When she looked at the last application and saw that it was something redundant about an outback town, something having no punch in her gut, she picked up ‘Untitled’ again, staring at it as if it held some answer. She read through the sample and it was good, so she whispered, ‘Yes’, privately declaring ‘Untitled’ her winner. She said, ‘Yes’ that little bit louder, until tears relaxed in the cracks of her eyes, not wanting to go any further, just happy to be let out. Eventually Marion said a forceful ‘Yes’ and Digger woke up, briefly howled. ‘Yes, Diggy! Yes!’ Together they woke up the house, and Marion began clapping, Digger began thumping his tail to the rhythm of the house’s chant, which sounded like yes and yes and yes, while Orion slept on, dreaming the dreams of a very young boy.
Very Viv
No breeze today, the sun simply holding up the sky and the ocean gently flirting with the sand where Viv walked this summer’s morning. No sandals, no bra, her uterus emptying itself once again. Pregnancy scares did two things to Viv: brought back her past and shifted thoughts of her future. True, she’d never cared much for babies – she’d talk to them and hold them but never get enthused – and yes, she was always a smidgen resentful for being somewhat left out in a group of women when birthing stories sprang up from the well of bonding, but each time her period was late and she remembered a particular night with a particular lover and counted the days, did the maths, she thought about a baby forming inside her, about what it might look like when it came out, and, for a short time, only flashes of moments, she experienced maternal longing. So on the packed sand of low tide, her footprints that little bit deeper because she was menstruating and therefore heavier in body and mind, Viv was as melancholy as the wind was still.
I wasn’t meant to have his baby now, maybe never, but definitely not this time. It was a form of rationalisation and it usually worked, relaxing all passageways and making room for air. But not this time. Not on the two-year anniversary of Jean Harley’s death. Must’ve been the whole birth–death thing. Or the death–death thing, more likely. Viv whispered, ‘Fuck’ and it had no less passion than had she yelled it.
She’d met Philip at the funeral, in that awkward space between the parlour and the car park, where people lingered, unsure of what to do. He’d passed by her and looked twice. ‘Sorry, but were you a friend of Jean’s twenty years back, at Flinders University?’
‘That’s where we met. And you?’
‘I’m Philip Cross. I was one of her lecturers back in the day.’
‘You’re not the Philosophy one?’
‘Oh dear. I’m afraid I might be.’
Memories of conversations and confessions with Jean and Neddy regarding Philip were vague as so many years had passed, but how could she ever forget? Philip looked down at his shoes with what appeared to be embarrassment and pride, cementing for Viv that he was the lecturer Jean had slept with before she’d hooked up with Stan. He was Professor Sleazeman.
Jean had assured her friends that he was not sleazy. That, in fact, it had been she who’d seduced him, hungry for an experience with an older man and feeling like she could be anyone so long as she was in a foreign country, unaware at the time that Australia would become her home. ‘And an academic too,’ she’d sighed.
‘You mean a sleaze,’ Neddy had said.
And forevermore he’d been referred to as Professor Sleazeman.
He’d escorted Viv to the wake, which was held in Neddy’s backyard.
‘Look at this spread. How did Ned have time to do this in between her children and her grief? How’s she able to take all this on?’ Viv had been finding it difficult to sleep at night, in a daze at work, apathetic towards the gym, so she was in awe, yet again, of Neddy’s energy. The woman was a powerhouse, and a caring one at that.
‘I’ll be honest with you, this is a bit strange for me.’
‘For all of us.’ Children were playing in the grass. Two teenagers sat together on a bench. Middle-aged men and women tried to enjoy themselves in whichever way a wake allowed. The oldest of the bunch sat at tables, weary of yet another death.
‘No,’ he’d said, ‘I guess you’re right.’
‘It’s good, though. Jean would’ve been happy with the turnout. She loved a party. We should dance before the wake ends.’ Viv smiled a sad smile, missing her friend, then imagined herself dancing with Philip in Neddy’s backyard. What a kick Jean would’ve gotten out of the whole thing.
