Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 2, Issue 5

by Venero Armanno

  After she’d made him penetrate her and come she hadn’t been satisfied, and she’d asked him to hold her as she’d then gently, then more boldly, brought herself to orgasm in his arms. The shuddering of her long tan body together with her soft cries were things he thought he would carry to his last breath. The only woman he’d experienced anything similar with had left this bed nine years back; she’d been the sole woman to occupy it, until now. And until last night Duvall had never experienced an orgasm, much less watched an orgasm, with anyone but Mary.

  Then Sandy had lain close to him and they’d talked a little, but not much, and neither of them had felt any real need to. Lying still in the half-light, Duvall had quietly waited for Sandy to move away from him and gather her things, dress and make herself presentable, then call a taxi to come collect her. Instead she’d nuzzled her face to his chest and said It’ll be good when we do this again. A light kiss on his chin, her hand over his heart. You should get some Viagra or something, it’ll help us a lot.

  Always practical, always pragmatic, that take-it-or-leave-it attitude, yet whereas the words should have cut him to the quick, a terrible underscoring of his diminished powers, the way she’d said ‘us’ and not ‘you’ had melted him.

  Us.

  * * *

  As Sandy’s university year unfolded and made its demands, Duvall and his surprising new lover found an unexpected symmetry. For Duvall, things fell into place so easily that this so-called ‘financial arrangement’ seemed like the most natural means for a man of his age to find happiness and solace. It also felt like the simplest way for a studious young woman like Sandy to finish her degree. And she was studious, which was something that he very much liked about her. At first he’d thought that, despite the serious way she’d gone about his house-cleaning, in her private life she might be one of those silly girls you read about in the papers who lived for weekend nightclubs and endless social networking-via-technology. A candidate for having nude photos or videos of herself taken by a boyfriend, while drunk, and circulated all over the Internet. Her many texts both sent and received, the Jean-Shrimpton-style dress, plus the numerous vodkas she said she’d drunk that first time she’d come to his home after nightfall, had certainly encouraged the view. Yet as time passed Duvall found that even though Sandy appeared to have a good enough social life, this wasn’t as important to her as he’d first imagined. She rarely, if ever, turned up hungover. She rarely, if ever, cancelled a visit they’d arranged. And she never spoke about shows, clubs, sports matches or music festivals she’d been to. New movies were things she liked to tell him about; his extensive vinyl collection with its myriad eras and genres of music was something she liked listening to Duvall explain. As it turned out, she was most attracted to his blues albums, and old songs by Bessie Smith were at the top of the list. Duvall could not imagine any of her friends’ portable music players being loaded with anything similar, but Sandy sought out the digital versions of the ones she liked the most, and there they were, the little album pictures of things by Blind Willie McTell or Howlin’ Wolf or even Robert Johnson flicking past on her compact iPod Touch.

  More often than not she would come to the house with her laptop and psychology texts in her backpack, and he would play records and settle down and read certain key chapters of some important book of hers as she read others. Though he had no background at all into studies of the human mind—much less the manifestations of illnesses so bizarre he was almost beyond comprehending them: the multiplicities of schizophrenias, plus sexual deviances in any form, amongst the most confounding—his experience of life and its vagaries helped him to help her. It was a curious thing, all right. He would never be a teacher, but he could be something of a guide; in turn, Sandy hadn’t introduced Duvall to sex, but she’d certainly rolled away the stone from the tomb of his desire.

  She told him she found it easier to read and study and write her papers with him, there in his home. The share house which she’d moved into a few weeks after starting the university year, was, she said, a nuthouse. Fun, but distracting. And her own home, where her mother Glenda suffered, well, that wasn’t much of a place for studying either. Sandy said she visited her mother as often as she could, and when she was there far more important things needed doing. Such as sitting and holding Glenda’s increasingly frail hand, and listening to her mother’s stories of her life long ago.

