by Thom Conroy
I turn the light of my phone onto the pages. Scribblings in the margins. Stars and brackets and little notes. Mrs R orchestrates time. On the next page: They are an island amid the current of time. It’s Harvey’s handwriting, because, it comes to me now, I lent him this book. It was early days in our relationship and I remember mocking him, the self-styled scholar, for never having read Virginia Woolf. So I lent him this very book.
This book, these pages, this paper.
Something happens. I’m lying there on the kitchen floor of my father’s caravan in this emptied-out campground with Harvey’s words in front of me and, for a moment, I don’t feel anything. I have Harvey in my mind and there is no pang, no twitch of pain, no tissue-deep remorse. For a long stretch of reflection, not even any drop of sadness. I think of Harvey and I see his words, and that’s all. I’m stoic as an old Roman. I am without gloom, and it is an unfamiliar but fiercely welcome absence. It is, I think, a negative transcendence. That’s two in one night.
‘Djuna,’ Joanne calls from the other side of the caravan, ‘go to sleep, will you?’
RETURNS
The drive back to Wellington is unbearable. Sunlight boring into my hair, Ella’s confused face in my mind the whole way. On my phone I see my dad’s frantic texting, his pitiful pleas for my return, and an unwelcome, unresponded-to farewell text from Bruce who is inexplicably and almost disarmingly tender. Still, dinner at Lois’s is much worse. Despite my insistence otherwise, they have waited for me to eat, and so when I arrive at 8.30, sticky with sweat, road-addled, I’m ushered into my mother’s arms and, from there, to the million-dollar view, obscured, as it happens, by the ex, Carl — ‘the fuckwit’ — cocktail in hand.
He has, apparently, returned. I suspect a reformation.
‘Sweetheart,’ the Puma says. Her jewels and gold tinkle and click when she comes in for the embrace.
‘I said not to wait for me.’ I’m unable to will the prickly edge of a whine from my voice.
Carl the fuckwit pours the contents of his glass into his pink face and opens his arms for me. I mince over to him and smile with something like grace, something like goodwill.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘we didn’t obey.’
My mother is quiet over the pork. Trampled seems like a better word. Her face is winter-pale and Christmas-bloated, her hair split and uncombed, like she’s been standing out on the balcony all day. But it isn’t until afterwards, when we’re walking in the night wind, the bay and the far shore winking at us between the dead heads of row after row of agapanthus, that I see at last how grave the situation is. There is no question that she is unwell, mentally and physically depleted. In the six months since I saw her last, she has been beaten down. She tells me this, says it matter-of-factly, like she’s giving me directions, but the truth is she didn’t need to mention it at all.
She has been managing a home for disabled men. It’s an ordinary house, almost. It looks like an ordinary house in an ordinary neighbourhood, but there are ten bedrooms and two have very thin bars on the windows. ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘the residents,’ recalling an early email she wrote to me in which she described an average day in the home — one man eating mouldy doughnuts, another calling obscenities out the window of the van, another refusing to move from his spot on the sofa where he bounced up and down saying his parents’ names for hours on end.
My mother stops walking. We’ve been marching at a good clip, and the sudden halt startles me. At once, she’s Lucy again. Maybe it’s the streetlight or the wisp of fish and chip grease from somewhere down in the valley of houses and shops below, but here she is.
‘Djuna,’ she says, ‘it’s not just the residents. It’s everything.’ She does a little pirouette and a laugh erupts. ‘And it’s nothing.’
On the footpath outside the gate to Lois and Carl’s house, I tell my mother that I love her, that I’ve missed her and that I hope she never goes back to the residents on Centennial Drive in Swallsborough, Pennsylvania.
Close to my ear, a whisper so soft I take it as a confession, my mother answers.
‘So do I.’
