‘How wonderful,’ Laini said. ‘And did you?’
‘Not then, not yet. Soon . . .’
He continued with the story: They moved out of the crowd, back to an empty stool against the wall. Maggie told him she’d never in all her life felt this good. It was the speed; she was buzzed. He told her that, and she made the sound. Bzzzz . . .
And with that, eyes closed and buzzing like a bee, she looks good enough to swallow whole.
Instead he leant in and kissed her, just kissed her, a taste, wet and salty.
As Martin was telling the story now, he stared straight ahead at the refrigerator as though its door was a screen playing the memory, but after the kiss, he looked back to Laini and smiled. ‘I spilt the drink I was carrying all over my pants. Bourbon and dry. That was it, a messy end to a first kiss.’
His eyes widened. ‘You know, she knew she was going to be a painter then; she knew it when she was seven years old. Amazing that, isn’t it? The way she always knew.’
Then came a different voice: ‘That she always knew what?’ It was Maggie behind him. ‘Sounds like I got here just in time.’ And looking at the empty bottle: ‘Or maybe not. Laini, darling, are you going to be right to drive?’
Some time later (had they had dinner?), he was alone in a bedroom.
It was after the kiss. And there were her words, pure and gushing: ‘I love this; I love your life.’
It went like this: The kiss, the spilt drink, and then . . .
‘I’m not kidding; it isn’t just the drugs,’ Maggie says, pulling back but staying close. ‘I love this; I love your life.’
There is an unexpected certainty in what comes out of his mouth as he passes her the glass: ‘This isn’t my life.’
She downs what is left of the drink. ‘Is that right? So whose is it then?’
He nods towards a couch, at Dave and Linda, who are waving them over. ‘I’m just a visitor. They are the real thing.’
She shrugs as she starts to sway to Bob Marley and tells him he is whoever he wants to be. ‘You said there are things you want to do . . . What are they?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Get more serious with the photographs.’
‘That’s great, Marty—you’re in New York; you can do anything.’
He tries to tell her it’s complicated, he’s meant to be doing the bar exams, but she shakes her head and presses a finger to his lips. ‘Remember what the pigeon lady said: fear is a gift . . .’
‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘sure it is. So let’s unwrap it. Let’s get out of here.’
There is an urgency now. She has crawled under his skin like an itch. It is the drugs maybe (or maybe not, maybe this is his way, his thing . . . ), but whatever it is, he needs to scratch; he needs to get to the door and stumble down the five flights and take Maggie back to the loft. He needs to fuck her and say goodbye and get back to what he was doing before. But she isn’t behind him; she has taken herself over to the couch and is sitting down, her shirt pulled off her left shoulder as Linda draws a heart on it and Dave hands her a spliff. And that is when he feels himself plunging, reeling . . . Something about the vignette tells him it could all slip away. All of a sudden he is questioning whether to walk back or just leave, because all of a sudden he is a pretender and this has to be what she always wanted, who she wanted to be with, Dave and Linda—just like he said: the real thing.
He is sweating, his heart racing.
He squats down on the floor in front of Maggie. She looks at the spliff and then at him like she has a question.
Dave answers it: ‘Weed on speed. It’ll warm you up, give you a sidestep.’ His voice sounds like it is coming from another room.
She takes a couple of tokes and when she is done, Dave puts his arm around her and pulls her in close then yells: ‘You gotta be straight with me, Marty: is this how they all look back home?’ He gestures to Linda and Maggie, side by side. ‘It is like I have died and gone to the island and here they are waiting for me: Ginger and Mary Ann. Fucking beautiful!’
Maggie takes hold of the fingertips resting just above her left breast and turns to kiss Dave’s cheek, then she makes everything right and slides down onto the floor next to Martin. Her pupils are full moon, and rolling . . . He puts his hand against her face; she presses against it like a cat, and whispers: ‘Let’s go.’
Maybe visitor was the wrong word.
It stuck in his mind as the edges blurred and the scene closed. When his eyes opened he was sitting in bright light on a ledge by the pool, watching Maggie swim. In his hand was a camera. He had started again with the pictures.
He watched her laps. This was what he did sometimes. Perhaps it was every day.
‘Do I come with you every day, Maggie?’ Mid-lap, there was no answer. Just the splash of water in an ocean pool.
Observer was a better word.
It was enough, wasn’t it? From the minute she knocked on his door . . . It was a call to action. But the truth of it was that the pigeon lady was wrong: you don’t have to do anything. Fear unwraps all by itself.
‘Let’s go. Let’s go back to the loft.’
On the street the night is warm and the smell is pungent, like the day has died and is rotting all around them. They have left the party. It is two a.m.
‘Let’s go to the loft. We can get your stuff in the morning.’
‘No.’ At first there is just the single word in reply, and a sinking moment when he thinks it is over. ‘No,’ she says, her head falling back in bleary worship of the night sky, ‘not the loft. The garden. Let’s go back to the garden.’ And her eyes spin, a rush of blood on weed on speed. ‘Let’s explore it in the dark.’
