Monkey Grip

by Helen Garner

  ‘Dear Nora, I’m going to Wilson’s Prom with Lillian, and expect to be back Wednesday night (but you never know). Happy days to you and yours. Love, Gerald.’

  I felt a shot of bleak anger which I did not trust. I sat on the bed; I thought, I should go out and speak to him before he goes. I got up and walked barefoot to his room (big bare unwelcoming space). He was standing there in white, just-washed trousers and a black velour jumper over which we once had a stupid fight, and sunglasses. I saw his favourite blanket folded neatly on a chair.

  ‘You’ll be cold,’ I remarked primly. ‘Is that all you’re going to sleep in?’

  ‘I’ve put my whole bed in,’ he said, standing there with his hands hanging down. Then I saw that his mattress was gone.

  ‘Where’ll you put it?’ I asked, curious to know how this tight fellow would envisage setting up a camp, and seeing quick visions of the crude (and thus, to me then, superior) camps I had taken part in.

  ‘On the floor of the tent.’ The floor?

  ‘Haven’t you been camping before?’ I asked rudely.

  ‘Yes. Lots of times.’

  We were face to face in the doorway. It was the moment to relent and hug. I did not touch him. I stepped back. He picked up a bag and I went out the front door and got into the hammock. The wind was streaming from the southwest, as turbulent as yesterday’s but colder. I lay there in my flowery dress with my feet up high, and contemplated a sick feeling which was growing in my stomach. Why couldn’t I let him go and wish him well? Why did I always need a man to be concerned with, whether well or ill? Why was I afraid to be alone, as Cobby was? Why did I involuntarily pick out Lillian’s least attractive characteristics, to comfort myself? I fantasised ludicrously about the two of them driving along, their large limbs disposed inside that neat, tight little car. I wondered how he would characterise me when they talked. I imagined his account of my rudeness as he was leaving, and her pulling a face as if to dismiss or sympathise.

  I was actually suffering low-level pain.

  The wind kept rushing through the meagre leaves of a small gum tree in our narrow front garden. Gerald opened the wire door and shouldered his way out, carrying a bag, a pillow and his guitar. When I saw the guitar I almost laughed out loud at a small, vicious fantasy of the two of them sitting over a camp fire, him playing well and her strumming away crudely; a more pleasant picture followed, of him kindly teaching her.

  He didn’t come nearer to me than he needed to in going down the steps; nor did I heave myself out of the hammock. I said,

  ‘See you.’

  So did he. He got into the car, but by that time I’d ceased to look at him and the car started and departed somewhere behind my left shoulder. I kept staring at the gum leaves. The last I saw of him was his arm lying along the top of the open car window as the car passed on the other side of the triangular, treeless park across the road from our house. See you. I hoped it would storm and drip rain for a week. I thought of them fucking on his mattress on the floor of the tent, and I did not wish them well.

  I am not a kind person.

  I waited, on and off, for the heavy steps of Javo to come to my door. I knew they would probably not come for several days, and that I would become used to sleeping alone without guilt or desire. I thought that, with Javo, I understood how it was possible to love the most positive and good parts of a person and to co-exist with the rest. I missed him, very much, and tried to imagine what he was feeling and thinking.

  I was not very happy.

  I woke in the morning and found Gracie sleeping beside me in my bed. I stumbled out through the kitchen on my way to the dunny, and wondered if Javo might have come back in the night. I felt certain that the bed in the living room would be empty, but I looked anyway, and found that it was full of his long body, his dark tousled head sticking up out of the blanket in which he was rolled. Surprised, I stood still in the doorway looking at that head. Unspectacular, gentle happiness ran smoothly through my whole body. I closed the door very quietly so that the noise of our household at breakfast would not wake him.

  But when I got to the baths that morning, the old aching feeling came back to plague me. Javo was there, but was concentrating all his friendly attention upon Jean and Hank, and I felt left out and lonely. I didn’t stay long. I rode home in the extreme, dry heat, puzzled and sore; picked up Gracie from school and went back to the baths. I was at pains to hide my unhappiness; I was at pains not to ask him where he had been for those nights, but he told me anyway. We were sitting on the edge of the pool at the shallow end, squinting in the glare, water drying on our shoulders.

