The Bodysurfers

by Robert Drewe

Johnson’s

  Baby

  Oil

  PURE – MILD – GENTLE

  Johnson & Johnson

  200 ml

  Max made a small spot of ink alongside the J for Johnson’s at the top of the label. Replacing the bottle, his pulse racing, he saw the oil as suddenly volatile, with a sheen like gin.

  It came as no surprise to him, though set his heart beating in his throat with a delicious, frightening anguish as if to choke him, to note two days later that the oil level was well below his mark. It was actually between the B of Baby and the O of Oil. Following their afternoon in bed, a feverish, almost savage exercise that left them both drenched and shaky, Max again marked the oil level, now just above the P for PURE.

  Three tense days passed before they could next go to bed together. Max had hardly slept. Each dawn, jogging red-eyed and heavy-limbed along Bondi beach, he decided resolutely to end the affair. Each morning she rang his studio cheerily to say, ‘I love you.’ He resisted saying it.

  ‘Tell me you love me,’ she wailed.

  He had trouble visualising her at her shiny green desk, a cigarette going between her bright nails, talking like this. ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘Good.’

  On the third day when Max entered the bedroom the bottle may as well have been the only object in the room. They could have been fucking on bear skins or broken glass. The label was turned to the wall but the oil level already seemed lower. The oil was as ominous as a sultry sea at dusk, tropically translucent before a storm. Its diffused whorls hid sharks, stingrays, venomous transparent mysteries. Max’s senses almost exploded. As soon as Anthea went downstairs for the wine he snatched up the bottle. Of course the level was down, way below the P, almost to the next J.

  When she returned he was subdued, flaccid as a jellyfish. ‘When did Brian get back?’ he asked, almost strangled by nonchalance.

  ‘He didn’t.’ Then she said, correcting herself, ‘He comes and goes,’ blushed and sniggered softly, a noise midway between embarrassment and coarseness, the most unattractive sound he had heard in his life.

  She picked up quickly. ‘Why do you ask?’

  The essence was right out of him and he let it go. ‘No reason.’

  ‘I love you,’ she said, staring into his eyes.

  As the oil dripped on him he watched her face, impassive except for a small moué of sensuality. Fury revived his spirit and they collided in lust and high emotion. Coins and keys spun and jangled beside them. Later, while she went to the lavatory, he marked the bottle. The tiny dot, between the J and the 200 ml, took his final strength.

  Max and Anthea had a passionate lunch at Doyle’s, overlooking the slick spring Harbour. Behind clouds a pale sun hung over Watson’s Bay. They held hands on the table, drank two bottles of Chardonnay, kissed in public, over-tipped and caught a taxi home to Paddington.

  Max hadn’t even undressed when he grabbed up the oil bottle right in front of her to examine it, stare at it. On the other side of the label, well below his last mark, almost at the bottom of the label, was a clearly inked cross which accurately recorded the present level in the bottle.

  Looking for Malibu

  ‘There is a growing tendency for Australians of a certain kind to seek the fulfilment of their lives or careers in America — and not just the well-publicised pop singers and tennis players. Whereas the creatively stifled and emotionally restless Australian middle classes of earlier generations “returned” to England or Europe for cultural sustenance, the new film-makers, artists, academics and business entrepreneurs are increasingly forming expatriate communities in California and New York.

  ‘Yesterday the Australian Consul-General held a party at his Jackson Street residence to celebrate the local release of Breaker Morant, the latest movie from Down Under, and no less than eighteen Aussie film-makers, actors, writers and painters were counted imbibing the excellent Australian wines …’

  San Francisco Chronicle

  After the consulate party David Lang took Richard Bartho, the Sydney film-maker, and Peter Boyle, the Sydney department store family’s black sheep, both visiting from Los Angeles, for a drink at the Vesuvio bar.

  The Langs had been living in San Francisco for twelve months and had their favourite haunts. David, an architect, had just completed a sabbatical year at Stanford and Berkeley, with a side visit to Harvard and a cold, drizzly fortnight at the University of Oregon at Eugene, and he and his family were shortly to return to Australia. Back home, where he lectured at Sydney University and had his own practice, and his wife Angela taught screen-writing at the Film and Television School, they had known Bartho for many years.

