In Two Minds

by Gordon Parker

  ‘I don’t want to go back to modelling again. It’s too vacuous. I want a career where I can use my intelligence. I’ll probably need to go back to uni.’

  ‘That’s impressive. Always hard to know what to choose.’

  ‘Yes, today I’ve been oscillating between a business commerce course or vet science.’

  Martin appeared surprised, turning from the food preparation to look at Bella with his eyebrows raised. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘I’m good at cutting deals but a bit light on the details. But I’m sure I’d be a great businesswoman.’

  ‘You’ve got the required number of balls?’

  ‘You know the AC/DC song “She’s got balls”?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, remember Miranda in the The Devil Wears Prada? That’s how I’d like to do business.’

  ‘Not too cruel, you don’t think?’

  ‘Oh absolutely and all the way down to her soul. But I’d only be like that on the outside. For decent people – like you – I’d bend over backwards.’

  ‘As I’ve observed,’ replied Martin quietly with a wink.

  ‘I often think that I have a dual personality – business would allow me to express both. Master others with monster deals but also be known as a great philanthropist.’

  ‘The two could be reconciled. The ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu had a great saying: Mastering others is strength. Mastering yourself is true power.’

  ‘Oh Martin, you are so amazing. Your depth of knowledge. And your wisdom.’

  ‘Lao Tzu in this instance. And if not a businesswoman, being a vet?’

  ‘I love animals, Martin. Always have. They are so innocent, so loving and they love you unconditionally. My only regret about living in apartments. Had to put my dog down last year.’

  ‘It’s a tough course. High stress rate in young female graduates. They often find themselves in their first year out working in some godforsaken area being called out at three in the morning to deliver an impacted calf. Physically impossible for many.’

  Bella tossed her phone to the side of the couch. ‘Reality check. Yes, you are probably right.’ She walked across and hugged him. ‘I am so appreciative of you listening to me. If you don’t mind I’d like to continue the conversation over the next few days. I’m sure you and I will be able to work out my best next career move. You are just so wise.’

  Martin served the cod from the baking tin and the Greek salad from a Georg Jensen mirror bowl and searched for the Semillon in the fridge. Bella brought it back from the living room. ‘You ready for some wine?’

  ‘Am I ever.’ Martin frowned, noting that the bottle was half empty.

  ‘Sorry, I started before you. I didn’t want to distract you from your cooking.’ She sat opposite him at the table. And exclaimed, after her first mouthful, ‘Martin, this cod. It’s so wonderful.’

  Martin beamed. ‘Better than the other cod?’

  Bella smirked. ‘More of a fishy taste, Martin.’

  ‘You have the mouth of a fishwife, Bella.’ Martin became more serious. ‘You must call me Sunny. Been my nickname for ages.’

  ‘Sunny. That’s so right. And I want to get close to you. Tell me, if I get too close will I end up like Arcus?’

  ‘Icarus, actually. As long as you don’t fly too high, or too low.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘He had waxed wings and, becoming heady during the flight, he soared too high. Just as his father had warned, the sun melted the waxed wings and he fell into the sea.’

  ‘Martin. Sunny. You are so intelligent. And if I get too close to you?’

  ‘I more see you as the sun. It’s me that is flying high. Since I met you I feel that I am soaring. I have never ever met anyone so beautiful and with such allure.’

  Bella reached across the table and gave Martin a big hug before refilling their glasses.

  ‘Sunny. I think I love you. You’re handsome, and that helps. You’re kind, and that’s not common. But you have the capacity to soothe me and I’ve never found that with a man before. No, perhaps one other. And, in your arms I fall into a deep sleep. When you smile at me I feel calmed and peaceful. It’s absolutely awesome.’

  Martin mentally winced at the last word. It reminded him of their age difference. Rather than respond, he swilled the last of his wine. Bella brought a second bottle to the table, standing next to him, her arm on his shoulder. She spoke softly, looking deep into his eyes. ‘I have lots of insecurities, Sunny. I need to be loved. I feel your love. You do something to me.’

