Escape

by Anna Fienberg

  'Why you always make problems? We don all 'ave to eat at six like you and Clara. Is ridiculous, even when I was a bambino I am used to eat at eight. Such a boring life we 'ave 'ere.' He laughed, perhaps to take the edge off his words, and strode back into the living room. He took the letter from me. 'Can't you do this small thing for your husband?'

  'Yes, of course, it's such fantastic news. But how many people? I don't know if there is enough—'

  'Oh, don worry, I ring up, maybe we will be ten, twelve. We have good things from the Italian market, you can make pasta.' He glared at me suddenly. 'You are not happy for me? Rachel, my first book! See, I am not just the magician, I am a poet! I will be a published writer!'

  I smiled and put my arms around him and tried to feel the beat of his heart and the warmth of his neck. I tried to think only of his happiness and not about the students coming for dinner and those two women in particular who Guido said cooked authentic Tuscan food just as if they had lived there all their lives, and spoke Italian with the true Florentine accent. I tried to imagine how wonderful Guido would feel to see his name in print, what a beautiful book it would be, with the poems in Italian on one side, in English on the other, translated by a real, qualified person who would do justice to his jewelled words. Perhaps he would be consulted on the calligraphy, the texture of paper, the cover picture . . .

  'I 'ave to think about a title, is very difficult, the poems 'ave such range and diversity of mood, subject, experience. This is what my publisher admires about me, the way I can espress depths of emotion, using landscape, the physical environment as a symbol. Is what Shakespeare did, she says, with 'is raging storms which signify the inner turmoil of his characters.'

  'Yes, how perceptive!'

  I tried not to mind that when my first book was published neither of us had really noticed at all. But mine was a children's book about ants and Guido's was a work of art.

  We did have twelve for dinner in the end, and both of the scary women came, but they were all very kind and so happy for Guido that I felt swept along on the tide of excitement. I also drank quite a few glasses of the pinot noir that one of the women had brought. By the time I could excuse myself to put my daughter to bed and read her a story, I felt so pleasantly blurred that Clara had to poke me to stop me falling asleep. 'This is the best part,' she protested, 'when Eeyore's complaining. You didn't do his voice properly.' So I had to read the page again, dipping my voice down and keeping it flat, like one of those heart-monitoring screens that indicate the patient is deceased. I always found this easy to do, just thinking of Saturdays and the shopping and the long flat line of Parramatta Road that ran all the way to the horizon. Eeyore didn't have much to look forward to either.

  When Clara was asleep I tiptoed out and sidled back into the living room. It was always an awkward moment, my sudden reappearance highlighting the fact that I'd abandoned my guests. I never felt right about absenting myself, or knew for how long was acceptable or whether it was at all, but I did it just the same. And I always felt torn.

  As I crept into the kitchen I heard Guido say, 'Often she falls asleep in there with Clara. Is very lonely out here for me.'

  'Oh, poor Guido!' someone said, and there was a lot of laughter.

  I dropped a pot on the stove so that they would know I was in hearing distance. 'Would anyone like coffee?' I called out lightly.

  Guido's publisher gave him a launch eight months later at Fellini's, an elegant Italian restaurant at Circular Quay. There was a party of twenty, mainly women, with Guido at the head of the table.

  After the main course Guido read a poem. It was so arresting that people at the other tables hushed and listened too. The winter cold of the mountains seemed to breathe through the room – my ankles felt icy just leaning against the metal legs of my chair. When he said the moon trembled on the water, I saw Sandra Farfalle shiver. The lights from the chandelier above sparkled in the dark of Guido's eyes, picking out the silver thread in his suit. I'm sure he was more magnificent than Dante and the smile he threw around the room as the applause broke over him was incandescent. He looked like he did the day he decided to stop being a magician and we'd flown down George Street like electricity down a wire.

  He was happy.

  On the way home we didn't say much. I put my hand on his knee as we drove and at the traffic lights he put his own over mine, our fingers weaving together. I wondered if he would ever write about warm things like hands touching or would his poems only ever be about the cold? He said the cold was far more interesting and you only had to read Leopardi to know that isolation and solitude gave rise to brilliant philosophy. If everybody was 'fantastic' all the time, there would be no art.

