Forty-Seventeen

by Frank Moorhouse

  It then occurred to him that it might be related to his hepatitis attack.

  His liver specialist was bemused by the question. ‘Yes, but I am a liver specialist.’

  The doctor pondered it. ‘It is possible that the liver which controls the flow of oestrogen into the body and out of the body could be affected by hepatitis. Maybe an over-supply of oestrogen.’

  His meeting with Belle, the self-proclaimed slut of all times, confirmed that his libido was ailing. Her allure no longer called to him across great distances, and desire for her no longer fell upon him like a fully armed woman jumping from a tree.

  ‘What is up with you?’ she said, after they’d finished a rather underpowered lovemaking.

  ‘I’m not full on,’ he said.

  ‘I can tell that.’

  ‘I’m suffering from an over-supply of oestrogen. From my hepatitis.’

  ‘You’re turning into a woman?’

  ‘No, not quite.’

  ‘You were erect but you lacked a certain follow-through, a certain zing.’

  ‘Maybe it’s turning forty. Maybe the books lie. It’s cruel.’

  ‘Oh come on – if it’s from your hepatitis it’ll pass. But tell me, what is being forty “like”?’

  He told Belle what being forty is ‘like’.

  You finally accept that you cannot drink a cup of hot take-away coffee and drive a car at the same time.

  You doubt that you will ever go to a ‘party’ again. Parties cease to be events of unlimited possibility.

  You realise that you have spent forty years raising the child within you.

  You find your ex-wife dying of cancer, that another friend has a noticeable lump on his face but you do not refer to it.

  You read your CV with a comfortable curiosity to find out ‘what you really are’. You run through your credentials and life experiences to remind yourself that you have ‘fully lived’. You find yourself sitting in a bar reading your passport reminding yourself of the world you’ve seen, about which you seem to recall so little.

  You have a feeling that it’s too late to bother a psychiatrist with your problems, too late to reconstruct yourself, that you have now to live it out. And you have a feeling that a psychiatrist wouldn’t think it worth wasting time on you – too little life left to live usefully.

  You have an urge to close up your life for a year and go to the seaside and re-read all the important books of your life; feeling that maybe you didn’t read them properly when younger or that you would ‘get more from them’ now. Or that you have forgotten too much of them.

  You find that expressions like ‘doing what you like’ and ‘being nice to yourself’ are traps which answer nothing very much. Respite can only follow volatility of human interaction, stress and friction are part of life, and anxiety a fairly predictable background to a dangerous and uncertain world.

  The excesses of life are too easily achieved, are not heroic, and yield less and less. You realise that the better pleasures are ‘managed’, structured, carefully sculptured from a won life.

  The past becomes closer, as you yourself have a history. Being forty gives you an understanding of what ‘forty years’ is in time, how close that is. Something that happened say fifty years before you were born becomes dramatically closer.

  You see sleep as ‘part of life’, not time wasted or something you ‘do too much of’. You learn to enjoy sleep. You see your dreams as an interesting part of living.

  You realise the huge distance between written descriptions of biographical detail and the density of conflict and despair which lies in the minutes and hours of those biographical descriptions. That success is always disputed, qualified by self-doubt and challenged by the ever-changing hierarchy of following generations. The formal moments and rewards of success usually come after the desire for those formal moments and rewards has passed.

  You have days where the repetition of nail-cutting, hair-cutting, teeth-cleaning, arse-wiping, and the ever-present deterioration of self and the material world about you, tires you beyond belief.

  You still sometimes hope for a dramatic opening in your life, for your life to alter course after meeting someone, after receiving a letter. You sometimes wish to feel the dramatic upheaval, renovation and certainty of blind conversion.

  You realise that you’ve never really got your life together. That there are parts of your life always in disarray, things not properly completed, living arrangements which could be improved, life practices which could be improved. You feel at times that you need to delimit your life so as to live a more reduced life more perfectly.

  You notice that fragments of past night dreams, fragments of travel, inconsequential fragments of past relationships, childhood, begin to intrude or drift across your consciousness with no discernible pattern or meaning, perhaps with an intimation of insanity, derangement.

  You realise that you have been ‘homeless’ most of your life, living in other people’s houses, in camps, in motels, in hotels. You have camped in life.

  With regret you realise that no person with a system of knowledge is going to release you from intellectual dilemma. No book will now come along to seriously alter your life. You feel that you have a fair grasp of the current limitations of knowledge and reason, and the necessary, compromising uses of faith. You recognise that your personal, unstable formulations are held without much confidence to stave off the sands of chaotic reality, that a refinement might take their place but you also fear that the rational shoring might one day give way entirely. You are daily made aware of how little reason and knowledge altered the course of affairs.

  After coming to terms with the imperfect self it is then necessary to come to terms with the imperfect world, to calculate how much of the imperfection of self and the world you have to accommodate without restlessness, without engaging in ineffective efforts to change, efforts which are more protest and despair than hoped-for interventions. What parts to find unacceptable, to bewail, to retaliate against. How much evil to live with. How much mess. To calculate the ‘unchangeable’.

