Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions (72 page)

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BOOK: Fay Weldon's Wicked Fictions
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Infidelity
Fay Weldon
August 1992
There's what ought to happen, and what does happen, and they're different.
There's love eternal, couples walking hand in hand into the sunset of old age, and you and I know how seldom that happens, and how we go on hoping against hope that it will.
There are theories of life and there's real life, and a great black tearful pit in between which it's all too easy to fall into. So be careful about the theories, because it can take years to climb out of the pit, and to women years are precious. And besides which, the climb so often has to be done in the glare of public opinionif only what your mother, his brother, her wife, and the friends and neighbours are sayingand the glare wreaks havoc with the complexion and ages you no end.
So if anyone tells you it's okay to have an affair, that it will enrich your marriage, don't listen. Or at any rate if you do, if you're meeting this man and out of hours, be careful, be secret, tell no one. And if you want to cry to the world I'm happy, it's so wonderful, I'm in lovedon't do it. The penalty for illicit love is the closing of the lips (even as the legs open, I was going to add, but this may be too vivid, albeit poetic, an image for
Allure,
and almost is for me) but it is this very punishment which heightens the adventure, makes the drive of the other into the soul, your receptivity to his, so powerful.
After all this heady talk, you married women may well start fluttering
 
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your lashes, catching the eye of the taxi driver, your best friend's husband, your gynaecologist, your Congressman, indeed your President, but don't blame me. I'm not saying it isn't worth it: I'm just saying be very, very careful. Or you'll be like poor Alex in
Fatal Attraction,
his wife appearing with a gun when all you'd ever wanted was a bit of acknowledgment: someone to say love matters. Let me say it for you, it does. Stop being so unhappy: get out of his life, find another, or you're dead.
There's how people ought to be and how people are, and they're different. There's how to be happy in twelve easy lessons, and how it feels to be you. There's
The Erotic Silence of the American Wife
and
Backlash
and
Madame Bovary
and
Women Who Love Too Much,
and there's how it is to lie alone, night after night, while your life passes by: or know that your husband is in that creature's bed: or the blissful relief of lying where normally your best friend lies, in her bed with her husband, because she always seemed to be so much happier than you, and you were envious. There's the triumph of finally prising your so-boring mother and father apart, of wrecking someone else's marriageyour parents', metaphoricallyso that you win, and then moving on, smiling sweetly. There's all kinds of truths no one wants to know about, because they're painful, or don't show you up in a good light, so you'd rather forget. There's you in the good photograph with your makeup on, as you like to be, and the snapshot of you you hate the more because others say how like you it is, and you can't believe it. That overweight, smirking idiot looking more like your own mother than you ever believed possible. Enough to drive you into the arms of your neighbour's husband, anyone's, come to that.
There's the early morning you in front of the mirror, patting on the moisturiser, trying new foundation, making the most of your eyes with browns and greens and the season's shades, pencilling in the lip-linersee the curve of the mouth, the sensuous line where lip meets non-lipnarcissus personified, or should it be narcissa? This face, this person, can it be me? Can this be the one I love? Perfect love?and there's you crammed up on the train on the way to work, protecting your person from grotesque others; you listening fearful to the footsteps which follow you home, can this be true love or attack? The lover with red roses or the apist on a date? That sensuous line between the two which no amount of pencilling can ever properly delineate. It's forever getting smudged to your disadvantage. Try another lip-liner: perhaps sharper, softer, deeper, brighter. Read
Allure
to see which one's best for you. But always keep the alleged self, the made-up self (notice the pun?) one step ahead of the real self, which you keep hidden from the world, and quite right too.
 