  ‘Wow, it’s been a weird weekend, Nor,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah? What’s been happening?’Very nonchalant.

  ‘I went home with Sue on Friday night – I suppose I sort of expected that – she cornered me.’ He laughed, abashed; I glanced at him and saw his awkwardness, which started it up again, ache, ache, the old ache, like music in the blood.

  ‘And on Saturday night I was round at Napier Street. There was only Claire home, we watched TV. And then when I got up to leave she came to the door with me, and she said, “Would you like to stay?”’

  Hearing him was like watching a film.

  ‘So I did.’

  I suffered under my cap. Not suffering I couldn’t bear, but suffering none the less. He was smiling as he told me, and I smiled too, hoping it was not a grimace. Oh no, it wasn’t the stabs of pain, but what you could call the subterranean homesick blues. I refrained from comment, dangling my legs in the water, keeping the peak of my cap between my eyes and his face. I was careful, careful.

  When it was time to go I did not ask him to come to my place. I picked up my belongings and said casually,

  ‘Which way are you going?’

  ‘Your way,’ he said, shoving his towel into his bag.

  He walked and I rode slowly along beside him with Grace on the back of my bike. When we got home we found the house full of people, kids mostly, with more expected for dinner. I felt claustrophobic and angry. I said to Javo,

  ‘Do you want to go and have a drink? I’d really like to get out of here.’

  ‘OK,’ he said agreeably. We set out for the tramstop. On the bench at the corner of St George’s Road I started trying to explain myself.

  ‘I’m afraid of doing to you what Gerald is doing to me.’

  ‘What? Don’t be silly. You just don’t do it. We trust each other too much for something like that to happen.’ He kept grinning at me. The tram came, we got on it. Old, comfortable situation: going into town with Javo to fill our stomachs at my expense.

  Back in my room, I walked straight in.

  ‘Is it all right if I sleep in here?’ he asked politely, standing at the bookcase.

  ‘Of course! I was just going to ask you.’

  ‘Good!’

  We stretched out on the bed in the hot room full of dry, still air. We lay good-humoured and naked, stroking each other’s skin. He heaved his arm to go under my neck and I smelled his good, sharp smell. I remembered the pink T shirt and blushed to myself.

  ‘Hey, Javes. The other night I was so freaked that I used your T shirt as a sucker rag. I slept with it all night.’

  He threw back his head and laughed, incredulous. I stopped feeling foolish. I watched his face, so familiar to me and loved.

  ‘I’m having such a good time these days,’ he said happily. ‘I like my body more and more. I’m not afraid of fucking.’

  Thinking of Claire, I felt at the same moment the aching start again and the beginnings of a small stream of happiness. The aching was for the realisation that, months ago, the dope had not terminated our relationship, but interrupted and changed it; the happiness was for the mother in me, watching him gather himself and take off.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for you, in that time after I got back from Bangkok,’ he said, ‘I’d be dead by now.’

  We laughed and talked the night away.

  ‘Who do y
ou fuck with, Nor?’ he asked me.

  At three or so we went to sleep. He was still sleeping when I woke from a dream in which a group of people, including me and Rita and Willy, went to live in a redbrick house on the outskirts of Camperdown. I wept and wept about some sadness I could not remember, and Willy held me tightly in his arms, standing at the window, to comfort me.

  Javo slept on, and I took the kids to school and went about my morning’s business. At lunchtime I went to the baths, taking Gracie with me, early from school. Javo was there, holding court at the deep end where children may not go. I stayed at the shallow end with Gracie. He saw me, eventually, and swam and waded over to me, his brown face grinning against that electric blue water.

  ‘I’ve got a room,’ he announced, as we stood thigh-deep in the water, leaning against the side of the pool, arms along the lumpy silver railing.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘At Neill Street.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  We stood for minutes in silence.

