‘That’s whatshisname,’ says the braided woman.
Dan nods. ‘He was forty-five when he made this, and it was the keystone of his first major solo exhibition. It was his first Tate. He’d been painting and performing art for years, working in organic materials like skin, but everything changed when he met a girl named Hannah. Met and fell in love.’
‘That’s not right,’ says someone.
Murmurs of agreement, heads shaking.
‘Everyone sees this piece differently,’ says Dan, shrugging. He has the urge to push them—all of them—somewhere uncomfortable. He’s afraid of what might happen if he does.
If he doesn’t.
‘How does the context define the piece? How does what it wants to say relate to how it says it? The materials are one thing, what the artist has used. Here, he’s used bodies to re-create a body. Animal bodies, human body. What does that say? Actually, don’t answer, not yet. How about the story behind it? His motivations?’
‘Sex.’ A red-haired woman at the end of the table.
‘Yes and no. He was spending a lot of time with Hannah, but they hadn’t consummated their relationship, wouldn’t for another year. No, by all accounts, he made this for her. To express how she was feeling.’
‘That’s shit,’ says Braids. ‘How could he ever know what she was feeling?’
‘Men are entitled to know everything, right?’ says the red-haired woman. Dan wishes he’d made name tags.
‘According to Hannah, she was struggling with her sexuality at the time. Her body was changing, burning up, and she was in love with a much-older man. And he loved her, too, as much as he could love anybody. Maybe this was how he felt he could help her, with his art, by making something that captured this moment in both their lives. The story goes that he wanted to destroy it, together, but she wouldn’t let him.
‘I’ll be honest with you: I don’t like the man much. But his art makes me uncomfortable, and I like being challenged in that kind of way. I think it’s important we test our boundaries now and then. What about the hands?’ Dan points to the hands pulling apart the flesh on the image. The fingernails are dirty, or bloody, or both. ‘Are they her hands, or his?’ he asks.
‘His.’
‘But how do you know?’ asks Dan. ‘Is there anything masculine about them? No. They could be either. And how does the picture change if they’re hers?’
‘I don’t like it either way,’ says the white-haired woman. ‘He’s watching her either way.’
‘Or is she showing him?’ suggests Dan. ‘I’m just asking. Not imposing. I just want us to try to see these things from every side.’
‘But why should we have to?’ asks Braids. ‘Why should I have to look at a picture of a girl’s genitalia, as though it’s the only picture of its kind out there? The world is full of this stuff. And I don’t care if he was trying to help her or trying to fuck her—he shouldn’t have been there. This was her body and he took it.’
‘So you don’t think intent matters?’
‘Of course it does. But can we really know why someone does something?’
‘What if a woman had made it?’
Dan sets the book down on the table. His legs ache; he sits down in his chair. He sits down like cement. ‘And what about writing?’ he adds quietly.
His lips are so dry. His tongue, his gums. He pours a glass of water from the jug on the table and drinks.
‘Are writers allowed to write about people unlike themselves?’ he continues. ‘Can women write men? Who writes about Muslims or Chinese immigrants? People of colour or disability? Where do we draw the line? How do we create empathy if we cut off most of the world?’
He looks around the room. He is the only man here. He is talking about appropriation, discrimination, and he knows which side he will end up on, if it comes to sides.
‘I believe that we create art from within our own bodies, but we use it to explore the alternatives. What we are and what we aren’t. What we could be. If we don’t try, how can we understand anyone else? Our own limits? And maybe,’ he says, ‘you disagree with me. That’s okay.’ He puts his palms flat on the table. ‘I think we should use this as our first exercise. Take the picture you’ve chosen and write about it from a perspective that’s unfamiliar to you. Imagine who you might be. Anyone. You don’t necessarily have to tell us who they are or anything about them—in fact, it’s probably better if you don’t. Empathise. See what happens. Let’s take five minutes.’
He sets the timer on his phone and, because he feels awkward, he picks up the picture nearest to him. Something to do. All around him he hears the shuffling of papers, pens tapping and scratching out ideas.
The image he holds is Virgin and Child, painted by Jean Fouquet in 1450. It is half of a diptych, he knows. The other part—man and male saint—is missing.
Why did he bring this? Any of these?
In the image, the boy child looks and points away, forefinger and toes and penis all in the same direction, somewhere offstage. To the next stage, next life. His mother’s exposed breast seems to burst out at him, bulbous and unspurting. She is the older, has birthed him, but the child will guide her.
Elise held William like this, though he came still and silent. The birth a hideous beast, all hers to bear—and he, the father, simply filled the space beside her. Observed. It was a long and difficult labour, an acid bath over both their skins that washed whatever was left away from them, parts of their bodies he had no experience with, no words for.
Before this, he and Elise had been a whole, shared form, a lizard, and though they had lost a vital part, he’d believed it would regrow between them, not as a new child, never, but through their collective grief. He was wrong. Elise had held their boy and looked at him with hungry mothereyes, and whatever Dan had shared with her before this moment was gone, took a small dead form, made a gap between them that frightened him, isolated him, could never be filled. Would not be given to him to hold, no matter how he asked.
