***
Late one evening, when he was a twenty-year-old student, Bryan Sandford was sitting on a threadbare carpet with four college buddies. The pubs had shut, but Jock had a bottle of cheap whiskey and some puff he was willing to share, so they all stumbled round to his place, climbing the stairwell to his bedsit and drunkenly shushing each other as they giggled and belched. Once ensconced in Jock’s tiny abode, they sat around passing the bottle and spliff as the conversation went from complaining about girls to arguing about why the planet was fucked to debating whether Star Trek really was better than Star Wars and back to complaining about girls again.
Bryan was drunk and a little stoned, so he was only vaguely aware when the conversation turned to what everyone was wanting to do with their lives. The usual crap about swimming with dolphins and becoming a millionaire by thirty did the rounds, and Bryan was quite happy to lean back against the wall and drop off to sleep. Then his neighbour gave him a nudge, said ‘What about you, Bry?’ and Bryan said the first thing that came into his head.
‘I want to be a man who knows how to love a woman.’
There was dead silence.
Bryan was suddenly wide awake and sober, his brain sounding a red alert. He saw four pairs of eyes gaze blearily in his direction and knew that merciless mockery was imminent.
‘I mean, I want to be a man who gets to fuck lots of women!’ he said.
‘Hah-haaa!’ ‘That’s more like it!’ ‘You had us worried!’ and a dozen other affirmation greeted this reformulation. Bryan grinned as he was jostled by his neighbour and he grabbed at the whiskey bottle for another swig. The conversation turned to fuckable women and the ocean liner slipped quietly past the iceberg.
But many years later, that moment came back to Bryan.
He was once more sitting on a carpet, although this one was far from threadbare. It was the plush carpet in the living room of his home, and he was watching his eight-year-old daughter and his wife. Bedtime was approaching and Becky knelt behind the girl Tara as she gently brushed her hair, telling her a story about a princess and a pea. She had got to the part where the man was getting women to sleep on a huge pile of mattresses.
‘But why did he want a princess?’ said Tara. ‘What was wrong with the other women?’
‘That’s a good question,’ said Becky.
She turned to her husband.
‘What do you think, Bryan? Why does a man want a princess?’
‘Probably for the same reason a woman wants a prince.’
Becky reddened.
She went back to brushing Tara’s hair and continued with the story. Bryan frowned and focused on breathing through his anger. In February, about a month ago, he and Becky had gone dancing at a fancy club and Becky had met a kind of prince: Marcus DeVere, a footballing legend with movie star looks and a reputation for bedding married women. Becky had damn near been one of them. Or might have been — Bryan managed to intervene before Becky had had to face that crucial yes-or-no decision.
And she might have said no. Getting closer than you should to a man on the dancefloor and actually leaving a club and getting into his car are not the same thing. Bryan could totally imagine Becky staring at an open car door thinking, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ She would turn to the handsome Marcus, say ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do this’ and that would be that.
But Bryan could just as easily imagine her saying ‘Fuck it’ and getting in. Women seemed to regard having sex with a famous, high-status man as some kind of achievement and Becky was a woman. She was as prone as any woman to refer to a handsome man’s conquest as ‘That lucky cow’, even if the man were a serial cheater. There really was one rule for the Alphas and another rule for the rest and Bryan did not like it one bit.
‘All right, Tara, say goodnight to your father.’
Bryan came back to the real world with a start. He daughter was coming over, his mother watching. Bryan gave Tara a hug and a kiss, telling her he loved her and wishing her sweet dreams. Becky led the little girl out of the living room, turned at the doorway and looked at her husband.
‘I’ll be back,’ she said.
She left and closed the door. Bryan thought of the Terminator’s ‘I’ll be back’ and did not find it incongruous. Becky was pissed off at him for the ‘prince’ remark, for reminding her of the near transgression, for not letting it go. He could already hear her say, ‘But it was a month ago!’ as though that in itself should make it just go away.
‘Okay…’ said an inner voice. ‘So what timeframe do you propose? One year? Two years? Ten years? How long before you let it go?’
