Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

We were lying on his bed. All the while as I talked I was glad of the warmth of his front against my back. I liked the feeling of the fine dry hairs on his arm.

  ‘I don’t suppose,’ he remarked gloomily, ‘we’ll ever fuck again.’

  ‘Oh, that’s just silly,’ I snapped in a rush of irritation at his dogged pessimism. ‘How can you think that?’

  ‘Because the only way we can ever approach each other again in a relaxed enough way to fuck is if I stop hunting you and you stop stepping back. And I can’t see how that can ever happen.’

  ‘Time helps, you know,’ I said, noticing a tartness in my voice.

  Just as our whole household was marching out the front door on its way to a birthday party at Rathdowne Street, the sand for the children’s sand pit arrived. They didn’t want to go. I said I would stay home for the first half of the party; Eve promised to be back by 5.30 to take over. Javo, on his way out the door with the others, heard what we said and turned back.

  ‘I’ll stay with you, Nor,’ he said.

  The kids stopped whingeing about having to go out, and ran into the back yard to play. I lay on my bed and began to read. After a little while Javo came in and lay down beside me. I put the book down and we talked, companionably at ease. I stroked his forearm, and the inside of his elbow, thinking vaguely of the hardened veins where the needle had gone in too many times. Kids were tearing up and down the hallway outside my room. We rolled towards each other and kissed with tongues. I could feel him give a great shudder, all up and down his body, his eyes tightly closed: I thought he had already come. But I put my hand on him and felt his cock still hard.

  ‘Let’s go up to Cobby’s room and fuck where the kids won’t find us,’ I said.

  For a moment I was afraid he would say no: he looked at me steadily for several seconds, and then he smiled and started to get up off the bed. We scurried upstairs and undressed quickly and crept into Cobby’s unmade bed in its ship-like alcove, and got our skins together with a sigh. What was it about him? Whenever he touched my cunt, my clitoris seemed to be in the exact spot where he first came in contact with my flesh: I was ready for him before we started, as if hastening all my processes to be there for him. I took his cock and put it inside me, and looked down at his wrecked and beautiful face, how it melted and turned gentle and even the blue eyes blurred, up that close. I seemed to start coming almost immediately; he saw it and smiled with joy, and we came together effortlessly, smiling and smiling into each other’s faces. We lay together without speaking for a little while, half-laughing with happiness and astonishment.

  I sprang out of bed straight away, to get ready for the arrival of the rest of the household, and indeed they walked in the door at the moment my foot hit the bottom stair. Nobody knew about it except Cobby; she laughed and frowned and glanced sideways.

  At the party Javo got drunk in a corner and danced by himself. I ate too much and played vampires with the children and tried to engage Philip in conversation. By the time the chocolate cheese cake had been eaten and the homemade brandy alexanders drunk out of vegemite jars, everyone was in the next room dancing and I did it too, grinning at all the same old delightful faces. Cobby and I decided to walk home. I gave the sign and the raised eyebrow to Javo, who was wedged in his corner dancing and smiling and closing and opening his eyes; but he shook his head as if to say, I’ll stay a while. We grinned and waved through the small thicket of dancers, and Cobby and I left, and wandered drunkenly home.

  ‘I need another drink,’ she said, dawdling at the gate.

  ‘Let’s take Gerald’s car and whiz in to the Southern Cross?’

  ‘I’ll ask him.’ She emerged from his room with the keys. ‘He wants the car back in twenty minutes. Reckon we can make it?’

  ‘Can we what!’

  In the bar we set up a line of drinks, two each, guzzled them, licked out the glasses, and ran out on to the plaza, disgusted but satisfied. On our way home along Rathdowne Street we flew past the party. Outside the house stood Angela flagging us down, and beside her a white-faced, bedraggled Javo with his overalls bib hanging down: he was leaning on Angela’s shoulder and appeared barely able to stand.

  ‘Javo is a sick boy,’ she said as we pulled up. ‘Can he come home with you?’

  ‘Of course.’

