Get A Life

by Nadine Gordimer

  She lay with her eyes closed, somewhere trying to pace her breathing along with that beside her as she would keep up with his longer stride on walks. He put aside the book, turned off the light. It was their long custom to dismiss the day for each other by saying goodnight in the dark. The kiss put a seal to it or led to lovemaking. He'd had some prostate trouble but didn't need Viagra. The kiss tonight was a seal.

  As he fell asleep he woke startlingly and heard her heaving with sobs. For a confused moment it was as if he found she was being attacked, desperate intruders know how to defuse suburban burglar alarms. His hand struck the wall, found the light switch. There was no-one. Her brutally self-distorted face cringed at the glare. He turned it off and he and the dark took her in his arms. Her body was hot, thick and strange against him.

  – Why did it have to be like this for him, so we could talk. Talk. Why not before? What were we doing. Waited for this. What happened to us. What's the matter with me so it couldn't be these years that've been going by so satisfied with what was supposed to be loving. -

  – Lyn – my darling – you're doing everything. Everything possible. Good God, you come home and make his bed, clean his room, wash his clothes – his nurse, servant – taken on more risk than anyone, than I do – all right, I helped him bath when he was still so weak – but how many professional women would get down to what you're doing. -

  Her body began to shake as sobs made her choke and cough.

  – Taking care of the man as you did when he was a baby. What more could there be. Listen to me, listen -

  He stroked her hair, her shoulder, at last she scrubbed her face with the sheet and it came to him as a signal they would have to meet, kiss. While they entered each other by the silenced mouths he began to hold and fondle her breasts and a desperate desire rose in both of them. They made love, as Paul and his woman had buried their fear when the judgment came by telephone, and they were not aware of their son without this resort, this brief haven from fearful solitude. Just down the passage, where he had come home.

  It turned out to be real that the inconceivable can become routine. At least so far as contact is decreed. Relationships. Their new nature, frequency, and limits. So if he does not get up to eat breakfast with them in the morning – sometimes too early a reminder that when he does join them his plate is paper and the utensils he uses must be put aside separately by Lyndsay or Adrian before they leave for the day – they make it their habit to open his door for an affectionate word of goodbye he knows is actually to see unobtrusively what state he's woken in. He supposes he must keep out of the kitchen as much as he can, although it's necessary, during the day when Primrose is not there, to go in for water or a snack from the refrigerator. While he eats his breakfast or lunch he may call out in a little exchange with Primrose attendant there beyond the door, asking what she's cooking up that smells so great, and receiving through the hearty gabble and thudding pop music of one of the African language radio stations she plays as she works, her dramatic report of the latest holdup she just heard about in a news flash. – These devils! Who were their mothers? God will punish them. – And with an effortless change of subject to the news of the progress of Tembisa in school sport – she wants to find something to tell that will interest a young man. Then she and the radio are gone.

  Berenice calls as soon as she gets to her advertising agency every morning. Or from her mobile if she's on her way to a working breakfast where she's to outline a campaign to an important client. Berenice. He visualises her by that name, as represented her to him when they first met and like most people tentatively attracted to one another used calls to pursue the attraction between meetings.

  This call is supposed to be a substitute for the natural exchange of daily preoccupations and happenings they've had since living together, that's the premise both must keep up. She has to fill the silences by relating what's in progress in her working life in diverting detail as if giving a report to an interested party – another, an intimate kind of client; he has nothing much at all to say.

  Yesterday I listened to the whole Fidelio.

  This morning?

  Maybe the garden.

  Well, nice place to read, looks like a lovely clear day. Enjoy!

  Some mornings she has as a hang-up conclusion, awkwardly irrelevant, I love you.

