[2003] LOSS & PORPHYRY the novels  

0022 – Part 13 - Marital Sex

Only when all the Sunday morning rituals of ablution had been ceremonially completed did I, too, make my way to the bedroom. As usual, Pat was reading the newspapers – the colour supplements - in bed. Discretely locking the bedroom door behind me, I joined her in bed; and began the ritual of courtship. At first she pretended not to notice, though the history of many hundreds of such encounters could hardly have gone unnoticed. The foreplay followed a ritualised pattern, as formal as any Noh play and determined by Pat; who had long ago decided what she found most enjoyable and had steadfastly resisted any changes. Part of this ritual was that she had to be seduced, where making love was against her modest wishes. Under this pretence, our ultimate shared orgasm was supposed to be for the benefit of me, and at her cost. She was to stoically tolerate the process, until her own violent orgasm pushed her beyond control, and she could no longer pretend it was a chore rather than a pleasure.

There was even a ritual break between the foreplay and the actual congress itself. When she eventually indicated, majestically, that she might consider suffering such an indignity, the process had to be interrupted to move the head of the bed away from the wall. The rhythmic banging of the headboard against the wall might, otherwise, have told the children what was happening. It mattered not that the two children, who were by now watching their regular Sunday diet of television cartoons in the living-room immediately below, were by now fully aware just what the regular creaking of the beams in the ceiling over their heads betokened. It was simply that a veil of modesty, even if it was an ineffective one, had to be drawn over the whole event. Both of us had just missed the freedom that the sexual revolution of the late nineteen sixties had bestowed on our more fortunate successors. Sex was perhaps no longer a dirty habit for them, but it was still an equivocal one for us.

Even so, Pat enjoyed the ritual. She welcomed its very predictability. She knew she would have her orgasm; the orgasm that the women's pages in the papers insisted was her right. There was no chance of failure; of that bitter feeling of dissatisfaction that came from nearly reaching that peak in physical feelings, but not quite reaching it. She would have preferred not to have any of it rather than face that lack of fulfilment. But, ritualised, the whole sequence had a warming feel of continuity, of certainty in an uncertain world.

In truth, as compared with the pretence, the roles were reversed. I found the ritual boring in the extreme. I did still love Pat. I even still found her attractive, despite the years of growing tedium we had spent together. I was also aware that, in spite of the depressingly obvious fact that she no longer felt it necessary to make herself attractive for me, she was by far the most attractive woman in our circle of friends.

But that didn't stop me from wanting sex to be exciting again. I wanted my lover to make herself attractive for my sake; and I certainly didn't want her to pretend that she didn't want me. Worst of all, the dull tedious boring repetition of exactly the same old missionary position, identical to the nearest centimetre each time, was the antithesis of excitement. It had one advantage, and that was that I found the whole process so unglamorous that it took me an inordinate time, long minutes of hard toil, to achieve my own orgasm. This meant Pat regularly achieved hers and, indeed, benefited from multiple orgasms; which would have made her the toast of the women's page writers, and possibly the envy of her less fortunate friends. Possibly that was the reason for her demands. But in any case I, in my love for her, would have striven to grant her such pleasure.

The paradoxical outcome was that, although in body I was faithful to her and to this regular ritual, in spirit I indulged in wild adventures of infidelity. Even now, in my thoughts, in my fantasies, I was savouring far richer delights. I saw not Pat in bed with him, but the young delights of Janice; the nurse who I had found so desirable earlier in the week. As I gently massaged Pat's mature breasts I fantasised that I was rubbing those of Janice under her thin hospital overall. Lifting Pat's real cotton nightdress I exposed Janice's imagined brief bra, buoying up her firm young breasts, and my fingers fumbled their excited way into the cups of that forbidden bra and stimulated her nipples. Fondling Pat's thighs I felt Janice's inviting briefs, and they succumbed to my touch. Finally it was Janice under me, her firm young body contrasting with Pat's well upholstered maturity, whose moans of delight eventually stimulated me to my own orgasm.

Thus, was my regular act of infidelity practised on my own wife. Physically satisfied, at the same time as being emotionally dissatisfied, I rolled over and lay looking at the ceiling. It had been so different in the days of our true courtship, before marriage had solidified everything into this sterile ritual. Then it had been a joy of spontaneity. It had been exciting. We had been, just, in advance of our time in celebrating our love to the full well in anticipation of marriage; at a time when a white wedding was deemed a necessary statement of fact, not just a celebration of events past. We had made mad exotic love together in the most unlikely of circumstances and places; ranging from the crest of an ancient burial mound on the Downs to the top of a desk in a public library. I had then expected Pat's reticence, it was in keeping with the times; and I had willingly pursued each seduction with great energy, where the seduction itself was part of the excitement. But I had not expected to have to continue the seduction through the whole marriage. It now irked me, where I now viewed it as an unnecessary, and inexplicable, imposition.

Alongside me, Pat too relaxed, enjoying the afterglow of orgasm; without any appreciation of the complex thoughts assailing her partner.

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