Sex and Death

by Sarah Hall

  After Christmas lunch, one of the couples – the only ones who did not have children – disappeared to their bedroom to ‘sleep it off’, but there was something sheepish to the way they left the lounge that suggested they were going to do more than just sleep. Selene noticed her husband also watching them leave with a wistful expression, but whether it was for the good old days of weekend napping or for the indolent pleasure of afternoon sex, she couldn’t tell.

  The remaining couples tried their best to pretend the mood hadn’t shifted in the room, but everyone was tired and full and a bit drunk, and the babies and toddlers – who had mostly slept through the lunch itself – were getting fractious. Each couple negotiated some sort of arrangement for the long hours remaining until the children could be put to bed. Selene told her husband he could go lie down; she needed to get out, to get some air, and unlike him she’d had very little of the feast.

  She and one of the other wives strapped their babies to their chests – Selene’s facing inwards, the other, who was closer to five months, facing outwards with his limbs sticking out like an upturned beetle – and headed down the dirt track beside the neighbouring farm’s fields.

  Like all new mothers, Selene and her friend were condemned to a relentless confessional intimacy. She sometimes wondered what they would speak about one day when their children were grown and they no longer felt such urgency to brief each other on the state of their children’s bodies, and their own. But still it was difficult for Selene to broach the topic that had been preoccupying her. Perhaps since it involved speaking not only of their own bodies but of those of their husbands, and that was mostly uncharted territory.

  ‘So you know they say six weeks is the time . . .’ Selene trailed off, trusting her friend to understand her meaning. ‘It’s not just about the bum thing. Even if everything was in working order, I just don’t know if I’d be able to – contemplate it.’

  A mist was settling. They kept walking, eyes forward, each holding their baby’s feet in their hands.

  Her friend was quiet for a while. ‘I’m embarrassed to admit this, though I shouldn’t be,’ she said finally. ‘I’m the one who initiated our first sex after the birth. Only at about three months, mind you. I had to talk him into it. I had this need to feel his stomach flat against mine, it had always been our thing. And I think I wanted to make my body private again, take it off the record. The way your body becomes public property, you know? My sister-in-law knew about my clitoral graze, for god’s sake. Even my stepdad knew about my stitches.’

  They laughed then, and Selene didn’t pry any further. She was grateful that her friend didn’t ask her for specifics either. But she understood her meaning, and it helped. Sex didn’t always have to be about love, or even desire. Sometimes it was about nothing more than marking out the territory of self. It reminded her of the way she’d felt at eighteen, when she’d triumphantly lost her virginity and it had not mattered one iota who the man was; even at that young age she had understood he was nothing more than a placeholder, a significant zero. This had taken her by surprise, her ability to use somebody else’s body to make manifest a transformation in her own. She had used him to become a woman, stepped over his naked body to go out to the dark swimming pool at midnight, caught up in her own act of courage and power.

  In the early hours of the morning on the day of her operation, Selene breastfed her baby beneath the lamp in the study while reading about the first hint of rot in Sylvia and Ted’s honeymoon paradise. She gets food poisoning, he thinks she is overreacting and goes cold. The stone man made soup. The burning woman drank it. They go for a walk at full moon, unspeaking and sullen. Years later, Sylvia writes a poem about a pair of rapturous lovers who see in the shining surface of their dining table the reflections of their doubles, unhappy, estranged.

  He lifts an arm to bring her close, but she

  Shies from his touch: his is an iron mood.

  Seeing her freeze, he turns his face away.

  The colorectal nurse had told her to fast for twenty-four hours beforehand, and by the time Selene was rolled into the operating theatre at noon, she was already floating away into the upper reaches of the room on the drug of high hunger. She felt very calm. The doctors and nurses gathered above her. She looked into their eyes, the only part of their faces left uncovered. Their eyes looked back, kind, apelike.

  A bright spotlight on an adjustable base was switched on but angled tactfully at the wall. Selene knew in a few moments it would be shone directly at her nether regions. The anaesthetic hadn’t even been tapped into the vein on her hand and she’d started to laugh.

