Tales of Mystery and Romance

by Frank Moorhouse

  ‘This patient enjoys his illness.’

  I brooded and vibrated.

  ‘You don’t sound convincing,’ she said, caringly.

  ‘Children,’ I began again, ‘were once an economic necessity and then a religious obligation – now nothing more than a suburban convention.’

  ‘I don’t wish to talk about it in those terms.’

  ‘Why did the State and the Church have to work so hard to convince people to have children – suppressing birth control information – why? – I’ll tell you why – because people preferred not to have children. That’s why.’

  She had closed her eyes, as if to the words. Then she said, ‘You must miss so much – I feel really sorry for you – oh, I know you’ve achieved so much – you lead what you call a free life but so much pleasure in life comes from having commitments and trials and worries.’

  I watched her closely during her speech, the bed vibrating away under me.

  ‘I like my life to be a warm muddle,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t, I’m afraid, understand that.’

  I shook my head vigorously.

  How clever the living process was. Oh bloody clever. You couldn’t really make a mistake. Whatever you did, wherever you ended up, the mind reshaped to accomodate and even celebrate it. Except for the intrusion, now and then, of ideal forms. Our tormented gift of being able to visualise perfection.

  Then I listened to her mundane certificates of life – her two deeply meaningful love relationships (including those early years with me – before I changed):

  – her three ‘creative’ children,

  – her four uncomplicated working class friends,

  – her five well-worn railings of inaccurate commonsense,

  – her six conversational mysteries.

  How correct all the black things of life then seemed. How basically good and decent pornography was. All the perversity and ornery, difficult people who messed up formulations about ‘full life’ and ‘loving interpersonal relationships’. All that American love.

  I told her that Anatole France said that volupté was the only solace.

  Dispiritedly, she said, ‘What?’

  ‘Volupté! Sensual pleasure! Evil sensuality!’

  She said that all she sought from life – now that I’d brought it up – was the warmth of the hearth and ‘the sticky fingers of loving children’.

  I stared at the ceiling.

  ‘I guess,’ I said, brightly, ‘that really I’m for Sin and against Motherhood.’

  I thought that was glib enough summing up, so while she was in the bathroom, probably weeping into the sanitised wash basin, I soundlessly left. The second time in seven years.

  In the rented car I breathed freely. A rented car is not an extension of self in quite the same way as a car you own. You are free of the bonds of ownership. The rented car is not your ego, rusting away, corroding, scratched. A rented car renews itself at each renting and renews you with it. Certain things, I said, can be best and freely used when not owned. People? Then they are not tangled with your ego.

  Ah!! Give me the technological life.

  I am a simple non-spiritual man, I said to myself, leading a simple rented life.

  I spoke to all the international ideograms at the airport, and took the advice of the wine glass.

  Disconsolation joined me at the bar some 15 or 20 minutes later when I began to ponder on how difficult and confounding it was to find volupté which Anatole France said was the only solace.

  I pulled my Breton cap over my disconsolate brow.

  Where was this volupté when you needed it???

  THE LOSS OF A FRIEND BY CABLEGRAM

  At first I thought it a shimmeringly pregnant moment – after it we would interlock in a refreshed way – but anyhow it ‘looked’ unreally vivid. She was standing in a white, hooded towelling bathrobe with the hood fallen back at the bedroom door with an international telegram in her hand. She was tousled from our love making. But her face was now wrinkled with importance.

  ‘It’s for you.’ Those words. Oral wiring. Linking a person to the message.

  At first I thought this tableau with those standard words had the feel of an ‘epiphany’ but I had a second sensation which decided me that it felt this way because it came from somewhere else, from another story or maybe a film.

  If films and stories have now recreated every conceivable situation it is not surprising that reality now and then stumbles into a dramatic posture and gives off sensations of being, well, an epiphany, a manifestation.

  I decided then that it was nothing more than an imperfect recall from the media, a late movie, superimposed on an ordinary situation. A celluloid overlay.

  I was left disappointed.

  ‘No one knows I’m here,’ I said, and this too had something of the earlier feeling, another line from somewhere else. I propped myself on my nude elbow – and felt like a photograph. With irritation I pushed this over-awareness away.

  ‘Someone does.’

  I read the telegram and put it down.

  She picked it up.

  ‘Is this the boy you’ve been on with. This homosexual?’

  ‘No, he really isn’t camp.’

  ‘You have tears in your eyes.’ She read the telegram. ‘Does he always talk like this? Does he always send such long telegrams?’

  ‘I haven’t had a telegram from him before.’

  ‘I’d be embarrassed to put so much in a telegram. He says that champagne, port and speeches and personal extravagance didn’t fit his new life style. Does he always talk like that?’

  ‘Who gave you permission …’

  ‘Ex-wives have a right.’

  Stories and films have also used the sensation that something is ‘from a dream’ or from a story – cannibalised real life, dream life, and fiction life.

  She said, ‘You have to go back to Australia and face him. How dreadful.’

  ‘I will say that I didn’t receive it. I will force him to behave as in the past.’

  That wouldn’t work.

  ‘You must care about him a lot.’

