by Paul Thomas
At this point, when I was already in reasonably deep shit, things took a serious turn for the worse.
I hadn’t bothered to inform Christine that I was married. Doubtless all you amateur psychologists will have an explanation for this; all I can say is that by the time it seemed pertinent, it was already too late. As I found out in the debrief, Chas had given Emma the impression that while there was a woman in my life, it was all pretty loose. And I was, after all, a bohemian.
Christine had mentioned that she had friends in Sydney but I hadn’t attached any significance to it. Most Kiwis do.
Christine had a pile of air points. On a whim she decided to visit her friends in Sydney. She persuaded Emma to extract my phone number from Chas’s address book.
I was still in Christchurch when Christine rang our apartment. She got Kate instead. By this stage Kate’s opinion of me as a husband and all-round human being was undergoing radical revision. Showing a deviousness I didn’t know she possessed, Kate pretended to be my sister, thereby extracting further damaging information.
Kate said she was meeting me for a drink that evening, why didn’t Christine join us? They connected at the pub, Kate saying I was running late. She got a couple of drinks into Christine and probed for the smoking gun. Not content with the bare facts, as damning as they were, Christine flexed the imagination that had got her into the creative writing course and transformed a brief spark into a towering inferno.
Kate revealed herself. Christine fled weeping into the night. By the time I arrived home twenty-four hours later, Kate had changed the locks.
twelve
The rest, as they say, is history.
We went through the process of seeing what, if anything, could be salvaged but our hearts weren’t in it. Kate was implacable — another revelation — and, as I realised on emerging, saliva-splattered, from another counter-productive face-to-face, I wasn’t prepared to fight — or grovel — for our marriage. If I did and Kate relented, I’d be sentenced to a life of impeccable conduct. To beg for a second chance and then abuse it would be monstrous, and while I had a conscience it wasn’t busy enough to sustain a long-distance moral obligation. Perhaps my premonition of ending up alone became self-fulfilling; in any event I came to believe that Kate would be better off without me.
As much to my surprise as hers, Kate’s family didn’t rally to her cause. When the news broke, Ginge vowed to hunt me down and administer the Aussie equivalent of a horsewhipping, which provided some welcome light relief. He’d often been sprung with his freckled mitt up a neighbour’s skirt or doggied over some tragic old footy groupie he’d plied with piss down at the league club. And he’d always got away with it.
Lynne would ring me after getting no change out of Kate. ‘Believe me, Max, me and Ginge have had our ups and downs. Talk about rocky patches. There’ve been times when I’ve been this close. I’ve had the suitcase out; I’ve rung my sister to say this is it. Didn’t have to say any more, she knew exactly what I meant. But I’m a positive person, Max.’ Short, mirthless laugh. ‘Some people would call me a saint. I see the good in people, not the bad. I know what Ginge can be like, especially when he’s had a few. Doesn’t make it any easier, mind you. I know exactly how Kate feels. You men have no idea what it’s like to find out your husband’s been playing up. And then to find out that half the blinking suburb knows about it. And you know what they say? “Oh, things can’t be too good in the O’Toole household; Ginge wouldn’t be chasing skirt if everything was sweet on the home front.” I’m not a gossip, Max. I live by the golden rule. I put myself in the other person’s shoes and ask myself how I’d feel. But I’ve found out the hard way that not everyone’s like me. They’d never admit it, of course, but a lot of people enjoy the misfortunes of others. And if they were jealous of you to begin with, well, look out. Who knows why? It beats me. Maybe it’s because I’m a warm, positive person and, deep down, they wish they could be more like me. But at the end of the day, Max, you’ve got to be bigger than them; you’ve got to rise above it. Compared to forty years of marriage and everything we’ve been through and the lovely children we’ve brought up and the life we’ve built, what does it amount to? I mean, really? I know why you did it, Max. Same reason they all do. You did it because you could. That’s all there is to it. So some scrubber drops her panties in an alley, so what? She’s the one with the problem, not me. If Ginge tripped over her the next morning he wouldn’t recognise her.’ Long-suffering nasal exhalation. ‘I’ve just finished telling Kate this, and not for the first time. I tell her, Max, but she won’t listen.’