  Martin became acutely aware of confounded agendas. He viewed himself as engaged in an erotic journey possessed by a primary daemonic force of sexual desire. Bella had been presented serendipitously and in some supernatural way to him and created an epiphany. She had wakened him, akin to Odysseus being wakened by the laughter of Nausicaa. But love? No, he did not love Bella. But would he be so cruel as to tell her? As he mused he sipped. He noted that he had drunk most of the second bottle. And yet he did not feel drunk, or even tipsy.

  Bella was staring closely at him. ‘Could you love me, Martin?’

  ‘I’m a one-woman man, Bella. I love my wife.’

  ‘You love her and yet you race into an affair with me?’

  Martin offered instant logic. ‘I love her and I’m entranced and enraptured by you.’

  ‘Enraptured by me. That sounds simply physical.’

  ‘It’s more than that. Your body is exquisite and it captivates me. I ache to look at you and to touch you.’ Martin doubted that she would appreciate an academic discussion about Eros. He simply alluded. ‘But I’m also attracted to your life force. You are irrepressible, active, risk taking, strong willed, full of spirit and, dare I say it, you possess divine energy. I feel that energy and I presume that I absorb it and it inspires me.’

  ‘And will you tell your wife that you were screwing around in the week she was away? Perhaps just after she’s given you your duty-free bottle of whisky?’

  ‘Of course I’ll tell her. We don’t have secrets from each other. When? I don’t know.’

  BELLA’S REPRESSION

  Bella was nonplussed. She luxuriated in Martin’s presence, was soothed by his ambience and his comforting arms and considered him the kindest man with whom she had ever had an affair. And yet his naivety was breathtaking. She wanted Martin. It might be simply achieved by blowing up his marriage. But if he was prepared to let his wife know about the affair that strategy might be nullified. She needed to ensure that Martin needed her more than he needed his wife. His basic need of her was sexual. Bella knew nothing about Lysistrata and her companions withholding sex from their husbands to end the Peloponnesian War, but she did have sex boycott tease expertise. She was going to post a no enter sign on their relationship. She would tease him and please him but sexually freeze him. Her basic needs of Martin now were not sexual. She had to keep this man. If he abandoned her she would be lost.

  HOW TUESDAY BECAME A DICK OF A DAY

  It was the start of World War Three. The explosion of the rogue nuclear bomb lit up écorché figures, the bodies unclad so as to suggest a rubenesque massacre of the innocents.

  Martin entered the apartment quickly, disclaiming any weariness from working almost twenty hours at the front. He had felt bulletproof all day.

  Despite his dynamism he stopped to take in the TV scene and to admire Bella asleep on the couch. Reports from his superannuation fund littered the adjoining coffee table, many stained by condensation and contents from the two now-empty wine bottles. One once containing claret, the other a Semillon, both harmonised by the signature of their golf club labels. Dizygotic twins, mused Martin, separated only by birth. He felt awash with whimsy. Martin moved the horizontal one to join the vertical bottle and checked that both were aligned.

  Bella continued to sleep through the explosion of another nuclear bomb. She wore a silk negligee, which was failing to hold captive her beautiful breasts and riding so high on her hips as
to allow a public pubic glimpse. My trophy consort, Martin mused with a gentle smile, becoming briefly stilled. Bars of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Suzanne’ filled his mind. You know she’s half crazy…You can spend the night beside her. Yes, he mused, I have indeed touched her perfect body with my mind.

  Martin crossed the room and turned off the television.

  Bella stirred, then woke quickly, frowning, her face animated, one hand feeling for a cigarette pack.

  ‘You turned the TV off?’

  The question was etched with irritability. But Martin knew he had the capacity to pacify her.

  ‘There be trouble at t’mill?’

  Bella’s frown shifted from Mona Lisa to a moue. ‘You are so late. I thought I’d be sleeping on my own tonight.’

  Martin tapped into her logic. She was simply impatient. Thought she’d be sleeping on her own implied not wanting to sleep on her own. Wanting to sleep with him and frustrated by his lateness. Wanting him. He was on a promise. Well, he would always deliver on a promise.

  Since entering the room he had been subliminally aware of her perfume, but now the subliminal was sublime. Differing floral scents, tinted by rose water and musk, of freesias, cyclamens, peonies, carnations, lilies and even lotus flowers, oscillated and merged to create a woody fragrance. It was an aromatic roundelay, singing to Bella’s beauty.

