But Paul answers with his voice only; I still cannot see his face or his eyes when he speaks because he continues to look at the wood. ‘For Addie. I had a wooden trike when I was young. I loved it. I thought she would too.’
The shrill ridicule of my voice. The disdain. The assault. ‘What is the point in wasting time making something she might never use? And even if she did, what if it fell apart and she hurt herself? You’re not known for being Mr Fix-It.’
I hate myself then and so I leave before he can answer and I stand in the garden wanting to find this hatred that is living somewhere inside me, to cut it out, to open my mouth like a gargoyle and have it spew out because I do not want it, no one wants it, but I do not know where to locate it. All I can do is take it inside with me, up to bed and have it lie there, within me, trapped.
Awake in bed I think that divorce would be one less person to care for, to worry about, to feed and remind and cajole. One less thing to be angry about, the not taking out of the rubbish, the leaving a jar of Vegemite open on the bench long after it is finished with, letting Rosie climb the ladder up to the trampoline even though she is only eighteen months old and when she turns as she reaches the top her elbow slips and she almost falls and cracks her skull on the bricks below.
I realise I have reduced marriage to domestic chores and child-rearing. In none of these instances is there anything about us, about Paul and me. Where did we go? Out with the rubbish, away in the cupboard with the Vegemite, separated by shouting over a trampoline ladder.
There is no husband in all of this, no one to talk to about the liver that could be waiting for Addie if only I could make her sick enough, make her an urgent listing too. Home state would get preference. Then she would be fixed.
There is no one to talk to about how I no longer see death as corporeal, that I do not believe Addie will cease to be just because her body fails her. That I no longer think death means anything, nor do I think that if the parents of the child with the liver were to donate it, it would somehow make sense of their loss, that it would make their loss mean something. It is senseless, it means nothing, just that their daughter is dead and mine is not and how could that be any comfort to them when they do not love my daughter the way they love their own.
What do you think, Paul, what would you say, talk to me please just so I know that someone else is floundering too.
EIGHTEEN
When I wake up I have one tiny moment, not even a second perhaps, where I think, Hurray! Because tonight is opening night. My exhibition. But guilt scours the joy away and I am left with a kind of queasiness lodged in my stomach – the omnipresence of the liver we do not have mixing uneasily with a nervous excitement about the evening to come.
At breakfast, where I feed Rosie and Felicity and everyone else but somehow forget to eat, Felicity tells me she wants to do nothing other than stay at home with the girls, so I can do everything I need without having to ring and organise babysitters and be at the mercy of my husband and his lawsuit.
The first thing I do is to visit my obstetrician. The bleeding has stopped. The ultrasound shows that the baby is still there. Alive. Tenacious. I smile. At least one of us is.
Then I go to a beauty salon and have my hair done, my nails done, everything done. The whole time I am there, all I can think is: do I believe in my ability to make Addie sicker, so sick that she will be at the end, a place where I never wanted her to be? I cannot imagine my daughter about to die. But there is another child already brain-dead. And a third child, the one who should get this liver, the urgently listed child, how long till they die too?
But of course I don’t have an answer.
When I return home, I have a shower, put on my make-up and get dressed. I step out into the living room and both girls are on the sofa with Felicity, reading a book.
‘Oh Mummy,’ says Addie.
‘Princess!’ gushes Rosie and she bounces off the sofa to come over and feel my dress, to lift up the hem and inspect my shoes, to tug on the pearls in my ears.
‘Oh Mummy,’ Addie says again. ‘I want to wear that dress one day when I’m a grown up.’
Oh dear God, what do you say to your child, who may never live to be fully grown, when she asks something like that?
I step over to the sofa, sit down beside her and wrap her in my arms. ‘Of course you can. Of course you can,’ I repeat as if, by saying it more than once, I can make it come true.
I look over the top of Addie’s head at Felicity, whose eyes are running over with tears and I swallow and blink until it is safe to kiss both girls on the cheek and stand. ‘Mummy won’t be late,’ I say. ‘Auntie Fliss is going to tuck you into bed.’
Before I leave the house I send a text message to Liz. No decision yet, is her response, which I suppose mimics my own lack of certainty about just what I am going to do for Addie.
I’m a little late to arrive, which is a good thing I think as I step through the doors of the gallery, because by the time I get there, the sense that the exhibition is a success is palpable. People’s faces are flushed, their voices animated, but they are not just drinking wine and chatting; they are viewing the art and consulting the catalogue.
Sarah waves to me and I join her. I’m introduced as the curator and people congratulate me, ask about Dan, about Jack and about my own work; the pen-and-ink row of deliberately imperfect fragments of bodies. One collector even wants to commission another set of drawings from me. I imagine myself in my father’s studio, pen in hand, head bent over paper, drawing imaginary bodies that never die, bodies that I can manipulate – like plaster, like paint – to become whatever pleases me. I say that I am not sure, that I will think about it.
Then it is time for Sarah’s speech, for my speech. The applause is vigorous and, while I stand there letting it nourish me, I spot Nick smiling at me. I make my way over to him and he hands me a glass of champagne.
