by Kathy Lette
‘Do you have any idea what an image of failure that creates for our school? Do you think that’s a confidence-building initiative?’
Mr Scroope always spoke in these terms. The man would call making love an ‘on-site merger’. He would call an orgy an ‘off-site team-building event’. He would call his wedding anniversary a ‘performance review of core competencies’. His children ‘pilot projects’. A divorce – ‘emotional downsizing’.
‘Um . . .’
‘I think it’s time you reassessed your critical success measures.’
And I think it’s time you did something about your chronic halitosis, I wanted to say in reply, but instead smiled meekly. If being pathetic were an Olympic category, I’d be a Triple Gold Medallist, I really would.
‘Your classroom skills are creative, as the Inspectors keep pointing out, but we must also stick to the curriculum. I’ve had a round-table discussion with the Governors and I think, to be on the safe side, it’s time you took some advice from a more . . .disciplined colleague.’
And I thought it was time he took a direct hit from an asteroid, followed by a round-table discussion about whether or not he’s the world’s greatest asshole. (Including open forum and role-play.) I bristled. Could people smell submission on me? Eau de Useless. ‘What sort of advice?’
‘Mrs Pendal has generously offered to go through your coursework and make sure that it’s in keeping with school policy. Despite being a rival, she’s kindly allowing you to drink at the fountain of her knowledge.’
Actually, I needed a stiff drink and I needed it now. I’ll have knowledge on the rocks, please.
And so, for the next week, I had to face the ignominy of Little Miss Priggy poring over my lesson plans. ‘Never forget, you’re unique, Cassandra. Just like everyone else!’ Perdita oxymoroned. Worse, she had also been put in charge of inset day. This was, usually, a relaxed, kid-free day where the teachers got to drink more tea than usual and indulge in some badly needed preparation time. But Perdita had the brainwave of the staff ‘bonding’ by playing games.
‘What shall we play first?’ she chirruped to a sullen crew, come Monday morning.
I looked at our Headmaster with loathing and thought, Pin the Toupee on the Bald Bastard’?
Gee, this throwing myself into my work thing was proving so rewarding, I might just as well go back to agonizing about my private life. Work, as we all know, is a pain in the ass. Funny isn’t it then, how people are always putting the word ‘work’ next to the word ‘marriage’.
‘It’s all organized. A double date.’ Jazz tossed her car keys in the air and kicked up her leather-mini-skirted legs, her eyes sparkling with mischief. I felt in awe of her brilliant, shifting surface. I so wanted to be Jazz, to enjoy her ease in the world, her way of knowing just how much to tip, just what to quip . . . and how to cross her legs to make every man she met want to part them immediately.
‘You should come as well, Hannah, for a little extra-curricular carnal activity.’ Bending into Hannah’s fridge, Jazz swung her tush pendulum-like, back and forth, as she helped herself. ‘While we’re still young enough. The Three Muffkateers.’
Hannah’s shoulders twitched towards her earlobes and she replied loftily, ‘You may only be young once but obviously you can be immature for ever.’
‘Hannah’s just been advising me to go to marriage therapy,’ I volunteered, then tried to make light of it. ‘You know, to stay Jung at heart in my own little Nietzsche.’
‘Therapy?’ Jazz cringed. ‘Are you insane?’
‘That’s the reason people normally have therapy,’ I replied, crestfallen.
‘Having counselling for a failing marriage is like, I dunno . . . the coyote in the Bugs Bunny cartoons, trying to stop a freight train with a twig.’
‘Not thinking you need counselling means that you obviously do.’ A by-now familiar frostiness had crept into Hannah’s voice.
Listening to their gaggle of contradictory opinions about my life made my brain flip flop like a dying fish. I looked from one to the other of my best friends. Here I was once again – the ham in the friendship sandwich. ‘Well?’ they demanded in unison.
I didn’t want to join Sad, Middle-aged Adulteresses Anonymous. Nor did I want therapy – the only profession in the world where the client is always wrong. ‘Um . . .’
One thing was for sure. I’d definitely skipped over the ‘for better’ bit of my wedding vows and was very firmly in the ‘for worse’ section now. I had to do something. And soon.
But how to choose between my friends? As usual, my indecision was final.