  ‘Count down from ten for me, please,’ one of the masked faces said, and she realised it was her specialist, the one with a newborn daughter named Matilda. She hadn’t recognised his eyes.

  ‘Ten, nine, eight, seven . . .’

  Selene was trying very hard to stay conscious. She had important things to process, she felt, things she wasn’t sure she’d recall when she surfaced. In her follow-up appointment with a different midwife – Agatha nowhere to be seen – she’d lied on every depression scale question and been told she was in perfect mental health. Once upon a time she’d broken up with a lover, slapped a $20 note on the bar top and stormed out in righteous fury, all because he’d said he didn’t ever want to be at the business end of a woman’s birth, in case it put him off her forever. Imagine if that man, now a stranger to her, could see her like this! She pitied him his youthful greenness in the ways of the body, for not yet knowing that the flesh is designed to disappoint, that even his own would in due time put off everyone in his life, even – especially – himself.

  Her husband’s lustful eyes gazing down at her now, his mouth and nose covered by the pale blue mask, his hair covered by the surgeon’s cap. He was lifting the edge of her hospital gown, and in his eyes was no memory of the other things he’d seen of her, the other things he knew. Was she more than the animal sum of her parts? Whittled down to portals, spirit-like? With him, she could be neither and both. She would use him to fix herself, and once more pretend to be whole.

  THE POSTCARD

  Wells Tower

  ‘Let me save you a few bucks on your therapy tab,’ said Cora Jakes. ‘You haven’t found the right person because the right person doesn’t exist. You want to be happy, forget the big, pink abstractions. Find someone whose daily presence is not intolerable to you.’

  ‘Do you put that on your anniversary cards?’ asked the man she was with. ‘To my husband, whose daily presence is not intolerable to me.’ Tom was this person’s name. He was a photo editor with whom she had slept during a festival in Los Angeles three weeks before. The specifics of their tussle were lost to Cora, who’d been close to quadriplegia from negronis. But the experience left in her memory traces of something exciting. So now she was sitting in a dark saloon in the meat-packing district with Tom’s thin knee between her thighs. Downstairs was the neighbourhood’s last establishment that still packed meat. The room smelled authentically of blood.

  ‘Is he an artist?’

  ‘He’s a non-depleting human presence. It’s a talent they should give MacArthurs for. He doesn’t argue for the pleasure of it. I like the way his breath smells. We laugh at the same things, and I am never lonely. The only issues, and I actually think they are relatively minor, are that I’m not in love with him, and I’m not especially interested in having sex with him ever again.’

  Tom’s tongue was now scouting Cora’s molars. His stiff thumb toured her breast.

  Outside, a blue static of falling snow haloed the streetlamps. A serious storm was in the works. Haste in Tom’s bed would be necessary if she wanted to find a taxi home.

  ‘How about we get out of here?’ Cora said. She took her phone from her pocket to check the time. The phone, she saw, was on an open call to her husband. It had been that way for forty-six minutes. Cora hung it up.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ she said to Tom. ‘I have to go.’

 
Cora left him on the corner. When she was out of earshot, she called her husband, whose name was Rodney. The phone had been in the deepest pocket of her thick, wool coat. The bar had been a poultry house of background noise. It was reasonable to suppose that her husband had not heard a thing.

  ‘Hey there,’ Rodney said with perfect affability. ‘How was your night?’

  ‘Rife with jargon and profane young women.’ Cora was a photographer. A launch party for a fashion magazine was where she had professed to be. ‘But a big, dumb paycheck may come out of it somewhere down the line. Anyway, I’m getting in a cab now. Do we need anything from the world?’

  ‘I just ate our last ginger snap.’

  ‘Ginger snaps: check,’ said Cora. Relief warmed her thorax. She could not get home soon enough. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Actually, yeah,’ said Rodney. ‘Who was that guy you were talking to?’

  Abasements were made. A divorce was proposed and rejected. In the weeks after the telephone call, fits of tearful self-recrimination seized Cora at restaurants, in the grocery store, in the small hours of the night.