‘You’re an amazing woman,’ he says. ‘I hope your husband tells you that.’
I shake my head. ‘No. He doesn’t. But I don’t compliment him either.’
‘Because you don’t think he’s amazing any more?’
‘I’m generally not very amazing either.’
The silence that follows is the opening. This is where it begins, an affair, in such moments of bravado, moments where someone loses heart and gives in to the straightforward simplicity of lust.
But I am always the kind of person to think about the complications. It’s my job.
I take Nick’s hand and lean over and kiss his cheek. Then I step back and say, ‘It would be so easy. But that doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do.’
‘I hope your daughter gets her liver, Camille.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, as I slip back off into the crowd.
I wander from painting to sculpture, feeling like the confidante of each piece, that they have shared their secrets with me. Some of their secrets are now told in the catalogues that people hold in their hands and in the quotes surrounding each artwork but I have kept many of the secrets for myself. Because they belong to me; they are a part of me. They are the unseen blood that keeps these works alive.
I stop in front of one of Jack’s paintings. It is the biggest in the exhibition and its size is imposing and somehow, on the wall where it has been hung, it looks different to the way I had remembered it.
The Waltz, it is called. My mother dancing with a faceless man.
I move back, to give the picture the distance it requires to notice such details as the visual rhyme between Alix’s outstretched hand in the top right of the painting and the edge of her skirt at the bottom. Then a voice, Jack’s voice, is beside me and he is quoting four lines of poetry:
Oh plunge me deep in love – put out
My senses leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.
‘Sara Teasdale,’ he says. ‘I read that somewhere, later, after Alix died, and now every time I
see this painting, that’s what comes to mind.’
I am so shocked by the words. By the longing. For two men, for one man, for a dead man, who knows? Did Alix even know? Perhaps what I have thought of as Alix’s selfishness is not that at all, but madness.
Oh plunge me deep in love. I can see my mother diving into the deep pool of my father and drowning. Put out my senses. So that she would no longer feel. A taper in a rushing wind. Not a taper though. A taper does not blow itself out.
But if Alix was selfish in what she did – in what I think she did – at the end, then so am I. I want to take my daughter to her own end, to the edge of the river, a tiptoe before the sand meets the water. Is this what you do for love when you are on the edge of madness?
I go home and lie on the bed, still in my dress. I fall into sleep. Then I am woken by a sound. As I walk into the hall I know that it is Addie. I go into her room and she is lying in bed, weeping so softly; I only know she is crying because of the gasped intake of her breath.
‘Darling, what’s wrong?’ I lie on the bed next to her, pulling her body against mine, wiping cheeks that are so wet I realise she has not just begun to cry, she has been crying for some time. She has been crying while I have been sleeping. ‘Why didn’t you call out for me?’
‘I didn’t want to wake Rosie up.’
I remember, as if it is happening right now, all the times we have asked Addie not to laugh and giggle and be too loud when we are putting her to bed, all the times we have told her off for calling out at night for no reason and risked waking the baby, all the times I have put her in her room for time-out, all the yelling I have done at her and I wonder why I wasted so much time on things that matter so little, why I put her in her room for three minutes when I could have spent that time playing tea-parties with her. I think of all the calling out at night I would be happy to have now, if only.
Addie begins to cry loudly now. ‘It hurts, Mummy.’
I don’t know what it is that hurts, I don’t know if it is bodily or emotional, I don’t know anything other than I am crying too, so loudly, like Addie. I can no longer tell who is making the sounds that I can hear, a relentless wail, a keening, a lamentation, grief no longer hidden, nor dignified and brave and strong as it is supposed to be but cast out of us and I know with the certainty that I have blood and bones and flesh that my daughter is going to die.
NOTES ON AN EXHIBITION
LONGEVITY
(Photographs, 10x15cm. Snapshots of the artists, during their time with Alix.)
Alix turned and walked out of Jack’s exhibition, calmly, sedately, as if she was just going out for air. She spoke into the silence of the evening and said, ‘Why didn’t you say that they were all paintings of me?’ A question meant for Jack, not for the waters of the harbour.
‘What would you have said, Alix, if I had told you?’ Jack’s imagined voice was quiet and calm; not angry but matter-of-fact.
But he was right, what would she have said? What did she ever say when he asked to meet Camille, when he asked her about the date of the exhibition, when he told her, on the night she wore the blue dress, that he loved her. What could she say? I love a dead man as if he were still alive.
She went home and found Dan’s mask and then went into Camille’s room and lay down on the bed beside her, holding on to the only solid things she had left of him.
And then she saw something. A groove on the mask that she had not noticed before. It sat just below Dan’s ear and was only slight, barely an indentation, certainly not a furrow like the wrinkles beneath his eyes, but it was there nonetheless and she did not know what it was.
This mask had touched Dan’s skin, it was fixed to the truth of him; it contained nothing that had not been there when he died. Yet there was this mark that she could not recall. Had it always been there or had she damaged the mask in some way? And was it worse that she had forgotten something that was always there or to lose him all over again by damaging the mask, the only thing about him that was still real?
