The Secrets of Married Women (8 page)

But then, the longer we were married and the happier we were, we no longer had a strong enough reason not to do it. So we stopped using birth control, and decided to let nature take its course. Rob still claimed he was doing it mostly for me. Although he’d say things like, ‘I hope we have a girl. A little you…’ And he’d get that quietly pleased expression. Then I caught him making a crib, which was really crazy given that I wasn’t yet pregnant. ‘A bit ahead of things aren’t you?’ I teased. He looked up at me, with his stain brush in hand, looking very handsome. ‘Just in case she gets an earlier boat.’ We tried for over a year. I got tested and was fine. Then Rob got tested and found out he had a problem. ‘Total sperm count: 0,’ he read to me from the piece of paper that came in the mail. We trouped off to see two specialists. I couldn’t get my head around the diagnosis. I thought that if Rob could ejaculate he had to have sperm. Some sperm. Enough to do the job. I kept thinking of that little egg I saw on my ultrasound, how mesmerized I was to see my body preparing to create life. How sad now that my little egg would be like The French Lieutenant’s Woman in that film, wandering the shores of my Fallopian tubes, waiting for her lover who wasn’t coming. It saddened me to think I’d never have the sights, smells and tastes of being pregnant, like other women. I didn’t go potty and stalk maternity wards or steal babies at bus stands, but I’d take strange dislikes to food, my breasts would be tender and a strange brewing feeling took up tenancy in my stomach. ‘I have to be pregnant,’ I said to Rob. ‘Why do I have morning sickness? Why is my period late?’ Rob would get annoyed. ‘Azoospermia,’ he’d say. ‘I have no sperm. I’m unable to produce a baby.’ But I was sure we were going to prove the doctors wrong. And then my period would come and I’d plaster on a happy face for Rob, but inwardly I’d massively mourn that baby I’d been so sure I was having. I felt like they say amputees feel when they loose a limb—knowing it’s gone but feeling it’s still there. Then I’d say, Jill, snap out of it; you can’t miss what you’ve never had. But you can. You can grieve without having lost.

‘You can leave me, you know,’ Rob said, in one of my weak moments when I couldn’t mask my despair. We were in bed. Neither of us could sleep. ‘If you left me for somebody who could give you a baby, I wouldn’t think badly of you one little bit.’ I felt one of his tears roll into my hair. ‘I’d still love you,’ he whispered, ‘but with the best will in the world, I’d let you go. And if I saw you walking down the street one day with your new husband and your child, a part of me would feel nothing but joy for you.’

I bawled my eyes out. ‘Of course I’m not going to leave you! You’re my life. Not some baby that I’ve never consciously wanted until someone tells me I’m not going to have it.’ I planted protective kisses on him, trying to make that feeling go away, of catching myself in a lie. Because I did have my moments where I’d see my life in scenes with some other husband: leaving Rob today, meeting someone else tomorrow, marrying him Thursday and having his baby by the weekend. I’d just have to look at a man with his child and find him instantly more attractive, because he was virile. My old criteria for a partner—tall, dark, handsome, sense of humour, job, no beer belly—seemed a naive and distant second to that glorious F-word: Fertile.

Infertile. Childless. Barren. We can’t have children. At some point we’ll have to get round to telling everybody. But Rob doesn’t want to yet, so I have to respect that.

And I’m okay about it. I’ve stopped wanting what he can’t give me. I suppose I’m like that. I can still feel like a woman without being a mother. And I still have a family because I have Rob. Besides, we could always adopt, which we’ve not talked about yet—because, well, we’ve not talked.

Because Rob has taken it badly. Rob has come to obsess about what he can’t have. Rob feels a failure. Rob feels less than a man. Rob would never tell me this. But I know. After all these years with somebody, you know the things they cannot say. You feel the things they can’t feel. Maybe that’s why he’s gone off sex. Maybe it reminds him of his failure. I try not to focus on it. I keep thinking give it time. Give him time… But then I just get impatient to have everything be good between us again. The few times we have made love since we found out, our inability to make a baby has lain there between us, like some third wheel on a date. But I worry that the time will come when he’ll want to be in the arms of somebody who doesn’t have this history with him, who doesn’t sometimes cry when they’re in bed with him.

