Bliss

by Peter Carey

  So when Joel came scurrying through at this moment she was, without knowing why, irritated and depressed. She was always disappointed when she saw him: physically he was not quite what she had remembered.

  Joel always rushed. He had no cool. Harry had more style than Joel, who almost waddled, and there, there still, were those damn cufflinks he wouldn’t take off.

  'Hello, honey.' The bar stool farted when he sat on it. She tried to tell herself it would have happened to anyone. 'I've been getting your husband on to an aeroplane.'

  'Do you really have to wear those cufflinks?'

  But Joel was ordering a drink. 'He nearly missed the damn plane.'

  'If you really want to wear cufflinks why don't you come with me and I'll buy you some.'

  'I don't know why in the hell he wants to go down there, we could have done it on the phone. Hey... get your hands off my cufflinks. What are you doing?'

  'I'm taking your damn cufflinks off.' Joel sat at the bar with his cuffs flapping at the bottom of his coat sleeves. 'What in the hell do I do now?'

  'Pull your sleeves up,' she said and started giggling. 'Did you have a nice day at the office?'

  'Hell, honey, that isn't funny.'

  Bettina ordered another Sunrise and Joel removed his suit coat, put it fussily over the next bar stool, rolled his shirt sleeves up, and put his coat back on. He sulked for a while and Bettina looked around. In the end he started talking to stop her looking around.

  'He's not in a very healthy state of mind?'

  'Who, honey?'

  'Your husband.'

  'Ah,' Bettina waved a ringed hand, 'he's just growing up.'

  She liked Harry when she was away from him. He towered over everyone else she knew.

  Joel started laughing incredulously, 'Oh that's good, honey, that's really good. Just growing up. He tells me in the car that he is going to be Good. Is that sane? Because, honey, if that's sane, then I want to be crazy.'

  'It's not your style, darling.'

  'What isn't?'

  'Being crazy isn't your style.'

  'What in the goddamn hell do you mean by that?'

  His chin was starting to wobble so she changed the subject. 'Who did you take to lunch?'

  'I'm taking George Lewis out to lunch next week. I've got a table booked at La Belle Epoque.'

  'He said he'd go last week.'

  'Well he had to cancel.'

  'Why can't we steal someone else's clients? Why do we have to steal Harry's clients?'

  'We haven't stolen anyone's clients yet.'

  'Damn right we haven't,' said Bettina bitterly, wondering if she had got herself stuck with a schmuck who couldn't even get one account. She had listened to Harry when she shouldn't have, and ignored him when she should have listened.

  'You do it then.'

  'Alright, fuck you, I just might.' The bastard. He knew she couldn't. He knew it gave her the shits to be unable to do this thing that she wanted to do more than anything else. But how could Harry Joy's wife phone up a prospective client and take him out to lunch.

  'Well do,' he said smugly. 'Do it yourself.'

  'I just might.'

  But he wasn't even threatened by it. In fact it restored his good humour and a little colour crept into his face.

  'What I was thinking,' he said, and began to run his chubby finger around the wet rim of his Scotch glass.

  Bettina listened. When Joel spoke like this she thought of an ice-skater. Suddenly the little bugger was so damn elegant it was almost unbearable.

  'What I was thinking was it might be better and simpler and less disruptive for everyone if we just had him committed.'

  He took her breath away. Bettina, literally, could not speak. And when she looked at Joel she saw that he meant it: he had that strange little prim smile on his face and his eyes were wet but how or why they were wet she didn't know. Some emotion moved him. But she smelt no weakness, only a sly satisfaction, a boneless strength.

  'Christ,' she said, 'you little creep.' But her eyes were bright with admiration and the smile seemed to stay on Joel's face even while he sipped his Scotch.

  That night, in the branches of the fig tree beside his house, Harry would conduct his Final Test.

  It had not been easy to get there. Joel had been attentive and kind. He had driven him to the airport and waited for him to board the plane.

  'You go, Joel. No point in waiting here.'

  'No, no, I'm fine.'

