Free The Secrets of Married Women by Carol Mason

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