by Michele Lee
I touched the Backpacker and he let my hand linger. We hugged.
Later, soothed, we cuddled by the murky water in St Kilda and he laughed at me.
‘I could see that you were trying so hard to prove your point. You really had it in for me. You were getting all high pitched. You were almost standing on your toes. You cutie.’
He thought it was funny, my attempts at standing up for myself. I thought it was funny too, in a way, but I noted that he didn’t say sorry or own up for his part in it. The least he’d done in the past was to acknowledge that other girlfriends had had a problem with the swiftness and intensity of his anger. Four years had passed yet not much had changed. He was cute. I was a cutie. Sometimes, with no warning, he got angry; I flailed.
I met up with the Backpacker, now by the murky Yarra. We were near the end of his trip, in which time we hadn’t fought again and he’d also been up to Queensland to see his other Australian ex and I’d spent a few days without him, missing him. We smoked the double-length joints he liked to roll, and when we were done we dropped the ashy butts into the grass. I told him about the review.
Corset had already rung to console me.
‘What review?’ I’d said.
‘You haven’t seen it?’
‘No.’
‘Shit, I thought you had.’
‘No. I haven’t. Why?’
‘Listen, don’t worry. Okay? The review’s over the top.’
‘How bad is this review?’
‘Bad.’
‘Oh.’
‘It focuses on you, the writer. It doesn’t say much else about the rest of the production.’
I’d walked from The Journal to the City of Melbourne library and asked for a copy of The Age. I’d flipped to the Metro Arts section and found the comedy festival reviews. I saw the one-star review of The Talking Vagina. Under the name of the play were the words ‘By Michele Lee’, the culprit playwright.
The Talking Vagina is sex farce at its most vanilla. A children’s book illustrator, Jessica, must contend with her talking muff, Frank. It’s a premise ripe with potential for situational comedy, especially since Frank sounds like a bogan from hell and has a mind of (his?) own.
Jessica’s new boyfriend, Edward, is initially repulsed, but soon becomes obsessed by Frank. And her boss, Mr Wong (played by a white actor in what is probably the most egregious Asian stereotype since Mickey Rooney’s performance in Breakfast At Tiffany’s), gets in on the action. Michele Lee needs to give her comic writing a sharper edge if she’s to succeed at satire, and her jokes and situations a galloping absurdity to make the grade at farce.
You can stick as many ‘fou-fous’, ‘minges’ or even ‘bearded clams’ in the script as you like, but unless they’re attached to a dynamic sense of camp, it will just come across as twee.
Yes, there was a Chinese man in my play. Yes, played by a white man. Not a political statement. Just a gag. The reviewer didn’t think that was funny, or any part of my play. I wouldn’t say it was a pretty bad review he’d given me, I’d say it was excoriating. Thankfully only a million or so people read The Age.
It’d be good to talk to the reviewer and explain myself, my stereotypes. I’d tell him: ‘The Talking Vagina isn’t a sex farce, it’s Michele Lee being an emerging Hmong playwright who’s trying on something different: telling a funny story about a speech-blessed vagina that dreams of using his voice to be a voiceover artist for this egregious Mr Wong’s DVD story about the Cultural Revolution that Jessica, the owner of the vagina, is illustrating using images of Australian wild fauna including a koala bear that looks like Chairman Mao. Two stars?’
The Backpacker listened very patiently. When he wasn’t being unpredictably overly sensitive, he was my biggest fan and always gave me his unquestioned support. After I was done, he told me his solution: the reviewer could get fucked. The Backpacker had seen The Talking Vagina and thought that it was very funny.
On his last night we ate Bimbo’s pizza and then moved next door to bloat up further on Vegie Bar cheesecake. The Backpacker wanted to do relaxing things at his favourite haunts. We finished up drinking beer back at Albert Street and inhaling more pot while sitting in the hammock, peaceful and lazy. Our eyes were droopy and our eyeballs veined but we were rested and well-fed, our Krav Maga fight a splotchy memory etched faintly in our time together.