A feeling in Bryan’s chest whispered ‘never’. And ‘never’ felt about right. And yet those words from his youth — ‘I want to be a man who knows how to love a woman’ — still roamed his heart. Was it loving a woman to bear a grudge when, technically, she didn’t do anything? Do you refuse to love a woman who has sexual desires for other men? Or was the memory re-emerging as a warning that there was something naïve about a man who wants to love a woman?
Bryan tried to imagine what he would have done if the situation were reversed, if some famous beauty had walked across the dancefloor with her eye on him. He was immediately struck with the unlikelihood of that ever happening. Famous beauties fancied the Marcus DeVeres of the world as much as all the other women, perhaps more so since they were on an equal footing. They certainly didn’t lower themselves for ‘ordinary’ men such as Bryan and he realised that at least part of his anger was a kind of envy that Becky had sexual opportunities simply not open to him.
But even when Bryan pushed the fantasy scenario to its extreme — a gorgeous woman who refused to take no for an answer — the worst thing he could imagine doing was taking her number. Bryan realised that he had very strong views about how a man should behave when together with his wife in a social situation. He would have adhered to his personal code of conduct.
‘How can you be so sure?’ said an inner voice.
Because I’m a man of my word, thought Bryan. Being a man of his word was at the core of his character. While some men rooted their masculinity in their ability to beat other men in combat or competition, or by earning more money than other men or sleeping with more women than other men, Bryan rooted his sense of masculinity in his capacity to keep his word. Put simply, if he ever broke his word, he would no longer be able to see himself as a Man. It was both his greatest strength and his Achilles Heel.
But while Bryan believed in honouring his word, Becky believed in honouring her feelings. She would deny this, of course, but the more Bryan listened to her actions rather than her words — and since the Night of Marcus DeVere, he had been paying attention — the picture was becoming clearer and clearer. While Bryan had one moral code which he applied to every role and situation, Becky had a selection of moral codes, each with its own rules and principles. As a mother, her moral code was very similar to Bryan’s — promises made to Tara were always kept, boundaries were clearly defined and adhered to, and Becky always strove for one hundred percent honesty with her daughter.
But as a wife … different story. Bryan was expected to be ‘flexible’ with regard to promises made, boundaries changed depending on how she felt, and although Becky never flat-out lied, she was not above ‘forgetting’ some key piece of information if it served her best interests. And when Bryan brought up a picture of Becky as daughter to her own parents, yet another moral code emerged with subtly different rules and principles to the others. She was like someone with multiple personalities.
What of the personality who came face-to-face with Marcus DeVere that night? She was certainly not Becky the Wife or Becky the Mother. No, in that moment, Bryan’s best guess was ‘Becky as Cinderella at the Ball’. The scullery maid who feels like an imposter in her beautiful dress, suddenly transformed when Prince Charming — whom everyone defers to — singles her out as the fairest in the land.
And what is the moral code of a woman in a moment like that?
Bryan heard footsteps on the stairs and Becky came in. She had changed into sweatpants and a jumper, with her hair tied back in a ponytail. She looked sexy in a girl-next-door kind of way. As expected, she sat cross-legged before Bryan, facing him in combat, and said:
‘How long are you going to keep this up?’
Bryan looked her right in the eye and said:
‘Until I know, deep in my heart, that you would never, ever cheat on me.’
‘In other words, “never”.’
‘That’s how it looks, I know, but you’re an intelligent woman, Becky. If you really want to convince me to trust you, I’m sure you’ll find a way.’
‘And why is it up to me?’
Bryan laughed. He got to his feet.
‘You see, this is an area of our marriage where I’ve always had a problem,’ he said. ‘You don’t trust me, but I’m supposed to trust you.’
‘I do trust you!’
‘So if I stay out all night and come home the next morning smelling of perfume, you’d trust me?’
‘Well … obviously not.’
‘Exactly, so I don’t pull that kind of shit. I go out of my way to earn your trust, to keep my word when I give it, to let you know where you stand, to act in a manner that is trust worthy. And I don’t just do that with you — I do that with everyone.’
Becky sat on the carpet, her face red, her mouth tightly pursed. She knew where this was going.
‘You, on the other hand,’ said Bryan, ‘want me to trust you without doing any of the work. And the reason I should trust you, as far as I can tell, is “Because I’m your wife”.’
Becky leapt to her feet.
‘Fine!’ she said. ‘So you’re perfect and I’m not! Got it!’