by Michele Lee
‘Former best friend by then,’ ‘you say. ‘And I’m not as bad as you. Like that time when you hosted a high school friend and her partner in your West Brunswick house. You said to them you were going to drive them to the airport for their early morning flight back to Canberra. Then, at 2 a.m., you went to that guy Eyebrow’s house to have sex – ew.’
‘Hang on! I left out the Yellow Pages, open at the taxi section, clearly marked.’
‘Funny. Real funny. Stop. Please. You’re too funny.’
‘Okay,’ I say, smiling tightly. ‘If you really want to know, I wasn’t thinking about Goose. I was thinking about family. I’ll miss them when I’m in Laos.’
You roll your eyes. On the Game Boy screen, a square block descends. You manoeuvre it into a spare slot, creating a complete row, which buzzes and disappears. You grin at yourself and then frown at me. You say, ‘You didn’t even remember Tsong’s birthday the other day.’
Tsong, one of my younger sisters, was born on the twenty ninth of August. It’s September now. I may have forgotten to wish her a happy birthday.
‘Okay. I wasn’t thinking about the family in Canberra, I was thinking about my family in East Brunswick.’
‘You mean Fuzzy? The housemate that you like?’
I pause. ‘You want the ‘truth’? The truth is that I was thinking about my work.’
‘In the government job? The one you take breaks from to have … ew. It’s so gross. You have sex with strange guys in empty buildings. What if he’s a rapist?’
Jesus. He’s a real estate agent, not a rapist. And I did that sex thing with him once. And I’ve made up for it staying back at work until 7 p. m. other nights. Photocopying scripts.
‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I wasn’t thinking about Goose or my family or work. I may have been constructing an email to –’
‘Jackie Winchester.’
‘Yes.’
‘If you send it, he’s not going to write back.’
Your eyes don’t move off the screen. When you’re done, you say ‘Yes!’ to indicate a high score. You leave without saying goodbye. I pick up the Game Boy. I haven’t played Tetris in a while but I hope I’m still as good and I hope I kick your know-it-all, fifteen-year-old arse.
Love,
Michele
On Friday morning, the day after God of Carnage, Husband hovers at my desk at work with urgent news.
‘Pole Dancer Naturopath Chick didn’t think the text message about having a threesome was funny.’
He surmises, somewhat shocked, that she likes him and does feel jealous about skanky ex-girlfriends. Thus he feels a bit embarrassed and a bit sheepish about the joke-text and I feel sheepish for encouraging him to have sent it. We should probably stop calling her Pole Dancer Naturopath Chick too. We haven’t said it to her face but we should probably stop defining her by the pole dancing and the stripping.
She’s a nice girl, Husband’s a nice guy.
He’s my friend and I should be good and supportive. I should be nice too. As a start, when I meet her tonight for the first time, I should now think of her as the Naturopath.
Being with Husband, as his girlfriend, was a good thing.
He was a friend to start with. He was an actor, me a playwright, and we were both low in the Theatre Land food chain. We were colleagues at the Malthouse Theatre, working in administrative roles. After hours, late into the night, I was seeing a guy called Wushu – he was trained in the martial arts practice called Wushu – and another guy called Organic Apple – he ate, yes, organic fruit – and they both wanted me to be their girlfriend and I wanted to um and ah about them. As Husband and I shared lunch in a Japanese restaurant nearby the Malthouse, he listened to my umming and my ahhing. The meat in the squid balls was so compacted that the balls sprang back when pricked with a fork. Husband offered me sympathy and good advice.
