The Bride Stripped Bare. Nikki Gemmell

the room. You step into it from the bathroom and kiss Cole on the tip of his nose. He envelopes you in his arms with a great calm of ownership and laughs: he likes you vulnerable. And to teach you, to introduce you to new things. You didn’t look closely at a penis until you were married, didn’t know what a circumcised one looked like. You wonder, now, how you could’ve had the partners you’ve had and never really looked. You always wanted the lights off quick because you never liked your body enough, and dived under the sheets, and felt it was rude to study a man’s anatomy too intently: you favoured eye contact and touch. Cole forced you to look, right at the start, he taught you to get close. He likes to direct your life, to guide it.

      You let him think he is.

       Lesson 12

       it is our greatest happiness to be unselfish

      Cole fell asleep inside you once. He laughs at the memory, finds it erotic and silly and comforting. The morning after, to soothe your indignation, he’d said that falling asleep inside a woman was a sign of true love.

      What? Shaking your head as if rattling out a fly.

      It means that the man’s truly comfortable with the woman, so comfortable that he can fall asleep in the process of making love to her. I could never do that to anyone else. Think yourself honoured, Lovely.

      Hmm, you’d replied.

      

      You love Cole in a way you haven’t loved before. Calmly. It glows like a candle rather than glitters. You love him even when he falls asleep in the process of making love to you. You’d never loved calmly before, in your twenties. That was the time of greedy love, full of exhilaration and terror, and when you said I love you you always felt stripped; there was no sense, ever, of love as a rescue. Sometimes, now, you wonder what happened to the intensity of your youth, when everything seemed so vivid and desperate and bright. Sometimes you imagine a varnisher’s hand whipping over the quietness of your life now and flooding it with brightness, combusting it, in a way, with light.

      But Cole. When he enfolds you in his arm you feel his love running as quiet and strong and deep as an underground river right through you. He stills your agitation in the way a visit to Choral Evensong does, or a long swim after work. The bond between you seems so clear-headed: the marriage is not perfect, by any means, but you’re old enough now to know you cannot demand perfection from the gift of love. It’s a lot more than most people have. Like Theo.

      Your dear, restless, vivid-hearted friend. Sometimes you feel a sharp envy at the sensuality of her home, all candles and wood and stone, her fluid working hours, weekly massages, Kelly bags. But you remind yourself that she isn’t happy and probably never will be and it’s a comfort, that. For no matter how much Theo achieves and acquires and out-dazzles everyone else, she never seems content. She’s taught you that people who shine more lavishly than everyone else seem to be penalised by discontent, as if they’re being punished for craving a brighter life. I’ve been knocked down so many times I can’t remember the number plates, she said once.

      Many people are afraid of Theo but you’ve never been, perhaps that’s why you’re so close. All the noise of her personality is a mask and when it slips off, on the rare occasion, the vulnerability riddled through her is always a shock.

       Lesson 13

       it cannot be rational enjoyment to go where you would not like to have your truest and best friend go with you

      Hold my hand, Cole says as he steers you through the twilight crush of Marrakech. Neither of you knows the pedestrian etiquette of this city; the cars are coming in all directions, the dusky streets teem like rush hour in New York but everything’s faster, cheekier, more reckless; exhilarating, you think. Mopeds and tourist coaches and donkeys and carts stop and start and weave and cut each other off without, it seems, any rules and the scrum of people funnels you into the great sprawling square at the city’s heart, Djemma El Fna, and you lift your head to the low ochre-coloured buildings around you and break from Cole’s grasp and swirl, gulping the sights, for you feel as if all of life’s in this place. There are snake-charmers with arms draped by writhing snake necklaces, wizened storytellers ringed by attentive men, water sellers with belts of brass cups like ropes of ammunition, veiled women offering fortunes, jewellery, hennaed hands. It’s a movie set of the glorious, the bizarre, the deeply kitsch.

      Diz would love all this, you laugh.

      Thank God you didn’t bring her.

      You’d almost invited her on the spot when she said she was so low. You wanted her to join you just for a couple of days, as a treat: it’s her birthday in three days, June the first. But you knew you’d have to check with Cole first and he wouldn’t stand for it, of course.

      She’s weird, he says of her.

      You say that about all my friends.

      She’s weirder than the rest.

      You can’t argue with that. Theo takes the train to Paris just for a haircut. Has a tattoo of a gardenia below her pubic line. Can’t poach an egg. Never watches television. Gets her favourite flowers delivered to herself every Monday and Friday: iceberg roses, November lilies, exquisite gardenia knots. Is married to a man called Tomas, twenty-four years her senior, whom she’s rarely made love to. She has a condition.

      What, you’d asked, when she first told you.

      Vaginismus. It sounds vile, doesn’t it? Like something you’d pick up in Amsterdam. It means that when anyone tries to fuck me the muscles around my vagina go into spasms. It’s excruciatingly painful.

      Theo, darling Theo, of all people. You wrapped her in a hug, your face crumpled, you began to cry.

      Hey, it’s OK, she laughed, it’s OK. It’s actually been rather fun.

      And she leant back and smiled her trademark grin, one side up, one side down. Took out her little silver case. Lit a cigarette. Said that she’d decided to investigate the whole situation, a woman’s pleasure, and it was so deliriously consuming that it eventually slipped into being a job. Said that most women never climaxed from vaginal penetration: all the fun was in the clit. You’d blushed back then, at hearing the bluntness of that word, there were some things you couldn’t help.

      I can’t tell you how many clients get absolutely no pleasure whatsoever out of bog-standard penetration, she said, punctuating her words with savage little taps that made the cutlery jump. We just don’t know how to please ourselves enough. We’ll never learn. We’re still too intent on the man’s pleasure at the expense of our own.

      You weren’t entirely comfortable with this talk, it was a little close to the bone. You wanted to know more of her condition, for it was a strange relief to hear that your arrestingly sensual friend also had stumbling blocks over sex: so, Theo was human, too.

      Did you get some help, for the vagi, vagis—

      Mm, I did. It involved a horrible thing called a dilator.

      Did it work?

      Well, yes, but when I finally had the sex I’d been waiting for it was such a let-down. It’s so dull compared with everything else. Why didn’t anyone tell me this?

      Theo’s wonderful laugh curdled from deep in her belly but there was no joy in her eyes. Her marriage to Tomas was so odd, you couldn’t figure it out. He had other relationships with men as well as women and she had relationships with women as well as men, that was their life. And yet they stayed together. I don’t have any passion in my life, for anything. Not for her husband, whom she says she’s too clever to love. Nor for London, the city of fractious energy you both fled to as teenagers from the same boarding school, almost twenty years ago. Nor for her job,