Detours
Page 6
Her acceptance of my less than chivalrous proposal was, I hoped, affirmation that she wasn’t married or in some kind of romantic tryst. I could, of course, have asked outright but that just seemed too prosaic. I’m fond of detours, if only for my own amusement and education. I didn’t want my intentions to be blatant. Because they weren’t. Pursuing romance with The Hurricane while she was in a relationship? Along with staring at women while they’re jogging or when they are lifting themselves out of a swimming pool, it’s just something I won’t do. And even if she was single and heterosexual, romancing her wasn’t even something I was sure about. I was almost resolved that my future would be surrounded by domestic animals, neckerchiefs and gnarled photographs.
When I dropped by the restaurant the following afternoon, she slipped a small envelope into my shirt pocket. She had written her phone numbers on a small card, thereby confirming we had a loose plan going. Even the use of pen and paper had me aflutter. My perceived list of personal misdemeanours includes using a mobile telephone in public, and while I’m certainly not alone in this, punching her number into my telephone back home after pinning the card to the wall above my desk confirmed that we shared at least some peccadilloes. Written notes – I mentally checked it off with a puckish grin.
I assumed The Hurricane and I were around the same age, that we both loved a drink, could slip easily into illogicality with no great regard for whether others were following our train of thought, and that we probably read a bit and didn’t get involved in group physical training sessions – only because we would be unable to keep a straight face. This got me thinking about whether I really wanted to be romantic with someone similar to myself. The joy of discovering a shared love of dancing on tables at 3 am might be matched with shared anxieties the following morning. We could be dragged into a whirlpool of habit.
But I had to ask myself, as I had for years: what the hell was I looking for? I’d sabotaged enough friendships and relationships through drinking and drugging, anger and jealousy, to prove to myself I should live the rest of my years being an attentive yet geographically distant father and not cause any more distress. A wise person would of course suggest that drying out might be a great idea if I desired a romantic partner, but I knew I would resent that person if I made that effort. I wanted my relationships to defy my habits, goddamn it, not be defined by them. Alone, I could lock my door when I could feel the world tilt on its axis and whatever daemons I had screaming for attention could, at least, be dealt with privately, with no-one else getting hurt. Yet here I was, walking dreamily into her orbit. So maybe all my lone wolf thinking was just bullshit.
Yes, I wanted to kiss her and make love and fuck and smoke hastily rolled cigarettes in a post-flagrante daydream, then drive out into the middle of the country and terrorise whole towns with our dancing . . . but hadn’t I vowed to spend at least five years without romance, and then, when I turned fifty and had exorcised my self-loathing, wasn’t I going to ask for the hand of someone who understood the need to be alone as much as the need to be held close and adored?
Well, I called anyway and asked her over. And in the way only a true coward would, I got loaded before she arrived. I reckon my lazy invitation was also a test: this is who I am, take it or leave it. A middle-aged man without much more going on than a deep thirst.
The TV was on, a football game I wasn’t even interested in, just familiar noise and movement in the background of whatever the hell it was we were going to do. She arrived with her hair loose, and it was only then I realised I hadn’t seen her away from work. Dressed in black from head to toe with a high-collared shirt and jacket, trousers and heels, and with only a little less of the authority she showed at the restaurant. But just enough to curse my preparatory drunkenness as stupid as well as cowardly.
She was clutching a bottle of red and had none of the timidity of a first date, if that’s what it actually was, but she also had the appearance of being at least a little expectant, which I hadn’t been prepared for. Through whatever clouds I’d gathered around my head to shield both my expectations and nerves, I could still see I’d made a mistake. And though making amends was beyond me that night, already I wanted another chance.
And I keep on hoping for another chance every morning I roll out of bed after some kind of evening blow-up with her. In our three years of loving it happens every six weeks, I reckon.
Our song is ‘We’re a Couple of Swells’ by Irving Berlin, and swelling it up is what we do best; sweeping up the damage the next morning is more difficult.