  David hadn’t met Boyle before. He knew of him only through the financial press and the Sunday social columns — and random dinner party conversations where the doings of the buccaneer rich were either extolled or savaged. He certainly hadn’t mixed in his circle of right-wing establishment playboys. Two or three years before he’d heard of him suddenly resigning his chairmanship, selling all his shares in the Boyle Emporium Limited back to his family for four or five million dollars and moving to Southern California. Bartho and Boyle had also never previously met.

  But a foreign country — even America — makes for convivial compatriots. At the Vesuvio, Bartho and David had several palate-cleansing beers, Boyle had a couple of scotches and the three men joked and hedged around onto common ground. This was the usual expatriate discussion on green cards, permanent residential status. Boyle had a green card, the others four-year visas. Bartho then brought up the subject of film investment as a tax incentive.

  ‘Stop buttering him up,’ David said to him. Boyle laughed.

  ‘I can’t afford to lose an opportunity,’ Bartho complained. ‘How long do you think this gravy train’s going to last?’

  Before long it was dark and David suggested dinner. The others agreed enthusiastically and they strode in high spirits down Columbus Avenue to the Washington Square Bar and Grill.

  ‘You’ll like it,’ David told Bartho. ‘Coppola eats there.’

  ‘Jeezus! He’s on the skids.’

  As soon as they sat down Bartho ordered vintage Dom Perignon. ‘All part of the image,’ he announced. Then he addressed Boyle. ‘I’ve been trying to think who you remind me of. I’ve decided it’s the young Sydney Greenstreet.’

  ‘That’s an improvement,’ Boyle said, lighting a cigar. ‘I used to look like the young King Farouk.’

  Bartho laughed loudly and several diners turned around. ‘Actually, you still do,’ he said. ‘And the young Sydney Greenstreet. Perhaps it’s the white suit.’

  ‘How are you doing in Hollywood with your diplomatic ways?’ Boyle asked.

  ‘Great. The moguls are suckers for the brash young Aussie bit. Don’t think I don’t load on the accent, either. I come on ultra-straight, butch and scruffy and they just fall over. No Balmain irony in Hollywood, cobber.’

  ‘Don’t underestimate the moguls,’ Boyle said. ‘Moguls can be trouble, son.’

  ‘That’s just what I was telling Sherry Lansing at Fox yesterday.’

  Boyle leaned over the table to David. ‘This boy is an original,’ he said.

  ‘You better believe it!’ Bartho hooted.

  ‘You may go far.’

  ‘Only as far as my American Express card,’ Bartho said, ordering more champagne.

  David couldn’t tell them how refreshing he found this abrasive boozy banter after the hot-tubbing, laid-back silkiness of Californian academe. It made him nostalgic for Australia and its laconic clubbiness. Maybe he wasn’t the expatriate type. They ate, joked, drank Bartho’s champagne, walked back up Columbus for cognacs and coffee at the Tosca, exchanged phone numbers and disappeared into the night in different taxis.

  Next morning David had an evil hangover. Angela was sympathetic, perhaps because of its nationalistic origins. He considered, gratefully, that a couple of years ago she wouldn’t have been. They had been together fifteen years. Two year
s before, under the swamp-gum in their Mosman garden, away from the children’s ears, they had talked of separating, but the discussion itself, conducted around mugs of coffee in those green and secure surroundings, had scared them out of it. Angela’s private definition of fear, enunciated that Sunday morning under the gum tree, was finding a letter from another woman in his coat pocket. His was discovering her in an intimate restaurant bar in earnest conversation with a strange man. The year in America had been organised by him and perceived by them both as a chance for reconcilement and new harmony.

  To a degree it had worked. San Francisco had been a qualified success. Angela loved the city, so much that sometimes it seemed it had insinuated itself between them. He liked the Bay Area well enough and had enjoyed prowling around Berkeley, but he was looking forward to going home; she could have stayed forever. It was their children, Paul, Helena and Tim, especially Paul, the eldest, who hadn’t taken to the place.

