by Anna George
‘Everything’s fine.’ His brown eyes glinted.
‘I needed a break from the edit suite . . . I need to talk to you.’ Her words came out loud. ‘Now.’
Frowning, he considered her. To her surprise, again, she felt vulnerable and wrong. An interloper. Her lips began to tremble. As if newly conscious of her fragility, or their hushed audience, he nodded.
In his office, Elle could see as far as the Dandenongs. She had forgotten how spectacular the views were. David closed the glass door. Though his office had a couch, he sat behind his desk and she sat in front of him. For seconds he sat, staring at the wall behind her. It, like the other wall, seemed to be constructed of black-labelled folders. Each folder bore a golden, round shield: Leonidas. The densely packed shelves and their folders reminded her of bars. Rows of black bars. She made herself look outside. Rain was pelting into the glass. The wind had changed. David’s eyes sought his computer.
‘This won’t take long,’ she said.
Sighing, he leaned across his desk and retrieved from a wooden box a packet of cigarettes. Though no longer an office worker she was familiar with certain developments in the law. Furtively, David lit up. She thought to speak but became aware of the bounce of noise beyond his office: telephones, talk, photocopying. Through his closed glass door, she could see the spectacled eyes of a middle-aged woman in the secretarial corral.
‘Why don’t you say what you have to say?’
His mood, she saw, was against her. She should have called ahead. Or at least gone to reception. David inhaled without looking at her.
‘Okay,’ she said.
David turned in his chair and exhaled onto the window. He watched the smoke spread and thin across the tinted glass. His body was squared, as if bracing itself against her.
‘Yesterday I visited a specialist and he thinks I have a gynaecological condition called endometriosis. That’s what’s been affecting our sex life.’ She paused. ‘It’s closely linked to infertility.’
David stared at his depleting veil of smoke. His lack of response astounded her. Fireworks she had anticipated, but silence? She found it dizzying, like she was suspended over a trapdoor. She stood, realising this was not the place for this conversation, not the time. Her lack of judgement, again, wrong-footed her.
From the orchestrated bedlam of ringing machines and purring copiers, the PA was watching openly. Elle ducked her head. The woman glanced at her colleagues, a stealthy invitation. More eyes turned to the theatre-screen of David’s door. David didn’t move, though he sighed. He opened a drawer and extinguished his cigarette into a clean ashtray.
She walked to his thick window and peered down at the human specks on the bitumen below.
‘Spit it out.’
‘Okay.’ Her face felt hot. ‘I need to have a procedure to confirm the diagnosis and if it’s right, cut away what’s there. He thinks I should have it immediately, but . . .’
His eyes narrowed, and she saw twin pinpricks of anger.
Into the silence, her voice croaked. ‘I don’t like hospitals. I want to get a second opinion.’ She wiped her mouth with a trembling hand.
‘What’s the point?’
Elle frowned, uncertain of his meaning. Watching his stillness, she realised that he was unsurprised. He jutted his lips into a Neanderthal pout but she could see guilt in those red-brown eyes. When he spoke, his face turned a deep, sour red.
‘I’ve had enough of this.’
She sank into the couch. ‘This? What do you mean?’
David slid the leaden document from his desk. Impassively, he crossed his legs and observed the sets of eyes on the other side of his door. He angled his chair so that he could see neither them nor Elle, and turned the first page. Amid scrawled annotations on the cover, she glimpsed the ubiquitous shield and the word: ‘Tender.’
‘You don’t get it. I want to be a father, not with someone defective.’
His smile was a surprise: fat and thick, rich, like a poisoned dollop of cream. She hadn’t known a smile could hurt so much. She rose from the couch gingerly, as if giddy with it. She rested her fingers on his desktop, like struts. His phenomenal selfishness struck her.
She found that she was struggling to breathe. As her chest rose and fell, he stared at the slab of paper in his hand, as if it was the most fascinating document in the building. As the seconds passed, it took all of her strength not to yank it from his fingers. She imagined climbing on top of his desk and tugging his face to hers. Tears sprung from her eyes and she crumpled as her fingers gave way on the desktop.