The first night I kissed her she told me she was forty-eight, which only amplified my desire to be with her. That she was single and a little older than me suggested that maybe she was at a similar point to me: that we could be done with any posturing or bending ourselves this way and that just for the sake of being together, and any romance would be either completely fanciful or the one true thing in the world. We wanted fun and passion and absurdity, and we got it. But I think we’re also damaged, and desperately want bare-knuckled honesty too. It’s a difficult mix. And we test it often, The Hurricane and I.
If I’m not walking her to work, and she only does night shifts at the restaurant, we’ll meet up when the sting has gone out of the day and the dusk can settle in. Making love is the perfect segue to a great night. There seems to be an acknowledgement that later in the evening we may not be so responsive to physical intimacy so we’ve attained an almost Pavlovian response to the setting sun.
It’s a time of day I’ve come to covet, but when I was a kid it was a time of great dread. Back then it meant the end of physical activity and the start of quietness and solitude, and looming nightmares. These days the dusk means I get a chance to reconfigure what has been bothering me in the daylight. The ‘golden hour’ – when the light dips just enough for colours to soften and blend with each other – happily coincides with cocktail hour, and so The Hurricane and I meet either at her place or mine to half-mindlessly share the day’s thoughts and actions.
Of course, the polka-dotted elephant wandering around the room is drink. The Hurricane will counter any cautionary ‘advice’ from a concerned acquaintance with ‘We’re not alcoholics, they go to meetings. We are drunks.’ But some mornings I catch a flicker of fear in the corner of our unfocused eyes as we try to make sense of what happened the night before. Was there a fight and what was it about? The worst thing either of us has said to the other was that maybe we’re just good drinking partners and we should stick to that. We’re unable to have kids together and we haven’t chosen to live together yet, if ever. But the suggestion that we’re just a couple of old soaks whose nightly aim is to end up nude dancing to Hall and Oates records at 4 am hurts. And jealousy, apart from dehydration, is our greatest enemy until the inevitable health problems.
If my confidence is low, I can be reduced to a seething heap if mention is made of an ex-partner of hers. I’ve never met one, and she’s never used an ex as a way of hurting me, but, fuck, we’ve lived almost a hundred years between us and there’s considerable history. While I don’t ever want to use my past to wound her, I do talk about it, not boastfully but perhaps stupidly, because I reckon it illustrates why we found each other and why we are in love. When a shadow passes over her face as she buckles against the latest story I’m too dumb not to tell, we’re thrown into our own private re-staging of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I excuse my volubility as honesty, but why would I skirt so close to places that can hurt her if not for some selfish pride? It’s the reflexive brag of the ugly kid with all the skin problems who got lucky. Approaching our autumnal years and still wearing protection too flimsy.
When we began to romance each other, I wondered whether The Hurricane considered me an ‘easy’ option, that because I was in my mid-forties I’d have my shit sorted out and we could waltz our way out of middle age. She has assured me that when any acquaintance asks about me, she describes me as ‘tricky’. I can accept the charge. A man who whiles away most of
his hours daydreaming and is somewhat ironically a minor-league insomniac could not be without his foibles. She doesn’t propose to iron them out, but accepts them, particularly the ones that match her sense of humour. I really would hate to discover I was being tolerated. So my rushes of self-righteous fury are named The Third Level – the top of the Eiffel Tower – and anytime I’m disengaged with space and time and in my own waking dreams, she can call me back to earth with a gentle ‘Sweetheart . . .’
My suitcase is perennially half-packed on the bedroom floor and my toothbrush is never left outside my toiletry bag, which must give anyone grave doubts as to my stability, and for a woman whose life is not peripatetic as mine is, I can understand any misgivings she might have. Fulfilling little promises like calling whenever my plane lands or letting her know I got through a show okay never feels like a burdensome ritual. It’s an opportunity to make her laugh at some fresh folly and dig myself deeper in her pockets.
But who are we to swan about these southern suburbs like Zelda and Scott without the bibliographies, inventing our own little Cirrhosis-on-Sea? These are the voices of condemnation the morning after, as I slink to the bathroom to check for wounds, the hum of fresh anxiety settling around the apartment like television static. The Hurricane is still asleep and will be for a few hours, her body clock reminding her it’s another long shift tonight serving tables to people who will amplify after the second glass, cackling at innuendo and office transgressions. So I scratch my neck and stretch my back, contemplate a beer for breakfast to silence the static, and walk to the edge of the bay, muttering to myself the whole way.
