by Thom Conroy
‘Harvey was in Shakespeare?’
‘He almost failed,’ Lyle says, showing me all his lovely teeth for the first time that day. ‘But you couldn’t fail Harvey. At least I couldn’t have. He’d read everything, spoke more eloquently than the lecturer. Failing him would have been in very poor taste.’
‘Lyle, you’re a prodigy.’
‘Haven’t heard anyone say that in a while … When you enrol in university at sixteen and finish at eighteen, you’re a prodigy, yes, but once you’re twenty-four with a Master’s in English and selling merino jerseys, you’ve descended to “former prodigy” status.’
‘You have a Master’s in English?’
‘Among the world’s worthless things.’
A BOAT ON A DARK CANAL
Later, Lyle and I shift to another bar, and we run into some old friends, people I used to know in conjunction with Harvey. I text Lois to let her know I may be very late, but when I look up I see these old friends sitting around a table with the first frosting of dusk-light on the windows around us, I wonder what it is I should feel. The evening is strong and thick with so much living. These people before me are not false. They were drawn to Harvey and have shared with him all manner of intelligent conversation. At least one of them has slept with him.
But under this mesh of talk and laughter and the hum of sexuality that seems to come with all life, there is the simple fact of Harvey’s death. This fact does not mar the night so much as flow beneath it, move silently along like a boat on a dark canal. A little shadow you can remedy with a turn of the head.
Near midnight, the subject of Harvey arises at last. There is nothing especially dramatic about the way we ease into the topic. His presence simply bubbles up and engulfs us. He liked this beer, didn’t he? Do you remember that jacket of his? The one with the maroon collar? I loved that jacket. So did I, I say. This is my contribution to a conversation about the man I loved: an expression of how much I loved his jacket with the maroon collar.
Now, inevitably, there are expressions of loss. Condolences are exchanged and special attention given to me.
‘Djuna, I’m sorry,’ a woman says. Her name is Christine. She’s the one who slept with Harvey, years before I even knew him. She has always been kind to me, and she is a beautiful and very thin woman with delicate collarbones showing under her shirt. But the way she apologises, bleary and a little pouty-mouthed, finally breaks me. What I feel is anger, and so I redirect it to sadness, which I have found is just next door.
I don’t make a scene. In fact, the sight of me smiling through sadness seems to settle everyone. The musing begins. The men bring in philosophy and the conversation turns general. The current of life. I am not immune to such things, and I tell a little story my father used to tell. I mangle it a bit, but I’m clear about the moral, as my father always was.
‘Life is not quite good enough,’ I say, ‘but there’s nothing better.’
On the street afterwards I feel like a shit. Who am I to start joining in with truisms? How passionately I must want to be loved, to be accepted as wise and full of enriching aphorisms. And now here I am drunk on self-pity over it!
As it happens, I have said some, or perhaps all, of this monologue aloud.
‘Self-pity is too often maligned,’ Lyle says, catching my arm.
‘Need to sleep,’ I say.
In the hallway outside Lyle’s apartment my phone buzzes. Make sure he’s good enough 4 you, Lois texts. Lois, who cannot imagine going home with a man without sleeping with him and who, as a result, will never again go home with a man.
Lyle says, ‘Who’s that?’
‘My mother’s friend,’ I say. ‘She’s afraid I’m going to sleep with you.’
Lyle laughs at that, a laugh of protest.
How full and deep this laugh is.
THE SMALL, STARTLINGLY WHITE BATHROOM
Bruce is married to a woman named Joanne, and they have a child, an eight-year-old girl named Ella. Ella, my niece. My almost-niece, at least. Bruce is the older brother of my deceased ex, and he has undeniably miserable fashion sense — tight jeans, polyester sleeveless singlets. Nothing is beneath him. In other words, he’s easy to malign. And I have every right. But, then, maybe I don’t.
A fortnight ago we met for lunch while he was in Wellington. He sells insurance for a firm based here, and it’s not unusual for him to spend the night at a hotel. This day when we met for lunch it seemed like everything might have been reset between us. I had not seen him since the hour we spent in a hotel a month before Christmas, and when I first saw him again, when he first walked into the corridor-like space of the café I’d chosen, his pale suit-jacket looking crisp beside the dull blackboard wall of lunch specials, it seemed to me like everything would be all right. By which I mean, over.
‘Djuna,’ he said. He took my hand, in a not quite brotherly fashion. Took me a moment to understand the quality of this touch: affectionate.
I told him he was late, and then fibbed. Said I’d been going to order without him.
‘You wouldn’t,’ he said.
‘What’s to stop me?’
‘What’s to stop you from doing anything?’ he said. He put down the menu and stared.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said. I scanned the single row of tables against the wall. Not a face I knew. No one was paying the least attention. When I looked back at Bruce, he was still watching me.
He said, ‘I never know which look will be my last.’
‘Please,’ I said, ‘I don’t think romance exactly suits us.’
We ate then, speaking only of small, irrelevant things. In this I saw that an alliance had been formed. And with this came civility, solicitude. A touch of kindness, perhaps.
