Love You Two

by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli

  She squats down near the model, her chin barely bobbing over the table. She motions for me to squat down too. ‘This is a panopticon. If you look at each door and each window from the watchtower, you can see inside them all. But if you try and see the watchtower from any of the windows or doors, you can’t see the guard.’

  I try it from lots of angles and see that she’s right. Wei Lee’s looking at her model with hushed and wry awe.

  ‘It was Bentham’s perfect system of control and surveillance. Be able to observe everyone but not be seen observing. If the prisoners feel they’re always being watched, even when you may not be watching at all, they’ll police themselves. They’ll behave as if they’re always being watched. And there’s soon no need for a guard to be there at all.’ She smiles dryly. ‘Quite a master plan, hey? Like life really.’

  She holds up a finger as if she’s about to launch into another lecture but just then the phone rings. As she goes to answer it, she says, ‘But sometimes some people get on with their lives anyway. They find a corner, somehow, away from the watchtower where they can be their harmless loving selves.’

  Wei Lee begins to chat on the phone about skylights and sunlight, angles and mirrors. The doorbell rings and she signals to me to go and open it.

  There’s a man – sorry, a hot male model type straight out of Cleo – standing there wearing a see-through shirt contoured by large biceps, and the tightest of dark blue jeans. The breeze sways his glossy hair while he peers at me with steel-blue eyes over the top of designer glasses. I’m hardly breathing as this mirage, this hunk of sexiness, says in a deep voice, ‘Hello sweetness, is Don in?’

  ‘No, but Wei Lee is.’ I’m hoping he’ll come in so I can lust some more. Is this one of their Narnia friends? Is there one like this closer to my age? I smile brightly in hope.

  ‘Why Lee, darling?’ he repeats slowly, lowering his glasses and sneering at me.

  Maybe he doesn’t know who she is. Anyway, the sneer’s putting me off from the sexiness. ‘His girlfriend,’ I explain.

  ‘Girlfriend?’ He smirks. ‘As in real girl girlfriend?’

  ‘Yeah.’ He may be hot-looking but he’s beginning to leave me cold with this snarky attitude. ‘I’ll get her.’

  ‘No, no. Don’t bother, darling. I’m outta here. Just tell Don that his ex called by. I’m back in town and he knows where to find me – if he still likes boys, that is.’

  13

  Of bats, boxes and boyfriends

  I CLOSE THE DOOR AND STARE at its pastel pink and purple. There’s that loud silence: no seagulls squawking, no wind chimes tinkling, no surf frothing on the sand.

  Then, a slight shuffle behind me. I know she’s there. I can feel her watching me, waiting while I have my commercial break before this soapie life of mine goes off into another impossible storyline.

  I shake my head slowly, still staring at the door. Here I am, surprised again, but a little less hysterical after having lost my balance already in my own home in Adelaide. It’s less of a maze this time, but I’m still standing on a new border between what I knew before I opened that door, what was here all along, and what had been suggested by the language and gestures of this house.

  ‘Why do houses change around me so much and so quickly lately?’ I ask out loud to the door, laughter and tears both on the alert. If I turn around to Wei Lee, what else will she be, who else will I see?

  She moves towards me. I feel soft small fingers on my upper back. ‘Let’s go for a walk on the beach.’

  Gradually the seagulls and surf start up again as we make our way past Luna Park, the grinning clown’s teeth and frenzied eyes mocking me. From inside its chasm of a mouth come screams and laughter from the roller-coaster.

  We find a quiet spot on the sand and gaze at the setting sun splitting the sea and sky, turning the vast horizon into blurring blends of pink, purple and rose.

  ‘Your uncle is bisexual, if there must be a label,’ Wei Lee says, taking us right into the depths of the middle. No hesitating on the surface before spiralling in. No, let’s begin at the centre and hope we find our way out. ‘He has a heart that enables him to fall in love with a person regardless of gender.’ I hug my knees and stare into the sand at my feet, each granule a tiny cold rock. But I can feel her voice melt with the loving smile I know she’s offering to the horizon. ‘I think it’s a gift. Most in this world call it a curse. What do you think?’