The next night she called Louisa and lied. She said she had to stay at work a little longer and asked her to look after Camille until she had finished. Of course Louisa agreed. Then she paged Dr Hollander.
‘Do you have plans this evening?’ she asked when he arrived.
‘No, no plans. What’ve we got?’
He was expecting her to say something like, Fifty-two year old male with congestive heart failure, but instead she said, ‘Dinner. Bistro Claude.’ It was the same restaurant that Jack had taken her to on their first date and she felt the need to go there again, with someone else, to have a different date to the one she had had with Jack.
‘Sure.’ His eagerness was endearing. ‘My shift finishes at seven.’
There was no albatross sitting on the harbour that evening. There was just water, black like a shadow of the sky, stretching towards cliffs decorated with small stars of light. The waiter showed them to a table by the water and they sat down and ordered drinks.
‘I don’t think I actually know your first name,’ Alix said after she had sipped her wine.
‘It’s Greg.’
‘Alix.’
‘I know.’
They were silent and Alix looked at the man across the table, Greg, and wondered what she wanted from him. Not conversation. He would want to talk about transplants and try to praise her work or impress her with how much more he knew than the other residents. And she couldn’t imagine having sex with him; he was too young. What would it be like to have those lusting eyes fixed on her naked body, his hands stroking her limbs, his lips burrowing in to the most intimate parts of her? But if she didn’t want dinner, conversation or sex then what was she going to do with him?
She finished her wine. He was handsome. Had screwed half the nurses at the hospital or so she’d heard. Maybe that was what she wanted. A quick fuck in the car with someone who had to answer to her the next day at work.
‘Alix.’ It was not Greg’s voice. It was Jack’s.
She should have remembered, or perhaps she had; he was going to dinner that night with a curator from Melbourne who wanted to run the Body of Work exhibition. She hadn’t asked which restaurant he was going to but she should have known. This was his place.
‘Jack. This is Greg,’ she said.
Jack did not say hello, did not offer his hand. Greg began to offer his and then withdrew it when it became apparent that it was not wanted.
Alix continued. ‘Greg and I work together.’
‘Not too many people needing transplants around here.’ Jack’s voice was lighthearted but his eyes were fierce; he was accusing her of something she hadn’t even done, didn’t even know if she wanted to do.
‘No, there aren’t,’ she agreed.
‘Why did you leave last night?’
An understanding of at least part of the situation he had found himself in was beginning to show on Greg’s face but he had not the strength of character to say anything or to extricate himself. He just sat there, unspeaking, listening.
‘I was tired.’
‘You found out something about yourself last night.’
‘You’re very arrogant, to assume your art can be so transformative.’
‘Where did you feel it when you fell in love with me?’
Alix was so thrown by the question, out of context as it was, that she did not make the obvious protest, I’m not in love with you. Instead she said, ‘Nowhere specific. Body parts don’t have feelings.’
‘If I stub my toe it hurts. What if I stubbed your heart?’
‘You’re making the assumption that if you did something to hurt me I’d feel it in my heart.’
‘No. Just that you’d feel it.’
Jack turned and walked back to his table. Alix folded her napkin, stood and said to Dr Hollander, ‘I think we can safely say that we won’t be having dinner tonight.’
She walked out to the front of the restaurant, to the grass by the harbour, where she had gone that first
night with Jack. She closed her eyes and when she opened them the albatross was there, sitting on a broken stump, drying his wings. The feathers on the underside of his wing were just visible in the moonlight and she turned her arm over to look at her wrist, at the veins colouring her skin. Then she held out her arm to Dan, to take, to kiss, to change the colour with the stroke of his lips but he didn’t so the grief stayed where it was, not lodged in her heart but there in the veins of her wrist, pumping steadily around her body.
Alix wrote a letter to Jack. It was a goodbye, a parting explanation and she felt it was a good and thorough explanation until she reached the last line. I love you as much as I can and I keep his face because he will need it when he comes back.
Two things shocked her about that line. The first was that she had written the words I love you. Those words had come from her mind down to her hand, into her pen and onto the paper. She hadn’t planned to write them. I love you. I love you. She loved Dan. She loved Camille. I love you. She loved Jack.
The second thing that shocked her was the last part of the sentence. He will need it when he comes back. When was Dan coming back? It had been two years and he had not come back.
She took out the mask and she remembered when she and Dan had become lost in the lanes of Florence, when they had visited the gallery with the death masks. Her arrogance, declaring that Dan was not to die and that, even if he did, she would be able to fix him. To bring him back. But of course she could not.
She had thought that having Dan’s face in her hands was like holding his soul because his face was the most faithful representation of him that she could have. But it was nothing like his soul. The plaster was cool and hard and surely his soul was more than that. She stood and folded the letter to Jack, put it away in her desk then found a box and packed Dan’s face away.
It was midnight when she knocked at his door. Camille was sound asleep on her shoulder and Alix wondered if late-night outings such as this would have some kind of lasting negative effect on her when she grew up. But then Jack opened the door and Alix was only aware of the lasting negative effect of not making this visit.
If I Should Lose You Page 18