'Me too.'
'What I'd like right now is for us to be able to take a walk in the hills. There's great walks round here, even an old gold sluicing pond at the top of the gully. With Ben I haven't been able to do any of that, but I remember it all from when I used to come here as a kid myself.'
'We could walk the section boundary, though,' Theo said.
That's what they did. Up the rough grass slope to the plum tree and behind the wooden dunny, down a fenceline of rusted out wire and a few remaining, tipsy waratahs to the great macrocarpa hedge by the gravel road and their two cars, back along the other side boundary marked by three gnarled apple trees, and a return to the church pew by the back door again. She was almost as tall as him, and they walked quite close together, side by side. Without intention they found themselves talking of the Californian television programme again, perhaps because they wanted to avoid the whole custody thing, and weren't quite ready to talk about their feelings for each other. Penny stood in the spikes of the brown grass in old sneakers and jeans: any gloss of an American television programme seemed a world away, a world in which exposure was the measure of significance, and recognition more important than achievement.
'The set is so bloody crowded,' Penny continued. 'That's one thing I do remember. You've no idea when you're just watching a programme how many people there are hovering, mouthing, jabbing gear about, just out of shot. And it's hard not to sweat because there are lights everywhere, hard not to look at people off camera.'
They ended up in the patch of shade by the back door, and that's where Theo kissed her. Neither of them said anything immediately before or after it. They just had that long kiss with their bodies close together, then sat on the church pew. Penny rested partly on his shoulder and partly on the seat back. He tried to remember if he had condoms in the car, what he had done with the packet after the last time at Melanie's. For a long time he had looked forward to sex with Penny, and now in the most obvious place at the most predictable time maybe he wasn't prepared. He put his hand beneath her shirt and cupped a breast in its soft fabric bra. 'Shall we go in to the sofa?' he asked lightly. She stood up without reply and led the way inside.
The sofa wasn't large: they ended half curled, half lying there. Theo undid her bra and the dark metal top button of her jeans. They kissed and she put the flat of her hand on his stomach. 'You're not fat at all,' she said.
'No one to cook for me,' he said. The remaining chocolate cake sat on the wooden table, and beyond it the black stove. He thought of Ben asleep a few paces away, Erskine wanting to keep some sort of family and Penny at a vulnerable time. None of those things diminished his eagerness to make love. He could feel the slight roughness of her nipples beneath his fingers, catch the faint womanly smell from the skin of her shoulder. One of the bewildering things about sex is that it seems to promise something else: an accomplishment of the spirit quite unrelated to the act itself.
'You don't have to do anything out of obligation, you know,' he said, fumbling for the zip on her jeans.
'I'm not the sort of girl who fucks from gratitude.' Her voice had a matter-of-factness that surprised him. 'You got the necessary?'
'Not on me.'
'Then it's no go,' she said. 'But you can give me a rub and I'll jerk you off.'
He hadn't heard a woman use that expression, and it seemed dated anyway. Maybe it had come back in America. Their first lovemaking wasn't developing in the way he had imagined it, but the more he thought of the car glove compartment, the less he could visualise a packet of sheaths there. So they had a rather busy and manipulative encounter: he with one hand ranging her breasts and the other between her legs; she giving head then a vigorous hand job. Plenty of localised pleasure and release which left Theo damp and out of breath. 'I'd better check on Ben,' was the first thing she said. The separation was something of a relief to both of them.
Penny came back and sat close again, however, a sheen of light sweat on her face and collar bones. 'You can't take chances without a rubber,' she said. Such an American term — rubber.
'Of course.'
'It was what you wanted, though, wasn't it?' she said.
'Great,' he said, 'maybe just a bit mechanical.' Why did he say it? A bad mistake. He could see her face stiffen.
'Mechanical. Jesus, Theo, I never thought I'd hear a guy complain about sex being mechanical. Fuck you then. I'm sorry I wasn't loving enough for you.' She started to cry, and went from the sofa to sit at the table.
Theo knew you could never really recover in the short term from that sort of blunder, but he said, and meant, all the things which laid blame on him and not her. To be in the midst of mutual masturbation one minute and arguing the next, is superficially inexplicable, but both exchanges are based on intimacy.
'You think it's easy here, with my son in the next room, no proper bathroom. And everything that's happened to me in this place. Christ, Theo, try to think with something besides your prick for a change.'
His name again. Penny rarely used it when she talked, but now seemed to find it both appropriate and a satisfaction. And the accusation of thinking with his cock. Such an easy score against men, and so customary that no rebuttal is permitted, or expected. And so often true. But the important thing that Penny said was quite apart from any of that. 'Everything that's happened to me in this place', that was the phrase, and she meant more than the unhappiness of the last months. Theo could see Erskine at the hotel window in Nice, hear him saying that Penny had a whole bunch of issues from her childhood. And that reference to her father — dead, but not gone, he'd said.
But it wasn't a time to be asking Penny anything of that: it was a time for apologies and then hitting the road. In their talk they worked their way rather awkwardly back to the shelter of friendship. 'Well, maybe it's me too,' Penny said. 'I'm an emotional wreck at the moment. Thank God soon I should be able to leave here, and Ben and I can have a proper home.'