‘I can’t cope with this,’ she said. ‘I can’t cope.’ She said it over and over, as if the words were new in her mouth. The more she said them the more she shocked herself. The more she knew it was true.
‘Don’t do this,’ she said. ‘David, don’t do this.’
The absence of his anger now was creating a vacuum into which she felt her emotions sucked and magnified. Her chest continued to heave while David continued to stare at the document. She found herself sobbing. It took her a minute to realise that he didn’t intend to speak again.
With tears sliding off her cheeks she left stealthily, ignoring the startled faces of the administrative staff and the sudden hush. In the corridor, a familiar striding figure, leaner, more concave, stared through her; Andrew Milne’s disinterest was the final paper cut. Back in the elevator, her chest was a cage of pain.
For five days, she didn’t hear from him.
Tears, delicate and ephemeral as feathers, became a part of her days. It was as if a great stopper had been tugged from her and she trickled. She became accustomed to the unheralded wet sensation on her cheeks. In the edit suite, on the footpath, in the toilet. She tried to remember to stock tissues in her backpack and every pocket.
In the small hours of the night, she unpicked their relationship until she understood. They had been entwined, playing off each other for months, and the more she’d needed him the further away he had gone. But the insight didn’t change a thing. She couldn’t breathe without him, couldn’t eat, couldn’t concentrate. On day six, she called him and he hung up. On day seven she tried again. On day ten it seemed she’d paid her penance, and he came back with The Old Man and the Sea and tickets to Tasmania to visit the Museum of Old and New Art. They picked up where they’d left off.
As soon as the final edit was approved, the picture locked, she and David went to Hobart. And he doted on her. But not long after their weekend away, he started to yell.
One Friday, he yelled because she hadn’t made an appointment for her laparoscopy. He called her irresponsible, short-sighted, selfish. And, by way of punishment, he took off for the weekend, without another word, only to return with a handcrafted picture frame for her. One Monday, he yelled again when she asked why he’d stopped seeing Marion. He called her a harridan and a hypocrite, and hurled his phone across the kitchen. After, spanking-new his-and-her smartphones appeared on their pillows. One Thursday, he hollered when she confessed that her film, now in the final stages of post, was a disappointment. ‘What’s all this been for?’ he screeched. ‘All my goddamned sacrifices!’
When he shouted, she told herself that she could take it. That she must be calm. Stronger. That it would pass. Mostly, late at night, she couldn’t stop herself from shaking; even so, she made her voice firm and demanded he stop. He’d fall silent, and, while he didn’t speak to her again for a day or two, afterwards he cooked and waited on her. Sometimes she mustered the courage to tell him she had no need for his gifts, and he’d nod, hangdog. Or, amazingly, he’d make her laugh. Vindicating her enduring faith in him. Sometimes, though, when he yelled and she pushed back, he yelled and swore and she felt more afraid. And, then, ashamed, she cried again. As the weeks wore on, it became a dance. The more he yelled, the more she cried, the more he yelled.
Late one night, he was strewn across the couch. That day, he and his team had presented their pitch to Leonidas. It had not, she gathered, gone so wel
l. His hot scrutiny, his malaise, radiated from his nakedness. In the unlit room, cross-legged on the rug, she stared at the television. Watching it had become his leisure-time activity of choice.
‘I’m trying here,’ he said, out of the blue, ‘but it’s probably going to get worse.’
She felt him looking at her, awaiting her reaction. For months, as she withstood his moods, she’d been trying to will the good David into being, permanently. His warning was, she supposed, fresh evidence he still existed. Even if he was saying: Go. If you can.
‘So you should see Marion,’ she said, gently.
‘She said I didn’t need to come any more.’
Once she would have laughed or screamed. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘she was wrong.’
She rose then for bed.
‘You don’t seem so good yourself,’ he said. ‘Maybe you ought to go see someone.’
She nodded, numbly; perhaps she should. Lately, managing him and spruiking her film seemed to be getting the better of her. Just that morning she’d mumbled her way inanely through a radio interview. He gave her a ruined smile. Dutifully, she walked to him and bent down. He kissed her cheek.
