Desire

by Mariella Frostrup

  “Are we?” Jerry said.

  “How tall are you?” I said.

  “Six foot exactly.”

  “I’m five eleven,” I said. “One inch difference. What do you weigh?”

  “One hundred and eighty-seven.”

  “I’m a hundred and eighty-four,” I said. “What’s three pounds among friends?”

  There was a pause. Jerry was looking out through the french windows on to the terrace where my wife, Mary, was standing. Mary was still talking to Bob Swain and the evening sun was shining in her hair. She was a dark pretty girl with a bosom. I watched Jerry. I saw his tongue come out and go sliding along the surface of his lower lip.

  “I guess you’re right,” Jerry said, still looking at Mary. “I guess we are about the same size, you and me.” When he turned back and faced me again, there was a little red rose high up on each cheek. “Go on about these two men,” he said. “What about some of the other differences?”

  “You mean faces?” I said. “No one’s going to see faces in the dark.”

  “I’m not talking about faces,” Jerry said.

  “What are you talking about, then?”

  “I’m talking about their cocks,” Jerry said. “That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? And you’re not going to tell me...”

  “Oh yes, I am,” I said. “Just so long as both men were either circumcised or uncircumcised, then there was really no problem.”

  “Are you seriously suggesting that all men have the same size in cocks?” Jerry said. “Because they don’t.”

  “I know they don’t,” I said.

  “Some are enormous,” Jerry said. “And some are titchy.”

  “There are always exceptions,” I told him. “But you’d be surprised at the number of men whose measurements are virtually the same, give or take a centimetre. According to my friend, ninety per cent are normal. Only ten per cent are notably large or small.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Jerry said.

  “Check on it sometime,” I said. “Ask some well-travelled girl.”

  Jerry took a long slow sip of his whisky, and his eyes over the top of his glass were looking again at Mary on the terrace. “What about the rest of it?” he said.

  “No problem,” I said.

  “No problem, my arse,” he said. “Shall I tell you why this is a phony story?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Everybody knows that a wife and husband who have been married for some years develop a kind of routine. It’s inevitable. My God, a new operator would be spotted instantly. You know damn well he would. You can’t suddenly wade in with a totally different style and expect the woman not to notice it, and I don’t care how randy she was. She’d smell a rat in the first minute!”

  “A routine can be duplicated,” I said. “Just so long as every detail of that routine is described beforehand.”

  “A bit personal, that,” Jerry said.

  “The whole thing’s personal,” I said. “So each man tells his story. He tells precisely what he usually does. He tells everything. The lot. The works. The whole routine from beginning to end.”

  “Jesus,” Jerry said.

  “Each of these men,” I said, “had to learn a new part. He had, in effect, to become an actor. He was impersonating another character.”

  “Not so easy, that,” Jerry said.

  “No problem at all, according to my friend. The only thing one had to watch out for was not to get carried away and start improvising. One had to follow the stage directions very carefully and stick to them.”

  Jerry took another pull at his drink. He also took another look at Mary on the terrace. Then he leaned back against the sofa, glass in hand.

  “These two characters,” he said. “You mean they actually pulled it off?”

  “I’m damn sure they did,” I said. “They’re still doing it. About once every three weeks.”

  “Fantastic story,” Jerry said. “And a damn crazy dangerous thing to do. Just imagine the sort of hell that would break loose if you were caught. Instant divorce. Two divorces, in fact. One on each side of the street. Not worth it.”

  “Takes a lot of guts,” I said.

  “The party’s breaking up,” Jerry said. “They’re all going home with their goddamn wives.”

  I didn’t say any more after that. We sat there for a couple of minutes sipping our drinks while the guests began drifting towards the hall.

  “Did he say it was fun, this friend of yours?” Jerry asked suddenly.

  “He said it was a gas,” I answered. “He said all the normal pleasures got intensified one hundred per cent because of the risk. He swore it was the greatest way of doing it in the world, impersonating the husband and the wife not knowing it.”

  At that point, Mary came in through the french windows with Bob Swain. She had an empty glass in one hand and a flame-coloured azalea in the other. She had picked the azalea on the terrace.

  “I’ve been watching you,” she said, pointing the flower at me like a pistol. “You’ve hardly stopped talking for the last ten minutes. What’s he been telling you, Jerry?”

  “A dirty story,” Jerry said, grinning.

  “He does that when he drinks,” Mary said.

  “Good story,” Jerry said. “But totally impossible. Get him to tell it to you sometime.”

  “I don’t like dirty stories,” Mary said. “Come along, Vic. It’s time we went.”

  “Don’t go yet,” Jerry said, fixing his eyes upon her splendid bosom. “Have another drink.”

  “No thanks,” she said. “The children’ll be screaming for their supper. I’ve had a lovely time.”

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me good night?” Jerry said, getting up from the sofa. He went for her mouth, but she turned her head quickly and he caught only the edge of her cheek.

  “Go away, Jerry,” she said. “You’re drunk.”

  “Not drunk,” Jerry said. “Just lecherous.”