  She kissed his cheek – Angela the junkie-hater kissed Javo’s cheek! We loaded him in and Cobby drove as smoothly as she could. He leaned on me as far as my room, and collapsed on my bed. I got him a bucket and a towel, and painstakingly untied his complicated arrangement of sandal strings. I dragged his overall off his long legs and leaned over him. As I watched, a paroxysm of vomiting caught him unawares: he was lying on his back, and a few drops of the watery yellow vomit flew into the air and splashed on to my cheek. I turned him over so he hung over the bucket, and he spewed weakly. I felt no revulsion about anything that was happening.

  When the spasm was over I laid him back on the pillow and dried his face with the towel.

  ‘Sorry, Nor,’ he whispered. ‘Guess the dope has fucked my liver.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. People have had to do this for me dozens of times.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He smiled at me from under his drooping eyelids. I noticed tears creeping out, and a small sob or two.

  ‘Why are you crying, Javes?’ I asked in dismay, trying to hug him gently.

  ‘I’m just – so – happy!’ he whispered. I almost laughed out loud, full of my own happiness, and remembering the times I’d cried drunkenly, years ago, in the luxury of excess. He held on to me with bony arms sticking out of his two T shirts, one blue, one pink.

  ‘I’ve been thinking,’ he said with difficulty, ‘neither of us will ever be one-out while the other one’s alive!’

  I sat in the curve of his body and held his dirty hand.

  ‘And also . . .’ he went on, ‘before I got drunk, I was thinking – everyone should have a fuck like that before they go to a party.’

  I was holding his hand, nodding and smiling.

  ‘I’m going out to the kitchen,’ I said after a while. ‘If you need me, call out.’

  ‘You don’t have to be so good to me, Nor,’ he said, still hanging on to my hand. I just looked at him and we both grinned, almost laughing.

  When I came back, he’d fallen asleep. He slept all night in my bed on his own, and I slept with Gerald and made him miserable with what he saw as my indifference. I did not tell him I had been fucking with Javo.

  I was driving in the car with Gerald.

  ‘Last night,’ he said, ‘I asked Selena if she wanted to come home with me. But she said, “No, I think I’d rather just go home to bed”.’

  ‘Oh, yeah? How did you feel about that?’

  ‘Rejected.’

  We were driving round the Swanston Street roundabout where the two big clean gums grow.

  ‘It doesn’t matter, though, does it?’ I remarked, suddenly filled with a certainty that fucking occupied far too important a place in all our lives. He didn’t agree, that it didn’t matter.

  ‘You don’t seem to suffer from loneliness, do you?’ he said, as we passed a corner of the university. I was staring in some acid memory at the cars parked under the shade of a concrete structure, probably the bottom of a lecture theatre.

  ‘No – I don’t get enough of it – solitude, that is.’

  ‘Well, then, it’s easy for you to say it doesn’t matter. You don’t have that longing to get close to someone.’

  I supposed I was speaking out of some immense, unexamined privilege. I began to feel myself in a position of power arrived at, inadvertently, through an absence of deep or passionate feeling. I remembered someone asking me, years before, ‘Has there ever been a time in your life when you haven’t been loved?’ I answered no. But Gerald would not make that answer.

  ‘There are,’ I said, ‘quite a few people I’d like to ask to fuck with me, but I don’t, because I’m afraid of being rejected.’

  ‘You!’ he exclaim
ed, not believing me.

  ‘Of course!’ I looked at my battered feet in their battered sandals, and thought about Philip, and Willy. ‘I am afraid of people thinking I’m ugly.’

  ‘Wow, that’s good to know,’ he said. ‘Well – good in one way – I’ve been thinking you’re so cool, and I’m so uncool.’

  Once again I felt that steady flood of certainty: ‘It just doesn’t matter, though.’

  ‘How can that be true?’

  ‘Well – with Selena – you’re both still walking round.’

  We looked at each other. I laughed, and he almost did.

  NOTHING TO GIVE, OR SAY

  But.

  Caught out by acid three times stronger and longer than I’d expected.

  Caught out by very small, very sharp thrusts from the knife of Javo’s not reappearing, the night we all went out to dance. He left the pub with a woman I didn’t know. I was drunk enough not to let on to myself that those very small, very sharp pains were beginning . . . like a labour come to surprise me. I knew I would have to work hard at letting him be born.

