Tales of Mystery and Romance

by Frank Moorhouse

  We lapse.

  Milton says, ‘Your wife lived with Brooks after she left you and you got off with Brooks’ daughter. That is incest, technically.’

  He’s just saying that. He doesn’t believe in psychiatry. Just saying it for what reason? Don’t say he’s being nice?

  This time the Balmain Hotel. The new mildly-rebellious young adults. Living in old suburbs like cockroaches.

  ‘Milton has kicked me out!’ I announce.

  ‘He hasn’t!’ someone exclaims on cue, rushing to get me a drink.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I brought a girl home.’

  The clinking of laughter.

  Most of the laughter is owed to me.

  ‘He told me to get the girl out of the house. I said “You bring girls home – if we have this homo sexual thing then I’m a feminist.” He tried to hit me and I spat on him and then he went banging off to his room shouting obscenities and locking door after door. I walked along the keyboard of his piano.’

  ‘That might have been what did it – walking along the keyboard of his piano,’ Brooks says.

  ‘You think that might have been what did it?’ Brooks is an expert on marital crises – having also broken up my first marriage. ‘Do you think that walking along the keyboard of a piano could have been the primary cause of his rejection of me?’

  ‘I think it could’ve been,’ says Brooks.

  Of course, it wasn’t like that at all.

  Milton is an anal retentive and can’t relinquish anything he has claim to, or once had claim to – including, or especially, humans. The girl I brought home had once slept with him.

  Milton collects love, mostly in substitute forms, such as sex, fame, disciples, achievements, titles and publications. And me. And ex-girlfriends.

  It was all of a tormented, drunken and emotionally freezing day and night before we were able to wrap each other in our uncertain rapport.

  Sometimes being drunk brings a heavy grace, or at least the sensation of grace, to sex.

  But alcohol and inhibition and tension stumbled over each other, instead of standing aside for passion, when Milton and I first made love. Milton fell out of bed. If making love was what we were trying to do. Among other things I suppose we were trying to overcome what we talked about as ‘our inhibition’ – on principle; to resolve what we felt to be a discrepancy between our feelings and our behaviour; to defy the limitations of our upbringing; explore further what was happening between us and advance it; find a new pleasure; visit strange territory, down among the dark forces; and perhaps even, for Milton, to prove to himself he wasn’t homosexual – that the experience would be bad enough to persuade him he wasn’t.

  It was bad alright. Milton knew I was somehow passive. I’d told him that. I fell into a role of active compliance. But no signals of a guiding sort came from him after a confused initiation by him set the game in play. Other signals came which I didn’t want to accept delivery of – about no, no, no, it’s really not what you want to do, or if it is what you want to do there are too many barriers, and if it is what you want to do and you do climb the barriers, this is not the way to go about it, not the form. He tried to fuck me up the arse. I sucked his penis but he didn’t relax there. We kissed, fondled nervously. He was erect alright. I could’ve become erect, not that I care that much, if he’d calmed. We should perhaps have gently, slowly masturbated each other. But he scrambled at everything at once. Like a scavenger race. Tried to sample the infinite variety of male sex. It was all too grasping and worried.

  ‘You see,’ I say to Milton in the Taj Mahal with his new mistress, Cleo, who is trying to comprehend, ‘it’s really an alter ego relationship – that’s why it didn’t work in bed. At least not the way we tried it.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Milton says, finding this somehow more palatable with Pork Vindaloo, ‘that’s right.’

  It explains to me why I sometimes doubted that I could physically overcome the Sapoderm.

  But not why I buried my face in his underwear.

  ‘I’m your downtown self,’ I say, ‘and you’re my academic self.’

  Milton chuckles.

  ‘It’s narcissistic,’ I say, ‘you love me as part of yourself. And me you.’

  Cleo is silent, probably wondering if she’s heard correctly.

  I don’t say it, although tempted to say it for Cleo’s reaction, that perhaps we should’ve masturbated ourselves, simply lain there together, touching, and masturbated. Maybe that was the way.

