His smile on the verandah, as he waits, as you walk up the path, says he knows exactly where you’ve been and why you’ve done it.
‘Your lesson today—a treat,’ is all he says, leading you inside by the hand; just squeezing it tight, in thanks. ‘If you’re up for it.’
You squeeze your readiness back.
Leading you to a razor placed carefully on a folded linen napkin. Pleasingly weighty, silver. Waiting in readiness, by the chaise longue.
‘Take off your clothes,’ he breathes, ‘and lie down. Now, think of O. Being readied … ’
He retreats to the kitchen and returns with a bowl of soapy water.
‘Trust me,’ he whispers, tenderly parting your legs. ‘This is not going to hurt. But tell me if you want to stop … ’
You wince at the first stroke, the shock of the cold. He is removing the hair in long, practised strokes, gently guiding the instrument in all the dips and crevices.
Wetter, and wetter, and wetter, as he works.
‘Women have been doing this for centuries,’ he explains softly. ‘They used tweezers in Roman times. South Sea Islanders did it and then tattooed the lovely, brave flesh. It’s a tradition in Arabic cultures. It increases sensation, apparently. Just you wait.’
You can’t. You come.
Feeling so raw, open, exposed. Can barely contain your coming, the spasms tripping over themselves. His head dips down, he is laughing in delight, he is lapping you up in eagerness. When you come again you almost break his neck—he is scissored between your legs, trapped, drenched, you have varnished his face. He laughs and you laugh and now you know why men perceive women in terms of the sea, water, fluids, and you have no idea what is next, how this ends, does it ever end? He is like dry ice on the tongue, you flinch in shock but you can’t help tasting again and again, coming back for more, always more, in blind and furious want.
‘It’s so weird,’ he murmurs in the solid quiet of afterwards, ‘that what began as a trend purely for male fantasy—to maximise exposure, if you like, as in porn—has become this amazing symbol of sexual empowerment for women. Do you feel empowered? Does it really work like that?’
‘Yes,’ you whisper, ‘yes.’ Opening your raw lips for him with the V of your fingers, spreading yourself wide, in wonder, splitting yourself apart. ‘Yes, yes. Come in. Now. Please.’
He is a drug. You are enslaved.
Back and back you will go, always back. You can’t not.
Lesson 106
Maria and Bob used to go home laughing, and thanking their stars that they did live in that shocking place London
A constant state of readiness, now. Bare. Sublimely aware, and knowing you’ll have this raging sense of illicitness later, and days later—every time you move, as you peel the potatoes, eat the Sunday roast, vacuum and sweep, clean out the chook house—all the time you’ll be squeezing your legs together and thinking of him, what he has transformed you into; a woman bound. By want.
‘It’ll start to itch,’ he’s warned you, his fingers tracing his handiwork and bringing on the stirring all over again, the slightest touch triggering you off. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Well, we’ll just have to keep doing it. Maintenance. It’s always important, that.’
Aware, as you walk inside your house with a childish slap of the screen door.
Aware, as you brush past your stepmother and put on your apron.
Aware, as you greet your dad from his shift and yarn over the bonnet of an old Ford Falcon up on bricks, yakking away about the heat, how it’s bringing out the snakes, and the dams are dropping and church, on Sunday, you need to get back, yes Dad, yes.
Almost coming with it as you talk, squeezing your groin on it.
Do they see it in your face, your stroll, your stance? Your proud, walk tall love. Do they have any inkling, of any of it?
This threshold you have crossed.
You congratulate yourself on your cleverness. Squeezing your rawness, smiling, exquisitely calibrated.
Lesson 107
The wonderful law of sex exists spiritually as well as materially
He has taken to writing on sheets of paper, he has retreated from your book but he will not give up.
THE KEY
One of the most transcendent joys available to women.
‘And I’m so jealous of it.’ He smiles a knowing smile as he holds up the page. ‘Ready?’
You nod. Bite your lip.
Delicately, he parts your lips. Licks, once; a shiver of tongue. You exclaim as if you’ve been burnt.
‘God has given women the most glorious gift imaginable.’
‘Which is?’ you groan, clutching his hair.
‘The only organ on the human body—on either body—that’s devoted entirely to one thing. Sensation,’ he chuckles, stroking, teasing. ‘Endless, lovely … sensation. It is, of course, the clit. Which has eight thousand nerve endings. Can you believe it? Twice as many as the boring old penis. And you must never, ever believe that the vagina is the explosive centre of female pleasure. Alfred Kinsey found that its interior walls, deep inside, actually have very few nerve endings, that they’re really quite enormously insensitive—compared to what’s on top.’ He smiles conspiratorially. ‘But this is something, I think, that any woman knows.’
He kisses your clit in reverence.
‘This tiny, beautiful bud is the doorway to all the mystery and power of making love; a woman’s gateway to the divine. In Greek mythology, when Zeus and Hera visited the hermaphrodite Tiresias—trying to work out whether it was men or women who experienced the more pleasure from sex—Tiresias replied, “If the sum of love’s pleasure adds up to ten, nine parts go to women, only one to men.” And it’s all down to this.’ His tongue gently encircles your clit. ‘The one thing guaranteed to lay a woman waste. If she’ll let you near it.’