  One night when Duvall asked Sandy how her mother was, as he always remembered to do because he’d genuinely liked Glenda, she said, ‘It doesn’t seem long now,’ and later in the darkness of his bedroom at 2.17 a.m., after he’d helped her structure out a particularly tricky assignment, and they’d eaten a light supper and made love twice, thanks to the 40mg Cialis tabs his doctor, Maurice Laine, very cheerfully had prescribed him, a text had buzzed into Sandy’s well-used Samsung. After she’d read it, he’d needed to hold her for more than an hour before the trembling stopped and she’d been able to summon the strength to go face what had finally happened.

  Sandy returned the next night, which wasn’t usual, not two nights in a row, and this time she didn’t have her knapsack. No books or laptop, and she didn’t want to hear the blues or any sort of music at all. Sandy had stopped along the way to purchase an ice-cold bottle of Smirnoff. What she wanted to do was to sit with Duvall and drink and talk. She turned the living room’s lights down low. She told him about her mother Glenda, from her earliest memories as a child. It wasn’t a terribly sad evening, somehow not even mildly depressing. Instead Duvall knew he would remember the night the way he thought he would remember Sandy herself, as a sort of light in his life. For all the love-making and erotic activities she encouraged in the bedroom and other parts of his house, Duvall felt these quiet hours in particular would always be the most touching.

  She asked him about his son. By then the level of vodka in the bottle had descended considerably. Duvall swirled the ice in his glass.

  ‘My boy Steven,’ he started. Sandy listened. It wasn’t until almost the dawn before they’d slipped into the double-bed, both of them now mumbling and wet-eyed with booze. After that, Sandy hadn’t returned for more than two weeks. Duvall understood. He didn’t go to Glenda’s funeral or send flowers. He didn’t want to intrude into Sandy’s private life.

  CICO, which by then he knew meant Can I come over?

  Yes, by all means, I’m so looking forward to seeing you again.

  When Sandy arrived she was a little quieter, but more herself. All her assignments had done well; she showed him the grades and he was so proud of her that the next day he purchased a collection of compact discs of old music she liked but still didn’t have. By some form of alchemy he knew she would transfer these to her tiny machine. Sandy kissed and kissed his weathered face. Duvall’s heart surged for her—she’d stopped being his cleaner (he did all that himself now, and successfully, he wondered why he’d never thought to be self-sufficient in that regard), he gifted Sandy a very decent weekly payment for what they’d agreed need only be a single visit per week, but which she always turned into two or three visits, and he couldn’t imagine ever wanting anything but absolute happiness for her.

  He also couldn’t imagine any question of morality that could taint what they were doing. He questioned the harm to himself and to her and couldn’t think of a negative. Since Mary had died he’d managed to go on even though he’d been certain he never would, and nine years later he’d progressed to a point of being more or less fine. Yet he’d been existing and not much else. Here he was now, living.

  And for Sandy—was she really selling herself? Was she really a young woman who’d taken the easy way to get along and so had ended up corrupting her own soul? He had no illusions that without the weekly payments he would ever see her again, but in terms of damage inflicted to herself, he thought sincerely that there was none. How could there be? She wanted this and had asked for it. She’d tested the waters, had discovered the route she didn’t want—those men with their revolting ideas—and
she had decided on a route she did want. So how was Duvall exploiting her; how was he taking advantage? Once, early on, then many times after that, he’d made sure Sandy was clear on one very important point: ‘If this ever gets uncomfortable for you, just say, I’ll understand.’ She’d told him she would definitely say, and, if it got that way for him, so should he.

  ‘One of us says it,’ Sandy had spoken with her quiet smile, the one that made him always need to kiss the corners of her mouth, ‘and that’s the divorce.’

  As far as he could tell, she had never come close. He certainly hadn’t. The thing just seemed to work. Maybe all relationships are a transaction, Duvall reflected, a sort of negotiation. We’re programmed to long and to want and even to expect some ideal of romantic love that will sweep us away into endless bliss, but, in the end, even if it’s at the most unconscious level, we work out our terms and conditions with the person we think we can bear to be with: I give this, you give that. I don’t like X and I’ll never do Y. Would you make sure to do the same?