  Benni, by contrast, comes often and regularly in the afternoons. This is Benni, all right. In her unconventional, gypsy form of business dress and scarves she carries off so well and that he likes to watch her arming herself with when she gets up from their bed to begin a day. He watches her now as they stand in that No-Man's-Land, the safety of the garden, and unbidden, inappropriate, nerves coming alive from some anaesthesia, he has the surging yearning to touch her. Cross the few feet of space between them, where they stand, or where on the chairs from the terrace he's put out they sit, apart, facing each other; feel her under his hand. She has rung at the gate on the intercom, he has pressed the remote control, she has driven up the drive and he has been there, not far, not near, as she gets out of the car, and they stop – each held back. A greeting across the void, laughing, had they forgotten the sheer pleasure in seeing one another? But it has no natural conclusion in touch. This gap she hastens to fill with the things she has brought, more books, clothes, letters – once flowers, but that, both saw, was a mistake, as if he were a sick friend in hospital. Who can say what his existential category really is?

  His mother takes him to the hospital for his out-patient monitoring. His father substitutes if the appointments coincide with a court hearing at which she is appearing for a client but he is not as familiar with the medical procedures as she is, which makes her uneasy – one cannot know the bond the unfamiliarity makes, the father and son entering, as two men, the alienation of the one, the way men bond in the traditionally male circumstances of war. Or, in another kind of gender identity, when (vividly again present, in the hospital waiting room) the ten-year-old boy and the father were side by side like this in homage to the physical power of maleness at a rugby game. His father is Adrian, a man: this consciousness has become ignored under the filial relationship taking second place to that with wife and child. Sitting beside him in the nowhere of waiting rooms, the man knows that to look at your woman across space and to be held back from going over to touch her, breathe her, is a castrating frustration.

  On the first weekend she brought their child to him, but later visits had to be confined to the three-year-old boy seeing his father from the other side of the iron-barred gate – he could not be stopped from running up to hug round his father's legs, in an open encounter. And then there came the day he flew into a tearful, violent rage, weeping as he clutched the bars and yelling, Daddy, Daddy, Paul, Daddy, Paul. The one called upon had to go away into the house so that the child could be persuaded, in despair, to let go of the quarantine bars. No-one of the adults who had brought him there to visit his father could reach the depth in him that was perhaps sure he would never see his father again.

  It was decided not to expose the child to trauma while protecting him from danger he could not be expected to understand. Instead his mother substituted for the sight of him by beginning to talk a great deal about him, when she called, and when she was a visitor at a distance. How their baby (still was that) had had his first swimming lesson (there are many dangers to be anticipated), how cross he'd become when a friend from nursery school came to spend the night and wet the bed, how he'd developed a passion for avocados and would eat a whole one like an apple. Once she brought a crayon drawing – he said it's for you. There's the home every child draws, high walls, two windows, door, steep roof. A few strokes as birds in the sky. A free-floating flower with trailing kite-stems. His father had once bought a Chinese paper dragon and taken him out to fly it one Saturday afternoon but he was too young to understand how to control it. To the left and in the foreground, reaching up the picture higher than the house, a man with stick arms but carefully outlined pants, Chapli
n-splayed feet, has a big head and huge bared teeth. Greeting? Or anger.

  Primrose called to him at his breakfast, Why Nickie doesn't come to see his daddy no more? And the wail: Oh shame. But you must tell, you coming back soon, children don't think time like we do.

  He had the impulse to bring the drawing from his bedside, where he had avoided looking at it since placing it where it ought to be, and he held it up for her to see from the distance of the kitchen door.

  Adrian and Lyndsay manage the weekends well. It has never needed to be discussed, goes without saying that they refuse to keep their distance from him; even so far as that would be possible, sharing what's become the family house again. The only exception is that Lyndsay, the one who handles what touches him intimately, clothes and bedding, resists the move to follow him into his room and give him the goodnight kiss that a mother is entitled to, from childhood surely for all his life – the two men wouldn't be aware of this need. She herself does not know if she resists out of fear. Is there some sort of parenthesis in the mind: how can you fear your own child?

