever it was that I had. Sometimes I thought that that meant that I didn't have anything at all.

  And then I said something to try to shock him. We'd got on, at last, to why I didn't want to sleep with Sean. It wasn't that I was repelled or hated the thought of it or him. It just didn't tempt me. It felt like when you go shopping and you forget something really trivial, some polish or stamps or some standby for the food cupboard, and you'd have reached out for it if you'd remembered, but nothing so important that you'd bother going back out for it again.

  “I think I want more sex.”

  He sat up, and I think his eyes swung for a second down to my breasts. I'd noticed that he did that whenever we mentioned sex. It might have been an embarrassed avoidance of my eyes, but then again, it may just have been an involuntary male response.

  “But you've said that you feel sexually … uninterested in Sean.”

  “I want more sex with someone else.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “Can't you tell me?”

  “You love Sean?”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “You've said before that he annoys, irritates, you in the same way your father does.”

  “So?”

  “Only an observation. Is there someone you have in mind, the someone else you mentioned?”

  “Not really.”

  But perhaps I did. I'd only said what I said to lift the boredom, but now, once it was out there, staring at me, I thought it might be true. I wanted more sex with someone who wasn't Sean. Yes, with someone who was …

  The hat was a Philip Treacy trilby. The coat was camel, not beige. It wasn't made from dolphins. It can't have been made from dolphins. Is anything made from dolphins, apart from other dolphins?

  SEANJOURNALSIX.DOC

  THE MECHANICS OF IT

  We did it last night. First time in two months. And I don't mean to carp, but, well, it was terrible. I remember when we first discovered our thing. I read about it in a Marie Claire at the dentist, trying to take my mind off the impending two fillings and descale. It absolutely promised an orgasm every time. Not very likely, but worth a shot. Celeste said she'd heard about it, too, but was never sure about the mechanics of it. So we tried. It was fun footling about trying to find the right place, fun in a fun way, not fun in a sex way. And then …
click. She stopped smiling, opened her eyes in astonishment, and said “yes.” It was as if she'd suddenly seen the point of the whole thing. The point of sex.

  The key to it was immobility. I had to stay completely still but for a kind of hydraulic pumping or throbbing action with the mighty tool itself. (That's meant to be ironically self-deprecating, by the way.) All the movement was down to her, below me, and even that was a matter of millimeters, like polishing a diamond.

  And fuck me if it didn't work. There had been nothing especially wrong with our lovemaking before we discovered our thing, but nothing like this. Historically, for a woman to come while I was still actively about my business was a happy accident. But now science had been introduced, and results could be guaranteed. It was the industrial revolution, the invention of the microchip, the bag-less vacuum cleaner all rolled into one.

  It took about six months for the novelty to wear off. Six months during which Harry was well and truly conceived. The wearing-off process began when I realized that the discomfort of our thing almost exactly equaled the pleasure of it. The process involved Celeste's grinding against … against, well, I don't really know the name of it. Pubic bone? Can that be right? Do men have a pubic bone? Am I thinking of public phone? Well, anyway, that bit, a bit that didn't particularly enjoy being ground against. Certainly not one of my pitifully few erogenous zones. I've always envied people with multiple erogenous zones. Ears, feet, napes of the neck, some small section of the back, bottoms. I only have one, and it's my knob. Not, as I say, my pubic bone.

  But it was more than the discomfort, which hovered somewhere a notch above a nuisance and a smidge below a pain. It was more that I felt—get those hankies ready—used. I was a mere device, an object, a—yes, let's say it—a dildo. I stopped being a person to whom Celeste was making love and became a shape. To return to Kant—and how can we ever fail to return to Kant? (see my earlier comments re: self-deprecation)—I was a means to an end and not an end in myself. There's a sexual pun in there that a less serious person would have wasted valuable time trying to extract.