  Through all of this, Rodney was impossibly forgiving. He was not only her absolver but a spirited attorney for Cora’s defence. ‘Of course, it sucks and it’s painful, but strictly speaking, I can’t really say you did anything wrong, when we’re down to what, about three IOOs a year.’ The acronym came from Rodney’s computer work. It stood for input/output operation, a piece of household vocabulary that, in its transition into standard usage, had ceased to be waggish and become merely apt.

  ‘Anyway,’ Rodney went on, ‘we did say that if either of us wanted to be extracurricular, we would talk about it and deal with it. You just happen to have acted first.’

  Cora could not recall having had that conversation. She wondered, with a touch of vertigo, whether Rodney was making it up. ‘But I didn’t tell you,’ she said. ‘I lied.’

  ‘Well, it’s not an easy thing to talk about,’ Rodney said. ‘But if you lie to me again, I will divorce the living shit out of you. Just so we’re clear.’

  Cora did not ask how much Rodney had heard of her conversation with Tom. If her husband was guilty of a cruelty, it was that he did not immediately let on that he had heard it all. Rather, he hoarded the contents of the wiretap and returned them to Cora, moment by moment, at moments calculated to cause her pain.

  ‘For someone who didn’t want to have sex with me ever again, you did a bang-up job,’ is something he told her one night after a satisfying bout of lovemaking.

  Lying tranquillised on the sofa of a Sunday afternoon, the curve of her skull warmly cradled by his chin, he said, ‘Even if this is you not being in love with me, it seems to deliver the same basic neurochemical effects.’

  Then Cora would go in for briny testimonies, swearing, no, no, no; he’d overheard only the meaningless lies of a horny lady trying to ease Tom’s conscience about screwing someone’s wife. ‘But he’d fucked you once already,’ Rodney pointed out. ‘What easing did his conscience really need?’

  Cora demonstrated her remorse with grand mortifications of her checkbook. She bought for Rodney a pair of $700 boots and, for $1,200, a set of Japanese kitchen knives whose whorled blue blades were so delicate they had to be stored in special scabbards packed with rust-retardant gel.

  She spent thousands on a three-day reservation at a coveted hotel upstate. It was built of garbage: cardboard, shipping pallets and rendered plastic waste. The grounds were unstrollable. The glades were seeded with kitchen leavings to solicit visits from bears.

  ‘My little six-year-old boy, who’s started to act like a real little terrorist, today he asked me, “Daddy, why is it so easy to be bad?”’ said a voice on the Christian radio station Cora was flipping past on the drive back to the city. ‘I told him, “We’re all born with a dark place inside of us, and every time we sin, that dark place gets bigger and bigger and easier to fall into.”’

  This caused Cora to lurch against the window glass and sob.

  ‘Ah, fuck, okay,’ said Rodney in a sigh. ‘I don’t think you get to do this any more.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All this grief and guilt, what you’re doing, you’re hijacking the story. You got it on with some guy, and you’re sorry about it. Only you’re so sorry about it that you’re the injured party now.’

  ‘I’m not the injured party.’

  ‘Yes, you are. You’re so broken and stupefied with guilt that this AM radio jackass has you in hysterics, and now I’m the noises-off in your one-woman contrition play. It’s not even good theatre. You go and do this not-nice but extremely standard thing, and now you’re biblically wicked. Presto-Christo! Now you believe in sin.’

  As a matter of fact, she did believe in sin. She did believe that a tar pit was spreading within her and corroding her decent parts. Tom was not the first person with whom she had betrayed her husband. He was the eleventh, in the past six months.

  Her work, she felt, was to blame. A spasm of unanticipated career success had lately come to Cora. It had bent her id.

  She had started out in photography with earnest aims. It was the work of Dorothea Lange, Jacob Riis, Ben Shahn and Walker Evans that incited her to buy her first camera. Her sincere, early ambition was to spend her life taking pictures that mattered of people who did not. But there was rent to be paid, and Cora ended up in the lucrative business of taking pictures that mattered not at all of those who matter quite a lot. Actors, musicians, home-run kings, senators and warlords made visits to her studio. It was exciting stuff, at first, standing in a room with Earth’s most significant animals and compelling several million strangers to view them through your eyes.