He decided he wouldn’t move back to Melbourne: this trip had been useful for confirming that. He’d had a reunion and he’d realised he’d moved on from Melbourne. London was definitely his home. I thought of The Talking Vagina, my reunion with this second production. I’d moved on too. It didn’t matter so much about the review, that things were terse with Smoker Boots, that we disagreed on elements of the production, that I’d never congratulated him on opening night.
‘Don’t fuck Mr Wong,’ Smoker Boots had told me, in his role as director and guardian of the play. He didn’t want the show to be affected by this compulsion of mine to fuck.
‘I’m not going to fuck Mr Wong.’
And I didn’t. Jesus, I didn’t fuck everyone. Really.
Besides, the Backpacker had been here.
He hadn’t been impressed with my Theatre Land fucks or any other former men that we’d bumped into. And we’d bumped into a few. It seemed that Melbourne had contracted and the travel routes had drastically reduced. Men I hadn’t seen in years emerged. The Backpacker thought that a girl like me deserved better. Not that he was nominating a guy like himself, that he was slyly saying I should pack up and leave Theatre Land and the messy in-fucking for London – he’d never intimated that. Corset said that I should say something to him because you never know what the other person might confess to you.
The play was over. And then he was gone.
I saw him off at the SkyBus terminal. From Spencer Street, I caught the number 96 back home and I climbed into my bed alone. I had a cry even though he had told me sternly like father to child that I was not to be sad about him and I had told myself that often he was like the worst of fathers – recalcitrant and unapologetic – and I was mourning something that was over many years before. We’d had a light relationship when he was living here; it was kept carefree because of his visa expiring. Our time together had always had an end in sight for him and he had wanted fun times only, for us to be stunted in a honeymoon phase, a buttery summer fling.
I head to Elwood for dinner and on the tram I go down Brighton Road, passing the same billboard where the contentious self-defence classes had been advertised. The tram keeps going and a little while later I get off, but at the wrong tram stop and it takes me an extra hour to get to my friend’s house. I’m incredibly mad about this. I don’t like going south of the river and I certainly don’t like wandering around lost in its leafy streets. Luckily, after a soothing dinner of quinoa and eggplants, and sitting through bright holiday photos from Fiji, I get a lift home: one of the other dinner guests is in Brunswick too and has driven.
Slim calls me but at 3 a.m. I’m deep asleep so I don’t answer. And, I have to reiterate, I really don’t fuck everyone. Besides, he’s from Bellingen and he’s only in town visiting, and most of the people I know and like live in Melbourne and on the northside. In Melbourne you pick your side – north or south – and you stick with it.
Goose is Northcote; Tambourine in Fitzroy.
Husband’s in East Brunswick, around the corner from me, and about to live further north in Reservoir when he moves into the apartment that his parents have helped him buy.
Orlando. I met her in Theatre Land, in Melbourne, five years ago when I was doing my premiere theatre shows at RMIT and meeting northside people like Corset. Orlando, like me, loves Brunswick and is very much a Brunswick Girl, with the Blundstones and vegetarian food and communal living to go with it.
The day after my Elwood dinner, I’m gloriously strolling through the tram-friendly heart of my beloved Brunswick. It’s a busy Sunday and I walk up Sydney Road and then down Moreland Road to see Orla
ndo. She has cooked me a farewell lunch to wish me well on my trip to Laos.
‘Pinky!’ She greets me at the door with my Theatre Land nickname. She kisses my cheeks. ‘I’m so glad to see you before you head off!’
She’s prepared dhal and a coconut okra dish, and served this with a homemade side of pickled bananas. She grins Cheshire cat-like as we exchange stories and update one another. I like our girl talk. She’s serenely single so it’s hardly a conversation where we swap locker-room notes but she finds a lot to dissect in my stories; she listens keenly, seeing the crux of the story, hidden absurdities or little telling human details that other people pass over. She gives me a container of curry to take home and hands me the remaining okra too. She tells me I’ll have a use for them.
