How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints) by Kathy Lette (top 10 novels to read TXT) 📗

The second worst thing about therapy is the communal waiting room. The compulsive gamblers invariably make the sex addicts wager bets with the passive aggressives about who can make the bulimics throw up first.

The worst thing about therapy is the therapists. Early on in our treatment, about late April, Bianca decided I had a ‘hostile vagina’.

‘Excuse me?’ Surely something was being lost in translation?

‘From everything Rory has told me in our one-to-one, I think you have an arousal disorder, Cassandra.’

‘No,’ I countered, ‘what I have is a job, kids, an angry spouse, high blood pressure, an overdraft and a promotion in the offing.’

‘Hostile vagina, eh?’ Rory rocked back in his beanbag and cocked one leg over the opposite knee. His face broke into a smug smile. It was the first time I’d seen him cheery for weeks. ‘You know what, Cass? I’m beginning to think maybe there really is something to this therapy malarkey after all,’ he gloated. ‘It does seem to explain your lack of horniness.’

‘Hey, how horny would you feel, having worked all day then coming home to spend your time cooking, cleaning . . . and teaching small people to construct oil derricks out of coat hangers? And what about your hostile penis, hmmm?’

Bianca, who obviously didn’t like to be interrupted, clapped her hands to regain the attention of the class. ‘Right. Who knows the basic ways to please a woman?’

I put my hand up. ‘Stacking the dishwasher. Not snoring. And telling a woman she doesn’t look fat in stretch Lycra.’

It was Rory’s turn to speak. ‘To become more cliterate, right?’

Cliterate? God, I thought. Where had he got that one?

Bianca bestowed a ‘go to the top of the class’ beam at my cunning hubby.

‘I’d just like to say that ninety-nine per cent of men give the rest of us a bad name,’ Rory chirped shrewdly, flashing our therapist his most endearing grin.

Bianca’s reciprocating smile was so intense I felt sure it could irradiate soft fruit. ‘Well, I’d just like to say that I’m sure we can help your wife overcome her inhibitions,’ she assured him in her honey-buttered accent.

‘My inhibitions!’ I scorned. ‘Huh! We’re talking about a man who can calculate the total surface area of every room in our house, determine the exact mile-to-the-gallon ratio of a trip from Calais to the South of France – where he effortlessly locates the remote fishing village that’s not even on a map – yet he can’t find my clit? No, the truth is he just can’t be bothered to find it!’

The women in the room barked laughs of recognition. The men grumbled about women demanding too much. Bianca’s embarrassing solution was to make us sit through a sex video, depicting ‘willing’ couples in acts of intercourse which were so graphic and badly lit, that it made my legs go to jelly. Classmates whose legs still functioned properly rose shakily to their feet and fled, leaving human-shaped holes in the walls. One thing was for sure. I would soon be over my sexual inhibitions. Mainly because I would now be celibate for the rest of my life.

By mid-May, the only thing on my mind was whether or not I was going out of it. Why else would I ever have insisted on dragging Rory to therapy? Hannah was adamant that I must persevere. All therapy was confrontational and difficult, she assured me as we had our heels pumiced at the local Chinese nail bar. Things would turn a corner if I just stuck with it. ‘And whatever you do, don’t mention your misgivings to Jasmine, dah-ling. She hates you seeing a shrink.’

‘Oh sweetie, I don’t hate you seeing a marriage therapist,’ Jazz said, wafting late as usual into the nail bar. ‘I’m seeing one too.’

‘What?’ I nearly fell off my stool into a bucket of pedicure shavings.

‘. . . and a Pilates instructor and a dentist, and a yoga teacher and a dog walker.’

Hannah jerked so violently she accidentally kicked over her foot-soaking bucket. ‘What happened to your Internet toy boy? Don’t tell me you’ve contracted some kind of CTD – Computer-Transmitted Disease.’

But Jazz remained immune to goading. ‘Well, my main squeeze is still my divine little toy boy. But I do have this small, emergency back-up Love God called Zen who trims my trees. We had sex for the first time yesterday morning, then the second, third, fourth and fifth time during the afternoon.’

‘Um, Jazz, I think you’ll find that running two or three simultaneous relationships for more than a month and you stop being an adulterer and officially qualify as a Mormon,’ I told her. ‘And what about Studz? Is he still cheating on you?’

‘Well, I’m not stalking him any more, sweetie. But last night he told me he was out with our neighbour, the dentist. And well, that was impossible. Because I was – but obviously I can’t say anything, can I? A rather modern situation, no? Love thy neighbour, but don’t get caught. That’s my motto.’

‘Jasmine,’ Hannah said seriously, ‘all these one-night stands, no matter how much you deny it, are just a shelter, however fragile, against the terror and despair of a broken heart. You do realize that?’

Jazz’s face crumpled for a second, before she steadied herself. ‘I’ve never had a one-night stand, Hannah,’ she corrected airily. ‘Just a few one-night relationships.’

My relationship, meanwhile, had no idea what side its bed was buttered on. It seems to me that there are very few aphrodisiacal bonuses to being able to visualize the 8,000 nerve endings in one’s cervix contracting during orgasm. This is what I thought as I stood before eight strangers holding my crutch and moaning in an effort to liberate my sexual chi. Blushing and sweating, I was suffering from a performance anxiety I hadn’t felt since those hedonistic hours of enforced folk dancing in Kogarah Bay Primary School.

‘Are the nerves in your vulva sensorium quivering?’ Bianca demanded of me.

‘Um. . .’

‘Fewer than fifty per cent of women actually achieve