‘So my laugh hasn’t put you off?’
‘Protective coloration. I’m sure you could lose it if you wanted to. You want to be seen as, well, less than optimum, I suspect.’
‘Protecting against what?’
I had to shrug. How could I be sure? ‘Accepting less. What we were talking about the other evening. Or your own appetites. I don’t know you well enough. You should tell me.’
‘I’m more interested in what you make of it on short acquaintance.’
‘That’s a bit one-sided.’
She looked at me over her glass as she sipped her wine. ‘You’re here now. I’m taking chances too. In fact there’s something we have to do later.’
‘Oh?’ She was teasing again, deliberately loading the atmosphere. ‘May I ask what?’
‘Certainly. You can kiss me. One kiss.’
‘One.’ It was both trivial and yet incredibly, unexpectedly erotic. She was going to let me kiss her.
‘Sounds prissy, I know, but it’ll tell a lot.’
‘Passionate? Gentle?’
She smiled and put down her glass. ‘Wet? French? You’ll decide. But just one.’
‘You’ll respond to it?’
‘Of course. It wouldn’t be happening unless I could respond. Makes it interesting, doesn’t it?’
‘It would have been kinder just to let it happen, then deliver the verdict. This way it may not be too natural.’
The smile slipped away. ‘David, this matters, okay? You say it matters too. Knowing that will make all the difference.’
‘Accountability.’
‘Close enough. If you had one kiss to give—to be your ambassador—how would it be?’
It sounded so melodramatic, so juvenile, and yet there was a powerful charge between us because it was coming, something to be given and taken. I made sure I didn’t touch my glass now. I needed my wits.
‘Why have I deserved it?’
‘Who said you had? It may be a gift. But I could ask the same thing. Why have I deserved your interest?’
‘I like you.’
‘I like you. Liking’s easy. It’s a yes-no. But see it from my viewpoint. It’s what we started talking about the other night. If this is a rebound, holiday romance thing for you, then I could be anyone. The world is full of suitable candidates. I need to matter more than that, and finding out takes time or a gamble. I may be more serious about the kiss than you are.’
Possibly one of the smartest things I’d ever done was not trying to answer that. I kept my hand away from my glass and let her continue.
‘I like your silence, David. You see, Carlo was right. You do show promise.’
‘Carlo?’
‘At that party you first came to. When you guessed our names.’
‘Right. Tell me about the kiss.’
‘Some of it, okay? How about this? We go from the general to the particular when we meet someone. You’re a stranger here. For you, I’m new. I’m both a woman and Woman, everything you want me to be. You get to know me, you see my limitations, my habits and idiosyncrasies –’
‘Meet Mr Baggins.’
‘Exactly. Then I become the latest version, the latest instalment of woman, the configuration of womanness you’re currently working at. I do the same with men I meet. We make do; we always make do with as much of what we need as we can find, with as much as the person we meet is capable of. But things get shut out pretty quickly, that lovely universal quality of first recognition. It gets shoved aside.’
‘How can it last? It’s projection, idealisation.’
‘Exactly. It exists only in the recognition, in the stranger. Most people can’t sustain it. Why should they? It’s the stupid adolescent yearning that powered courtly love and dooms so many people to searching somewhere else for what they already have. Did Julia become desirable again once you lost her?’
The question threw me. ‘Julia?’ I couldn’t mention Zoe but she could ask this!
‘Yes,’ Gemma said. ‘You were close. You were comfortable before the thing with Mike.’
‘Mark.’
‘With Mark. Were you passionate? Intense?’
‘Gemma, I –’
‘Were you?’
‘We were close. We were fond.’
‘Comfortable. Women grieve before a relationship is over, men do it afterwards. You were ready to move on too, but the loss of connection is so devastating. We see our death in it.’
‘Listen, Gemma –’
‘David, answer the question. Did she become alluring again?’
‘Yes.’
‘Exciting?’
‘Gemma –’
‘Exciting?’
‘Yes.’
‘Would you go back to her?’
‘No. Not now. No.’
