How to Kill Your Husband (and other handy household hints), Kathy Lette [books to read to increase intelligence .txt] 📗

your Krug and steals your fur coat. And the Human Rights doctor who hates humans. Not in general,’ she amended, ‘but in particular. He can save the lives of people he doesn’t know while decimating the lives of the people he does. I just don’t know him any more,’ she said desolately. ‘Who is this man I married? He’s alien to me.’

An alien from Planet Shag, I thought to myself, turning the hire car for home.

‘The stupid thing is, I still love him, Cass,’ she said with melting vulnerability. Love was a feeble word for what Jasmine felt. David Studlands was her whole life.

It was starting to seem that love prepares you for marriage the way needlepoint prepares you for round-the-world solo yachting.

Day seven was the Sabbath. Surely this had to be Studz’s day of rest? What was the jerk doing – auditioning mistresses? He’d had sex with so many women this last week his penis must have developed scar tissue.

Not only was I haemorrhaging money on babysitters as Rory was away at a conference, but I was so tired from a week of late nights that I was throwing clothes into the washing machine with the kids still in them. When I was making my daughter’s breakfast, I buttered my hand and placed it on Jenny’s plate.

But no. The very day Jazz was due back from her allegedly tranquil seaside sojourn, Studz was in their marital bed with a lithe, blonde-highlighted, forty-year-old university lecturer Jazz recognized as one of his private patients.

Sitting in the rental car opposite Jazz’s house watching them draw the blinds in the master bedroom, I made a stab at jocularity because, really, we were both beyond shock now. ‘My husband’s a vet. Let’s just hope Rory doesn’t sleep with his patients.’

‘Maryanne, that’s her name,’ said Jazz. ‘I saw her at our house once. After her face lift, she started suffering from fainting fits, as I recall. Obviously I had no idea that the cure was to take deep breaths, lean forward . . . and put her head between the legs of her doctor.’

I laughed tartly. ‘What does she lecture on, this Maryanne? Husband rustling?’

‘Sylvia Plath.’

‘So she’s Plathological,’ I punned.

We roared at that. Great belly-wrenching guffaws. Exhaustion and emotional overload had kicked us up into a state of near-hysteria.

‘I think it’s time I left David a note. Hello, darling. Dinner is on the table and . . . your wife’s head is in the gas-oven.’

We laughed until we cried . . . Only when Jazz stopped laughing, she just kept right on crying.

5. If He Wants Breakfast in Bed, Tell Him to Sleep in the Kitchen

Marriage, I’d now realized, is for Extreme Sports enthusiasts. It’s a highwire act with no safety net. The Amazing, Dare-Devil, Flying Married Couple! Trapeze Artists Extraordinaire!

And Jazz had fallen. Splat. Leaving Hannah and me to try to pick up the pieces. It was Sunday afternoon and we were sitting around my crowded kitchen drinking neat Scotch and painting Jazz’s naked body with fake tan before a fan heater. She was due back at Heathrow from her Sri Lankan holiday in an hour. Hence this crisis meeting.

I was slightly nervous as I don’t often entertain visitors. This is mainly to do with the abundance of methane-gas-producing canines. Guests were constantly reeling back, eyes smarting, lungs scrambling for oxygen, great-grandfathers reliving the mustard gas attacks they endured in the trenches . . . or worse. The one and only time I’d attempted sweet-talking my Headmaster, Mr Scroope, over dinner about the up-and-coming Deputy Head vacancy, he’d fled in humiliation after one of Rory’s pet rats tried to mate with his hairpiece. But this was an emergency. My kids had been banished to their rooms and some dental-drill rap was now vibrating down through the ceiling.

Predictably, the conversation kicked off with Jazz blaming herself. As I sloshed whisky into chipped glasses, she began to make a squeaking noise like a stuck drawer.

‘It must be my fault.’ She peered through her wispy fringe like a startled woodland creature. ‘David just doesn’t find me sexy any more.’

Hannah and I immediately went into our roles as human Wonderbras, uplifting, supportive and making our girlfriend look bigger and better. But with Jazz’s melted-lemon-drop hair and skin as pale and smooth as vanilla ice cream, we didn’t need to exaggerate.

‘Jazz, darl, you are so beautiful. I mean, look at your hair. It never has a bad day. And you’re soooo slim. Unlike me. Which is bloody unfair when I’m the one always dieting,’ I complained, goodnaturedly. ‘In my life I’ve lost 147 stone, do you know that?’

Grief was devouring our friend and I ached for her. Banging your head against a wall also uses up 150 calories an hour and that seemed to be Jasmine’s current form of exercise.

‘Yes. And I’m the one who’s bought every cream. Creams for toes, tummies, eyelids, inner goddamn insteps even. And all for nothing,’ Hannah added lightheartedly. ‘I have more lines than British Telecom.’

But Jazz couldn’t be cheered. She just stared mournfully at her whisky glass, as if it were a crystal ball.

‘Turn,’ I ordered. As though basting a chicken, I began slathering fake tan onto my girlfriend’s haunches. She looked pensive and delicate in the wintry light. Naked, her thinness shook me. She seemed to have dropped seven pounds in the last week.

‘Maybe I breastfed too long? My tits have gone all tribeswoman. Then there’s my stretchmarks, crepe-paper bum, pelvic-floor muscles shot to pieces. That’s the one thing about childbirth which nobody tells you. That you will never be able to laugh again without peeing yourself,’ Jazz whimpered.

‘It’s true,’ I confirmed. ‘At your dinner party the other night I laughed so hard, tears were running down my legs.’

Childfree Hannah squawked a laugh, but at the mention of pelvic floors Jazz and I suddenly got that expression you see on the faces of people whose dogs are crapping on the street: that vacant, preoccupied, this-isn’t-my-dog look, as we secretly contracted our vaginal muscles.

‘Listen, dah-ling,