Vera

by Wasowski, Vera; Hillman, Robert;

  Clever girl, Werunia! Clever girl to go to the ABC and show off your brain and your pretty face.

  It is the character side of make-up that I most enjoy. People are led into the studio hungering for the beauty they have never known, but believe they deserve. ‘Make me ten years younger and ten times more lovely!’ – that is what they wish to say. What they really say, often, is this, and they say it in a murmur, just between the woman in the chair and me: ‘Can you do something for this poor, abused complexion, Vera dear? Say yes, for God’s sake! I look like the mother of Dracula.’

  And I say, ‘My dear, when I am done with you, boys of eighteen will write you sonnets and beg you to send them your knickers.’

  Or they say, ‘Vera, my darling, does wardrobe have a scarf for my neck? I can’t show these wrinkles! Dear God, can you help me? Also the crow’s feet, make them go away!’

  The men say, ‘I can’t submit to this. Let them take me warts and all. I’m a mess, I admit it, but what would you expect after a litre of scotch and sixty cigarettes a day? No, no, I refuse to play the peacock!’

  While they complain, I am at work smoothing out the furrows, exciting some colour in the sallow cheeks. I say, ‘So you want me to stop?’

  ‘Yes! I mean no. Maybe. Okay, just a little. Make me look as young as I feel. Twenty.’

  The art is one thing. Then there is the conversation. You make a judgement in a couple of seconds about the tolerance for chatter of the woman or the man in the chair, choose the subject, switch on, and – zoom! I rarely get it wrong. There is something about being ministered to by a person who is going to use all of her craft to make something glorious of your looks that brings out the urge to speak confessionally in both women and men; in women especially, of course, with their appetite for intimacy. A make-up artist works in the same space as the priest, the priestess, but saving your looks rather than your soul. A blemish disappears, a wrinkle is smoothed over, a fuzzy upper lip is all at once sheer and free of undergrowth – I am talking of women at the moment – and the gratitude of the poor, salvaged creature spills over into a story about a boy half her age who pesters her and pesters her with compliments that teeter on the brink of proposition, and of course it would be wrong, it would be grotesque, but she can’t hold out for much longer.

  ‘Should I, Vera? Oh God, he’s unbelievably beautiful, and so gentle!’

  Women adore confessing to another woman, the right woman, one who’s discreet when it’s important, full of sympathy and understanding, with all the right phrases at her disposal: ‘Did you, now?’ And: ‘I know what you mean, I really do.’ And: ‘The exact same thing happened to my friend.’ And: ‘Oh, you poor, poor thing, poor baby!’ And: ‘Did he? What an oaf!’

  I have that knack, sure. But I also wish to amuse myself. If the person I am hovering over wants to talk about a home renovation (shall we say?), I might protest after a minute or two of colour-scheme nonsense: ‘Enough about Dulux. Who cares? Tell me about Don Chipp and what’s-her-name.’

  Men – straight men, at least – usually want to be considered frank and forthright. A senator says, ‘What do I think of Black Jack? A complete and utter bastard. Pardon my French. Don’t quote me. I never said a damned thing, and I’ve never seen you before. But, yeah, he’s a bastard.’ The senator’s party is in government with Jack McEwen’s party.

  And there are stories that unfold as serials. I hear the opening of the story one day, the continuation the next, more the next, then the crisis and the requests for advice, which I give.

  ‘So you are saying you’re happily married. Pardon me, but a man who is happily married does not allow a woman to unzip his trousers in the back of a taxi. She can be your mistress.’

  I’m like one of those magazine columnists who respond to letters from readers. And I recognise what the columnists also recognise: that nobody is going to take the advice; that she or he just wants to hear it in order to reject it then go ahead and do the catastrophic thing they really want to do.