Brushing her teeth, she wasn’t so lost as to deny the truth of her lot. Her marriage had become a type of hell. Undressing, she peered at the leaning tower of books on her bedside table. Why, she wondered, was she still there? And then, the baffling answer came. Despite everything, she loved him. The decent, clever man he truly was beneath the murky hurt and rage. And the thought of her life without him filled her with grief.
20
On the evening of Thursday 5 June, she stood before her mirror, blinked mascara onto her lashes, dabbed rouge at her cheeks and grazed lipstick across her lips. Her hand moved half-heartedly, the faint tremor of her fingers more beguiling than the result created by the creams, dusts and gunk. Her hair was in a towel and she forgot it: the heaviness on her head, the dense, cold sensation around her ears. Only once the towel began to unravel did her focus shift from her fingers. It was then, as the towel tumbled, that she felt the inexplicable urge to gag.
Gagging was the latest in a litany of changes she was observing. Anxiety; she had never realised it worked in such peculiar, tangible ways. Her vagina smelled, her skin was scaly and her hair was coming out in clumps. Each week as she took stock of herself, to her horror, the list grew. Her body was shrinking, her cycles haywire, her sleep disturbed. Worse, observing these changes seemed only to magnify her anxiety; so on it went.
Her hair, wet and tangled, waited on her shoulders for the gagging to pass. With her throat still heaving, she glanced at it. A visit to the hairdresser had been booked but forgotten. She rubbed at the matted strands with a sandpaper-y towel until the bile in her stomach settled. Then, yanking and plugging in her hairdryer, she turned upside down. The hot air blasted onto the base of her skull and she left it there, like a punishment. She could smell hair singeing and heard the dryer groan. She shook her hair and dried it patchily. Right way up, she didn’t look into the glass but merely flattened the tousled mess and exited.
For a night like this, she would never be ready.
Opened in the late 1920s, the Regent Theatre had been one of the first and most extravagant picture palaces in Melbourne. Once, she had thought its golden Rococo interior was fitting for the opening night of Limerence. Tonight, ascending the red-carpeted staircase, she regretted the theatre’s size and opulence; its romance and grandeur. With a gritty smile she slid past the small crowd of onlookers. Posed for the photographers. In the foyer, briefly unobserved, she tarried. She tried to take heart from the resplendent velvet furnishings, the glowing candelabras. In its long life, the theatre had survived a fire, a flood, a twenty-year closure, and threats of demolition.
At ten past seven, already she was late.
Midway across the crowded foyer, she heard a voice. But it wasn’t possible. When she’d called, awaiting him in Seddon, he had been snared in a meeting in Richmond. Disappointed but pragmatic, she had called a cab and waited. Nothing about this film had gone as she had hoped and its opening night wasn’t to be the exception. Listening for that voice again, she surveyed the faces, mostly youthful, some middle-aged, but all dressed similarly in black evening clothes, and many breathtakingly beautiful. She found it unsettling, the relentless tallness and beauty. Where did these people come from? Scanning heads, she couldn’t see his distinctive wayward hair. But still she hesitated, confronted by so many faces; her momentum was lost, caught in a crosswind.
A waiter appeared alongside her, barely twenty and as beautiful as the rest of them. He recognised her. Plucking a water, she turned from his reverential bow and thought of hiding beneath the staircase. Then, once the lights dipped, she’d be able to slip in and watch her film alone in the back row – as she had at its test screening. Thanks to some disengaged murmurings from that audience, twelve minutes had been shed since then. At the eleventh hour, she’d come up with an introductory disclaimer: ‘The relationships depicted herein are purely fictitious, and bear no resemblance to actual relationships, past, present or future. Please don’t expect this at home.’ As well as quirky intertitles, each a chapter heading beginning with ‘Love is . . .’ or ‘Love is not . . .’ Even with its retro soundtrack, featuring Blondie’s ‘In the Flesh’, she still hadn’t saved it. Not much she could do with an uncommitted lead or lack of sparkle. The investors’ contradictory notes hadn’t helped much either. Over time, some people had come to appreciate the film’s irreparable problems. (‘This is not the Lucy we paid for,’ one investor had complained.) Others, even now, refused to see them. Like Mira: resolutely optimistic Mira. Perhaps, thought Elle, that was the enduring power of Lucy van den Berg.
