The Mistake

by Katie McMahon

  When I got to the door he spoke again.

  ‘Kate,’ he said. He rapped the tip of his pen on the desk in front of him. ‘Regarding your mental health. Sorry if you took offence.’

  ‘Not very competent, are you?’ I had learned by then that doctors hate being called incompetent. It’s medical professional kryptonite, the same as telling a bogan man that he punches like a girl.

  Mean, very mean. But also justified. Very, very justified.

  Even though Dr Darcy had managed to strut his long-eyelashed way to a place where he wasn’t, actually, all that far off the mark. ‘Trying something’ was not completely out of the question, at that point. Not out of the question at all.

  *

  There are several problems with prostheses, apart, obviously, from waiting months to get one. The first problem is that it’s harder to do things with them, because – even still, more than a decade after that very first fitting, and despite iPhones and 3D printers and driverless cars – no one has actually worked out a way that your brain can make prostheses move very well. So they tend to get in the way, whereas you can use your stump to hold things down relatively easily.

  The second problem is that prostheses can irritate your stump, even break the skin, and thereby usher you into a nightmare world of 14-year-old doctors and swabs and antibiotics and thrush.

  The third thing is that you have to slot a prosthesis into a really gross harness sort of thing, like a weight-lifter’s truss except on the upper body, and it totally wrecked my underwear look and gave me back pain.

  The fourth thing – which should be the least important, but which (yes, superficial, yes, vain) became by far the most important – is that if you’re going to have sex – or even just go swimming – with someone then that person is pretty much going to have to see you without it.

  Now, just to be clear, I think there’s almost nothing more annoying than men who criticise women for wearing push-up bras. If my breasts were smaller, I would probably be first in line for the most cleavage-enhancing contraption on the market. God knows my face has had enough fine-line-removing laser to sink a ship.

  However, given my ‘enviable’ (fashion-writer speak) body, I never felt any pressure to don a Wonderbra. In my youth, many a man had made comments along the lines of ‘I can’t believe these are real/they’re amazing/you’re so wonderful/natural/genuine etc.’, as if my exceptionally lovely breasts in their non-padded bras meant I was a superior person. And, even more annoyingly, as if the poor man had spent an unreasonable portion of his life being duped by cunning, padded bra-d women who’d had the temerity to bow to lifelong, society-wide pressure to look a certain way. The way he wanted them to.

  Anyway. Wearing a prosthesis and long sleeves felt different to wearing a padded bra in a way I couldn’t really explain. More like concealing herpes or bankruptcy or a husband than just pretending to have bigger boobs for the first date or two.

  So what would happen – this was back in my late twenties, before the Tudors – was that I’d spend ages feeling bad about wearing the prosthesis, and then men would see my hand was fake straight away anyway. (Prostheses appear to be much less convincing than Wonderbras.) At a certain point, maybe on the second or third date, when we’d both had a wine or two, whomever I was dating would awkwardly ask me about it. Then I usually wouldn’t hear from him again, perhaps because at that stage I tended to become emotional during such conversations, but perhaps also because he just didn’t fancy me anymore.

  Around that time, there were two men – both called Dave, rather oddly – who said they didn’t mind, because they liked me just as I was, and they therefore wanted to ‘get to know me better’. They both used the same phrases, too, as if they’d looked up the same guidebook on euphemisms to seduce women.

  With the Dave-the-First, I said no-it-just-wouldn’t-work and then I cried for about a week (pretty much literally). Not because I liked Dave-the-First that much – I didn’t, to be honest – but because of what it meant for my future if I couldn’t even risk being naked with someone like him. (The reason I didn’t like him that much was because he said he was philosophically opposed to tipping waiting staff. Also, he worked in health insurance, which seemed likely to be deceitful and also was somehow girly.)

  With Dave-the-Second, after about six dates, I agreed we should – as he put it – ‘take our connection to the next level’. We went to his house, which was in a suburb quite a long way out – Dave-the-Second had been married previously – and into his bedroom. The house had been built in the 1980s. There was a lot of exposed brick, and his built-in-wardrobe handles were spheres of exceedingly shiny wood.