In August, having known each other for about half a year, Husband and I fucked; I initiated it with a text – So, blow job? Naturally, the step after a blow job is for the blow job recipient to move into your share-house. As it turns out, Husband was looking for a room and there was a room going at Albert Street. Given we were colleagues cum casual lovers cum sudden housemates, clearly the simplest thing to do was to continue having lots of sex covertly. After a few heady but exhausting weeks of this secret schedule, Husband emailed me an alternative proposal to ‘go out’ and for us both to stop seeing Organic Apples and Wushus and whomever else. I emailed him back, and we had a meeting in a pub about his proposal and I said yes to it. It was exhilarating to give up umming and ahhing for monogamy with Husband and being a couple. This was monumental: for the first time in my life, I shared utility bills and fridge space with a live-in boyfriend. My Husband, who made my soul feel better. Yes, ‘My soul feels better’ was what I said, as if at age twenty-six I’d stepped into a perfect temple and stood under a shaft of holy light, enlightened and expanded. ‘I have feelings of love towards you’ is what I had to tell Husband as I found myself upon his torso with my naked legs splayed, my heart juicy. Yes, ‘I love you, baby’ is what he had to say when he felt sure, words he didn’t use lightly yet words I fell into and threw around like party streamers. I bought him Thom Yorke’s Eraser. I muvved him.
Not all the time.
We crossed St Georges Road to go to the Pinnacle. I was mad with Husband about something inconsequential that had happened on one side of the street. As we crossed the road, he called out to me and asked me very seriously why I had become ‘moofy’ with him. The word was born. It made me smile, slow down, and made me not so moofy.
We added the word ‘moopy’ later, and then ‘muvvy’. Our language, our jokes. He got me, he got me off, he made me think, he made me laugh, and if he made me mad he chased me and was determined to make up with me or he let me simmer and let me determine when I’d make up with him. We’d met in Theatre Land and even after we stopped working together in Theatre Land we’d go to see shows in other theatres in Theatre Land, hand in hand. We’d do domestic things too. He cooked jumbo packets of fresh ravioli; I made stir-fries because I liked to have vegetables in my meals. We shared food or saved the other person leftovers in handy onemeal tubs. We talked so much, and even when he was tired I wanted to talk to him about everything inside my head. Then we slept, locked together like Lego. Summer passed, autumn came and he got a heater. We turned this on and we warmed up in front of its hot blasts, awaiting winter. And did my soul stay better?
I said it did. But I don’t know.
He did make me so bloody moofy because he was so bloody bolshie so bloody often. And as much as he might have joked about my Asian nature to save face, it was true, I found it hard to be openly frustrated. I clogged up with angry, dense thoughts and didn’t know how to release them.
‘I didn’t like that,’ I said, disproportionately tense, after witnessing a run-in between Husband and Fuzzy. I was on Fuzzy’s side.
‘It doesn’t have anything to do with you, baby.’
‘I was in the room.’
‘But it was between Fuzzy and me. And we’ve talked. And she’s fine with it. So I don’t know what your problem is.’
‘My problem is that you didn’t have to behave like that. I don’t understand why you didn’t just give her the remote control.’
Yes, that’s right. I was pissed off at him about his stoush with Fuzzy over the remote control. I couldn’t explain why I was mad so I did what I did best in times like this: I stomped off to my room to think meanie-pants thoughts about Husband and his behaviour. When I’d stewed enough, I knocked on his door and he let me in. I crawled into his bed, which had been the round table for our post-argument treaties throughout the preceding seasons.
I was nearly twenty-seven. Husband and I had been together for a year and we agreed to have an open relationship while I was overseas for five weeks. My trip included seeing Mee in Portland and meeting her young family for the first time. Fucking a man in San Francisco, curling up with one in New York. H
usband flirted with a girl in Melbourne, he had a drink with her and then invited himself to her home where he massaged her feet, and that was it. She didn’t want to have sex with someone in a relationship. When I left London – the middle part of my trip – the openness of my relationship with Husband had brought up the not-so-distant memory of being single and the intense thrills that came with it. I stayed a few days longer in Beijing, the last leg of my trip. This allowed me to celebrate an engagement party that my Beijing friends were having, wander around the ancient hutongs in central Beijing and also fit in a day trip to the majestic Great Wall. Husband accused me of staying longer out of ambivalence with our relationship. I pleaded on the phone until his tone softened. He relented but he warned me that things weren’t completely fixed until I came home. I was trying to talk myself into this, to shake the ambivalence, because I knew how spookily compatible Husband and I were, that we shared liberal views on polyamory and there were our Theatre Land outings and there was the ravioli and the chicken stir-fry and the walking into a temple sensation, feeling blessed and edified, and I knew if I tried, I really tried, I could be ready for a real Husband in a few years and our relationship would survive and would work. Muv must work.
