Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  We went up to the Golden Nugget bar. I left her in the middle of the crowded room with a small island of baggage while I went to the bar and ordered. I glanced back at her and she pantomimed a wave – bent her knees and grinned with a closed mouth and waved one hand in a circle in front of her face – I burst out laughing, foolish at the bar in my flowery dress and funny haircut, holding a purse in one hand and two dollar bills in the other.

  We picked up her beat-up, collapsing suitcase tied together with rope, and packed her things into the car and drove home. I mimicked her American voice: ‘uh huh’, ‘do you have . . .?’ and ‘far-out!’ At the house we ate a meal the men had cooked. Cobby ‘took a shower’.

  ‘You know what they don’t have over there?’ she yelled through the louvre windows. ‘Methylated spirits.’

  ‘Don’t they call it “rubbing alcohol”?’ said Gerald.

  ‘Is that what it is?’ she said vaguely, her mind already on something else.

  On New Year’s Eve Angela streamed drunkenly into our kitchen.

  ‘Well, it’s finally happened,’ she announced.

  The ring of faces turned up to her where she stood poised dramatically on the step, one foot up, one down, hands out to balance.

  ‘What?’

  ‘They’ve started fucking.’

  Everybody knew who she meant: Willy and Rita.

  She hoisted herself on to the high bench, took a deep breath, and poured out a great flood of forbidden feelings, making us shriek with guilty laughter. We surprised ourselves by the simplicity and violence of our identification with her in this most ancient of situations, the one we had theorised endlessly about for the past four years: until Eve made her statement, leaning back against the bench with her arms folded:

  ‘Yep – there’s one thing you just don’t do, and that’s take away another woman’s man.’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Eve! What are you saying?‘

  She looked defensive and cross.

  ‘Well – you know what I mean.’

  ‘But – if you think that, what’ve we been agonising about all this time? All that stuff about breaking out of monogamy? Jesus, Eve!’

  Angela, too miserable to care about theory, took another swig from her glass of beer.

  ‘I told him I wouldn’t fuck with him again while he was seeing her.’ She turned her eyes sideways to me with a childlike, tearful smile. ‘But . . . I’m scared he might . . .rape me,’ she whispered hopefully. ‘He’s really strong, you know.’

  I started to laugh in spite of myself, thinking of Willy, the most unlikely rapist north of the Yarra. She was laughing too, or almost. I wrapped my arms round her.

  ‘Oh, Ange. You’re nuts!’

  ‘Anyway –’ recovering herself with a sniff and a shrug; ‘so I said to him, “Go ahead and get it out of your system, but you needn’t think I’m gonna share you with her – it’s just a matter of pride – just get out,” I told him, “and don’t come back till you’ve finished”.’

  She started to cry, rubbing the tears off her beautiful, clear-skinned face, sitting up there on the bench dangling her roxy pink shoes down against the cupboard door.

  ‘Oooh, I hate her, I hate her!’ she sobbed, drumming her heels with such abandon that we hardly knew whether to laugh or cry; and I thought about Rita and the way she turned her face up and fluttered and shone; how she hid her own private fear and wretchedness; how she gave herself generously, without reserve, loved too loyally, without criticism; and how we all thrashed about swapping and changing partners – like a very complicated dance to which the steps had not yet been choreographed, all of us trying to move gracefully in spite of our ignorance, because though the men we knew often left plenty to be desired, at least in their company we had a little respite from the grosser indignities.

  On New Year’s Day Cobby and I did some acid and everyone drove down to St Kilda to the Boardwalk gig. I sat in the front of the ute with Gracie on my knee, my stomach riding airily on the movement of the big car. An assortment of foxy types in baseball caps and sun visors, and yellow-faced junkies unflattered by the clear sunlight, swarmed loosely round the old concrete stands. If you got too close to the buildings the smell of piss became overpowering: the smell of every concrete dressing shed on every civilised beach in Australia. But it was a day of rock and roll; Angela stood beside the mixer grinning proudly at Willy oblivious behind his drums; and down at the water’s edge the lesbians and the unaligned women and the kids danced on the hard sand in a steady, warm wind that came ploughing in off the bay, oh, the looseness of the spine! and moving in the streaming salty air.

