Dancing on Coral

by Glenda Adams

  “Americans think they can do what they like,” Donna Bird murmured. “They write n-i-t-e instead of n-i-g-h-t, c-o-l-o-r instead of c-o-l-o-u-r, c-e-n-t-e-r instead of c-e-n-t-r-e. Such laziness, such sloppiness. They obliterate the history of our beautiful language.”

  Tom had to let the camera go and bend down to hear her. “You’re absolutely right,” he said.

  “You’re not like an American,” said Donna Bird. “You could be English.” Apart from murmuring when she spoke, Donna Bird turned every sentence into a question. “You could be English? You’re not like most Americans?” was how she sounded.

  Tom smiled, his mouth turned down, his head inclined to one side in self-deprecation. “Oxford straightened me out,” he said.

  Lark stood still, listening. Tom Brown and Donna Bird, engrossed in their pronouncements, pushed their trays along the metal ledge and bumped into Lark’s tray.

  “Americans don’t know their arse from their elbow,” Tom was saying. “I should know. They’re too concerned about making money to take the time to write the u in colour. Lazy sons of bitches.”

  Lark nudged her tray along. Such language. Such imagery. So vivid. So free.

  “What’s this you’ve got here?” the cashier asked. She had lifted up Lark’s roll and was pointing at the pat of butter squashed under it on the plate.

  Tom burst out laughing. Lark blushed, exposed as a thief and humiliated before this learned and well-traveled, urbane American.

  Tom turned to the cashier. “Please don’t touch the food with your hands,” he said to her. “It’s against health regulations. You’ve been handling money. And money’s filthy, in every sense of the word.”

  The cashier dropped the roll back on the plate.

  Tom took the roll and placed it beside the cash register. “She can’t eat that now.” He turned to Lark. “Go and get yourself another bun. And here,” to the cashier, “here’s a penny for the pat of butter.”

  The students in the line crowded around. “Here’s a bun for the girl,” said one. He grabbed a new roll and threw it down to Lark. Tom caught it and placed it on her tray. Lark hurried off to a table in the corner and sat looking out the window at the hockey field, wishing she was in a canoe on some lagoon in the middle of some atoll in the middle of a calm ocean, or perhaps walking on fine yellow sand. She opened her book and read, moving her finger along the line, mouthing the words, “Et nous avons vu, très loin, un petit chalutier qui avançait, imperceptiblement, sur la mer éclatante.”

  “So? ‘We saw in the distance, a little fishing boat imperceptibly moving on the dazzling ocean.’” It was the American, Tom, reading over her shoulder and placing his tray on the table beside hers. He took Lark’s book. “‘Marie a cueilli quelques iris de roche. De la pente qui descendait vers la mer nous avons vu qu’il y avait déjà quelques baigneurs,’” he continued for her, in what seemed to Lark to be flawless French. “‘Marie picked some rock irises. Descending the steep path to the sea we saw that there were already some bathers there.’” He tossed the book aside and sat down. “Good for you,” he said, “fighting the system like that. Butter belongs to the people. Butter and guns and art. They should be free, and if they’re not, the people should take them.”

  Donna Bird had followed Tom and stood for a moment before deciding to place her diary and her tray on the table and share the American. She took out her fountain pen, opened the diary, and started scribbling in bright green ink. Every now and then she placed her hands over the open pages, as if the entire student body might try to read what she was writing.

  “Just jotting down a thought or two,” she whispered to Tom, who bent close to her to listen. “I have a continuous diary from the time I was four, when I began to write?” Tom nodded at her, approving. “You just have to hold all the volumes in your hands to know that you are indeed alive and have been alive?”

  Tom lifted Donna Bird’s hands from her diary, which he closed and held for a moment in his own hands, as if he might take the oath.

  “Why ‘take the current’ et cetera?” Tom asked, examining the quotation on the front cover.

  “Because,” said Donna, “I have already used ‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate,’ and ‘Allwissend bin ich nicht, doch viel ist mir bewusst.’”

  “Touché,” cried Tom, “sonofagun. Allwissend what? German is the weakest of all my languages.”

  “‘I’m not omniscient, but I know a great deal,’” Donna said.

  “You’re a fine, fine writer,” Tom said to Donna. “Truly fine.” He handed Donna’s diary back. “You’re an original.”

  Lark loathed Donna Bird. But she thought this Tom was wonderful, and had thought so even before she discovered, as he talked to her, that he was the most talented and accomplished person in the world. He addressed political rallies, spoke French and possibly dozens of other languages, and had studied at Harvard and in England and Europe. And he had chosen to sit with her, even though she knew she had made a fool of herself at the cash register.

  “Why did you bother to come all the way out here, to Sydney?” Lark asked.

  “Let us just say that the world is my oyster,” said Tom.

  “Mine, too?” said Donna Bird, without looking up, “I guess you’d call me cosmopolitan?”

  “Guess,” said Tom to Lark, “why I’m here.”

  Lark shrugged and made a face. “I can’t guess.”

  Tom laughed. “Anyone can guess,” he said, and stopped laughing to wait for her to try.