  At this time we have an apartment in the Banff, in Fitzroy Street, St Kilda: a deco block from the late twenties, the most gorgeous place you’ve ever seen. We came by it – Jan and I – when a friend of ours vacated it. He told us of his intentions and we made an application before anyone else. The interior space is huge, and there are three bedrooms, one of which we give to Helena, Jan’s mother, who continues to keep close to us. I am untroubled by that, Helena in her generosity, her kindness standing in such contrast to my own egocentric mother. Three bedrooms, yes, tall ceilings, such attractive cornices, and those signature plaster deco ornaments above the light fittings, wonderful tile work in the bathroom, light streaming in through the front windows over Fitzroy Street, through the north-east windows looking out over St Kilda West.

  I sip my coffee on the balcony, gazing east down Fitzroy Street to the rooming houses on the far side of the 69 tram line. St Kilda West was at this time still a blend of shabby and stunning. I’m told that there are parts of Paris like this – parts of New York, too – where no final emphasis has been made; a woman in something stylish from a Collins Street seamstress walking down one side of the street, on the other a seventeen-year-old runaway from Methodist Ladies College offering al fresco blowjobs for the price of a big hit of smack.

  From the balcony I can see down to Tolarno, the restaurant and gallery of my cheeky friend Mirka and her husband, George Mora, and to the Gatwick rooming house, a dire place with a paint job unimproved since the days of Ned Kelly, the home of people who have never had a home and never will.

  On this side of the street, a few doors along, stands the George Hotel, a pub where you’re compelled to throw your drink down quickly to avoid leaving a half glass on the counter after you’re stabbed. A few places further west is the Majestic Hotel, a big, gorgeous monster built by an insane Greek immigrant who came here without a shekel and made himself a millionaire (so the gossip goes).

  And over there, the football oval of the team that represents St Kilda, a three-metre-high wall of very aged red brick almost all the way around, a wonderful construction with grandstands inside. On days when St Kilda are playing, huge roars like the thunder of a great storm erupt, and you might see a football appear in the air above the ground and hang there for a few seconds.

  In the other direction, there is a wonderful wooden pier, so long, with a café at the end; also the beach, the fawn sand, on hot days (and here you have some summer days so hot that you can’t see straight) a hundred thousand people on the sand, splashing in the water, so much shrieking, a place to take Marek who thinks Australia is the best of all paradises on earth.

  It is important for me to find a home: a place that welcomes me each day. I can’t be a bohemian nomad all my life. I can’t; no-one can. You need a place where you sit down in your weariness with a glass of wine and a cigarette and gaze across the room at the books of your life, at the paintings that bring a gladness into your heart each time you look at them. Paintings such as those by Mirka, a sculpture purchased in Marrakech, or the small table that came to me as a gift from my friend Hazel. The beauty all around whispers to me. At times over the years I have been attracted to the life of the gypsy, I have owned only the clothes in which I stand, a single cracked mug for your coffee; I have been carefree, needed nothing. Except that I do. I need a home.

  The Banff is the first home that had truly welcomed me since the squalor of the Lvov ghetto.

  I invite home for dinner people I know from Gordon Street. We eat, we drink, we pass round a joint – two, three joints. Guests are dazzled by Jan’s conversation. In me, they see a clever woman with a talent for flirtation, a whiff of the bohemian still hanging about her, and if you want to hear opinions, political, philosophical, she is an avalanche. But in Jan, they see genius and originality. He never says quite what you might expect on any subject. And you end up thinking, ‘If I live to be a hundred, that would never have occurred to me, yet it seems absolutely perfect.’

  It
’s a difficult thing, being original. You can never escape it. People want something to go with it: great accomplishments. But our guests notice in Jan that his originality is drowned in booze. They want to say, ‘Dear fellow, you are one of a kind, don’t pickle it in Smirnoff.’

  Adrian Deamer, editor of the Australian, once offered him a job, but just before he was about to start, Adrian phoned him and said it had fallen through. ASIO had built a file on him, going back to his writing in Poland, and he’d been marked down as an avid red. So he was, but not the sort of red the Australian government should have been worried about. He was the sort of red that Russia should have worried about.

  What can you say? Can you expect an ASIO file to register anything subtle? You’d be waiting a hundred years. Do you have that much time?