  We were both a little bit drunk, and I had a sick sort of feeling. There was some jerky, non-rhythmic kissing. He was feeling around my dress, trying to work out how to remove me from it, presumably. It had a left-sided concealed zip, the sort I find fairly easy to deal with.

  ‘I’ll just go and . . .’ I indicated his bathroom. I went in, unzipped my dress, slipped my left arm out, used it to pull the dress over my prosthesis, and then pushed the dress onto the floor. I unbuckled the prosthesis and laid it carefully in Dave-the-Second’s corner spa. Then I inspected myself in the mirror.

  My underwear look was not well-developed at that stage, but I was at least wearing a matching lacy bra and knickers set. I had bare legs. Some of the sick feeling went away, because, to be honest, I thought I looked really beautiful and extremely sexy. My hair was all rumpled and was falling down over my shoulders. My skin was hairless and had, in a pre-sex grooming frenzy, been exfoliated and moisturised to a strikingly lustrous sheen. In that instant, I realised that I’d been making far too big a deal of the arm thing in my head, and that Dave-the-Second was bound to like what he saw. I marched straight back out towards the bedroom, high heels still on.

  ‘Just coming,’ I called. It was partly a warning, in case he was picking his nose or something, and partly . . . I don’t know, partly, I was trying to both make an entrance and to sound humble.

  He was sitting on the edge of his bed, and was wearing boxers and a T-shirt.

  He stood up and said, ‘Wow! Kate!’ But he used the tone a mum would when her kid plays a tune on the recorder. (Assuming her kid is an ordinary child of recorder-bearing age, not a grown-up who plays recorder for the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.)

  We started kissing again, standing up, and I could feel that he didn’t have an erection, but I knew (although not from personal experience) that that happened sometimes. So, at first I didn’t worry. After a while he stopped kissing me and took off my bra (both hands). He looked at my boobs and felt them for bit. I closed my eyes and tried to enjoy it, but then I opened them at the exact moment he glanced up at me. His face was tense, like a game-show contestant who is pretty sure he’s going to lose.

  ‘Sorry, I don’t think this is going to work after all,’ said Dave-the-Second. He still had his hands on my breasts when he started speaking, but he stopped squeezing them on the word ‘think’ and politely removed them as he said the word ‘work’.

  Then he turned his back, so I could pick up my bra and depart. I went into the bathroom and put on my dress. I shoved my (tiny, eighty-dollar) bra into my handbag, heaved up my (enormous, many-thousand-dollar) prosthesis and telephoned a taxi. I said, ‘OK, Dave, I’m going to wait outside.’

  He said, ‘Oh, no, you don’t have to do that, Kate. Why don’t you wait in the kitchen?’

  I waited outside, and the taxi came after about thirty-five freezing minutes – it was a Saturday night in a pre-Uber world – and I held my prosthesis all the way home.

  I vowed never to wear it on a date again. It is a vow I have kept.

  Also: Dave-the-Second was my last kiss until Adam.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Bec

  There was no way Bec wanted to see a psychologist in Hobart. ‘What was your car doing parked on Macquarie Street?’ someone would say. Not that there was anything wrong with seeing a psycho
logist, but Stuart would wonder.

  Kate said she’d pay for everything, and Bec booked an appointment with someone in Melbourne called Glenda O’Malley. Glenda’s internet photo had been professionally taken (unlike some, that looked as if they’d been cropped from holiday snaps) and her profile said she had eight years of accredited training and thirty years of experience. Hundreds of clients whose life-disruption had been significantly reduced while their priority-management had been positively impacted. Well. Bec needed Glenda to make her understand why she was being so unreasonable as to be having this affair, to say something like ‘it sounds as if this is all coming from your deep-seated fear of abandonment’. Then, in a flash Bec would realise what the problem was. All her ridiculous feelings would be reduced to easily understood products of her own flawed psychology. It would be possible – painless even – to go back to normal.

  ‘I think Kate could do with a bit of company, after that Adam guy,’ she told Stuart, as she was setting the table. She said something about cocktails and pampering. ‘What do you think? Girls’ weekend away. I’d go the Thursday night, be back Sunday arvo.’

