Triangles

by Andrea Newman

  She tells Neil she doesn’t want to go to the party but he can go without her, with her blessing. He is not pleased. Apparently that won’t do at all. It is for couples only.

  Neil sulks. He sulks powerfully, having had plenty of practice and being temperamentally gifted at it. His sulking pervades the house like dark swirling fog. Janis is frightened of it. What if the Neil she knows and loves never reappears? She tries to think of the party as a trip to Australia. Perhaps if Neil goes there once he won’t actually want to emigrate, whereas if she won’t let him go there at all, he will blame her for ever. If only she didn’t have to go with him.

  (Jan wonders why Janis didn’t just say no and the hell with the consequences. Simple. Jan thinks Janis was a wimp. Her psychiatrist thinks she secretly wanted to go and put all the responsibility on to Neil. Maybe he’s right. He calls her Jan because that is what she calls herself these days: she thinks Janis has a childish, petulant sound.)

  Neil tells Janis the party will make her less inhibited, improve their sex life. He says it’s not fair that she can have more orgasms than he can. Janis says it’s not her fault that she has a clitoris and he doesn’t. But she knows it’s her fault that she earns more than he does (they both work in advertising but she has been promoted) and her fault that she doesn’t want to have a baby yet. She doesn’t actually think she is inhibited. But admittedly she doesn’t like it when he ties her up and pushes objects inside her, saying he wants to observe her reactions without being involved. And admittedly she doesn’t like it when he makes her tie him up and toss him off for half an hour or so. If that means she is inhibited, then she definitely is. But she supposes there has to be give and take in every marriage. As she sits there, stopping and starting, looking at her watch to be sure she makes it last long enough, or he’ll be angry, she is strongly tempted to leave him there, blindfolded and spread-eagled, and go to the pictures. She feels powerful and invisible, like God. She feels bad-tempered and silly. If she were doing all this for a stranger, she thinks, she would get paid. If they loved each other enough, perhaps she’d be happy to do it. Or he wouldn’t ask her to. Whichever. She isn’t sure if it’s the activity he likes or the fact that she doesn’t like it. She thinks they need psychiatric help.

  They go the party. Janis can’t hold out against all the sulking or maybe she really wants to go. She doesn’t know her own motives but she knows it is easier to agree. She buys a new pink dress and puts fake tan on her legs. After all, she will be taking her clothes off in a room full of strangers. In the shop she suddenly wants to tell the sales girl why she is buying the dress but of course she doesn’t. She is frightened that the party will be full of fat ugly people who will laugh at her and be nasty to her, maybe even spit on her, but when she says this to Neil he tells her not to be silly.

  The party is held in a Kensington basement. They are both very nervous when they arrive. There are four other couples, all in their twenties and thirties: the host Michel and his wife Francoise, a woman called Sheena with long dark hair and her husband Rob, who looks like Rupert Brooke, a Welsh dentist called Evan and his blonde mistress Margie, and another couple whose names Janis can’t remember because they are so plain and she is already getting drunk. Everyone sits around drinking and chatting and there is dancing; later they play strip poker. It is all very civilised: everyone is clean and well spoken. Janis fancies Evan: he is short, dark, and has a wicked smile. She has never fancied anyone but Neil before and it shakes her. She is also terribly worried about the plain couple, that no one will fancy them and they will be wallflowers, as if at an ordinary dance.

  Eventually everyone is naked, dancing, touching, drunk. It is odd seeing people’s clothes come off and shedding her own: the nakedness goes through various stages of seeming exciting, absurd, embarrassing, and finally natural. Janis is past caring what happens. She can’t tell any more whether it is daring and erotic or silly and sad. They have a choice of staying in the living-room for group sex or going into the bedroom to be private. She goes into the bedroom with Rob because he has a kind face, and he kisses her and strokes her but he has no erection and she feels terribly sorry for him and both relieved and disappointed for herself. How awful to be a man, a victim of such an unreliable mechanism. She hasn’t given it much thought before: it has never happened to Neil in all their years together.