  In the evening, when everything had quietened down, I worked with Gerald on the back yard, planting lawn seed. He was pulling the roller across the yard and I was standing on the back porch watching. I saw his thin, hard arms.

  ‘Hey,’ I said suddenly, let’s get into bed and fuck.’

  ‘What?’ He looked up, smiling. I said it again.

  ‘OK. Let’s do that.’

  We finished the grass and came into my room. He lay on my bed and I wandered round the room putting clothes away. The doorbell rang. He went to open.

  ‘It might be Clive with the acid!’ I yelled.

  ‘No, it’s not Clive with the acid,’ came back Gerald’s voice from the hall.

  ‘It’s Philip with a paper bag,’ called Philip, and they walked past my door to the kitchen. I went out and sat with them at the kitchen table.

  ‘Do you want to go up to your room and play some stuff?’ said Philip.

  ‘Sure,’ said Gerald, and without a word to me they got up and clomped along the passage to Gerald’s room.

  Oh well. Back to the purdah.

  I went over to Peel Street and found Rita tidying her room. Her face lit up sharply when she saw me. Quick as a flash she hit me with the news.

  ‘Guess who Javo is hanging out with in Hobart?’

  ‘Oh . . . I guess it’s probably . . .’ I began, but she cut across me to announce:

  ‘Sylvia, Mark’s sister.’ She wasn’t looking at me, but was sorting through some papers on the table.

  ‘Oh yeah? Can’t say I’m surprised.’

  I remembered the one time I had met Sylvia, last summer in her small kitchen; how I wandered through her house while she and Javo awkwardly talked, and came upon a huge photo of him, gaunt and smacked out in some show he’d done, pinned to her bedroom wall.

  I imagined him in her house, in her bed, waking up grumbling to the shouts of her children. I felt that small leakage of pain, which dissipated itself immediately.

  ‘I’m just going over to the tower to talk to Angela,’ said Rita, pulling a comical face of apprehension.

  ‘What are you going to say?’ I asked, quite curious.

  ‘Oh, I don’t even know why I’m going. I’m really scared of her. I just want to say that I don’t think she ought to blow it with Willy just because of what’s happened. They’ve got something really good together.’

  ‘Do you think anything more is likely to happen between you and Willy?’

  ‘Oh . . . yeah, probably.’

  Over Angela’s dead body, I thought privately, noticing how in Rita’s presence I forgot the image of her as nothing but a scatter-brained twit which Angela had been unscrupulously promoting in her accounts of the situation. I drove her over to the tower and felt like hugging her when she got out of the car, but dared only give her a small tousle to the hair.

  Gerald and I walked over to Rathdowne Street to borrow Georgie’s bike, on a sunny afternoon. The front door was opened by Lillian, also there on a visit. At the unexpected sight of her, I instantly felt she was too close to me: I wanted to take several steps backwards, instead of which, under the influence of social impetus, I stepped forward and into the house, feeling my eyes drop and constantly go past her, as if to escape the intensity of her notice. I was afraid she would touch me, and my flesh shrank at the prospect; of course, she did no such thing,
but merely smiled at me from inside her mop of salty, untidy hair and said, ‘Hullo, Nora,’ allowing me to be courteous.

  ‘Do you know Gerald? This is Lillian,’ I mumbled. They inspected each other with frank interest. I remembered Gerald saying once, ‘I think she’s stunningly beautiful.’ I watched her toss him the challenge, almost a ritual gesture: she flipped her hair back over her bare brown shoulder and glanced at him sidelong, with half a laugh, doing something indescribable with her mouth – just like in the movies.

  ‘Here we go – and you’ll fall for it, too, you great fucking dunce,’ I thought savagely. In some peculiar mixture of relief, pain and self-disgust, I slipped off into Georgie’s room and sat in his big, overstuffed armchair and listened to Steely Dan, my arms along the rests of the battered chair and my spine against its back. Ugh, Nora, you dog-in-the-manger. Not in love with Gerald, never have been, don’t want to be, but so afraid of loneliness that the very cells simulate the chemical reactions of jealousy, in some primal instinct to grasp and hold against all comers.

