Her Ovidian fascinations did make me think sometimes that when she did fall in love it would be dramatic and intense and that she would embrace the role. The role? The surrender to feeling, when it finally came. Of course I had no idea that when it did come it would be like it was.
The excitement that had been there around the trip before George’s death was muted now, but Ingrid’s restlessness grew. The stillness that had characterised her when she had first arrived had been replaced by a kind of constant, subtle, internal agitation. She was always running her hand up and down her arm. She even tried smoking cigarettes.
The days of being at the house around her and Ralph and Eve had made me tired of her company and more solidly jealous of her relationship with Ralph than before. Ralph was sunk pretty deep in quiet most of the day, watching daytime TV and reading, and when he did snap out of it and look up from what he was doing it was her he watched, anxiously. She seemed aware of it for the first time. I left them each night sitting together on the couch in the little TV room upstairs, her legs curled up on the seat beside her.
By the time Ingrid left, two weeks after the funeral, Ralph was doing better. No more daytime TV. He spent a lot of time on one of his final essays for class that was extremely overdue; his teacher had given him a long extension because of his father’s death but he was pushing the limits of it. He was back at the Kings Cross flat more frequently, always reading at the kitchen table, a giant stack of library books in front of him that seemed to grow by the day. It was something to do with Malory; or it began that way. His latest addition to the stack of books when I stopped by on my way to work was an ominously large collection of titles on Freud and Carl Jung. The retreat into books and the essay appeared at first to be his way of withdrawing himself from Ingrid before she went away, so that her absence when it came would be less painful. But the essay dragged on after she left and his absorption in it became an even more intense kind of distraction. He looked terrible, his stubble grown into an uneven kind of short beard, and the laundry room in the flat was piled with clothes. He came into the store regularly when I was working, but would stand there moodily, elbows on the counter, not watching whatever I was playing on the video machine. Or he would bring one of his books and sit in the back reading it, scribbling on little Post-it notes he would then stick in the pages. Every now and again he would look up and bring me slowly into focus.
‘Venice. What’s the weather like this time of year anyway?’ he would ask. Or, ‘What did you like about Rome? Where did you stay, again?’ Or, with his Jung book in hand, ‘If you were an archetype, what would you be?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Go on, pick one.’
‘You pick one.’
He eyed me critically. ‘Alice in Wonderland. The Lady of Shalott.’
‘That’s not an archetype. And those are two completely different things.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘What about you?’ I asked once.
‘Peter Pan,’ he said brusquely, and got back to reading.
I tried to be patient.
Then one night he didn’t come when I was expecting him, and I was relieved. A cute customer struck up a conversation with me and I found myself wishing he would ask for my phone number. I thought about giving him a card from the little stack on the counter, but I would have had to have written my name and my own phone number on it, which seemed a bit laborious and desperate. The phone rang and it was Ralph, calling to tell me that he had finished the essay. He wanted to go out and celebrate. His voice sounded different and I realised how much I had missed the humour in it since George had died.
The good-looking customer had picked up a card of his own accord and held it in his hand. I smiled at him and took it and wrote my name and phone number on it and gave it back without thinking much. ‘See you,’ he said and left with his French movie with subtitles.
Ralph didn’t answer my knock. I waited. I tried the handle after a minute and it opened. He was there on the couch, asleep. Ingrid’s abandoned collection of guidebooks lay scattered on the coffee table. The stack of library books was gone from the kitchen table and now sat in two tall piles next to the front door. The kitchen table itself was strewn with papers and something that looked like an essay with a cover sheet, neatly stapled. It was about 1:30 am. His face was unbearably unguarded in sleep, dark hollows under the eyes, sadness not quite wiped away. I stepped back out the door.
A few days later the library books were all gone and the guidebooks were gathered together low on the bookshelf against the wall. The weekend papers were on the coffee table. Ralph’s face was covered in tiny cuts.
‘Never let me go that long without shaving again,’ he said. ‘I can hardly stand to go out like this. Is it cold outside?’ He looked out the window. ‘I haven’t been out for days.’