  Lark simply could not guess, although she very much wanted to. She could tell that this attractive man liked guessing games, and she would have liked to play it the way he wanted.

  “My ancestor was Robert Brown.”

  “Robert Brown?”

  “Scottish. Botanist. Came to Australia in eighteen-o-one. Observed Brownian movement in eighteen twenty-seven.”

  “Brownian movement?”

  “The irregular zigzag motion of minute particles of matter suspended in a fluid. Also, he discovered the cell nucleus in eighteen thirty-one.”

  “Are you a botanist?”

  Tom shook his head. He waited for a few seconds. “You’ll never get it. Anthropologist. I used to study Javanese village life.”

  “And now?” Lark was catching on. She could at least ask the required questions and thus spend time with this man without running out of words to utter. It was similar to testing Henry Watter in one of his categories.

  “Now? Urban anthropology. I keep a close watch on contemporary life. I’m a social theorist, and in my spare time, a critic of society.”

  “You’re the first social theorist and critic of society I’ve ever actually met.”

  Donna Bird looked up, slapping her hands down on her pages, having ignored Lark’s attempts to talk to Tom. “It makes you feel your life is a river, continuous, flowing, with a purpose or destination? Keeping a journal? Gives you a sense of your own history? You ought to try it?” She addressed Lark for the first time.

  “The only thing I’ve done since I was four is keep a suitcase packed, ready to leave.” Lark paused, then coasting along in the interrogative, asked Donna, “Did you say you were cosmopolitan?”

  “Well, basically English?” Donna replied modestly, going back to her writing.

  “She was marooned there during the war,” said Tom. “But she’s been all over, with her father, of course, and met everyone.”

  “Her father?”

  “You don’t know who her father is? Manfred Bird?”

  “Manfred Bird?”

  “Surely you know of Manfred Bird? Professor Manfred Bird?” He placed the emphasis on “of” and then on “Professor.”

  Lark sat still, not even shaking her head. She had never heard of Manfred Bird. Donna’s page was almost completely covered with her green words. She never looked up, appeared not even to hear.

  “Manfred Bird is my mentor. He holds a chair at one of our great Ivy League institutions. And he has r
efuted several prevalent but false concepts about primitive societies. He knows the Queen of Tonga, the Rockefellers, and Tom Lehrer. And they know him. Donna is his daughter. Didn’t you get to know Michael Rockefeller?”

  “Our fathers were among the first art collectors to foresee the value of Oceanic art,” said Donna. “They knew it would be revered one day.”

  “You should see Manfred’s apartment in New York,” said Tom. “Crammed with stuff. A museum.”

  At least Lark had heard of the Rockefellers and the disappearance of Michael in West New Guinea, West Irian as she carefully called it now, and she already disliked anything Donna Bird and her family might have done. “Didn’t they say that he was just a plunderer, stealing art from societies that couldn’t protect themselves?”

  “It’s called preservation,” said Donna quickly. “Sometimes the natives just threw away the stuff, their funerary carvings and so on. The Rockefellers and my father just wanted to preserve art. Art is what matters.”

  “And he didn’t just take stuff,” said Tom.

  “Certainly not. He brought the natives things they very much craved, begged for—knives, axes, cooking pots, cloth, and so on. And I can tell you that for weeks after the canoes overturned and he was carried out to sea, the natives kept watch for him on the beach? That shows you whether he was a plunderer or a friend.”

  “Couldn’t he be both?” asked Lark.

  “She’s still young and inexperienced,” said Tom to Donna, at the same time patting Lark’s hand in a fatherly way. He turned back to Lark. “Donna should know,” he said gently, like a doctor at an invalid’s bedside. “After all, she’s the one who knows them all. Say,” and he turned back to Donna Bird, “what say we take her in hand? Our next project?” Donna Bird raised her eyebrows, and with it the visor, then went back to her writing without answering. From his pocket Tom drew forth a pack of photographs, portraits of twenty young men and women, full face and profile. “Look.” He flourished them before Lark, beautiful mug shots. “They’re from ten different countries—we were all together last year studying in Europe. What a waste of time. Grooming people for the system. Same as Harvard. A waste.”

  “It must have been wonderful to be in Europe,” said Lark.

  Tom shrugged and shuffled through his photographs.

  “It’s all friable, wherever you are,” Tom said.

  Donna Bird looked up again and laughed for a minute or so. “Friable,” she said. “Friable.” She placed her hand on Tom’s tweed sleeve.

  Lark could think of nothing clever to say to this American Tom. He would surely get up and leave her, at any moment, with the clever and original and cosmopolitan Donna Bird.

  “Is Champaign-Urbana a wonderful town?” she asked.

  She still carried Solomon Blank’s letter in her pocket. “I asked a girl out,” he wrote. “You have to go out on dates in America, otherwise they think you’re odd, it doesn’t mean anything—and she said she was very sorry, but would I give her a ringcheck. I said, yes of course, but being a careful scholar I enquired what it was exactly that I was to give her, and where could I get one.” And while he had not mentioned again that Lark might join him, he had said that he remembered her head on his shoulder, “or was it just a bit of your hair? Just joking.” And he had said that he missed her.

