The Bride Stripped Bare

by Nikki Gemmell

  Cole will be home in a day. The businesslike voice told you that.

  You have to work. You have to find something else in your life. You’re at your desk because you don’t know what’s beyond the baby’s due date or when you’ll ever be at your desk again. You’re disciplined, energized, not scattered and tired and procrastinating like the old self. The words rush and tumble to get out. Work replaces pain, it pushes it out. You are calm and strong as you work, you feel lit. Being at your desk is an antidote, a balm, for it means having a voice, it means saying and doing exactly what you want.

  There’s much, too, to prepare for the birth. You’ve heard the word layette for the first time in your life and apparently you must have one. You’re buying the big items now, the stroller, Moses basket, bath, and you wash baby clothes in powder you never knew existed. And all the time you put your hand under your belly, slinging your child into stillness.

  You’re astounded at the clearness and focus you’re entering this latter stage of pregnancy with. And the passion of loss that accompanies it, it’s sullen and erotic and wild, like nothing you’ve experienced before. The loss of Gabriel, of all that he represented.

  You feel you’ve been hauled into another realm; you feel, finally, that you own your own life.

  Your mother calls, asks how you are, she’s been calling a lot now. She wants to know when Cole’s coming back. You tell her in a day’s time; you don’t tell her you have no idea what to expect. You ask her if she wants to come and stay with you for a while, be around for the birth. No, she tells you. Oh, you respond, why? Because it’s such a special time for Cole and you, she tells you: the arrival of a first child is a magic, miraculous episode in any relationship, and a mother-in-law shouldn’t intrude on that.

  You see, I know this, because I never had it. But I saw it around me a lot.

  Oh ma. I’m so sorry.

  Your heart cracks. For with motherhood almost upon you now, an understanding of something of your own mother’s life is, at last, being unlocked.

  Lesson 125

  all waste is sinful

  Cole’s due back tonight. You have an urge to phone Theo, you’re not sure why, tonight of all nights. You hang up at the second ring, want to talk but don’t: her friendship was so demanding and with a baby you’ll have to be more rigorous with your time. And there are too many months of silence to be explained, too many questions to be asked. You know if you let her in just a chink she’ll be back in one great swamping rush. You won’t be able to do coffee any more at the drop of a hat, won’t be obeying when she commands pick up, pick up on your answering machine, won’t have time for the late-night hour-long chats; it’s all so exhausting, just the thought of her. And she’s trying for a baby and you don’t want to compete with her over motherhood: you can see that it’s a whole new arena of competition among women. You wouldn’t enjoy Theo comparing whose child sleeps the best, has more hair, smiles the most.

  Don’t want her, in fact, in your child’s life in any way.

  Music, your music, is turned up loud. You wrap yourself in your antique chinoiserie dressing gown that’s too flamboyant and fragile to wear but tonight you don’t care. You pour a glass of red wine. It’s your first in so long and how smoothly it slips down.

  The glittering alone.

  A key in the door, just like the old days, when Cole would come in from work. The thud of bags set down in the hallway. He doesn’t come inside. It’s as if you both want to hear from the other first, to gauge the tone.

  He stands very still in the doorway; your heart skips.

  Did you sleep with him; it’s all he asks.

  No.

  The lie comes out easily: you look him straight in the eyes, the good actress, the good wife, you’ve prepared for this. The relationship will not survive the brutality of absolute honesty, you know that.

  He walks across to you, his head on one side. You silly old boot, he says, you silly, silly old boot.

  The relief.

  Your smile, like an umbrella whipped inside out.

  You can’t help yourself. And you cannot speak, because of the kindness in his voice, it’s breaking your heart.

  Lesson 126

  dust must be removed and not simply displaced

  That night Cole holds you so tight, he presses you into the wall as if he’s clinging on to a life buoy in a vast ocean of the unknown. His body’s deeply familiar, there’s a volume of experience behind the holding. You think of that love running as deep and as strong as an underground river. What’s between Cole and you is so complex, changing, alive; the love ebbs and flows, it sprang from nothing, a barren place, and sometimes, at bleak moments, it seems to retreat to it.

  But then it’s back. Fuller. Faster.

  You turn and face your husband, you kiss him softly, enquiringly, on the lips and he smiles and nods absently in his sleep. The baby’s awake beneath your skin. You place Cole’s wide palm on your belly and the rumpling stills, as if the child’s listening to his skin, is remembering the touch.

  That night the thump of Gabriel in the front of your head slips away, like a fish unhooked.

  Cole stirs early, at first light. You’re already awake, on your back.

  What really happened with Theo, you ask into the morning cleanness. Perhaps, now, he’ll speak, with this new cleanness between you. He does. It’s simple and stupid, he says. I don’t know why I didn’t tell you sooner. He turns to you. She could see we were in trouble, so she rang me up and offered to tell me the secrets of keeping a wife.

  I see, you smile, you raise your eyebrows. And they are?

  He plays with the silver chain round your neck, he’s always liked doing that. Oh, you know, he laughs, all that stuff about flowers once a week, and listening to what you want, and giving you lots of space.

  Uh-huh.