  Martin had a sudden recollection of being in the dissecting room for the first time. He had initially judged the room – and its contents – as his initiation to purgatory. The room had some thirty steel tables, each containing a naked cadaver at the early stages of dissection. He had worked his way around the room, this House of Hades, looking at each corpse. Most were shrivelled and wizened, their thin-lipped mouths partly reflecting their edentulous status and the enervating impact of their final illnesses. It was their asexual nudity that preoccupied him. He could not cloak them with Milton’s in naked beauty more adorned romanticism. He wanted to cloak them with a sheet, as they more evoked scarifying images of holocaust camps and of man’s inhumanity to man. He was training in medicine – a career embracing care, empathy, respect for the patients and beneficence – and here lay those stripped of their dignity and dehumanised, identified neither by name nor life story, and only by their table number and a cardboard tag tied with a leather string around their ankle.

  And yet, over the weeks that involved dissecting these bodies – his student group assigned the head, neck and torso, while their companion group had the lower body and limbs – and as muscle groups and tendons began to resemble a plate in Gray’s Anatomy, he ruminated as to how ‘nature’ could create such a complex machine as the human body. Was there not some deus ex machine power source bringing actors to the stage of life? Some god? Martin observed that he was progressively depersonalising the bodies that lay on the steel tables. He contemplated when does ‘somebody’ simply become ‘some body’. And he appreciated a paradox and a dichotomy: that to become a doctor, to be able to cure sometimes, relieve often and comfort always, he had to depersonalise and dehumanise the ‘other’ but also to view the ‘other’ with empathy. It would be years before he resolved the suggested dissonance. That the technical curative tasks of medicine required distance (and so no surgeon should operate on a family member) while the healing aspects required a compatible rapport. And that the doctor’s skill lay in knowing when to recruit which, or both, competencies.

  The memory lasted a nanosecond for there was little place for morbid thoughts in his current entitled mood. Here lay Bella and he was enraptured by her perfect body. Face, breasts, legs – but not her arms, as they were partially covered. Martin focused on the changing colours of the skin lying over her shoulders as she turned and slowly raised herself up. A basic rich mahogany, turning to nutbrown, copper, bronze, roan, sepia, ochre, taupe, ecru, auburn and russet as she stood, and with the tableau expanding as she dropped her negligee to the ground. Her skin colours were mirrored by subtle changes in the scents of her perfume. My God, thought Martin, there really had to be a god.

  Bella pouted ever so slightly. ‘So I guess I won’t be sleeping on my own tonight?’

  Martin picked up her negligee, folded it along its invisible seams, placed it carefully on the table and reached out theatrically towards Bella. ‘Bellarissimo, my Bella. Ring the bell, strike the clappers. To bed, to bed.’

  Bella adopted a childlike posture of submission, evoking the image of a Bill Henson photograph. It had perturbed Martin on first sight. But not now. Context was everything.

  She affected a girlish voice. ‘Tonight I’d like to be your waif.’

  Martin hesitated. Not sure whether he had heard wife. But her posture was not wifey. Not comely. More an innocent virginal Lady of Shallot.

  Bella put her thumb in her mouth, closed her eyes and rocked slowly. ‘Take me to bed, DADDY.’

  Martin picked her up gently, luxuriating in the touch and warmth of her skin, and breathing in her perfume. He carried her to the master bedroom, placing her gently on the bed on her left side. Right side pointing towards him.

  Even her ankles struck him as exquisite. He suspended his eager look of longing to pad his way to the bathroom. To where Bella shortly called, ‘Will you be long?’

  ‘Less than a minute, my homeless child.’

  As he brushed his teeth Martin inspected himself in the bathroom mirror. A handsome enough man, he concluded. He played his toothbrush like a violin, then engaging the brush in thrusting vertical strokes as if he were an orchestra conductor. His vertical penis was quivering, pulsating discordantly with the toothbrush. While generally Martin would have felt an emotional blush of discomfort as his sex raised its head, he now smiled. Homer erectus! King Priap. Hard on! Used to be too hard on myself. He grinned as he decided that he now looked like an ithyphallic satyr who had lost his place in a Bacchic festival march, a toothbrush as his flute, and with his goatish and hornish masculinity demonstrating that he was one hunky piece of meat on offer for his favourite customer. In his current mood Martin was inclined to generate multiple metaphors when one might do – or even then be superfluous.

