‘I’ll be there at eight.’ It was only when she’d hung up the phone that she realised she’d forgotten about Camille, that it hadn’t even entered her mind to consider what she would do with Camille while she went out on a date for the second night in a row. And the next logical thought was: did Jack know she had a child? They knew so little of each other but Alix realised she didn’t care, that the not-knowing was somehow more exhilarating than all the knowing she’d done about all the people she knew.
In the end, it was Louisa who came to her rescue, of course. She said to Alix, ‘You haven’t ever asked me to look after Camille at night for anything other than work. It’s not as if you’re overdoing it.’
‘But it’s two nights in a row. And you look after Camille four days a week.’
‘She’s Dan’s daughter.’
And this was why Alix knew that she could ask.
They didn’t kiss when she arrived at his house, which was a terrace in Paddington, half done up, half not, a little shabby but artfully so. Inside there was space, so much space, no internal walls, just a white void that did not feel in the least bit hollow because of the abundance of paintings lining the two long walls of the room.
‘Can I?’ she asked, gesturing at the pictures and he nodded and said, ‘I’ll get some wine.’
She studied Jack’s paintings. A face in shadow. The back of a head. Downcast eyes. A succession of unknowable people.
Then she sat in an armchair and looked some more. Not unknowable, she started to think; it was just that the figures’ thoughts were the sort that others preferred not to know. Like the exact shade of grief, which she had believed last night was like the albatross’s wings, the colour of veins beneath pale skin, hidden blood coursing through a sometimes translucent exterior.
She hadn’t noticed Jack approach until she heard the sound of a pencil caressing paper. She covered her face with her hands and said, ‘No.’
He continued to draw and she was torn between getting away from the impress of his pencil and remaining still lest she spoiled his creativity. She peeped through her fingers and said, ‘I’m sure I’d prefer a drink.’
He moved closer, stopping for barely a moment to leave a drink on the table bedside her. ‘Aren’t you curious to know how others see you?’ he asked as he stepped back to his position between her and the kitchen.
She shook her head. ‘Is that why people have their portraits painted? I thought it had something to do with vanity and something to do with the instinct for immortality.’
‘I paint people to show them the hidden pieces of themselves.’
‘Perhaps whatever I’ve hidden is best left uncovered,’ Alix said, standing now.
‘I’ve got it anyway,’ he replied, grinning at her.
‘What’s a painter doing scratching around with a pencil anyway,’ she said, crossly.
‘I knew you wouldn’t sit still long enough for me to do a painting. Let’s eat and maybe my cooking will make you like me again.’
‘You have five Michelin stars, do you?’
He didn’t, of course, but the chicken was tender, the salad fresh and the wine chilled so she relented a little and began to talk. They had another curiously external conversation about things outside themselves but which was engaging and stimulating enough to last them through main course. It was only after he had brought out strawberries and icecream that he said to her, ‘So what fills your days?’
‘I’m a surgeon. I do heart transplants.’
‘Another one interested in bodies.’
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘I remember telling Dan it was for the joy of saving. But I think it’s also to do with the privilege of going inside, to a person’s heart, the repository of so much that’s symbolic and imaginary, and seeing what’s really there, what it really does.’
‘So do you believe in broken hearts and love hearts and following your heart?’
‘I believe in love and grief and hope but I don’t think they’re a function of my heart.’
‘So where do they come from?’
‘The mind, of course.’
‘So everything after Dan died was in your mind and not your body?’
‘No.’ The instinctive answer came quickly but then she stopped. She could mention Dan in conversation because then she could manage it; he was a person about whom she was speaking, not her dead husband, just a point of reference. But if someone else spoke about him they might not stay within the boundaries of what was safe because even she didn’t know where those boundaries were; it was only ever apparent after she’d crossed them. She felt his question was dangerously close to the limits.
‘I’ll wash up,’ she said, standing and taking her plate into the kitchen. He let her go, without politely protesting that he’d do it later; he just sat and watched her walk, then carried the remaining plates to the sink.
There wasn’t a great deal to do because he’d already stacked the dishwasher so it didn’t feel awkward for the few minutes to pass in silence.
‘I’ll make coffee,’ he said when she’d finished.
‘Thanks. Black with one, please.’
Alix resumed her earlier place in the armchair by the paintings and then, after a few minutes, stood up to see if she could help. But he had disappeared. She waited alone with the music for a short while, decided he couldn’t possibly be in the toilet and went to investigate. There was a light on downstairs which she hadn’t seen earlier. She felt her way down in the half light cast by the room below.
The stairs led into another large room, which she could tell by the smell and the mess of canvases and brushes and paint was his studio. Her face flushed when she saw what he was doing.
The crude pencil sketch he had made of her earlier was clipped to his easel and she was taking shape on the canvas before him. Her body sitting in a chair, skin naked, face covered by her hands. She was leaning forward so only a rounded shoulder, the curve of a breast beneath her arm, and her calves and feet dropping below the armchair were on view. But it was enough. It was like a confession in all it revealed.
‘I don’t normally run away from my dinner guests to paint them,’ he said. ‘But I had to get it down. Didn’t want to lose the muse.’ He smiled.