Back in his study after her laps, Maggie had come and gone. She hadn’t liked what he had said. He hadn’t said it right.
‘I’m going to the studio now to do some work.’ Her hair was still wet from the water.
He nodded. ‘On the wall.’
She started to walk out, but stopped. ‘I am not painting on the wall, Martin.’
Of course. This one was paper. This was the one she sent to Mrs Bess. ‘This is why I call you.’
‘What are you talking about, Martin?’
He was talking about the painting in the window of the shop. Months after Maggie had left New York, he had seen the painting in the window. It was an ink wash. There he was! The likeness was unmistakable: Martin sitting on a chair in a corner of the loft like a man in a junkyard. He appeared dazed, his shadow forming part of the wall, his body another object amid the debris. After that night in the garden, Maggie had gone home and there had been no contact between them (though it was unsettling how much the girl was in his thoughts). And then the painting. Martin saw it, stopped in his tracks. He went in to speak to Mrs Bess, who told him Maggie had sent it all the way from Australia. She asked if Maggie had done it while she was in New York. ‘No,’ he had replied. ‘She only drew one, on the wall in the loft.’
The pigeon lady seemed surprised, then suspicious, and went to bring the painting out from the window. When she returned she looked closely at his face then pointed to the page, to the faint crevice on the chin, the line of the cheekbone. ‘She knows your face like she has known you all your life.’ She stated it as a fact, shrugged. ‘She is an artist, this one. She understands demons even when she has none of her own . . . I’ll keep it in the window so you can see it when you come by.’
As he walked home he remembered what Maggie had said that morning in the loft, how as a girl her mother had his photograph on the fridge. He wondered if Maggie had kept it and looked at it again when she had painted this last portrait.
‘It was months after you’d gone,’ he said to Maggie, who was still standing at the door of the study. ‘I walked past her shop and there it was, the drawing you sent her. She kept it in the window so I could see it. That is why I called you.’
That was wrong. The chronology was wrong. She shook her head in anger.
‘You didn’t call, Martin,’
she said. ‘I called you.’
What he did not tell her, what he meant to tell her before she rushed off, was that years later he went back to see the pigeon lady. On his last visit to Dave, he had gone back to try to buy the painting. But Mrs Bess wasn’t there anymore; the school wasn’t there. All that was left was a shopfront and, above the doorway, a pair of shitting pigeons.
Chapter 14
It was only later that night, dripping ink around the edge of a canvas, that she could pinpoint what was still bothering her. It was not the skewed perspective on the pebbles in the corner of the painting (that was no worse than it was yesterday—no better, no worse). As the last ink drop swelled, what Martin had said that morning in the study continued to replay—this idea he had seen the painting she sent Mrs Bess and, because of that, had called her.
As she often did when she was stuck on something, Maggie turned away from the painting and towards the objects on the shelves behind her. She would pick one—the plaster hand or the peacock feather, the dried acacia branch or one of the skulls (human, bat, unknown). Today it was the small canvas, a woman in a plain, pale dress sitting on a front doorstep; the backdrop was the brickwork of the building. It was a painting by an unknown artist that her father had rolled up and carried around a continent. Over time it had been damaged, a watermark on the lower step, and on the right side a clumsy attempt at restoration—the section of the overpaint contrasting with the subtler blend of the surrounding bricks. Maggie had thought to test it with turpentine to see if she could remove the overpaint without damaging the original, but she never had, at first for fear that whatever lay underneath would be too fragile, and later because there was a reason to understand the endeavour and, in spite of the crude brushwork, to respect its intention.
I walked past her shop and there it was . . . That is why I called you.
Martin had not called her.
It was a mistake of fact and Maggie had corrected him. Her protest had sounded like adolescent pique—I called you, you didn’t call me—when in truth the event was the initiation of the rest of their lives. Yes, Martin was forgetting; he was forgetting what food he liked for breakfast—some days he still forgot that there were no more judgments to write—but he was not forgetting what happened in New York. The repeated retelling of what happened all those years ago, what made it bearable, sometimes astounding, was the accuracy of it, the newfound power of recall—and then this morning in his study, such a fundamental error in the chronology.
What Maggie realised as she gave up on the portrait and went to wash her brushes was that it was the first time he had stepped beyond that day in New York, to what came next. It was the first time he had ever mentioned the painting she had sent to Mrs Bess, and the telephone call between them.
And as soon as he stepped past the day, that was when the lies began.
The chronology—the truth—was this:
The first phone call, three months after her return to Australia—November 1973 (You have a choice, Maggie, her friends said. It is 1973!). The script was off track from the start.
‘Hello, Martin, it’s me—Maggie.’
She hadn’t meant to say ‘me’, just that it was Maggie. ‘Me’ presumed intimacy. The tone in his voice she was sure was a reaction against it—the same tone he used that night in the garden in New York after she’d said her final piece, after she’d said too much.
‘Maggie! Maggie. I meant to . . . how are you?’
Her friends said they knew a doctor who would do it. Her life was just beginning; she didn’t need to go through with this. For God’s sake, it was 1973 . . .