  And oral sex, he chuckles, she was very big on that. She said you were hopeless at speaking out. He pauses, he speaks more carefully. We became mates. We’d just have a drink now and then, after work. I like her. That’s it.

  He smiles, he looks you straight in the eyes. A rich silence. Your mouth is sapped dry. You hold your face in your hands, you laugh. So, your husband could never explain that he’d been taking lessons, from your best friend, on the art of holding a wife. And you’ve chosen to believe him. At last. Finally it’s clear: first comes the choice, then belief follows, led docile like a hound on a leash.

  So what does Theo really want, you ask. I never figured that out.

  Well, she’s desperate for a child, you know that. She’s been trying for eighteen months. IVF, everything, nothing’s worked.

  Your heart reaches out to her; you must ring.

  But you don’t.

  Lesson 127

  cruelty punishes itself, as it should do

  Two days later, a letter. On thick, creamy paper, so inviting to the hand. Your fingers run as deft as a lizard over the thud of the type.

  It’s me again. For the last time. Please don’t stop reading. Please just hear me out, and I promise then that I’ll never write again. I’ll never see you, if that is what you want. So, you are having a child. You are so very, very blessed. Cole as well as you. What a beautiful family you will make. My heart hurts whenever I think of the three of you, and your happiness. A child completes our lives, I think. It’s taken me a long time to see that, that a life without children is a life adrift.

  Your hand rubs your stomach and rests on a gentle protrusion, your baby’s little rump, the midwife has told you that’s what it is.

  So, it was me who wrote the letters. It didn’t seem so mad at the time. It was a way to reach you, the only way, and you were so hard to reach. It was a way to surprise you; in a good way I hoped. I imagined you reading them and thinking it could be any number of people: the guy you slept with when you were twenty-four and never saw again, but always wondered about, or the guy you never slept with, but always wanted. The one who’d be perfect for you, but you’d never done
anything about. I wanted to enchant you in some way, I love doing things like that. You know that.

  There’s another reason why I wrote the letters and this is the really hard bit to tell you. Maybe I shouldn’t be telling you at all, I always put my foot in it but I feel that you need to know. I wanted Cole to find them. I wanted him to doubt you, because he never doubts you. You are such a good person. He has told me more than once that he’ll never leave you. You should know that. I’ve accepted it now. I’m in awe of his devotion to you, and the love you had.

  As if a giant’s fist is squeezing your heart, as if it is twisting it, as if it is squeezing all the blood out.

  I just wanted you to know that I am sorry, for so many things. You’ve been such a good friend to me and I don’t know why I feel I have the license to be cruelest to those who are the kindest to me, and whom I love the most. I’m not a good person, in so many ways. Sometimes I do horribly selfish things, I can’t help myself. Is there anyone who doesn’t? You, perhaps, and look at what I’ve done to you. I can’t imagine you ever understanding what has happened. I just had to tell you this, and these crazy letters seemed the only way to get through to you. Cole tells me you’re still asking, you can’t let it go. He’ll never tell you. I don’t think it’s healthy that you don’t know. I’m sorry, and I love you. That’s all I wanted to say. T.

  You surface to great gulps of air, you break into the air and the light.

  After being submerged for so long, at such crushing depths.

  You lie on your bed, on your side, for a very long time, for the whole day, until the light softens and stops. What is the purpose in sending this now? Is Theo conceding? Does she want you to concede? Does she sense, finally, the battle lost? Is she bowing out with grace, or beginning a more insidious campaign?

  … the love you had… Cole told me you’re still asking…

  She’s good, she’s good, she’s always won her fights.

  The baby inside you shifts, as if it’s protesting at the churn of your blood. You know all the tales of revenge; the prawn heads sewn into curtain hems and the cutting up of a husband’s suits and the dialing of the recorded time in New Zealand and the phone left off the hook. Oh no, you’d want a more magnificent retribution than any of that, something that would haunt them for ever, that would stain them for the rest of their lives.

  Then again, perhaps enduring will mean you’ve won the most.

  She wants you to confront Cole, you sense that. To find out where he stands, to force it all into the light. You will not give her anything she wants. She’s never suspected you were capable of surprise, her letter has told you that.

  Lesson 128

  be proud that you are not in debt

  Cole comes home around ten and you are still curled on the bed. You do not acknowledge him as he comes into the bedroom, do not turn your head, cannot speak, your heart is filled up.

  He takes off his work shirt and tosses it, playfully, across to you. It lands on your head.

  Hey, he says.

  You say nothing. You remove the shirt.

  He will not know what you know about him; now is not the time.

  Perhaps it will never be the time.

  Lesson 129

  the motherly instinct is strong in us

  The midwife tells you the baby’s head is down and it’s ready to come out. You read in Vogue that a boy makes a mother appear more masculine because of all the new hormones flooding into her body, and yet you read that a girl steals her mother’s beauty. Can this be true? You cannot win. You’re tired. The hospital’s put you on an iron supplement to boost your energy and your stools are hard and as black as ink. You feel old, the baby’s sapping you, there are vice-like cramps in your legs during the night, thrush in spurts of ferocious itchiness and too many farts. You complain a lot. Cole laughs and tells you to relax or the baby will come out as brittle as a tin toy.

