by Jenny Diski
It had been her choice to give up her job as a personnel assistant in a department store, to look after the children, and she had no sense of loss, either at the time, or later. On the contrary, her life was full. She had almost completed a degree course in literature with the Open University, and Tom had willingly taken care of the kids when she went off to the summer schools. She planned to continue with her studies, so that by the time the children left home, she would be ready to do a PhD, perhaps on a full-time basis.
She was not aching for anything, as far as she knew. Even the suburban life of Paramount Close was congenial to her. She liked their friends, the dinner parties and Sunday lunches. She enjoyed taking the day off with Margaret, her neighbour, to shop in the West End department stores. The quietness of the Close, its lack of drama, did not dismay her. Susan was no bored housewife. In the evenings, she and Tom discussed his work as a solicitor and what she was reading, as well as keeping a lively conversation going about world events. Neither was radical, but both had found the breath of fresh air of Thatcherdom had soured, and were not sorry to see her go. They were roughly Tory, but consensus Tories. “A touch of rising damp,” as Tom would joke to their more right-of-centre friends. When Harold Macmillan had spoken with alarm about “selling off the family silver,” they had been relieved to hear an old-fashioned, decent Tory view being stated once again.
Susan and Tom had a regular sex life. They slept in a double bed and made love, these days, once or twice a week, and neither of them felt their relationship was anything other than full and successful. Both knew that good marriages found their level over time, and that there was a great deal more to the long haul of partnership than fevered sexual activity. When they made love, they satisfied each other, and there was a warmth and familiarity about it which gave both of them pleasure.
Sometimes, as thoughtful people, they worried slightly that life was going so well for them. The Close had seen its share of domestic disruption. The Donahoes, everyone agreed, seemed to have the knack of making domesticity work. Susan knew that, while Tom might have had a passing flirtation or two, he had never been unfaithful to her. She, on her side, had never been unfaithful to Tom, not for fifteen years.
Then, eighteen months ago, at a retirement-cum-Christmas party given for Tom’s senior partner, Donald, she had met Richard, Donald’s son. Richard was a lecturer in English at a south London poly.
“We’re a university now,” he smiled at her when they first spoke.
“Who isn’t?” she answered.
He was in his mid-thirties—ten years Susan’s junior—and married to an aromatherapist called Jackie. They had a small child, Sara, just about to start full-time school. Richard and Susan had talked books and the Open University, where, it turned out, he was a visiting lecturer. He was not particularly striking to look at, his face was pleasant enough though a little nondescript, and he was slightly overweight.
“I’ll be seeing you at the summer school,” Richard had said pleasantly when she and Tom said goodbye.
Richard, keep on missing me. Stay obsessed. I dreamed you took me to pieces. Broke into me and cut the threads that hold me together. Then you replaced them with strange extruded stuff (cobwebbed latticework, brittle lace) made of your saliva and kisses. Miracle connective tissue that runs now through my bone marrow and keeps me in one piece, but all the time quivers me on your frequency. I vibrate with you, even when you’re not here. Do you know what you do to me, you devious, dirty man? I’m not just yours, I’m made of you. You liquefy me. I have never felt quite so much the sum of my parts, yet at the same time I sense each organ of my body in its right place, doing the right things. I hum with you, through perverse telegraph lines you laid in me when I was distracted. You last in me, not wholly ghost in my machine.
Oh, you do distract me. And you aren’t good: you’re bad, very bad, though saintly in your dedication to the pleasuring of you and me. For which, all must be forgiven. Just now, I conjured you, and you came to me so deliciously, so darkly that I thought, for a moment, that you were really here. Well, you are, of course. I’ve even come to love the silences between us while we live our other lives, even they speak to me of you.
About the things you want to do to me: the answer, so far as my imagination can stretch, and much, much further, is yes. What you want—yes. Over and over again. I love repetition.
And the things I want to do to you: I want to taste the tears that lubricate your eyes with the tip of my tongue. Your eyelids would resist, but wouldn’t be able to prevent my penetration. I’d lick each eye from corner to corner. And then as a prize for being so still, I’d dip my finger into my saturated privates and run it across your mouth. I want to watch your tongue gathering up the taste of me. I’m so happy to be your secret slut, slipping under your skin, into your interior, into the labyrinths where your perverse daydreams huddle. Can you feel me there? In your dark, damp nooks and crannies, nuzzling you and asking for more? I wonder if I should do my PhD in filth? Or limericks. Look, I wrote one for you:
A pair who were anal fixated
Could never entirely be sated
They weren’t just perverse
It was something much worse
Even God turned his back when they mated.
Susan had forgotten all about Richard by the time the summer came round. Except, in retrospect, she recalled looking forward to the summer school even more than usual. She was certain, though, that nothing had happened between them at the party, no special looks or anything, and she was sure he had not been on her mind as she packed, with such enthusiasm, for her week at Sussex University.