'Surely you'll hear from Zack soon.'
They went down to the hedge and the cars, the sun still warm, and they still aware of the sweat of sex, but with that awareness kept below the surface of their conversation. 'I'd better get back,' she said. 'He'll wake up any time now.'
'I'm sorry about, you know —'
'Yeah, well, it's not easy. It doesn't matter.'
'We'll keep in touch, though?' Theo said, hopefully.
'Things will be better, won't they, when you aren't cooped up here. I spend a lot of time thinking about you. Often I think about nobody else. There are things we need to talk about, but it'll be better when all this stuff is sorted. Okay?'
'I know. We'll get to it. There's just so much going on.'
Would that always be the way of it: so much going on, so much having gone on in their lives, that they couldn't have something special between them? The heat was more concentrated in the car even though the window was open. They didn't kiss, but Penny leant down and said goodbye, put a hand lightly, briefly, on the side of his neck and then his shoulder. Her lips were pale, but one ear was pink; her capped teeth were in perfect marching order. 'Email me if you want,' she said. 'I'll catch it in Alex sooner or later. And thanks for coming, thanks for everything.'
Theo swore softly as he drove down the snaky, gravel road. He turned the driver's mirror to catch glimpses of his face: a grey tinge already in the hair above the ears, a touch of something white at the corner of his eye that he wished he'd wiped away sooner, a flush beneath the beginning of stubble. Who was he kidding? Even his breath was heavy with chocolate cake. What had Ben said — until Theo? But what about after Theo?
23
Erskine tried to talk to her about it several times. The physical side of the marriage, he called it. She imagined it a section heading in a library book promoting matrimonial harmony. The Physical Side of the Marriage: among chapters on the Importance of Maintaining Dialogue, the Significance of Children to the Marriage Bond and the Concept of Intellectual Partnership. She never felt any confidence t
hat generalisations about human relationships had a useful connection with her own experience.
Erskine said she should see someone about it, that he was willing to go with her, that maybe the responsibility was his as well. He thought it was her, though. She could tell from his impatience, and the occasional glimpse of suppressed and dismissive disappointment. Once in a ski chalet in Colorado, with conifers far down the white slope, he said the women he'd known before he met her had liked it well enough. Lovemaking should be a trip for two, shouldn't it? he asked her. That evening they went down to one of the restaurants and had flapjacks, which she never much liked anyway, and tried to pretend there was something besides a sad familiarity between them.
She did go to a counsellor. The guy in Sacramento not much older than herself, and still able to be slightly embarrassed by intimate disclosure. At most sessions he mentioned something about his wife and daughter, as if this establishment of involvement elsewhere made a discussion of sexuality less personal. He was large, fair-haired, subject to persistent, subdued coughing and didn't take many notes. She took the last characteristic as a reassurance that the things she told him were humdrum in his work. She went alone to these sessions, for which Erskine paid. How could she talk about sex with him there? How could she talk about the tight, deep things even to the happily married psychiatrist? She wasn't a Californian woman so emancipated in sexual matters that vibrators, multiple orgasm and cunnilingus were coffee topics.
She talked about her father in the way she thought women would discuss such abuse but found little relief in it. She said what she thought the psychiatrist expected to hear, and wished he'd give more of a lead. But she was unable to put into words the things which came most powerfully between her and men at the very time that obstacles should be non-existent. That moment, for example, when a lover ceased to be an attractive guy, and metamorphosed into the generalised male insistence of panting spasms, fierce grip, self-absorbed rhythm, eyes narrowed in sexual gluttony. Fight against it as she might, how often she felt possessed again by her father at just that time: heard his harsh breathing in the throats of other men.
Penny could just remember a minor accident her father had while fencing. A strand of number eight under tension had whipped back from the strainer and cut the bridge of his nose and the soft skin beneath his left eye. He had come mid-morning into the kitchen, and Penny, not yet at school, remembered the blood and her mother saying it really needed stitches. Even without sutures it had healed well and was not normally noticeable. When he was aroused, however, when the map of his face was closest and alien, when she wanted some point of concentration other than herself, she saw how pale the scar was, how finely grained, distinct against the weathered suffusion of his face.
How could she talk about such things with the counsellor, or with Erskine after they had made love as best they could? And after a couple of years Erskine didn't bother to try to talk about it — didn't bother to do it that much either, especially after the boy was born. That was the point, wasn't it? How Erskine spent his spare time on his many business trips, how close his relationship to women colleagues, were questions never raised between them.
When Penny finished therapy, she gave the psychiatrist a present for his daughter, who was five years old — a charm bracelet, and he gave her a present for Ben who was two — a truck with non-toxic paint. 'I'm sorry,' he said, and, after coughing, 'I don't really think there's anything more I can offer, but I'm always ready to talk if that's a help.' Their children were what they had in common, safe territory to explore. There was no gift, though, that she could bring back to her husband when the sessions were over: no transformation, and any greater understanding wasn't gain enough. It helped to understand, of course, but there is a form of damage done to the emotions that is irreversible.
24
'Why don't you come round tomorrow evening?' said Melanie. 'Come round as a friend. You know what I mean.'