We went over to Kirribilli for lunch. Eve had bought a roasted chicken from the local deli and made a salad. She and Ralph bickered the whole afternoon with no real enthusiasm until she seemed to just run out of steam. She showed us her postcard from Ingrid proudly – a collection of panoramas of Venice. Ralph was sullen. There was no card for him.
We got back into what felt something like old routines. I don’t think I was naive about it; I hadn’t expected things to go back to being exactly the way they had been before Ingrid had come along. And there was a lot to like about the way things were with her around. I missed Ralph’s showy cleverness around her, his extra efforts, which weren’t turned on for me nearly as much. I missed Ingrid herself and her catching enthusiasm. Ralph was happier than he had been a couple of weeks earlier, but he didn’t have the brightness he had once had, when I’d first met him, and it was impossible to distinguish between the effects of grief over his father and missing Ingrid. He was cross with me at times, never really sharp, but snappy. I began to look forward to her return.
She called early one morning.
‘I’ve called you once or twice,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t reach you.’
She hated leaving messages on answering machines. I’d overheard her try to do it once or twice; she went on and on without getting around to what she was trying to say, talking until the machine cut her off.
‘Everything’s fine,’ she said now. ‘I just wanted to say hi. I miss you all!’
‘Ingrid, it’s really early here.’
‘Oh, sorry, sorry, I can’t ever get that right.’
‘That’s OK. I was awake. How was Venice?’
‘You were? Venice – so great, beautiful, I’m so glad I came. Julia, I have to tell you – I’m in love.’ She sounded very serious.
I smiled. ‘I’m really happy for you.’
‘Thank you.’
Her voice grew very quiet suddenly, a fault in the line, disappearing into the miles between here and there.
‘Hello?’
‘… a friend of Maeve’s.’
‘Sorry, I didn’t hear you.’
‘What? Oh, I was telling you about Gil. Gil Grey.’
‘He’s a friend of Maeve’s?’ It was hard to put Maeve, with her dark plumage and smooth walk, together with any of the young, easy, nicely accented types I had imagined for Ingrid’s holiday romance.
‘Yeah, from New York.’ Her voice was swallowed up again into silence. It came back in suddenly. ‘… in Florence, a palace!’
‘I can’t hear you. Something’s wrong with the line.’
‘Oh, too bad. Look, I’m in Florence, I’m staying here a week longer and I’ve changed my tickets.’
‘OK, that sounds great.’
‘Can you tell Ralph?’ ‘Tell him what?’
‘I’m staying longer?’
‘Why don’t you call him?’
‘I’ve tried Eve’s place …’
‘OK, OK. Have fun.’
‘I can’t wait to tell you about it.’
‘Bye.’
‘Ciao, ciao!’
I fell back to sleep almost immediately and woke up
when the phone started ringing again. I reached down to pick up the receiver from the table next to my bed but there was noone there, just a dial tone that gave way to a long beep, beep. The ring had been a dream. It rang again, for real this time. I had a strong idea that it would be Ingrid again, and a feeling of dread came over me. It rang and rang. I answered it. It was Ralph.
‘Are you just waking up? It’s late!’
‘I’m awake, I’m awake.’
‘Yeah. Sure.’
‘Ralph, Ingrid called me.’
‘Really? When? Is everything OK?’
‘Fine, she’s just staying a week longer.’
‘Oh, alright. She’s going to miss the start of classes.’
My fingers felt clammy against the phone.
‘I suppose she’ll get here just in time for that. She said that she’s in love.’ ‘Oh.’
‘With some friend of Maeve’s.’
‘Ohhh. I wonder who.’
‘Some guy called Gil.’ ‘Well, well.’
‘I sort of thought that something like that would happen.’
‘It would, wouldn’t it?’
We were both quiet. He said goodbye. Seconds later the phone rang again and I picked it up right away. It was Ralph again.
He laughed. ‘I’m an idiot, I forgot what I was calling you about. Before.’ He wanted me to come to the bookshop with him to buy books for class. We were taking one together: Post-War German Film.
