by David Brooks
When there was a softening, as once or twice there was, it would last hardly a day before the thick tide of their lives swept over them again. So he began to stop trying, began to see the walks, the talking with Jennifer as a way of balancing, a way of surviving, and whether in truth it was his marriage, some demon within himself, or just the wide, flat landscape of middle age hardly mattered. The truth seemed relative, contingent, unanchored, the story altering with the angle of perception. There was no ultimate explanation; no final arbiter. If it seemed uncanny how Jennifer would call, would want to see him and talk, so often in the midst of a period of tension with Margaret, after a night of vicious argument when he had found himself wrestling again with her blackness – with the blackness – it was also, perhaps, no more than a register of how often this wrestling happened. Perhaps Jennifer was a gift, after all, and the matter was no more complicated than that. And perhaps such gifts were so rare – and so painful to see, to those who did not receive them – that all the moral cards had been carefully stacked against them.
And perhaps, too, as he sometimes thought to himself, in fits of self-loathing, all would-be adulterers felt this way. Still he and Jennifer had barely touched. But if now, instead of shaking hands when they parted, Jennifer would lean toward him quickly, to kiss him on the cheek, it was all he could do not to hold her there, at that moment, to breathe in deeply the scent of her hair.
She wanted him to come to Clovelly. She had mentioned it more than once. She wanted to be able to make him lunch, to show him the view, to sit quietly looking out the window with him, without the worry that they already had that they would see people they knew, as once or twice each of them had, and have to introduce each other, find some explanation. Now, by working overtime, she had arranged a day off. It seemed easy, innocent enough, and he did not want to disappoint her.
The day was blustery and cold, but also bright and cloudless. He parked the Holden down the hill from the bus-stop where he had first seen her. Her flat, on the top floor of a building closer to the sea, was larger than he had expected, with wide windows looking out over the beach, Coogee, and Maroubra Point. It was simply furnished. There were hundreds of books, dozens of records, Chopin playing already on the radiogram. At a table by the centre window she had laid out prawns, bread, fruit, cheese, and placed a bottle of the same white wine they had shared for their lunch at McMahons Point. She looked pleased with herself, almost radiant as she backed into the room before him, gesturing, and then, as if there was nothing else she could do with the feeling, hugged him, truly, for the first time, and he held her tightly to him, taken aback by the racing of her heart.
They liked the Botanic Gardens, and met there more often than anywhere else. One time they spent a hilarious half hour sitting on a bench under a huge coral tree trying to guess, from the way people walked or were dressed, or the looks on their faces, what it was that they most wanted from life. One time they spent most of their lunch hour reading the initials and dates and love-messages carved into the stalks of the giant bamboo, carried higher and higher, further and further into the dense thicket as the years passed: the names of boys about to embark for the First World War, the names of American sailors from the second, country boys who had come down for their first visit to Sydney, lovers seeking to testify to each other and the park and the grass. Another time, taking the high path back up from the Quay, Jennifer asked him what the building was next to the State Governor’s house, on the other side of the high wrought-iron fence, and it had taken him some seconds to recognise, from an angle he’d never seen before, the Conservatorium, and the very tree he had once spent so much expectant time under. Still another day, hearing a shot, they went to the Rainforest Gully and found a large colony of fruit-bats sleeping in the high trees. She pointed out a couple on one of the lower branches, grooming each other upside down with gentle, meticulous care, oblivious to the daylight or the occasional wakeful squabbling breaking about them. A gardener with a rifle said they were slowly destroying the trees. He was trying to scare them away, he said, but they were getting used to him. Every time he fired a shot they just rearranged themselves, as if they knew that he had no intention of hurting them.
She had read in books and magazines, and friends had told her – it was a kind of cliché – that married men would always use the excuse that their wives did not understand them, or care for them, or that irreparable distances had set in, and at first she had been on the watch for this, but it never really came. He had not used any excuse but himself, and her: that they were what they were because of themselves. She, for her part, was conscious of his wife, but he said little about her now, and her consciousness was not constant. It was true that sometimes, when he came to her, there was an ache or fog or dark in him that she would have to try to smooth away before they could be properly together, and she regretted it because their time was so precious; but it was also a sort of vulnerability, a proof of other feeling. She never asked why, and he rarely told her. She had ideas. Some things seemed obvious enough. And there were allusions, references, inevitably. Sometimes they would bring a momentary chill but it would pass.
In truth it was not Margaret, at least not so much or so often as it might once have been. There were also those nights when sleep seemed impossible and he would lie awake, feeling the slow tip into the abyss, the opening of the box to see the endless nothing, the thought that he could die tomorrow and that would be an end, so little finished, so little achieved, no more pleasure, no more dreaming, no thinking, just extinction, the sudden ridiculous purposelessness of what, until such moments, seemed so crucial, so important. But it was not that either, since that had always been the way: that had always been the way, from the beginning of thinking. Margaret had been because of that. Isobel had been. Hazel had been. And if every relationship had come about because of it, then it was as much as to say that none of them had. It was Jennifer herself. It was him.