  When the plane had finally begun to board Harry had still waited.

  'You go,' he said. 'I'll go on in a second. I'll just wait for most of them to get on.'

  But still Joel wouldn't go, and Harry found himself both irritated and moved by his kindness. Joel waited to watch him walk down the boarding finger and waved him all the way on to the plane.

  He took his seat and stood up again.

  'I'm on the wrong plane,' he told the hostess, and smiled wanly. 'Sorry:' She took the ticket from his hand.

  'No,' she said, 'you're on the right plane, sir. Please be seated.'

  'I want to get off.'

  'But this is your plane.'

  'I don't care. I don't want to fly on it. I was only pretending to get on it.'

  'And you just got carried away?' the hostess said sourly, stepping back into the galley to let him past.

  And now he was up the fig tree just as he had planned to be, ready to observe what Actors did when they had no audience. The final test was hardly worth all the effort.

  It was not so uncomfortable. He had been in worse situ-ations. For this particular branch he had a good view of his neighbour who was taking advantage of the late summer light to dig a hole. This was quite consistent with his behaviour in all the years before Harry had died and he found it, in a peculiar way, soothing to watch him scurrying and puffing around his garden like a little mole. The neighbour always enjoyed holes and mounds of dirt. The earth in his garden could never lie in peace, always on the move from one corner to another. Just when it was settled in, he would decide to shift it. It had all the senseless motion of a sadistic punishment and yet the man (known affectionately as 'the Miner' by the entire Joy family) looked happy enough as he surveyed his mound of dirt and his hole in the ground.

  Harry settled in against the trunk and lit a cigarette just as the Miner was walking across to his back door. He stopped and stared up at the tree. He stood very still.

  'Hey you,' he called at last, 'you, in the tree.'

  'It's only me,' Harry hissed.

  'Who's you?'

  'Mr Joy.'

  The Miner replied in a similar style, in a piercing whisper: 'What's up?'

  'I've lost my key.'

  The Miner's wife came and stood on the back step: 'Who is it?'

  'Mr Joy, from next door.'

  'What's he doing?'

  'He's lost his key.'

  'The boy is home.'

  'Your son is home,' hissed the Miner.

  Harry knew that his son was home: he could see yellow light shining through the chink in the heavy curtains three feet above his head.

  'I know,' he hissed back.

  Down on the back step of their house the Miner and his wife had an anxious little conference.

  'He knows,' the Miner said.

  'I'm not deaf.'

  The Miner took a tentative step towards the fence. 'Do you want me to ring the bell for you?'

  'Stupid, stupid,' the wife exploded and went inside and slammed the door.

  'I want to surprise them,' Harry whispered.

  'He wants to surprise them,' the Miner told the darkened screen door. Obviously she had not given up all interest. The door creaked outwards, inquiringly. Another whispered conference concluded with a sharp little bang as the screen door shut like a trap and the Miner, as in the manner of one reluctantly following orders, left his territory and came down the side path on the Joys' side of the fence.

  It would appear that he wished a more confidential talk.


  It was not an easy tree to climb and the Miner did not acquit himself well. The problem was the first branch.

  'Stand on the chair,' Harry whispered, deciding it better that the climb be executed quietly if it was going to be done at all.

  'What chair?'

  'There.'

  It was almost dark now but it was still possible to see the bulges and creases in the Miner's bulbous form as it approached, heralded by wheezing.

  'Hi.'

  'Hi.'

  Such American-style casualness in the middle of a tree. Was he going to remark on the weather?

  'He's not here,' the Miner said at last.

  There were so many people who were not there. Harry couldn't think what he meant.

  'The blue BMW.'

  Joel drove a blue BMW, but why would anyone climb a tree to tell him that Joel, as was perfectly obvious, was not visiting his house.

  'The person you are trying to surprise,' said the Miner, trying to take possession of Harry's branch, 'is not here.'

  'Thank you, Mr Harrison.'

  'You're welcome any time.'

  'Can you find your own way down?'