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There's
How to Find Your True Self,
and what you discover your true self to be: a banshee wailer on the telephone, when love goes wrong, full of hate and anger, a fishwife, a harridan, out of control and further in love, and the more you shriek and the fouler your language, the further love departs, but you can't stop, because the desire to hurt is greater than the desire to be loved. But you can't see it. You think evidence of your distress will work upon the other. But of course it doesn't. Just because when you were a baby, roaring and spitting out your passions, your mother came running to soothe you and love you, cuddle you and kiss you, doesn't mean there's anyone out there to do it now. Just some man, with his ear a foot from the phone, yawning and wondering how long this is going to go on, wanting to get to bed. With whom? Don't ask. It's not you. Accept it.
There's passionate love and there's bored, this-will-do love. There's the marriage in which the partners say to one another, be sexually free, dear. All I want is your happiness. Your personal fulfilment. And what that means, if you ask mewell, I'm telling you: bending your ear: what chance do you have?is that neither of them can be bothered to care. Either they don't have any imagination, just don't envisage what the other two do, or murmurthe movement of limbs, the entwining of spirits, the entering of bodies, one within the otheror if they do envisage it and simply don't care, and think it doesn't matter, who wants them anyway?
If a husband says to you, "get it out of your system," you might as well leave him now. If he's not jealous he's not worth having: if he lets you get away with it, you'll despise him for life. You'll just use the poor defeated creature like a fetch-and-carry lapdog. "Fetch me my bag, dear," ''you haven't poured my drink, dear" signals to the world you have the upper sexual hand. Where's the challenge in that? Hand-in-hand into the sunset, all you like, but who wants to hold that hand? It's cold and it's clammy and it's only in yours because it never had the energy to wrench itself away. And you'll know it.
There's how the scene ought to go, and how the scene does go. Let me play it for you the way it would if we were all the self-aware, civilised, understanding people we ought to be when we've finished our
Twelve Steps to Self-Understanding
and have taken to heart Dalma Heyn's
The Erotic Silence of the American Wife
and stirred our wifely selves up with a little sexual love and passion outside marriage.
Our cast: Dean and Louella. They've been married five years. She's at the office; he calls from home.
DEAN
: Hi, Louella. You too busy to talk a little?
 
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LOUELLA
: Never too busy for you, sweetheart.
DEAN
: Okay, because I've just played the answerphone and there's this conversation on it between you and Bob. I think it was recorded by accident.
LOUELLA
: (after a little pause while she rapidly thinks back) Bob?
DEAN
: Yeah, Bob. Your sister Frieda's husband. Look, I'm really sorry for listening in. I don't want you to think I'm prying into your personal stuff, but there may be one or two things here need talking about. What say I take you out for dinner tonight?
LOUELLA
: Great, Dean! Where shall we go?
DEAN
: I could pick up your little black number from the cleaners, and come by the office and we could go to Arabella's. They do great vegetarian dishes. I'll see about the babysitter.
LOUELLA
: I'd really love that, Dean. You're right, we do have one or two things to talk about.
At Arabellas, they sit opposite each other. Candles flicker in their concerned, self-aware faces. They eat quiche and drink mineral water.
DEAN
: So you really can manage to love two men at once?
LOUELLA
: Dean, there is so much love in my heart, of course there's room for both of you. You are my husband. He is my lover. He gives me such a wonderful new sense of selfwe American wives can hardly find the words to express what we feel in these extra-matrimonial relationships! I read it in Dalma Heyn.
DEAN
: I understand that, Louella. I don't want to undermine your feelings in any way, believe me. I don't want to undervalue your experiences. I don't want you to feel I'm putting any aspect of your eroticism under attack. I just want us to use this love affair of yours to build up our marriage, make the feeling between us stronger. Enrich both our lives. Speak to me, Louella! I don't want you to fall silent, as you American wives so often do, according to Dalma. I've read it too.
LOUELLA
: I just can't get over your listening in to that phone call.
DEAN
: You know how these things are, Lou. Try and forgive me. He was talking about what you were doing with your mouths, and your toes, and I kinda got interested. I never did any of that stuff. I didn't know American husbands did.
 
