Becky looked at her husband with tears in her eyes. She slowly shook her head.
‘You fucker,’ she said.
***
Bryan joined Becky when she went upstairs to bed, although not with the intention of having sex. But one thing led to another, the nightclothes just seemed to come off and before long the two of them were inside each other, making love. It was a gentle, undramatic missionary style fuck. Bryan reached orgasm, came inside Becky, and then the two of them just lay connected, holding each other in silence.
Bryan tried to lift his head to look Becky in the face. Becky’s arm flexed across his shoulders, indicating she wanted him to stay put. Bryan relented, his eyes open, his mind turning. As if reading his thoughts, Becky turned her head so that her mouth was by his ear.
‘I’m not angry with you,’ she said. ‘But you gave me a lot to think about, and I need the space to think about it.’
Bryan once more moved to lift his head. This time, Becky did not try to stop him. He looked down at her and frowned.
‘Do you need me to sleep in the spare room?’ he said.
‘No, no, no,’ said Becky. ‘I need mental and emotional space, not physical space. I still want to make love and be touched and … and be with the man I love.’
Bryan nodded stoically. Becky tilted her head as she looked up at him.
‘You don’t believe me, do you?’ she said. ‘When I call you “the man I love”?’
‘I … believe you’re telling me the truth of what you feel.’
Becky’s face hardened.
‘Get off me,’ she said.
Bryan pushed himself up and off her, moving over to his side of the bed. Becky shifted herself away and lay on her back, one forearm over her brow. She stared upwards and a tear ran down the side of her face.
‘You know, I used to take pride in the fact that I married an honest man,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t one of these stupid women who’ll get hurt by some man’s lies! Little did I know that honesty can hurt just as fucking much.’
Bryan said nothing. Becky looked at him from under her arm.
‘It’s those books you’re reading, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I’ve been looking at some of them. They basically say that a woman is incapable of unconditional love.’
‘Well, I disagree with that.’
‘Do you?’
‘Yes. I see women unconditionally love their children all the time.’
‘Their men, Bryan! Their husbands, their partners, their whatever-you-want-to-call-it! That no woman will ever love her man unconditionally!’
‘Oh, okay.’ Bryan sighed. ‘Well, that I agree with.’
‘So you believe that no matter how much a woman loves her husband, she will always be on the lookout for a man of “higher value”?’
‘No, that she will always feel a sexual attraction to a man she perceives to be of higher value.’
‘Well, how is that any different to a man getting a hard-on when he sees a nice pair of tits?’
‘It’s not. That’s kind of the point.’
Becky glowered at Bryan. Then she turned her gaze back to the ceiling.
‘So what you’re saying,’ she said, ‘is that when I danced with Marcus DeVere, I got the female equivalent of a massive boner?’
‘The mother of all boners, judging by what I saw.’
Becky’s face twitched as she forced herself not to smile. Bryan pretended not to notice.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘So are you basically saying that my sex drive got the better of me?’
‘It’s more than just sex drive,’ said Bryan. ‘It’s the dreams, the Cinderella fantasy, the longing for perfect love. You told me yourself that when you were single and feeling lonely, that watching Pretty Woman made you feel better. That you’ve seen literally hundreds of romantic movies, all with the same basic message: that a woman should settle for nothing less than “the One”. Do you seriously believe that’s had no effect on your thoughts and feelings?’
‘Men have fantasies too!’
‘Yes, but we get slammed for ours! A movie shows a pretty girl loving a man even when he’s a dork and she’s dubbed a Manic Pixie Dream Girl! Olivia Newton-John dressing sexy to get John Travolta at the end of Grease is “problematic”! Edge of Tomorrow wins a feminist award for “Most Egregious Age Gap” because Emily Blunt kisses Tom Cruise! Trust me, I am well aware of what the world thinks of my fantasies!’
Becky looked at him, her forearm still on her brow as though shielding her eyes. Bryan looked away. He was angry. But he wasn’t angry at Becky and she sensed that. When Bryan felt her move on the bed, he looked over and saw her get close to him, her face clear of her arm, her expression softened. Her lips looked very kissable.
‘So what is your fantasy, Bryan?’ she said. ‘What is the love that you long for in your dreams?’
Bryan felt tears prick his eyes. A movie had entered his thoughts, but he also felt a reluctance to tell Becky what it was. Unfortunately, she had already seen his reaction and knew there was something to tell.
Bryan took a deep breath.
‘Do you remember the movie High Noon?’ he said.
‘Is it one of your black-and-white “classics”?’
‘Yes, a Western. We did watch it together one time.’