  “Don’t you get lecherous with me, my boy,” Mary said sharply. “I hate that sort of talk.” She marched away across the room, carrying her bosom before her like a battering-ram.

  “So long, Jerry,” I said. “Fine party.”

  Mary, full of dark looks, was waiting for me in the hall. Samantha was there, too, saying goodbye to the last guests – Samantha with her dexterous fingers and her smooth skin and her smooth, dangerous thighs. “Cheer up, Vic,” she said to me, her white teeth showing. She looked like the creation, the beginning of the world, the first morning. “Good night, Vic darling,” she said, stirring her fingers in my vitals.

  I followed Mary out of the house. “You feeling all right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Why not?”

  “The amount you drink is enough to make anyone feel ill,” she said.

  There was a scrubby old hedge dividing our place from Jerry’s and there was a gap in it we always used. Mary and I walked through the gap in silence. We went into the house and she cooked up a big pile of scrambled eggs and bacon, and we ate it with the children.

  After the meal, I wandered outside. The summer evening was clear and cool and because I had nothing else to do I decided to mow the grass in the front garden. I got the mower out of the shed and started it up. Then I began the old routine of marching back and forth behind it. I like mowing grass. It is a soothing operation, and on our front lawn I could always look at Samantha’s house going one way and think about her going the other.

  I had been at it for about ten minutes when Jerry came strolling through the gap in the hedge. He was smoking a pipe and had his hands in his pockets and he stood on the edge of the grass, watching me. I pulled up in front of him, but left the motor ticking over.

  “Hi, sport,” he said. “How’s everything?”

  “I’m in the doghouse,” I said. “So are you.”

  “Your little wife,” he said, “is just too goddamn prim and prissy to be true.”

  “Oh, I know that.”

 
“She rebuked me in my own house,” Jerry said.

  “Not very much.”

  “It was enough,” he said, smiling slightly.

  “Enough for what?”

  “Enough to make me want to get a little bit of my own back on her. So what would you think if I suggested you and I have a go at that thing your friend told you about at lunch?”

  When he said this, I felt such a surge of excitement my stomach nearly jumped out of my mouth. I gripped the handles of the mower and started revving the engine.

  “Have I said the wrong thing?” Jerry asked.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Listen,” he said. “If you think it’s a lousy idea, let’s just forget I ever mentioned it. You’re not mad at me, are you?”

  “I’m not mad at you, Jerry,” I said. “It’s just that it never entered my head that we should do it.”

  “It entered mine,” he said. “The set-up is perfect. We wouldn’t even have to cross the street.” His face had gone suddenly bright and his eyes were shining like two stars. “So what do you say, Vic?”

  “I’m thinking,” I said.

  “Maybe you don’t fancy Samantha.”

  “I don’t honestly know,” I said.

  “She’s lots of fun,” Jerry said. “I guarantee that.”

  At this point, I saw Mary come out on to the front porch. “There’s Mary,” I said. “She’s looking for the children. We’ll talk some more tomorrow.”

  “Then it’s a deal?”

  “It could be, Jerry. But only on condition we don’t rush it. I want to be dead sure everything is right before we start. Damn it all, this is a whole brand-new can of beans!”

  “No, it’s not!” he said. “Your friend said it was a gas. He said it was easy.”

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “My friend. Of course. But each case is different.” I opened the throttle on the mower and went whirring away across the lawn. When I got to the far side and turned around, Jerry was already through the gap in the hedge and walking up to his front door.

  The next couple of weeks was a period of high conspiracy for Jerry and me. We held secret meetings in bars and restaurants to discuss strategy, and sometimes he dropped into my office after work and we had a planning session behind the closed door. Whenever a doubtful point arose, Jerry would always say, “How did your friend do it?” And I would play for time and say, “I’ll call him up and ask him about that one.”

  After many conferences and much talk, we agreed upon the following main points:

  1. That D Day should be a Saturday.

  2. That on D Day evening we should take our wives out to a good dinner, the four of us together.

  3. That Jerry and I should leave our houses and cross over through the gap in the hedge at precisely one a.m. Sunday morning.

  4. That instead of lying in bed in the dark until one a.m. came along, we should both, as soon as our wives were asleep, go quietly downstairs to the kitchen and drink coffee.

  5. That we should use the front doorbell idea if an emergency arose.

  6. That the return cross-over time was fixed for two a.m.

  7. That while in the wrong bed, questions (if any) from the woman must be answered by an “Uh-uh” sounded with the lips closed tight.

  8. That I myself must immediately give up cigarettes and take to a pipe so that I would “smell” the same as Jerry.

  9. That we should at once start using the same brand of hair oil and after-shave lotion.

  10. That as both of us normally wore our wrist-watches in bed, and they were much the same shape, it was decided not to exchange. Neither of us wore rings.

  11. That each man must have something unusual about him that the woman would identify positively with her own husband. We therefore invented what became known as “The Sticking Plaster Ploy”. It worked like this: on D Day evening, when the couples arrived back in their own homes immediately after the dinner, each husband would make a point of going to the kitchen to cut himself a piece of cheese. At the same time, he would carefully stick a large piece of plaster over the tip of the forefinger of his right hand. Having done this, he would hold up the finger and say to his wife, “I cut myself. It’s nothing, but it was bleeding a bit.” Thus, later on, when the men have switched beds, each woman will be made very much aware of the plaster-covered finger (the man would see to that), and will associate it directly with her own husband. An important psychological ploy, this, calculated to dissipate any tiny suspicion that might enter the mind of either female.