  'Which would you rather have, art or love?' I asked. But we were getting out of the car and Guido had gone to the mailbox.

  As I switched on the light in the hallway I saw the letter in his hand. There was the blue airmail stamp. Heartacher.

  'Oh, what a coincidence!' I exclaimed. 'You could send him a copy of your book. Or if you didn't want to bother, I could, if you like, I mean—'

  Oh, why didn't I think before I spoke? Why did I ever speak at all?

  Guido's face was thunderous in the harsh hall light. 'Why don you shut up, Rachel? How many times I 'ave told you, I don waste my time with this man? My life 'as nothing to do with his! Is no concern of yours, when will you understand that?'

  I turned away abruptly. I could feel my eyes filling. That tone of his punctured my tear banks instantly, like a pin in a balloon.

  'I'm sorry,' I whispered.

  'Cristo dio, and now you cry. è possibile? Can't we 'ave one night where there are not the tears? Why you 'ave to spoil this night with that idiot man, why you persist like this? You do this to torture me?'

  'No, no, I'm so sorry, as if I ever would . . .' I rushed to him and hugged him fiercely around the waist. I put my head into his back and kissed his neck and up under his hair. Against my chest I felt his shoulders drop. His back relaxed.

  'Let's go to bed,' I said quickly, and took his hand.

  Afterwards, when Guido was asleep, I tried to think about what he'd said, and how nearly I had spoiled his night. The night he was truly happy. But how could I stop wondering about this Heartacher person when Guido always reacted so violently, even just to his name. What was it that had happened between them? And why would Heartacher continue to write, over all these years, when he never received a response? He'd even taken the trouble to track Guido down in Australia. That would have been difficult, almost impossible, given Guido's lack of family. Perhaps they did have a friend in common, a girl, now a woman. Perhaps she was even living here, in Sydney . . .

  I lay awake, twisting in my bed. Whatever the reason was, I couldn't forget about James Heartacher. He'd become a symbol of my husband's opacity, the gap that was his past. I couldn't accept that Guido would never forgive James for his sin. There was something biblical about the harshness of his judgement. He reminded me of the god in the Old Testament. In his eyes you were either condemned or blessed, and there was nothing in between.

  I was too restless to sleep, and crept along the hallway to the kitchen. As I heated some milk, I decided that it must have been hope that kept me asking questions. As long as there was the possibility that one day Guido would forgive and acknowledge James Heartacher, then maybe there would always be hope for me.

  In the weeks that followed the launch Guido seemed cross, slightly deflated, sighing each time he got up to cross the room or start a conversation. I wanted to ask him if he felt let down after that initial blaze of news – as if the world should have stopped and yet hadn't, with ordinary life just rolling on around him as before. Did he look at his printed poems, set in the dashing new Galliard typeface, and think, was it me who wrote this, will I ever be able to do it again? Like I did?

  When Clara was five and one month, she started school. She was excited in a breathless way that could, I worried, turn into hyperventilation. As we drove to
school I told her to take four deep breaths and hold them for four seconds. I'd always found even numbers so reassuring as a child. But from the first day she waved goodbye in quite a jaunty manner.

  Clara didn't tell me a lot about her days at school. Sometimes she hardly said a word on the way home. When she did talk to me, her news didn't include what she'd learnt. I knew they'd been studying sea animals but she was more interested in TV cartoons and what Saraah said to Cathy and how it made her cry but it was the truth and why did Cathy have that big mole on her cheek and could you catch it?

  I had to say things three times to Clara now before she would hear me. What was she thinking about? She was floating off in her mind somewhere, I was sure. Did she do that at school, too, when the teacher was talking? Would she be like this forever?

  When she didn't answer me I grew anxious, then angry. Our conversations were often short and sharp, like bullets fired across enemy lines. It was dreadful. Often I had empty arms now even when she was at home. Stop pestering her, I told myself, let her be. But I couldn't.