‘I’m great,’ she said. ‘Fantastic. I started art school, and I’m saving some money.’
What her friends did not understand was that since her return home, Martin was her first and last thought of the day, and the fly in her head all the hours in between. What her friends did not—could not—understand, was that on the other side of ‘he loves me not’ was the belief that the life inside her was a sign of a shared destiny. She began an ink wash portrait, working now from memory—the only photograph she had being the one of him as boy—and as she painted she carried on a mental dialogue, continuing all the conversations they had begun in New York and writing and rewriting the one they would have on the phone when he called.
And she sat behind the counter in the dress shop or in her art class and relived the night from every which way. His voice: ‘Lie down . . .’ It played over and over: the pinched skin as he pinned her arms above her head with the warm weight of his body. Sometimes the only way to stop it was to bite the palm of her hand; only that would bring her back to the suffocating tedium of the present, the nausea of her pregnancy, a customer browsing and not buying, a lecturer looking to her for the answer to a question she hadn’t heard.
She waited three months, but the call never came. That was why she’d got the tone wrong; in the version she’d imagined, it was Martin who dialled the number—she didn’t need to tell him who it was. When it came to picking up the phone herself, she hadn’t thought to rewrite the introduction.
‘And you, what’s news?’ As the question left her mouth, the fact loitering in the subterranea of her mind came steaming to the fore: that her relationship with Martin was for the most part of her own making, that it consisted of a single day, or—in the words of Erica Jong—a ‘zipless fuck’.
‘Well, you won’t believe it, but I’ve enrolled to do the bar exams. Linda finally convinced me. I sit them in a few months. So I’ve become a total swot.’
Though her brain scrambled for a response to mask the demolition of her hopes, it produced nothing more than, ‘Oh my gosh.’
‘Well, you know, she’s right: as a lawyer, there’s so much I could do here—I mean there’s some fucked-up shit going on.’ (Hadn’t she heard those words before? Weren’t they Linda’s words?) ‘And she’s got this contact in the public defender’s office and they think I can get sponsored through the firm. So I could do a bit of criminal defence work . . . They need lawyers out in the boroughs. And it keeps the parents happy. They’ve even sent me some money to see me through.’
‘And photography?’
There was silence for a second. ‘I guess later, maybe.’
As Maggie continued her part in the conversation, a perfectly acceptable imitation of calm in her voice, the words ‘I am pregnant’ repeated in her mind as some kind of joke, pathetic and cruel, more cruel and pathetic than any joke she had ever heard.
She finished the painting, and sent it to Mrs Bess.
Four months later—when she knew he’d be done with his exams—she made the second call.
His voice choked. ‘It’s mine?’
There was fear in it, more terror than fear. It made her want to scream. Instead, what came out was something she had never planned to say, a lie she had never planned to tell: ‘I think so. There was a guy in Paris.’
‘Oh . . .’ And in that small sound, some relief.
A guy in Paris. There it was, his out, and a way for her to end the conversation.
It took two days for Martin to call back and he opened with: ‘I’m really sorry this is happening to you.’
She didn’t have a response ready for that.
But he was ready: he would sort this out. He would be back for a visit once he could get the time. There were tests they could do, blood tests to determine the identity of the father. And he would send her money, for ‘baby stuff’; his parents had sent him more than enough. ‘And then, once we’ve sorted it, we’ll go from there. I’m not walking away from this, Maggie. I don’t want you to think that.’
Somehow, she diverted the conversation back to the everyday. He had got his results and had passed the bar, and in a week was starting his new job.
‘How’s Dave?’
‘Not so good. He took off; the drug thing got pretty bad.’
‘And Linda, how is Linda?’
‘Great, she’s good.’ And then the question she didn�
�t ask because she knew the answer to it and all the ones that followed: So it’s just you two there now?
When Martin came back for that first promised visit, Ethan was twelve months old. For Maggie, there had been months of chronic reflux and breath-holding spells, months of watching the colour drain from his lips, and at some point of every day she had looked into her baby’s eyes with the thought that Martin was not there to look into them too. There was no more art class (no ‘room full of wankers’), and more often than not Lili still worked night and day, leaving Maggie alone in the flat with the baby and the stack of books a teacher had lent her. When Ethan slept she buried herself in them, art history and mystic theory, a favourite on the art of automatism, and though it was not the time to paint, there were days when it was all she wanted to do, and through the delirium of night she would keep at it, her body exhausted but her mind separate, frenetic, free.
When finally Martin did come back, it wasn’t that her love for him had paled, it had just changed colour.
She walked him into the room; the baby was sitting on the floor. ‘There is no need for a test, Martin.’ This was all she said. ‘There was no man in Paris. This is Ethan, your son.’
Ethan started crying again. She picked him up and handed him to his father. The crying stopped.
She didn’t know what she had expected of this first meeting, but not what played out, not this simple, quiet exchange. They sat on the square rug. Martin watched in gentle awe as Ethan rattled the plastic keys. ‘He is amazing.’
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