Eliza:
Please go on.
Green
What the hell. He could never get that fucking green right, always too blue or chartreuse, or brownish (how the fuck did that happen, considering he was mixing like two colours), malachite when he sought verdigris (or the other way round?), either too viscous or insubstantial, gelatinous rather than buttery. What the fucking hell. And then there was Ellen at the gallery. Ellen had no idea the pain he went through with green, but she didn’t care about his pain at all. Or paint. She hardly looked at the works: a casual check to see they were mostly covered in pigment. Seemed near enough. Sure, Ellen, whatever the fuck. What is it I do again? Colouring in?
So here she comes again with that lip-kiss greeting which is just saying hello, and here he is kind of trying to back out without backing out. And the one time when he didn’t peck and stand back, on she’d gone with it. Don’t you find me attractive? she’d actually asked, whenever that was, maybe three visits ago. What the hell was the right answer to that? Was this a precondition for her to like his paintings without looking at them? Or, you know, a minimal kind of glance thing. Maybe she didn’t have to like something to sell it, maybe this was how she was in the world. Fucking hell, maybe this applied to him, in her mind, that he shouldn’t have to like her, but what kind of fucked-up, twisted-up way of thinking was that? Jesus, Ellen, get your hands off me, he didn’t say as she steered him towards the stairs. Shhh, she did say, because her father might have been working in the other office, or the old man might have come in and obviously she didn’t want him to hear, how weird would that be, so shhh and he felt her urgency as Ellen seemed to change, to become or embody this urgency – so there was nothing of judgement, only of wanting, nothing of the judgement of form or of greenness, only urgency and, as for him, well it wasn’t as if his body was saying the same kind of no that he felt in his mind, and he was not resisting her urgency in any kind of effective way, or even in a way that properly communicated that he wasn’t into this, not in the way he might have said straight up, and yet without offending her – and fuck it, he was caught in the urgency she had somehow conjured all around them as they began to ascend those stairs.
But what the hell, Ellen. Here was he with no other characteristic than availability. Did she even find him attractive? He couldn’t believe it. She didn’t act attracted or unattracted. She would have nodded and smiled about anything, he was sure, as long as they kept moving towards that little room upstairs with the daybed taking up almost the entire length of the wall. She was edging him up the stairs, kind of pushing him. She held his arm as though they were sharing a goal, but Ellen was a mono-fucking-maniac. She gripped his bicep. Yes, for some reason he hadn’t even recognised that she was totally pinching his arm, she had it between thumb and finger. Let go. Take your hand off my arm. Stop pushing me. Fuck, he should have said something, and he knew he should say something to break her momentum, but he shut his mouth, his trap. She’d once said that to him. Shut your trap. She’d said it kind of flirty, or trying to be, and standing too close to him, leaning forward the last five centimetres and nipping his lip as she said it, whoa, unexpected, and such a light nip. He’d stood still, allowing himself to be the object to be nipped. Now she was pinching his arm between pulgar and medio, playing him, feeling that bicep and pushing him. He raised his other hand, thinking to bat off hers.
There was still some of that imperfect green paint staining his fingers. The imperfect green from the imperfect work he’d brought in, perfection wasn’t everything, maybe she also had that in mind about him, maybe he should have waited before bringing in the paintings, waited until he had assessed the degree to which the not-quite-right green had compromised the piece. So smart a painter he was, a real thinker. Someone had once written something like that. Was he smart or stupid enough for this? He knew what would happen and could picture the future where everyone got what they wanted or didn’t, and immediately time was up and Ellen became her third version, not the warm human he’d once seen, not the embodiment of urgency, but this crisply spoken, perfunctory type with no memory for the immediate past. He had options, just that he felt incapable of exercising any of them. He could have grabbed her back and she would have laughed like last time. What did that even mean? He could have kissed her back – fucking hell, he could have kissed her first, would she have liked that or would she have switched character before anything happened – and if he’d kissed her back, anyone would have thought he was just as into it.
None of that had a chance.
I’m going to jump your frigging bones, she said. Your skeleton will rattle in its container.
Oh yeah, he’d tried to say, wanting to put some element of his own potential bravado in there and she just laughed: I am way dirtier than you. Tell me it’s not true. Say it.
Was he supposed to argue with that? He couldn’t outdo Ellen’s competitiveness and he was in a little shock at how he’d arrived here once again. If anything was dirty round here, it was Fate, not Ellen – Fate which ought not to exist, whereas Ellen seemed inevitable. Should he say something, other than no? He could comply fully. He could join the contest, Oh yeah, I’m filthy as anything given the right circs, but here in this capacious white-walled tomb I’m the king of fucking purity. She smirked, because he didn’t say anything. Well? Say something, she said. She pinched him, hard. Have a little bruise. He pulled his arm back, and turned to grab her, but she jumped down a couple of steps and laughed again. How funny it all was to her. I love how articulate you artists are. She stepped up again and made as though to kiss him, but instead pushed him over the last step. He almost tripped. He was at the top. She was mean. He felt like he was thirteen years old again. Come on, she said, though he was ahead of her. They were still heading straight towards her focal point. She was totally focused as all hell.