You push Tol’s face onto you, into you, can hardly bear it anymore; need all this talking to stop.
He bobs up, grins. ‘I need to get your toes pointing. That’s my next task.’
‘What? Just get on with it.’
‘It’s a sure sign of orgasm. And there’s an awful lot of toe-pointing with cunnilingus. It’s a much more certain way of bringing a woman to orgasm than vaginal sex ever is.’
Your toes as flexed as a ballerina’s, again and again, that afternoon. Until you have to push him from you, away, get him off. Because your nerve endings are aching, exhausted, screaming for rest.
Lesson 108
We just plod on together, men and women alike, on the same road
A grave instruction, the next time: you must always, always tell him if you don’t orgasm, if what he is doing isn’t working, you must never pretend; this whole process will grind to a halt if you do that.
‘But wouldn’t you know?’
‘Sometimes, believe me, it’s hard for us Neanderthals to work out.’
‘I thought modern girls knew how to have orgasms like their mums knew how to cook Sunday roasts.’
He laughs. ‘You’d be surprised. It’s extremely easy for a woman to pretend. But if you do it means I’ve failed. I have married friends—women—who’ve never had an orgasm in their life. I need to know. So I can help. I need honesty, that’s all, you know that.’
‘Are you doing this for me, or for you?’
He rolls his eyes, he says nothing.
A chill, again, at why exactly he is doing this. You will never know him; you love him. The impossibility of that. You wonder if you love him because of the chip of ice within him—that rangy, jittery distance you can’t quite broach. He says he is obsessed, can’t get enough of you and then he walks away, because of his work, apparently, shutting you out; he goes off to his room and locks the door and tells you to go away, time is up, he needs to be alone. For a day, two, sometimes three. And then he rushes to you when you walk your bicycle up his drive and you are so pathetically grateful; craven, greedy, lost. Ready. For anything. He knows it.
Resis
tance is sexy. He has mastered that. The tension in a stretched wire, singing with tautness.
You are writing all through the notebook now, cramming the margins of the author’s written words, the bottom of her pages and the top of them.
The awful question, the perilous dynamism; a dynamism of absence and presence. If he wanted you completely and consumingly, if he conveyed that weakness—would you want him? Would serenity, stasis, knowing sink the boat? This love is a verb not a noun. It is galloping, withdrawing, retreating, surging—backwards, forwards—forever restless, refusing stillness and rest.
It is exhausting.
You are becoming thin with it, skin and bone. And it can only get worse.
You can’t get it stopped.
You need to know what’s next. Always what’s next. It’s how he has bound you to all this.
You are on a path.
And every morning now your little diary of observation is slipped into the pocket of your overalls, the new journal that your stepmother will never find because she would never think to glance at it; just another old book with a patched-up cover, from school no doubt. It is your explosive instruction manual for encroaching womanhood, the words you must never forget. Your words, now, more so than his; as you become more aware. As you step into being the woman he wants. And observe. Detach.
Lesson 109
In any profession, there is nothing which is so injurious, so fatal, as mediocrity
Exploring what your body can do.
To the limit, he commands.
His project. That he will facilitate. That he will observe. And take mental notes, you are sure; so keenly he watches.
He tells you he wants you to be in awe of what your body can achieve, to learn it, revel in it, unlock it.
‘Work out what’s best; use me, come on. Position me. Find out what you want. Every woman is different. Should I be behind you, on top, underneath? Experiment. Live with audacity! Make your man a better lover. Every man you have. Teach them. We need to learn as much as you. Find the animal in you, the carnal, what you feel not what you think. What works.’
You do. Working out the best ways to orgasm while he’s inside you; angling him with hands on slim hips. So he’s rubbing against your pelvic bone, so he’s stimulating your clit; guiding him, talking him through it, yes, over there, yes, more, that’s it!
‘I’m learning so much,’ he pants his gratitude, ‘you’re like a blank slate, pure instinct, it’s glorious.’
You giggle to hear it and then suddenly, without understanding, you are crying. He licks up your tears in one long salty sweep, one cheek, then the other.
‘What’s this?’
‘I—I don’t know.’ Struggling to find words. ‘It’s just … all of this, it feels like it’s for … I don’t know, men, in the future, you said every man you have but I don’t want anyone else—I—you’re shaping me for … what? Someone else. Something else. My future? Like you’re not going to be in it? You want to create the perfect lover—but for who?’ You thump his chest. ‘Who? ’
He stares in surprise.
‘I’m doing this for you.’ Finally, matter-of-fact. ‘Don’t you get it?’
‘No.’
‘One day you will.’ He rolls off you. ‘And you’ll be grateful. That you had all this at the start. Because believe me, most women don’t have the luxury of it.’
You thump him hard in the chest with your fists.
‘Ow!’
Lesson 110
I once asked a man—in his own house a father whose authority was unquestioned, his least word held in reverence, his smallest wish obeyed—‘How did you manage to bring up these children?’ He said: ‘By love.’