  Picking up one of Bella’s eyeshades, he dropped it over his penis as a casual codpiece, and marched to the bedroom. His gourded and gorged penis waggled like an erratic metronome, while the eyeshade suggested his penis had grown a handlebar moustache.

  He slipped into the bed, seeking to spoon (whispering ‘Hey Bella. Can we make the beast with two backs?’), cupping a hand over her right breast, aware of multiple skin textures, and of shifts in her perfume’s scents – but with the ascent of alcohol now dominant. Nirvana awaited. He romanticised that she was a virgin, providing a value-adding frisson – that in entering her space, he would boldly go where no man had gone before.

  Aware that she was now breathing regularly and deeply, Martin raised himself to look at her face. She was asleep, and drooling.

  Martin’s parents had inculcated numerous rules of etiquette in relation to place settings, RSVPs, thank you notes and punctuality. But never had they covered the convention of sexual congress between one erect sentient man and a horny and consenting woman who had just migrated to the land of Nod. He judged that, just as he might handle a locum call – when the absence of house lights suggested he might not have the right address – a gentle door tap was in order. Lassoing his twanging penis he guided it on a reconnoitre mission, until it made gentle contact with love cave labia coppice land. Martin murmured, ‘Houston, we have touch down.’ His penis announced its arrival – tapping on her gateway – decorum overcoming Martin’s rutting instinct. Bella gagged slightly, placing him in a moral quandary. She had signalled her sexual passion earlier. But to proceed now might technically be rape or, at best, a violation.

  Martin’s penis stopped ringing the bell, retreated, its metronomic oscillations easing, pulsations lessening, its swollen shaft subsiding, letting itself down. He gently kissed Bella on the cheek. Her perfume scents had attenuated – perhaps overcome by the odour of a
lcohol. He had gone off the scent. Martin rolled on his back, patted his penis for at least playing the game and, aware of the ache in his testicles, examined the ceiling for the next hour as Bella slumbered and occasionally snored.

  Martin felt a hand on his penis, and was awake enough to know it wasn’t his. He looked at the night clock. Two thirty a.m. An indicative time he calculated. Bella had metabolised the alcohol. And he could no longer be charged for a high alcohol offensive. He felt himself rising rapidly out of sleep but his penis came to life even more quickly. The light from the clock illuminated Bella. Intense, eyes bright, clenching him and with her left hand touching – no stroking – herself, her hands asymmetrical in beat, the left hand presumably knowing what the right hand was doing. She ceased her handshake as she prepared to climb on top of him. Martin waited to be mounted. His penis was screaming, ‘Here I am.’ Bella was now on top of him, had her hand on his penis, and inserting it. He closed his eyes, seeking to enjoy every sensation.

  And then she rolled off him. She reached for a sleeping tablet and lay on her side, looking at him. ‘I had the most amazing fantasies tonight when I felt your willy about to enter me.’

  Martin chilled with irritation. ‘Willy.’ The term a five-year-old boy might use to describe his small soft appendage as he flicked it in the bath or pulled the foreskin over the penile head in an affectionate gesture. Unaware that it might later drive his life’s trajectory. Willy? Like peepee or winkie or twinkie. Weak as piss.

  ‘You mean my bed snake, beaver basher, best friend, beef whistle, broomstick…’

  Bella gave a deep throaty chuckle. ‘You are funny, Martin. I presume you are going to go through the alphabet again…’

  ‘Cock, custard launcher, deep-V diver, dick, ding dong mcdork, dude piston, Excalibur, fire hose, fun stick, groin ferret, giggle stick, goofy goober...’

  ‘You are too!’

  ‘Hairy hotdog, heat-seeking moisture missile, joystick, lap rocket, leaky hose, longfellow, love rod, meat sword, member, middle stump, old boy, one-eyed trouser snake….’