Robot Girl. She’s in North Carlton. I met her in Theatre Land too. She was in my first play in Melbourne, as a robot prostitute. She’s originally from the woggy ’burbs of Melbourne, and that lineage is present in her costume jewellery and high-heeled boots.
She has a clothes swap at her house that afternoon. I bring frittata to share, not the okra Orlando gave me, and I bring Goose. It’s good that I do, as the clothes greatly outnumber the afternoon tea guests. Also, I think that as long as we don’t dwell too much on her boy stories or my conquests, we’re genuinely reconciled. The sofa in Robot Girl’s living room gets draped high with clothes emptied from garbage bags and – in one person’s instance – a suitcase. We circle the mountainous pile so many times until items that we initially reject, and then reject another three or four times, become palatable. I protest and resist because I’m going overseas and I’m not supposed to be collecting more from this junk-heap than I brought to swap. I surrender though, in the spirit of the afternoon, and I take home at least one too many black T-shirts. Goose has no qualms in giving in to unnecessary acquisitions. Flush-cheeked with clothes swap pride, Goose comes back to my place to pick up extra clothes, items she’d stashed before I could bring them to the swap. Then she heads off, a half-hour walk to Northcote, with lots of new clothes and an ethnic-looking beaded necklace that looks like the many other ethnic-looking necklaces she already owns.
That night, I sit in front of my laptop and like a good Asialink-funded resident I courteously email my host in Laos: I remind him that I’ll be in Vientiane very soon. Only three weeks to go and I’m very excited to be working with him. I give him my exact date and time of arrival.
And I do it, I write the email to Jackie Winchester that I’ve been writing in my head.
hi jackie winchester,
i hope your nose has been recovering and when unveiled from the bandages, people will gasp at the beauty. and i hope sorting out the move to melbs is going ok.
look i’ve been wondering whether to email you or not, whether we’d just be beating the same dead horse all over again. but then i sorted stuff out with ol backpacker and so i thought it might be good to give you an explanation.
so i’ve been off google street. i’m getting more work done and i don’t think it’s good for me to have chats with you. ever since i got back from auckland and put the not-so-heavy heavy on you about the potential of 2010, things went a bit pear-shaped with our dynamic. i thought i’d be cool, i thought it was probably inevitable anyway, you thought it’d be easy enough for me to get cool, i did too, but when i have time away from our conversations, i reflect on our little thing and i still feel uneasy about it. i feel like the ‘whirlwind’ you described me as. but it’s not some unexplained whirlwind.
i haven’t been in this situation before: rejected in this way. that is, where someone purposely says and does emotionally loaded things with me to build an intimacy because they’re lonely and want to be entertained and want to feel wanted and then they back away from what they’ve helped create, and they say ‘look, i only saw you face-to-face for 6 or 7 nights’ to downplay things. but i think i’ve been ‘you’ before. i think i’ve jumped headfirst into a new relationship straight out of another one, got pepped up, talked myself into the idea of a new thing and as soon as i agreed to get serious again and i trialled it, i flipped out and ditched the dude. so i kind of know where you’re coming from. and yet, i think i stop short of full empathy with you. it might be a convenience for me to paint you as the dodgy guy, but i don’t know.
maybe it’ll be nice to see you when you get into town, i’m not sure. i think i’d see you and all these negative feelings would emerge, and we’d have this tense, unfulfilling coffee (well, i’d be drinking tea or a dandelion drink). so, i have your t-shirt right? maybe it’s best that i drop it off at one of your mates’ places. your mate floyd lives in fitzroy. my mate lives there too. let me know floyd’s address.
hmm, that sounds sort of final. but if we’re supposed to hang out, then things will conspire to get us into the same coffee/tea/ dandelion joint.
michele xx
Monday morning, I check my email. Nothing. I go to work. I check my email.
Nothing.
I meet with my manager and I go through things that I’m finalising before my four-month absence. She tells me that she’s not worried, I have things in order. And what’s not in order will survive unattended.
I check Gmail.
Nothing.
