The Helen 100

by Helen Razer

  On at least one of these flights far away from our still marriage, she cheated on me. She didn’t want to sleep with me, so she slept with other people. She didn’t enjoy her real life with me, so she had a false life with happier people. It was expensive and it was humiliating.

  I can’t blame her. But I blame her.

  When she was ready to explain why a young Scandinavian had written on her Facebook page ‘I have you for pussy party anytiem!!’, she said that she had cheated on me, but that she’d prefer to cheat on me next time while I was actually in the room. We would do this abroad, she said. We would put the sex back into this marriage. And perhaps some of the marriage back, too.

  Her appetites were stimulated by travel and its prospect. At that sexless point in my life, my appetites were stimulated by anything at all. So, if I was going to get laid—and, I really do like sex quite a lot—it had to be in another nation with an extra person.

  ‘But a stranger, Helen?’ said Kay.

  I reminded Kay that it was a far better plan to have a three-way with a stranger than, say, one of the idiots from my office. I did not remind Kay that back in the nineties, she was herself widely celebrated for fucking first and failing to ask questions later. This, in any case, would have just given her licence to talk about her grand program of reform and how Love and Sex Addicts Anonymous had cured her of the youthful need for nooky. So I just told Kay about the time I had a three-way with a ‘stranger’.

  Public Service Announcement: If you are considering a three-way with your partner, I am going to insist that you select a participant unknown to both of you, and preferably one with whom the likelihood of close future contact is nil. Further, there are those who should consider not doing this at all. If your intention is to spice a marriage that has lost its flavour for sad and complex reasons, then the solution is perhaps not to go and mutually fuck someone else. Especially not in an expensive hotel thousands of kilometres away from your home.

  Look. Do whatever you want. Just try to not be the dick that I am.

  I told Kay that we had found him on the internet without much trouble at all. We were two relatively fuckable female tourists who had promised to return to our nation after the fucking was complete. Quite fathomably, we were a convenience in high demand. Such high demand, in fact, that we were able to make a shortlist consisting entirely of former Ivy Leaguers, all of whom had graduated with Latin honours. We actually settled on a summa cum laude, just for the elitist hell.

  ‘No! Not how did you find him. How did you find him?’

  Miss Abstinence wanted to know about the sex.

  Kay had now taken a prurient rather than a moral interest in my account. This was fine with me. Perhaps she’d get a bit hot under her Spanx and we could have a tussle, as we had sometimes done in the nineties. She could go to a meeting to recover.

  Even if we didn’t have a snog, I decided that this afternoon was now intimate enough to count as a date. Fourteen down. Eighty-six to go.

  ‘Look, I’ve cleared your bad energy. The least you can do is give me something fucked-up to report to my sponsor,’ said Kay.

  I briefly wondered if ‘report to my sponsor’ could serve me in future as a comic euphemism for masturbation. Then I said that the sex was ‘good and bad’, and next I just asked her, ‘Why the fuck are you asking me, anyhow?’

  I mean, if anyone knew what a three-way was like, it was Kay, who had graduated from slut school Come Loudly. Boom tish.

  ‘You’ve had more three-ways than my Aunty Joan has had communion wafers,’ I told her.

  This was true. If I didn’t count the seven kinksters I’d just met, no person of my immediate acquaintance had partaken of the bodies of so many.

  Kay said, ‘I can’t remember any of it. If only I could remember a bit of all the fucked-up sex I had, I might still be able to have fucked-up sex. As it is, I’m in meetings for being a drunk sex addict seven days a week. So, the least you can do is tell me about your fucked-up sex.’

  I first told Kay that this three-way was okay, but that I couldn’t recommend it as especially therapeutic. I then told her, in my tedious way, that this was not because I believed that consensual adventurous sex is intrinsically bad. All pleasure that is safe and consensual is good pleasure . . .

  ‘Shut up with your extreme sexual tolerance, you bitch, and tell me about his cock.’