‘Why? Is it pride? Is it because she betrayed you? Forfeited your love? Because she doesn’t want you back? What?’
Because there’s you. But I dared not say it. It was another thing I couldn’t afford to say. Words didn’t cover it.
‘So I’m here because I matter enough,’ I said.
‘Obviously.’
‘You’re hard with this.’
‘It matters.’
‘It’s all going your way. On your terms.’
‘Seller’s market. You’re too wounded. I have to be careful for both of us.’
‘That’s presumptuous.’ But I loved the intimacy of her words: for both of us.
‘How I see it right now,’ she said.
‘But you like me.’
‘That’s easy. It’s easy to make do. I want more.’
‘This kiss is going to be something.’
She smiled. ‘A real killer. Or not.’
‘Or not. How’s our timing?’
‘It can be soon.’
‘But I decide when?’
‘Has to be that way. Tonight I’m the queen bee. Lots of suitors.’ She saw my expression and smiled. ‘Figuratively speaking.’
Teasing again. We sat across from one another, not touching but going to.
‘You’re so sure of yourself,’ I said. ‘But you’re not calm with this either.’
‘No. But you want the restlessness. You aren’t easy, but you don’t want to be easy. It’s demanding; it’s exhausting, but you want to be at that edge. The same with me. Most people never choose it, never even know it’s there to choose. They never see it, and if they do they instinctively try to get rid of it, bland it over. You do the opposite. You keep yourself there.’
‘It’s my condition, Gemma.’
‘No, it’s more.’ She was so certain. ‘It’s a position. Your condition may have put you in it initially, but you want what it brings. It’s about intense recognition. Better seeing. It’s what I was trying to say in the car the other night.’
‘You’re more intense than I am.’
‘Not at all. You just have a medical condition to justify whatever you like. You can tuck yours away behind catch-all, convenient labels. What are the words again?’
‘Coulrophobia and counterphobia.’
‘Coulrophobia and counterphobia. I wonder how David Leeton would have been without them.’
‘I’d like to think he’d still be looking closely,’ I said. ‘Still being this. Go on.’
‘More?’
‘This kiss matters to me very much.’
She regarded me carefully, saw not a trace of flippancy or sarcasm.
‘All right. I guess we all need to be accepted for what we really are. That’s choice one. Failing that, we settle for choice two: we resemble what the other person wants. We tidy up our act, modify our behaviour, adapt. We’re good at it. It’s what you said earlier: protective coloration. How many relationships go with choice two—spend years at it until time and familiarity bring about a version of choice one? Modern relationships tend to sample a lot of choice twos and move on. Look at the divorce and separation figures. Cynicism helps. We connect too quickly.’
‘You want choice one.’
‘Don’t you? Doesn’t everyone? Anyone who’s worth anything. I guess I want choice three really: choice one with a sense of the universal in the everyday. That extra seeing. Can you manage that, David? Sustain that? Most people can’t. Can you allow what I’m saying?’
‘I’m hoping the kiss will tell.’
‘Hey, I like that. Kiss and tell. It’s something we’re given few chances at except through organised religion, sometimes music or movies and books, maybe in an act of bravery and sacrifice. That connection with the archetypal, the symbol selves we are as well. It’s the hieros gamos. The sacred game. We die small. We have to stay bigger, remember to stay bigger. Work at it.’
‘I understand the kiss.’
‘Then it’s working. We’re two people sitting in a room, but we’re every two people who have ever done it and required it to matter. This kiss is every kiss that’s ever been required to do this task, carry such a message.’
‘Reaffirmation.’
‘Close enough, but devalued like so many good words. You like me, David, for whatever reason, but I’m infinitely replaceable. We’re all replaceable. But we might just do. It might be enough. I’m risking the Nelson Syndrome. You’re risking the standard Gemma Ewins one-kiss test.’
‘Right. Then the statistics are against me. Astronomically.’
‘True. But at least you’re someone who knows what I’m talking about. It should make a difference.’
‘One kiss to do such a job. The physical will get in the way. Can’t help that. It has to.’