  It was when Clara came home saying Stuart Alexander was a peasant because he blew his nose in a tissue instead of a hanky that I saw I'd have to take a more active role in her social education. Guido didn't hold with Kleenex, saying tissues were unhygienic, but I had always found this bewildering – what you do with a hanky is stuff it, still full of snot, back into your pocket. Clara's own handkerchiefs, which Guido insisted we have embroidered with C, were often plastered with dried green mucus, hard as plastic, that crackled when you opened them and had to be soaked in hot water to soften into slime before they went into the wash. Perhaps, I thought, if Guido had to do the washing himself, his championing of the handkerchief as opposed to tissues might change.

  'What did you see today?' I asked Clara after her excursion to the rock pool.

  'Miss Booth wore a purple dress and she didn't even know it's bad luck. So I told her and anyway it's an ugly colour like a bruise and it makes her look old.'

  'Did you see any periwinkles or little silvery fish?'

  'Can't remember,' said Clara. 'Aren't silvery fish those things we keep in cupboards that aren't cleaned out? That's what Daddy says.'

  Guido laughed when Clara told him about Ben's funny eye twitch or Cathy's wetting her pants. Clara would smile at him and glance quickly at me, then away.

  'That's not funny, Clara,' I'd say, 'Ben can't help it, imagine how bad he would feel—'

  'Oh let the girl 'ave a laugh. You are always so serious, like the tomb.'

  Perhaps it was to make her laugh that Guido made a feature out of people's peculiarities. In the car, or walking through shops, he would point to a woman with a pronounced moustache, a man at the bus stop with a drooping eye, someone with a garish shirt. He remarked on these things while walking with Clara the way another person might indicate a particularly beautiful flower, sunset, view.

  He had a whole system for keeping himself separate – unmoved or touched by others. He held his breath when a homeless person walked by. He made the scongiuro sign at people in funeral parlours, to ward off bad luck. I got the feeling that with just a small flick of the mind, people, for Guido, could become lumps of flesh, squiggles of clumped cells wiggling on a Petri dish under his X-ray eye.

  I didn't want to think about it. But like Ben with his twitch or Cathy with her mole, I couldn't help it. I thought about his disgust when I cried, lost control. His distaste for the secretions of humanity seemed infinite. Most of me was horrified but my secret self, about Clara's age, understood it. Inside, in the pit of me, I'd sometimes laugh with him too.

  Guido brought out the worst in me, and I loathed myself.

  Chapter 16

  It was my publisher, Mary Page, who suggested the series on magic. She took me out to lunch and contemplated me across the table. 'Isn't it strange, after all these books of yours, that I've never met your husband?' She smiled at me flirtatiously and sipped her wine. She'd never offered me a smile like that, or an invitation to lunch either. 'And now I find he has a second book of poetry published, and very good, too.' She leant forward confidentially. 'Is he really as handsome as his photo?'

  'Oh yes,' I told her, 'more so. In fact he's so good-looking that when you meet him you don't notice anything else for five years.'

  'And tell me, his bio says he worked as a magician, is that how you two met?'

  The waiter came and I ordered the saltimbocca alla romana because we were at Fellini's and Guido said that was their best. He said, 'You might as well order something expensive, seeing as you don't have to pay, and if you can't finish it, bring it home – I could have it for dinner. Or, could you get an invitation for me, too?'

  Two weeks before, when we'd made the lunch date, I hadn't liked to ask Mary about Guido but now I wondered if I'd done the wrong thing. Of course you did, said the voice. As we waited for our lunch, I tried my best to describe the kind of magic Guido had performed – his escapes from the Door of Death, his Houdini Metamorphosis, the Bohemian Torture Crib, the Winged Angel illusion. Drinking another glass of wine I could feel myself warming up. Remembering Guido's magic was like coming into a room with a fire roaring after being outside on a winter's night. I felt my cheeks flushing. I explained to Mary that the successful performance of magic depended on a knowledge of the laws of nature. Magic, I said, is actually all about science.