PART THREE
12. Genitalia Failure
The volume of her orgasm made the objets d’art – lean mahogany phallic things collected by the therapist on her travels to New Guinea – rock precariously on their bookshelf perches.
‘A few months of my classes and you too will be able to orgasm at will!’ the couples counsellor promised in a velvety voice. This didn’t seem to reassure the pear-shaped woman with dry flaky skin, lank hair and defeated, astonished eyes sitting next to me, who was surveying the sex therapist with horror.
The spontaneous orgasm had emanated from a curvaceous thirty-year-old redhead who was wearing emphatic lip-liner, a push-up bra and a nametag which read Bianca. This Life Coach, Clinical Hypnotherapist and Marital Healer had the endless vitality usually associated with cruise-ship directors. Bianca stood up from her chair behind her desk . . . and then she kept on standing up for what seemed like hours. Her long legs were finely shaped and fishnet clad.
‘So, how many months have you and your wife been sexually dysfunctional?’ She sashayed towards Rory, who was smouldering in a beanbag the shade of dog poo. She flicked her tangerine-coloured tresses over her shoulder, took my husband’s hand in hers and smiled. This woman smiled as the sun shines over the Aussie outback of my childhood – relentlessly.
Rory glared savagely in my direction. When I’d suggested therapy, he’d told me he’d rather have steel spikes jackhammered up each nostril. But after I threatened to deny him sex for the rest of his natural life, he’d sullenly relented – although driving to Muswell Hill in rush hour with an angry husband on the wrong side of the road was probably not the kind of marital therapy we needed, actually.
My beanbag, which was attempting to eat me alive, was so tatty and cheap it could only be made of imitation vinyl. My thighs stuck to it in pools of nervous sweat.
‘Dysfunctional, yes . . .’ Bianca checked her clipboard. ‘Your Significant Other feels you haven’t noticed that she takes longer to reach arousal. What’s your reaction to that . . .’ Bianca peered at the crayoned nametag I’d stuck to my husband’s chest, ‘Rory?’
Rory turned his prisoner-of-conscience countenance in my direction and glowered even more angrily.
‘Well?’ Bianca insisted, squeezing his meaty palm.
‘Well, ugh . . . um. According to my wife, our marriage has . . .’ Rory sank further into his sludge-coloured beanbag as he groped for the right words ‘. . . blown a gasket. Got a flat. Needs a tune up.’
The therapist’s mint-green eyes, hard as peppermint candies, glittered. A husband who talked of emotions by using car terminology? She was mentally reaching for the speed dial number of her accountant to inform him that she would be able to afford that gazebo, after all, as this was obviously going to take years!
Bianca sidled around the rest of the group introducing herself. There was a pallid pair of newlyweds. A bloke whose John Lennon specs were overwhelmed by his jowly face and lugubrious expression, and by his large librarian wife, who announced that he could only get an erection when wearing her underwear. In the beanbag beside them was a client who was in the middle of a third hysterical pregnancy . . . and he was male. The man whose toupee resembled a dead animal which had just happened to pass away on his head, had brought an imaginary friend.
In other words, just the sort of people with whom you’d like to share your most intimate
sex secrets.
As Bianca put on her Enya CD, lit her essential oils in the infuser and made her little introductory jokes (i.e. ‘How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? One – but the light bulb has to really want to change!’) I took the opportunity to examine my surroundings.
The Therapy Centre, a utilitarian, two-storey brick building in North London, had the décor of a shabby motel lobby on a motorway. It was all exhausted pot-plants, worn, grey carpet, cheap beige desks, fluorescent lighting and unwashed windows. The room had the friendly ambience of a concentration camp.
I could see it was also the kind of place where you needed to look at your shoes a lot, because when I tuned back into the conversation, my husband was telling Bianca that, yes, his wife took a little longer to reach arousal, ‘Say a day and a half!’
‘Um, you can shut up any time now,’ I interrupted, embarrassed.
But no matter how squeamish it made me and how much Jazz would disapprove, to agree to pay £35 an hour to have my sexual shortcomings paraded in public proved beyond a doubt that I really did need therapy.