  Neither Lyndsay nor Adrian plays any organised sport – Adrian likes to remark with pretended ruefulness, How can I retire, as I don't play golf? A vision of an eternity as an endless stretch of greens, tees, sand pits, small flags. He's always been a much diverted spectator of rugby, however, since he played scrum half in student days; on Saturdays he plans to pass the afternoon for his son, turning on the TV with the enquiring invitation glance to be joined in the living-room.

  The form of exercise Adrian and Lyndsay take is long walks, ordinarily they would go off into the bush somewhere at least once a month, spend a weekend at some small resort from which they could cover trails with the exuberant dog, its sense of freedom matched by theirs. Paul knows, come Saturday-Sunday they would be doing what leisure best meant to them, and besides was essential for healthy people getting older. Living with a small child of his own two generations removed, he's been used to thinking of them as old, but in these days close in this house, a way one or the other moved, a reaction between them, a gesture or turn of phrase either used, returned them from individuals to what they had been before. Parents. He can't tell them, as he wishes, that they could go off and enjoy their walk in the country, he knows from living with Benni how, never mind the exercise, you have the need to do some things together, surely even in a marriage as long as theirs… how long must it be?… doesn't remember. He'll be all right. He's learning to be alone in his new way just as he and his sisters learnt in the old way when parents were absent from this house. But he can't raise the subject because logic of this kind brings up the unimaginable state: why is he here with them, at all. Adrian and Lyndsay, parents who are now also the new devout missionaries, no care possible for self, in this private place of asylum, taking care of the lit-up leper.

  Most evenings the three listen to music. Adrian has a remarkable collection, not only CDs but rare LPs, even 78s, and the gamut of equipment, antique and the latest, to play them. Adrian has to go about the house to find the particular recordings he wants Paul and Lyndsay to enjoy – an early Klemperer, a contemporary Barenboim – since the racks that hold his collection are stacked here and there, even in passages. Equipment to provide occupation in retirement (he'd been promising himself for years to find time to catalogue his treasures properly), they had had to clear from what was to be his study become the son's refuge. Of course Paul knows he is welcome to banish the listening silence during the weekday desertion by parents (that is how Adrian and Lyndsay think of their absence at office and Chambers). Sometimes he tries it, the complete Fidelio an experiment, and if the recording is a single human voice, Callas with the systole and diastole of the breath that empowers it, present within his four walls, it is one-half of a dialogue with what is missing in his present. Full orchestral stuff which perhaps Adrian hopes for his son will be a rousing affirmation of being, is an unwelcome crowd gate-crashing the silence. He'd rather strain, half-consciously alert to make out if maybe there might be the small domestic sounds of Primrose moving about in the kitchen.

  His sister Jacqueline lives with an accountant husband in another suburb. She was a Montessori nursery-school teacher and has substituted their own two children for the general brood who used to receive her maternal care. She sends her brother homemade concoctions she remembers or thinks he likes. Pork sausage rolls. Once a baked banana pudding, upgraded, the accompanying note says, 'from the treat we used to love, by a good slosh of brandy'. She brings the offerings to the gate and Primrose takes delivery. The first occasion, he went to greet his sister beyond the bars and she began to cry at the sight of him; so he kept himself out of the way, after that. But then he had gone strangely, slowly, back to the house and to the bathroom to see in the mirror what she saw. He had become thinner; but it seemed to him only that he looked falsely innocent, artificially younger than he remembered his face as he shaved – before.