  It had been something like that with Mary. Until the illness took her, they’d been happy. Duvall thought about this often. I’m not romanticising it. If she was here to be asked, Mary would say the same thing. For the few problems that came up, between us the whole show had been lovely.

  Of course, he hadn’t told any of his friends about this new side to his life. More and more Duvall had been feeling that these good people weren’t very much like friends at all, not really. For all their fine points they were just nice folk he used to spend the grey hours with, and no one had made too much of a fuss about his increasing absences. There were always others to fill the chair at the chess table, to pour the Muscat or port, to regale them with humorous stories about their funny and strange offspring. Individuals came and went from such groups; few questions were asked because the answers seemed always so manifest; a new medical treatment needed undertaking; an accident or infirmity had occurred; in one or two cases there’d been something of a late-blooming romance. Last year there’d even been a marriage: both over seventy-five, his second, her third. Not many of Duvall’s male friends had—at least as far as Duvall knew—taken on a sugarbaby.

  Now that was a word to make him half-smile and half-grimace. Yet the word that made him laugh out loud wasn’t the exact opposite side of the coin, ‘sugardaddy’, but the truth of the entire matter: ‘sugargrandaddy.’

  * * *

  The extent of Duvall’s pleasure was completed by one more thing, and that was the dream that now came quite regularly, usually, he noted with interest, on the nights when he was alone, Sandy not with him. He would be in that countryside again, sometimes with the dogs, sometimes not, wind rising through the trees in the distance and a blue pall smudging the long irregular lines of the mountain range. From up high, standing at the peak of a hill, he again would see an almost infinite fall, a direct plunge down into nothingness, but when he took that deep breath and filled his lungs and leaned forward into space, the dead-drop became the grassy hillside’s gentle decline. He would descend, floating, enjoying every moment yet not being particularly shocked by the wonder of his ability.

  One night the dream changed: Duvall didn’t float downward, instead he rose up. He ascended with the power of his own volition, and from up high, there with the spreading clouds, he saw the entire reach of his childhood home. The old house, the farm, the pastures, the fallow lands and rolling meadows. Just over there were the other farms—in reality long-gone, of course, but they lived forever in dream-memory—including the cow pastures owned by the Wiseman family. He remembered Mrs Melly Wiseman riding over on her chestnut mare pulling the wooden cart that carried the vats of that morning’s fresh milk. Little Mary used to come for the ride after milking; she’d been four years younger than him. When he was ten, she’d been six, and when the local community got together on Sundays after mass and members of different families played each other in one-set tennis matches in the school grounds next to St Patrick’s chapel, Duvall used to walk with Mary down to the nearby creek and they’d watch the tadpoles and frogs, and wet the soles of their feet still aching from their good Sunday shoes. Then, one by one the families sold up and moved on, the old community evaporated into the air, and it hadn’t been until the funeral of Walter Wiseman sixteen years later that Duvall met Mary again. He’d seen the obituary notice in the newspaper and had decided to go pay his respects, and to see how time had treated all the old faces—the ones still alive, that is. There Mary had been, now in her early twenties and lovely, wiping her eyes and holding her sister’s arm at the loss of their father.

  ‘Aren’t you—?’

  ‘And you’re—?’

  When he awoke, the memory of the dream remained so thrilling that the next time Sandy came to the house, he said, ‘You know, I’m thinking of going back to visit the area I grew up in… would you like to come? We can drive out, it’s not far. Then we can stop for lunch on the way back. A bit of a country outing, it’ll be fun and not too long a day.’

  Sandy didn’t quite stiffen. She was silent a moment, then said, ‘I come here…’ and that had been enough.