  As well as the demands of being a loving person, from which you constantly fall short, you have to live with recrudescence of love for lovers lost, who come alive unannounced in your mind, dreams. Call to you. You find you cry over spilt love.

  You learn that most things require a proper time for their performance for the thing to be savoured, to be performed with gratification. Including shopping.

  You strive to keep all conversations exploratory and all positions negotiable and to avoid people who push conversation into competitiveness, or make you insecure or over-defensive, or cause you to perform poorly intellectually. Some people jam your mind and lower its quality of performance. Some people raise this performance.

  You realise that nothing is really forgotten or lost to the mind, simply that access to the memory bank became erratic.

  You read reports and letters written many years before and realise that you’d known much that you no longer consciously know. You hope that it is working for you in your chain of reasoning which stretched back twenty-five years.

  The secret of negotiation is to break the deal into many smaller, tradeable parts.

  You wonder if omens are unconsciously formed patterns made from myriad inputs and then erupting as signals, warnings, cautions, guidelines, messages – self-planted, self-addressed, but given this form for urgent dramatic revelation.

  You are unable to determine whether you have led the richest of lives or the most miserable and deformed of lives.

  ‘Well,’ Belle said, ‘is that all? Is that all you’ve learned?’

  ‘What is sad,’ he said, ‘is that I’ve learned some of these things more than once.’

  ‘I think I’ll wait until I have to learn some of those lessons,’ she said.

  ‘Oh they come along in time, when they are no longer of much use.’

  Delegate

  It was at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna that
he first glimpsed the face of his seventeen-year-old girlfriend in the face of his seventy-year-old co-delegate, Edith.

  The face of his seventeen-year-old appeared through the distortion of the double glass of a showcase there in the museum. The distortion came from seeing through both sides of the glass case, the angle of vision, too, maybe – and maybe the aura of the liturgical objects or whatever, who knows? – this together with his yearning for his girlfriend, all went to create her face, perfectly but fleetingly. Edith then moved and came around the other side of the showcase and her face returned to being that of the seventy-year-old and the girl was gone.

  ‘Go back around the other side of the case, Edith,’ he asked, prepared though for the illusion to be exposed the second time around.

  ‘Why?’ she asked, going back at his bidding anyhow. ‘Here?’

  He bent down again and squinted at her through the double glass, but it was no good. Something wasn’t there.

  ‘How long must I remain here?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s all right, that’s it.’

  ‘What was all that about?’ she asked, coming back to where he was.

  ‘There was an optical distortion,’ he said, ‘it pleased me. I could see you as a young girl – you looked very girlish.’

  ‘Would that one could always move, then, in a glass showcase.’

  ‘I think it was the magic coming off …’ he glanced at the label in the showcase, ‘the second-century glass liturgical vessel.’

  They moved listlessly through the museum. He stared unseeingly at the objects, the other floors had dazzled him into apathy. Edith tried to make notes which would keep all that she was seeing and half-seeing fresh and organised in her crowded mind.

  In this his fortieth year he had planned to visit Spain with the young girl – well, she was no longer seventeen, except in a master frozen frame of his multiple visions of her. But she had ‘fallen in love’ and was unable to make the trip with him. Instead he found himself as one of the team at the IAEA General Conference along with Edith.

  At the beginning of her Grand Tour the girl had written, ‘I wish you were here with your hip flask of brandy and crooked talk.’ But a second card had come, ‘I have fallen in love.’

  He wished so badly that she was there with him in Vienna with her carefully worded assertions, her nicely judged quotations, all so newly won from her thinking and study – and he yearned for the physical intoxication she could bring to him.

  ‘You seem glum,’ Edith said.

  ‘Too much history. Human race too old.’

  At breakfast without his glasses he was again pierced by the young girl’s image crossing Edith’s old face as she entered the breakfast room after a night’s rest. But as she came into focus, the suggestion of the girl went and it was the seventy-year-old who sat down.

  Edith went straight into the jam, cold cuts and cheese. She had a youthful appetite.

  He too began to eat. Why was it that in Austria he enjoyed the Austrian breakfast, in the US the US breakfast, in France the French breakfast, yet back home he didn’t eat breakfast?

  He asked Edith whether she had a theory about it.

  ‘No …’ she said, wary of his teasing, ‘no, I have no theory on that.’ And then she added, ‘That I know of.’

  ‘Changes of habitat require different diets. Maybe we’re symbolically eating the prey of the country we’re in.’

  ‘Cheese?’

  She wasn’t going to be led into jokey ground.

  ‘Sleep well, Edith?’

  ‘No, as a matter of fact, I had a restless night – I could hear strange water noises,’ she said, taking a mouthful of roll and jam. ‘Yourself?’

  ‘Oh yes, I slept well, I’m a bushman – a few cognacs and all noises sound friendly.’

  ‘You would be the first bushman I’ve known who drank cognac. I might ask for a different room – would they mind?’

  ‘Of course not – but the hotel is probably full. Delegations and staff.’