  Tripping at the baths. The meaning of life constantly flicked away from me, eluded the corner of my eye as I turned to pounce on it in the precise condition of my cells at the very second at which I looked at the curved, bright corner of the children’s pool. Gone! Missed it! I turned back to watch hundreds of children swarming shrimp– and sardine-like through the chemical water, and let myself be tossed and buffeted again by the turbulence of the day’s air.

  Rita was lying on her stomach under her large Virginia Woolf straw hat. She glanced up at me and her face looked pale and blotched with trouble.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, all acid innocence.

  ‘Oh, everything’s been getting me down lately,’ she said; her features seemed to be dissolving before my eyes, as if she were struggling to contain them in their customary form. Not sure how far I could trust my intuitions (wouldn’t I ever learn to go along with them?), I lay down and said nothing. In the afternoon we were sitting on the bench surveying the bubs’pool, she under her floppy brim, I under the stiff peak of the Berger paints cap. I asked, again ingenuously unaware of the reaction my questions might provoke,

  ‘How are things with Willy?’

  She kept looking straight ahead.

  ‘I never see him,’ she replied. I said nothing, looking sideways at her. She took a breath, gasped, sat forward as if to hide her face, said, ‘I’m going to cry . . .’ and let her face crumble. I put my arms round her shoulders (her very soft brown skin) and she sobbed for a few moments, stammering out words about how Willy criticised her clothes and her demeanour, how she felt the weight of community disapproval on her. ‘Do you know what Jack asked me the other day?’ she said, recovering her equilibrium as she talked. ‘He said, “How’s your reconstruction program going?”’ She gave a painful laugh. ‘It’s not that I mind being criticised. It’s just that it’s done in such a hard way.’

  Too much righteousness, not enough love.

  I got home from the baths and found Philip crouching on the road beside the window of Gerald’s car, as if Gerald were about to drive away, which indeed he was. I walked up to them and noticed in a flash Philip’s teeth stained from smoking, Gerald’s white clothes, and two sticks of incense burning in the dashboard. This seemed to me quite mysterious.

  ‘Are you going somewhere?’

  He looked up at me, faced closed and dark. ‘Yes. For a drive, and possibly to a beach.’

  I put my hand on his arm (tripper’s privilege) and said, ‘Incense! Carlos Santana.’ I hadn’t meant to tease too hard, but perhaps I did, for he put the car into gear and drove off with a nod. Philip and I were left standing on the road outside the house. Philip, as he always did, stood still, hesitant and slightly non-plussed.

  ‘Want a cup of tea?’ I asked, hoping he would come in.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Just that pre-gig thing: driving round to people’s places.’

  ‘To get some?’ I suggested, looking at him from under my cap peak. He looked back quite steadily for a second, then laughed and nodded. I surprised myself by saying something I didn’t know I was going to say: ‘Well, suck away,’ I said, putting my arms out in a giving gesture; ‘I’ve got plenty, today.’

  At the Kingston that night, Lillian was inexplicably there when I walked in. She was sitting quietly at a table by herself, very brown and smooth and long in the legs, her thick hair round her shoulders in a wavy mass. We nodded to each other. I was still tripping faintly. I sat down with Gerald at a table. He looked strange to me: his face was browner and the whites of his eyes showed all round the irises. I didn’t like the way he looked at me. I said,

  ‘Did you have a good afternoon?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Down to Arthur’s Seat. Went on the chairlift.’

  He was leaving off pronouns.

  ‘Did you go by yourself?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who were you with?’

  ‘Lillian.’

  I understood the incense and the white clothes. My heart opened and closed like an anemone.

  ‘What did you do?’ he asked politely.

  ‘Oh . . . mucked around at home.’

  I danced, I sat, I drank orange juice. Rita put her arm across my shoulder, sometimes held my hand.

  Gerald drove Lillian and me home. We dropped her first and then headed for our place.

  ‘I hope I didn’t blow it for you by coming home with you and Lillian,’ I remarked from where I was lying across the back seat. ‘Bit of a drag, me hanging round like a bad smell when a bloke’s trying to get it on.’