Home in Melbourne, I visited his room – we still kept separate bedrooms. I wanted to chat, maybe hug. As I knocked and then turned the door handle, Husband stuck his penis back into his pants but didn’t have time to zip up his fly. I saw this. He saw me seeing. He greeted it with nonchalance.
‘Have you been masturbating?’ I asked.
He was in front of his computer monitor.
‘Yes,’ he said without apology.
Husband liked the standard off-the-shelf porn. Fake blondes with bulbous plastic tits and sloppy cunts eye-fucking the camera while some generic nugget-head banged her flaps silly. Husband didn’t need or want a storyline, a cerebral spark. When he wanted intimacy, he had me. But I’d been losing the loving feeling. My flaps weren’t shaved and my cunt wasn’t sloppy. It itched uncomfortably when Husband touched it. ‘You tell me when you want to have sex,’ he’d said, putting my needs and yeast infections first. I hadn’t told him because I didn’t want to fuck my boyfriend. So he was jerking off to a pair of last-resort phoney boobs.
Michele wasn’t horny.
I said, with clarity, ‘I want to break up.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes.’
I thought about the porn, not because I felt betrayed. It was a bland cliché that my boyfriend was seeking solace in porn because I, the distant girlfriend, was mentally far away and still not fully returned from my trip.
‘Okay,’ Husband said, as if we were talking about changing our internet provider. He was due to go on an acting tour in three weeks. And he was over fighting for me. He added, ‘Who’s going to move out?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘Are you going to move out?’ he repeated.
‘Wait,’ I mumbled. ‘Why should I move out? I’ve lived here longer.’
‘Okay, maybe I’m being too rash. But if you move out, I’ll do as much as I can to help you with the move. You’ve said that it might be time for a change.’
This was true. I’d been in the house for a long time, which gave me some legitimacy to be the kicker-out but also reason for a change. And Husband told me that the times when he’d been at his lowest were when he’d had to move house. What sort of person was I to kick out a man into possible mental health regression?
I didn’t say yes to moving out. Husband didn’t say no.
But when he came back from his tour, he found another place.
It’s going to get cold tonight when we’re at the Animateuring showcase.
‘I’m going home first,’ I say to Husband at work. ‘I want to put more clothes on.’
We’re waiting for his afternoon latte. Husband and I have already seen each other today on his 10:45 a.m. morning tea break and then at 1 p.m. for his lunch break. It’s Friday so he was in charge of lunch, which meant I put in a request for food from the Queen Victoria Market, which meant he went to the place that sells boreks.
‘I’m staying in the city,’ he says. ‘I’m going to meet the Naturopath for a drink.’
I nod. He’s shown me pictures she’s sent him. They don’t reveal her face but I do know what her breasts look like. ‘So I’ll see you at the VCA?’
‘Yes.’
He’s grinning.
I’m okay about meeting the Naturopath because I plan to be in opposition to her: I want to emphasise the difference, to make it sartorially obvious to anyone watching why I wasn’t a good match for Husband, why I broke up with him and why we’re better off as best friends. So there. That will be my alpha female way of greeting her. I’m told she’s very feminine, and I suspect she never gets mistaken for being a boy. I run out the door and wait at the tram stop for the 96. From a distance, I could easily pass as being a young man.
At the arts college, before the showcase starts, I meet the Naturopath. She walks in with Husband and she’s wearing a cherry-red trench coat, sashed at the waist, and calf-high boots over tight jeans. She has thick foundation on her pretty face and her eyelashes are held frozen in black curls by heavy mascara. She looks like a grown-up Nancy Drew: spritely but with a lot of makeup. My armour is ruched leggings and heels, and a flannel shirt on under a holey jumper. I dress as if I went shopping in a Flinders Lane boutique and then ran out of money and so foraged in a clothes bin to complete my outfit.