INSTA-DAIRY
I wake up one morning with Harvey’s signature in my head. Not the thought of his signature, but the real thing, right there, the crisp image. Harvey Joseph Summerhill Wells in his straight, wind-skewed handwriting that always struck me as incongruously familiar. My eyes not yet open, I recall — not dream, but actually recall — the first time I saw Harvey Joseph Summerhill Wells. It was written on the inside cover of Anna Karenina, which Harvey lent me the second time I ever met him. I remember what I thought as I looked at that signature, too, though I can hardly bring myself to repeat it.
I thought, This is the signature of the man I’ll grow old with.
And there’s one more thing. The smell. There’s a smell that goes with that signature, and with Harvey in the early days. It’s not a smell that I associate with him later. Maybe his hygiene improved after we became a thing, but then this early smell isn’t exactly bodily. It’s a strange, wordless sort of plastic smell, part dust and part paint, like the smell of the back of a downtown hardware shop of the sort my father once managed back when I was a baby and there were such things as downtown hardware shops.
Here’s the puzzling bit: later that day, shopping in the city — for shoes, of all things — I catch a whiff of this smell again. I haven’t recalled the scent in years, but there it is on a featureless side street with a nearly empty furniture store, a solicitor’s office upstairs, and one of those very small and very sterile dairies that carry an ultra-limited selection of products, a single shipping container’s worth of pre-packed stuff — an insta-dairy. Outside the insta-dairy stands a group of very well-coifed Asian girls singing together, their voices approaching a wounding pitch.
What could this moment possibly have to do with Harvey Joseph Summerhill Wells?
WHAT LUCY WANTS
One night I’m out at a restaurant with Miranda, and we’re talking about some subject I cannot for the life of me get my head around, lithium ion batteries or something like that. So when my phone rings, I’m relieved.
‘Just leave it,’ Miranda says. ‘I have this new rule — no calling me! You want to talk to me, text me, baby.’ All the time she’s speaking, my phone is ringing its jangling dance-music tone so loud that most of the other patrons turn to glare at us. Miranda pays them no mind.
I look down and see my father’s name on the screen.
‘My dad.’ I duck outside.
My father is, well, Eugene Lawrence Claremont, same as always. Schemes and dreams, only now with a slightly saltier tang. He and Tama, it seems, are creating a salvage company together. They’re going to salvage shipping containers from the wreck of the Rena. Tama knows this guy who knows this guy, and so forth. And how am I? And when am I coming back? And how is Lois? Oh, Carl the fuckwit is back, is he? It won’t last, my father is sure of this. I tell him not to be cynical, that anything is possible, and perhaps it’s this comment that leads him at last, nonchalantly, in a muttering, incidental and entirely offhand way, to ask how Lucy is.
‘She’s not great. She looks a little beaten down. Maybe it’s just coming from winter and all.’
‘I see,’ Eugene says. A truck passes in the street, and I can’t hear anything. When I can hear again, my father is at the end of a question I didn’t catch.
‘What was that?’
‘Nothing,’ he says, and I can picture him shrugging, standing in a sleeveless flannel shirt out under the stars in some paddock, forgotten sunglasses still propped up on his head. ‘Just wondering how long she’s staying in New Zealand.’
‘I don’t know. She’s on holiday leave now, but she’s told them it may turn into medical leave.’
‘Can’t imagine they’ll take too kindly to that.’
‘Then she can quit, Dad — but why are you even asking? Aren’t you still together with Reina?’
I count to three in the silence that follows. Then, m
eekly, my father’s voice. ‘Yes. Yes and no, I guess. We’re … taking it slow. Why are you even asking me that?’
‘Dad, please.’
The door to the restaurant opens, spilling a pool of gorgeous carnation light on to the street and catching the attention of a thirty-something couple walking by. I see them turn and look at each other, musing. Should we go in? They slow down as Miranda comes to the door and gives me a wave, but the sudden movement scares them off, and they end up crossing the street, turning the corner.
‘You know why I’m asking,’ I say. I hold up one finger to Miranda.