‘Right. But that’s okay. It’s focused you. You’re right here, yes? It has to make a difference.’
To save further searching? I almost said, but that really wasn’t the point. It was better than that, more than that.
I was fascinated in spite of myself. It would have been so easy to lean across and kiss her then, bring it into this moment.
‘I’d like to hold you.’
‘So it’s now?’
‘I need to know.’
‘The outcome?’
I smiled. ‘What I’m capable of.’
‘Brave.’
‘What we’re capable of. It matters.’
‘Brave.’
We stood and moved out from the table. I went to her, feeling awkward, clumsy, fifteen, sixteen again, but needing to act. One kiss might buy everything.
Gemma stood waiting, very passively, arms at her sides. ‘Feels weird, I know,’ she said, a welcome kindness. I’m in this too. ‘Trust your instincts.’
There could be no hesitation. I moved to her, letting it be slow, took her in my arms, stood almost against her, then let myself move in. There was the thrill, the heat, the rush of touching the stranger, the definite hardening in my jeans. She’d feel it, had to expect it.
I waited till she raised her arms and held me too, then I put my mouth on hers.
It was soft, light, maybe eight seconds of the timeless you trawl for and find so readily in memories from youth, from when there were eternities on call and romance brightened everything, even polished the lies. There was the smallest pressure at the end. Let it be enough.
We parted. Nothing was said.
It was her test, her verdict. I’d let her speak.
Gemma turned away, took our empty glasses from the table and went over to the kitchen counter. She pulled the cork from a nearly full bottle of red and poured us each a refill, then came back to where I was standing.
She handed me mine. ‘A more fitting colour.’
‘I dare not comment.’
‘I have another surprise, okay? But I’ve been in these clothes all day. I need to change.’ She took her glass and disappeared into the bedroom.
I stood looking through her windows at the night, feeling my heart slow, my erection sink away. I noted the pictures on the walls, the patterns on the cups and plates standing by the sink, the titles of the magazines under the coffee table in front of the sofa. I crossed to the old wooden sideboard and studied the ornaments there. Among them was a ceramic model of a girl on a swing—somehow no surprise, and reassuring—the tiny stylised hands neatly formed around the twin wires; and there was a jewelled bee resting on a small wooden box with a marquetry inlay on the lid in the pattern of a honeycomb. Fitting for a queen bee, for someone who had drunk mead at a picnic on a hot afternoon.
Her world. I savoured it, sipping the wine, learning the person, seeing everything as choices, decisions, outcomes, much of it comfortingly familiar: the fridge magnets, the post-it notes, the sewing kit on the sofa; much of it at odds with the cosy, four-wheel drive, bingo night, chook raffle commonplaces of life in such a town.
Gemma Ewins at odds, the vessel. Taking everything projected onto her, all I needed her to be. All she needed herself to be. I meant to be fair, sought to be, wanted it more than anything at this fraught, injured time. No Nelson Syndrome. No harm. No harm to others. Being David Leeton at no-one’s expense. If I could manage it.
The kiss had changed nothing and yet everything.
The books on her shelves took the duality further. John D. MacDonald, Tolkien, Arturo Pérez-Reverte, Robert Lipscombe’s The Salamander Tree, Michael Flanagan’s Stations, the new Rick Amor retrospective: The Solitary Watcher, Steinmetz’s The World of Peter Greenaway, Donald Stoltenberg’s The Artist and the Built Environment, things you’d expect of someone interested in graphic design.
She was taking longer than I expected. The wine was good, mellow, edged with just enough oak, but it was getting to me. I set the glass down so I wouldn’t finish it too soon, because the moment was so important, so uncertain, and it was all such a cliché, having a drink while she slipped into something more comfortable. I didn’t want to have wrong expectations, do wrong things. It had already been delicate without the kiss.
The bedroom door opened.
And a clown was there. Just like that, a white clown, a hideous, unforgivable, hairless white clown stepped demurely into the room.