She smiles sincerely at me, masking her assessment of me or, possibly, not giving a shit about who is wearing what.
I see her again in the women’s toilet during the intermission. There’s another hour or so to go of the showcase, and I haven’t yet seen my friend’s piece.
‘It’s a bit quirky, isn’t it?’ she says about what we’ve just seen. ‘I mean, “quirky” isn’t the right word. But it was different. Interesting, some of it was really interesting.’
‘A lot of it was underdeveloped but I guess it’s just a showing.’
‘Yes, you’re right. I don’t see a lot of theatre. But this stuff, it isn’t what you might pay money to see.’
‘No. Not yet. They’re all at first draft essentially.’
She smiles. ‘Husband mentioned to me that you do theatre too. Is this the type of stuff you do?’
‘Not so much. I’m a playwright, I like using words.’
The hand-dryer blasts. I stick my hands under it. She places hers under another dryer, smiling, rolling her eyes apologetically about the noise.
‘But did you like it?’ she shouts. ‘I liked the one with the boxes. It was very pretty.’
After we exit the toilets, Husband is in the foyer and he’s ready to go, he’s done his duty having seen his friend’s piece, the one with the pretty boxes. He and the Naturopath leave into the night.
I stick around with Tambourine. My friend’s piece in the showcase is about … well, it’s primarily about a biblical character but there are a lot of things and ideas and modes of storytelling going on. It’s dizzying. Tambourine and I sneak out after it’s done.
‘The thing with Animateuring is that they get these people in who are trained and experienced in one area of theatre and then they’re supposed to direct, design, write and perform. I don’t think it works very well. At least not what we saw.’
That’s me talking, not Tambourine. She’s my equally aesthetically assimilated friend – she can do the gutter-glam look as well – but she’s not one for rants or monologues. We moved to Melbourne from Canberra within a week of each other. We both live northside. We have tattoos and generic asymmetrical haircuts from hairdressers in Fitzroy. We have a drink at a bar and then Tambourine says she’ll go home. She won’t come to the Croft as she’ll just be the third wheel. That’s where the Cub is right now for a birthday party.
The Croft brims with interchangeably fashionable hipsters, thin-legged and downcast. I dress the part too but I feel like a third wheel m
yself. Apparently the Cub’s on the top floor, in the gymnasium-themed room. It’s loud in there and dark. To help me search for him, I put on my new prescription glasses, the ones with the hot-pink frames, and I peer into the darkness, scanning the knot of bodies on the dance floor. I can’t locate him. I sit on an empty bench. Then the Cub is beside me, casually slick. He kisses me on the cheek.
‘Look, junkie vodka!’ he says, unlatching a briefcase he has with him. He shouts into my ear, over the music, and there’s a delay between what he says and what I hear and can decipher. I peer into the briefcase and see that he has a bottle of Absolut vodka inside it.
‘What’s the explanation for this, Cub?’
‘Pardon?’
‘I said what … your briefcase? What’s the explanation for it?’
‘What? Can you speak up?’
‘Tell me how you got the vodka.’
‘Yes?’
‘The vodka.’
‘Ah. The vodka. So I’m walking past all those gaming arcades, I get stopped by a junkie and he just, well, outright, while he’s high and as if he’s just robbed a shop –’
‘A what?’
‘A shop. As if he’d just done a job.’
‘A job?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I really can’t –’
‘I can’t hear you too.’ He leans in and says into my ear. ‘A junkie. On the street. Potentially on the run. He asks me, do I want to buy the vodka for twenty dollars? I said yes. I’ve been, yeah, I’ve been buying soft drinks all night, topping up my own drinks, undercutting the bar.’
I agree that it’s subversive and cost-efficient.
I go to the counter, the one with the grass growing on it, and order a Coke for $3.50 and return to the Cub, who sips out a quarter of the liquid and then clandestinely refills it with vodka.
We shout into each other’s ears about the week that’s been and how we’re going since we last saw each other. It occurs to me that this is a second date. It occurs to me that he is like a cuter, beefed-up version of Woody Allen.