  ‘We love each other only as parts of our unobtainable selves,’ I add, unnecessarily.

  Me trying to look down inside to see if this fits the way it is, really is, I mean.

  ‘Do you love Milton?’ she asks me.

  Dodging, I say, ‘The homosexual interpretation was partly forced on us by our friends and by the fact that we behaved as if we were torrid. Partly as a guise. We even came to believe it ourselves in some moods.’

  ‘We are self-confirming,’ I say, ‘alter egos.’ She puzzles.

  She then appears relieved.

  ‘We are also,’ I say, ‘useful to each other – that’s part of it.’

  ‘My mother told me to ask if you’re married?’ she says.

  ‘Did she?’ I ask, realising that I’m perhaps working back among old conventions which I assumed had all gone in the slip-stream. ‘Did she really, or is that a Jewish joke?’

  ‘It’s a Jewish joke,’ she says, grinning. ‘Are you?’

  Sitting there in the Greek restaurant, I thought that, apart from the Sapoderm smell which might become erotic, in one of those weird reversals which occur, if we had a sexual breakthrough, I really ache to touch his penis, to hold it, tight and erect. Taste the first oozing juice and then to have it throb into me, mouth or anus. It doesn’t appear that the alter ego interpretation is sufficiently explanatory or predictive.

  LETTERS TO AN EX-WIFE CONCERNING A REUNION IN PORTUGAL

  A. When I received your letter after seven years of silence I found myself ‘quaking’ – an embarrassingly standard reaction from one who has always wanted to have special and atypical reactions. Why should you, the ex-wife, cause me more inner commotion than some one more alive and more recently relevant (and in one case, more gruellingly relevant)? I realised that I had very much wanted to hear from you again. That was what I realised.

  B. Picnic love-making on a flat rock in hot river bushland, shrilling like a whistle. One of those summer days when there was as much noise in the underbrush and trees as in a city. Did it hurt her backside? Were we doing it because of the idea of it – love-making-in-bush? But not only were the passions indistinctly felt but we also shied away from precise observation of ourselves. I did things partly, and maybe still do, I realise, because of the idea of it, to experience some thing described by other human beings, a ritual for instance, or say something in literature, a celebrated experience. As one sometimes visits places or monuments because of having read of others visiting the places. Do I do it as a way of knowing others by doing what others have done? Is it an attempt to identify with ‘humanity’ or sometimes ‘the great’; or to gain ‘humanity’? I bet I had read of love-making-in-bush. She always said I was missing ‘something’ because I wouldn’t let myself be ordinary. Everything we did together was for the first time and could not avoid being motivated by experiment. Seventeen. We pre tended that we weren’t experimenting and, in fact, pretended by bravado that nothing was being done by us for the first time. Maybe this unwillingness to admit to innocence is evidence that we have some pre-existence which signals through us saying you’ve done this before. If only, if only, we hadn’t had to pretend. I mean not only about sex but about the whole mechanics of courtship. If only we could have admitted we didn’t know and have relaxed in each other’s ignorance. Why do the innocent detest innocence?

  All alone on a flat rock up the river under a sky, a five minutes of intercourse, neither of us aroused fully, the oppressive summer sun trying to get at us
through the leaves. Wishing we were back in a cool suburban bedroom. Maybe there was some trembling passion. But more than passion was that feeling that this was a necessary act, thing to do. To have made love in open bushland so that, as seventeen-year-olds, we could say that we had ‘done it’. Especially for me the seventeen-year-old intellectual, atheist, philosopher, poet.

  C. So a man’s ex-wife, well, legally still ‘wife’, writes to him after seven years of silence and offers to do a favour for him at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, the country in which she now lives, having heard from a friend passing through that I was trying to get some thing going there and of my special interest in the country. I naturally look for a concealed motive. No such thing as the free lunch from an ex-wife. I immediately ask how it was with Paul and the children.

