The shrink never looks at her watch, but Lizbie suspects there is a clock somewhere in the room, one without a tick. She is aware of time being measured; it is pointless, really, this so-called talking cure. In the hours she has spent here, the backs of her knees sticking to the puffy leather of one of those ugly recliner chairs all psychiatrists keep for their clients, this shrink, like others she has seen, has never said anything that has helped her get through her days. They have excavated Lizbie’s childhood right down to the fact that she was named after a poem by Thomas Hardy. Sometimes Lizbie wants to shake the woman. Other times she wants to shock her.
“Of course, Marty and Griff both wanted to fuck me.”
The shrink doesn’t bat an eyelid; she appears to Lizbie to be made of something like the materials that must be used to quake proof tall buildings.
“And which of them did you want?” The therapist’s voice is mild, her grey eyes unblinking behind steel-rimmed glasses.
“I wanted them both,” Lizbie says.
For a moment she sees them on the verandah where they had been playing that Sunday morning – Marty with no shoes, no shirt, a length of blue batik cloth clinging to his narrow hips and dark hair falling into his eyes, Griff with his silky blonde beard and his lazy smile.
“They were …” she feels her composure dissolving, and draws in breath, “… exquisite. They were exquisite human beings, each in their different ways,” she says. “I slept with both of them, of course, but it was Griff I married.”
But her session is over. It never matters where they have got to; when the hour is up the shrink rises from her chair and calls time. A part of Lizbie resents this, and another part doesn’t blame her: imagine listening all day to people’s fucked up lives, the disasters they’ve brought upon themselves and the shit that fate has stuck in their path for them to slip arse over kite on. As she pays at the reception desk, Lizbie thinks she won’t come again. Because what point is there in throwing good money after bad when Marty and Griff are gone, and her perfect life has turned out a shipwreck. This woman she pays to listen to her knows less than she does. Lizbie tells herself she will just have to survive until it is all over for her, too, and the sooner the better.
Before she fell in love with Marty, Lizbie had fallen for his house. It was that first glimpse of Winterbourne, its white gables, and the black door with its fanlight like half a snowflake. Although it was really just a large suburban home, in her imagination it had been a lighthouse, set steadfast upon a rock, impervious to storms, a fixed point in the tilting world. The thing she’d loved most was that it was always immaculate, as if elves emerged at night to dust and polish, and whisk everything into place, like in that fairy tale about the shoemaker.
No such elves favoured her own house – for while her mother could argue all day long against see-through blouses and push-up bras for teens, she couldn’t keep a kitchen or a bathroom clean. In Lizbie’s opinion, her mother should cull ninety per cent of her belongings and give what remained a thorough scrub. And she was damned if she was going to become a midnight elf all the while her ma sat festering in that decrepit garden shed she called her ‘Writing Room’, pecking away at her portable typewriter.
Marty’s mother was the one who kept everything shipshape. Lizbie was a bit afraid of Claire Delaney, but she revered her impeccably laundered table linen, her pressed pillowcases and sheets that smelled of fabric softener when you shook them out to put them on the bed. She loved her pantry with its shelves of bottled plums and peaches, and jars of chutney and jam, all made from fruit trees in the garden. Claire was a gold standard housekeeper; there was never a rush to clean up because people were coming over, and there were people in that house every weekend of the year.
Marty claimed his mother had entertained when he was a kid so that he could appear to have friends.
“She’s always been terrified I wouldn’t turn out normal,” he said, giving his smoky laugh.
Marty had been a solitary child, and hadn’t taken to any of the children who came to the house with their parents, until he met Griff. Marty and Griff had been solid ever since. After Griff’s mother Annie left home, or as Griff always put it in that dry, throw-away tone he reserved for speaking about her, ‘After Ma got Liberated’, he and his younger brother Clem had stayed at Winterbourne while their father chased Annie down and tried to coax her home. Lizbie often wondered how different all their lives might have been if he had succeeded. But Annie Darkley had bolted to a commune in India she’d heard of at a Theosophical Society meeting. There, according to Griff, his mother had been brainwashed by a fake guru. And then something bad had happened to her, and she had ended up in the asylum.
As soon as she started singing with Griff and Marty, Lizbie became aware of the young women who circled them, looking for a way in. Few found it. The two were immersed in music, and it was Lizbie’s luck that she could sing. She’d passed grade six piano, too, and they got her a keyboard, and worked out some arrangements. The three of them gigged in all kinds of venues, from bars to private parties, occasionally getting in a drummer to beef up the sound, and bringing out the electric guitar and bass. The longer they made music together the more deeply Lizbie became embedded in their lives, although as Marty told her once when he was stoned – he would always be closer to Griff than to anyone: Lizbie should have taken it as a warning, but she’d been stoned herself.
She had lied to the shrink about sleeping with Marty. They had tried often enough, always because Lizbie had willed it, because she had got them to a place where it could happen, but they had never fully succeeded. This thwarting only fanned Lizbie’s desire. She was consumed with a scorching, helpless love for Marty, that at least she knew enough not to declare.