They would see each other once a week, rarely more. He would come to her flat, or they would have lunch in the Gardens. Sometimes there would be an afternoon or a whole day, that they could use for a picnic somewhere, or spend languidly in bed. Twice – the best times, for each of them – they went to the shack at Cliftons, and were together in total isolation for a whole weekend. They cooked one another meals, lay late in bed, sat long into the evening on the verandah, watching the sunset on the river, talking. He told her of his plans for the new house, showed her the blueprints. They went up to the site, paced it out, clinked an imaginary glass of champagne where he indicated the dining-table was likely to be. She made him promise that he would never pull down the shack.
From almost the start they dreamt of each other, and these dreams were amongst the things that they would tell when they met. Each saw in them a deeper confirmation that it was not merely from their conscious selves that the need or feeling for one another came, as if there were another life that they were already living together, even when they could not be physically doing so. And they would marvel at it, sit before it, in their minds and their conversation, entranced at the way it was taking them back through each other’s lives, and sometimes forward, rearranging, re-explaining them. They came to place great store in the dreams. That was the problem. In the beginning of their second year it was a dream that changed things utterly.
One overcast day, reaching Macquarie Street on his way to meet her in the Gardens, Daniel found traffic at a standstill, police-cars and an ambulance at the intersection, and ambulancemen pulling a blanket over the face of a person just killed at the pedestrian crossing. He could not tell if it was a man or a woman, old or young; there was only the shape of the body that a few minutes before had been a living person, thinking, walking, feeling, crossing the road. The scene affected him deeply. Only three weeks before, Mark Patterson, Ellen’s eldest, had died in an Army training accident. Margaret had gone up for the funeral and had spent the week there, and returned more bleak, if that were possible, than he had ever known he
r. With the sight of the body on the street it seemed eerily as if the news had arrived for the second time. Later it came to seem something different, a foreshadowing, an omen. When he met Jennifer, by the kiosk, and they decided to walk rather than have tea, he sensed something troubling her, and asked about it. He would not normally have pressed her, but a panic of sorts – a residue – had set in and made him ask repeatedly, despite her insistence that there was nothing, that it would pass.
She had dreamt of Margaret, she said eventually, three times now. There was a pattern of sorts. The first dream had been disturbing, but was not unlike other dreams, of unexpected returns, near-discoveries, that she had had before. It was of an encounter only, or rather a glimpse, on a tram; she had felt an uneasy presence, as soon as she stepped up, but the tram was crowded and she had not been able to see beyond the people immediately around her. After a few blocks the crowd of passengers had thinned and her attention had focused on a woman in a cream-coloured dress, whose face she could not see, a beautiful woman, elegant, locked in a steely calm. At the next stop the woman had risen and moved to the door. In the last second before alighting she had looked up, and their eyes had met. Although in truth she could not be sure what Margaret looked like – she had only ever seen her in a newspaper photograph – she knew that this person was she, and in the dream she knew that Margaret knew about her.
The second dream had unsettled her more. She was waiting for Margaret in a café. Even in the dream she felt the strangeness of this, but she was none the less there, waiting for Margaret as for a friend. And she had not arrived. The coffee had been milky and sweet, in a brown glass cup, and she had enjoyed it immensely. People had gone out and come in from the rain – a bell on the door had rung each time they did so – and trams had been coming and going along the street outside, but Margaret had not arrived. She had ordered a second cup. It took an inordinate amount of time. When the waitress finally brought it to her, she had stumbled, at the last second, and the scalding coffee had spilt into Jennifer’s lap. She had woken in a state of anxiety, almost mourning, not clear whether this was for Margaret and what might have happened to keep her, or for herself, whose friend had decided not to come, whose friend had chosen to leave her sitting there alone.
Even this dream, strange as it was, she might have told him readily enough. It was the next dream that had shocked her. If the meaning of the first two was not entirely clear, the meaning of the third seemed only too obvious, too hard not to face, very hard to tell.
She and Margaret were sitting on a bed, in a close, darkened room. It was evident that they were friends, and that Margaret had confided some deep distress. She was sobbing inconsolably, and Jennifer had begun crying too. This was all, and yet it was enough. Jennifer had never seen such grief, and had been hollowed, appalled. In the dream she would have done anything to stem it, anything to repair. It was a sorrow that seemed to go back behind the surfaces of things, behind the immediate situation, awful as that now seemed to be, to some great and unnameable darkness beyond. She had woken to find her pillow wet with tears, and the day itself emptied, as if someone had died.
Almost nothing further was said. She could see enough in his eyes, the pupils tiny, the gaze sharpened and set, a cold curtain of realisation fallen there too, not masking but making things irreparably clear. She could not fight it because it was her own realisation also. Almost in that instant, each gave the other back to themselves. Neither had intended such a moment, such a choice, but neither had intended that love itself could create such agony for a third person, or would, if they did not take it on themselves.
Almost unwittingly then, with very little said, they walked out of the Garden, separately, because sometimes if separations do not occur like that – as suddenly and irrevocably as a road accident – they cannot occur at all.