  In Cora’s case, the shelf life of that thrill had been about ten years. The work was already unfascinating her profoundly when she did a session with Beyoncé Knowles. The singer pitched a tantrum over Cora’s slave-flash, whose pinging hurt her ears. The celebrity retreated to the restroom and refused to come out. For lack of anything else at which to aim her camera (an 8 x 10 with bellows; large as a horse’s head) Cora made a very pretty portrait of the bathroom door. She printed it and showed it to Rodney, lamenting that a photograph of Beyoncé unseen in a latched toilet would command an infinitely vaster audience than a snapshot of a corpse on the street. But making the image, Rodney observed, had boosted her professional spirits for the first time in recent memory. And that was true, it had. So she made more of them: a broom closet containing Derek Jeter, a rose trellis obscuring Mick Jagger, an armoire behind which Angela Merkel stood, and a few dozen more.

  On a visit to Cora’s studio, her agent saw the photographs. Cora explained they were just a dull joke she’d been cracking for her own sanity. The agent felt otherwise. So did lots of other art world folk. A book deal was easily arranged. First galleries and then museums, in ten different countries, hosted solo exhibitions. For the first time in her life, Cora found herself on the business end of photographers’ lenses. Her face was in magazines. She was paid to give masterclasses at universities that had rejected her student application. Collectors bought prints for significant sums. In an absurd eversion of her own intent, the celebrity photographs – an aria to nothingness sung in the key of contempt – had, in her narrow corner of the world, made Cora Jakes a star.

  Why the onset of her public life had sparked this uncharacteristic adultery binge (which doubled her life’s count of sexual partners) was a question for which Cora had no clear answer. ‘Satiable’ was how she termed her appetites to the psychiatrist she visited after the pocket-call disaster. In her thirties, she testified, she had passed three consecutive celibate years with no antsiness at all. In every major past relationship, she had been scrupulously faithful.

  The psychiatrist proposed that this boom year of what he called ‘debauches’ was Cora’s method of ‘scourging’ herself for success she felt to be misbegotten. Cora said that though she was not, admittedly, brainlessly sex-driven, she did not confuse coitus with a cat-o’-
nine-tails. She added that someone who liked to be called ‘doctor’ should try not to talk like a maiden aunt from a Jane Austen novel. Here, the doctor pinched his nose, which did resemble something medical: the rubber head of a tendon hammer that had been gnawed on by a cat.

  Wanting to help the doctor out, she proposed three possibilities for what was going on. One was that she was getting older. She intended not to procreate. She wanted her body to have some diverting experiences before it grew too crepey and groundward to appeal to mainstream sensibilities. Two: though she knew that her marriage was over, she lacked the emotional courage to tell her husband in plain language that she no longer loved him. By a riddlesome logic, Cora feared she would do Rodney more harm with a direct conversation than by his discovery that she’d been betraying him in bulk. Or perhaps the language for that conversation did not exist. After all, he had overheard all the material points, baldly stressed in Cora’s chat with Tom. Her disavowals notwithstanding, Rodney could not but perceive that the fish was trying to flop out of the boat. So what did he do? He gave her a pass. He built a bigger boat.

  The third possibility, a thick-skulled non-hypothesis to which Cora privately subscribed, was that all this semi-anonymous sex was just something she happened to be grooving on at this strange and public time. Or, rather, it was what this dislocated, half-baffled version of herself was grooving on. Propriety seemed to call for it. When you have spent a long weekend at a photo festival in Nice, going from microphone to microphone, from reception to reception, amid elegant people with wine-bruised teeth, all assisting the illusion of your own significance, and at your arm through all of this is a beautiful and timid man of twenty-three, whose name is Clément and who is your Paris gallerist’s assistant and whose eyes would trump a Hereford’s for brownness and diameter, and who mumbles for fear that his English is too clumsy for the ears of the woman who made the celebrated photographs, and who tells you, on the final evening of the festival, in his charmingly graceless way, that he has very much enjoyed the weekend, but honnêtement, he has been so stressé, so nerveux in your famous company, he will be also a little bit happy when you go away – well, what can one possibly do in these circumstances but to invite Clément to one’s hotel room and let him be as tirelessly oral as he wishes to be?