too ready,’ he’d chide and then leave her alone once again.
* * *
Thandi was ready. Every night, she lay beside her husband in bed, White Linen perfume seeping from her neck and tickling her nose. For a long time, she had been too preoccupied with caring for her son to mind that Lee had stopped having sex with her. Now that Joseph was almost self-sufficient when it came to food, clothing and shelter, she was ready to make another baby, a new needy being. But in the meantime, her co-creator had slipped away. Their marriage had ceased to be conjugal; his body did not conjugate hers; there was no grammar between them.
This sometimes happens in a marriage, and with age, but Thandi was not done with sex. She was thirty-one, brimming with desire, haunted nightly with visions of men – rough men, hung men, sweet men, creative men – annoyingly, all slight revisions of her man. Lee had not been her first but he had been her best. He had set her sexual compass. How humiliating to lie on her back every night, nipples brushing her nightie with each breath, aching for him, while he lay on his side, snoring with a stringy whistle, his palms clasped and wedged between his knees.
He still slept with other women, she was sure of it. But what could she say? She had forgiven him in advance, hadn’t she? She had found his little fuck-book in Harare, that cold list of names, and she had run off to Livingstone, and she had bounced right back to him anyway. They had never spoken about that book but it had revealed to her just how broad his tastes were, just how expansive the circle of his desire. When she had agreed to marry him, she had never thought that one day, she might be left standing outside of it.
Her ache for him spread through her each night, as if issuing from an unbearable throbbing in her upper left wisdom tooth. She eventually resorted to touching herself while he slept beside her. She would hitch one leg like a flamingo and fumble with her fingers, pondering what would happen if he caught her busy-handed, if he woke up and asked: ‘What on earth are you doing, Thunder?’ Would he believe her if she said she was scratching an itch? Would he roll on top of her with a cheeky grin? No. Whenever she turned to him and opened her eyes, she’d find him dozing through her solitary ministrations. It was a small death every time.
She began taking herself to the guest room to take herself in private. She would lock the door and lie on the bed. Eyes closed, breath catching, she would thrum and clench, automatic tears slipping down her temples, a rancid taste in her mouth. These excursions always put her to sleep and sometimes she didn’t make it back to the master bedroom until morning. She would come in and find Lee awake, sitting on the edge of the bed, rubbing his eyes. ‘Good morning,’ he would say with a soft smile. He never asked where she had been, which felt like both a relief and an insult.
One evening, as she kissed her son goodnight, she saw Joseph wince and turn his head from her mouth. Only then did it dawn on her that her toothache might smell as rotten as it tasted. Was that why Lee was avoiding her? She started taking antibiotics, hoping to quell the infection. A month later, Mrs Thandiwe Banda found herself once again caught with her pants down, sitting on the toilet – her own this time – and wondering what she had done to deserve this. She scrutinised the canvas between her legs, trying to read the baffling stain, sniffing tentatively at it. It smelled like a bakery and it felt like one too – dry and hot as fire. Hellfire? Was this her punishment for her nightly visits to the guest room? Thandi was not a regular churchgoer, but she was well acquainted with flaws and their consequences.
Thandi said nothing to her doctor husband and she barely registered the pharmacist’s matter-of-fact diagnosis – thrush – and how normal a condition it was, especially on antibiotics. She suffered in silence as she inserted the cool lozenges into her hot hole. She suffered as the prescribed medication destroyed the pearly legions of yeast inside her. She suffered a trip to the dentist, who peremptorily pulled the tooth.