  So much for the basic plans. Next came what we referred to in our notes as “Familiarization with the Layout”. Jerry schooled me first. He gave me three hours’ training in his own house one Sunday afternoon when his wife and children were out. I had never been into their bedroom before. On the dressing table were Samantha’s perfumes, her brushes, and all her other little things. A pair of her stockings was draped over the back of a chair. Her nightdress, white and blue, was hanging behind the door leading to the bathroom.

  “Okay,” Jerry said. “It’ll be pitch dark when you come in. Samantha sleeps on this side, so you must tiptoe around the end of the bed and slide in on the other side, over there. I’m going to blindfold you and let you practise.”

  At first, with the blindfold on, I wandered all over the room like a drunk. But after about an hour’s work, I was able to negotiate the course pretty well. But before Jerry would finally pass me out, I had to go blindfold all the way from the front door through the hall, up the stairs, past the children’s rooms, into Samantha’s room and finish up in exactly the right place. And I had to do it silently, like a thief. All this took three hours of hard work, but I got it in the end.

  The following Sunday morning when Mary had taken our children to church, I was able to give Jerry the same sort of work-out in my house. He learned the ropes faster than me, and within an hour he had passed the blindfold test without placing a foot wrong.

  It was during this session that we decided to disconnect each woman’s bedside lamp as we entered the bedroom. So Jerry practised finding the plug and pulling it out with his blindfold on, and the following week-end, I was able to do the same in Jerry’s house.

  Now came by far the most important part of our training. We called it “Spilling the Beans”, and it was here that both of us had to describe in every detail the procedure we adopted when making love to our own wives. We agreed not to worry ourselves with any exotic variations that either of us might or might not occasionally practise. We were concerned only with teaching one another the most commonly used routine, the one least likely to arouse suspicion.

  The session took place in my office at six o’clock on a Wednesday evening, after the staff had gone home. At first, we were both slightly embarrassed, and neither of us wanted to begin. So I got out the bottle of whisky, and after a couple of stiff drinks, we loosened up and the teach-in started. While Jerry talked I took notes, and vice versa. At the end of it all, it turned out that the only real difference between Jerry’s routine and my own was one of tempo. But what a difference it was! He took things (if what he said was to be believed) in such a leisurely fashion and he prolonged the moments to such an extravagant degree that I wondered privately to myself whether his partner did not sometimes go to sleep in the middle of it all. My job, however, was not to criticize but to copy, and I said nothing.

  Jerry was not so discreet. At the end of my personal description, he had the temerity to say, “Is that really what you do?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean is it all over and done with as quickly as that?”

  “Look,” I said. “We aren’t here to give each other lessons. We’re here to learn the facts.”

  “I know that,” he said. “But I’m going to feel a bit of an ass if I copy your style exactly. My God, you go through it like an express train whizzing through a country station!”

  I stared at him, mouth open.

  “Don’t look so surprised,” he sa
id. “The way you told it to me, anyone would think...”

  “Think what?” I said.

  “Oh, forget it,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said. I was furious. There are two things in this world at which I happen to know I excel. One is driving an automobile and the other is you-know-what. So to have him sit there and tell me I didn’t know how to behave with my own wife was a monstrous piece of effrontery. It was he who didn’t know, not me. Poor Samantha. What she must have had to put up with over the years.

  “I’m sorry I spoke,” Jerry said. He poured more whisky into our glasses. “Here’s to the great switcheroo!” he said. “When do we go?”

  “Today is Wednesday,” I said. “How about this coming Saturday?”

  “Christ,” Jerry said.

  “We ought to do it while everything’s still fresh in our minds,” I said. “There’s an awful lot to remember.”

  Jerry walked to the window and looked down at the traffic in the street below. “Okay,” he said, turning around. “Next Saturday it shall be!” Then we drove home in our separate cars.

  “Jerry and I thought we’d take you and Samantha out to dinner Saturday night,” I said to Mary. We were in the kitchen and she was cooking hamburgers for the children.

  She turned around and faced me, frying-pan in one hand, spoon in the other. Her blue eyes looked straight into mine. “My Lord, Vic,” she said. “How nice. But what are we celebrating?”

  I looked straight back at her and said, “I thought it would be a change to see some new faces. We’re always meeting the same old bunch of people in the same old houses.”

  She took a step forward and kissed me on the cheek. “What a good man you are,” she said. “I love you.”

  “Don’t forget to phone the baby-sitter.”

  “No, I’ll do it tonight,” she said.

  Thursday and Friday passed very quickly, and suddenly it was Saturday. It was D Day. I woke up feeling madly excited. After breakfast, I couldn’t sit still, so I decided to go out and wash the car. I was in the middle of this when Jerry came strolling through the gap in the hedge, pipe in mouth.