  'Yes, I think so.' But he had only retreated by one branch when he stopped. 'Mr Joy?'

  'Yes.'

  'I must discuss the fence with you sometime. We are going to have to replace it.'

  'I'll drop in, Mr Harrison.'

  'No hurry.'

  He crashed his way through the lower branches and just when Harry judged him safely down, there was a sharp crack followed by a soft thud and a yelp of pain.

  'Are you alright?' he called.

  There was no answer, but he thought he saw the shadow of the Miner limping along the darker shadow of the fence and then saw it slide inside the still-dark screen door.

  Harry, already, was doubting the wisdom of his final test and the Miner had reminded him, had let him see himself as he must be seen: Harry Joy was crazy. He fervently hoped he had been. His theory, so cleverly arrived at (if they are Actors they will reveal themselves when they think their audience is absent) seemed puerile to him, more affected by champagne than common sense.

  So there he was, considering leaving his tree, climbing down, finding a bottle of wine, removing himself from that uncomfortable, undignified position, when Joel's blue BMW pulled up outside, and it was only the fear of being thought mad that stopped him climbing down and saying: here I am.

  He waited, and, with no real interest, watched.

  He heard Joel turn off his blaring radio. He saw Bettina lurch from the car. The clink of bottles. Bettina saying: 'You open the door for me again and I'll break your bloody arm.' Laughter. Joel locking the door and having trouble with his keys.

  His partner kissing his wife. His partner's leg jammed hard between his wife's legs, in the glow of the street light, against the hedge, beside the footpath.

  No.

  Harry retreated up the tree in pain.

  Joel, far below, said: 'We should have gone to my place.'

  He did not want to hear anything. He came to escape pain, not find it.

  But Bettina's voice insisted on reaching him: 'I can't stand your bloody brass any more. If I have to look at your brass any more, I'll puke.'

  Eastern brass artifacts in Joel's bedroom. He had bought a crate-load of them in a market in Kabul and a woman was paid to polish them every week. In the living room there were books he had bought by the metre.

  Harry kept climbing, away from voices.

  He wanted normality and peace so badly that he could still deny he had seen this torture. He could have erased it from his memory. He wanted normality and warmth. Instinctively, seeking comfort, he put his eye to the chink in his son's bedroom curtain. Show me my son.

  There: David Joy, his trousers around his knees and Lucy, her skirt beside her on the floor, sucking his son's pale-skinned penis.

  Harry Joy at the windows of Hell.

  He moaned and staggered on his branch like a man pole-axed. He began to descend, forgetting that trees should not be left in a hurry, but slowly, carefully, one leg at a time, even by those practised in the art.

  But Harry, hurrying, left his branch too quickly and barely held the next branch for a second before he was on his way further down the tree. He crashed ten feet, was wrenched, and held.

  The sharp end of the branch the Miner had broken in his fall now held Harry securely like a butcher's hook in the trousers of his suit.

  He stayed there, suspended, and swung a little in front of one more vista. For in front of his eyes, the curtains properly parted, was a window where he was presented with one last glimpse of his partner's pudgy little hand disappearing up his wife's dress.

  Bettina Joy looked up and saw her husband's head staring in the window, upside down.

  Harry saw her mouth open wide and her eyes bulge a little. He thought of fish eyes in shop windows and Billy McPhee screaming about a dollar's worth of petrol.

  Bettina Joy hit Joel Davis who misunderstood and would not stop.

  Harry saw Joel Davis turn and saw his mouth wide open. Joel Davis wiped his hand on his handkerchief before he made a move towards the window.

  'I put you on the plane,' he said. And, indeed, he looked up into the sky as if Harry might have dropped out.

  'Just cut my trousers.'

  They were there in a second: all the cast of tormentors: the partner, the faithful wife, the good neighbour, the loving children. They fooled around with him on the broken branch, claiming to lack strength and height. He felt them circle beneath his blood-filled head like a congregation of Satanic dwarves come to perform magic rituals.