  ‘You could say we played together.’

  ‘You are crying.’

  ‘I will tough it out. I’ve been down this route all the way before.’

  Then I said, ‘No – I’ll exert a positive absence in his life. He will forever act in reaction to my absence. I know how I can do that.’

  ‘That sounds sinister.’

  ‘I probably am.’

  Some people are sinister?

  ‘There really is no love in you, is there?’

  Was she a person who was always looking for ‘love’ in other people and not finding it?

  ‘I have probably fifty relationships which I value and which do not involve the use of the word “love” or even the word “friendship”. Everyone wants to force all things into those two poor words.’

  ‘Most people find these words sufficient.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘And you have two ex-wives. Is that a category?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you write to us both.’

  ‘In recent months, yes. And here I am in Portugal sleeping with one.’

  ‘And you’ll go to London and sleep with the other.’

  ‘I’d like to.’

  ‘Don’t you think you’re in a mess? Wandering around the world, visiting ex-wives and being hounded by telegrams sent by poofters.’

  ‘Do I have too many people alive in my head? Yes! Yes!’

  I went to the bathroom to pack my wet toothbrush into my leather bathroom bag. I wiped my eyes on her Portuguese tissues. I was hit. I was bleeding. I was emotionally locked out. I was banging on the door again.

  ‘Do you think you’re fully honest with any one person – or just partially honest with a lot of people?’ she called to me from the bedroom.

  In the bathroom I read the international telegram again.

  When I came out of the bathroom she was read
ing my notebook.

  ‘You shouldn’t do that. You know that.’

  ‘I never dared before. I want to know about you. About you and this boy Milton. We have nothing to conceal now.’

  ‘Aren’t you late for the Court?’

  ‘I’ll go soon. I thought you were coming too.’

  ‘I don’t feel like Courts of Big Issues.’

  ‘You poor bastard – you are upset.’

  ‘Will they let the press cover it?’

  ‘The world press should be there. It will be historic for Portugal. And for Women. Maybe your ex-wife in London will be there. She’s a journalist isn’t she?’

  ‘It’s not her kind of story.’

  I could not recall what was written in the notebook – they were the recorded and forgotten thoughts of yesterday or even last year. I keep the notes, I am Keeper of the Notes, but I don’t know the eventual purpose of the notes. It seems I never use them. They are not retrievable.

  There was something now abnormal about the way we were talking to each other. Not the way people usually talked with each other. Given that every relationship has its own way of talking. There was a retreat to formality. Or stage language. Or magazine language. Had I become strange, my image disorganised, because of the telegram and its implications? Maybe because I openly wept. Was she uncertain of me. Yet as well as this formality, or whatever, she had a confidence to be blunt. Unlike her. Or was the formality making her sound assured. Had I jumped her preconception, had the boundaries of her expectations been re-distributed. Had I been right about the epiphany, the tableau.

  She giggled then, as if sharing something about me with someone else. Something ludicrous about me. The giggle, the noise, was not beamed at me. Did not invite me in. It was a hard giggle.

  ‘My god,’ she said, ‘how pretentious you are. Really.’

  She then read out from my notebook:

  … in lecturing, when I am truly lecturing, a sort of madness can take over, although I follow the general direction of my notes, I find myself being taken way beyond and back and forth into my personal history, my personal information bank, remembering relevant material long since lost, spotting weaknesses in my general position, without pre-thought, or consideration, I am a passenger of my mind. I do not feel in control. At the end I wonder what sense it made (the case against pre-distributed ‘lectures’ or why lectures aren’t simply chapters from books)…

  ‘I always felt you were a lousy lecturer – you lack fluent thinking on your feet. But I suppose in a way you have a presence, you are allowed to get away with your rambling and ego-tripping.’

  It was unlike her to be so blunt.

  Had she nosed out my vulnerability – maybe she and Milton would tear me apart. Here and now. I would lie down and die in darkness, here in Portugal.

  … sexually he wanted to be dominated. But refused to be dominated. Sexually he was stale mated. Except in sexual play now and then with very special people. R almost ‘commanded’ him sexually. Almost took control. The nightdress – both presenting the body and withholding it. Some women knew about the mechanism of withholding. If only R had commanded him …

  She stopped, her voice weakened as she read it. She covered it with a cough.

  ‘Is that R – me? Is this all about you?’

  I didn’t answer but went on with my packing.

  Was that ‘he’. The ‘him’ in the notes. Some were written as ‘I’ and others as ‘he’ and some about generalised ‘humans’ or ‘people’. There was the spontaneous self and the ‘corrected’ self. Corrected for the phantom reader of the notes. There is always a supposed reader. Corrected for intellect or corrected because of poor performance of the intelligence. There was an honest, speculative self, and a separated fragment of self, who spoke in the notebook.

  … there are two age-ego-centric positions, (find a good word for this???) one that Youth is making a fresh beginning with higher values and original ideas – the genesis illusion – and a second, the illusion that we belong to the Last Generation – that a tradition, a style, a virtue, a grandeur, a ‘better way’ will end with us. Or the really big illusion that the world will end. Some generations like to think the world will end in their lifetime. Is there another generation or illusion, that of being the Saviour of the world??? Of course, one of them at least, could at any time be true???…

  ‘That’s rather clever,’ she said, ‘is it original?’