‘And then. . .’ said Jazz, kittenishly brushing her hair from her eyes, ‘he ate strawberries out of my fanny. They were halfcooked and well marinated by the time he devoured them!’
‘I’m so pleased to see you’re both looking after your nutrition,’ I replied, trying not to sound flummoxed.
It was later the same night and we were sitting around my kitchen table, listening in awe to details of Jazz’s erotic adventures with her Internet toy boy. It was like a sexual tutorial.
‘And then, after we’d drunk champagne in the bath, I let him fuck me gently with the neck of the bottle. The bathwater was so hot and the bottle neck was so cold . . .’
‘Oy veh! Obviously dignity is the only thing alcohol doesn’t preserve,’ Hannah put in primly, but nothing was going to interrupt Jasmine’s epiphany.
‘And then, he took some of the ice cubes from the champagne bucket and slipped them inside me, while he licked me. Oh, the sensation of my hot juice and his hot tongue and the melting ice trickling down my thighs,’ she reminisced in a sighing staccato, before concluding with breezy impudence, ‘So, how was your day, Cassie?’
‘Oh great,’ I replied dispiritedly. ‘I learned to put a condom on a cucumber.’
The second worst thing about therapy is the communal waiting room. The compulsive gamblers invariably make the sex addicts wager bets with the passive aggressives about who can make the bulimics throw up first.
The worst thing about therapy is the therapists. Early on in our treatment, about late April, Bianca decided I had a ‘hostile vagina’.
‘Excuse me?’ Surely something was being lost in translation?
‘From everything Rory has told me in our one-to-one, I think you have an arousal disorder, Cassandra.’
‘No,’ I countered, ‘what I have is a job, kids, an angry spouse, high blood pressure, an overdraft and a promotion in the offing.’
‘Hostile vagina, eh?’ Rory rocked back in his beanbag and cocked one leg over the opposite knee. His face broke into a smug smile. It was the first time I’d seen him cheery for weeks. ‘You know what, Cass? I’m beginning to think maybe there really is something to this therapy malarkey after all,’ he gloated. ‘It does seem to explain your lack of horniness.’
‘Hey, how horny would you feel, having worked all day then coming home to spend your time cooking, cleaning . . . and teaching small people to construct oil derricks out of coat hangers? And what about your hostile penis, hmmm?’
Bianca, who obviously didn’t like to be interrupted, clapped her hands to regain the attention of the class. ‘Right. Who knows the basic ways to please a woman?’
I put my hand up. ‘Stacking the dishwasher. Not snoring. And telling a woman she doesn’t look fat in stretch Lycra.’
It was Rory’s turn to speak. ‘To become more cliterate, right?’
Cliterate? God, I thought. Where had he got that one?
Bianca bestowed a ‘go to the top of the class’ beam at my cunning hubby.
‘I’d just like to say that ninety-nine per cent of men give the rest of us a bad name,’ Rory chirped shrewdly, flashing our therapist his most endearing grin.
Bianca’s reciprocating smile was so intense I felt sure it could irradiate soft fruit. ‘Well, I’d just like to say that I’m sure we can help your wife overcome her inhibitions,’ she assured him in her honey-buttered accent.
‘My inhibitions!’ I scorned. ‘Huh! We’re talking about a man who can calculate the total surface area of every room in our house, determine the exact mile-to-the-gallon ratio of a trip from Calais to the South of France – where he effortlessly locates the remote fishing village that’s not even on a map – yet he can’t find my clit? No, the truth is he just can’t be bothered to find it!’
The women in the room barked laughs of recognition. The men grumbled about women demanding too much. Bianca’s embarrassing solution was to make us sit through a sex video, depicting ‘willing’ couples in acts of intercourse which were so graphic and badly lit, that it made my legs go to jelly. Classmates whose legs still functioned properly rose shakily to their feet and fled, leaving human-shaped holes in the walls. One thing was for sure. I would soon be over my sexual inhibitions. Mainly because I would now be celibate for the rest of my life.
By mid-May, the only thing on my mind was whether or not I was going out of it. Why else would I ever have insisted on dragging Rory to therapy? Hannah was adamant that I must persevere. All therapy was confrontational and difficult, she assured me as we had our heels pumiced at the local Chinese nail bar. Things would turn a corner if I just stuck with it. ‘And whatever you do, don’t mention your misgivings to Jasmine, dah-ling. She hates you seeing a shrink.’