  I worry about Jan, sure, but I worry about myself too. I’m making my stand in Australia, as I promised I would. But I don’t yet have what could be considered a life here. You know the way in which a vine can be made to weave itself in and out of a trellis? A life is like that. The place where you make your stand – the culture, the customs, the sources of delight offered by the place – acts to support you. Australia doesn’t yet support me. I am still in a sense a refugee.

  17

  ADVENTURESS

  Robert wants to talk about sex. About lovers, passion, orgasms. He thinks I have led the life of a femme fatale, something of the sort. What is he imagining? That I want to be known for my sexual appetite before anything else? Is he mad? No mature woman boasts about her lovers. Doris Lessing, maybe, in her autobiography. Otherwise, no. You meet so-and-so, you like him enough to go to bed, you go to bed, your life resumes with the addition of a pleasant memory, if you’re lucky.

  Robert says, ‘I’m not asking you to boast. I don’t want you to say anything about sex if you don’t want to. But yes, I do believe that you’ve been more of an adventuress in that way than many other women.’

  ‘“Adventuress”?’

  ‘Or whatever word suits you. You’re being coy. You know what I mean.’

  ‘“Coy”?’

  ‘Vera, please, this is awkward for me. Sex has been a part of your vital life. It should figure in your story.’

  ‘What is my “vital life”?’

  He is becoming exasperated. Well, what can I say? Is it my fault? Sex is sex. And what is he trying to say with my ‘vital life’? All of my life is vital. I don’t like it when he brings in these pretentious terms. ‘Vital life’. Spare me.

  ‘It’s the concentration of the experiences that burn most intensely in any human being. Your vital life. When you read Tolstoy, your vital life is engaged. When you listen to Bach, to Mozart, to –’

  ‘Erik Satie. Leonard Cohen.’

  ‘To Erik Satie, Leonard Cohen, sort of. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What I’m saying is that lovemaking has been a great feature of your vital life.’

  ‘Sometimes. So what are you making this book? A sex manual?’

  ‘No, no – not at all. But lovemaking should be included. Not in detail, just through reference to lovers. And so on.’

  ‘Where do you want to start?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Where do you want to start? I should give a number to each? And a mark out of ten for quality, we should do that?’

  ‘Start with Bob Hawke.’

  ‘I never slept with Bob Hawke.’

  ‘Really? Someone told me that, years ago, you’d slept with Bob.’

  ‘Not years ago. Not ever. Robert, listen to me. Not ever. Hazel was my friend, very close – very, very close. You think I would sleep with my friend’s husband? Are you mad?’

  I am upset. Do you know what men do, always? They use women to furnish their fantasies. Okay, sometimes that’s good. I can enjoy being in a man’s fantasy. But they are usually so stupid. I’ve known men who think, ‘Vera, she’s insatiable.’ I am not insatiable. No woman is insatiable. One or two, but that’s a medical thing, a type of madness. Me, no. I let them believe it if it costs me nothing. ‘Vera, ah Vera, my darling, always so crazy for me, you want me day and night, it’s true, it’s true.’ I say, ‘Sure.’ Sex for men is hunger. For women, it’s more complex, more involving. Or it can happen from time to time that I want to keep it one-dimensional – that is not impossible. Then, in the midst of it all, I change my mind and desire the complexity. What can I say?

  To Robert, I don’t attempt to explain. I say, ‘We’re not going to have chapters all about coitus.’ And, ‘I have no interest in telling the public about my romantic life.’

  He says, ‘That’s not what I was suggesting, Vera.’

  What I could say to him – maybe I will, I don’t know – is this: I have never suffered any of the fretting and anguish about sex that so many other people endure, so I gather. From the start, I thought, ‘So what? Mr X wants to sleep with me, let him. Or not.’ There is a line that I’ve always liked, once I grasped it, that comes I think from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: ‘Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, won’t you join the dance?’ What this means in the book is one thing, but for me it has come to mean the hesitancy and indecision of those who can’t make up their minds about one thing or another; whether to jump in or not to jump in, or to test the waters first perhaps, and so on and so on and et cetera.