‘Djuna.’ My father’s voice is disconcertingly flat. Emptied of dreams and schemes. A flat tyre of a voice. ‘She contacted me.’
‘Lucy?’
‘She wants a divorce.’
Miranda is walking towards me now. Something about the look on my face has caused her some alarm. In my ear, my father’s voice and my name.
‘Djuna? Are you there?’
THE INCIDENT AT THE UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
Lyle and I go for dinner at this amazing hole-in-the-wall divey Mexican place in a location I’ll never reveal, and, as per our almost mutual stipulation, it is not a date. When we get to this undisclosed location it’s dim, and we’re shunted into this damp corner where the cracked red globe of a candle sputters a harlequin sheen on the punk skating stickers someone has pasted on the wall beside the table so narrow that when I pull back my hair I can smell the little space between us blooming with synthetic pear and rosehip. I shift my place, bumping against Lyle’s foot under the table and stirring up the scent I’ve worn just enough of that I can see the musky smell of it make contact with his nostrils. But, I must remind myself, this is not a date. After all, this is what Lyle said after we’d arranged to go out just the two of us alone on a Friday when we could have both gone to a party instead.
‘It won’t be a date,’ Lyle had said. I wonder what he occupied himself with during the pause that followed, when, safe on my end of the phone, my chest went hot and my head felt tingly with panic — panic both that it might have been a date and that, in the end, it was not.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, of course not.’
‘Right,’ said Lyle, ‘yeah.’
‘Yeah.’
So what is it we’re doing here? After the cervezas arrive, I find out. It’s a catch-up session, apparently. How is my father and how was the Cape? Did Ella behave herself? What’s this he heard about Ella’s father? A crime of some kind?
‘Bruce?’ I say cheerfully enough. ‘Oh, he’s an embezzler.’
‘An embezzler?’ Lyle looks at me, waiting for the punchline. ‘Shit, you’re serious.’
‘I’ve actually known it for a while. He’s a strange guy. Still, he’s a good guy. A good heart, I think.’
This is the first time I’ve ever thought such a thing, let alone uttered it aloud, but Lyle speaks up before this fact fully registers.
‘You know him?’ A beat passes, and in it Lyle shakes his head. ‘Sorry, course you do. He was Harvey’s brother. Is Harvey’s brother.’
‘Was is correct.’ My voice choking, for some insane reason. ‘Harvey’s dead, Lyle.’
The waiter, his hands full of salsa and chips, stops short of our table, wary.
Lyle sets down his beer. Softly, he says, ‘I know that, Djuna.’ Then he gives the waiter the sign that it’s safe to approach, a coded man-nod, and I feel my anger suddenly, inexplicably raging, my face fiery. Am I going to ruin this date? Jesus, I think I’m going to ruin this date. But, no, I’m not because it’s not a date.
I finish my beer in a gulp I was unaware I could pull off, and ask the waiter for another. And what does the waiter do? He glances at Lyle, as if asking for his permission. I’m nearly on my feet and screaming about this, but then the impossible happens and Lyle gives him another man-nod in response. The waiter turns away, and I say, ‘Did you just give him the nod about my beer?’
‘What nod? What are talking about?’
‘That waiter.’ My voice is now trembling.
‘No, I didn’t give him the nod.’
‘It looked like you gave him the nod.’
Lyle does something most date-like at that moment and reaches across the table to take my hand. ‘Djuna? Is everything all right?’
‘Is everything all right?’ I should stop now, I know this. I should really stop talking. If I had the least bit of sense I would run to the bathroom, lock myself in for five minutes, and then return to the table and say, in a meek voice, that I’m sick, that I’m sorry, I need to get home and will he please take a rain check? But I am, it seems, without sense.
‘Is everything all right? No, Lyle, no, everything is not all right. My father is in love with another woman, my mother is sick and likely depressed, the Puma has taken back the fuckwit, Bruce is going to jail, the Burmese want our house, and here I am sitting here with you not even on a fucking date. So, no, I am not all right, okay?’