He seemed contemplative. She wanted to say shy but there was arrogance too. Serious-mysterious. She remembered thinking that Jean was lucky having bagged a lecturer and wondering if he’d be fair game when Jean and Stan got together. But Professor Sleazeman had disappeared and they’d never really talked about him again. Why would they have? But now he was here, so different from how she’d imagined him and yet also exactly the same: Professor Sleazeman. Professor Sexy, more like it.
She told him all of this that night as they lay in her bed, naked and sated, and he’d told her it had been a midlife crisis thing, his time with Jean, that it had led him to a life of near-celibacy and meditation. It had been intense for a while and it embarrassed him now, but he was trying to get back into the game.
‘It appears to me that you’re playing the game very well.’
‘Am I winning?’
‘I’d say I’m winning.’ Viv’d had three orgasms in seven hours, unprecedented in her bedroom. Maybe it was due to the sex–death thing. Whatever the reason, he’d stayed another three nights and they called it a draw.
A long-distance relationship ensued: emails, sexy video calls, a rendezvous in the Hunter Valley she’d suggested, a visit to Thailand he’d suggested, then the week-long holiday to his old home in Katherine where Philip had hermitted after his affair with Jean, nothing to his life back then but a computer and a zafu and a two-person canoe. And it was in the gorge, in that same canoe, where Viv realised that she was in love.
Had she ever been in love before? When she told her therapist she didn’t think she had, there was talk of her parents and their absence from Viv’s life. She learned to blame them for all sorts of things and especially blamed them for this. They were her reason for feeling so vulnerable with Philip. One day he’d leave and devastate her completely and it would be their fault if she didn’t survive.
When she finally told Stan about the affair, he’d asked if it made her feel better, knowing she could blame someone for something she was afraid of.
‘It’s easier than the alternative, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, yeah? And what’s the alternative?’
‘Leaving him. Being alone without him to love.’
Stan had smiled and looked toward the sky. ‘Man, Viv. If Jean could only see you now.’
Stan hadn’t heard the names ‘Professor Sleazeman’ or ‘Philip Cross’ before, but he got an earful that afternoon. The story became the butt of many one-liners, an inside joke that set them both at ease, and when Orion had asked, ‘What’s a “Sleazeman”?’ Viv told him, ‘It means “funtastic”. Want to meet Funtastic Phil one day?’ The boy’s eyes grew wide and he nodded as if he’d just been asked if he wanted to meet Superman.
So Philip visited Viv, then Viv visited Philip, and it went on in this way until finally they were talking about living together, but where? He was a damaged man and protective of his space, afraid to share for fear he’d ruin it like he had with his first and last partner, Rebecca. Viv was a selfish woman, also protective of space, and wasn’t leaving Adelaide. When home isn’t about family, it ends up being about place. Like it or not, Adelaide was hers. ‘What would ground me if I left?’
‘I could try to ground you.’
Their last tryst had been three weeks ago, when Viv’d been ovulating.
She walked along the beach, calf-deep in the water, the hem of her dress wet and clinging, and she missed Philip, missed Jean, wondered if Jean knew that she had br
ought the two of them together and that the anniversary of her death, for Viv, would always be mixed with deep thoughts of Philip, no matter what happened now. She was forty-three, time almost up, and she wondered if she should have his baby. Maybe Jean wanted her to have his baby. The re-birth thing.
She felt her nerves turn in a point below her bellybutton and deep, just there, where a commonplace miracle of nature was stirring, where eggs were dying because they hadn’t received her lover’s sperm.
She sat in the shallow water, letting the salty waves splash against her thighs. A man and a woman passed with their toddler. Viv watched them take turns carrying the little girl, setting her down, the toddler walking and falling, walking and falling, the parents picking her up again. Viv watched the family move forwards in this way, in this letting-go, this coming-back way that they had, until she couldn’t see them anymore.