He was not her tutor, but they found themselves on the first evening sitting in the same group in the bar. They chatted about books, and he moved his stool closer to hers to make their conversation easier above the raised voices of the rest of the crowd, drinking and laughing their way into familiarity. When the others went off to bed, leaving the two of them alone, Susan had not thought anything of it. Even when he walked her back to the hall of residence, and then accompanied her to the door of her room, Susan did not consider it strange or meaningful. It was only when, having unlocked the door and, without a word being spoken, both of them were behind it, in the room, and still in silence they had locked together, fumbling desperately to get each other’s clothes off, that Susan realised what was happening.
They never got to the bed, or even fully undressed. He freed her breasts, pulling her blouse and brassiere down to her waist. She opened his flies and, dropping to her knees, grasped inside his underpants to get at his penis and fill her mouth with it, half-choking on its bulk so that the pressure on the back of her throat caused contractions, like swallowing movements, as if she would devour him. In a few moments, he withdrew it, and pressed her down on to the carpet, pushing up her skirt and dragging her knickers to her ankles, only getting one leg free before grasping both breasts between his fingers, and entering her. He drove himself into her, tightening his grip on her nipples with every movement, and spitting the word, “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” into her face, and although she had no recollection of ever before using the word, she called it back to him with matching ferocity, until the two of them were so fiercely in unison that suddenly they both laughed out loud. He kissed her then, and the laughter died as his tongue reached towards the back of her throat, tasting her and himself at the same time, and he came with a cry that travelled down from the interior of Susan’s mouth into her abdomen and brought her to an anguished and frighteningly strange orgasm of her own.
In the ensuing silence, they were strangers in shock: people meeting for the first time in the aftermath of a natural catastrophe, not knowing how to address each other once the intimacy of disaster was over. Someone moved slightly, Susan did not know who, and it cued their separation. Hesitantly, rather awkwardly, Richard kissed her on the lips, but it had about it the quality of a well-mannered gesture. You had to do something to recognise the person you barely knew, when you had ju
st had tumultuous sex with them. She knew he would rather have dressed himself in silence and left, because that was what she wanted to do. It wasn’t that she felt that either of them disliked the other for what had happened, only that it was such an embarrassing situation they now found themselves in.
Neither of them found appropriate words—not surprisingly on Susan’s part, she didn’t know what they were, she had never done anything like this before. They dressed, turning their backs on each other for modesty, and then stood in the vacant silence.
“I’d better go. I’m . . .” Richard said. She could hear that he had been about to add an apology, but decided against it, not wanting it to be misunderstood.
“Yes,” she said, meaning nothing very much at all.
Again, at the open door, Richard turned as if to say something, feeling, Susan knew, that he ought to arrange another meeting, that it was not right to leave it like this; but instead he cracked a bit of a smile and closed the door behind him with elaborate care.
They continued to see each other in the bar, but never when there wasn’t a group of other students and teachers around them. There was no remaining behind when the evening’s socialising was done. When they passed each other on the way to lectures, he gave her a fleeting smile that suggested he remembered what had happened, but could not cope with anything more than that. Susan’s smile said the same thing. If it had been an adventure, it was one which both were happy to leave to find its place in the past.
A month later, he phoned her in the middle of the day.
“I want to see you,” he said. Just that, no greeting or explanation.
“All right,” Susan replied, and he arranged to come to her house at midday the following day.
They fucked immediately on Susan and Tom’s bed, as frantically as they had at the summer school, but this time they continued to lie in each other’s arms. When they’d rested in an easier and far more comfortable silence than after their first encounter, they began again, but now it was different, and they took their time, exploring their faces and bodies with delicate care, watching the response to every slight caress. They called each other by name, tentatively at first, and looked into each other’s eyes to judge the pleasure they were giving and convey the pleasure they were receiving.
After that he came to her twice a week, on the days when his timetable left him free before and after lunch. It was, to Susan’s surprise, extraordinarily easy to push past the limits of what she had once considered to be generally acceptable. The exploration of the boundaries—physical and mental—between them became the structure of their affair. On his second visit, while Richard moved slowly, thoughtfully inside her, Susan’s hand casually stroked his lower back and continued around the curve of his buttock. As a sudden spasm of desire ran through her, she gripped him harder, her fingers digging into the dividing slope, and for a split second the rhythm of his movements was interrupted. She looked up at him and saw some new longing in his eyes. That time, the moment passed, and they continued their slow and sensual reacquaintance, but Susan took note.
Each time they met, they tested the further possibilities of what was wanted of them and by them, and each time found they had not reached the innermost boundary of desire. When, cued by the look in his eyes on the previous occasion, she first penetrated him with her finger, he moaned and abandoned himself readily to her exploration. He breathed “Yes,” as if he had been waiting for it, and lay wide open and shuddering with an almost deranged pleasure at feeling himself invaded and caressed so deep inside his body. She discovered a new sense of power, a novel potency which made her heart beat fast and her eyes gleam, while she released his desire to be taken and used.