  After what I thought was a decent interval I got up and went into the kitchen, where Gerald was sitting at the table with Lillian, being charming.

  ‘Hey, Nora!’ said Georgie, presiding at the head of the table behind a huge chocolate cake, knife in hand. I looked at his big, beaky face and bleached hair and felt better. ‘Reckon you can handle a slice of my magnum opus?’

  ‘I’ll give it a try,’ I replied, hiding my misanthropy under a rocky smile.

  ‘What a nice house you live in, Georgie!’ said Lillian, resting her pointed chin in her hands. I felt a stab of some unidentifiable pain, something to do with Georgie and three years in that old brown house on the corner of Delbridge Street and our having lost it; and resentment of Lillian’s presence, almost too deep for the rational mind.

  Georgie handed me a piece of cake and I felt the sweetness of the icing hit a hole in one of my back teeth.

  ‘Do you want to get the bikes and split?’ I said to Gerald.

  He was looking up at me from his chair. I fantasised him saying, ‘. . . oh, you go, I might stay here for a while,’ and me hiding my mortification and saying, ‘OK, see you later.’

  ‘OK.’ He stood up and we said goodbye. Georgie walked to the front door with us. He put his big hand on my shoulder.

  ‘What’s up, Nor?’

  ‘Oh – nothing I can feel good about admitting,’ I said with a shrug. ‘It’s Lillian. There’s so much old bad stuff between us, I find it really hard to be in the same room with her. Sorry! Sometimes I’m just an old grouch.’

  He grabbed my neck and gave it a gentle squeeze, clicking his tongue and shaking his head. ‘You’re OK, mate. If you’re not, I dunno who is.’

  I glanced up and saw Gerald shrug his shoulders and raise his eyebrows, as if to say, ‘What’s all the fuss about?’ Georgie just grinned at him, still holding my neck in his warm hand.

  A letter, painfully printed on blue paper, came from Javo in Hobart.

  ‘I am making a solid blow against my past. I want to come back but I won’t. I am thinking a bit, falling in love with strangers – new ones every day – getting better at being me again.’

  I folded up the letter and stashed it away. In the heart very little happened.

  In the middle of the night I woke out of a thick and bottomless sleep. Silent house, alone in my bed. I must have fallen asleep early in the evening. I went out to the dunny and found the sky, clear and hot for two days now, had covered itself with cloud. The air was still and cool. I had no idea of the time. I stood between the new grass and the vegetable garden, in the dim air. What a strange night. I was afloat in it all by myself. I held my breath. Something was gathering itself to happen, not now, but very soon. I shook my head and the premonition flew away without a sound.

  I went down the passage to Gerald’s room. His door was propped open with a chair. For a second I thought perhaps he wasn’t there, was somewhere else; but I wandered in, in the dark, and saw him doubled up under the blanket. I knelt on the bed, put my hand on his hip, and said,

  ‘Can I get in with you?’

  ‘Yes! Of course,’ he replied, speaking as sleeping people sometimes do in a perfectly ordinary voice. ‘Have you had a bad dream?’

  ‘No. I just woke up and couldn’t go back to sleep.’

  He put his arm round me, and I backed up against him for warmth. I thought, the ecstasy and the tortures waste too much time. Maybe I should settle for this.

  I dreamed: I went to China, in a bus, with a lot of other people. What I saw there – happy people, full of energy and life – made me weep with joy.

  LEFT WITH A GRITTY RESIDUE

  The next evening we went down to Southside Six to dance to Gerald’s band. Grace was determined that I was not going to have a good time.

  ‘You’ve already had a hundred drinks,’ she said as I came back to the table with my second scotch and ice. ‘You’re going to get drunk. I don’t want you to!’

  I watched Gerald playing, and started again to understand the romantic lust that rock and roll musicians provoke. I looked at his strong arms and the way his face tightened and relaxed in concentration, working in sympathy with his hands. I was dancing with my head down, concentrating myself on letting my spine go loose. Once I glanced up and he grinned at me, hesitantly, as people do when they are not quite sure whether they are being looked at or not. I smiled back and his funny curved face split in half.