  ‘I think I shall, though.’

  ‘See Frau Smidt.’

  ‘I think I shall. Or do you think I should see someone from the Embassy?’

  ‘No, see Frau Smidt.’

  She spread more blackcurrant jam on her roll, taking his share of the sachets.

  ‘You don’t think I should also tell the Embassy …’

  ‘No.’ He held back his impatience. ‘There’s no need.’

  She exasperated him. He scrounged another mouthful from the dwindling breakfast food and waited for what he knew would be her request. He knew it was coming.

  ‘Would you mind dreadfully asking her for me – your German is so much better than mine.’

  ‘Edith – you know I have very little German. Her English is fine. But yes, I’ll ask for you.’

  ‘Thanks awfully, I can’t cope with that sort of thing, I know I’m being silly … these days women should, I know … try.’

  She made this admission without conviction and at the same time poured the coffee pot dry.

  He studied Edith while they sat in the auditorium listening to instantaneous translation of the speaker through headphones, an African stating that nuclear war fears were ‘Western hysteria’.

  He ached to see the face of his young girlfriend appear in Edith’s face again, but it would not. He moved his seat, he half-closed his eyes to reduce the light, he pulled the skin near the eyes with his fingers to cause distortion in his sight, but nothing brought back the girl’s face. Edith’s worried face remained as she strained to follow the argument and as she made frowns of satisfaction and wallowed in being appalled.

  She liked being appalled. He suspected it was her strongest emotion.

  In his room at the Hotel Stephanplatz he drank cognac and read Goethe’s Faust, stalling now and then with self-consciousness, recalling the Consul in Under the Volcano, who also read Faust and drank – though he’d read Marlowe’s Faust. Marlowe was next on the reading list. But given the Germanic influence about him and their mission, what else?

  He hadn’t been able to face the evening session of Non-government Organisations – too much piety and youthful attempts at re-invention of the world.

  Age is an ague fever, it is clear / with chills of moody want and dread; When one has passed his thirtieth year, / One then is just the same as dead [says Baccalaureus, the young student … Mephistopheles replies] My children, it may be so; / Consider now, the Devil’s old; to understand him, be also old!

  He guessed that Edith would be back from the evening session and he went to her room, wanting company, even Edith’s limited company. It was 11.35 p.m., at least politely before midnight. He knocked. Was he drunk?

  ‘Yes, who is it?’ she called, from behind the door.

  ‘It’s me.’

  She came to the door in a robe over her slip. She looked very old, identified by dress with her generation now passing out of life. But he felt, despite her age, that she still didn’t ‘know the devil’.

  ‘I was preparing for bed – you wanted something?’

  Then. For an instant. Their eyes met in a weak glow of sought desire – like a torch with failing batteries – but this was extinguished instantly as he recoiled with the physical incompatibility of it. The utter unfeasibility of it. He was sure she had registered it but she looked away, nervously erasing whatever faint carnal sensation she had picked up, or, sent out.

  He’d wanted, he realised, then, to glimpse the girl, moved by a foggy concupiscence, a dim, unformed intention of somehow lurchingly imposing his erotic exigence on her aged body, but even in the dim night lights of the hotel corridor the girl was not there. Even with so much cognac twisting his imagination, he could not find the girl there in her.

  ‘I thought you might have a spare airmail letter form – the late-night letter-writing – from the darkness of the soul.’

  She was flustered and left him standing at the door while she went to look.

  She stopped half-way across h
er room and turned back to him. ‘An airmail letter form?’

  ‘Yes, just one.’

  She turned away and then turned back again. ‘Oh do come in – how rude of me – I’m getting ready for bed.’

  ‘Is the room quieter?’ he asked, as he came in and stood in the middle of the room.

  ‘Yes, thanks awfully, it was decent of you to arrange it all.’

  He saw her medicines beside her bed. Medicines of ageing.

  She handed him the airmail form and he left.

  Down the corridor he stopped. He wanted to look at her once more, to try once more to see his girl’s face in her. He retraced his steps to her door and tried it, found it still unlocked, and opened it, without premeditation.

  He was in the room and Edith was standing naked and shocked.

  He thought of a skinned kangaroo and then mumbled, ‘Sorry,’ and went back out the door, closing it behind him.

  Mephistopheles: I thought to meet with strangers here! / And find my relatives, I fear: / But, as the ancient scriptures tell us, the world is kin, from Hartz to Hellas. / I’ve many forms, in action swift, / For transformation is my gift / But in your honour, be it said … / I have put on my ass’s head … / Faust: caste one by one your maskes aside! / and lay your hideous nature bare! / … My choice is made: this pretty dear … / Alas, dry broom sticks have I heare / … this little darling would I clasp … / A lizard wriggles from my grasp.

  At the early breakfast before the trip to the contemporary art exhibition he said good morning to the Canadians, bonjour to the Cameroons, guten morgen to the waitress, and made his way to where Edith was already seated, eating her way through the rolls, jams, meats and cheeses. He decided to ignore the embarrassment of the night before.