What’s the story in that? he wonders. But he does not pick up his pen.
chapter 6
That evening when she comes home, she finds him on the patio, waving a piece of cardboard over the makeshift fire pit. The lid of a red Weber drum, overturned. The flames threaten to fizzle on the damp wood but he keeps at it, moving around the little cauldron as the smoke does.
Dan looks up at her. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Come sit with me.’
She wants so badly to sit beside him, cold beer in hand, sock feet in his lap, firelight in his eyes. She drops her things inside and returns with two ales from the fridge and hands him one, uncapped, and sits cross-legged on one of the wood-slat chairs. The chair is dry but stained with mildew from the rain.
He snags the fire on a branch of eucalyptus, and for a moment the flames burn high and bright and fragrant. The heavier sticks beneath it sizzle and pop, but the fire catches. He settles back in the other chair, takes a long drink, and closes his eyes.
The fruit bats tip over the top of the hill, black against a blue-black sky.
‘More rain coming,’ he says.
‘Not tonight.’
‘No. Not tonight.’ He looks at her, then. His eyes reflect the fire. Creases at the corners, more than there used to be, but fewer than hers. Often she forgets she’s older, but now she sees it. Feels it.
The unsaid between them. They will not discuss it. Last night or William.
‘I did a class today,’ he says. ‘The one where we use art as prompts.’ He pauses. ‘Every single image I took was a woman. I didn’t mean to do it, but there they were. And one of the people in the class said, I bet they were all painted by men—and I didn’t say anything, but you know what? They were.’
Elise sits back in her chair to think. ‘How we see women. It’s been shaped by art, hasn’t it? It’s a legacy of all these male artists and their choice of subject matter.’
Dan pokes the fire. ‘It made me think of my book.’
‘Your uncl
e?’
‘No,’ he says. ‘The novel.’ Of course, then, he’s talking about Tess. His first love. Her story was The End.
‘That was healing,’ she says. ‘You were honouring her life.’
‘That’s not all I was doing.’
‘Maybe not.’
Elise studies her bottle. The corner of the label is peeling and she rubs it flat with her thumb.
‘You need to write something for yourself,’ she says quietly. ‘Not your fucked-up family. Why are you even doing this memoir? Your uncle’s never been anything in your life, and now he wants you to write his stories.’
For a moment, Dan is silent. Turns a bit of blacking wood with a set of barbecue tongs.
Then: ‘It’s good money.’
‘We don’t need the money.’
Dan shrugs. ‘He’s family. He’s all I’ve got in the world, besides you.’
It hangs in the air, and she wants to grab it, hold on hold on hold on.
But it’s too much. A spike of something like jealousy.
She snorts. ‘Besides me. You can hardly put us in the same category. We all know the man—he’s a dick. It’s not worth it. What are a bunch of tapes going to tell you that we don’t read online?’
‘Stop,’ he says sharply, and glances up at her. ‘Just stop.’
She wasn’t going to tell him now, but it feels good to provoke him. Imagine him cruel, like her father was.
Hit me, I dare you.
‘So,’ she says. ‘I want to go away. I want to go into the field, collect some more antechinuses for the lab. I’ve organised it, I’m going next week.’
He stares at her and, in a way, she is satisfied.
The fire crackles into the silence.
‘You have work, too,’ she says.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘that’s it, then. Decided. I can’t imagine I have a say in anything, so go for it.’ He looks away from her, into the dark bottlebrush tree. ‘I’ll be here. Working away.’
His silence is smothering.
She would like to fill the dark air with words, tell him (again) about the antechinuses, marsupials not rodents, their strange mating habits. How they give so much to breeding that they die—the males after a short, synchronous rut and the females, later, after the young are weaned. Suicidal breeding.
Suicide.
I would have done it for William, she wants to tell him. Given him everything, if I’d had the chance.
But he doesn’t ask. He doesn’t say anything at all.
She will collect some females for an experiment, a study her student will run. They will breed the females with males in the lab, let them gestate, let the babies squirm from the cloaca to the pouch, fuse to teats there. Then, they will pluck some or none or all of the babies out and measure the effects on the female’s stress responses, immune responses, lifespan.
Elise already knows the answer to the question. Take the babies away, and the mother will live. The great evolutionary trade-off between sex and death, reproduction and life.
But what kind of life will it be?
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. But the word is cold on her lips. Untrue, maybe. She scratches at one thumbnail with the other. She wants to tell him it’ll be fine, but she can’t. She doesn’t know what this means, exactly, for either of them.
He flattens the wood and coals of the fire and slides the grate over the top as though he might cook something. Maybe, Elise thinks, she is hungry, maybe she’d eat what he made her. But he goes inside and does not come back.
She sits and watches the steel fence that frames the courtyard. There, in the light from the patio door, she can just see two geckoes, glowing white, tugging against each other, a moth held between them.
*
Before bed, she stands at the bathroom basin, examines her skin and hair and eyes in the mirror. She’s lost colour, lustre; she has warped in the wet and the bed and the grief. She pulls back her hair into a low ponytail and fixes it with an elastic. A palmful of loose strands stick to her hand. They are too fine, dull, almost translucent now that the hormones have abated.