  ‘I’ve never really thought about it. I know people can be gay.’ I think of Laura’s mum. ‘You know, gay or straight, but bisexual? I thought it was a phase and then people chose which they were. I mean, he’s with a girl, you, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yes, and he could be with a man just as easily. He’s tried to be straight. In Adelaide, for the sake of your grandparents, Pina, being the only boy. That good Catholic Italian son routine. So he found a girl in Adelaide. He made her his girlfriend, and then he was arrested in a park. With a man.’ Jigsaw pieces slot themselves into place. ‘He was trying to do straight in public and gay in private. After all, that seems to be far more acceptable than being honest about one’s desires.’ Wei Lee’s voice is dry through the smile, the way it had sounded today as she told me about her mother, and her life at school.

  ‘He hurt her. He hurt himself. And of course, the shame from the community. You can imagine your nonna.’ She pauses with a sigh. ‘You never knew?’

  ‘No, but then I know eff-all about what’s been going on for years,’ I reply bitterly, digging my fingers into the sand.

  ‘You were a child,’ she says, and I can feel her looking at me. ‘Adults often use silence to protect a child, rather than finding a way of speaking to the child so that protection becomes unnecessary.’ She looks away and I think about Wei Lee’s mother’s silence. About my mother’s silence.

  She shrugs and makes finger-rivulets in the sand. ‘So, Don decided he must do gay. He would become gay. Because he couldn’t see it any other way. And to get away from your grandparents and the gossip, he came to Melbourne to be gay. He tried to fit in. That guy at the door was your uncle’s boyfriend when I first met him here. He was seeing other guys behind your uncle’s back. Don didn’t want that. But he was also cheating his boyfriend, I used to tell him, by not telling him about his feelings for women, for me. They broke up. Other guys came and went. Even a girl who dropped Don like a hot potato when she found out he could also love a man. He zigzagged from straight to gay.

  ‘And I loved him through it all, but I wasn’t prepared to get caught in that zigzag. I wanted him to be who he was, all of it, with dignity, with me. When we met again, we agreed to work on our own boundaries. I’m straight, he’s bi. Well, actually, we’re two people who really love and connect. We’ve agreed to be monogamous, but if anything happens to either of us where we may wish to change that, we’ll talk about it openly and re-map the fence.’

  I think about the cake shop owner and the praise she heaped on Wei Lee and Zi Don today. ‘It would surprise so many people – like the woman in the cake shop.’

  ‘I’ve wanted to tell her. We often want to tell all these people who think they know us. They really do know us well, Pina, and yet they only know part of us. We want to tell them about the other reality that has always existed beyond the simplistic stereotypes presented out there in newspapers, on television, in magazines. But we don’t, and sometimes I hate myself for it.’ Sad chuckle. ‘Maybe she’d understand. After all, she understands hatred. She was a Jewish baby whose parents were gassed in a concentration camp for goodness’ sake.’ Wei Lee sighs.

  ‘Are there many people in relationships like you and Zi Don? I’ve just never heard of it.’ Or of ones like my parents’, I think.

  ‘Yes, in the cracks of what’s meant to be, either gay or straight, and beyond the stereotypical “married men with secret boyfriends” scenario. Society allows for all that, and rewards and punishes accordingly. But in our little prison cells, we find space to exist and flourish, and then we disguise
ourselves when we’re in view of the watchtower. Like in the cake shop.’

  Wei Lee stands up, brushing the sand from her. The sun’s sinking, the sky darkening into that satiny blue that blurs more and more with the sea. Wei Lee holds out her arms and breathes in deeply. ‘Let’s go home, Pina. To Narnia. Where people are multicultural, multisexual. Where knowing how to love is what matters, not who you love.’

  ‘Where people are … multipartnered?’ I ask shyly.

  Wei Lee smiles down at me, her eyes shining. She holds out her hands to help me up. ‘Yes. It’s rare, but if that’s the way they love and everyone agrees on the boundaries, who does it hurt? Why divorce and destroy love when it might need only a redesigning, a renovation, rather than tearing the whole house down and starting again. You might find the next one has poor plumbing, or the new wall colours clash.’ She laughs.