Who could blame her? I’d hang up from these confessions of a serial martyr praying that Kate didn’t change her mind. One thing I surely didn’t need was a mother-in-law who saw me as a captive audience, to be endlessly confided in.
Sister Adele was on my side too. Any man who was prepared to stick around was okay in her book.
But Kate didn’t change her mind. ‘Fucked if I know, mate,’ lamented Ginge late one night, his voice clogged with booze and exasperation. ‘You’d swear to Christ you were the first bloke in history to have a poke on the sly. Either that or she thinks she’s so fuckin special no bastard’s going to root around on her.’
We tried mediation, one last shot at settling out of court. As we were waiting to start she said, ‘How come I’ve got all these shitheads in my ear telling me I should take you back but you’re not saying a word?’
Kate’s fervent belief — to have downplayed it as a negotiating position would have been the height of wishful thinking — was that I’d entered our relationship empty-handed and done little to address the imbalance, therefore it was only right and proper that I should leave with not much more than I could wear and carry. The apartment was non-negotiable: Myra hadn’t left it to us, she’d left it to her, bequeathing her worldly goods to the daughter she never had, whose care and companionship had illuminated what would otherwise have been a grim twilight. I’d never met the woman, despite having plenty of opportunities, not to mention invitations.
Fortunately for me, matrimonial property settlements are no longer exercises in establishing fault and measuring contributions. Kate and I were a married couple of more than three years’ standing so it was just a matter of adding up and dividing by two. I was a twenty-first century house-husband reaping the benefit of changes driven by women for women, to the delight of my lawyer, who was ecstatic at getting one back for the boys.
So in the end Kate had to divvy up. She could have taken her share and traded down to something more manageable but the apartment had become her anchor and refuge. I’d failed her, her family had failed her and her column had been watered down to a sickly blend of PR froth and celebrity worship. The highlight of her day was getting back to the apartment and shutting the door on all of it and all of us. The mortgage was like a physical weight. She felt like one of those around-the-world-on-$5-a-day backpackers bowed under their brutal swags. She cut down on everything from coffee to makeup and did the sums five times a day, searching for a set of numbers and assumptions that would make it look like a smart move.
I had no such problems. For the first time in my life I was a man of substance, cashed up, debt free, unencumbered — quite a catch, in fact. Blessed with the means and freedom to go anywhere in the world, I went home.
My first instinct was to stay put. Weather is weather — you adjust to it, wherever you are — but I’ve never struck a better climate than Sydney’s. Especially the winters, if you can call them that — one mild, blue day after another with just enough of a chill first thing and after sundown to maintain the rhythm of the seasons. And while summer could be too much of a good thing, there was always the possibility of an epic storm: biblical rain sheeting from purple-black thunderclouds a thousand storeys high, and wild electricity prancing across the horizon, colouring the night like the first air raid of an American war. All in all, a far cry from New Zealand summers that arrive late and leave with the job half done, like
cowboy tradesmen.
But while Australia had filled my saddlebags, it had done nothing for my career. I’d imagined I’d make those Aussies sit up and take notice but the ex-colony was growing up and not disposed to fuss over minor-league blow-ins. Quality lit heavies and authorial brand names with global reach were a different matter. When they dropped in, the fawning was as unbecoming as ever but with a pushy familiarity and less sense of gratitude now that Australia was so much more than a comfort stop on the international circuit.
When the stars jetted out, the flag-waving resumed. Australia was embracing its home-grown writers, tellers of Aussie tales who embraced the vernacular, revisited the history, placed iconic figures and national archetypes in a unique landscape and explained — for those who couldn’t work it out for themselves — what it meant to be Australian.
