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“Sounds like a bad case of vagina mortis,” he chuckled.
She decided to ignore the comment. Sara had always hated Hugh’s boarding school sense of humor.
“Hugh, just answer one question—am I pretty down there?”
“Down there?”
“You know—down there.” Sara bit her lip, Hugh’s obtuseness suddenly reminding her of darker times—and then there was the constant frustration of him only speaking English, for Sara’s natural inclination at this point would have been to break into French or Italian, which were somehow more suitable languages in which to discuss such matters.
“Oh! Down there.”
“Exactly.”
“Oh right, I see. Sara, does it really matter? I mean, it’s not like us men look at a woman that way. I mean, smell, lick, taste, and touch, but do we spend hours looking at the old Bermuda Triangle? No. Besides, I seem to remember you looked fairly decent, normal, pretty if you like. Jesus, Sara, what is this, some kind of female hormonal crisis?”
“And we had a good sex life, didn’t we, Hugh?”
“Christ, we’ve gone through all this before—sex was not our issue. Listen, Sara, I have a house full of guests; I have to get back.”
“It was this nightmare, my labia kept growing and growing and then I was lost in my own sex.”
There was a beat of silence in which Hugh’s incredulity seemed to rush down the phone line.
“Should you be discussing this with your ex-husband?” He suddenly sounded wary, as if he was worried Sara was setting some kind of trap.
“Well, who the hell should I be discussing it with? My great-aunt?”
“Sara, I think you need to see a shrink, I really do, but if you’re really worried, go and see a cosmetic surgeon to get yourself tidied up—a lot of chicks do it over here. Not that I give a fuck, but apparently they all like to look like porn stars—you know, nice tight boxes with no dangly bits.”
Sara’s heart sank. Was it possible she did have a problem and Hugh was just being polite?
“So you do think I have a problem?”
“Sara, that is not what I said, I just said—” Hugh was interrupted by the same young female voice asking when he was coming back to the party.
“Hold on a minute, Sara. . . .” Faintly Sara heard the words “. . . I’m just having a conversation with my ex-wife; she’s worried about her box! Yes, you heard right—friggin’ box!” The two then broke into peals of laughter. Humiliated, Sara shrank into the bed, feeling more alone than ever. She contemplated hanging up but before she had a chance Hugh’s voice came back on the line.
“Sorry about that, Sara, but listen—on the sex front, sweetie, we’re divorced now and you’re not meant to be ringing me in the middle of the night.”
“I miss you, Hughie. . . .” Sara slipped into that baby voice that Hugh had once found irresistible but now found irritating. She waited for his reply, hating herself for still wanting him, for demeaning herself in this way, but it was like an addiction. She couldn’t help herself. She did miss him and she still found it hard to accept the reality of his departure.
“Sara, don’t start with the pleading again, please.”
“But, Hughie, we were so great together. . . .”
“No we weren’t. Now please, we have no intimacy anymore and my psychologist told me it was bad for me to be in communication with you, so move on, Sara. I’m getting remarried, remember?” He hung up.
In the silence of the bedroom Sara found herself holding the receiver up like a wand, the buzzing dial tone a tiny beacon in what felt like a gathering storm. Finally she replaced it in its cradle. Feeling pathetic and unbelievably lonely, she got up and wandered into the en suite bathroom. As she sat perched on the toilet, she found herself staring at her mother’s portrait hanging on the opposite wall. Slim in a bikini with long, perfect legs and a high, full bosom, stretched out on a rock beside a turbulent sea, the eighteen-year-old future Mrs. Le Carin seemed to stare down at her daughter with all the arrogance of impossible female perfection.
“Fuck you,” Sara told the photograph, then wiped herself and flushed. Back in the bedroom, she wrapped herself in a dressing gown, sat down at her desk, and booted up the laptop. The screen flickered into life. Sara pulled her dressing gown closer around her shoulders, then hit the Internet key and typed “VAGINA” into Google. She selected the first link on the long list that appeared and found herself on a site for a charity campaigning against female circumcision and mutilation of female genitalia. There were several photographs of the crotches of young girls who had had their clitorises cut off and, in some of the images, their labia. Their stories appeared beneath the images and they were all heartbreaking and poignantly provincial in tone. Sara noticed the cases ranged from Turkey to Ethiopia. Reading it, it was as if she could hear their voices, soft, matter-of-fact, none of them self-pitying. They hung in her head. It was all too confronting, and not what she was looking for.
She exited the site and typed in “XXX.” Within seconds a list of porn sites appeared. Steeling herself, Sara began to plow her way through the group orgies, young women with legs splayed, men opening the legs of young women, women opening their own legs, bending down, leaning up, on their sides, upside down, in swimming pools, in baths, on fur rugs, on beds, in hotel rooms, in fields, on the beach, perched on the back of horses, on the back of ponies, on the back of goats . . . Sara stopped noticing the context as she surfed through images that were free to download. She even stopped looking at the rest of the women’s bodies, her eyes obsessively fixated on just one body part. She was on a mission, a search for the perfect vagina. Big outer lips, small inner lips, big clit, thin outer lips, big inner lips, tiny clitoris, no lips at all, barely a clitoris . . . The variety was endless, but after a while she began to notice a hierarchy—an elite of symmetrical, younger-looking vaginas that were neat, with the inner lips barely visible and the outer lips plump but not protruding—as she gazed at the genitalia, assessing each one for beauty.
She bookmarked several, then put them up on the screen in a line, trying to decide which was her favorite. She settled on one belonging to a blonde—a natural blonde, she assumed. The vagina was neat, pink, with no inner labia showing at all. Sara highlighted the image and hit Print. In the study next door the printer whirred into action. She got up and collected the printed image from the machine. Back in the bedroom under the lamplight it looked garish. After drawing a neat square around the vagina and the spread thighs of the porn star, she stapled to it the business card of a plastic surgeon that a girlfriend had recommended a couple of years ago. She glanced over at the alarm clock—it was nearly five a.m. She collapsed onto the bed, then reached into the side drawer, and after taking a couple of sleeping pills, fell asleep cradling herself.
• • •
Sara spent the next morning at the gym with her trainer/life coach. As she ran on the treadmill the memory of her call to Hugh, along with the accompanying sense of mortification, gradually faded, almost as though she were literally sweating her need for him out of her body. But afterward, in the changing rooms, she found herself painfully aware of the other women’s bodies—all of them younger and fitter—as she changed back into her clothes. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror looking flushed and over