I lay back down. The next thing I knew Ralph was standing in my doorway. He said something in French and I recognised the word for sleep.
‘Merde,’ I said.
He closed the door and sat down on the bed and looked at the floor. The sun was high in the sky and my room felt airless, the window closed. I sat up, legs crossed on the bed. I was wearing a short cotton dress, yellow and white, that I liked to sleep in. It had a small hole near the hem. Had I been wearing it the day before? I shook my head. It wouldn’t come clear. Ralph reached over – slowly, it seemed – and put his hand on my bent knee. I rose then, onto my knees, and put my arms around his neck, my head buried into his shoulder. We pressed ourselves together. His breath moved in and out, ragged like mine.
I struggled with an image – a picture in my mind of my dress lifted over my head, my arms stuck for a second, bound above my head as the dress caught. I closed my eyes. The room was all air, and then none, a vacuum, a knot of space.
He put his hand up to my hair, smoothing it away from my forehead. His face was bleak. He smiled. ‘Get dressed,’ he said.
I got up and went to the shower. When I came back he was sitting up on the bed with his back against the wall, ankles crossed neatly, reading a novel he had picked up from the floor. He kept reading it as I dropped the towel from around myself, dropped the dress I had been wearing earlier, and picked clothes out from the dresser. The yellow dress lay crumpled on the floor. I opened my wardrobe and took out a skirt. I stole a look at his mouth, thin and relaxed, as he read. For a second it took everything to stay standing up straight and not buckle over, a big dent right in my middle like a bent piece of tin. I wondered absently if this was what it felt like to be hit in the stomach. I pulled on my skirt and a long turtleneck.
We walked down the hill to the bookshop and bought our books. We must have talked on the way and when we were there – I can see his face now, against the shelves, pointing out a title to me and raising his eyebrows in an ‘as if?’ kind of look. He picked out two of all our texts and took them to the counter and paid for them.
‘Merci,’ I said.
‘De rien,’ he replied. It was all French that day for some reason.
6.
I first saw Ingrid after she got back from her trip in a class we were taking together, a course in the English department on the classics and English literature that I was taking to fill a requirement. She caught my eye across the room; Ralph was there next to her, looking tired and cross. We all went to eat lunch together afterwards. She was wearing a new shirt in a deep blue like a madonna’s dress, with tiny pleats. Her tan was more obvious than ever next to Ralph and me after our wet Sydney winter.
She told me about Gil Grey.
‘Well, he’s an old friend of Maeve’s. He used to be a partner in her gallery, you know. But you know who introduced us? Your aunt’s dealer! Keith – I saw him there in one of the rooms, at the Biennale, and remembered meeting him at her house with you that time – and he was with Gil. I would have met him anyway because of Maeve, but it was Keith, after all.’
Ralph stared off into the distance. He had probably heard it already.
‘Anyway – Gil was there in Venice with his daughter, Fleur. She’s an artist – like, a child prodigy.’
‘How old is she?’ I asked.
‘Thirteen.’
‘And they were going to the Biennale too?’
‘No – yes – well, she was showing there.’
‘She was showing her art there?’
‘It’s amazing, isn’t it? She paints these incredible abstract paintings – she’s famous! She was famous when she was four years old. Her finger paintings – they’re real art.’
Ralph hadn’t spoken yet. ‘It’s true,’ he said now, stifling a yawn. ‘Eve knows all about her, through Maeve, I suppose. She was a kind of prodigy.’
‘But she’s not doing finger painting now?’ I asked.
Ingrid pursed her lips. ‘Well, her paintings that I saw all had some finger painting in them. It was hard to tell. Not just finger painting though – something else too.’
‘And Gil runs the gallery with Maeve?’ I asked.
‘Well, no. He was part of it initially. He’s a dealer now. But he’s really a collector. He collects art.’
I wondered how old he was.
‘We walked through Venice for days. And Florence. It’s so beautiful.’