  I can’t, you tell him, you have no idea.

  He’s so even, so assured in these final weeks and you would have thought once it meant he wasn’t churning or smudged like yourself but uncomplicated, open, clean. Once.

  Can you get any bigger?

  The baby pushes and jabs with its fists and you can feel, sharply now, the wanting out. You’re trying to get as much writing done as you can, with the little time left that’s your own. Your fingers fly on the keyboard when Cole is out of the flat. The child still wriggles when you work, urging you on: sssh, you whisper, not long now. The overnight bag is packed. The baby’s in position, head down, with its spine obediently to the left, readying itself for out. You can sense it, soon, and are nesting like a she-wolf retreating to the hills.

  You sleep sixteen hours a day now, can’t help it, can’t fight your body’s need. The apartment’s spotless, all the new clothes are washed. There’s a feeling of tremendous change coming, it’s like the flint of a storm in the wind. You must rid yourself of clutter, live more sparely and honestly now, more in tune with what you want; you won’t have time for anything else. And through it all burns something deeply physical, an urge that’s old and wild and howling, something buried over many years, now out. You feel like an animal, purely that. You surrender to it.

  Lesson 130

  a separate life should be lead for three months after childbirth

  It is the day the ultrasound has said the baby’s most likely to be born.

  But it doesn’t want to come, it’s not ready. It’s found a comfortable position in there, resting its heel on your rib, and won’t budge. You can feel your body saying wait, rest, gather more strength.

  In the night there’s a rippling across your tummy, below the navel, like a roll of thunder across the desert that amounts to nothing.

  For a week, nothing.

  Just occasional Braxton Hicks contractions, the wily, pretend ones. They’re like a rolling pin over uneven dough, tightening around you and falling away. Cole’s impatient now, he puts his lips to your belly and tries to coax the baby out. You try everything: champagne, nipple tweaking, pineapple, curry, raspberry leaf tea, everything but sex. Not ready for that.

  Or swallowing his cum. You’ve heard that works. You couldn’t think of anything worse and it’s one of the things he loves the most. You never want to do it for him again.

  Gabriel never expected you to, never asked.

  Lesson 131

  the patient should submit cheerfully to being kept on her back, to the supplication of a tight binder and to other remedies that the nurse or doctor will suggest. the patient should pull on a sheet secured to the end bedposts

  You awake at three A.M. with what feels like a small gray cloud drifting across your abdomen. Like a giant—or God—is squeezing your belly.

  You file your nails, for you’ve heard you’ll dig them so hard into Cole’s flesh you’ll draw blood. You have a shower, wash your hair; God knows when it’ll be washed again. Watch CNN, ring your mother. And somewhere in there you’re in the bath that Cole’s drawn and he’s in the nursery ironing his shirt because he doesn’t know what else to do and he’s never heard you yell fuck, Jesus, fuck and in such a gamy way before and then you shout to ring the hospital, please, to get you out. Cole’s packing the car and helping you into it and you’re scrabbling at your clothes, trying to claw them off, you don’t know why, it’s some instinct all feral within you; to have nothing on your body, not even a watch, and at a stop light you’re clutching at Cole’s hand like it’s never been held before, you’re clutching bone. There are contractions like wild buffalo pummeling through you, oh God let the child come, come.

  Five hours after the first clench in your belly, ten minutes after your waters have broken, the baby’s out like a fish whooshing along a deck. You’ve given birth on all fours, with just gas and air to get you through it, and Cole and the midwife in the room. A textbook birth, says the midwife afterward. An easy labor, laughs your mother over the phone. You tell her that no labor’s easy, that there was a moment during it when you fe
lt like you were splitting apart, that there was a point where you said to yourself, very calmly, you were never doing this again.

  You didn’t know you’d defecate during labor.

  Didn’t know there’d be so much blood.

  Didn’t know that several hours after the birth your belly would resemble a child’s attempt at baking a cake, all sunken and soft in the middle.

  Didn’t know such love.

  Lesson 132

  the moment any part of a living body ceases to change, that moment it dies

  Cole is in a chair beside the bed you’ve given birth in. He’s sitting with his whole body curved around his squawly bundle of son, as if to shield him from the glare of the hospital lights and the midwife as your vagina is stitched up. Cole’s face is cracked, red, raw, it’s wet in great streaks with a teardrop clinging to the tip of his nose.

  He is all wonder and love and shock at the little hand like an alien’s that reaches up from the blanket and hooks on to his thumb and holds it tight. As if this is the supreme moment of his life, as if you hardly matter any more.

  It’s so odd and sullen, that thought. You lean and stroke your husband, once, in the clearing behind his ear, as if in apology. He smiles, he does not look up, he kisses his son’s fingernail; it’s the size of a nail head in his toolbox.

  Lesson 133

  all have to travel, through life at any rate, if they do not go abroad

  Your son’s skin is your new terrain, you ache for it when you’re separated from him, you want to be breathing it like the desert sky during an English winter but the need is worse, much worse.