  I said, ‘I’m glad you’ve got a place, but I’ll miss you.’ I didn’t look at him. We stared away from each other. Long moments passed.

  ‘Yeah . . . well, I need a place to work. I’ve got a show to do.’

  Eager to agree, I hastened, ‘You could never work at our place – I know.’

  A pause. Gracie came dog-paddling up to me. ‘Watch me! Watch me!’ I watched, and in the corner of my eye his long dark body launched itself out into the water and he swam away.

  Turkey, cold turkey.

  I’LL DO ANYTHING YOU ASK

  But two days later he came into our kitchen in the morning while I was ironing my blue and white spotted dress. He wanted me to put his dole cheque through my bank account. In the bank he sat on a chair waiting for the teller to call my name. I leaned on the shelf beside him.

  ‘Hey Nor,’ he said, ‘have you got forty cents change to lend me for the tram?’

  I looked in my purse and found the money. I held it out to him: he put out his hand, palm upwards, his face turned away towards the street. I dropped the coins into his hand and he made no acknowledgement. My insides performed a little dance of anger and sadness. No, no, said my resolution, the small voice of reason, he asked and you gave. You didn’t have to give, and he didn’t have to be grateful. Giving is not bartering. I handed him the ten dollar bills.

  While the teller fiddled with my passbook, Javo wandered out on to the street. He tapped on the window and mouthed, ‘Here comes my tram. See you.’

  I nodded and waved. We were smiling at each other, our faces less than a foot apart, but there was a sheet of plate glass between us. I watched him walk away in his pink T shirt and overalls. I turned back to the counter, picked up my passbook, and walked out to meet Eve, sitting straddled on her bike waiting for me, half-stunned from a valium she had taken to help her stop smoking.

  We pedalled off towards the city, to the art gallery. We walked around arm in arm.

  ‘What’ll we look at?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I dunno,’ she replied. ‘You just lead me round and show me things.’

  So I did. I showed her my secret picture, The French Window, two women sitting at a circular table having a cup of tea; beside them a long window opens to let in a strip of bright garden, the hard lovely light of summer; in the middle of the lawn sticks up a polished brass tap, and on the verandah you can see half a deck chair.

  ‘That’s you,’ remarked Eve.

  I said, ‘That’s us.’

  Sometimes I wished old age would hasten upon me.

  In the street in Carlton I met Angela.

  ‘Where’s that junkie ex-lover of yours?’ she asked, looking distracted. She was carrying a large exercise book.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, you’re more likely to see him than I am. Here’s his call for the movie.’ She scribbled the information on a piece of paper in her extravagant, unformed handwriting. I took it reluctantly, not knowing how to make it clear to her that I didn’t expect to see him again before the time she wanted him. I rode away with Eve. We took the good, fast run along Rathdowne Street, playing at racing and rolling neck and neck, and parted at the corner of Richardson Street. As soon as we separated, the old ache sneaked back again. I came home to the empty house and rang Angela. I told her I didn’t know where Javo was and would prefer not to have to go looking for him. She took the task away from me, and immediately the ache stopped.

  I lay on my bed reading for most of the afternoon. I fell asleep. I woke up at 3.20 precisely and in that neutral moment between full sleep and full awareness my mind involuntarily conjured up a series of images: Javo and Claire standing facing each other, reaching out their arms and stepping forward and embracing each other tightly, her face pressed hard against his chest. The rapidity and vividness of these uncalled-for visions astonished me; and so did the fact that they did not bring back the ache. I lay there listening to the quiet falling of warm rain in the alley outside my window. Gracie pushed open my door and came in dripping and smiling, with a bag full of ‘work’ from school and her reader Ronno the Clown.

  Half an hour later I heard Eve call out,

  ‘Want a cup of tea, Gerald?’

  I got up in my red underpants and wandered out to the kitchen. ‘Is Gerald back?’

  Eve nodded and pointed to the room with the TV in it. I pushed open the door and saw his long legs in stained white trousers sticking out from the couch. I was delighted to see him and went to hug him. Gracie sucked her thumb and watched us greet each other.