'Yes,' said Theo. 'It means we don't visit the Christmas trees.' He was at his office desk, working on a story about some big cat sighted in Mount Cook National Park. Some people said it was a mountain lion; some said it was a lynx. A tourist from Calgary claimed to have seen it at dusk on the Hooker Glacier moraine; an ironman athlete from Nelson glimpsed something he couldn't account for at Bush Creek; a pub owner in Greymouth said he'd been told by a casual drinker that a yachtie from Singapore had liberated something very strange. Journalists rely on a world of stories.
'We're still friends, though. We can still talk,' said Melanie.
'Of course we can,' agreed Theo.
He liked that about Melanie. She and Nicholas were the two people he could talk to without running into a growing incomprehension which required lengthy explanation to dispel. He might resent her tendency to direct him as to the best course of action, but her understanding was rarely suspect.
Theo saw her head and shoulders at the kitchen window as he came around the side of her house: the undulating corona of brown hair about her small face as she concentrated on preparing food. She came to the door to meet him, then went back to the kitchen and Theo followed. They had a beer there: Theo sitting on a wooden chair, Melanie drinking as she worked at the bench. She was preparing cannelloni, and he watched her spooning the mince and sauce mixture into the pasta tubes, her lips funnelled with concentration in unwitting correlation. What a good colleague, friend and occasional lover she was; how sympathetic, and yet equable and rational in her responses; how much larger in intelligence than appearance. Yet he'd never considered marrying her, before or after Stella. Was that some natural conviction of his, or a response to Melanie's strong independence?
'It's quite fiddly, this,' she said, 'but I usually make enough in one go for three or four meals, and have it in the freezer. An Italian mama wouldn't approve, would she? I'm going to run a series in the paper about how our attitudes to food are changing. It used to be a sort of pit stop, don't you think: pack in what you need and then have a breather, or get right back to work.'
'Eat to live rather than live to eat. You're right.' Theo remembered how his father had taken his meals, sometimes even standing at the bench, or in the cab of the truck. He'd liked to read as he ate, and treated it as the necessary refuelling Melanie referred to: his eyes on the newspaper, or magazine, so that he was hardly aware of what he handed into his mouth. He ate steadily until he'd had his fill, and rarely made any comment afterwards on the quality of the food or expressed any preference beforehand.
Theo's mother had been under no pressure to vary the menu; in fact she'd had a not dissimilar attitude to food herself. Boiled vegetables and roast, or fried meat, were the staples, not so much favourites as dependables. 'We never had pasta, never had rice,' Theo told Melanie. 'We never had blue vein cheese, olives, pâté or nachos. I bet even now my parents wouldn't know what sushi is. My father had chops and fried tomatoes for breakfast, or bacon and eggs, and hardly distinguished one from the other.'
'Your mum and dad okay?' asked Melanie.
'Happy with their bowls and bridge.'
'Stella's father's not so good again.'
'Poor old Norman.'
'You did ring him?'
'Yes,' said Theo. 'He never complains much — just makes the best of things. He still does field research and writes up his findings for the university. He's got a rotating drum polisher in his workshop and works up pieces of greenstone, obsidian, agate and so on.'
'Well, he used to polish teeth, didn't he,' said Melanie.
'You're right. I never thought of the connection before, but you're quite right.'
As he finished the sentence, Theo experienced a little lurch of sadness within. It seemed to be directed at himself rather than Stella's father. He had noticed during the last two years such sudden changes of mood, and resisted them. They were self-pitying, self-gratifying emotions, and so to be repressed. They were the small aftershocks of his divorce, he told himself: explicable and of no significance. Some small gland somewhere
was prompted to puff its chemical into the system, as those creatures of the soft sea floor become distinct for a moment and, with protuberant mouth, puff into the brine around them. Theo deliberately opposed himself to the sudden disposition by becoming more animated and passing on one of Nicholas's jokes to Melanie. 'What do you call a man who doesn't want sex?'
'Pass.'
'Dead,' said Theo.
'How are things with Penny Maine-King?' asked Melanie after giving the joke its due.
'Good news, actually.' And he explained what had happened.
'I mean between you and her,' said Melanie.
It was the question bound to be raised during the evening, yet Theo was taken aback by the difficulty he had in answering. He had no wish to be evasive: he valued her opinions and her concern. The inhibition arose not so much from a fear of intrusive revelation about Penny's life as from Theo's inability to judge just what had developed between them, and whether it had any real grip apart from the special circumstances that had brought them together. The turmoil Penny was involved in, the fluctuation of fear, resolution and disorientation, must mean any relationship with Theo was uncertain, however contained she usually appeared. Some of all that he endeavoured to convey to Melanie. He said nothing, of course, concerning his unfortunate sex with Penny at Drybread, or Erskine's references to her father; nothing of his own growing concern for her, and his affection for the boy. 'Until the whole custody mess is settled,' he said, 'until she's had time to feel part of regular life again, I don't really know where the hell we are.' He said nothing about the pleasure he felt in being able to help Penny by going to Nice, and how much more lasting that feeling was than the encounter on the sofa at the bach.
Drybread: A Novel Page 16