And I bleed for him. I bleed for us because we’ve fallen into this dark place. And I just want to make him all right again, see him happy again, but I don’t know how.

Now, on this bridge, since seeing that dad and his kid, all the joy seems to have been rung out of him, leaving only a sad and pensive shell. I take his warm hand as we arrive on the Gateshead side in front of the Baltic Centre with its banner advertising the new Antony Gormley exhibition. The sun has been dramatically exchanged for that thin quiet rain that soaks you in seconds. A girl is quickly packing a harp into a case as people scatter onto buses that are switching their lights on. We go inside to take cover, stand by the window and watch it coming down. When it eases off we leave. On our way back across the Blinking Eye, I can feel his sadness. It is palpable. I don’t know what to say to him, so I just take his hand in mine again and give it a reassuring squeeze. ‘Thank you. I love you, you know,’ he says quietly, as though we’ve just undergone some sensitive thought transference. His thumb massages my knuckles. We stop half way over and listen to a Newcastle that seems to have grown louder in the rain.

The Tuxedo Princess, the nightclub boat where we met, still sits there. We often come and look at it, and I’ll make him tell me again about when he first saw me… ‘Well, I saw you standing on the edge of the dance floor with your three mates, in your buttoned up blouse and poodle perm, and I thought there’s a rose among thorns. And then when you smiled at me and you didn’t look away, I said Please God let this work.’

Then he’ll ask me the same thing.

Rob did make quite an impression. There was something Heathcliff about his tumbling dark hair, intense almost sapphire eyes, and his quiet way of watching me. He oozed a sense of contemplation and reserve, yet he wasn’t boring; he was witty and gave me the giggles. I thought, here’s somebody who isn’t Your Regular Legless Local Thug. Peel me off the floor! By the end of the night there was already something about Rob that made me love him, and the fact that I’d only known him a few hours meant that time wasn’t moving fast enough for my liking. What followed was just a close friendship, because Rob thought I was out of his league. He was convinced I was waiting for some millionaire to come along. I just reckoned I was too giggly for him or too loud, but he liked me as a pal. But then came the defining moment. Seated waiting for Chinese takeaway, he telling me about some famous mobster his aunt married in America, I threw myself onto him. His conversation trailed to a stumped syllable. I burrowed into his neck, relishing this new proximity of him. Then two awkward hands clamped themselves, bear-like, on my back. ‘I’m in love with you, Rob,’ I croaked. I was thinking God I’ll have to hurl myself off the Tyne Bridge after this humiliation because for sure he didn’t love me back. There was this weird little pause, then a voice… ‘Two order black bean ticken, flied lice.’ We could only see the top of a head across the counter. Rob plied my arms off him, scoured my face, keeping me in suspense. Then he said, ‘D’you suppose they forgot the sweet and sour?’

I wondered whether the Tyne was going to feel cold.

Later, when we were opening the fortune cookies, Rob read me his. ‘It says, A sudden confession can bring a change in destiny.’

‘It doesn’t say that!’ I read mine, disbelieving my eyes. ‘Oh my God it says, Accept the next proposition you hear.’ I waggled it in his face.

‘Bloody hell,’ he raked in the bag for the last cookie. ‘It says, you are of double character: An active socialite and a serious thinker.’

We piddled ourselves laughing. When we stopped, he said, ‘I’d better ask you to marry me. I think Buddha would want it this way.’

An airplane passes noisily overhead, startling me out of my reminiscing. The Newcastle train slides over the bridge on its way to Sunderland. Everybody moving, going somewhere. Except, I sometimes think lately, us. I climb my free hand up his arm, feel the soft warm hairs on it. I married the love of my life, the first, the only. And when I fell for him, it wasn’t because I was thinking I wanted to have his babies. I was thinking I love him and I can’t imagine ever letting him go or not seeing him again. I am so happy when I’m with him. I am this lit-up person. ‘Rob….’ I gently nuzzle up to him. The other day I asked him why he never dances with me in the supermarket anymore. Not so long ago he’d have thought nothing of snogging me on this bridge while disapproving seniors passed and scowled at us. His arm comes out in goose-bumps, the hairs stand up. As if by reflex I press my breasts into his arm. But he stiffens, draws his arm back so quickly, and there’s an instant where we both register his reaction. Then he brings the arm around me, pulls me into him. Affectionately. Appeasing. But that’s about it. We stand without speaking and stare at big ships.