  It was Paul who suffered most from the vagaries of its much vaunted ‘lifestyle’. He endured the bussing to a distant high school in the Mission district, where he was regarded by the school’s Latino and black drug and weaponry entrepreneurs as an egregiously unhip Anglo novelty. And it also depressed him closer to home, where there were few teenagers in the landscape. Their apartment block on Sacramento and Laguna had an elaborate security system to protect its snooty elderly tenants specifically from the likes of him: they eyed him like a mugger or a mainliner in the lobby. Early on, when Paul crossed Sacramento Street to hit tennis balls in Lafayette Park, men with closely cropped hair kept idling by into the bushes, whistling and making flattering remarks. Red-faced with anger and embarrassment, he’d burst back into the apartment and refused to return, even to play tennis with his father. He drooped around the living room reading surfing magazines and crunching peanut brittle, muttering cynically about the trysting males and Pacific Heights dowagers walking their Shih Tzus and Lhasa Apsos below the window. He daily gave the impression California had let him down.

  His father agreed that San Francisco gave kids short shrift. ‘Southern California’s different,’ he sympathised. ‘The Beach Boys, Hollywood, surfing. We’re going to do all that stuff before we leave. But this is really interesting here. Three blocks down is Fillmore Street. You’ve heard of Bill Graham’s Fillmore Auditorium where Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company used to record? All those great San Francisco rock traditions? They were just down the street.’

  ‘I don’t know them,’ Paul said.

  ‘You’ve heard of the Vietnam war, I suppose? The peace and love movement started in Golden Gate Park. That’s where the whole protest movement got going with Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Co.’

  ‘Protesting against what?’

  David Lang stared for a while out the window. On the steep incline of Laguna Street a plump young man dressed in a solar topee and tight gold shorts and carrying a three-foot long blaring tape player, sped down on roller skates. ‘Anyway, Southern California’s different,’ he said.

  One of the minor ambitions of his life was to swim at Malibu.

  David was mildly surprised to receive a phone call from Peter Boyle two days later. He had been delayed on business in San Francisco, he said, suggesting lunch. David’s sabbatical commitments were over and they were planning their Southern California holiday for the following week. The scheme was to drive down Highway 1 to Los Angeles and on to San Diego, taking it easy, no more than a hundred miles a day, with stopovers at Monterey, Big Sur, San Simeon, San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara. He wanted to motor through the redwood canyons of the Pacific Coast Highway with the mountains plunging into the windswept ocean at his shoulder, just like in the Sunset Guide. But that was a week off, he could manage lunch, and they decided to meet at the Vesuvio. ‘They’d never believe this in Sydney, you and Peter Boyle so chummy,’ Angela said.

  When he arrived Boyle was sitting at the bar drinking an Anchor Steam beer. There was no white suit today. He was dressed in Levis and a khaki bush jacket and his hair looked longer and floppier. He blended into the raffish atmosphere of the bar. David felt over-dressed in his tweed jacket. It was his bar and he was the one out of kilter.

  ‘Dave, how’re you doing?’ Boyle greeted him. David noted the Americanism ‘doing’, rather than the usual Australian ‘going’. Boyle seemed altogether more Californian today, very San Francisco, even to the stack of paperbacks at his elbow. ‘I just dropped in to the City Lights next door,’ he said. ‘L.A. ’s not so big on bookstores, much less Ferlinghetti.’

  David realised he didn’t know Boyle at all. Nevertheless his first impression of him did not include avant-garde poetry, or jeans and bush jackets for that matter. He was vaguely curious why Boyle should pursue their relationship, but guessed at loneliness or even homesickness. Boyle probably sought him out mainly on the basis of nationality. Not that it mattered. They chatted amiably and then walked up the street to lunch.

  During an Italian meal and a glass of Chianti, however, David felt it reasonable to ask him why he had moved to California. Immediately he felt he had overstepped some mark because Boyle stopped eating and sat with a forkful of veal poised in front of his face for a second before resuming, at the same time looking at David forcefully while he chewed.

  He did reply though, with a distant smile. ‘Pressure of one sort and another,’ he said. ‘I was under a bit of strain.’

  ‘Any regrets?’ David went on blithely. After all, it was Boyle who was directing this sociability. ‘It must have been a difficult decision.’