  We drove to the Southern Cross for a drink and an escape from the house. He told me about his trip to the Prom with Lillian. I was very tense and defensive, and talked between clenched teeth about Lillian and what she could do with her opinions of my personality; but then I calmed down and told Gerald everything I could about Javo and the way I was feeling about him. He was attentive and kind, and listened patiently.

  ‘And on top of everything else,’ I said, getting into my stride and beginning to orate, ‘I’ve got this thing in my ear which I think might be a pimple. Will you have a look later and tell me what it is?’

  ‘I’ll do anything you ask,’ he replied.

  I looked up sharply, thinking he was getting at me, but he was smiling at me with an open face; there was a layer of laughter behind everything he said. I relaxed.

  I woke up before anyone else in the house. A dull, heavy morning, weighed down with yesterday’s rain. I got up, shoved my feet into my sandals, walked quietly out to the kitchen, and noticed that the living room door was shut: this usually meant that Javo was asleep inside. My heart didn’t even turn over. It ticked away as it should. I picked my way across our bomb-site of a back yard, past the gnawed, holey broccoli which Gerald swore would survive the cabbage moths, and into the dunny. For the time being, I’d lost the ache. I sat on the dunny, gazing bucolically out at the side wall of the garage, the bricks under the back wheels of the half-mended van, and the low wet thick sky. Small, non-specific visions of Claire and Javo in each other’s arms flickered in the corners wherever I looked, but nothing registered on the pain metre. I was alive to the knowledge that they may have begun to love each other, that was all.

  (Gracie: ‘Three boys chased me in the yard and said they loved me. So’– demonstrating vicious punches to the solar plexus – ‘I bashed them all up.’)

  Javo was not in the living room.

  I took the kids to school and my washing to the laundromat. When I came home I got in the shower.

  ‘Javaroo was here,’ called Eve.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’ I was scrubbing my face and hair and talking to her through the louvre windows. ‘Where’d he go?’

  ‘To the dole office.’

  ‘Did he shift his stuff out?’ I jerked my head towards the living room. We grinned wryly at each other. Valium’d, she stood arms akimbo, one hand pointing the hose into a yellow plastic bucket.

  ‘Nup. I think he was more like shi
fting it back in.’ I laughed. She shrugged.

  ‘I was thinking I’d get him to move it out. It makes it harder for me, the way he comes and goes.’

  She nodded.

  ‘But at the same time, I guess I don’t want to let him see how much . . .pain. . . he can cause me.’ The word came effortfully off my lips; afraid of exaggerating, of sounding melodramatic. Eve gazed at me, eyes dull with the drug but with a spark miles behind of knowing what I was talking about.

  Gerald walked in the front door as I was on my way out with the shopping bag over my shoulder. Javo’s calico bag was lying in the corner next to the front door. I gave it a casual poke with my foot.

  ‘Bloody Javo,’ I remarked without venom. ‘Looks like he’s still leaving his stuff lying round.’

  Gerald instantly warmed to the subject. ‘Yes! He came in this morning while you were out, and set up the ironing board, and stuff – I thought to myself, oh no! he’s moving back in. I almost said something to him then.’

  ‘What would you have said?’

  ‘Oh, something about how you and I were having enough trouble living here with each other – and him being the third person was making it even more difficult, being here – and maybe he ought to go.’

  I felt a rush of horror at the idea of him standing there and saying all that to Javo, like a husband protecting a wife who was battling with feelings too strong for her. I walked quickly away from him down the passage towards my room.

  ‘Hey.’ He said it uncertainly, on two notes, but with the unambiguous meaning: stop. I went on into my room. I stood in front of the mirror on the dressing table; I looked at myself helplessly. He followed me into the room.

  ‘What do you think of that?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I replied in a neutral voice.

  ‘But at least you could tell me what you think of it.’ He was insisting. I picked up the eyedrops and squeezed them into my eyes, one after the other.

  It’s up to you to say what you think. But . . . as long as you don’t give the impression that what you say is the result of a conversation with me.’ Ugh, the revulsion I felt at being spoken for, or at being thought to be spoken for.