  I reach out and take one of her small hands. I don’t know why I’m so cool about it all, or why I’m suddenly so affectionate. Somehow cynical and bitter-and-twisted is seeming kind of boring and useless. ‘You really love him, don’t you?’ I ask.

  One arm winds around my waist while the fingertips of the other seem to find their niche in the diminishing space between sea and sky, now barely lit by the last of the sun’s arc. ‘Look out there, Pina. It’s like a love story between sun and ocean. In the morning they separate after having spent the night together. But they always keep in touch. The sun’s rays massage the ocean throughout the day, the sun itself reflected in the silky folds of water. And the reflections from the surface of the sea make the sun spread its ribbons of warm colour throughout the sky. But in the evening –’ she smiles, holding me closer, her jet-black hair brushing my upper arm – ‘they come together again. They change colours as they flush with excitement, the sky reddening like fire, the sea turning aqua, turquoise, light blue, velvet blue. My designs can never match this.’

  Luna Park is shut now, silent. Its wire gates are braces gone crazy as they grid the mouth opening. The clown’s eyes are spotlighted and look exhausted from trying to be scary.

  The lavender and white roses give off a strong end-of-the-day, welcome-home scent as we walk towards the front door. It’s mixed with a warm tantalising scent of herbs and sauces coming from within the house. The sign ‘Narnia’ is just visible, glinting in the growing dusk.

  There’s Zi Don cooking up a feast, the cake from Acland Street in a tray, chilled glasses ready to be filled with something refreshing. ‘This is what I come home to in the evenings,’ Wei Lee says, eyes warm and teary as she walks towards him, rises on to her tiptoes and kisses him.

  ‘Hey, buonasera, belle donne!’ He bends low to meet her kiss, wooden spoon not missing a swirl in the sauce simmering on the stove.

  Music’s playing, he’s smiling and swaying, my Zio Donato, who is also bisexual. When he sees me hesitate, he gives Wei Lee the wooden spoon and comes forward, sweeping me up in a waltz like I’ve seen Dad do to Mum. We go for a whirl, strategically dodging the coffee table, the sofa, the pots on the stove, while Wei Lee licks the sauce off the spoon.

  He’s deliriously happy. ‘Two of my fave girls here. Only wish your mother was here too,’ he says as the room spins around us.

  We finally stop and he whisks Wei Lee up into a hug, her feet dangling off the floor. He wrestles the wooden spoon from her just before she scoops more sauce from out of the pot, and continues with his cooking.

  Maybe a few days ago my response to their easy affection, to everything I’ve learned today and to what I’ve learned in the last few days would’ve been simple and automatic. I would’ve known the script and performed it like a stage veteran: contorted my face into the customary moulds of disgust, shock, horror. But it’s like I now almost expect the whole world to be this blurry mess with all the real stuff jack-in-the-boxing out of the closets. And the world I was taught was real? Well, that’s the world of scripts and surfaces.

  ‘Dinner’s ready. Let’s have it outside,’ Zi Don says, draining steaming fettuccine in a colander. Outside, there’s a candlelit table and three champagne glasses. I follow him to where he begins to scoop out fettuccine in funghi e peperonata. It smells divine! One thing’s for sure. He may look like my mum, but he’s certainly different in the cooking department.

  Zi Don raises his glass. Wei Lee and I raise ours, and he toasts us. ‘To real love, real family and hurts healing.’

  Wei Lee raises hers. ‘To life despite the prison, to spite the prison.’ They smile at each other.

  Zi Don turns to me. ‘Your turn, Principessa Pina. What do you send out to the universe at the end of this gift of a day?’

  I raise my glass. ‘To no more family secrets.’ I raise my glass higher and point it towards Wei Lee. ‘I’m too old to be lied to.’ I point the glass towards Zi Don. ‘Now those secrets piss me off, and they’re stuffing around with my life too.’

  Zi Don’s glass has got stuck in midair, the light from the tealight candles playing with the golden champagne in it, the bubbles refracted into rainbow spheres. He looks at Wei Lee again. She nods and takes a sip.

  For some reason, I’m feeling strong, in control. These adults owe me truths. They say they had their reasons to lie, all that stuff about protecting me. Well, I’m way over wanting to be protected. I’m ready now, and I’m not going to take any more lying from them.