  Janis and Rob stay in the bedroom for quite a while, just kissing and cuddling in the dark. They don’t talk much. Janis thinks they are both nervous and glad to be with each other, almost hiding from the rest of the party. It’s a bit like the first day at school, the same sense of relief when you find someone to sit next to in class, or make a little friend in the playground. She likes him, and he is very attractive; she is sorry he can’t make love to her.

  Eventually she goes back into the big room with Rob and finds Michel having sex with Sheena. She has never watched people having sex before and she has to admit it excites her, the movements, the sounds. It looks comic, aggressive, beautiful, all at once. There is the curious thrill of seeing a private act done in public.

  Neil goes into the bedroom with Francoise, who has very big tits. Oh well. Janis holds hands with Rob and watches Evan having sex with Sheena now that Michel is having sex with Margie. Janis wonders how Rob feels, watching Sheena with another man. Is that why he came to the party, to see his wife with someone else? Or is he, like Janis, here against his will? Do men get bullied into these things too? Sheena seems to be very popular and she comes very noisily, like someone in a film. The plain couple are in a corner glumly having sex with each other; Janis was right to fear that no one else would fancy them. But she feels someone should have made the effort, to be polite. Or maybe they are happy exhibitionists and she has no need to worry. Or maybe she has missed a lot of group activity while she was in the bedroom with Rob.

  No one else offers to have sex with her or Rob, just as well really, she thinks, so they roll around together for a while in a friendly way near the others and Evan kisses Janis while she is underneath Rob and he is still on top of Sheena. ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ he says, which sounds encouraging, although she doesn’t suppose he has the energy to fit her in now and she keeps wondering how Neil and Francoise are getting on in the other room. But she feels warmed by his approval nevertheless. She is so drunk that her thoughts are coming through very slowly and it only now occurs to her that it is odd of Neil to go off into the other room when he had said he wanted to watch her with someone else. She is beginning to get a headache too. But she feels very friendly towards everyone.

  (Jan is cross with Janis that she can’t remember more details; her psychiatrist tells her she has suppressed them, but Jan puts it down to all the alcohol. Looking back, she can’t understand why they weren’t all smoking joints instead. And she envies them their Pill freedom. If it was happening now they would all have to use condoms, not the same thing at all.)

  Eventually Neil and Francoise come back, but she can’t tell from their faces how it went. People start getting dressed and Michel makes coffee, like an ordinary host. It is two o’clock in the morning; the party is breaking up like any normal party. Sheena says she and Rob must get home to relieve the babysitter. Janis admires Sheena’s long dark hair and Sheena says her five-year-old daughter holds it up for her when she goes to the loo. Michel invites Janis and Neil for lunch with him and Francoise later in the week and Janis hears herself saying yes.

  She and Neil go home, too drunk to drive but driving nevertheless. They don’t talk much; they are very tired. She wants to ask him how he got on with Francoise but something stops her. She keeps thinking that now they are on opposite sides of the fence. When they get home they go straight to bed and they are so tired and drunk that they fall asleep instantly.

  In the morning she wakes with a colossal headache and goes out to get the papers while Neil is still asleep. A lorry driver whistles at her and for the first time in her life she feels only flattery and exhilaration, instead of embarras
sment or annoyance. The world looks different to her. There are other men out there who fancy her, well, she has always known that, but now she knows she can fancy them back, and that is a big surprise. More than that: a revelation. It changes everything. She had always thought she would never fancy anyone but Neil, because she loves him. And last night she fancied three other men. Three. Now that he has given her permission, who knows how many other men she may fancy? She understands the split between sex and love at last: so this is what they mean. It’s really very simple.

  She goes home with the papers, feeling light-hearted despite her cracking, crashing headache. She wakes Neil with coffee. Only then does she discover he feels deeply depressed, humiliated. He failed to make love to Francoise last night. Or to put it another way, he failed to have sex with her. Or to put it yet another way, he was impotent.