  She had that bitchy strength. I had not heard it before. She had relaxed with me, maybe, maybe she felt ‘rid of me’. But it was, after all, her place, her new country, her scene – I had only visitor status.

  … my humanism, my compassion, is gratuitous. It flows unevenly from a poorly formed con science, scrappy christianity, a suspect code of secular ethics (probably Primary School moralism and Boy Scouts), easily put aside, turned on, but never imperative. True of the country as a whole???…

  ‘I believe that,’ she said. ‘Oh I believe that. Australians are basically unfeeling – but you, you especially.’

  ‘Why are you suddenly so hard?’

  ‘Well, you started it – you left me at that motel and went off. And then returned and then begged me to go to bed with you, begged me. Now you get this telegram and you want to go off again – and again without seeing your daughter.’

  ‘We’ve been through this – she is not my daughter in any real sense.’

  ‘But really – I have good feelings towards you – I’m just wary of you all over again.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You have a heading here ‘Volupté’. You were on about that before you walked off yesterday. And in one of your letters.’

  ‘I’ve been on about it for some time. I forget what I’ve written there. I’m finished with that. I gave up on that.’

  … distinct from thrills of, say, sport or luxury (mainly expensive comfort – but no, luxury is qualitatively different from comfort, yes) related to sumptuousness, volupté is related to sumptuousness and luxury. Not to refined pleasure – art viewing. Excess. Maybe related to excess. Re quires loss of self, abandon, perhaps only through intoxication of one sort or another, may have to be found with strangers??? Not only strangers but perhaps with some familiar – but outside the banal day to day routines – need an intimate who does not have to share the shit of day to day routine – outside immediate life, but with rapport, great enough rapport to permit self exposure without embarrassment (anything-goes rapport). Jettison of temporal status, aberration. No expectations beyond that occasion no suggestion of, hint of, convention. Lighting? Certain fabrics – satin, silk (why voluptuous?? Exaggerated skin???) Dancing? Does it follow from conscious planning or arrangement – or never? Certain musical rhythms?…

  ‘I would have thought it was one of those things that you never find if you think about it all the time. Especially so coldly.’

  ‘That’s a trick we use to prohibit ourselves from seeking things we really want. We say the intangibles can’t be sought.’

  ‘When we were living together I never dreamed you were thinking like this. We never had … volupté … did we?’

  She said it as if perhaps we had, hopefully, and that I would now confirm this.

  ‘No. We didn’t. Reading the notebook wouldn’t have helped – I lied to the notebook then.’

  Lying and fiction are brothers? But not twins.

  ‘We could have had it, could have it …’ she said, hesitantly.

  We looked at each other. I saw in her face all the years she had lived and all the years I had lived. Her face transmitted a lightning recall of all our mistakes of candour – the dishonesty to ourselves, the polite dishonesty, the sparing dishonesty, stoical dishonesty, embarrassed dishonesty, fearful dishonesty, silent dishonesty, unintentional dishonesty, inarticulate dishonesty – our whole faulty candour, realising with a huge momentary fatigue, that it would take too much energy, and that we were at an age where we were both conscious of how much energy we had left in a
ny day, left in our lifetime, doing also a calculation of the immense number of words which would be required to correct it all, knowing that the replacement words would contain their own new errors and concealments, that repatching was beyond us, so we looked away.

  To an outsider, it would have seemed no more than a glance.

  She looked back to my notebook and read on.

  … my family – it was not their opinions which made me feel sick, scalding me with frustration, but the delivery of their opinions which was done in such a manner that it was made clear by their manner that anything I had to say would be of no value. I was of no value. This was the dead baby buried there in every conversation. Perhaps I lost credibility when as an adolescent I told exagerated stories which were patently untrue and which were transparent, pathetic attempts to gain their attention, their pleasure. Hah! Is that what I still do! Storytelling to win lost adoration????…

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘Oh, I know. No wonder you can’t love. Your parents gave me the creeps. So unbearably certain of themselves.’

  I didn’t want her to take up that point. I wanted her to take up the last point.

  ‘There are other things besides love. Just as good.’

  ‘Your intellectual bravado doesn’t convince me. Not any more. You have failed with two women and now an international telegram comes halfway around the world to say you even failed with this, this homosexual or whatever he is. With both sexes you fail!’

  ‘You’ve become bitchy.’

  ‘No, not bitchy.’

  She wasn’t assured. I’m almost certain she was not quite assured. It was assertion – emotional bravery. Trying to be a ‘person’ when faced with puzzling and unwanted information. She didn’t want to know these things. But she couldn’t admit that because we are not allowed ‘not to know things’. She had struggled against and resisted the other way of handling it all – tender, sympathetic – merging into a physical submissiveness. This would be a possibility invited by our former domesticity. In stead, to cover herself, she went on reading out these things, avoiding, as far as possible, her own re actions. But she had resisted the narcosis of physical contact.