I edit a publication about traffic offences. I type my handover notes. I have an afternoon break and go downstairs to the cafe with Husband. Flipping through a newspaper, Husband comments on Gary John Riddle, a convicted child sex offender who attended a school ball in Geelong. Husband gets a latte and tells me how boring the media response is to paedophilia. Husband has been doing research for a one-man show about modern monsters, and what he’s unearthed on the internet is much more colourful.
That night I drink wine in Carlton, after work. I drink with Goose, who’s showing off her clothes swap wardrobe; the next night with the Cub. We’re at Markov, where the wine is twice as expensive as the beer and the beer is already more expensive than it is at the Irish pub across the road.
‘When did you start coming to wine bars?’ the Cub asks.
‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘It’s a grown-up thing to do. Don’t you think?’
I hadn’t thought about it.
He continues: ‘There must be an age when you start coming to these places.’
We cross the road and go to the Nova to watch The September Edition. It’s a documentary about American Vogue and its all-powerful editor, Anna Wintour. Her face is birdlike and pretty, and she’s looking well preserved for someone who might be in her fifties, but most of the time she looks like she might just be about to get very annoyed with you.
‘It’s like the doco just ended,’ the Cub says afterwards, as we walk down Elgin Street to catch the number 96.
I agree with him. ‘I don’t think she gives much away.’
There were interviews with Anna Wintour but I got the sense that she is never candid, even when she is talking to the camera or allowing it into her office and her home.
I wonder if I’m candid, how well I hide things. Back in my room, on my mattress, the Cub settles his body on top of me in his well-fitting crush. We curve and undulate in the dungeon. He says he’d like to get into an elite arts academy in Europe. I’ve seen his pencil illustrations, lifelike but lacking precision in their detail. There’s room for improvement, a reason for going to an arts academy. In the interim, while he is still an IT helpdesk aide, he says he’d like to leave Richmond and live northside too – he’s picking his side.
We sleep. And in the morning while he stays asleep, I check my email.
Check.
No reply.
Work, work. Work. Home. Dinner.
I visit the neighbours in the evening, a family with primary-school-aged children and a Labrador, and I talk about going to Laos and going to London and America after that. We drink white wine from a bottle opened from some other night. They wish me well, wistful about my youthful adventures but not envious; they confess to me that they’re conservatives w
hen it comes down to it and the wife mentions her younger brother, well into his thirties, who is adventurous like me and isn’t yet married. Imagine that. I go home and I call Barnacle for a late-night fuck. He’s my longest casual sex partner but no one in his universe has ever met me and no one in my universe has ever met him.
‘Don’t be a poof,’ I say on the phone. ‘Just come over. Sleep on the plane.’
‘I’m leaving at 3:30 a.m.’
‘Well, you better get here soon.’
Barnacle has worked in the same computer games company for the last twelve years. He owns his own house in Abbotsford and every year he takes annual leave and goes on a holiday. This year it’s Africa. He’s well into his thirties, he’s not particularly wild but he’s never even been close to marriage. He comes over so we can say bon voyage to each other; I push him onto my mattress and he lets me mount him. He’s gone by midnight and he must be soaring over an ocean by the time I wake up.
And I check.
Nothing.
Fuck.
It’s Friday now, another week gone. I catch the number 96 in to work; I’ve got my mini backpack with me, and in that some basic toiletries, and a couple of outfits and changes of underwear. After work I’m going to fly to Canberra for Family Time this weekend.
The Cub works in his IT helpdesk job in a skyscraper on Elizabeth Street. I imagine him in some anonymous room, counselling offsite employees about their computer failures, and every now and then the shy girl in accounts tries to catch his eye. I feel shy myself, clumsily bringing him a treat early in the morning, like a schoolgirl trying to impress her favourite teacher. He doesn’t ask me for an explanation about the cupcakes and brownie I’m bearing, and because he’s so happy to be given dessert at 9:15 a.m. he starts eating immediately. I accept a thank you kiss on my schoolgirlish cheek and he wishes me well in Canberra. I don’t mention who else I fuck and who else has eaten my cupcakes.