  They discussed ladders. They made it a protracted affair.

  He begged them to cut his trousers.

  But, no: 'I'll get the aluminium ladder.'

  'No, the wooden one will be better.'

  'Alright, you get the wooden one.' Which was further away, next door.

  Then, with the ladder, they fooled around some more and claimed they should not lift him off. He lifted his head upwards, trying not to black out.

  Joel Davis knelt so he could look into his senior partner's bloodshot eye: 'We're going to have to cut you down.' He held up a rusty old razor blade. 'O.K.?'

  Harry closed his eyes. He felt them cut and then, suddenly, there was a loud rip and he fell into an untidy nest of elbows and arms with fingers poking out the top of it. Bettina poked a finger in his eye. David put an elbow in his throat.

  When he had vomited, he spat sedately on the lawn and looked at them. They had all gathered in a little group beside the house, like people posed for a photograph, each one looking a little self-consciously into the lens, no one quite sure what expression to adopt.

  The Final Test.

  'I curse you,' he said, and the anachronistic sound of the word impressed him with its power. 'I curse you all, for all time, without exception.'

  They stood before him silently, giving him the respect awarded the holy and the insane.

  PART THREE

  The Rolls Royce of Honeys

  It was like a holiday. Everything seemed bigger than life: nice wine, dramas, whispered conversations, madness, maybe even love. The Joys' house at Palm Avenue felt like the head-quarters of some ecstatic campaign in which madness played a vital role, but whether as an ally or assailant was not always clear.

  Harry had retreated to a suite on the twenty-first floor of the Hilton, from which privileged position he managed to charm the doctors who were sent to commit him. They savoured the champagne, letting its acidity take away the feeling that they had almost been associated with something unclean.

  They had disliked Joel and had found his cufflinks offensive.

  The beluga caviar Harry Joy offered them helped erase the last of this vulgarity and they chatted about the Hiltons they remembered from other countries and other times. They remembered lost luggage at airports, cancelled flights, and bored each other a little until the champagne was drunk and they depar
ted smiling, a little unsteady on their feet.

  Even' while Joel was complaining about the expenses Harry was running up, Bettina was ordering take-away food from Milanos and having it delivered by taxi. They all felt themselves to be trembling on the edge of something new and wonderful. Lucy saw all this and understood it instinctively. She couldn't understand why their happiness surprised them or needed to be denied.

  'You were stuck,' she told Bettina.

  'How stuck?'

  'Stuck. Now you're unstuck.'

  'You're too young to understand.'

  'You've got a new lover,' she hugged her mother. 'You're having a wonderful time.'

  'You've got no feelings. What about your father? Your father is crazy. He's insane.' And she burst into tears...

  They ate chocolates and had curaçao in their coffee. They made pancakes and mulled wine. They all put on weight and their faces became rounder, their skin tauter, and it made none of them less attractive but somehow tumescent.

  They tidied the house as if they were expecting important visitors. They had conferences about Harry in which they pretended everything was being done for his good, as if even the chocolates would somehow help to bring about the cure they said they wanted. They sat around the shining Georgian table and; as they acted out their concern, they came to believe it. Joel's eyes shone with emotion and no one could doubt that he wanted his partner well.

  To Lucy the conferences began to stink of hypocrisy and she could no longer enter into the spirit of things. She sat glumly at the table and listened to the unsaid things, the dark brown words with soft centres. There was something 'off' about the meetings. She thought of stale water inside a defrosted refrigerator.

  Lucy spoiled it for the others. They were happier and easier when she went off to bed; and as she left the room she could hear their chairs shifting and their bodies unfolding and, sometimes, a light clunk, as Bettina's shoes were dropped gently to the floor.

  Lucy did not go to meetings (official or secret) of the Communist Party. She had resigned from the branch and her Comrades were disgusted with her. Comrade Dilettante, they had called her.

  She lay on her bed and looked at the ceiling. She rolled a joint and turned on the radio to block out the conspiratorial murmur which reached her from the room downstairs.