She came in holding her glass, smiling inside a bright red smile, a too huge, too wide, painted red smile. Gemma in a long-sleeved white leotard, white tights, white gloves, new white Converse hi-tops, her hair tucked away inside a white bathing-cap, her face all stark white greasepaint with the big red smile stuck on and flaring red stars where eyes should be. Where eyes were, eyes inside eyes, wide and knowing, her smile inside the smile widening as she came towards me.
‘No!’ I managed the word. And others. ‘Just stop!’ Others never said: why why why?
Clown Gemma reached out, not to me, rather to steady herself on a sideboard. She set her glass down and moved towards me.
‘Gemma, just stop!’ And like a mirror image, like an echo, I had to steady myself too, found myself reeling, fighting dizziness. Not drunkenness, not a known clown-fear symptom at all. The racing heart, the constricted breathing, the sweats: they were there—all known, but not this new sudden weight, this drawing out, this smearing of vision and pulling away from under. I didn’t know it. Didn’t.
All part of the trap. She would dull me and have me. She was already too near. Awful white thing.
The wine. The opened bottle of red. She had drugged the wine!
But in the shift, the falling away, the white clown was reeling too, it seemed, it seemed. I saw her tipping, toppling, reaching to grab the back of a chair, the edge of the table, tricker tricked, trapper trapped. She’d drunk the wine too. All the while, getting ready, painting her terrible face, she’d been sipping. Such terrible beauty. Such terrible, stupid beauty.
They don’t make clowns…
I might have laughed as the white clown fell away. As we both fell.
…like they used to.
CHAPTER 18
I woke in a darkened, enclosed space, in a shifting dream of one, barely able to move. Something—padded cuffs, hospital restraints?—held my arms to the sides of a bed, held my legs apart near the foot. How it seemed. Seemed was the word. There seemed to be straps across my chest an
d waist, seemed. All vague and fascinating and uncertain. Euphoria was there, too, and a thick, underwater dreaminess, an uncertainty about everything.
I was drugged. That was it. Drugged by a dream of a white clown made from Gemma. Something like that. Did I have that light blanket covering me? Was I naked under it? I had an erection; there was no mistaking that. White clown’s curse. Terrible arousal.
I stretched, shifted, felt myself held. It had to be restraints. Something. There was no sitting up, no leaving the bed.
I’d been medicated before. I knew drug euphoria, the sweet, heavy lassitude, the craziness. I tried to focus, tried to plot it back. What? How? The wine. Of course, the wine. The good wine. White clown’s wine. And now the after-effects of whatever drug Gemma had given. But no nausea, thank God. Good Gemma. Good girl. No nausea. It was unreal, ludicrous, but good Gemma. She had managed it.
But what if? What if not Gemma? This wasn’t the movies. This was real. Seemed to be. What if?
I pulled at the cuffs, kicked at them, no longer content to accept. I strained to sit up. Somewhere in the unreality, the twisting euphoria, disbelief became annoyance, something like anger, though that was unsupported, hard to keep. But in the joy there was alarm too, far off, twisted, thickened by the wonderful torpor. The clown had fallen. I smiled at that. Felt I did. There was fear back beyond the drowsiness, beyond the drift. I feared it, and feared the fear. The falling clown. Falling down. Phobophobia.
Struggled again, meant to, might have, wasn’t sure, but no use anyway. I lay back and let it flow, this dream that had panic, sharps, hard edges set in it, chunks of dread, but as strangers, visitors, bits of someone else. The clown had fallen.
I tried to learn the dream, as you do, like you’re meant to, tried to take it all in: remember this on waking!
A musty-smelling space—too small, too cramped. Not a room in a house or cabin. More like the back of a van. The inside of a caravan.
That was it! Some old caravan. A long window at the end, another above my head when I leant back to see. Two long windows, letting in dimmest moonlight, starlight, dawnlight, a sense of those, through curtains, lighting just enough, just enough, laid out there.
Nothing else. No other furnishings that I could tell, no fittings, other telltales, but the sense of built-in cupboards, the usual tuck-aways.
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