  'Fascinating,' said Mary. 'And does Guido still practise magic?'

  'Well, once you're a magician, I suppose you never lose the knack,' I said wistfully. There was a short silence. I fiddled with the stem of the wineglass. You should hold a glass by the stem when you're making a toast, Guido told me, because the glass must be free to vibrate with sound. If you hold the glass itself, as peasants do, the sound is muted.

  'But does he still perform, or maybe just in private, for you, hmm?'

  'Well, no, not really, not in public I mean,' I smiled uncomfortably.

  But Mary wanted more. 'So what's he like? Does he write every day? He teaches too, doesn't he, it said so in the blurb.'

  'Yes, he meets all kinds of interesting people. He was reluctant to teach at first, wanting to devote himself to his poetry, you know, but now he seems to enjoy it. His students are always telling him about some show or exhibition – he has a lot in common with them.' It was so much easier to conjure up Guido's magic than to describe him as a person. These days he seemed more like a relief sculpture stuck on his bedroom wall – you could see the front of him but anything behind or in the middle was a mystery. When I thought about it, the fact that he'd become a relief sculpture was a kind of relief in itself.

  When we were having our coffee Mary said, 'For your next series, would you like to write about magic? I've been thinking about it for a while – you know, a "how to" series, laid out simply, something children could follow and perform for their friends. You could—'

  'Oh I couldn't possibly, I don't know enough—'

  'You didn't know much about tarantulas or mud wasps when you started that series, either, remember. And look, for this one you'd have ready help at home!' Mary smiled and touched my hand. 'Would your husband be interested in contributing to the series? He'd lend real panache, hey? We could put his name on it with yours.'

  And his photo, too, I thought. Guido on the cover might become a bestseller.

  'Well, it's a great idea, I'm sure children would be interested—'

  'And we'll be increasing your advance too, Rachel. You've completed five different series now, and you've got quite a name in educational circles.'

  'Really?'

  'Yes, don't you read the publicity letters?' She put on her glasses and flicked through the papers sitting next to her plate. The slim black frames and her charcoal suit emphasised the professional, successful aspect of Mary Page. My anxiety rose as she read. ' "The Insect series, together with Natural Disasters and Bush Banquet, are becoming a standard text in this state for fifth and sixth grades." You should be very proud. With magic,
we may get international interest, particularly if you approach it from the science angle. So, will you ask Guido if he wants to have a part in it? In any way he'd like, of course.'

  'Well, certainly.'

  'No,' said Guido when I told him that afternoon about Mary's offer. He was opening his mail at the desk.

  'But she seemed so keen that you be involved, and they'll be increasing my advance, too, and if you came on board, well, I imagine they'd offer even more—' although the thought of Guido negotiating for a higher fee made my stomach tense.

  'I said no, Rachel, or weren't you listening? I am no longer interested in magic, is not part of my life. I thought you would know this about me.' His voice slowed as if he were talking to a child.

  'Well, yes, but I thought, you know, it might be good to do something together, it could be fun, don't you think—'

  'Obviously not if I have said no. You didn't have an entree today?'

  'No, Mary didn't have one and it was too much—'

  'What does it matter what Mary orders? You could 'ave brought one home for me. So, we eat scrambled eggs again tonight?'

  He left the pile of torn, empty envelopes on the desk and started towards his room. As I watched him go, heat flared in my chest. 'But wait, Guido!' I hurried down the hall after him. 'I can't do this subject by myself. I'm not a professional, I wouldn't know how to start. I couldn't do it without you!'

  He turned around and raised an eyebrow. 'Oh, Rachel, you are too old to say things like this. Is absurd. You will do the research as you do with all your other little projects – this book is only for children, remember.' His face darkened as he studied me. 'If you are asking this to convince me to return to my old job, then you are making a mistake.'

  'Oh no, I hadn't even thought of it—'

  He waved his hand at me. 'What do I 'ave to do to make you realise I am no longer interested in that job. Soon I will make money, big money, you will see and then maybe you will leave me alone about this.'