After breakfast Viv put on an old t-shirt and skirt she’d had in a bag by the door for an op-shop drop. Never mind, today they would be her painting clothes. She went to Bunnings and had them mix an assortment of paints to give her three perfect shades of pink: Scarlet Ribbons, Violet Orchid, Pompeian Pink. Her wooden chairs in the kitchen needed sprucing and she had it in her mind to paint a couple of random cabinet doors, too. Gaudy yet feminine. Seventies yet eighties. Viv’s home was nothing like those she worked on for her job. Deep down she was a dag, though an unconventional and highly artistic one, and her flat reflected it.
The regularity of the strokes, even the biting smell of toxic fumes, relaxed her body and got her mind moving. She interrogated her eggs, composed soliloquies to the child she was not having and addressed the foetus she’d long ago aborted. She’d never told the guy and now she could barely remember his name. Jason Pan, Jason Pash, Jason Pink?
Despite the synthetic Daft Punk rifts pumping through her speakers, she heard the phone on its first ring and knew it was Philip. Call it women’s intuition, call it love, Viv answered the phone with a question: ‘Do you miss me?’
‘Madly.’
‘Do you want me?’
‘Always.’
‘I knew it was you.’
‘So it’s not just how you’ve taken to answering the phone, hoping one of these days the right man will be on the other end of the line?’
‘I’m pretty sure you’re it.’
‘Pretty sure?’
She was sure. ‘How about me?’
‘How about you what?’
‘Am I the right person? On the end of the line?’
Sometimes the way they communicated was nothing but a game. Like catch or charades. What she wanted to say was that she was bluer than the ocean outside her window because she was bleeding the red, heavy discard of her what-if.
They continued to back-and-forth, the sort of foreplay telephone calls allowed them, then they worked out some details for their next rendezvous. Griffith, New South Wales. The Acacia Motel. Would they be able to keep quiet during sex and not wake Orion?
‘I’m not doing it with him in the room, sorry.’
‘Are you sure he needs to come?’
‘He’s coming, Philip. We’ve already talked about this. I’m helping Stan out and I’m really looking forward to it.’
Since Jean’s death, Viv had made Orion a major priority. She wanted the child to grow up knowing he’d always have her to talk to because shouldn’t every boy have a woman’s gentle ear and soft-breasted hug? They were getting closer. They were beginning to need one another. At Marion’s wake, such an awful day, Orion had clung to Viv’s neck, resting his head on her shoulder, ignoring everyone’s kind words and gentle touches. He’d been six, not too light, but she carried him around, never setting him down for a full two hours. In the end she’d carried him to bed.
‘I don’t know, Viv. Is it so wrong for me to just want you? What if I told you I don’t ever want to share you with anyone?’
‘I’d tell you to piss off.’ And that was the end of the playful banter.
‘You OK, babe?’
‘No, I’m grumpy. Menstrual. I’m just in the middle of something I should get back to.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, I’ll let you go then. I’ll call you later, though. Happy hour.’
‘Sounds perfect. I’ll be better with a wine in my hand.’
They said they loved each other, and so they did, no doubt about it, but was it love because Viv was a childless woman who, on the surface, wanted to remain as such and Philip wanted exactly that in a partner? A love of convenience. Uncomplicated. If things changed, if she changed, if he ever had to share her with a little someone else, would he stay?
What if she lied and told him she was pregnant just to see what he’d do? She’d never told Jason whatever-his-name-was when she was pregnant with his child – could it be any worse? She wondered what that old flame might say today if she found him and told him she’d been pregnant then, way back when, after they’d met at some pub near North Terrace. Had it been an old church converted to a drinking spot? Inside there had been blue lights. Everything had been blue, she remembered this. She had drunk a bottle of wine to his four bourbon and sodas and he had told her she was sexy, very sexy, a jungle lolly so sweet he wanted to roll her around on his tongue, leave bits of her in the crevices of his teeth for later, when she had gone and the smell of her had disappeared. It had been an impressive pick-up line and she’d allowed him to spend the night with her in the one-bedroom house she shared with a budgerigar.
She’d been only twenty-three at the time, and the question of what choice did she have was very simple to answer. They hadn’t been in love. To have the baby and move back home with her parents was out of the question because her parents were living in Tanzania while her dad was knee-deep in writing his first script, a career change that would never see the light of day. What kind of role models were they anyway? Viv didn’t know how parents were supposed to act and she wasn’t about to figure it out herself. To stop her pursuit of oils, prints, clothes, jewellery, all that she created, to care for a baby? It had been unthinkable.
