Bleeding Hearts. Lindy Cameron
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"What's to discuss?" Tori demanded, as she did the rounds to fill the empty champagne glasses. "Unless you can get some kind of mileage out of keeping it, you know like he's a Windsor of the royal variety, or an offspring of clan Packer, why the hell would you want to keep the bastard's name? Get your own back I say."
"You haven't taken yours back," Paula pointed out.
"Ah! My case is an acceptable exception to my own rule. I didn't want my own back. One of the best things about marrying Frank, especially in retrospect, was getting rid of my maiden name."
"What was it?" Kit asked.
"Horney," everyone else chorused.
"I really hated being Tori Horney," Tori snarled. She sat back, looked thoughtful for a moment and then in the sweetest voice, as if it was a new and surprising idea, she added: "Also, I never really liked my father. Actually he was an arsehole, so I couldn't see any reason to give up the perfectly nice name of one utter bastard to return to the surname of a bodily orifice."
"Here, here!" Carmel cheered. "But, I'm still tossing whether to keep Fisher or go back to Reece."
"Tori's case aside," Kit said. "I don't understand why you'd take his name in the first place."
"So you can take the prick to the cleaners, when he cheats on you," Grace explained. "It's much easier if you've shown your good faith in the marriage by taking his name."
"You make it sound like you expect it not to work," Kit said.
"No! Do I, honey? " Grace queried, with a melodramatic flail of her hands. "Of course I didn't mean to and, like, the tabloids tell the truth and a colourful box of tampons gives you enjoyable cramps. Yeah, sure!"
Kit raised her eyebrows.
"Well, how many marriages do you know that last the distance?" Grace asked.
"A few," Kit shrugged. "My parents for one."
"Mine too," Dee declared, giving Kit a proudly supportive nod.
"You can't count your parents," Tori remarked. "Not our generation's parents anyway. Most of them only stuck it out because it was the thing to do, for the kids' sake, even though they hated each other. After that they stayed together because they were too unimaginative to do anything else, and in the end they're too old or scared to change."
"My parents adored each other until the day my father died," Kit stated.
"Mine are still madly in love," Dee said. "And Robbie and I expect to be exactly the same."
"Yeah, well we don't talk about you and Robbie," Miranda snarled.
"Why not?" Kit asked.
"Because they're the perfect couple. Teen sweethearts, married at 20, still cooing," Paula said.
"So?" Dee asked.
"So, we're all as envious as hell. Always have been," Tori admitted to her, before turning to Kit. "Robbie is handsome and honest and thoughtful and, worst of all, not in the least bit boring."
"He's also as faithful as all get-out," Miranda complained. "Which, as a concept, is as rare as truth in advertising. For that reason alone we all think Robbie is the man of the century, this one and last, and we all hate Dee because she won't share him."
"God knows I've tried to make him notice me," Paula admitted.
"Ooh, me too," Carmel said, pressing her hand to her heaving breast.
"Jesus, you lot!" Rebecca laughed. "You admire him for being a one-woman man, yet you admit to trying to seduce him?"
"Of course!" Miranda declared. "What choice do we have? It is, truly, the greatest dilemma facing women, here at the dawn of this new millennium: the only men worth having are already being had."
The greatest dilemma? Bloody hell, Kit thought. Men and women are from Mars and Venus; and I am from somewhere else entirely - thank god! Or somebody more appropriate.
"I thought that was the oldest dilemma," Paula frowned. "I mean the nineties - remember them girls? - they were also completely void of available men with dicks and brains."
"But if you did have it off with Robbie," Dee was saying, seemingly not fazed by all this drooling over her husband, "then he wouldn't be what you admired any more. He'd just be another cheating husband. And, to be perfectly honest, I'd have no choice but to kill you. With my own bare hands."
The three-second silence was followed by an eruption of laughter, which included Dee herself snorting champagne all over the table. "I'm serious," she insisted.
"Please don't deny us our fantasies, Dee," Carmel begged. "You and your Robbie are safe, but Miranda is right: all that's left to us are the dregs or," she grinned, "our continuing adventures in the commitment-free-zone with someone else's lying bastard."
"Men! What are they good for?" Paula sang, to the tune of War.
"Nothing else, but fucking," Miranda and Grace chimed in.
"Am I right in inferring that you've all had affairs with married men?" Kit asked, when they'd all stopped singing and giggling. Dee looked smugly superior as she shook her head and Rebecca gave her a raised-eyebrow smile, but the other five demonstrated the deadpan-serious look to the ground, the sky, their hands and then each other, and then fell about laughing again.
Kit wondered whether it might be time to go home. It was seriously hard to get a handle on any of these women. The fact that they all belonged to the 'brutally honest' breed of talkers actually made it harder to figure out whether one of them might be harbouring a dark hatred for Rebecca Jones, or a closet fondness for vituperative letter writing. And the alcohol was making them sillier by the second!
"Oh my god, she's so young," Paula intoned, waving a hand at Kit. "Make the most of whatever you think you've got, Katherine, because in another ten years you'll be right here where we are."
"Yeah, at our age, it's the married penis or none at all," Carmel agreed morosely.
Shoot me now then, please, Kit thought desperately. I don't want to go straight!
"There must be some single blokes out there," Dee insisted.
"Sure there are Dee," Paula slurred. "But if they're single and in their forties you gotta ask what's wrong with them. And the only other kind of man out there belongs to the boys brigade and likes to hang his bum cheeks and whatnot out of leathers every year at the Sydney Mardi Gras."
"What on earth are you all complaining about?" Grace asked. "Married man equals sex without laundry, sex without cooking," she reminded them, caressing herself as she spoke. "Sex without having to put up with his obnoxious friends. That kind of sex couldn't be more perfect."
"She has a very valid point," Miranda stated, tipsily prodding the air with her finger for emphasis. "I, however, now prefer my playmates young, unattached, adoring and, temporarily, at my beck and call. I did the married jerk thing once. It only took me three months to realise I didn't have the patience for it. I spent my days getting ready for him to come, waiting for him to come and watching him come. I quite often came on my own, after he'd come and gone, because his time was limited, and sometimes I came on my own because he didn't come at all when he'd said he would. It was very boring and I went through a lot of batteries."
"Do you, um, give any thought to their wives?" Kit asked.
"Who are you? Miss goody two shoes?" Grace asked. "My god that's a stupid expression," she added.
"Not at all," Kit replied. "But, and correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like you've all been done over by a cheating husband, yet you're all happy to be the other women in someone else's potential marriage break up."
"We don't want to keep them, honey," Grace laughed.
"Your motives are irrelevant if she finds out,"