We don’t feel better or more deserving than others, but when you join someone not only in love but in rapidly creating a new vernacular that often drives those in your company barmy, and they’re as beautiful as they are baffling, you can either get smug or suspicious. What did I do to deserve this? And what is the penance to be paid for such luck? And so when things get too cozy we can fuck it up as a reflexive action. We’re pursuing warmth and joy but we both somehow mistrust it, out of fear. I recall the look in her eye when she first came around to my apartment: ‘Is this what I really want?’ Did I look the same as the other mid-forties dilettantes who had pursued her in the past? And how much of what The Hurricane and I have now is a defiant stance in the face of what ‘should’ be happening to us as a couple: clinging to each other for fear of solitude as we tumble into our fifties and beyond? I can’t live with that thought.
I’ve named her after the wildest of storms, but it is her gentleness that I love the most. One night when I returned to Melbourne after weeks away for work, and the first time we’d been away from each other for such a time, I walked into my kitchen delirious with fatigue to be greeted by a full bowl of fresh tomatoes, a crusty baguette, olive oil, ground coffee, a bottle of whiskey and a card that read: ‘Sometimes all you need is a good piece of toast.’
She’s a little like the past; a little like the future. A little like home and a lot like a holiday. She’s told me that when I first came around to her apartment she was overjoyed that I was wearing a cardigan that made me look like an extra from The Sullivans and not a garment more befitting what I did for work and its sartorial clichés. After a gig one night when she jumped in the band van for a two-hour journey home and encountered the usual debate about the right soundtrack for the drive and accompanying drinks, she broke the traditional one-upmanship of four music nerds with ‘Geez, where’s the bloody disco? Come on!’
And then there was the morning I had shared my concern about having woken up with a bottle of Jameson’s beside me. She pondered it briefly, and then, with the faintest of smiles, said, ‘Well, at least it wasn’t inside you.’
We’re not going to huddle together for shelter, dammit. We’re going to be kind and generous. And loose and gregarious. We weren’t looking, were we? While I was sitting there for all those years playing word games with the labels of liquor bottles, did I sense that on her nights off she was doing crosswords and creating more absurd fun than folks do ‘partying’ on a Saturday night? Could we have been wanting the same things? To never use the word ‘party’ as a verb, and to never eat al fresco near traffic, to keep Thursdays as nude chess night, and sometimes to just bloody need a piece of toast. To meet someone in the long shadows of your forties and stand in the rain together.
So we contort our naked bodies in poses that will stretch our toneless bits and fix silk scarves to the bathroom windows so the midday sun won’t expose the dark smudges underneath our blinking eyes. We declare that the odd night shall be for food and a movie without Aunty Ethanol, and make promises never to talk about past lovers when Aunty is present. We remind ourselves that when one of us goes down, the other must be resilient, and not to mistake each other’s self-doubt as anything more than that. And to err on the side of kindness.
As long as there’s dancing allowed, I will stand in the eye of The Hurricane.
Stardust
We meet often, you know. I’ve been considering our statistics this afternoon while reading of baseball folklore, one of my habits when I feel the old familiar sadness approaching on these long, wintry afternoons. Afternoons that will once again, in four months’ time, be full of smiles and flirtation, but now mean cans of soup and nubs of ginger pocketed in plastic bags, shuffling with legs of stone on streets weary, and not a smile, nary a come-hither bat of an eyelid, or turn of a hued cheek to exhibit a profile to me. Winter is not keen to introduce strangers to each other. So it’s me and you, again. Me, slow-footed and crooked, imagining myself on the rooftops of a town dividing itself into pockets of warmth, and up above the moon, to humanity and its many variations, barely sentient on Earth, almost smug in its monastic vantage, but certainly watchful.