She’d made the decision the moment she found out and sealed it over fire-hot sake with her two best friends.
‘What if you regret it later in life? What if you found yourself childless at forty and you realised that this had been your only chance?’ Neddy, always the optimist. Even then she’d wanted so badly for them all to have children who would play together in their backyards for birthday parties and random barbecues and surprise pop-ins. Neddy had had this way of insisting that normal was natural.
Then Jean said, ‘We’ll have children for her.’
Viv finished the chairs and two cupboards and laid them outside to dry. Only 1.30 – too early for happy hour? She poured herself a sav blanc and opened her laptop to have a look at what Griffith had to offer. Her cat jumped onto her lap, and for a moment she was lost in the warmth of his purr. I know. I know. She breathed him in, then got back to all the restaurants and the cellar doors for a romantic couple’s getaway. But Orion would be there, so she looked at the wildlife park, the hill with a lookout, the farm tour with tastings and the pool at the motel. The boy deserved to have fun and hopefully this would suffice. He’d just turned seven, was struggling with his dad’s first girlfriend after Jean’s death, but not as much as Stan was.
‘Orion’s got to come first.’
Viv got it but knew it to be more multi-faceted than that. ‘So can’t she come second and still be an important part of your life?’
‘I’m not sure if it’d work anyway. She uses those flush things that stick inside your toilet. Drives me batty. When would I ever find the time or the energy to make it work? I’m so tired, Viv. Probably too tired for a girlfriend. Ugh – that word. It’s so adolescent. I’m beyond that now, aren’t I?’
A girlfriend? No, Viv didn’t think he was, s
o she’d offered to take Orion with her for the week she and Philip were to meet halfway between their homes. She hadn’t thought of consulting with Philip, only thought it was something she really wanted: for Stan, for Orion, for herself.
So now they were leaving in five days, Friday, after school. They’d make a road trip out of it, stay overnight in Renmark, maybe some little place on the Murray. And the next day, would she look at Orion in the rear-view mirror as they passed over the New South Wales border, and would her heart ache for what the boy had been through and for what he’d have to go through for the rest of his life, and would she think about Jean, once again, We’ll have children for her ? Yes, she would.
Maybe she was ready. ‘It’s only hormones talking,’ she told her cat. But why now? In her mind, she played out an imagined conversation with Jason what’s-his-name:
‘I was pregnant with your baby and I aborted it without telling you.’ She envisioned an old wheelchair with pin-striped canvas and scratched metal. One that Jason found stylish, particularly in its refusal to be a motorised scooter. By all counts it was practical, transporting him around his house, across the street to the local shops, down the corner to the train station. And she knew its backstory, too: it was his first wheelchair. Mornings, it sat next to his bed, awaiting the curve of his arse, the weight of his upper body, the drooping of his legs. His trusted old friend and nemesis. It reminded him always of the car crash that had taken away his wife and unborn daughter.
Viv imagined meeting him at the café for her overdue confession. ‘I was pregnant with your baby and I aborted it without telling you.’ He would tell her he could no longer father children, the irony of the situation not lost on either of them, the sadness heavy and encompassing. And then Jason would cry. And then Viv would cry. And then the story, as she saw it, would end tragically with Jason going back home on the train, waiting for the conductor to lay down the ramp while some teenage boys looked almost sick watching him struggle to position himself for departure, as if the idea that one day they could be in wheelchairs had suddenly hit them, as if they finally realised the transience of ‘invincible’. There were Jason’s muscles working the handles on the wheels. There were Jason’s hands, calloused. Jason’s legs, dangling. Jason’s phone, vibrating with Viv’s message of ‘I’m so sorry,’ because she had told him, ‘I was pregnant with your baby and I aborted it without telling you,’ and she imagined him not answering because he needed to get back to his lonely home so he could let go of his piss in the catheter.
Jean Harley Was Here Page 17