  Back on our side of the river, Gracie wanted a souvlaki. I took her to the Twins in Lygon Street and we stood there among the drunken, stoned, glassy-eyed late-night crowd silently waiting for food. My ears were still ringing from the music. The vats of fat hissed. The lights were harsh and people there, customers and cooks alike, looked dirty, tired, washed out, old, pushed past the limits of fatigue.

  Gracie said into my ear,

  ‘I’m tired, but I can’t lie down in here.’

  She went and squatted in a corner by the fridge, sucking her thumb and staring blankly.

  A boot, a leg, a body, a head burst through the plastic fly curtain. It was Javo. He saw me and stopped in mid-flight, arms still flung out from the force of his entrance. We stood three feet apart. We smiled the same ancient, wary smile.

  ‘Ssssst. Hey, Javo,’ I said, very softly. He said nothing, but continued to smile. Hank slid in behind him, blond hair glowing in the hard light.

  ‘Good day, Nora!’ he said. He jerked his thumb at Javo. ‘Look who’s back.’

  Javo dropped his arms to his sides.

  ‘When did you get back?’

  ‘Two hours ago.’ In his voice I heard the harsh grate of the dope: but even the cold neon could not leach out of his skin its new colour. He was alive again.

  He lay down across the foot of my bed and I lay the length of it. He stroked my leg and we talked idly, with many pauses.

  ‘I am only here for a week,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a part in a movie.’

  I was wondering whether Gerald had gone off into his own room, when I slipped off to sleep and was woken, probably only seconds later, by the shock of Javo’s hand on my back.

  ‘Do you want to sleep here with me?’ I said, looking at his brown face and shiny hair.

  ‘Yeah.’

  He took off his clothes and I watched him out of my dozing eyes: brown skin, hard body, healthier than I’d ever seen him. He came over to the bed and got in, and turned off the lamp, and our bodies moved towards each other as they had moved a hundred times before. His skin felt burning, a fever from the first hit of smack in six weeks. Our arms went round each other and I heard him whisper my name, ‘Oh, Nora!’ and again my heart turned to water. I picked out in the dimness the bony lantern of his head and his eyes and teeth gleaming with that fierce smile, I came joyfully with no hesitation: but then the fact of his being stoned made itself apparent, for he did not come, and his body went on trembling and burning, cock hard and face turning again and again to my mouth in the
dark, long after my energy had been exhausted and I wanted to fall away and go to sleep. At last I said,

  ‘I have to rest – I’m too tired to fuck any more,’ and we shifted apart and fell into a restless sleep, tossing half the night. His skin seemed so hot and dry that whenever we touched, in our restless movements, I woke up and felt him burning me with his arm or hand or side: I’d wake and he’d wake too and I’d feel eagerness run off him like a charge, and I’d mumble some helpless word and slip back into the same thin, uneasy sleep, right on the edge of the bed.

  Very early in the morning I felt him get up out of the bed and go out of the room. I woke up, sat up; he came back in, dressed. He sat down on the side of the bed and said,

  ‘I’m gonna split now, Nor.’

  ‘OK,’ I said, thinking that I’d never seen him up and dressed before me, ever, in all the time I’d known him.

  ‘See you at the baths later, if it’s swimming weather.’

  ‘It’s going to be,’ I said, glancing out my window past the brick wall to the strip of dry, lightening sky. He leaned down and kissed me goodbye. I heard the front door close and slipped away into sleep at last, properly, for an hour or so. When I woke up again I crept into Gerald’s bed and hugged him and felt an immense relief – done it! Fucked in the house with someone else, liked it, managed to get through the night, parted friends, found myself still open to being with Gerald (though I felt the odd flicker of apprehension at the thought of his doing the same thing – tit for tat).

  ‘I almost wished,’ said Gerald with a twisted grin, ‘that I could have heard a few groans or sighs, just so I’d be sure it was . . .’