Ingrid’s face was radiant. I looked down at my plate of lasagna from the caféteria and picked at it and remembered the good food in Rome.
Ralph pushed his plate away with an irritated motion. He hadn’t eaten much. ‘Why did you get the vegie burger?’ I asked him. ‘They’re always so bad. Can I eat your chips?’
He shrugged and lit a cigarette.
‘When did you start smoking Camels?’ I asked. He offered me one and I turned it down. Give him a few days, I thought. He’s happy she’s back. But I really couldn’t tell whether he was or not.
Ingrid studied even harder that semester than she normally did, while Ralph and I seemed to get slacker at our work. She was taking advanced Ancient Greek and lugged around enormous reference books and grammars. She stopped by the video store less often and didn’t stay as late at the university bar on weeknights; she came out with us to parties on the weekend sometimes and seemed even less interested in men than she had been previously. Ed was still trying hard with her every so often, over at Kirribilli for lunch, taking her out to see potential cars to buy and giving her the occasional driving lesson.
‘You know she had this big romance in Venice?’ I asked him at a party one night. We were smoking in the backyard and Ingrid was inside, drinking a vodka drink in a bottle. I had one too. It tasted like lemonade and had some faux-Russian name.
Ed looked dispirited. ‘Yeah, I know, I know. The artist from New York.’
‘He’s not actually an artist,’ I corrected him.
‘Oh, whatever, art collector, artist, dealer. I’m sure he was really great. And really smart. Fuck him.’ He finished his bottle of beer and looked around for somewhere to toss it. ‘American wanker. Old enough to be her father.’
Ralph came over to us then looking a little unsteady. He had taken a thin line of speed in my car just before we had arrived at the party, and it wasn’t a drug he handled well. I hadn’t wanted it, hating the jittery paranoia that it brought.
‘Please tell me you’re not talking about Grey,’ he said.
Ed looked at me and didn’t say anything. Ralph handed him a beer. ‘Good.’<
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A few candles in glass jam jars were scattered around on the ground and the night was dark. It was a small yard, dead brown grass under our feet. Two guys I recognised from art history classes were trying to get a fire going in a metal garbage bin near the fence. Another guy came up and argued with them about the merits of wasting a cheap bottle of whisky to get it started and whether that would even work. ‘I’ll drink it!’ ‘There’s heaps of beer!’ ‘Well, where’s the lighter fluid then?’
‘Let’s go inside,’ I said, and Ralph and Ed followed me in.
Ed stuck with me that night. He made a pass at me an hour or so later and I found it strangely annoying. Moments beforehand he had been still complaining about Ingrid.
‘Look, I like you, Julia,’ he said, after I’d pushed his hand away from my breast.
‘I like you too, Ed.’
He was staring over somewhere away from me. I wondered if I had been too quick to get annoyed. He was wearing a polo shirt that had North Shore written all over it, but somehow he wore it with style. His face started to lose its set, frustrated expression as I looked at him. I wanted to reach out and smooth his troubled brow. The moment passed.
He folded his arms. ‘You’ll have no luck with Ralph, you know,’ he said. He met my eyes with a bitter expression. It felt like a low blow, just as he had meant it to be.
‘I don’t want to be your fucking consolation prize,’ I said.
It cut through to something.
‘You might see it that way, Julia. No-one else would.’
Somehow that hurt me more than anything, and the sad reluctance in his voice. I walked away.
Ralph was arguing with Ingrid in a room off the hallway as I left. She looked bored. I’d never seen them argue before. It was a long walk home to my own house.
I didn’t see Ralph and Ingrid argue any more but there was a tension between them every now and again that grew more frequent. Ralph spent less time at the Kirribilli house than he had before. I got another job, at the second-hand bookshop across the road from the video shop, and worked there every Saturday, cutting down to just a couple of shifts at Videomania. I found that I liked it. It made Ralph incredibly happy. Every time he came in for the first few weeks I worked there, he would launch into the routine from The Big Sleep again. ‘Would you happen to have a Ben-Hur, 1860?’ If I felt like it, I would go along.
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