  ‘Look, Kay. I will try to remember some juicy stuff, but there’s one terrible image that really gets in the way of the good ones. The fact is, my ex looked like she was waiting for a bus. She was getting this head-job from a very handsome, and quite twitchy, young Yale graduate, but she looked exactly like she was waiting for a bus.’

  That’s just how she had looked. Like she was waiting for something to take her away. Honestly, I think this dude was probably much better at cunnilingus than me. He seemed to be a methodical type of thinker, possibly even one with a dash of neurodevelopmental disorder. Hot. In any case, I’m positive he would have done a lot of reading to prepare for this ‘encounter’, as dirty sex derived from the personal ads is known in the United States.

  They do love to name things in the register of Personal Growth, those Americans. They also love to prepare for an event. If you want something formalised and studied and described in the language of empowerment, call an American.

  As far as I could tell, this Yale guy was carpet munching with all the skill and willingness of someone who had just completed a degree. I mean, he clearly had laboratory-tested techniques going on. There was absolutely no reason, in my view, for her to look as bored as she did.

  This is the problem with the three-way. It can reveal your partner at unflattering angles.

  After the ‘encounter’, I asked the ex about this face of hers, rationally fearful that she endured my almost certainly inferior head jobs with exactly that look, if not one of even greater unconcern. She told me that she couldn’t help it, and, incidentally, that my sex face was hardly any better. Apparently, when he was doing me from behind and I was going down on her—a classic FFM three-way configuration—the top half of my face looked like that of a very simple child smiling for a school photograph.

  So, if we’d never had this ‘encounter’, we could have gone on believing that each of our sex expressions were just like those of the ecstatic ladies in porn. Instead we spent a lot of money to find that during sex one of us looked like a complaisant fifth-grade idiot and the other looked like a jaded teenager.

  ‘Get to the fucked-up sex,’ said Kay, who seemed to keep veering between judgement, boredom and arousal.

  I wished that I could.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So he spun me ’round and fucked me hard from behind without so much as a BY YOUR LEAVE, MA’AM.’ She sat beside us and put a hand over my mouth so that I could not scream, as I am wont to do. She then sat on a chair across the room and watched him make me come. She told him to fuck my arse, which he wouldn’t, but it was arousing in any case to hear this request. She told me to go down on him and when I did, she returned and guided my head up and down on him with her hands to the point that I thought that I might choke.

  This was the nearest approach we had ever made to replicating our relationship in sex, but the proto-BDSM kick was not sufficient to save us.

  ‘Is that enough? I can’t remember much else.’ Just as I was unable to find sex in my present life, I was having difficulty locating it in my past. ‘I mean, I know it was mostly quite good and that he definitely spoodged on my chest.’

  I certainly knew that I enjoyed some of the ‘encounter’. But something corroded my memory a bit. I also had come to know that it took place in a hotel that, two years later, would become a fairly infamous crime scene where a worker alleged she had been sexually assaulted by a guest, who happened to be a director of the International Monetary Fund.

  I was sad at the thought of what may have happened to this worker, employed to clean up after vacation sluts like me, but I was also pretty shitty with the IM
F whose lending policies were, in my view, just as brutal as the alleged assault.

  This revulsion I had for the finance sector’s habit of fucking the workers of the world induced a sort of pleasure-amnesia. My memories of the ‘encounter’ became quickly hazy.

  ‘I can’t remember much else,’ I added, ‘except that all this occurred not so long after the 2008 crash.’

  ‘Jesus, Helen. Do you have to bring money into everything? Even sex?’

  I know the question Kay had asked was a fair one. But I had long been of the view that money has the habit of bringing itself into everything, with no kind of help from me, and especially into a sex holiday that had cost thousands of dollars. And one, moreover, that took place in the world’s financial centre and had itself produced a conversation about money. Specifically, the need for gold to resume its place as the standard unit of US account.

  I didn’t ask this Yale alumnus to reveal himself as a Gold Standard libertarian. But he did.