The little pond had turned out to be a reasonable-sized body of water, a bigger-than-you’d-think pond. I’d left the big pond because I couldn’t make enough of a splash, but had created hardly a ripple in the little pond. That left the tiny pond. (For a while, in emails to friends and acquaintances elsewhere, I referred to New Zealand as ‘Tinpon’. The joke soon wore thin.)
The Tinpon strategy — Kate preferred ‘Chicken Run’ — also had its flaws. (Does that surprise you or do you see a pattern emerging?) I’d assumed nothing much would have changed in New Zealand but in fact there’d been a cultural flowering similar to Australia’s, driven by and reflecting the burgeoning of a post-colonial national identity. Back in the seventies there’d been a handful of novelists grafting away in semi-obscurity but now I was greeted by a cacophony of fictional voices.
They say that in Hollywood there are a hundred film scripts for every movie made. The New Zealand literary scene hummed with similar frantic, frustrated ambition. Whenever I went to a bookish event or party I’d be bailed up by three or four would-be writers. Some, not all of them male, were steely-eyed, impatient and occasionally chippy, seeing me as yet more competition for publishing slots and grant money. Others, not all of them female, stroked my ego and fluttered their eyelashes as they sought my views on all manner of things in the hope of panning a nugget or two of inside information from the flow of dross.
When not disarmed by fluttering eyelashes, I opened fire on those who whined about the plight of aspiring writers and the craven reluctance of publishers to support Generation Next. Been in a bookshop lately? I’d growl. The novel isn’t dying because publishers don’t put out enough new fiction; it’s being crushed to death by a vast accumulation of crap that should never have been published in the first place. Easy for me to say, as more than one young Turk riposted.
Although I had a reputation in Tinpon, it was out of sync with the new mood. None of my books were set in New Zealand. In fact, a skim of my oeuvre would leave the impression that my working premise location-wise was Anywhere But Here. And I’d given other hostages to fortune in the form of interviews with various Tinpon publications in which I’d rather belaboured the point that you wouldn’t find pohutukawas and Maori place names in a Max Napier novel anytime soon.
This sort of thing: ‘I draw a distinction between being a New Zealander — which, by the way, is how I see myself; quite a proud one in my own quiet, non-jingoistic way — and a New Zealand writer, i.e. someone whose work is inspired by a New Zealand setting or a New Zealand experience or who sets out to explore subjects and themes that are unique to New Zealand or have a particular resonance for New Zealanders. As Bob Dylan put it, that ain’t me, babe. New Zealand was — and no doubt still is — a great place to grow up, and my upbringing obviously had quite a lot to do with the sort of person I am today but not, I think, the sort of writer I am today. Right from my earliest woolly daydreams I looked to Europe and America. They supplied the events and settings and ideas — and, of course, the books — that inspired those daydreams and stimulated my imagination and eventually drove me to a typewriter. I think it’s a generational thing and maybe my generation will be the last to look outwards rather than inwards. But who knows? One day I might ransack the old memory vault — assuming those brain cells are still up to the job — and fashion a novel out of all the weird shit that was floating around Auckland in the seventies. Then again, maybe not.’
Bullshit, of course. Pure manure. As with most of the guff I’ve spouted in interviews and question and answer sessions over the years — and I’m certainly not the only one — there’s very little substance here, very little deliberation. What happens is that you pick up the phone to do an interview or show up for a signing session or an appearance at a writers’ festival expecting the standard questions: ‘What’s your book about?’ ‘Is it based on personal experience?’ ‘Who are your favourite writers?’ ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ ‘How many books have you sold?’ You come prepared — you might even have jotted down a few notes — so that you’ll have something to say. It probably won’t be intelligent or original but it will fill in time and reduce the risk of embarrassment.