  Janis can see from his face that this is a big disaster. She tries to cheer him up by telling him that Rob failed too, so they are still equal, as it were. He looks marginally cheered up but stays in bed all day reading the papers while Janis runs up and down stairs with trays of food. To her surprise, all the men from the party ring up wanting to arrange to see her and Neil again. She relays this information to Neil, still in bed, but he tells her to say no to them. He is writing poetry now, in free verse, all about the party; Janis sits on the edge of the bed and reads it. Some of it is rather good, although he has never written poetry before. She is aware of feeling resentment at having to say no to all the men.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Neil says, in one of his scary mind-reading moments. ‘I know how much you’d like to see Evan again.’

  Janis is struck by his calm tone, accepting that their wishes are different but there is no room for debate. She has gone along with his desire to attend the party, now she will surely go along with his desire to retreat. Has she ever gone against him? She runs through her memory for an occasion: probably not, unless you count the time she bought a cheap skirt from a street trader in the market, just after they had agreed to economise, in the early days when they were poor. She remembers they had a big row about that. She has obeyed Neil more than she obeyed her father, who didn’t want her to get married so young, or to Neil, or perhaps at all.

  She wonders if Neil realises they are at a crossroads, that the ground is shifting beneath their feet as in an earthquake, that their whole marriage is changing shape. She stares at him, eating the sandwiches she has made and writing another poem. He looks tired and she feels sorry for him but there is another feeling too, alarming and unfamiliar, like a stranger standing in a corner of the room, someone veiled or cloaked, with head turned away like the figure of Death in The Seventh Seal: anger.

  ‘And you’d better tell Michel and Francoise we can’t go to lunch,’ Neil says.

  After a pause Janis shakes her head. She is conscious of defying him and she waits for the sky to fall in. Nothing happens.

  ‘I want to go,’ she says.

  During the week they argue about it and she surprises herself by pointing out that he made her go to the party so it is not fair to cancel the lunch. She is even more surprised to hear him agree with her and she feels a terrifying sense of power. Now there is no safety anywhere, no boundaries at all, if they can both get their own way by force. Anything can happen. At night they lie tensely back to back without speaking, each waiting for the other to fall asleep.

  They go to the lunch. They eat homemade curry, which is very hot, as if by accident, somehow tasting hotter than intended, and Janis wonders if it is meant to be an aphrodisiac. If so, it doesn’t work. They talk of this and that, rather awkwardly. Although she is on the Pill, Janis is also wearing her old diaphragm in honour of the occasion. She is very nervous and feels the need for belt and braces: she doesn’t think Michel will be impotent like Rob. During lunch she watches Neil’s face and wonders if he is frightened of Francoise, who seems extraordinarily relaxed. Perhaps she has done this sort of thing many times. They both compliment her on her curry and she smiles.

  After lunch they adjourn to separate rooms, which is a relief but still makes Janis wonder why they could not have just gone off and had separate secret affairs in the first place. She has the same feeling of apprehension that she had before her driving test. Michel makes love to her carefully, as if she were a virgin, and as if he had read the same handbook as Neil, doing all the same things with his hands, his tongue, his cock. There must be a standard way to make love, Janis thinks. But he looks and feels and smells different; he is not the same size and shape. She doesn’t do anything clever herself, she feels shy, but she responds, she welcomes his sallow muscular energetic body, and she keeps remembering he is foreign. She is crossing a frontier without a passport or visa. She is amazed how easy it all is and wonders why she ever felt frightened. She forgets about Neil in the other room with Francoise, but her last thoughts of him are benevolent, she actually hopes he is having a good time; she relaxes into sex with Michel and she comes before he does, feeling triumphant, as if she has passed an important exam.

  Michel is pleased. He smiles down at her and says, ‘Oh, you are very good, for an English girl.’

  (Jan is disgusted with Janis that she did not hit him for this piece of male chauvinist piggery, but Janis only remembers being amused that he is so French he can’t even pay her a compliment without insulting her at the same time. She is too grateful to be angry. He has set her free. Or helped her to free herself. She cannot help seeing him as a benefactor. She strokes his hair.)