  Between three-ways, he said that he believed in gold, and that Nixon had ruined this country. Naturally, an argument between him and me about currency and the responsibility of the state followed. She told me to ‘Shush’ and ‘Leave the money out of it for once, Helen.’

  The Skull and Bones man soon forgot that we’d been arguing about the convertible dollar, because my girlfriend was now administering what looked like a virtuosic hand job. Which, I supposed, was something a girl learns at a good private school.

  ‘Ladies, this is what you do when a Marxist harpy has argued politics with your successful husband.’ Pump. Pump.

  But I kept on talking and this killed his third boner. As we have now established, I am the sort of person who ruins sexual adventure with my economic views.

  ‘This money thing is a compulsion and I am very embarrassed about it,’ I said to Kay.

  ‘Yes. But you should also be embarrassed about having sex with a stranger.’

  ‘Oh, shut up. I’m not embarrassed in front of you.’

  I am sufficiently socialised to know that the thing I should be most embarrassed about disclosing here—to you and not to Kay, who was a famous slut and therefore, despite her moral presentations, actually unshockable—is not my uncontrollably boring views on money but that my female partner and me not only had sex with but planned and bought aeroplane tickets in order to have sex with an age-inappropriate student of bullshit in a hotel that was so expensive it would later host a director of the IMF.

  Of course I am embarrassed when I think about this terrible couples’ therapy. Mostly because this freedom fanboy turned out to be engaged to a young woman who, as I discovered later by internet, had won an award for selfless dedication to the New York public school system.

  This promising person clearly had no clue about her partner’s activities, which were misrepresented to her by text message after one round of sex had ended and another one had begun to seem very likely.

  He recited semi-consciously as he wrote, ‘Stuck at Habitat for Humanity’, a charitable organisation to which, he had told us previously by internet message, he often volunteered his service as a construction worker.

  In the midtown suite, I began to feel very bad for the people whose low-cost homes would be built by Ivy League hands unaccustomed to labour but that were now familiar with my arsehole. I also felt bad for Habitat for Humanity, whose reputation had been exploited in the service of infidelity. But I felt the worst for his girlfriend; her most intimate bond violated through the ridiculous attempt to intensify my own.

  So there was one positive reading of my three-way, which I urged Kay to consider, hoping it might stop her from insisting I go to one of those damn Sex Addicts meetings: As soon as I saw him texting his girlfriend, I did my best to stop further sex.

  I wasn’t able to completely stop it. I mean, we’d spent so much money to get there.

  I couldn’t stop this sex, therefore diminishing its quality was the only moral course, but for the sake of low-cost housing providers and of the partners of the people engaged to their duplicitous volunteers I made sure that we all had an ordinary time.

  I am sure the libertarian never looks back to part three, possibly part four, of our ‘encounter’ fondly. I lay there like a starfish in the hope he would be so struck by my mediocrity that he would never cheat again. I also farted.

  ‘Are you ashamed?’ asked Kay.

  I couldn’t say that I was ashamed either of the bad sex or the farting. Anyhow, at that point, my shame would have made about as much sense as a violent sectarian militia leader apologising for mispronouncing the word Kalashnikov on YouTube. I’d incriminated myself with filth and with infidelity. What was a fart, now?

  I told her that I was not ashamed of the ‘encounter’. But that I was ashamed of my lack of due diligence, which should have turned up the fact of the libertarian’s fiancée (and the fact that he was a libertarian).

  Sure, it’s true that he had said in his dating profile that he was single but, then again, we had described ourselves as a ‘happy couple’. I should have known better. I should have known that people lie when they shouldn’t, and forget to lie when they should.

  Kay finally agreed that I was clearly more of a sex saboteur than a sex addict. Especially when I told her about Anton and Georges. But since she was such a big fan of the program, she insisted that she drive me to an Al-Anon meeting.