  (Kate seemed perfectly fine, in actual fact. When Bec had checked in about Adam, Kate had snorted and said something about stop fussing and just a bit of fun and emotional distance. Her tone had implied that Bec was overthinking the Adam situation, and Bec had wondered, yet again, if she would ever understand sex as well as Kate did.)

  ‘Of course, you should go,’ Stuart said, looking in random drawers for the tongs. ‘Spend time with your sister. You both deserve a treat.’ Then he added, ‘Your mum and dad can help out with the kids, can’t they?’

  Bec wasn’t sure why he’d need help, but she was in no position to take the high moral ground. In fact, she had to just not think about what she was doing. She had to slam the door shut on the feelings. She had to . . . what was that thing? Compartmentalise.

  Because. Stuart’s face. It was the face that had creased with delight when he surprised her with that party on her thirtieth, that had looked up at her with such tense, unexpected vulnerability when he asked her to marry him, that had barely been able to hide his pride and relief when he passed his final exam, that had been next to hers, tearful, when each of their children was born. She could read his face; for her it had always seemed like a map of his whole mind. And she’d always been able to look back at him and show him everything she was feeling too. She’d barely hidden anything from Stuart. Only the normal stuff. Only things like ingrown hairs and body-shaping underwear and tiny barely-worth-mentioning bits of Botox.

  But now. He’d made chops and vegetables, and dinner was on time, and he’d managed the lunch boxes, and when the kids started complaining that she’d be gone for a whole three nights, he told them that their amazing mother needed a break, she’d been working so hard, they should all just give it a rest because they were going to have a great time with him. And he looked across at her with an expression of such understanding and apology and gratitude that she had to hide her own eyes. She had to concentrate on the water jug.

  Of course he hadn’t said it to that waitress. This was Stuart.

  ‘Yeah, you’ll have a great time with your dad,’ she told the kids.

  She looked around the table at all of them, and felt, for a brief, blissful moment, that nothing with Ryan was worth it. And yet. Melbourne was all arranged already, so she said, ‘Thanks, my darlings,’ and got on with eating her dinner.

  *

  ‘The thing is,’ said Bec, ‘that before the complaint, I honestly believed there was nothing wrong with my marriage.’

  Glenda O’Malley nodded her head. She was wearing one of those necklaces with beads made out of bright-coloured felted wool, and a shapeless black linen dress. Her shoes were chunky and expensive and mauve. Bec felt mildly surprised that a psychologist would care to think so hard about accessorising.

  ‘I love my husband. Truly. I always thought we were really great together.’

  ‘In what ways?’ asked Glenda. She had a soft voice.

  ‘Um—’ In what ways, exactly? She could hardly say he was rich and handsome. It made her sound so superficial. And that wasn’t it, anyway. She’d fallen in love with Stuart – and she really had – precisely because he could have gotten away with just being rich and handsome, but he made the effort to be more than that. When one of his receptionists was widowed at thirty-four, he gave her six weeks of paid leave. He stopped to let people out of side-streets when the traffic was bad. He once said, ‘That’s enough, mate, you’re well out of order,’ to a man who was yelling abuse at a checkout operator. One time last year, when Bec was out to dinner with some of the school mums, a tipsy woman from a few tables over had squatted down next to Bec’s chair and raved about what a fantastic surgeon Stuart was. (‘So smart. And so lovely! We all absolutely adore him! I’m Ruth, by the way.’) Bec thought she must be a patient – perhaps one with alcohol-related health issues – but it turned out Ruth was a theatre nurse. (‘We saw you one time? Dropping off his laptop? We’d all been wondering about his wife. We knew you’d be gorgeous!’) Ruth was really very drunk. Bec had wondered if she was going to be working in theatre the next morning, hung-over, rushing out between laparotomies to vomit in the staff toilets. Surely not.

  ‘He’s very kind. Good manners,’ Bec said. ‘He’s a great father.’

  ‘In what ways?’ asked Glenda, again. What on earth were people taught in a psychology doctorate?