  Boyle shrugged. Yes, David thought.

  ‘The company’s going to the shit-heap now,’ Boyle said. ‘My brother’s screwing it up, my uncle’s screwing it up and my mother’s retreated into her bloody bedroom and hasn’t spoken to anyone since July. It’s ripe for a takeover, sure as God made little apples. Myer will get it, Bond maybe, nothing surer.’ His smile became even tighter. ‘Hear that rumbling sound? That’s my old man turning in his grave.’

  Then he changed the subject so blatantly David could almost hear the gears clash. ‘You mentioned you’d spent some time in Oregon recently. See any Australians up there or on the way? Northern California, Mendocino area perhaps?’

  David said he hadn’t. He felt this wasn’t a random query, however.

  ‘Just for your information, there’s quite a few up there, living very quietly in their coastal hideaways.’

  ‘Really? Dropouts, eh?’

  ‘Very big dropouts. It’s too hot for them in Australia.’

  David liked gossip as much as anyone. ‘Criminals?’ he asked.

  Boyle drained his glass. ‘Not really, just your Eastern Suburbs laissez faire capitalists, old public schoolboys who like a snort and got in too deep.’ He went on, ‘It’s rather funny.’ A lank lock of black hair hanging in Boyle’s eyes made him look surprisingly disarrayed. It hung down to his nose for what seemed an inordinate length of time before he wiped it back and poured more wine.

  ‘Funny?’

  ‘If their enemies were middle-class Australians they’d know where to look for them. You know something? When Australians run away they always run to the coast. They can’t help it. An American vanishes, he could be living in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, the mountains, the desert, anywhere. Not an Australian — he goes up the coast or down the coast and thinks he’s vanished without a trace.’

  It was probably the wine, but David couldn’t resist the joke. ‘Where are you living in L.A., Peter?’

  Boyle glinted a little. For a moment David thought he might be drunk. ‘Malibu,’ he said. ‘On the beach at Malibu, home of the stars.’

  To take the sting out of his query, David rapidly mentioned their forthcoming trip and that they were looking forward to surfing at Malibu. While he was rambling about their missing the beach and a proper summer and so forth, Boyle interrupted him gruffly.

  ‘Be our guests,’ he offered. ‘We’ve got plenty of room. Fiona would love to meet you.�
�� And while David was politely declining, pointing out the rowdiness of his children and the haphazardness of their plans, the other man put up a hand to silence him and declared, ‘Actually, Fiona’s coming up here tomorrow. You and your wife have dinner with us and we’ll make the arrangements.’

  If David had been a little surprised at Boyle’s interest before, now he was taken aback. So was Angela. While they were dressing she asked, ‘If we’re being feted by the Boyles up and down California, do I pretend Marin County-style or go as the All-Australian girl?’

  ‘All-Australian girl, I think. They seem nostalgic for it.’

  ‘Why are we doing this?’ She was frowning as she threaded herself into her pantyhose.

  ‘I don’t know. Curiosity? Don’t be antagonistic about it. He seems lonely, a bit cut adrift. What have we got to lose?’ And also because back home Boyle was a big name and they were not long enough away not to be flattered at his attentions.

  Their host had suggested a favourite restaurant in Chinatown. When the Langs arrived on the dot of 7.30 the others weren’t yet there. When they arrived ten minutes later, Boyle’s resemblance to the early Sydney Greenstreet was apparent to David too. It was the exotic backdrop, the ornate red and gold restaurant-Chinese archway framing them, which heightened the effect. Tonight Boyle was dressed in another creamy suit, a pink shirt and dark club tie, and his hair was slicked back in the thirties’ manner. His wife was as tall as he. Fiona Boyle was lean and sharply pretty and appeared twelve or fifteen years younger than her husband. In one circumspect paragraph the social pages had recorded their marriage, his third and her second, about two years ago. Toward Angela and David her manner was instantly affable and attractive. She moved fluidly to their table, chatting in a broad Australian accent as if she had known them for years and was grateful to come across them.

  Apologising for their lateness, Boyle announced, ‘We ran into Jim Dunlop in the hotel lobby. He asked me if I could get him a girl. I hope you don’t mind if they join us later?’