‘Come on,’ he soothes, ‘let’s have some fun. We both need it right now.’ He raises an eyebrow. Goes to the kitchen. Returns with a bowl of ice cubes.
‘Allow me to demonstrate.’
He parts your legs, pops in a cube, and leans down with the utmost tenderness.
Your back arched in a radiant flinch.
That afternoon, the shadow of a terrible truth. Whether you love Tol or hate him is indiscernible, not important anymore. You want him, just that. It is neither love nor hate but hunger: wolfish, rangy, focused.
Something entirely different.
Lesson 111
Put the whole past life aside as if it had never been
Wiped clean by a new day, the anticipation over what’s next. A heading on his page, just that:
THE G SPOT
The rest of the paper blank.
‘Where’s the lesson?’
‘This one, you have to work out for yourself.’
You snort a laugh.
‘Some people think it doesn’t exist in a woman,’ he whispers, a moth to your ear. ‘But it does, oh it does.’
‘Where?’
‘You have to find it. I can’t help. Much.’
A full-length mirror from his bedroom is placed in readiness against a lounge room wall.
‘In men the G spot’s in their arse.’ He chuckles as he guides you before the mirror. ‘But with you, well, let’s just see if we can locate it. Sit. Legs wide.’
You do.
‘Wider.’
You laugh, you do.
‘Now get your finger, your ring one, yep, and kind of hook it—on the front wall, so to speak. Tender. Slow. Yes. That’s it. Forget about me, concentrate.’ He says nothing more, he sits back on the couch, he watches, leaves you to it.
It takes a while, and then, and then, oh God, it is found.
Cracked. Blazing, with light. With life.
His hand is around his cock and you both come at the same time and through the haze of your exquisiteness, your body seized up, you see his semen spurting out; its beautiful blue white as shiny as varnish and he comes to you and gathers you up and holds you and holds you, dabbing it on your forehead and cheeks and lips, thanking you for the gift of it.
Anointing you, blooding you, binding you.
‘I promise that I will never ask that vile little question, “how was it for you?”’ he says later, helping you into your clothes.
‘Don’t all boys do that? Lune says they do.’
‘Not this one.’
‘And why would that be, mister?’
‘Because I know.’
Lesson 112
Mature age—when the passions die out or are quieted down
He is expecting guests, for three days, you’ll have to stay away. He bats off all your questions, they’re old acquaintances, too boring to talk about but they have to come—sigh—they must.
Your crestfallen face.
‘Hey,’ he soothes, ‘none of that. Just remember one thing. A woman is sexy if she thinks she is. OK? And you are. Don’t lose it. Neediness isn’t sexy. Hold that thought.’ His voice drops to a whisper. ‘Believe the power that you have. That will stay with me over the coming days, hours, minutes. Alright?’
He runs a fingertip down your belly and stops, shutting his eyes for a moment. Your fingers hover at the buckles of your overalls, he catches them up.
‘Not yet. Wait. Imagine us as two dogs on heat, kept apart in their cages and then … released. This is good, reviving. We need it. Constraint, and release—remember?’
Of course you return. The next day. You have your bush skills, can be as quiet as a tracker when you want.
The gate is locked.
You bang your fist into it. It rings with your fury.
Right.
Crazed, now, with suspicion.
Because of that comment about how sex with the same partner always becomes routine, no matter what; we all need variety he said and you still aren’t quite sure what he meant; your heart pounds. Who’s in there? You are his plaything, his construct; he is moulding you for something—someone—else. Who? What?
Love to hate, such a little step, and you can feel, even now, a whiff of its fetid breath. If he stops craving you then by God you will stop craving him; you f
eed off each other, it’s the only way this can exist.
Thumping your fists into the fence. Again, and again, and again.
Lesson 113
Man and woman were made for, and not like, one another
Three days later.
The gate is unlocked, of course, and you are rushing through it knowing it’s pathetic but you can’t not do this. Be this. He runs out to you, encircling you in his arms and mumbling something about how vile it all was, the guests, it didn’t work, crashing into his life and his writing and his space; but he won’t say who, what; claims he has no idea about a gate that was locked and you seize it and are assuaged, you have to be for this to work. Have to trust, yes. And you note as he speaks, as if for the first time, the something that’s always so sad about his eyes. When he sees you, when he smiles, they detonate with warmth but when he’s not aware you’re looking—it’s like a peek through a curtain at a secret you know nothing of and you wouldn’t want to, no, you shouldn’t delve, you won’t like it, you sense that.
Who is he?
Written, more than once, in your notebook.
He laughs that afternoon in puzzlement. ‘I’m a failed writer. I’m far too old for you. I’m not great with kids. So never ask me that.’
He is the one.
Written, more than once, in your notebook.
‘Love has no right to be all knotty and tangled, does it?’ he muses that afternoon, more to himself than to you. ‘It should be the easiest, cleanest, clearest thing in the world. Don’t you think? It can often be so fearful; but you know, with you, I don’t feel afraid at all.’ He speaks as if he can’t quite believe it; the miraculous simplicity, at last.
With My Body Page 15