  ‘Well – he’s – he really loves the kids. And me. He’s very respectful of me, in front of them. And when we’re alone too, obviously. And he – he plays with them – when he has free time – which is not often, because he’s always worked very hard. And then lately he’s been, I guess, understandably, pretty down.’

  ‘He works very hard?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bec. ‘He was – is, a surgeon.’

  Glenda nodded, as if Bec had said Stuart was a mid-level manager in a mid-tier corporation.

  ‘And he generally worked very hard?’

  ‘Well. Yes.’ Shouldn’t that be obvious?

  ‘Did that bother you?’

  ‘Yes. No. I mean, that’s part of his job. It’s what I signed up for.’ Twenty-six. So young to marry.

  ‘You knew, when you married him, that he would be extremely busy?’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘But now you find it bothers you, maybe?’

  ‘Well, not now.’ Had the woman even been listening? ‘Now I wish he was working more.’

  ‘I see.’

  Glenda left a pause. Bec declined to fill it. Of course Stuart working so hard had bothered her. She’d been tired. It was lonely. Every evening she’d wished she had a husband who came home at 5.30 p.m. and took the children rowing or cycling or even to play a computer game for an hour before dinner. Even twice a week! It wasn’t that much to ask. But he just wouldn’t.

  ‘So. Stuart is great in that he’s a respectful man and a loving father to your children, despite his having had a heavy workload.’

  Another pause. In fairness, Bec herself had always sort of liked the fact he was a surgeon. When Stuart couldn’t come to things because Stuart Was Working or Stuart Was On-Call, most people said ‘Oh of course’, in a deferential sort of tone, as if to suggest that her husband was above school fairs or neighbourhood Christmas drinks. ‘He’ll only be taking out gall bladders,’ Bec sometimes wanted to reply. ‘How hard can it really be when you’ve had eleven years of training?’ But she was proud of him, she supposed. His profession was altruistic and a bit glamorous and, let’s be honest, very lucrative.

  ‘Yes, he’s a fantastic father,’ she said, firmly. ‘He loves the children very much.’ How weak did that sound? Even fathers in jail for armed robbery or domestic violence probably loved their children. ‘And he always had to work very hard. That’s what his profession demands.’

  Glenda raised her eyebrows. ‘And aside from being a good father?’ she asked. There was a si
lence.

  ‘Well,’ said Bec. ‘He – we generally can talk. We laugh together sometimes. I always trusted him. But I guess just with this complaint, it’s made me wonder a bit about whether I actually should trust him.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘He’s—’ Bec smiled, in a woman-to-woman way. ‘He’s very handsome.’ Maybe she should extract her phone from her bag, show Glenda a photo.

  ‘And his being handsome. That’s important to you?’ Glenda asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Bec replied, neutrally. She would not apologise. It wasn’t as if Kate was the only woman in the world allowed to have a handsome man. ‘I realise that makes me sound very superficial.’

  ‘There are no wrong answers, Bec.’ Oh, for God’s sake. Of course there were wrong answers. For one thing, that she was falling in love with someone else. For another, that sex with Stuart was perfectly good, but not as good as it was with Ryan. And that no one, surely, could expect her to give that up. There you had it. A wrong answer, if ever she’d heard one.

  ‘He’s very smart. My family adore him.’

  Glenda sat back in her seat and recrossed her ankles.

  Bec thought about the $300 Kate was paying for this appointment, and, so very much more importantly, how much she needed resolution. She may as well be completely honest.

  ‘I’m having an affair with a younger man,’ she said. She sounded poised and self-aware, she thought. ‘He’s very gorgeous and sexy, and the chemistry is ridiculous’ – she wished Kate could hear her – ‘and of course I know that that is just how affairs always feel. From what I’ve heard.’

  Glenda nodded, but in a non-committal manner, as if she declined to give away any insights into how affairs in general felt. The woman was really very exasperating.

  ‘But also, it feels as if – and he’s said this to me, Ryan, the other man – that perhaps it’s more than just a fling. Maybe it’s . . . proper love. But I don’t know, whether I’m sort of – straying, just because of the complaint, the trust issues, and the stress that that’s brought up, because I think if that’s the case then I should – could – be working through that. With Stuart.’