We eat at Saigon Sam’s, a new place that opened in a reinvented garage behind St. Mary’s Church. The food’s good but the atmosphere decidedly too funky for our mood. I push chicken around my plate with a fork. The things we can’t talk about speaking in a voice so loud that it drowns out even our ability to chit-chat over dinner. All this—what?—because he saw a man and his son? Or was it because I snuggled up to him on the bridge? We sit here like two empty eggshells. I keep looking at him hoping he’ll say something but his eyes are fixed in a blank stare while he chews food he doesn’t even taste.

There’s a couple at the next table, a good-looking pair a little younger than us, married, drinking matching orange cocktails. She’s got one of those elfin haircuts and has on a pastel ribbed top that emphasises the small, attractive swell of her chest. They’re not saying all that much. But a crosscurrent runs between them, in their silences, their glances, their occasional laughs. They’re in love. And I can’t keep my eyes off them. A lump rises in my throat that I can’t swallow back down. I know they know I’m watching them, but my fascination outweighs my manners. As we leave and I slip into my jacket, I glance over again. The girl is slowly climbing her bare toes up his pant leg.

‘Rob I think it’s time we talked,’ I venture gently, when we get home and sit in our unadorned front room, me on our chocolate sofa, Rob in the wicker chair by the window. The evening light is making it harder for me to see his face properly and easier therefore to confront him.

‘Oh Jill, don’t go spoiling a nice day.’ He tussles with little Kiefer who’s a grateful ball of excitement.

‘We have had a nice day Rob. A lovely day.’
Don’t you understand? This is what makes this worse? That we’re the best of friends and yet still we can’t talk.

‘I know. We always do.’

My heart cracks. ‘Then why don’t you want me?’

He frowns, an expression his face is not used to. ‘Want you? Of course I want you.’

‘But you obviously don’t want to be intimate with me anymore. You don’t fancy me.’

I can read all that pain backed up in his serious, kindly, blue eyes. ‘Fancy you? Of course I fancy you. I’ve always fancied you and that’s never changed.’

‘Then why won’t you make love to me? We never even kiss anymore and when I initiate it you always turn me down! Have you any idea how unfeminine it makes me feel when you keep rejecting me Rob?’ The words fall out sounding shallow and callous. I didn’t mean for them to.

He suddenly looks shocked, tired, waxy-pale. I’ve emasculated him. ‘Reject you? We do fuck! I don’t know what you’re going on about.’

Does he really not? I am almost lost for where to take this next. He goes back to roughhousing the dog, catches his knuckles on the coffee table but doesn’t even flinch. ‘Rob it’s been five months. You’ve not touched me in all that time. Do you honestly think that’s normal? Is it normal that we’ve not even talked about it?’ Maybe it’s not a long time to other people. But five days would have been an eternity to us, before. I stare at his unblinking profile. ‘It’s not like I am sex mad or anything, but I need to feel like you are my husband… How do I condition myself to be sexually unaware of the man I love? Because I don’t know. I don’t know how to act around you anymore.’ I rub my face hard with both hands and when I look up he is watching me. If you take the sex out of a marriage there has to be a whole new set of rules and codes of conduct. But I don’t know what they are.

‘I don’t know what you’re babbling about,’ he says again, less certain of himself.

I try to calm down. ‘Rob, you won’t tell me what’s wrong.’ He tugs vacuously on the other end of a rope toy, and the dog’s commotion just seems to go on around him because he is off into his sad headspace again. ‘I can’t get a handle on you anymore Rob. I don’t know what you’re thinking. What’s happening with us? You recoiled from me on that bridge. It was like you couldn’t bear the feel of me. Is it something I’m doing wrong? Tell me and I’ll change. I’ll do anything. Rob, look at me!’