Alix knew that running away herself or protesting would not stop what he had already started. He had the sketch and the idea of her, whatever that was; he did not actually need her any more to complete the painting.
She looked around Jack’s room, anywhere but at his painting of her and flicked her way through a stack of half-started canvases leaning against one of the walls.
‘That’s rubbish,’ he said. ‘Stuff I started and couldn’t finish. I’ve had this half-felt impression of a series of paintings I want to do but the impression isn’t making its way out of my hands and into the brush. Might be getting somewhere with it now though.’
‘I’m sure your rubbish is probably better than most people’s fine art project.’ But even she could tell that there was something missing in the canvases, and it wasn’t because they were unfinished. They were missing the sense that they mattered, and so they didn’t. She said, hesitantly, ‘They’re lovely to look at but they don’t make me want to stop and contemplate them.’
‘No, you’re right.’ He stood up and moved to stand beside her, beside a tall picture window that looked out onto a solid wall of trees. Long white branches pointed up at the stars like fingers stretching to reach constellations, and canopies of green swirled in the wind as though she was lost in a vortex.
Then he began to kiss her lips, much more softly than the night before, his touch was almost imagined, and his tongue like a fine-tipped paintbrush, drawing her into the heart of something that mattered.
UNCOVERED TORSO
(Plaster, 60x43cm. It is interesting to note the differences in composition between this work and the previous one, although the subject is the same.)
After they had sex, Alix left Jack
’s house. He watched her dress and watched her leave but he did not speak. For this, Alix was grateful.
She drove off in her car but she did not go home. She drove past places she had not seen since Dan died, places she had taken circuitous routes to avoid because they were places that made her think of him. Now that was all she wanted.
The French patisserie at Five Ways where they went for breakfast every Sunday if she was not working. It was closed for the night but Alix could still see, through the window, the table they preferred because it was always soaked in morning light and she could taste the coffee that was always brewed strong and bitter.
The antique store on Elizabeth Street where they bought the desk and shelves and chair for his studio. They had gone there one morning after breakfast, intending to browse, to while away an expanse of hours as if there were so many hours to waste. Dan sat down in the chair, leaned back, smiled and said, ‘It’d be nice to sit in something like this when I’ve run out of ideas.’
She’d laughed. ‘You never run out of ideas.’
‘Sometimes they get stuck though.’
As he spoke Alix could picture him, in his studio, staring at the beginnings of a sculpture, at an armature draped with plaster, seeing not what was there but what he wanted to be there. She could see him stretch his arms up, locking his fingers behind his head. He would arch backwards slightly so it seemed as though his hands were conversing with his brain, finding out exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Then his fingers would move away from his head, taking with them the image he’d had in his mind, ready to transfer it to plaster.
She looked at him sitting in the chair, hands in that familiar posture of fingers consulting with mind. So she went back to the shop after they left and bought him the chair, desk and shelves for his birthday, arranging it in the room one day when he was out so that when he came home the first thing he saw was her sitting in his new chair.
Her next stop was Rushcutters Bay Park, the backdrop for early morning walks or runs, where they rarely spoke, they just moved and felt sunshine and water refresh them, make them ready for the delicate precision of handling hearts and plaster. Perhaps they should have spoken, shared more words, and been less happy with silence.
Alix went to work the next day praying for a transplant. She was in luck. She called in the residents to review the waiting list with her and, even though she had her own opinions, she listened intently to theirs, pointing out where their ideas lacked sufficient detail, praising them for any especially astute observations.
Then it was time to scrub, to remove all trace of the invisible bacteria inhabiting her skin, making sure to get into the webs of her fingers, the folds of her knuckles, the beds of her fingernails. One of the male residents stood beside her, clearly not sufficiently concentrating on his scrubbing because he asked, ‘Get up to anything last night?’
‘No,’ she replied. ‘My husband’s dead, remember.’
He blushed. ‘Sorry, I didn’t know.’ He turned off the tap with his elbow and before he could turn away she said, ‘You’re not scrubbed. You’ve been there half as long as I have.’
And so he turned the tap back on and continued to wash his hands. Alix made sure she took an especially long time so that he had to stay there, in the clumsy silence, until after she had finished.
Once they were in theatre she said, ‘Dr Hollander,’ to the resident who didn’t know how to wash his hands.
‘Yes.’
‘Let’s see you make the incision in the chest.’
‘Sure.’
Alix wanted to know if his operative skills were better than his washing skills; it would be a waste of time to train him up and have to transfer him later. She stood right by his shoulder – she’d been taught by her superiors exactly how to make a resident feel as uncomfortable as possible – and watched him cut. Even pressure, clean cut.
‘Good,’ she said and she thought she saw his hand tremble with pleasure at the compliment and she remembered being that young and eager, remembered what it was like to not be so tired and sad and so she said to him, ‘Why don’t you cut the sternum too.’
He looked at her and nodded, a small smile of thanks on his face, and she nodded too and returned the smile. She stepped back just a little but showed him where to place the Stryker saw and helped him guide the blade along the bone. All she could hear then was the screeching sound of grated bone.