  The four of them reassemble in the living-room to drink tea. There is polite conversation, but Janis, watching covertly, thinks Francoise looks tense and Neil depressed. She interprets disaster and suddenly she is very fearful.

  They leave with insincere promises of future meetings and on the way home Neil tells her he had another failure and passed the time trying to fix a broken heel on one of Francoise’s stilettos. He sounds angry and bitter and humiliated, full of self-disgust, but Janis feels all these emotions are directed at her. Now they are really in different countries and it is meant to be all her fault. Well, she rejects that, amazed at her own strength. It is her fault they went to the lunch but his fault they went to the party. They are quits. She identifies a strong spirit of revenge in herself that is new.

  Neil takes to his bed again but this time he doesn’t write poetry and Janis doesn’t run up and down with trays. To her horror, he gives up his job instead and concentrates full time on being depressed. Janis feels herself to be without compassion; she telephones Evan and meets him for sex in someone else’s flat. He is different from Michel, heavier, violent. Janis begins to discover things about herself through his body: perhaps, she thinks, that is what bodies are for. Was that what Neil was trying to tell her? Does he even know? Well, it is too late now. She contemplates all the bodies in the world waiting to reveal her self to her, all the bodies that Neil kept her from until he threw her to them. She is a changed woman now; she has great expectations.

  Some time after this she realises she doesn’t love him any more. It is a profound shock, like losing a parent or a religion. The divorce when it comes is a mere formality, like burying a corpse that has been frozen for a long time, pending the inquest.

  (Jan decides not to go to the wedding. If she cries, they will think she regrets the divorce, and she is inclined to cry at weddings: all that optimism touches her cynical heart. And her current lover points out that she might drink too much and say something tactless. Besides, she doesn’t actually want to see Neil again. Instead she sends a telegram saying: ‘All the best’, and signs it ‘Janis’. He wouldn’t recognise Jan.)

  Luke’s Women

  When Luke left me for Millie, I wanted to kill her. I fantasised about putting a petrol bomb through her letterbox, only I didn’t know how to make one and I was afraid of getting caught. That’s always one of the big problems of revenge. There was also the chance it might kill Luke and I hadn’t come around to that idea yet. He was too beautiful to
hurt, I thought then, and he’d had a terrible childhood, and I’d always known he was easily tempted. (Besides, oh, shameful secret thought, he might yet come back to me, if I played my cards right.) But I’d expected better things of Millie because she was a woman and a neighbour and (I’d thought) a friend. The idea of injuring Millie was terribly attractive.

  Instead, I wrote their phone number in all the public lavatories I could find. I had a lot of fun composing variations on Miss Stern/French Lessons/Big Stud. Nothing sexist about me: I believe in equal opportunities. It seemed a while since I had had fun. Sometimes I got quite obscene and surprised myself. It gave me a sense of purpose while the children were at school. As a revenge it’s pretty near perfect: easy, harmless, anonymous, but very annoying. The beauty of it was, Millie had just moved house, so at first it looked as if they’d inherited a dubious phone number, and however much they thought it might be me, they couldn’t prove it. Better yet, even when they changed their phone number they still had to give it to me because of the children.

  Don’t let anyone tell you revenge doesn’t help. It’s very soothing, like calomine lotion on sunburn, and it stops you feeling small and helpless. You grow to your proper adult size again, like Alice if she’d found the correct ‘Drink Me’ bottle. Many a night when I still had a pain like an open wound at the thought of Luke and Millie together, I managed to go to sleep with a smile on my face because I knew they were getting calls day and night from a whole bunch of lustful strangers. Better for me than lying awake crying, I thought, which clogs up your nose till you can’t breathe and you just know that no one will ever love you again because you’re a snuffling, snivelling wreck with puffy eyes, like some old punch-drunk boxer. It was better than being a brave little soldier, too, all frightfully civilised, pretending it was just one of those things and nobody’s fault.