The door to the little room stood open, and she steered him in there. Here we are again. The room made no sense, he thought. Why would anyone design a space so small? Aside from the daybed and a small, louvred window near the ceiling, there was a cream-coloured storage cabinet set into the wall. Otherwise nothing. She’d shut the door. He was standing, knowing she’d tell him to sit. He stepped neither back nor forward. She reached slowly towards him, the urgency having dissipated with her growing certainty. Have a seat, she said. Casual as. He noticed that the little round handle on the storage cabinet was the exact perfect green. Without taking his eyes off it, and without thinking, he sat on the end of the bed. He was fixated on that green, that one intense point in the tiny room.
What’s got you so goddamn hypnotised, Ellen said.
It’s nothing. He couldn’t really explain it to her; what would she say if he tried? Something else about artists. There was hardly enough space between bed and wall for anyone to stand, and she edged along sideways until she was behind him, reached both arms around as though to hug him, and began to unbutton his shirt. He let her for a moment, felt her hands on his chest. He twisted himself in a moment to face her and he kissed her hard on the mouth, stopped, turned away again, gripped the bedclothes in his fists. You’re a funny one, she said. She tugged at his shirt again. One of his buttons flew up and hit the storage cabinet just near that perfect green handle, fell to the ground. She laughed. He started forward to retrieve the button, but she grabbed him by the shoulders and wrenched him back onto the bed. Now, she said, let’s get these clothes off you.
Theatre of Soak
The following represents dozens or hundreds of hours of gonzoresearch. Names, dates and some concepts have been changed to protect the writer (from himself).
There was a certain shop in Oxford Street that sold party decorations during the day. At night, its doorway was a popular hangout for pink-faced men with paper bags (bags usually holding bottles of methylated spirits).
On that particular evening, the window display comprised pink elephants sliding back and for
th in front of a sea of pink tinsel. The old man in the doorway was killing himself laughing. I assumed he couldn’t believe it.
‘They’re really there,’ I told him, trying to be helpful, imagining that swooping pink pachyderms might produce cognitive dissonances for the inebriated older person.
The man appeared to look at me, but did not respond to my revelation. He continued to laugh, to rock to and fro, more or less in rhythm with the mechanised elephants’ movement, clutching his bottle of metho. Our relationship was of actor to audience: we could speak across this divide, but we could not converse.
I could not figure out which was my role.
*
At a party, in the corner, a close friend held a half-bottle of red wine very close to his eyes. He was reading the label loudly. He tilted the bottle and a potential mouthful or two spilled onto the purple-, green-, red- and blue-striped rental carpet.
‘Enjoy wine to excess,’ he yelled, as another friend guffawed expansively. He was attempting to make a pun about rumours/roomers and how he was scotching those in his stomach. I was drunk enough to try anything (served to inmates in the closed bedroom). The music was seventies for some reason. A small number of shirtless men were dancing in I-surrender-to-the-music poses, the floor having mysteriously cleared of the fully dressed.
I was explaining this gregariousness as ‘research’. No one was too friendly or too snooty about this claim. It was as though the limits of the Theatre of Soak were constantly renegotiating and no one wanted to appear too surprised by its new directions.
*
At another party, someone on the couch was saying ‘thub, thub, thub’. A woman was explaining that her boyfriend was not a ‘testosteronic moron’ for his habit of flinging her and other people around the dance floor. I was suggesting alternative descriptions. Someone else was listening to our discussion, tilting her head from side to side instead of rotating it to face each speaker. She hadn’t yet said a word. I was conscious of playing to her, projecting my voice more than is conversationally necessitated. I was slurring and so was the woman with whom I was shpeaking.
I tried to shay thingsh properly but I couldn’t.
‘He’sh jusht a prick,’ I shaid. ‘Tell him to fuck off.’
‘He’sh okay,’ she claimed.
I hoped that my voice sounded concerned, but I could hear it squeaking a little with righteousness. I was trying not to lean forward. Later, the boyfriend was gone and I felt vindicated.
‘Good on you,’ I commented.
But I found him on the front steps wiping his eyes. I kind of remember saying to him, ‘Well, you stay away from her,’ and him saying, ‘You wouldn’t know.’ Anyway, we didn’t have a fight or anything. I walked back into the party and tried to find a mixer. A computer science postgraduate was trying to make a spinach daiquiri. There were toothpicks installed all over the kitchen floor, stuck down with something clear and viscous.
*
I discovered that people were anxious to share their own performances. It was a generous research area and I had to avoid making promises of co-authorship credits.
‘I was so drunk on mescal I couldn’t throw up,’ a friend informed me over dinner at the Old Saigon in Newtown. ‘The others left the room from time to time, but I stayed put.’