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I guess you'd have listened if I'd been talking like that with Frieda.
LOUELLA
: I'd have tried not to, Dean.
DEAN
: Well, I accept that. I failed. What bugs me most is that I may have failed you as a husband, somehow restricted your personal growth and not been sensitive enough to your womanly moods. Has that been the trouble?
LOUELLA
: I guess it has, Dean. But I've got to take responsibility here too. I might not have shown myself as a good wife, you see, and, what with one thing and another, that hasn't kept the sex between us all that exciting.
DEAN
: I guess adultery must be life-enhancing.
LOUELLA
: It is, it is, Dean. Not only that, I've been able to deal with the logistics of my affair with Bob so well, it's improved my self-image, just as Dalma describes.
DEAN
: Yes, I really admire you for that.
LOUELLA
: I reckon I'm so clever I could almost get to the White House.
DEAN
: Let's make that your ambition, sweetheart. How about Secretary of State? Handling all these complex and dangerous emotions, which your lust for Bob must have revealed to you, would make you a whizz at Foreign Affairs.
LOUELLA
: What I love about you, Dean, is your sense of humour. Because I do love you, more and more, now I see Bob too. I feel so comfortable in our bed; warm and safe and in a way the sheer familiarity of our surroundings makes the sex with you more focused; I can actually concentrate better on my erotic responses with you than with Bob, as Dalma points out.
DEAN
: I'm really pleased to hear that, Lou. One way and another, I'm glad this has happened. The American wife must be able to take her place standing next to her husband, unafraid and equal in the fight for erotic freedom within marriage.
LOUELLA
: Thank you, Dean.
DEAN
: Thank you, Louella.
BOTH
: Hand in hand into the sunset!
Whereas actually what actually happens is this. There you are, working away at your desk, hugging to yourself last night's secret meeting with Bob. There's a bang and a crash in reception and a sound of breaking faxes, telephones and computer screens, and shouting. You go and see that it's
 
Page 224
your husband Dean, out of control, and he's making a dash for you to strangle you and being held back by your boss and two colleagues. His language and manners are violent and obscene. You gather that he has overheard your long early-morning conversation with Bob, which he sometimes manages between Frieda leaving for work and his getting the kids to school. The only way to get Dean to leave the office is to go home with him, though you're frightened for your life. So far as your boss is concerned your job is on the line anyway: your mind hasn't been properly on your work lately; you are given to understand that your resignation is now expected. Dean thinks that you losing your job is no worse than you deserve, and you needn't think he's going to support you either. You may quote Dalma Heyn at him all you like, he takes no notice. Dean goes out on a drinking binge: to pick up as many hookers as he can. Why not, he says, and when you murmur about AIDS he says he hopes you get it: him getting it would be a small price to pay. You're shaking and trembling, but thank God Bob rings. Bob loves you and you love Bobit must be all right. Only it appears that Dean has called Frieda, and Frieda is very distressed, and Bob can't forgive himself for what he has done to her and he is ending the affair there and then. You can't stand the empty apartment and the desolation and go home to your mother, leaving a note for Dean saying how sorry you are and begging his forgiveness. Your mother isn't very nice to you either. Frieda is your sister and you have muddled up family relations no end by sleeping with her husband. Did you intend to be your nephew's stepmother as well as their aunt? Over the next couple of weeks you and Dean have endless phone calls (while your mother complains about the cost) in which you humiliate yourself and beg for forgiveness and Dean demands full physical details of what went on: the whens, the wheres, the whats, the hows, while he consults all your friends as to whether or not to have you back. By this time you realise you really and truly love Dean, and are blurting out stupid things like, "I thought if you found out I'd had an affair you'd want to work on our marriage, make it better, wonder where you'd gone wrong," and you realise you unconsciously wanted to be found out and stopped, which is no doubt why you left the message on the answerphone in the first place. (No such thing as an accident!) And you even say, "because there has been something wrong latelyI know there has beenI even wondered if there was another womanbut that was just stupid, wasn't it?" And then you get a formal letter from Dean's lawyers saying you have committed adultery and your joint bank account is frozen. He has left the matrimonial home. And your best friend then tells you Dean has been having an affair with your sister Frieda for the last two years and has moved in with her. And that Bob has

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