  After failing to give her anything much she could ‘report to her sponsor’, I figured this was the least I could do.

  18

  Two weeks, one memory of hope

  I will soon toot the Divorce Horn for the first time. This is not something I report to you with a sense of achievement or pride. But as I have committed to a full account of my break-up recovery plan, here goes nothing: it started in church.

  If you are of the sort to be troubled by heresy, calm yourself, as there will be no sex in the transept. In fact I never entered the sacred part of the building at all. This story ends with me being finger-blasted by a young man behind a council rubbish bin—to be clear, some several metres away from God’s house. But let me begin more earnestly and tell you what I had learned by that point about hope. This is for your own good.

  It is not just during a break-up that you must be cautious with hope. It is at all times, such as twelve-step meetings and in health and sickness.

  I have rarely been inclined to hope. This scepticism is one of the things I, a person of few good qualities, like best about myself. It was one of the qualities I liked best in my ex.

  While it is true she was disposed to many moments of belief in semi-Hindu nonsense, especially in our final months, and was, if left unattended, a Truther who supposed there were things That They Don’t Want You To Know, when it came down to the harder business of life, she could be marvellously averse to the garbage of hope.

  I remember her warmly as she refused hope in the weeks after her diagnosis. Even when I didn’t. I regret to report that I bought her a ‘wellness’ recipe book tailored by hopeful zealots to her disease. She opened it and said, ‘If cheese is going to kill me then I don’t want to fucking live,’ and threw the volume across the room with the reminder that I was the one always going on about the loss of reason and the need to test hypotheses; remember when I made fun of Aunty Ida’s acupuncture to her face?

  ‘This thing has a rainbow on the cover. How could you?’ she said to me. Quite right, too. There were no conclusive longitudinal studies about the impact of diet on her illness I could ever locate. This book was written not from reason but from hope.

  I really had no business bringing the ideology of hope to a sick bed. She was correct. No one has any business doing this.

  People do it, though. When things get tough, solutions can get really flimsy and the dying or seriously ill person not only has their pain and mortality to face but usually a long line of well-meaning tits like me all saying, ‘I read something on the internet about bee-sting therapy and magnets. You should look into tha
t.’

  Even if few truly believe that pain can be treated with bone broth or a Tesla pendant, many believe in the medical power of hope. They believe that if a patient is not sufficiently ‘positive’ to believe in the possibility of a cure, however unlikely it is, then they are not prepared to live. It works if you work it, as I would hear them say at Al-Anon.

  This is absolute bollocks, of course. Often nothing works at all.

  The other patients on the neurology ward where she was diagnosed knew that positive thinking was bollocks too. When I said ‘My girlfriend needs to be more positive!’ to an elderly woman named Essie, who had suffered a serious spinal cord injury and was trapped inside a halo, she said, ‘What in the name of ginger for?’

  She made an excellent point. There is, to the best of my present knowledge, no evidence that a patient’s positive attitude affects their prognosis.

  Essie told me pain is just misery. It isn’t, as it is often described, a ‘battle’, between the forces of hope and hopelessness, or one between a patient and disease. Pain is not a battle, it’s a surrender.

  ‘You wait. You see what happens. You let the people who seem to know what they are doing do things. That’s it.’

  No one has any therapy for a divorce better or more scientific than, say, going on one hundred dates within a year. There is no doctor, shaman or former alcoholic qualified to mend the pain of a break-up. You can’t submit to treatment and, at one point or another, you’re just going to have to agree to lie down and submit to defeat instead. Which is what the incurable Essie was finally compelled to do.

  Essie told her niece who had come to visit that she did not wish to be described as having ‘lost a battle’ in the classifieds when she died. ‘And don’t say “passed away”, either. “Dead” will do.’ Her niece said, ‘You’re not going to die!’ And while you and I are now agreed that truth is overhyped and modest lies can be polite, this was an untruth so extreme even the pathology nurse (who happened to be a fan of sexy vampire stories) rolled her eyes.