A burst of laughter from the middle of the foyer turned heads. It can’t be, she thought, craning, but it was: David. She blushed with unexpected emotion; given he’d arrived ahead of her, his presence felt like a betrayal. Few nights if any were hers. But it wasn’t anger that pinked her cheeks; it was shame.
Weaving towards him, she saw him foxtrot away, holding a tray of champagne flutes. A spick-and-span David. Not the David in his homey clothes, not the David in his work suit. This David had wax in his hair and was wearing the op-shop dress shirt that she’d found for their wedding. This David was jiggling to the music, a middle-aged raver. Mesmerised, she watched as the purring, sparking David glided with his tray above his head through the crowd. She felt like a mother, stunned to see her child out of context and in his element. She was dressed like a time-poor parent, in black trousers and a black scooped-neck top – as good as in her pyjamas. Clothes had become a dull necessity, like water. Her interest in her appearance had fallen away months ago. She had been focusing exclusively on her film, her anxiety and her reproductive potential. But the months, she realised, had had the opposite effect on him; he had grown toned and tidier. In the crowd of younger, fresher faces, he was shining. As he sidled towards three brunettes, Elle observed the youngest of the set flutter and stretch like a young horse trying out its legs. She admired the girl’s clinging halter dress and the way her shoulder blades jutted. She watched David bow as he served them. It was almost too much to watch: his gracious levity, his charm.
Conscious now of Mira, pinched and searching from the mezzanine – with a photographer in tow – Elle slid between bodies to better see. What had she done to deserve this? Or was he always like this when she wasn’t around? Incredibly, perhaps, she had never wondered at his behaviour in her absence. She had simply assumed he’d be glowering and alone, at an empty cocktail bar. Or engaged benignly at Alex’s gallery.
As she watched, David retrieved his wallet and gave his card to the girl, who pocketed it like a child receiving her first dollar. When he withdrew, he danced further into the foyer. He dusted himself around – laughing, inquiring, touching shoulders. This David was hers, though she hadn’t fully formed the thought before. His. Hers. These weren’t constructive words. But they were flaming above her head as s
he watched him spray himself onto smiling women as if fertilising flowers. Energy, she thought – it was so subtle. And her presence, her energy, was least relevant of all these people’s to him tonight. The realisation cleared her head like a blast of cold air.
In her pursuit of him she had drawn closer to the staircase but she didn’t acknowledge the friendly faces, the press and ascending acquaintances – all here for her film. Instead, she watched him. What was she doing? Was it grit or was it pride? Was it pride or was it hate? Whatever it was, she thought, it wasn’t love.
The realisation brought with it a kind of panic.
She felt twin stabs of colour in her cheeks, as if she’d been slapped. She was startled as much by her clarity as its timing. She folded her arms, clenched her trembling fingers. Perhaps something shifted in her, or her energy altered, for David saw her then. When his face didn’t respond, she busied herself with her handbag.
Nonchalantly, David extracted himself from a group. Approaching her, the light in his face dimmed. ‘When did you materialise?’
‘Oh, not long ago.’
‘What are you wearing?’ he said, his eyes flinty.
Elle glanced at herself, straightened her top, which had risen, revealing her belly. She felt conspicuous to herself now. Enervated yet knowing. David thrust his keys into her hand and she clenched them until the metal dug. As he scanned faces, Elle took in his new, old shirt again, his obedient hair and freshly shaven cheeks, his sweet melon scent and new shoes. He was humming – there was no denying it – and impossibly beautiful.
As David sipped champagne, they stood side by side, unspeaking. Around her, the din underlined their silence. She felt herself sinking into it. If she wasn’t careful she would disappear into it again and they would go on as they always had. She wondered if she had the strength to act. She told herself that when the time was right, she would – decisively and with dignity. But not yet: not on her opening night.