***
It is said that Tiresias, the ancient seer, once came across two snakes copulating on a mountain path and beat them with his stick. For this reason – so powerful were the spirits of these snakes, and so deep his transgression, whether he had intended it or not, and almost certainly he had not – he found himself suddenly changed, from the man he was, into a woman. Much later – it may have been centuries; it may have been only a decade or more – when Zeus and Hera argued as to who, man or woman, experienced the greatest pleasure in the act of love, Hera suggested that they call upon Tiresias, who had been both, and ask him the question. Because he answered in Zeus’ favour, saying that it was the woman who took the most pleasure from the act, Hera, in fury, plucked out his eyes. Zeus, in remorse, unable to restore them – or unwilling to risk his wife’s further fury by doing so – gave him instead a second sight, an ability to see with the mind’s eye what physical eyes could not see.
In retrospect it would come to seem – or might well have, had Daniel or Jennifer ever thought of it – that this or some such thing had happened to them at their moment of realisation in the Gardens, and that a relationship, a love that had been on one plane now shifted to another, and some of their ways of knowing and of seeing shifted with it. They saw each other only once more – unless one accepts that last kiss that a live person, while others are watching, gives to the dead cheek of another – and that was twenty years later. But nothing had ended, even with that glimpse, for glimpse is all that it would be: a car passing with two people in it, an elderly man, collecting his mail in the rain, raising his eyes at the right moment, as if he had known that the next car would be hers, which of course, in his bones, he did, just as she would know, in the following spring, the precise moment of his death, not needing to read it in the papers, not needing a phone call which in any case would not have come. Because for twenty years, in their dreams, in their moods, in their bones, it had been like that.
For some months he mourned, and had no reason to think that his consciousness of her, the intensity of her presence in his psyche, was anything other than this grief at the loss of her. Several times weekly he would walk by the Parliament offices, for the mere feeling of her presence somewhere within them, and although it was against his better judgement there were times, too, when he walked slowly by the Gardens, conscious, it seemed, of her knowing he was doing so, of her staying away for that reason, just as at other times, at his desk, he would have a clear inner vision of her walking, as at that moment he could only think she must have been doing, amongst the giant trees or across the wide lawns of the Domain in the midday light. One night he dreamt that she was in the bed with him, holding him, and he woke in the pitch dark, desperate. But when he drifted off to sleep again she was still there, still holding, as if his problem, his only problem, had been to wake, and to doubt that other life. Then for a few months he lost her and a different kind of grieving began. He had walked past the Parliament offices and had not felt her there. Within a week he had convinced himself that she was gone, or that she had met someone else, had ceased to feel as she had. The dreams now became labyrinthine odysseys of loss and dislocation, dreams often without her, in which she was an absent presence only, in which he searched, vainly, through buildings, markets, crowded rooms, glimpsing her fleetingly, never able to reach her, convinced as he was that she was somewhere near.
He immersed himself in his work. And although there were ironies, paradoxes, found himself working, too, on the relationship with Margaret. Time began slowly to make a difference. Like someone recovering from an illness, he became week by week if not stronger then at least able to breathe the air of ordinariness with some equanimity, even relief, for having discovered himself at first with a heart or mind – a being – suddenly emptied, after such fullness, he now saw it as at least a whole, an undivided thing. Margaret, too, seemed to have changed. There were moments now, with her, of a tenderness that surprised and disoriented him, and long stretches of unaccustomed calm.
There was also – and perhaps it contributed – a new strength to her singing, or the return of an old one, as though a barrier had been removed, an inhibition
overcome, albeit from an unsuspected source. Her mother Claire had died, after a long illness through the late stages of which Margaret had nursed her, sitting through the nights toward the end of it, talking quietly, listening. And she had watched her father too through it all, and had felt herself watched. Already ten years retired, almost eighty, he moved after Claire’s death, up into a cottage in the mountains, part of a church retreat on the edge of Mount Apex, where he began to tend a large garden with meticulous care, and was in turn tended by a woman from nearby in the town. After a year, Margaret caught a train from Central, got off at the Mount Apex station and, although she had never been to the house before – indeed, never even to that part of the town – walked directly to the end of Neild Street, through the front gate, the garden, the unlatched front door and into the kitchen of number forty-three, where the old man was drinking tea and reading about rhododendrons in the Yates garden catalogue. ‘I am tired of fighting you,’ she said, ‘and I am sorry that it has taken me so long. I am your daughter after all.’ And that was it. As if she had passed through something at last. As if she had decided that she was tired of living in shadow, and had simply got up, and walked out into the sun. She told him about her singing now, and the new roles, and what this late flowering of her life meant to her; and he, in his own turn, asked questions as if he had been following her career all along, and told her about flowers. After this visit she sang to more acclaim than she had ever received before, and responded without the anxieties and depressions that had earlier plagued her. She was offered and had accepted two major roles, of a kind never previously offered her, and the new support and confidence seemed to spread into other areas of her life.