When she was Venus. Helen.
Pregnant.
There are scissors in the top drawer, sharp-beaked.
Dan comes up behind her, then, and puts his arms around her waist, sets his chin on her shoulder. She meets his eyes in the mirror.
‘It’s okay if you need to go,’ he says. ‘I understand. I think I understand.’
She loves his eyes. They break her heart.
‘My mother did it once,’ she says.
‘What? Left?’
‘Cut all her hair off. You have no idea, it was so beautiful, smooth. She brushed it every night, sometimes she let me do it.’
Dan moves gently, pulls the hairband out of her hair, sets it free along her shoulders and back.
‘She’d sit in front of the television in a dining chair and let me play with it. I could do anything, she was like a doll.’
He strokes her hair, and she shivers. ‘So what happened?’ he asks.
‘There was one dinnertime and the house smelled like burned hair. It was awful. I was in my room and I came out to see what had happened, and there she was. She looked so small without her hair, but different, too. I cried. I cried and she put her arms around me and said it was okay, she was still the same person inside—just more free now to be that person.’
Then, Elise hadn’t understood how hair related to freedom. How hair or the cutting of it, or any change at all, could be a provocation. But then her father had come home, breath thick and sour, and her mother had turned and said, ‘Go to your room,’ and Elise heard in her voice that she must, now, go. But the cottage was wood—top, bottom and sides—and her bedroom had a little window above the door, cut-out flower patterns in the same wood as the walls, so that even with the door closed she could hear everything. The heavy step step stop, a long, terrible pause. The dishes clinking on in the sink.
‘What the fuck have you done?’ he asked.
She heard a thump on the table or the floor. A signal. A warning, maybe.
‘Where is your fucking hair?’
Her mother did not answer. The tap went on and off.
Elise had quietly carefully opened her door a crack, could see the two bodies in the kitchen, her mother, small and bird-like, turned towards the sink and her big, hairy father watching her mother. They were as still as a picture.
But then he turned and saw her pale face in the doorcrack of dark and said, ‘Get in your fucking room.’
And Elise had retreated.
A smack, a gasp, and four clumsy feet pedalled down the hall, past her pricked-up ears to the other bedroom, where shouts and hands like thunder overturned wood and bone.
Why did you do it, she’d wondered then, when you knew what he’d do?
But if she had clippers right now, she thinks, she might just do it, too. She understands her mother better in this single moment than she ever did in life, understands that she had to change things, unsettle things, abandon the way things were. That sometimes you have to show the world that nothing will ever (can ever) be the same again.
Dan pulls her hair to the side, kisses her neck, and her body tingles again at the touch of him. So warm. She turns to him, opens her wet mouth to the hollow of his collarbone, lets him press against her, and she thinks (but doesn’t mean to): the best sex is goodbye sex, we-can’t-be-together sex. The thought grips her, makes her frenetic with sadness.
He slides her underwear down over her feet, gently, one by one, runs his hand up her calf, behind her knee, up her femur hip waist until he is tucked under her shirt and pulling it over her head, standing to do so, face to face, his mouth hot but not on her mouth yet, keeping distance, mapping her as if he were a boat about to push off, though she is the one who will leave him. Her long hair stretches upwards through the top of the shirt, falls against her skin, against him, and he leans against the basin, pulls her to him, she moves in between his legs and his sh
irt over his head and the freckles of his shoulder spill out. She catches them with her tongue.
And they move to the bedroom. They take it slowly, gently because she is still so fragile, might shatter so easily. They are soft (too soft perhaps), but it hasn’t been long since the baby and if they push too hard, will it hurt too much? Will it hurt more than it does? So they are too soft; terribly, slowly, tragically, beautifully soft; and it feels so good to blur into him, skin on skin, cell on cell, molecule on molecule and finer and finer until there is not her and him but what they are when they are together, something more, something bigger and better and broken and (maybe) unfixable.
After, they curl in bed. No sound. Too much to say.
He pulls her limbs off him and turns to face her, his face illuminated by the light that streams in at sharp angles from the door to the hall and through the window. Lying as she is, her face is dark, shadowed, and she is grateful she is not as exposed as he is, cannot see her face as she sees his. She will save him from this. Her darkness, a gift.
‘I love you,’ he says. ‘I loved you since that first day. Remember?’
She remembers.
He takes her hand. His mouth is so close to her mouth, she can taste the humid deep of his lungs and carbon dioxide and beer and her fluids still there. She doesn’t answer.
She squirms in the moist between her legs, imagines the passage of his sperm through her body, tiny creatures flagellating deeper and deeper, thirty million of his cells, fragments of him, inside her, moving, fervid and futile. A flock of birds seeking water in the desert. For a few days, his body will be part of her body, and then he will be gone and she will be all her own.
Alone.
After a few minutes, she turns onto her back to watch a spider move across the dark of the ceiling, following the spear of light from the hall. She does remember that first day, Venice Beach, how they walked it, already, improbably, in love, though they’d known each other only a few weeks. Friends of friends. He, a writer, permeable to the world. She, five years older, on the academic track.
The Breeding Season Page 5