One afternoon, after a worse than usual argument with her mother, Lizbie had found herself homeless, and Marty had asked his mother if she could stay at Winterbourne until she got her own place. To Lizbie’s joy, Claire had acquiesced. Marty had helped lug Lizbie’s belongings up to the attic room next to his own, and crashed on the bed to watch her unpack.
“You’re sure your folks don’t mind me staying?”
Marty’s smile was wry. “Mum’s convinced you’re going to make a man of me.”
Lizbie had paused with her arms full of crumpled clothes and looked at Marty – his secretive eyes and his evasive mouth, the shadows in his face that gave him a suffering, patient look: he could have played Jesus Christ and never had to work at the part, she thought. And she had chosen not to understand, because if she were being honest, Lizbie had already guessed that Marty was gay. It was just that somehow – and perhaps his mother felt the same – she hoped it wouldn’t be permanent.
Marty was in his second year of architecture, and beginning to realise it wasn’t what he wanted to do; Griff had dropped out of med school after a year and was working in a surf shop; Lizbie was waitressing in a vegetarian restaurant. They hung out together at a wine bar called Moby Dick’s. It was on one of the beachside strips not far from where Griff lived. The owner, Raymond, gave them regular Sunday afternoon gigs. He was the first guy Lizbie had ever met who was openly camp. Most nights, Moby Dick’s was full of young men. There would always be stray girls, like Lizbie, who were somehow attached to them, and a few of those were what Raymond mockingly referred to as ‘beards’. If she’d ever had any doubts about Marty they fell away at Moby Dick’s, for it was impossible not to notice how his body took on a new, more languid set of gestures in Raymond’s presence; even the way he turned his head was different.
Lizbie, inwardly squirming, suspected that Marty had slept with Raymond, and she wondered whether, behind her back, Raymond referred to her as a ‘beard’. Meanwhile, Griff was his usual laid-back surfer-boy self; he was amiable towards Raymond, and around him and his friends his body language never altered.
On the third or fourth Sunday gig at Moby Dick’s, Lizbie realised in a flash of insight that her love for Marty had withered. Loving him was a one-way t
ransaction; it had become untenable. It was then that she had turned to Griff.
Despite herself, she goes back to the shrink. Perhaps she has become addicted to sitting in an ugly chair and trawling through the past; or perhaps, after all, there is comfort in talking, rather than cycling through these events over and over in her head, allowing them to herd her towards her own madness.
“Griff had his hang-ups,” she says. “His mother going off when he was young had screwed him over, but in every other respect he was straightforward, compared to Marty.”
“So Marty was gay, and Griff was straight?”
“Before I met them, Griff would swing either way.” Lizbie sighs, and is silent.
Eventually, the woman prompts her. “Their partnership had been sexual as well as musical, until you joined them.”
Lizbie rakes a hand through her hair. “Yeah, I guess.”
“You guess, or you know?”
She nods, resigned to where the conversation must go. “In high school they used to get stoned together, and experiment sexually,” she said. “But Marty had been with other boys; he always had lovers, whereas Griff only ever had Marty.”
“Then Griff fell in love with you.”
“I think he was just waiting for me to realise I was never going to get anywhere with Marty. That happened around the time that Griff’s father died, and I moved into their house out at the beach,” she says. “The place was a wreck, because Griff’s dad never had another relationship after his wife left, so you can imagine, three men living on their own for years, nobody keeping things straight.”
The shrink nods, and makes a note in her file.
“That’s when Marty progressed from smoking dope to using,” says Lizbie. “He got into it with a few people he’d met at Moby Dick’s. I don’t know, maybe Raymond was a dealer.”
“Was it because you had come between Marty and Griff?”
“Well, yeah, and the fact that the music scene had changed out of all recognition. Who would want to dance to someone playing records? That’s what we thought when we first heard about disco, but when it took off, live music was ruined. For years there we were only playing sporadically. Raymond still gave us gigs; there were still private parties, but not like before.”
The shrink scribbles something else in her file, and Lizbie wonders what it can be.
“Griff and I were happy,” she says. “We had the sweetest wedding. In his white suit he was so beautiful he could have been the bride, and I was in a second-hand white dress with a little wreath of roses on my head; Griff said I looked like Ophelia. There were no bridesmaids, no best man. Maybe Griff didn’t want to ask Marty. We just walked into the place together, and walked out as man and wife.” She pauses, takes a sip from the glass of water beside her. “I guess we were playing at being grownups all through the early eighties. Griff had started talking about going back to study part time. He knew he didn’t have the stomach for medicine, but something else. I thought he’d have made a great teacher – he was always so calm and patient; he saw the good in everyone.”
Lizbie sits in silence, allowing the grief that rises in her to settle. As she has been taught to do by an earlier therapist, she visualises breathing it out into the room like smoke, letting it drift out the window and away over the rooftops.
“After you were married, did you see much of Marty, outside of the gigs?”
“All the time. We never fell out, although it sometimes got a bit strained between them. Marty would come out to the house a couple of times a week, and I’d make a curry with vegetables I’d grown in the garden, or I’d do lasagne because they both adored it. We’d eat, and then smoke, and sit around the kitchen playing music just for the pleasure of it. Those nights were some of the happiest of my life,” she says.