I think I probably responded to this description rather mean-spiritedly, kind of ‘Aw, I dunno’. It was seeming to me like more of an epiglottal non-performance. I got no sense of contraction and expansion, which means no characterisation. Inadequacy. Exclusion. Later I realised I had misread my friend’s anecdote. My reading had lost the anecdote’s anecdoty. I had over-theorised my area of study, made its parameters too narrow. I had failed to picture the choreographic diagrams, exits and entrances. Patterns of potential eye-contacts. Stillness as performance retained representational axes, conjuring a sense of liquidity in a dry setting (very Australian), the inner struggle. Anyway, I was not so discouraging that others at the table were dissuaded from describing their own endeavours.
‘I was seeing a band and I was projectile vomiting. Someone took a photo,’ said someone else. Now, this was immediately theatre in that it was valued in another medium.
‘Do you have a copy,’ I asked, ‘for the story?’ But she didn’t.
The restaurateur – a former foreign correspondent for Newsweek – was getting me to demand our BYO from the back fridge in a growlier and more aggressive manner: ‘More beer.’
*
In yet another smear-focused restaurant, I was waiting for a friend to return with more wine. Because Sydney restaurant tables are so close together, a huge drunken man with his back to me was coming very close to upsetting the vase of plastic baby’s breath on my table (or if actually upset, I guess, off my table). There were four people at this other table. They were telling short anecdotes that I could not quite hear. After each, the person who had spoken laughed loudly, and the three others joined in briefly then dropped off. Each had a distinctive laugh which I imagined resembled a specific piece of light artillery. I quickly became irritated, and was thinking of asking to change tables, despite the terrible snub this would have been, when my friend returned. I hardly noticed the other table anymore. Our chardonnay had a lifted passionfruit nose and a melon/citrus middle palate with a dry, clean finish.
Short Twos
Party Boy
‘I think we spent the entirety of the Easter weekend either drunk or hungover,’ said the middle-aged man who was not holding hands with Janine.
What Chance Is There?
‘If you don’t support my efforts to get clean, what chance is there we’ll be all good anyway?’
Don’t Let Go
She squeezed him and squeezed him until he was quite outfuriated.
Overheard
We’re going to Italy?
What? Who’s going where?
We’re going to Italy?
Who is?
Isn’t that what you said?
No. I said, ‘We don’t really, do we?’
Oh. I thought you said we were going to Italy.
No.
Oh.
*
I give them six months.
Huh? Who?
Them. Six months, then el splitto.
Nuh-uh. They look like they’ve been glued together for forty years. El stayo.
They missed the announcement of no-fault divorce ’cos not paying attention, and they just heard about it.
They missed everything, but it doesn’t bother them.
It bothers her.
Nuh-uh.
Okay, fine. In that case, it bothers him.
No.
Set your alarm for six months.
*
Do you think people in this area are more judgemental than in our area?
I don’t think we have an area.
Rephrase. Do you find people in this area to be excessively judgemental?
We all know what we like and are impatient with people who don’t agree because not agreeing is an indication of faulty reasoning. Are you feeling overly patient with people?
Yes, my fault is too much patience with all people.
Except me.
No, I’m also too patient with you.
You should think that through again.
Okay, I will.
*
You can’t let anything go, you know, and in my opinion people don’t really like that.
They don’t mind.
People would like you better if you were more light-hearted.
I wouldn’t be me, so they’d be liking someone else.
You would be you, only more likeable.
Show me.
You want me to be you, only a little bit better?
Ha! Sure, for a minute.
Okay. People are very love
ly. There.
*
While you were being me, I stole your soul.
Check out those two. Lovers become more alike after years. Love is Lamarckian.
Occam’s Razor. They spend similar amounts of time in the sun, and their diets converge.
They crane towards each other.
Tch. We don’t. Most people don’t.
You’re bad at noticing things.
Not true. On the weekend I found the keys.
They were in your bag.
Were not.
Were so.
Not.
Next to your bag.
Ah ha!
I was going to say exactly that.
You were not.
*
How can I help you?
Hi. How much are the olives?
They’re free.
Okay, I’ll have some.
Would you like some cheese and bread too?
Yes please.
Here ya go.
Thanks. Wow.
You’re my favourite customer – the last lot were arguing like children.
How funny.
*
We should go travelling, you know.
We should what?
We should travel somewhere, pack the house up.
Oh, I thought you said something different.
What did you think I said?
Something about making dinner tonight.
No. I didn’t mean to leave tonight.
I realise that now.
We should go travelling.
We should what?
Foreign Logics
My body disagrees with the physical evidence of time. Following the flight, I lie awake in bed. In this night-lit hotel room, our daughter’s face appears to me like Chinese paper; my vision publishes unknown characters on her monochromatic forehead. I blink to clear them, but the ideograms persist in the gloom. My eyes, though still believing themselves subject to European clocks, have chosen an Asian insomniac alphabet.
When I Saw the Animal Page 12