  * * *

  So with the memory of young Mary and the dream of soaring over the hills and lands of his youth still fresh in his mind, Duvall had taken the drive on his own. He hadn’t been this far into the outer western suburbs in thirty years, and of course things were so changed that at many turns he hardly knew where he was. Most of the old farmlands had become housing estates; quiet country laneways were now roads that intersected with myriad highways. The new houses were magnificent; expensive vehicles had taken over what had once been dusty tracks.

  Amidst these new enclaves that dripped of such affluence, he had to search hard to find what had once been his, then there at last was one significant piece of it: Duvall found his hill. They hadn’t had a name for it way back, but now it was sign-posted as Summerland Heights, and was populated by a handful of new mansions on what looked to be symmetrical two and a half or three acre lots. Still, driving carefully so as to not get lost in all the cul-de-sacs, no-through-roads, and little roundabouts, he found a section right near the top, at the north-eastern face, where the land was still being developed. This particular subdivision wouldn’t be available for purchase and building upon until the middle of the following year.

  With relief Duvall climbed out of his Lexus. Here the road was gravelly and ungraded. He stood on the side of this hill he remembered so well, facing away from the homes and all the development, and he saw, first, the distant forest, and next, the outline of the mountain ranges. His heart lifted and soared. He felt the years melt away from his shoulders, and he imagined that here was his dream and soon he would float.

  Duvall sighed and let out his breath with contentment, then he filled his lungs as deeply as he could.

  A wave of nausea shuddered through him. A slight tingling at the left temple became the toll of an iron bell. When he picked himself up, Duvall found that his shirt and trousers were stained with grass and there was a graze on his cheek that throbbed. He couldn’t recall what had happened; he certainly hadn’t floated. The only thing he could tell himself was, Good the girl wasn’t with me to see. He dry-retched near his car.

  Duvall drove with the radio silent, remaining well under the speed limit. He wasn’t entirely convinced he’d make it all the way home, though he eventually did, and then he slept twelve hours. When he awoke it was as if the entire experience had only been part of that self-same dream, except that this time he bore some marks on his face, as if to show where he’d been.

  Four

  * * *

  So now this was the day and it was the end. The university year had passed too quickly; it was as if only yesterday Sandy had come to his home in her golden tan dress and newly-blonde hair falling to her shoulders. It was early December. For her there’d already been last lectures, last assignments handed in and graded, last examinations sat and marked, and fond farewells made to lecture
rs, professors, classmates—innumerable folk Duvall had heard mentioned and would never know. Her graduation ceremony would take place Friday midday of the following week, and he hadn’t been invited nor had he expected to be. The world outside his front doorway remained completely hers. Duvall hadn’t imagined he would ever intrude into it; the only slip he’d made, really, had been to invite her on that short sentimental journey.

  Duvall’s regret, if he had one today, was that in the last little while study demands had kept Sandy from visiting as often as she usually had. The thing had turned into the originally-negotiated once-per-week. If she’d needed even more space than that he wouldn’t for a moment have considered holding her to the contract, but he did wish that these closing weeks of their friendship had been easier. The last few times she’d been to the house Sandy had been her kind and tender self, but a slight undercurrent of absence had intruded, as if her mind had finally moved on to other things. Exams, final papers, those all-important results, yes, but also her plans—all that travel, all those bookings she must have carefully researched then made, the glorious moment she must have been holding in her mind when she would finally sit back in an economy class chair, ear buds transmitting some favourite music (Bessie Smith? Howlin’ Wolf? Something more contemporary?), close her eyes and feel her flight surging into the sky.

  Soaring, yes. It was her turn.

  * * *

  Duvall transmitted the money plus the extra two thousand he wanted her to spend on herself. The electronic receipt arrived into his email in-tray. He closed down his Internet connection and contemplated the photographs he had of Sandy on his computer, then he sat where he was holding his head in his hands and wondering just how vile the plunge back into mild existence and the grey nights of board games and drinks with folk not too unlike himself would be. He didn’t quite feel the urge to weep, but that might have been because he still had this one night left to look forward to; after that, well. One night to say goodbye, the rest of his years for remembering. A single night to make her remember him, too.