I had walked to the café with a little speech in my head. How this meeting would be our last. One final lunch and then we’d part our ways. We’d slept together a few times now, maybe half a dozen, but nothing had come of it. I was not pregnant. His wife didn’t know. Everything could be reversed. His marriage could be salvaged. This is what we both wanted, wasn’t it?
I thought of this little speech while I walked him back to his hotel. I thought of it when we began to kiss in the hotel room’s small and startlingly white bathroom. He had to be unbuttoning my dress for me actually to speak.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘We can still prevent this. We can still stop everything.’
‘Everything?’ he said.
He looked at me then in that little bathroom. Was he offended? No, I thought, as he crossed to the bed and lay down. He was merely puzzled. Merely sad. Merely lost. Had he reacted any other way, I would have left that afternoon. Had he been angry or persistent or burning with lust, it would have been over. But he walked over to the hotel bed and lay down on the pale-blue duvet, and so I followed, I stayed. In the morning, I caught him looking at me again in the bathroom mirror, but I didn’t scold or turn away. Let him look, I thought. He’s right. We might never be here again. This time could be our last.
But under that thought was another.
Please, no.
THE BIRD
When I wake up in Lyle’s flat, I am aware of the sun on the opposite wall. It might only last a few hours, and then the grey and rain will settle over the city, but during this moment of sun, I wake. I wake alone. Lyle has a daybed in his lounge, and I have spent the night here. Lyle is in his room, door closed. Everything is in order. There is nothing to suggest anything other than a platonic night.
Outside the uncurtained window is this bird. One of the ordinary ones, a thrush, a sparrow, a single representative from the minions of unimpressive tweeters that sit on the letterbox and announce the rising of the sun or the prowl of a tomcat. I cannot see this bird, but I can see its shadow. A tiny blotch of black on a white concrete wall. Every time the bird calls, its body bounces, or its shadow body bounces. And here is something I would not write in my notebooks or on any scrap of paper that came into my possession, something I can already hear my father mo
cking me for: I think this bird is Harvey. Not really, of course, and not a full incarnation of him, but more like a passing whisper, as if his spirit has caught in this bird’s throat.
Next comes the moment of intimacy I have been expecting since I saw Lyle in the café yesterday. How did I foresee this moment of intimacy? I cannot say, but I knew. I almost always know. My mother calls it a gift, my father a coincidence. Either way, I am not always grateful for it.
When it arrives, the moment is smaller and more subtle than I would have imagined.
I hear Lyle moving around in his bedroom, and I drop back down into my blankets where it turns out I can still see the shadow of the bird. The knob of his bedroom door turns. I close my eyes and hear Lyle passing into the lounge, and so I take a peek at him in his boxers — the shocking white rails of his legs almost make me laugh. He goes into the bathroom, shuts the door. I hear him peeing into the bowl.
No, that is not the intimate part. Not yet.
Lyle returns to his bedroom. This time the door is left open a crack and I see him bending over to put on a pair of shorts. When he emerges again, my eyes are open. He sees me, and I see him. We say nothing. We both want to talk, decorum demands that we talk, and yet we do not. This big mouthful of silence is between us, like something we share: a room-size cake we’re eating from separate sides. This is the moment.
It seems like nothing, I know, this little gasp of intimacy, but at the same time it feels so stark and immediate. I shiver, go tender. Were I standing, my knees might give.
Lucky for me I’m not standing.
THINKING OF HARVEY
Lyle walks into the kitchen and begins making coffee. Somewhere in there we say good morning and then decide to let one another go about our business. His is turning on the jug and clinking mugs, while mine is sitting with the blanket around me, staring. Lyle turns his back, and I look at this back, at the little arse beneath it.
When he turns to me, he says, ‘That look on your face — I know what you were thinking.’
My heart races — my God, I hope not!
‘You were thinking of Harvey.’
I take in a little air.
‘I could tell. Am I right?’
I was not thinking of Harvey, but I nod because it’s so easy.
What was really on my mind?
I won’t tell.
NO PEACE
That night, Lois roasts lamb with pomegranate molasses. The recipe is one I recognise from my mother. If there were a perfect food, I think that lamb in pomegranate molasses would be it. Afterwards, Lois reveals a two-layer chocolate cake with mocha icing, which, when served, is apparently all mine. She meant to make it for Christmas but never got around to it.
‘What about you?’ I say.
‘Oh,’ Lois says, ‘I couldn’t eat that.’
‘But it’s a cake. A whole cake. You expect me to eat an entire cake?’
Lois laughs with unconvincing abandon. Behind her, outside in the space over the bay, there is just enough light to see the vast planes of the clouds as clashing, dividing, merging. Violet and black seams. It’s daunting. A glimpse of the gothic that makes me think again of the million dollars it costs to live here.
Lois is staring, and I can tell she wants something. For a hard moment, I feel like Carl, the ex, that fuckwit who texts her to say he’s bought a sailboat and lost weight and given up cigarettes and is not dating anyone right now. Baking a cake is what she would have done for him before they broke up. The cake paves the way for what comes next. Unlike Carl, however, I will not be caught off-guard.