We first met, you may recall, in the Rogers family car hurtling across the Nullarbor en route to Melbourne, from our then home in Perth. It was 1977. Though you were written in the 1920s by Hoagy Carmichael of Bloomington, Indiana, when we first met you were being sung by Willie Nelson of Abbott, Texas. You’ve been covered by some 2500 different artists in your sweet life, but Willie’s version is the dearest to me. I was eight, no doubt clothed in my perennial footy jumper and shorts, but as we shambled through Eucla or Bordertown, three kids in the back of a station wagon dreaming of ice-cream sandwiches and sporting miracles, Willie’s tremulous, twinkle-eyed delivery transported me to somewhere more . . . adult.
‘Stardust’ – not so much a word, but a sigh, exhaled with a smile tilting to one side like the crescent moon. A sigh of expectation. A sigh of memory. It contains chords too fragile to draw breath in the presence of; when they resolve, my breath is stolen from me. Ebbing then flourishing like long thin fingers beckoning attention. A melody that tempts, then just as quickly forbids. To me, as a child, it was the sound of enchantment.
That the record was a favourite of my dad’s didn’t alter the romance I was experiencing for the first time. In fact, I’ve always felt Dad was a romantic guy, beneath the silent-guy exterior. I’d spy on my parents when we were supposed to be sleeping; they were two suburban Melbourne kids who found time at night to just be together and talk in that . . . European way. They must have been in love once. I don’t think I’m making it up.
I’ve always wanted my dad’s approval. On those long bicoastal trips, endured twice a year for the decade we lived west, I’d try to impress him either with my solemnity (the beginnings of the brooding aesthete) or by joining in with his rather sweet, high singing voice, in harmony or not. One time past the Victorian border I was tapping out the off-beats to a Wings tune from the Band on the Run record, when he asked enthusiastically, ‘Who’s that tapping the beat?’ I clung to the thought that he was impressed by my swing and tempo. On reflection his enthusiasm was surely more a driver’s annoyance at sounds easily mistaken for engine failure.
There’s a story about you I heard on public radio last year when I was spending some time in New York with my daughter. Your writer, H
oagy – who I’ve often imagined I will grow up to look like in all his slouched, quizzical droopy handsomeness – felt your melody fall on him as he was loitering around the ‘spooning wall’, which I imagine was a location for young lovers to groan and grope, at Indiana University. He was a law student too, like me. I wonder if he was ever told on a first date: ‘You’d be okay-looking if you didn’t have a face full of acne’?
Hoagy was in love with the cornet playing of the great Bix Beiderbecke, whose sound was described by guitarist Eddie Condon as ‘a girl saying yes’. He went so far as to book shows for Bix’s band, The Wolverines, around Bloomington. Over a short spell of years a strong friendship was forged, conspiratorially around bathtub gin and attempts to re-create Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite in college dormitory rooms with nothing but scorched voices and stark hubris. Hoagy wrote you under the spell of Bix, the music written two years before the lyrics, and I can hear, as has been noted by those far more ‘musical’ than myself, that your melody is hoisted for the horn. Though my time attempting to play trumpet was shamefully brief, my eyes still close and my chin juts upward on higher notes in moot representation, imagining the way a horn player’s body must tighten and contort. When Bix died of pneumonia and alcoholic exhaustion in 1931, Hoagy opined that his interest in music dropped about fifty percent. I imagine now, my ‘Stardust’, that your creation was as much about brotherly love as romantic adoration.
I hadn’t had anyone to share you with for a while, until on a TV show in 2014 I sung your bittersweet poetry with a hero of mine, James Black, accompanying me on guitar. I couldn’t look at him afterwards. I was almost in tears of sweet heartache. And if I had seen a similar glimmer in his eye . . . well, you gotta keep yourself nice these days.
You and I were on a plane together recently. There was a film playing: Beginners, with Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor. Mr Plummer played the part of a father who, after his wife’s death, comes out as being gay to his son. There is a concurrent love story, but Mr Plummer’s character had me in raptures. The creases of age and worry on his face softened to resemble multi-directional parentheses, highlighting his new-found joy and freedom as he was released from being a closeted homosexual man. As his wardrobe welcomed more cashmere and neckerchiefs, I regretted my own sartorial choices of dull denims for the flight. You were most of the soundtrack.