‘Oh sweetie, I don’t hate you seeing a marriage therapist,’ Jazz said, wafting late as usual into the nail bar. ‘I’m seeing one too.’
‘What?’ I nearly fell off my stool into a bucket of pedicure shavings.
‘. . . and a Pilates instructor and a dentist, and a yoga teacher and a dog walker.’
Hannah jerked so violently she accidentally kicked over her foot-soaking bucket. ‘What happened to your Internet toy boy? Don’t tell me you’ve contracted some kind of CTD – Computer-Transmitted Disease.’
But Jazz remained immune to goading. ‘Well, my main squeeze is still my divine little toy boy. But I do have this small, emergency back-up Love God called Zen who trims my trees. We had sex for the first time yesterday morning, then the second, third, fourth and fifth time during the afternoon.’
‘Um, Jazz, I think you’ll find that running two or three simultaneous relationships for more than a month and you stop being an adulterer and officially qualify as a Mormon,’ I told her. ‘And what about Studz? Is he still cheating on you?’
‘Well, I’m not stalking him any more, sweetie. But last night he told me he was out with our neighbour, the dentist. And well, that was impossible. Because I was – but obviously I can’t say anything, can I? A rather modern situation, no? Love thy neighbour, but don’t get caught. That’s my motto.’
‘Jasmine,’ Hannah said seriously, ‘all these one-night stands, no matter how much you deny it, are just a shelter, however fragile, against the terror and despair of a broken heart. You do realize that?’
Jazz’s face crumpled for a second, before she steadied herself. ‘I’ve never had a one-night stand, Hannah,’ she corrected airily. ‘Just a few one-night relationships.’
My relationship, meanwhile, had no idea what side its bed was buttered on. It seems to me that there are very few aphrodisiacal bonuses to being able to visualize the 8,000 nerve endings in one’s cervix contracting during orgasm. This is what I thought as I stood before eight strangers holding my crutch and moaning in an effort to liberate my sexual chi. Blushing and sweating, I was suffering from a performance anxiety I hadn’t felt since those hedonistic hours of enforced folk dancing in K
ogarah Bay Primary School.
‘Are the nerves in your vulva sensorium quivering?’ Bianca demanded of me.
‘Um. . .’
‘Fewer than fifty per cent of women actually achieve orgasm during intercourse.’ Bianca’s voice was syrupy with sincerity. ‘And I am going to show you how to fix that. Class, open your eyes.’
We were greeted by the sight of an anatomically correct inflatable woman lying, legs akimbo, on the floor before us. ‘Now, I’d like a volunteer.’
I stifled a laugh. Finally we had a partner for the toupeed man’s imaginary friend. Our ‘therapist’ had at last pushed the boundaries of reality too far. But to my amazement, all the men put their hands up to volunteer. A minute later I watched in a state of dazed disbelief as my husband was instructed on how to stroke his inflatable date to orgasm. He was advised on what pressure and rhythm and digit to use. Having mastered the finger, thumb and palm techniques, Bianca then instructed him on when to apply pressure to the pubic bone, when to pull on the plastic clitoris and when and how to rub her rubber labia. ‘Manual over other forms of stimulation are preferred,’ Bianca advised. ‘You don’t drive a car with your tongue, now do you? Once we’ve mastered manual stimulation, we can move onto cunnilingus. Now, if this doll were me, my genitals would be swelling with blood, my pulse would be racing, my muscles contracting involuntarily. My feet would be arching and shaking. My breasts would heave . . .’ As her voice crescendoed, Bianca’s cleavage, which was levered up near her chin by her lace underwear, jumped up and down. ‘Sweat would be surfacing on my breasts. My heart would pump frantically as my breathing becomes fast and shallow. Oh yes. Faster, harder, faster. Harder!!’
As the doll neared its imaginary orgasm, Bianca helpfully provided the soundtrack and running commentary. ‘Oh yes . . . Yes . . . YES!! Excellent, Rory! Don’t stop! Don’t stop!’
I noted my husband’s flushed cheeks and panting breath. For someone who hated therapy, he sure could put on a brave face.