  I join the dance; it’s my way. I slip out of my garments; I open my arms. Is this to end in disaster? Then so be it. Is this wrong? Then it is. Better to blunder than to walk up and down endlessly wringing your hands, looking at the whole thing from this point of view, from that. ‘Can I live with this if I do it? Is it right? What would my husband say if he ever found out? But he won’t find out, will he? Dear God, I hope not, oh, oh, oh and blah blah blah.’ Jump in the deep end, sink or swim.

  Except that I would not sleep with Bob. I didn’t have to wring my hands, I didn’t have to undergo some tortuous interior debate. I said, ‘No.’ Really, if you can’t be loyal to your friends, is there any hope for you?

  We were at my place in Melbourne, people had been gathered there, this was later, when I was out of make-up at the ABC and working on This Day Tonight. Everyone had been drinking, happily. In those days you drank happily. Nobody had heard of healthy living. If you spoke of the importance of diet and of honouring your body as if it were a sacred temple, people thought you were a Scandinavian nudist or a member of a cult. Nobody bothered with the gym, with salads of a hundred varieties, with those what-do-you-call-them, tofu steaks, with machines that give you the impression that you’re rowing a boat when you are stationary on the floor. Cholesterol hadn’t been invented. You could smoke a cigarette at the desk if you were the newsreader; all you had to do was wait for a cross to a bushfire at Nar Nar Goon. Drinking, talking, laughing – then everybody had to go to some other thing, I can’t recall what it was, I’m left at my place with Bob, and the possibility of something is hanging in the air.

  I say to Bob, ‘Go home.’

  He says, ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  Sure, you could sleep with Bob if you liked: many did. But if you met Hazel first, you had the chance to choose a big heart, a woman who delighted in the lovely things of the world, in art and music, a woman of courage, a woman loyal in friendship – and you chose Hazel if you had any brains at all, any heart at all.

  Then off he went, Bob, not with ill grace – with a shrug and a wave.

  And there you have it, Robert. Such debauchery! Such a crazy entwining of limbs, such cries of ecstasy! There you have it.

  Okay, okay. Not every man was told to go home. Many were welcome to remain exactly where they lay while I shrugged off my blouse and skirt. But please, let’s not go berserk about sex. People have appetites; I have mine. What more can you say?

  Sometimes there is a little madness. For instance, my affair with Brian Adams, the newsreader. He was an attractive man, full of charm. I followed him to London
, maybe, by arrangement, in 1964. We stayed in an apartment down near Marble Arch – or was it a hotel? I forget, but it was shelter.

  I didn’t mention anything about Brian to Jan, certainly not that I was going to meet up with him in London. I don’t want anyone to make a huge fuss about this. And anyway, I came back, eventually; I had to, I was only on leave from the ABC.

  In the meantime, Jan was left to care for Marek for a few weeks – four weeks, perhaps. And one day, after a long day’s boozing, he reveals to Marek that he is not, in fact, his father.

  It is a shock for Marek. He is twelve or so and we have barely mentioned Viktor to him. As far as he knows, Jan, this brilliant guy, eternally kind and loving towards him, this Jan he so adores, is his dad. Then one fine day, out it comes. Jan says to him, ‘You should know the truth. Another man is your biological father. Not me.’ It is a profound shock to Marek: better if I had been there.

  When I return from London, I have to deal with the repercussions. And I do. How, I can’t recall. Probably in a nonchalant manner: ‘Well, yes, my husband is not your dad, but the man who is your dad was my husband at the time. Is there a problem?’

  A little while later, Brian also returns. He is up in Sydney and I go up there to stay with him. How do I manage to keep doing make-up at Gordon Street? I don’t know. I have mysterious powers. Jan knows that I am staying with some fellow or the other, and then a strange thing happens. This only happened once in all our years of marriage – he sends me a telegram: If you are not back in a week, please give me an address to which I can send your belongings stop love stop Jan.

  So okay, I came back. Maybe I was mad for a little while. Maybe.

  18

  THIS DAY TONIGHT

  Applying make-up is not journalism, nor is giving advice to people who are determined to blow their lives to blazes. The years pass; I’m thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, and I begin to wonder if I will ever amount to more in this country than a cheerful woman with a good brain and a pretty face who can engage you in conversation while your wrinkles are smoothed out.