‘You know what I believe,’ Lois says. The inside lights are off. A vat of a candle burns between us and billows the artificial scent of magnolia. I can see the veins in Lois’s neck and forehead, the dark runnels above her eyes. It occurs to me that I have no idea what she might believe.
‘I believe you can’t begin a new thing until you end the old one.’
‘You mean Lyle? He’s not a new thing. He’s a friend.’
And besides, I think, I’ve already begun a new thing. But then I wonder if this is true. Is Bruce a new thing or a resuscitation of the old? A return to the dead without the death. Or with only a bit of it?
Lois smiles at me. It is the first time I have felt condescended to. ‘Friends don’t sleep over, dear.’
‘I’m sleeping over with you.’
‘Boys and girls, Djuna. Men and women, you know … There are truces, I know, lulls, but there will never be peace between the two.’
I have more to say to her on this subject, and Lois must sense this because she waves her hand in the candlelight and keeps on talking.
‘When was the last time you saw the Wells?’
Ah, here we are: her destination. The Wells are Bruce and Harvey’s parents, and I’m only too aware of the last time I saw the Wells.
This question is simply too much to take on, and so I deflect.
‘They’re in Waikanae,’ I say.
‘You’re free to take my car if you like. I don’t need it much this week. Tomorrow—’
I silence Lois by pushing out my chair and picking up the dessert plate. No more is spoken between us, but only because there is no need. The hostess has issued her instructions. If I asked, she would recommend which flowers to take.
I cannot set foot in the Wells’ residence, not ever again. It’s one thing to text Bruce from time to time, to hint that he should see me when he’s in the city, and then to take him like a lioness when we’re alone. This is one collection of truths. A collection I can set to one side, for the time being at least. But to be again in the house of Bruce and Harvey’s parents? To be again in that house where my stomach muscles hurt from crying. After that first night with Bruce, I drove away in the wee hours, and I remember jerking the wheel with my sobbing. Almost killed myself — and I’m still not sure it was an accident.
Nonetheless, I go to sleep that night thinking of the face of Harvey’s mother, Irene. I think of Irene Wells’ face with her eyes looking bruised. This seems to me the last thing I will think of before I wake.
But then there is one thing more. I’m seven or eight and sitting in my father’s office. A woman has come in, looking to sell all her furniture and many of her possessions by the following morning. This woman has a black eye. After she left, I said to my father, ‘What makes your eye go black like that?’ I don’t recall what answer he gave me. What I remember next are my father’s arms around me.
ON THE CORRELATION OF APPENDAGES
I’ll come clean about what I was actually thinking when Lyle turned around and said he knew what I was thinking. I had been staring at his thin back, the little blades of it working under his shirt, and this must have started my mind wandering, because, at the very moment he said he knew what I was thinking, I was in fact thinking of his penis. Would it correlate with Lyle’s other appendages? What if it was not skeletal and white, as it seemed it must be, but plump and dark.
Is such a thing possible?
A POISONED WOMAN
I lived with both my parents, Lucy and Eugene, until I was twenty-three. I recognise this is longer than some children live with their parents, but it was not enough for me. What I think is that my parents and I were all in love, and this love was something new. That’s how it seems to me. This love was absorbing, absolute, desperate but also very serene.
I think of the three of us cooking together. This was a pleasure we shared. Often when I think of my parents I think of the childhood apron my mother sewed for me. It is dusted with flour or stained from plum chutney. We had our own specialities and a certain grace in the kitchen. My father chopped and sang to the music, while my mother stood at the stove, rolling her eyes behind his back. We jostled one another for positions at the bench. Dishes were shattered.
When my mother moved to Wellington, it was for a job. We all knew this could not be true, that one part of us could not depart for a reason such as a job. The position she acquired was as the assistant di
rector of a charity promoting international children’s issues. If she fell in love with the job, my father and I would join her. Meantime, she would not get a flat, but would stay with Lois because the separation was not permanent. And she could come home every weekend. Weeknights sometimes.
I remember visiting my mother after she got her flat up on The Terrace in Wellington. It was still understood that the three of us would live together again. At least I thought it was. The house in Palmerston could be put on the market. My father was just doing some work on it, then his task would be complete, everything would be settled. This was what my father said. This was what I believed. I think he did as well. But at dinner on the first night of my visit to her flat, my mother sighed at the mention of my father’s name.
‘That man has poisoned me with talking.’
I had heard something similar before, but the tone of this declaration drew the situation into focus. I knew then that the three of us would never live together again. Or at least not for a very long time.
‘He expresses his feelings,’ I said. It was a line straight out of my father’s repertoire, and I said it to infuriate my mother, though I had no genuine desire to infuriate my mother. It was more that her own line had prompted mine. We were trying to speak honestly, but we were also caught in a script, and the emotions in the stage directions were distressingly real.
‘He’s a liar,’ my mother said. ‘And what does he have to lie about? Nothing at all! That’s the worst of it. At least Lois’s husband Carl had affairs!’
‘He wants to tell you everything. Don’t you see that? He wants us to know it all — what’s untrue and what’s true. And, anyway, he’s not embarrassed to cry in front of us.’