Nothing had ever, really, worked. But Clifford Carven the Third was a man set, there was no point in trying to veer him into something else. An American of supreme self-confidence and little self-doubt; a golden boy, an only child from east coast wealth who’d spent a silkily entitled lifetime getting his way and thinking little of anyone else, because he didn’t have to. Handsome, in that robust, blue-blooded American way, of rude, patrician health, as if his entire upbringing consisted of daily vegetables, energy-boosting drinks and the cleansing salt from wooden-decked Cape Cod yachts. Handsome, yes, but cold with it; his face as it aged falling away into hard angles and planes, the leanness and ruthlessness of a competitive cyclist now in him. But for Connie, at the start, he was a promise of something else. For her, for her children. A higher dynamism, perhaps. They were a golden couple and they knew it.
Connie had never come with him. She never told him that. In fact, she had never had an orgasm in her life. Her husband wouldn’t know because he never asked. He made love selfishly, with little thought for the recipient. Always had, because he had the air of a man who had never had a woman say what she really, actually, might want. It was too late, Connie didn’t try, didn’t care enough. And she knew that satisfying sex in terms of a woman was only one small aspect of the fullness of married life, and fleeting or absent for most, so she contented herself with gleaning satisfaction from the other parts. A gaggle of bankers’ wives and girlfriends around her for shopping weekends to Paris, pedicures in a gossipy line at the Cowshed, movie nights at the Electric. A show house of careful beauty, the former residence of the Portuguese ambassador. A manicured garden of clenched formality. Sushi parties for the girls, book club hostings, charity lunches, church fundraisers. Glittering dinner parties for fifty, Christmas drinks, Guy Fawkes barbecues, work dos, anything and everything to mask the terrible silence of the two of them, alone, like a shroud upon them both.
And then the accident, and the marriage was shifted onto another path. Cliff’s pumped charisma gone, to be replaced by something else: a simmering snippiness and cruelty brought about by a sheer sense of raging misfortune, Connie suspects; it’s something that, pre-accident, never seemed to surface. Her duty: to soften all that, to set things right, however she can. She has a purpose now.
Yet, yet. There is a woman she once knew and she gazes at her occasionally as though through thick, opaque glass; can’t touch her, grasp her, be her. That woman is free, fearless, blazing, bold. She is young, her younger self. The lust for losing her virginity surprises her even now, how badly she’d wanted to be rid of it. Yet ever since she has felt disconnected from the sex act, as if she was looking at it, every time, from the ceiling; observing it, wondering, flinching. This is what it’s all about? Surely not. The horror of sex not her way – not the emboldened way it always was in her head – was the first great shock of her adult life.
The men, again and again, who seemed so indifferent to who she really was; who just didn’t want to know, ask. It’s me, she was raging inside, this is who I am. She grazed upon sex through boyfriend after boyfriend; never gulped it complete, never swallowed it whole. Watched, intrigued, always watched; no one could penetrate her careful, observing, inscrutable shell. Then she married Clifford in the Seychelles in front of one hundred guests they’d flown in specially for the occasion and she stepped into, seemingly effortlessly, a world of ridiculous wealth: of subterranean screening rooms and swimming pools, of separate his and her massage rooms, summer as well as winter walk-in wardrobes, four cars (one just for the motorway alongside three vintage Porsches), of FedExed luggage, multiple help, ordering off the menu, daily blow-dries, museum-quality art. Like many rich wives, she rarely looked happy; no, that wasn’t the word for it: she looked collected, smooth, in a uniformly thin, carefully blow-dried, thoroughbred kind of way.
And it was only when Connie was needed that something like love – as far as she knows what love is – uncurled. The accident tipped their sex life into something else. Because Cliff gouged out – patiently, gently, beseechingly – the very marrow of his impenetrable wife. It had become the trigger that now tipped him into someone else. To see her so wanton, transformed, bared, cracked, made him focus on another, made him forget.
Her girlfriends have no idea of any of this. A listener rather than a talker, a receptacle for everyone else’s angst, Connie is extremely good at maintaining a secret life.
12
Often on a wet day I begin counting up; what I’ve read and haven’t read
‘I want you to read. I want you to tell me what works.’
So. The good wife, eager to facilitate, is flushed by a new sense of purpose. Reading above and beyond her creamy bankers’ wives book club with their Booker winners and Harvill challenges and occasional star guest who lives close. Reading at home, flushed, in the middle of the day, straddled firm on cool steel. A strumming hand. Drinking from an untapped well of words that tingle her up; that initiate, transform, exhilarate, unlock. It is writing that elicits a visceral response like no other words ever have; speaking directly to her in a secret language, woman to woman. To have such potency, as an artist, to elicit such a belly-churning jolt. Only connect, of course. It is said Renoir painted his pictures with his penis and Connie now seeks the words women write with their vaginas. Needs their vulnerability and their truth: as ugly and thrilling and complex and excruciating and scarred as her own. She finds it. Cliff, too. In a world she would never dare talk about with her friends, for she knows too much of it now; mustn’t give herself away, mustn’t break the spell of it.
And so the two of them began, alone. Tentatively. With blushing honesty. An exploratory spirit. Shared books, the enchantment of them, for it is an enchantment. Connie reads fast, her breath shallow, her belly dipping; breathing in deep the liberation of these new texts like a corset unloosed. The journeying progresses into the reality of words suddenly slammed down – a husband summoned, a wheelchair straddled, a Mont Blanc pen whispered into an anus that has never been penetrated; by night the Box visited and by day Coco de Mer; Brazilians are performed at home by a black man of satiny physique; there are collars and handcuffs, blindfolds and belts. The shame dies fast because the new world unlocked is so spectacularly different, transporting, vivifying; yet Connie had been stolidly sexually active for at least a decade before all this.
It’s as if Cliff senses that this is now the one way to entrap his beautiful, slippery, inscrutable wife, to bind her tight to his new life; it’s as if he isn’t quite confident of anything else. And so Connie is reeled in, resisting, but caught nonetheless. Complicit at every step.
All the stops on her life at such a young age, except this, vividly this. Cliff’s goal: to gouge out the – astonishingly different – woman underneath. I take you to be … but what he discovers over these days following the accident is that she is actually, exhilaratingly, quite someone else. And gradually, over time, dear, sweet Connie Carven of the carefully blow-dried hair and Vivier shoes – faithfully handing out her Bibles at the door of St Peter’s every second Sunday of the month – has slipped beyond her calcified adult life into a glittery, secret new existence that steals, spectacularly, her nights. Her husband found the key, at the height of cruel misfortune; his singular triumph in a time that seemed utterly absent of it.
Connie felt needed with all this. Thrillingly. Gratefully. Don’t we all have a universal desire to be needed in our lives? That basic human want. Cliff had a plethora