‘Remind me.’
‘Gary Cooper is this marshal who has just married Grace Kelly. And on the day they’re due to leave town, Cooper gets the news that a man he put in jail is being released and is on the noon train.’
‘Hence the title?’
‘Yes,’ said Bryan.
‘Go on.’
‘This man has sworn to kill the marshal and there are three henchmen waiting at the station to help him. So Cooper goes around the town trying to find people willing to face the gunmen with him.’
‘Oh, I think I remember now. Everyone chickens out, right?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘Okay.’
‘Anyway, throughout the whole movie, his wife is adamant that they should leave. That this is the town’s problem not his, that he should put their marriage first, and moreover she’s religious and doesn’t believe in violence. And when the noon train arrives, Grace Kelly gets on it with the intention of leaving him, and Gary Cooper has to face the four gunmen alone.’
Bryan felt a lump in his throat and had to swallow.
‘But the moment she hears the first gunshots,’ he said, ‘she gets off that train and runs back to town. She finds a gun in the marshal’s old office and shoots one of the gunmen through a window. And when the bad guy grabs her and tries to use her as a human shield, she scratches his face, giving Gary Cooper the chance to shoot him.
‘And here’s the thing that really gets me: at no point in the film does the husband ever ask her to do this. In fact, the marshal is old school — the kind of man to tell a woman to keep out of harm’s way. His wife chooses to do it. In a world in which men are expected to protect women, she chooses to risk her own life to stand by her man. I can’t imagine a woman loving a man more than that.’
There was a long silence. Bryan was on his stomach, propped up on his elbows and staring down at the sheet. Becky lay on her side facing Bryan. She let out a deep outbreath, right from the pit of her stomach.
‘Wow…’ she said. ‘You don’t ask for much, do you?’
‘It’s a fantasy,’ said Bryan. ‘I would never expect that of any woman. If our door were kicked in by home invaders, I’d be bundling you and Tara out of a window while I stayed to hold them off. Even without Tara, I’d be trying to save you.’
‘Do you really think I would leave you to die for me?’
‘If push came to shove,’ said Bryan, looking her in the eye, ‘I hope I would have the courage to insist on it.’
***
For the following few days, Bryan gave Becky the mental and emotional space she had asked for. He avoided the topics of Marcus DeVere, the trust issue and anything to do with the inner workings of their marriage. They still made love, were effective parents to Tara and could talk about day-to-day stuff with their usual combination of practicality and humour, but there was a kind of psychic no-man’s-land between them. And it was okay.
In his spare time, Bryan continued with his reading and viewing regimen. Becky meanwhile tried to have conversations with friends and colleagues to get some feedback and clarity. However, the more she talked with other women, the more uniform their advice seemed to be. Many had the attitude that it was just a dance and Bryan was being controlling and over-sensitive. ‘He should just get over it,’ was a common response. Even those women who accepted that Becky had crossed a line felt that the trust issue was more his problem than hers.
‘Did you apologise and promise never to do it again?’ asked one female colleague.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Then what more are you supposed to do?’
‘Well, the issue is that he doesn’t trust me to keep my promise.’
‘Then why did he marry you?’
That was always the argument at the end of the rainbow: a man doesn’t ask a woman to marry him if he doesn’t trust her, therefore a man who marries a woman will always trust her. And, by the same logic, if a man loses his trust in a woman, then he should no longer want to be married to her, therefore the marriage is effectively over. It was an argument which totally failed to take into account factors such as Tara and their family responsibilities and the fact that Becky still loved Bryan and he still loved her.
Finally, almost in desperation, Becky started reading Bryan’s books in earnest. It was stomach-churning. She was appalled at the unflattering picture that was painted of women’s behaviour and sexuality. One male author claimed that most women find it perfectly acceptable for a married woman to get pregnant by her Alpha lover and pass it off as her beta husband’s kid. Becky slammed the book shut and went online, looking for articles written by women to refute this monstrous claim.
To her horror, everything she read only confirmed it. Okay, the feminist writers hotly denied that any woman would behave in such a fashion … and yet they were fervently against mandatory DNA testing. They had no problem with child support laws which forced men to pay for children not biologically theirs. They condemned men who insisted on paternity as ‘insecure in their masculinity’. In fact, as far as Becky could tell, the official feminist position was that a woman’s right to privacy superseded the child’s right to know who their true father was.
It was ironic. The more Becky read articles by female writers talking about women’s rights, the more her thoughts went from ‘Why doesn’t Bryan trust me?’ to ‘How does any man trust any woman ever?’