The retractor went in and the patient’s heart was bare before them, pulsing, and Alix felt as she always did at this moment: the thrill of looking inside, of finding the object of so much ambiguity, an object that she knew better than most people, a reddish brown misshapen oval of muscle. Because that was all it was – she was yet to find in these operations any sign of heartache or heartbreak, something heartfelt or heartrending; she was yet to locate the soul.
She took the scalpel and cut open the pericardium so the heart was no longer enclosed in its sac. The patient was handing his heart over to her. And she was about to hand over the role of pumping and oxygenating his blood to a machine.
‘Clamp,’ she said and it quickly appeared in her hand.
‘Dr Hollander, I’ll clamp the aorta, you can do the vena cava.’
He stood by her side and watched and then repeated the word, ‘Clamp,’ and was handed one by the nurses. She saw him assess the heart and then place the clamps in place, thus isolating the heart from the patient’s cardiovascular system.
‘Good. Scalpel.’ She held out her hand and then said to Dr Hollander, ‘See the scar tissue there,’ she pointed, ‘and there, from his previous ops. It’s going to be much harder to cut the heart away. You need to feel the scar, where it is thickest and how it moves, and work with it from there.’
She was right, the hardened tissue made the cutting take longer than it should but eventually she was able to remove the lower portion of heart.
‘You can cut the aorta,’ she said to Dr Hollander. ‘Just there, between the clamp and the heart.’ He made the cut and she continued. ‘Now the pulmonary artery, right near where it emerges from the heart.’
She cut away the rest of the heart, leaving behind the back wall of the left atrium, which would be connected to the donor heart. Then she lifted out the old heart. ‘It’s enormous,’ she said. ‘Look at it.’
The big old scarred heart pumped one more time and then stopped. She placed it in a kidney dish.
Then it was time to stop for breath. She had a few minutes before the new heart arrived. Everyone was quiet; it wasn’t like a coffee break which was a chance to relax and be social. Instead it was a moment to draw inwards, to focus her mind and energy on what lay ahead: saving the life of the man on the table without a heart.
As soon as the esky was rushed into theatre, she moved to another table, drained iced water out of plastic bags and picked up the new heart. An unscarred heart. She flushed it with cardioplegia to paralyse it and said, ‘This one’s nice and big too.’
She examined it quickly, found a hole and over-sewed it to stop the blood bursting out when it was filled.
‘Okay, we’re ready. Stand in close so you can see,’ she instructed Dr Hollander as she placed the new heart on the patient’s sternum.
It was time for the easy part, the connection, rather than the cutting which was where all the time and effort was expended. She joined the back wall of the patient’s left atrium to the left atrium of the donor heart with a suture and then did the same with the right side.
Then she rested the heart. Allowed it to fill with blood slowly. It began to fibrillate.
‘Dammit,’ said Alix but one shock was enough to establish a regular rhythm.
After that it was time to clean up, to remove the remaining clamps, to disconnect the man from the heart-lung machine, to mop up the chest cavity. ‘Suction please, Dr Hollander.’
Then she put the man’s chest back together with stainless steel wires. ‘Over to you,’ she said to Dr Hollander, whose confidence she had felt gro
w with every successful step he took, just as hers had grown one day in an operating theatre when she had been allowed to play with another man’s heart.
She watched him put the patient’s chest back together with a line of sutures, so carefully because they both knew that even something as simple as stitching could cause the heart to arrest. But not this time.
‘Congratulations Dr Hollander.’ She put out her hand and he shook it.
‘Thanks.’
‘Come with me to talk to the family then you can monitor the patient. I’ll need an update in half an hour.’
And off they went to tell the man’s family that they had saved his life.
She went home that night and thought about the operation, about Jack Darcy and about Dan. She remembered the first time Dan had sculpted her; he hadn’t taken any drawings or used a photograph or asked her to sit. He’d gotten out of bed in the middle of the night and gone out to the studio to cast her naked torso, just the back, not the front, as well as the back of her neck and her arms holding her hair aloft. Even though it was a view of her back and she was not easily identifiable she knew it was her. He’d created her in such a way that the attitude of her hands in her hair suggested the sculptural ability of her fingers to connect, not just strangers’ hearts, but also hearts known to her.
Then she called Jack.
‘Sorry I left like that.’
‘My ego’s taken a bruising.’ He laughed and so did she because, of all the responses she was expecting, that was not one of them.
‘We could try again,’ she said.
‘Which part?’
‘Not the running away.’
‘Perhaps just dinner then.’
‘Just dinner would be great. How’s Saturday night?’ she asked.
‘Good. What about a picnic?’
‘You’re actually quite romantic.’
‘I’m an artist. I’ve got a reputation to uphold.’
She hesitated and then said, ‘What about Rushcutters Bay Park?’
‘It’s a date. Isn’t it?’
‘I think we could call it a date.’
A week or so later Jack gave Alix a gift, wrapped by a shop with ribbon and a glossy box. He’d remembered after breakfast that they’d been invited to a party that night and that, although he’d forgotten to tell her about it, he’d bought something for her in preparation.
If I Should Lose You Page 14