  D. Oh to be on your breast again, to have passed back to that infantile sexual semi-consciousness. Your night dress so womanly, between us, saying ‘this is a female body’. Saying ‘maybe this body will be offered to you and will pleasure you’. The night dress both presenting the body and withholding it. Tantalising modesty, a satin night dress saying maybe this female body will be offered to you for fondling and then for you to enter. Maybe I’ll pull this night dress up to my waist and offer my body for you, but now only the one breast held free of the night dress for my mouth, the body emphasised by the fall of the satin and its sheen, covered, presented, but withheld. Then at last the pulled-up night dress, the exposure of the body, for pleasuring, the sexual offering of the motherly body to the erotically tantalised child. Who then becomes a man.

  E. Lunch with Hestia.

  A. Now, I thought, this isn’t just a little old letter from an ex-Concord High School girl now living in Portugal offering to help an ex-Concord High School boy still living in the state of New South Wales, to whom she was once married. Whatever, it was great to hear from you. God knows where you are at now … Paine’s Rights of Man and Bertrand Russell were the books then … what now? Me? I have a retreat in Backhouse Mountain: I am given enough money currently, through grants, to carry on my perverse little works. I am not totally dismissed but am considered, well, unsavoury. Or more bluntly, my work does not reveal or concentrate on the more positive aspects of the human condition. I lack a socially relevant perspective, the Left say. I’ve been called a ‘misanthropist’. Imagine, a boy from old Concord High being a ‘misanthropist’. It’s so classical.

  B. Sunday school picnic. Black-haired, volatile, frenetic girl. I am burningly aware of her but it is not affection in any civilised sense – more elemental awareness. Those breathless, pre-pubescent chasing games, only just contained within some frame of sensible and ordered rules but really sexually propelled. Really an outlet for the dying animals within us. We always caught each other roughly, struggling, and then the clinch was broken after exhausting all the permissible, but insufficient, touchings of our bodies, hands, all a subterfuge, the meanings of the games were beneath our knowledge. Retreating then, to our own sex group, jeering and bantering, very hot, flustered, panting.

  C. Of course my first thought, damn it, is can we, in all honesty, be contemplating reunion. It cannot be expressed, there are all those verbal preliminaries, cautionary manoeuvrings, beware the illusions of memory, the promotion of romantic mystery, the magical attraction of going back to an earlier point in life. For christsake, how can I delude myself. It’s not likely, it’s not on, the letters anyhow do not hint at it. Her letters, let’s face it, are relatively banal. ‘I hope this finds you as it leaves me.’ She was verbally conventional. Maybe it is her ‘artless charm’ or her ‘common humanity’ which people were always trying to convince me that she had. Alright, maybe my love for sociological jargon, the psychological system, too readily deflated, and missed, her ‘earthiness’ her vernacular honesty. But I mean it is also her inability to delve, to watch herself, which in part drove our marriage to the wall (apart from the gigantic problems in the construct marriage itself). The language we use is, after all, a revelation of our weaponry, the social circumference being drawn, the mental throw. The language used, selects and rejects the company we keep. Her words show her in a tight, warm maybe, but tight, little fog.

  D. I can remember your adolescent lips, the moisture of their young purity, the saliva and the warm air of your lungs, on my face from a warm, sweet mouth, the juices of your virgin body, the activity of your lips, their relaxation, their membrane smoothness, their muscularity, the lips of a fifteen-year-old girl who grew up on dairy products and the white meat of fish. Before cigarettes, stress, illness have changed the taste of everything from the body.

  E. I sort old files. I discard now incomprehensible notes. I classify adolescent love letters but find them tiresome and turgid with now unfelt, unrecallable passions, posturings, and poor vocabulary. Unerotic. I look at photographs of her, giggling cheeks, and her, Jesus, so supple hockey-playing body. Her plait, her tunic, her white socks.

