The Bride Stripped Bare Set: The Bride Stripped Bare / With My Body. Nikki Gemmell

want to know how he is and where the hell he’s been and when is he going to get a computer and enter the twenty-first century like everyone else. You stand back and watch. You’re struck, again, by the peculiar gentleness, the shyness, still. He’s been in LA, at some castings for pilot season, it’s where all the English actors end up around this time of year, and then he stopped off in Rome and there was Barcelona too, a family wedding, and he speaks politely and affably but he’d much prefer to talk about something else. You recognise it; he’s not good in big groups. You’re struck, again, by the hair washed in night and the small clearing behind his ear, its vivid white. You want to lick it. You tighten your inner thighs as he leans across you to the bar, to pay for his wine, not beer like the rest. Another suit, of course, as if it would never cross his mind to wear anything else, as if he always visits his mother and attends church. No one in your life attends church. The suits have a vintage line to them; maybe they’re his peculiar style, or they’re his father’s, or he’s poorer than you thought. There’s so much to ask.

      He doesn’t bother fitting in with everyone else. Why shouldn’t he wear a suit and write in longhand and disappear for several months? He’s a man very loved; he’s like a rock that’s been struck by the sun for a long time and is warm with it. You see him as the only boy in his family with many adoring older sisters, the late child, the lovely mistake: there’s none of the responsibility or gravity of an eldest child. There’s such a sweetness to him. It’s all in his smile.

      Your breathing is wrong, it’s all jerky and light, you cannot still it. The others joke about the screenplay that’s taking a bloody long time to complete.

      A woman called Martha jumps in. You’ve noticed her a lot: she walks with a heavy brow, as if her fists are clenched. She teases that Gabriel’s finished twenty-eight pages and they’re the work of a genius but they’ve taken eleven months to produce and there’s doubt among the rest of them that another twenty-eight will ever be completed, and you can see in that moment you’re not the only one caught.

      What’s it called, you stumble the words out.

      I don’t know, yet.

      His boyish beam, his shrug. You want to get away from this bar, it’s all stilted and jostly and wrong. He’s blushed upon seeing you and it must mean something and you make an effort to still your breathing and a sip of wine slips into a gulp. One by one the others are drifting away, even Martha, lingering Martha, and finally, finally you’re alone. Silence, for a moment, then laughing from you both.

      Well.

      Well.

      You apologise for not calling, tell him you lost his number and were terribly upset and then hate yourself for revealing that. But he’s flattered, delighted, in fact. I’m glad you were miserable, he says, it makes me feel good. And you look at him, trying to work him out: he’s not interested in shielding himself.

      Then the talking, an hour or two or thereabouts, everything and nothing, the way Cole and you used to talk, in the giddy time following the first fuck when the friendship had burst into something else. The time when you’d fuck greedily, when you’d tail off with exhaustion at the wilting end of one night and pick it all up again the next. When the more sex you had the more you wanted as all the rusty cogs within you were oiled up. Before familiarity and exhaustion and stress wound you down and the less you had, the less you wanted. And you stopped.

      You’d never want that to happen with Gabriel.

      He’s making you feel so alive, just being around him. You’ve always loved people like that: heart lifters, not heart sinkers. He’s making you laugh again, with your eyes. You talk as if this is the last time you’ll ever talk and there’s so little time and you need to know everything, now, before it’s too late.

      How did it go, in LA?

      I don’t know. I never know. I’m always being told I was second-best. The list of failures is very long.

      There’s no anger, frustration, angst; maybe the affability is an extremely smooth defence but you suspect your Gabriel is not very good at pushing his way through life. Is it such a bad thing? Everyone’s so good at seizing now, especially Theo; her life is all about hunting down the best deals, perks, sales, nothing rare and desirable escapes the vigour of her grasp. Gabriel is content to let all the grabbing slip by him. He has a sunniness in his character that makes you want to protect him and preserve what he’s got.

      When he listens, his head leans on one side. He says interesting after your sentences a lot; savouring what you say. He’s hungry to know you. You used to be like that once, with strangers, at dinner parties and weddings and blind dates, you had the zeal of a collector then, firing off questions and hiding yourself. Before it was all buried in the cotton wool of complacency, and Cole, and you weren’t near as interested in anyone else. Gabriel wants to know what you think, he’s giving you space in the conversation: it’s refreshing in a man. You’re responding like a neglected child at the back of the class who has a new teacher and flowers under the attention. And turns into someone else.

      He’s making you feel beautiful. Wanted. Confident. Unique. Cole never sees you as any of that, he loves to tell you how you are, what you’re like; to box you up tight.

      At the end of the night you say goodbye to Gabriel – no kiss, just a brush of warm cheek – and you walk down the street propelled by a zinging high, it’s as if you could leap and brush the sky. You have his number and he has yours and on the tube, once again, you anoint his slip of paper with your lips.

      This one you will not lose.

       Lesson 50

       putting damp sheets on a bed is little short of murder

      A light under the front door. You’re usually home first – you sober your face down. Cole asks where you’ve been and you say the Library, it opens late on Wednesdays, remember? Good, he says, I’m glad you’re getting something out of it. He looks up from his Evening Standard: he loves the urban, gossipy side of it just as much as yourself. Hey, you’ve got two red patches on your cheeks, he says, like a clown.

      It’s the cold, it’s getting colder, can’t you feel it?

      How easily the lie slips out, it’s stunning, so smooth, so quick. It’s because your husband’s trust in you is tethered like a buoy to a concrete block; you’re the good wife, everyone knows that. Your palms fly to your cheeks to hide the heat and you look at Cole and think in that moment how easy it’d be to do anything you want, and, suddenly, how heartbreaking is his generosity and trust. You think, in that moment, that perhaps he never had an affair with Theo. It’s so hard to imagine, as he sits in his shirtsleeves with his paper and olives and beer. You toy with the thought, for the very first time, that perhaps all along he was telling the truth. He never adequately defended himself from suspicion but maybe he couldn’t: your mind was made up. Time is fading everything and you’re beginning, suddenly, to doubt yourself: what you heard, what you decided upon so quickly. Perhaps, perhaps you were wrong.

      That night you place your palm on Cole’s chest as he sleeps beside you and you cup his heartbeat in your hand like a glass over a leech. You can’t sleep, can’t sleep. If you commit adultery in your head, are you beginning the rejection of your husband and your marriage and your life up to that point? Or welding yourself to them? And if that’s the case, how does the marriage become, again, warm and rich?

      Do you need an excuse?

      You don’t ever lie. Except to tell lovers that you’ve just had an orgasm or your friends that you love their new haircut and all of that doesn’t count, it’s done to soothe and protect. You don’t steal. You don’t sleep around. But you think about it. It’s always been enough, just thinking about it, imagining sleeping with almost every man you meet.

      What furious need is within you, you wonder.

      Why must we crave the things we’re not meant to, you wonder.