  ‘The truth itself, bold and unadorned, is just too strange for some to take,’ Zi Don begins. ‘Ms Smart Niece of mine, think of Aesop’s fable, “The Bat, the Birds and the Beasts”. The bat was the creature who refused to take sides in the war between the birds and the beasts, and so ends up exiled from both groups. Some people want the world to be two neat boxes that we’re supposed to fit into. They don’t like it when they have to stop and consider that there might be more than two boxes, maybe even admit they got sucked in to squeezing into a box that doesn’t fit. Or what if boxes have connecting bridges?’ He pauses and grins at me. ‘You realise this is what I sound like in court.’

  I roll my eyes grimly. ‘Yeah, yeah, go on, big-shot lawyer. Argue your case.’

  ‘My pleasure. I will continue my summation. I’m a bat. Or maybe a seahorse. I’m in the middle, a bit of both and something else altogether. Like when Wei Lee and I have children. They won’t be Asian or European – but what kind of Australian? They’ll be bits of Catholic and Buddhist but not either or both. And whoever they choose to love, and however they choose to love, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s safe, responsible, healthy and passionate. Maybe by the time they’re your age, or maybe my age if it still takes that long, the world will say there are more options in how you work out life and love.’

  Wei Lee slices me a piece of bread to mop up the sauce in my plate. ‘Funny how what’s natural and unnatural changes over time,’ she muses. ‘Our kids will probably have a good life as more and more people have seen and come to accept multicultural families. Well, our family is also multisexual, and I hope one day that’ll be acceptable too.’

  My brain’s in overdrive making sense of it all. And I’m sad that it’s making the kind of sense I’ve never known.

  ‘I always thought life was very simple. Maybe I wanted to think that. Tick the right box: people out there are either gay or straight; parents out there either love each other or they don’t and if they don’t, they get divorced and then they love someone else; you know for sure whether you want sex with someone or you don’t. I wanted my family, and me, to be immune from shit choices. To be happy ever after with no what-ifs,’ I say.

  ‘So much is indeterminable, unsettling,’ Wei Lee says. ‘I meet that huge man there –’ she points her fork with a speared sun-dried tomato slice on it – ‘a hairy European-Australian three times my size, from a migrant family with its own baggage, and I fall in love even as he tells me he’s trying to be gay.’

  ‘And when I first saw Wei Lee, I had a boyfriend. I was working hard to be comfortably gay. So my first thought about her was, “Oh no”.’
>
  I can’t help laughing, pointing at them. ‘You two are so random. She gives you a model of a prison for your first anniversary, and his first thoughts when he sees you are “Oh no!”’

  Zi Don laughs but his eyes are shining with tears. ‘You can’t fit the straight box? Okay, there’s the gay box over here that comes with a whole lot more dents, shredded wrapping and graffiti from having to survive bashings from the straight box.

  ‘Then along comes this intelligent, beautiful, passionate strong woman –’ he gestures to Wei Lee – ‘and my box begins to split at the seams. But I can’t jump out of the gay box and knock on the straight box and say, “Let me in, I belong in there”, because that’s not true either. And Wei Lee wouldn’t live with my illusion.’

  ‘It was get real or get out of my life,’ adds Wei Lee, her eyes narrowing further while her lips smile.

  Zi Don raises his glass to her. ‘So, Pina, you can see why I stayed away from her even as I was magnetically drawn to her.’

  ‘But when were you going to get around to telling me?’ I ask Zi Don.

  ‘Tonight. This dinner. Time to sit down and chat because you’re here with us at Christmas and there are things we’d planned. Our annual Christmas party here, our Christmas visits. Our Narnia rituals that we either had to stop you attending or, if you came along, prepare you for in advance. Also, the ex called in to see me at work. He wanted to know if I’d come to my senses and stopped this silly phase with women. He told me of a certain young woman with stunned mullet eyes who opened the door.’

  I raise my arms and fan out my hands as if grandstanding on a stage. ‘That’s me.’

  ‘I invited him to our party. But he said he had better things to do. You know, he said that I don’t even look gay any more. What’s that all about?’

  Wei Lee laughs and makes a camera with her hands in front of her eyes, leaning forward as if to zoom in on him.