But sometimes these questions don’t get asked. (Thankfully, in the case of the last one, because that blunt impertinence must be deflected without being too obvious and without sending any writers or book-trade folk who happen to be present into sniggering fits.) Instead I get asked: ‘Were you a lonely child?’ ‘Why do you hate women?’ ‘Which characters represent your mother and father?’ ‘What do you dream about?’ ‘Who do you want to win the election?’ The natural-born performers lap this stuff up. A little striptease is all part of putting on a good show for the pushover audiences of the festival circuit.
When asked about something I haven’t really thought about, I tend to say the first thing that comes into my head, but I ran into a few NZ lit types who not only remembered those interviews but could parrot them, sometimes with damaging embellishments. They were letting me know that it was too late to ditch that snooty expat act and rediscover my roots. They had a nice little scene going in Aotearoa but it was a closed shop with no room for Johnny-Come-Latelies.
At least I had money. Most of it went on a flat. It was a step down from Casa Myra but it was mine and it was mortgage free. I put some in the bank and the balance into banking shares on the advice of a sharebroker Felicity put me onto. My occasional daydreams of winning literary lotto now had a tacked-on scene in which I shouted Kate the renovation she couldn’t afford. I guess we all process guilt in our own way.
I quit writing porn. Writing fiction, as Hemingway said, is hard work. (‘It’s hell. It takes it all out of you … So I do it.’) Porn was easy once I’d got the hang of it so I’d kept doing it. Ten or twelve days on auto-pilot, zap it off to Walter and wait for the cheque, trying not to think about what I was doing and what was happening to me. But if journalism blunts the pen, as Hemingway apparently also said, then pornography snaps off the nib and upends the ink-pot.
I knuckled down. I wrote a book of short stories that was respectfully reviewed but didn’t sell. I wasted the best part of a year adapting one of my novels for the screen and participating in the daily round of futility and deceit that accompanies any film project, however pie-in-the-sky. Nothing came of it and the bandits who’d inveigled me into it simply welshed, not even covering their option. I wrote a crime novel that I can’t, in all conscience, dress up as a genre-buster, buster, and you know what Shelley thought of that.
This is where we came in: the middle-aged writer — I turn fifty in a few weeks — alone in his little flat, strung out on alcohol and buffeted by rejection, reliving the past through a stack of faded photographs because the future doesn’t bear thinking about.
part two
thirteen
Dinner at Felicity and Murray’s isn’t the ordeal it used to be. No thanks to Murray: once a fuckwit, always a fuckwit is the moral of that life story.
I have to say, though, these days there’s something to be said for the sight of Murray, as opposed to the total Murray experience. Middle age hasn’t been kind to our Muz. Up until a year
or so ago you’d have said he wasn’t that bad-looking, if you didn’t mind a touch of the primate. And some women don’t because it reassures them there’s not much going on beneath the surface. They like knowing there isn’t an interior world where their status is uncertain. With Murray, what you saw was what you got. On meeting him for the first time, a physiognomist would have assumed the following: this man owns a jet-ski; he has a personalised number plate; if one were to relate an anecdote with wry understatement and irony, he’d laugh in the wrong places or not at all; he has no sense of shame or capacity for self-doubt.
Murray’s torso is much the same but his head has put on weight. Usually it’s the other way round. You often see men whose faces have retained definition long after they’ve succumbed, sometimes alarmingly, to middle-age spread. From across a table they appear to be ageing quite elegantly but when they stand up, you’re confronted by a spinnaker-like expanse of billowing shirtfront. And many a man, his head turned by a pretty face, has altered course for a closer look only to find that all hell has broken loose south of the breastbone. There’s a theory that people who dote on their pets eventually come to resemble them. Murray has become the incarnation of his opinions. He’s become a fat-head. If I could be bothered, I’d check it out on Google in case it’s a symptom of something sinister as opposed to an odd twist on the ageing process. Perhaps I should encourage Felicity to have a word with their GP. I mean, it can’t go on like this. If his head continues to beef up, there’ll come a time when his neck simply won’t be able to support it.