“What caused strain between them?” asks the therapist.
“Oh, Marty’s drug use. Griff worried about him. And Marty would laugh at us, poke fun. He would say that next thing we’d be decorating a nursery – he had a genuine horror of babies and pregnant women. It used to rile Griff, because we had talked about having kids one day.”
“And Marty’s overdose was accidental?”
They are moving out into the deep water now. Suddenly Lizbie is willing the clock to complete the hour and free her from the chair.
“I think it was, even though people said he’d been depressed.”
“But not so low he would have ended his life?”
“Music was still doing it for Marty. He was writing songs, and planning to record; he had booked a studio and asked Griff to play flute and bass.” Lizbie leans forward in the chair as if rejecting its padded comfort. “But there were other places he’d go to – clubs where you had to know someone to get in. When Marty got beaten up outside one of them he had to tell his parents he’d been mugged somewhere else.” She chews her lip, and subsides into the chair.
“So Marty’s parents didn’t know he was gay?”
“I’d say his mother suspected. But they were the straightest people on the planet, he could never have told them.” Lizbie shrugs. “And then their marriage was in trouble. So yeah, I guess things had begun to pile up for Marty. But I still think he would have left a note. He’d have wanted to dramatize the moment.”
Perhaps the clock has stopped. Lizbie wants to leap up and out the door, but there is no escape.
“And what was it like in the aftermath?”
How to describe those freefalling days after Marty died, with Griff refusing to get out of bed, to wash, or eat. Unable to comfort him, Lizbie had sat at the kitchen table and considered setting fire to the house; she’d called Lifeline and talked to someone for two and a half hours; she had walked to the beach and considered throwing herself off the jetty, just so she wouldn’t have to go back and witness the extent of her husband’s grief. Would Griff have been this way if she had died? It was hard to imagine. He loved her, she was certain, but it looked like he’d loved Marty more. She’d been so confused, so lost; she hadn’t known where to turn. In the end she’d gone back and crawled in beside him, and after a while the two of them had pulled themselves up out of the nose dive, more or less.
“Yeah, it was full on with Griff.”
“And how long afterwards was it that he got the diagnosis?”
A year had dragged by that had seemed like a decade. Then Griff had started forcing himself to do things again.
“It was a year and three months after Marty died.”
“How did he find out?”
“Oh, ever since med school Griff had been a blood donor; he was one of the rare types, so he went once or twice a year to give blood. This time they were running low, so the blood bank had called.”
“And his donation screened positive for HIV.”
“Apparently. He never had that conversation with me, he just …”
Again she has to wait while the feelings pass through her, only this time it takes so long that the therapist rises.
“I’m so sorry, Lizbie, that we have to end at this point. If you were able to wait until my next client leaves we could …”
Lizbie stands up. “No, it’s okay. Well, not okay, but obviously I’ve talked about this before.”
The woman opens the door for her, and Lizbie passes out into the reception area; it is filled with people waiting to see other shrinks, to see her shrink, people who don’t look as if their worlds are ending. She books an appointment for the following week, but in her mind she’s already calling to cancel.
Lizbie has been screened, and it has come back negative. But down the track there will be further screenings, and this is what everyone assumes she is most disturbed by. But everything disturbs her; any small thing is likely to tip her over the edge. Like that phone call from Claire Delaney when she and her husband were getting divorced and Claire wanted to know whether Lizbie would take their cat. Holding the phone, with Claire’s voice in her ear, she had nearly screamed: “No! I can’t look after anything, not even myself.
” But then she’d recalled how when she had been homeless Claire had given her shelter.
She wonders whether Claire even knew Marty was HIV positive. Well whatever: Lizbie wasn’t going to tell her. But the thing she can’t get out of her head, the thing that bedevils her days, is that while she was cooking curries, while she was pottering among her tomato plants and lettuces like Sunbonnet Sue, Marty and Griff had been lovers. They had been lovers while Griff was whispering to her in bed at night about one day raising a family, while they were picking out their favourite names. Griff had sworn to her he was done with all that; she had strengthened his heterosexual side, he said, and that was how it was going to stay. But Marty had taken Griff back from her, and she hadn’t even known: her glory days had been fewer than she’d thought.
Lizbie thinks of the two of them as she saw them first – they had been so beautiful that it had hurt to look at them for long. But their beauty hadn’t lasted, not for Marty with his ugly heroin death, not for Griff, who had found his dad’s old shotgun and taken it out to the back shed. Lizbie nurtures Claire’s cat that for years slept on Marty’s pillow. She goes to, or doesn’t go to, various appointments; she struggles to keep the house tidy while she waits to hear whether she is in the clear. And sometimes on a Sunday morning she takes the bus across town and walks past the old house where Winterbourne is written in faded black letters on the gate. The cypress hedge is no longer sharp; large sections of it are dying. Lizbie lingers in its shade as she listens for Marty’s artless guitar playing, for their two voices, with her own voice between. And it strikes her that there should have been a way for the three of them to express their love, some form of marriage that didn’t depend on one of them being excluded.
Murmurations Page 5