  Susan, the sister married to an ostrich farmer become unexpectedly prosperous due to the worldwide demand for low-cholesterol steaks, doesn't know what to say to him and phones their mother to enquire after his progress. She graduated from art school but with the inherited rigorous standards of her ambitious mother transferred from a professional vocation to that of art, saw that she did not have the talent to become an abstract painter or a postmodernist, a conceptualist, of originality, and with her father's adaptation to circumstances worked as a restorer of museum paintings before taking to her farmer and his surrealist birds. Emma, the biological prank sister who followed her brother's birth so precipitately, lives in South America, where she is foreign correspondent for a British newspaper. The emigration came about, as it does for many females, because she had married a foreigner – a Brazilian lawyer met when her mother invited him home to dinner during a conference on constitutional law he was attending in South Africa. This daughter was a precocious divorcée, a law student at the time; the only one of the siblings following any tradition of parental careers. Emma's emails greet my almost-twin (only twelve months between their births) hardly popped out before papa popped me in and they arrive every few days to that room designated for him, the very beep of the computer a kind of lively grimace, from her, at what had – what was the term – befallen him. She had no embarrassed reverential awe, no disguised distaste for how he must find himself as one could never imagine oneself being; she asked, came right out with it: absolutely ghastly, I try to imagine how you cope, it must be so unreal, I think it's a good thing I'm far away because I wouldn't believe it, some sci-fi thing in you, my boetie, I'd just hug you. Can't accept you've winged down giving off rays from horrible Outer Space. Lowest common denominator in corny entertainment. Ugh. We'd have a good laugh together, as we've done since we burbled as babies. The sheer absurdity of all this, in your life. Crazy. D'you mean you can't even have a fuck? There isn't anything she can't say, at her distance – she keeps that distance by not calling, and he understands; she somehow knows he has nothing to relate. Sometimes he sends a brief email in reply, she knows the formula is all he can 'manage', good to hear from you, got the hug, love ya. If she tears the band-aids of convention off his state, it's a wild release; for the moments while he reads and falls to the temptation to reread, he hears himself laughing out loud. But it won't work to leave himself raw, like this, management exists only in ordinariness being imposed, applied and maintained as long – long as he lasts. A test-decreed end. Or test-decreed survival. No more emanation, no light.

  He wanders the rooms of the house as if idly cataloguing objects recognised and things acquired, added, for which there is no memory embedded, representing periods and desires of two people postdating the time he quit this house where he is returned as emanation. Inanimate things do not receive cognisance of an ectoplasm, only living beings are aware of such a presence. The Labrador taking a stolen siesta on a sofa lifts her head at someone there, in the room.

  Through the deep windows of the living-room, legs thrown over the
sill, he finds himself in the garden.

  It's only at what must be some regularly spaced day that the man with the great fork or spade or shears is there: the salute. It has become a wave of an implement waggled in the air. He's tried to call back an opening for some exchange but the few words composed in Zulu are not responded to except for a grin that might or might not be incomprehension, maybe the grammatical construction is laughable or the man speaks another language. There's his own voice answered, by a raucous bird-cry. The hadedas come from the rooftop and thrust their telescope beaks sounding for worms in the lawn, as if he were not there.

  Seven- (could it be as young as that) eight-year-old with a catapult made from a jacaranda branch and some strips of rubber (old bicycle tyre) aims at the doves still mourning their recitative up on the gutters. The game is forbidden and the one time a bird is hit and falls limp but with life in the glint of the eye it's understood why: death is forbidden. What happened to the bird. Concealed in a dustbin. No, secrecy has more imagination than that, more than the lawmakers could credit. It was buried, a playmate brought in for the rites, there behind the old compost heap, with the stems of some daisies stuck upright in the soil.

  It's not often a grown man lies down on his back on grass; there're the plastic-thonged chaises longues meant to be unfolded in the sun or under the shade of the jacaranda. To a naked upturned face; no sky; space. No cloud to give scale in the bleach of glare, no blue to give depth. Grass stirs beneath with minute scratching claws. Perhaps there are beetles, ants, moving unseen as the predator cells in their terrain, all life is one, it's said. On this crawling sensation some weight thuds down, it's the playmate, there's a giggling, gasping struggle; if it's the playmate in turn thrust low on the irritation of the grass, ends in tears. Comes the liar's appeal for mercy – There's a gogga biting me! So this grass is the referee in the savage small-boy fights that are also forbidden. Is that how you treat friends? It's not a game. You will hurt each other.