The increasing reification of each other’s body became a goal and a gift. Her body was put at the disposal of his every whim, to be his object with which he could do anything he chose, and she saw how he, too, wanted the pure physicality of being reduced (though this was not how either experienced it) to a sexual commodity. She had never felt so much herself as when she was utterly and explicitly his object, a thing with no other use than to gratify his impulses. Nor had she known such welling passion, and what she would have called love if it had not been so much more and different a matter from the love she felt for Tom, as when her existence was being annihilated by his unfettered desire to have everything of her. They were possessed by one another and the desire for total possession of the other’s body. Very quickly, it was clear that everything was allowed and wanted. But soon enough they’d reached the limits of the physically possible and they discovered they were not satiated. Their desire surpassed the accessible areas of their bodies.
Richard wanted to know, one day, who got up first in Susan’s house, who collected the post? The following morning the first letter arrived. When they met a couple of days later, they smiled at one another, but made no mention of their exchange of letters. The story they were weaving by post continued in parallel to their meetings.
And so it went on, almost daily by post, and twice a week, in reality. They detailed their daydreams on paper and without any sense of hurry, though with studied compulsion, acted them out on the flesh. They delighted and amused each other with the games they invented, the roles they played in both their modes of communication. They encouraged each other, urging each other on to go deeper into their desires, to say what had never been said, to wish for what couldn’t be wished for, to do whatever they liked.
Yet, all the while, life went on as normal. The families noticed very little change; nothing more than a slightly distracted air from time to time. Tom would smile when Susan failed to hear something he said while she sat and read a book in the evening.
“Too immersed in her studies to hear her poor old husband,” he joked at her on that evening when the two cats were lying purring at their feet, fat and sleek after a large liver lunch. Tom was pleased to have a wife with a lively intelligence.
“Mmm,” she said, looking up briefly, and smiling back.
Susan, my Sidcup siren, let me tutor you in your PhD. I promise to give you very high marks, you’ll be a doctor of filth in no time, so long as you promise never to cure me. God, I wish I could mark you, and you me. It’s impractical, I know, but I long to trace the outlines of the bruises you would leave on me. The maps of pain and pleasure I know you know how to give. And your blood—what would it taste like?
It’s funny about the silences, isn’t it? But I love your sound and your presence, even more. I want to be drip-fed with your voice, your words. Even then, I’d fret when you took the time to breathe. I have such a need for you, such a hunger, and yet I want us to take our time. I want to go through in the flesh everything we’re going through in the story we’ve been telling each other by post (and the other, even murkier story which we haven’t dared commit to words: too dangerous), but slowly, deliberately. I want to kiss you for an age and toy with time.
I could swear that you are my invention. How else could you be how you are? I worked on your wishes just as I work on your body, making them real and solid. You are a monster conceived out of my own monstrous desires, for all your pretty floral curtains and blu-flush in the loo. But we’re angelic monsters, not fiends. The fiends couldn’t stand the heat we create.
The project of inventing you is going so well, though it’s slow, careful work. (Sometimes, Susan, I’m so scared about us, I can hardly breathe.) I’m starting from the inside: building from the centre and working out. (I don’t want us to stop. I want to go on. Is it OK?) I’ve got your delicious entrails in place, and they’re very beautiful, I wish you could see them. Soon, I’ll have your major organs mapped. Oh, I can’t wait to get to your bloodstream. I’ll carry on working on you for the rest of the evening. Tomorrow is dedicated to inventing your lungs and spleen. The next day I think I’ll devote entirely to your heart.
People don’t understand about repetition, do they? How it is at the heart (thump, thump, thump) of obsession; at the erotic centre (drip, drip, dri
p) of desire. You do, of course. Repetition is insatiability spelt sideways.
I love your ability to focus. Apart from repetition, focus is the main requirement of good obsessives. You are such a good obsessive. Do you know that, sometimes, when I see the word “you” in one of your letters, my heart stops for a moment?
My turn:
A batwitch who rode through the night
On a bookish young man did alight
She unleashed all her passion
In unspeakable fashion
When he thanked her, she said “That’s all right.”
In between lusting and family life, the subject of betrayal did, of course, occupy Susan’s thoughts. She knew that she was betraying Tom by any common definition of fidelity, but was she, she wondered, betraying Richard’s wife? This question engaged her for some time, seeming, at least at first, to be a different matter from her infidelity to Tom.
Richard had told her that he had had a couple of affairs during his five-year marriage, before his involvement with Susan, and it was clear to her right from the start that Richard was not a man who would be faithful to a wife. She was fairly certain that “a couple of affairs” meant more than two. She argued to herself that he would be sleeping with someone else if he were not sleeping with her. This was a statement of the particular situation, rather than a justification for her affair with a married man, but Susan discovered that she simply did not feel guilt about Jackie the aromatherapist. That marriage was entirely their concern: she did not discuss it with Richard, and would not talk about Jackie, even in passing.
“Why?” he asked when she stopped him telling her something Jackie had said about sending their daughter to private school.
“Because if Tom was in bed with another woman, whatever I felt about his infidelity, I wouldn’t want him chatting to her about me. It doesn’t matter what’s said. Your wife has a right to privacy. She’s none of my business.”