January. Cole has a job in Athens. It’s for an old acquaintance who’s in shipping, a billionaire who collects pre-Raphaelite nudes. But he’s got something different this time, a portrait from the waist up of an exquisite medieval Venus and he doesn’t want her out of his sight. Cole’s shown you the photographs, he did the condition report, the paint is blistering and flaking off. There are several losses, patches of canvas totally bereft of paint, and Cole will have to take his palette and brushes and create a seamless match. He can’t wait to get his hands on her. Her skin is pale and cold, as if it’s been carved in marble. She has tiny buttons for nipples, like flesh-coloured smarties, with no aureole, of course. There’s a snake winding round her elongated neck with scales as soft and luxurious as black velvet.
Cole’s gone for three weeks and your true self uncurls in this time. It makes you wish that throughout the years of knowing your husband you’d let him see more of who, exactly, you are. You can only bring her out when he isn’t at home.
This.
The music up loud, your music, all the secret pop songs from your youth, Wuthering Heights and Blondie and the soundtrack from Grease and Nina Simone at her gravelly best, the type of music he hates, it’s all crammed on compilation cassettes stored under the bed like a dietitian’s secret chocolate box. You’re dancing and singing off-key, too loud, drunk with the alone. You’re rearranging furniture, dragging it in great grating shudders, how perfect you could make this space if it were just your own – out with that overlarge TV, off with the Scotch bottles and cheap detective novels! You’re eating nothing but chocolate biscuits for dinner, a whole packet, or just a slice of toast and a glass of red wine and the dishes languish and the candles burn to their quick and at the end of each night you stretch on the couch and feel young and alive and sated and content. For alone you’re refinding a glittering, a clarity, you’re finding your distilled self.
You feel an intoxicating freedom when Cole is not with you, and yet you don’t want him to be gone. You think of the two types of aloneness you’ve known recently: this wonderful, sparkly, soul-refreshing type, and the despairing loneliness that sucks the breath from your life.
nothing impure should be left in a bedroom one minute longer than is necessary
A letter, heavy on the doormat. Thick, creamy paper, watermarked, Italian, its edges feather-soft. A sensuality to it you want to kiss. The words typed, the thud of them as careful as braille.
I want to remove your clothes in the darkness, I want to unpeel you. I want to feel you, inch by inch.
Your fingertips run over the words, deft as a lizard. You’re trembling, you cover the letter with your hand, you have to sit with the strangeness of it.
I feel like you’re helping me to live.
No name, no return address. Your dipping heart, seduced by text. You stand by the lounge room window with one hand holding the letter to your chest and the other spidered wide on the cold pane and your breath frosting the glass and your cheeks are hot. It’s as if you’re entering, tentatively, a strange new path and swiftly the trees are closing over you and the sky is gone and the light, you’re lost, and in the thick of it, in a clearing, you’ll be tugged down, drowned, in a bed of silk.
Come away. Start afresh.
The phone. Cole. All fired up. You know what’s coming next: he’ll be a couple of days late, he’s still bent over that painting, can’t drag himself away. He’s always loved telling you the minutiae of his work, you’re a good listener.
You’re looking at your watch and the letter as he speaks, wanting him off the phone. He’s worried about his Venus’s lips, some idiot somewhere along the line has had a go, clumsily, at touching them up and it’s tricky to get them right.
Don’t change them too much. No botox, mate.
Yeah, yeah, and he chuckles.
The point of his job is to work to a minimum, to do the least amount possible of fixing up because he’s tampering with an original artwork. But sometimes, Cole’s told you, he just wants to be let loose.
I want to cover her nipples, he says, she looks so cold. She needs some clothes, poor love.
Maybe she’s blissfully happy, darling. Maybe there’s a man under her skirt.
Oy, Cole laughs. Steady down. What’s got into you?
Nothing, nothing, and you hang up the phone, grinning at the irony of a husband so absorbed in his job he hasn’t seemed to have noticed the changes in his own wife’s face over the past few months.
do good and lend
How they’ve seduced:
Slow, enquiring fingers on your skin in an Edinburgh flat and you took off your pyjamas as something flooded through you and you could not dam it.
Marijuana, once, but you fell asleep.
Alcohol. Champagne always worked best.
Porn. A video to soften you up and you were intrigued at first but the monotony quickly repelled and it was the coldest, most unimaginative fuck you’d ever had.
The urgency in a kiss.
An expensive hotel room that made you feel guilty.
A song that turns you on every time you hear it, a line in it: she only comes when she’s on top: crazeeeee.
Compilation cassettes; and how many men have given you those? Why do they always think they know best? You’d never impose your own taste on them.
Letters. Letters have always worked.
But how would you seduce? How would you guard against scaring a man off?
They seem, often, so flighty, difficult, contrary, easily spooked. And you’re not convinced that it’s the men always chasing for in most of your experiences and your girlfriends’ it’s always the woman biting the bullet and doing the asking out, the hunting down. The looking, the not finding.
you ought never to keep anything whatever under a bed
Only Martha and you are left at the bar, for the Library men have all gone home to their families, and after an awkward pause Martha asks if you’ve had a shag lately and you laugh and say no, not for ages, you’ve forgotten how to do it, it’s been so long. Martha tells you she’s slept on the couch for the last six years while her husband’s in the bedroom, it’s all very English, she tells you. We’re high Catholic, we won’t split. You laugh from deep in your belly, suddenly liking this woman very much. How seductive is honesty. You ask her, casually, about Gabriel, what she knows about him, you can’t work him out. She looks at you sharply. Ah, Gabriel, she says, Gabriel, and she tells you she has a theory and leans close.
I don’t think he’s had much practice with women. He’s probably only had one or two girlfriends in his life. I think he