  He turned round and said to me, ‘I’d really like to get it on with you.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said, taken aback. The familiar juice of fear trickled through my blood. I turned my head and stared blankly through the back window, desperately trying to put together a satisfactory answer. ‘Well, I guess we will, sooner or later.’

  ‘I mean now,’ he insisted. He glanced back at me between the high front seats. I was afraid.

  ‘I only want to crash, right now. I’m absolutely fucked.’

  We had turned into the far end of our street. He was silent. I could see the tension in his cheek and neck.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked foolishly.

  ‘FRUS-TRA-TION!’ he bellowed in a harsh, loud voice, thumping the empty seat beside him with his fist. At that moment we were passing another car: he pushed his foot down hard and we were rushing along in third gear on the wrong side of the road. I was sick with fear. I thought, ‘He is doing that thing men do, he’s rushing to destruction, he’s got me here, he’s power-mad, I can’t do anything.’ I took a breath to call his name. I said, ‘Ger . . .’ and knew there was no point. I lay back on the seat. He passed the other car and got into the left lane, crossed the tramtracks in St George’s Road, and stopped in front of our house.

  Trapped in the back seat, stifled by closed windows and the high head-rests of the front seats, I half sat and half lay, looking at my feet, while he tried again to argue me round to the way things once were. For fifteen minutes we shouted at each other in barely controlled fury. A silence fell. I could hardly breathe. I said, in a small quiet voice,

  ‘Gerald, I have to get out of this car right now.‘

  ‘All right.’

  He opened the driver’s door and got out and I folded the seat forward and scrambled past him. He sat down again, his legs out the door, hands between thighs, head hanging on one side, eyes downcast: his limbs, disposed in that way, made him look like a large, tired grasshopper. I realised that my reserves were empty. I had nothing to give, or say. I walked into the house.

  In my bed, which I saw as a final refuge from the world but which to him was the centre of the battlefield, I took a dirty pink T shirt of Javo’s under the sheet with me, to let the smell of him comfort me. I lay
there with it shamefully under my stomach, flat on my face, two-dimensional like a thing steam-rolled. Gerald came into the room.

  ‘I’ve calmed down,’ he said. ‘You’re right.’

  I wished he’d go away and let me die quietly into sleep. He sat down beside me on the bed. His movements seemed self-consciously casual. ‘Do you want a hug, or anything?’ I froze up inside and lay very still.

  ‘If you feel like it,’ I said, ‘but all I can do is just lie here.’

  He began to stroke me, and to touch the side of my neck and face, in a way I dared not submit to, lest it become sexual. I lay there in a crazy panic of revulsion, half-turned away from him, disliking the smell of his breath, wishing I could dematerialise. I escaped by slowing down my breathing and pretending to be asleep. He stroked on. He said,

  ‘Hey – has Javo come back yet?’

  Javo had not been back for two nights and two days; and the pains were small and sharp. I didn’t answer. He let a moment or two pass.

  ‘Are you asleep?’

  I didn’t answer. He stopped stroking me, lay beside me, non-plussed, then got up off the bed and walked out of the room. I spread out into the cool corners of the bed. Just before I went to sleep I was half troubled by a rhythmical sound like a tap dripping in the alley outside my window. I even got up to check the bathroom taps, but they were all tightly turned off. Puzzled, I got back into bed. The sound continued. It dawned on me that it was the beating of my own blood.

  I was lying on my bed reading when I heard Gerald come into the house and speak to Cobby. My door was closed. I went on reading. Scraps of the conversation filtered through to me.

  ‘. . . Going somewhere?’ asked Cobby, in her dry, drawling voice.

  ‘Yeah . . . Wilson’s Prom . . . three days . . . Lillian.’

  A big ragged hole opened up in my stomach. The words on the page became black scratchy marks. I wondered, still on my back among the cushions with the book upright on my chest, if he would come and say goodbye to me. (Why should he?) I heard his footsteps in the hall stop outside my door, and a piece of paper was pushed under the door. He walked away. I got up quietly, picked up the note and read it.