As I say this last bit, the waiter arrives and sets a second beer down in front of me. There’s a moment here where this waiter with his dark eyes and his curly hair should really speak, but Lyle and I turn our collective gaze upon the man and he backs off, his little round tray a shield.
Against all odds, what happens next is that Lyle redeems himself by simply looking at me and, after a long minute of openly affectionate staring, laughs.
‘Why are you laughing?’
‘Just thinking how much I enjoy your company.’
AFTER OUR DINNER AT THE TOP-SECRET MEXICAN PLACE WE walk from this undisclosed location down to Cuba Street to get some coffee, but we end up sitting outside a pub with glasses of white wine. You can see a thin path of starlight just over the street, and the sound in the air is laughter, conversation, and a bit of musical chaos, as our table is poised in the contact zone of competing buskers — one a lonely and feverish electric violinist, the other a group of wannabe hillbillies with a banjo, a mandolin and an authentic Appalachian-sounding woman maybe ten years my senior singing about dancing in the sweet milky moonlight. Right away, we take sides: the violin is on my side, the hillbillies are on Lyle’s. No sooner do we decide this than the violinist saws a masterful, frenetic high note, whips his bow away from his instrument, unplugs, packs up and darts off with a rueful, backward glare at the crooning Appalachian.
‘So what’s this about your father?’ Lyle says. ‘You told me he still loves your mother.’
‘Did I say that?’
‘Sorry, you did.’
I laugh at myself. ‘I talk too much.’
Lyle swallows, and his Adam’s apple looks oddly large. Without meaning to, I think again of him in his boxers, of my question regarding the correlation of appendages.
‘What?’ Lyle says. ‘What is it?’
‘You live near here, don’t you?’
Lyle points with his thumb, and I finish what’s in my glass.
IT’S ALL HARVEY’S FAULT
We’re on Lyle’s sofa, the very same one I’ve slept on previously, the window open, the sound of the city pouring in, and Lyle’s face so close to mine I can see the flecks of orange in his brown irises. We have not kissed, and I’m thinking that this is a condition I’d like to remedy. In general, my feeling inclines toward greater intimacy, and when I stroke Lyle’s back through his shirt down to the bottom of the spine, where I cross over on to skin, I am unambiguously, I believe, communicating this intention.
Our lips meet, and I feel as if some current has made contact with my body, a line of desire opening through all of me. The kiss builds and lingers, and in a moment we’re on the brink of something else altogether, some feeling that, since Harvey died, I’ve felt only with Bruce. But this is not the cruel and dirty version, I think, pressing up and into Lyle’s hips, into the appendage about which I have expressed curiosity. This is the benevolent, categorically pure, rock-solidly benign variety.
‘I’m sorry.’ Lyle’s mouth has parted from mine. My hips follow
his away from me until he’s sitting, and then they fall, heavy and hard. ‘I’m sorry, Djuna.’
Now I’m sitting, though my head’s still swimming. ‘What is it?’
Lyle makes this noise with his mouth, as though he might be chewing something. I lean into him, touch his back. ‘Are you all right?’
‘It’s just Harvey,’ Lyle says.
‘Harvey?’
Lyle looks at me, eyes wet, mouth tight. ‘I just don’t know.’
Then I understand. I gasp at the sudden knowledge, at what this man thinks he’s doing. I get to my feet, search around for something, though I have no idea what.
‘It sounds strange,’ Lyle says, ‘but I just feel like what would Harvey say about us.’
I’m putting on my sandals, bending down to buckle them, before Lyle gets what’s happening here between us.
‘Hey.’ He stands now, too. He looks a little lost. ‘Are you going? Djuna? Are you leaving?’
What would Harvey say about us? Who does this man think he is? What would Harvey say? Harvey had a chance to have a say, but that chance is over now. And, anyway, if he had anything to say, he’d say it to me, not Lyle. At least Bruce had the sense not to speak this way to me.