  A. Your last letter, of course, was the key one. So you and Paul have broken up. Well, well. I feel for you. You always invest so totally in a relationship. I know that. Two relationships in your life, both broken. But I guess that a liberated view would be that marriage is, well, transitory, rather than permanent. That to talk of ‘failure’, overlooks the quality of what did exist, and that which, in some instances, remains after the relationship finishes in that form. Me? I’ve drifted too far from ‘pattern’ to return to anything resembling it. Uncommitted, venturesome, but solitary. Thank you for making those arrangements. Much appreciated. But so, the letter was not just an ‘old times’ note but really something of a cry from the heart. At least you are economically without stress – and at least he’s not tearing you apart with dispute about the child. Well, I have to ask it – how is my child? Three men in your life leave you with three children. That’s about the first time I can remember that I’ve allowed myself to think ‘my child’, to admit to having fathered a child even – though I’m aware that I have contributed nothing more than sperm. Does ‘insemination’ sound better? I know that if I allowed myself to think of it as ‘my child’ I would have had this fruitless obsession, to see and know the child. As you know I told you (and I respect you for having done it) that I wanted to know nothing about the child. Even now I am uneasy about admitting its existence to my conscious mind. I have a child. I fathered a child.

  B. Asleep in each others arms in a steam train rocking through the dark lucerne fields and the sleeping cows. Without tickets. Jumping from the train before it reached the station, tumbling down an embankment into the fields. Did we do that? Wow. Everything about her was perfectly acceptable. Any proposal was just right. I have swallowed her blood, her saliva, her tears. There must be some sort of essential subfusion from that. Is the word ‘intussusception’? We used to say and think that the sperm was absorbed into her body and we became united that way.

  C. ‘But I’m against hard drugs.’ Is that really worth saying? Jesus, I mean she’d be hard pushed (unintended pun) to define ‘hard’. If she’d taken the issue on, with its complexities, but no, she states this proposition as if I might be damned well interested. We are all against debilitating addiction. What about compulsive work? There are many debilitating activities. What about occasional use of a drug like cocaine. Oh, but it all comes back to me. I’d be moving with someone in discussion, unravelling some assumption, stopping a drift in meaning, or struggling towards a precise set of qualifications surrounding my position, when she’d say ‘but doesn’t everyone know that’ or ‘you intellectuals just want to make difficulties for yourself’. She had a bunch of simple-minded – if progressive – propositions about society. To these ropes she would cling.

  D. I could tongue your arse for hours. I could delight in the flavours of your body, the flavours of your cunt. I was the first to touch you there.

  E. Spicy fruit rolls, coffee without milk, no sugar, Costa Rican blend, a garden of ankle-deep grass, a Venezuelan hammock, days of good note-taking, slo
w reading, at Backhouse Mountain.

  A. I’d guess I’d call it Sydney anarchism – or Backhouse Mountain anarchism. An interest-conflict interpretation of life rather than a moral interpretation. But taking into consideration that ‘moralities’ are a fact and operate in the lives of some people. My own and only revolutionary pre-condition is total freedom of communication and increasing flexibility in economic, working, arrangements away from authoritarian family patterns. Consequently, a political preference for government policies which maximise choice in working arrangements, especially. (You remember Jimmy and the way he talked – when we were together and first met him – we couldn’t buy any of this then. We believed in magical revolutions. He died last year of lung cancer. As you might have expected.)

  I have remained fluid and pretty much out of day-to-day struggles. I’ve stayed my distance from the academy. I didn’t want to become involved in making rules and enforcing rules. Although there is some dismantling going on now. I go to meetings but I am not a mover of motions. I have a friend, Milton. He sits on committees daily – a radical career academic. Ambitious Left. I forget, you don’t know him at all. He has a range of nervous stress symptoms; Hestia, you don’t know her either, his woman, is hysterical. His relationship to me is weird. Maybe I can bring myself to tell you about it one day.

  B. Her first orgasm – was not with me. She didn’t really have an orgasm until she went off for a lost week end with that bore. How can that be? The greatest bore in the Left Club turns her on. I suppose we are all bores to someone. Then we talked for the first time about sex. We achieved after that some sort of mechanistic but satisfying arrangement. I would have taken almost anything to regain my sexual pride. I remember her hurting me, leaning back on my prick. But I said nothing.