  Tom was shaking his head, looking at his photographs, smiling in recollection. “You’ve got to be kidding. New York might be a wonderful town, but Champaign-Urbana is the armpit of America. Do you call everything wonderful? That’s sweet, but it sounds a bit callow.”

  Lark contemplated the armpit image. Donna Bird closed her diary. She touched Tom’s sleeve again. “It’s to be expected, don’t you think? I distinctly remember the word ‘callow’ when I came across it for the first time. They had given us a book in school called English Short Stories of Today. In one of the stories, a passenger on a ship in the Middle East seems to know everything. In the heat he advises everyone to drink hot tea.” She turned to Lark. “You can be sure that everything that happens recurs. Every tragedy, every humiliation, every image that imprints itself on the mind, every incident, even every word that is spoken or heard in a certain context will recur in a different form and be relevant much later on? That’s why there is no such thing as tragedy or error? No such thing as meaning?” She patted her diary. “This tourist tells everyone to keep out of the breeze and turn off the electric fans, fancy gadgets he calls them, in order to keep cool. He boasts that he is an experienced sailor, not a callow tourist. Of course, he is wrong. He nearly gets everyone marooned and killed by Arabs on a desert shore. But that was when I understood the word ‘callow.’”

  “Brava! You are just great,” Tom said to Donna Bird. He turned to Lark. “You know that embarrassment with the American warship?”

  Lark shook her head.

  “You don’t know? You don’t know what Donna and the others did?” He inclined his head at Donna Bird, who was now chuckling as she wrote. “You know that the ship was in town for ceremonies to commemorate the battle of the Coral Sea? Well, Donna and the others rowed around to its far side and climbed on board and set off all the alarms, as if there were an enemy attack. The captain was demoted for having let it happen. Don’t you read the papers? That was Donna here.”

  “We were proving how easy it is to manipulate the authorities?” said Donna Bird. “I love practical jokes? They can be so pedagogical.”

  “We’re planning another one,” said Tom. “A biggie. We want to educate society.”

  Lark sat silently. What could she say? The ports of call on the sea route to Southampton? The names of the states in alphabetical order?

  “We had an air raid today according to the radio,” Solomon had written. “But since I didn’t see any atomic bombs falling I can only assume that it was a joke, or perhaps a civil defense effort. I was in Washington D.C. with a friend over Easter and viewed the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence in their bombproof, shockproof, fireproof, helium-filled vault. I had no idea that America was such a complex country, and I never suspected that their traditions were in any way valid or serious. I came away quite overwhelmed and can now think of America as more than a huge imperialist financial machine, the home of the Midwest, the bomb, the hot dog and the musical doorbell.”

  Lark took a breath. “You’re absolutely wrong, you know, about the American language,” she said rapidly, to Tom. “The Americans standardized their spelling before the British. They decided to go back to the pure Latin endings, -or and -er, for instance, instead of -our and -re, which come from the French. After that the British standardized and, just to be different from the Americans, chose the more recent French endings. So, in a way, the American language is more pure.”

  Tom wagged his finger at her. “That’s very good,” he said. “But are you sure of your source?” He passed his photographs to Lark. “Okay, the education of, what did you say your name was? Okay. The education of Lark. Lark? Okay, lesson number one. See if you can tell me where each person is from.”

  Lark guessed them all wrong. Tom beamed. “No one ever gets them right. You’re so literal-minded.” The young woman with long blond hair and a round flat face was French. The dark woman with heavy eyebrows was Swedish. The narrow-faced man with a thin mustache was German. Tom laughed. “It just goes to show that you mustn’t trust even your own eyes. That’s what Manfred Bird has done for anthropology. Lesson number one completed.” He shuffled the photos and retrieved the blond woman. “This French girl was my girlfriend for the year. Agnes. Very attractive.”

  Lark found that she was jealous.

  “A wonderful, beautiful person,” said Donna Bird. “Her father acts for Manfred in his European dealings.” Donna Bird, with a blissful half-smile on her face, had swiveled around in her chair and was now wielding Tom’s camera, focusing first on Tom, then turning away and surveying other tables.

  “I heard that Agnes tried to kill herself after I lef
t. I hear she’s in so-so shape.” Tom was shaking his head. “A terrible waste of a beautiful person. The mothers of all these beautiful European girls wanted them to marry me.” He pulled a face indicating modesty and puzzlement. “I think it was just because I was from America, land of the giant refrigerator.”

  Tom stood up. “We have to plot a big prank, shatter some complacency, change society.” He took his camera back from Donna Bird. “Then I want to do some photography—the urbs, the strand.”

  “The Strand Arcade?”

  “Strand as in beach, the littoral.”

  Lark was still struggling to say something of interest.

  “I feel now that it is time for me to attend to other matters,” Solomon had ended his letter. “So if you will excuse me I will just sashay over to the cocktail bar and rustle up another martini, straight up, and do-si-do into and out of the kitchen, where I know the olives and twists are kept.”

  Lark’s mouth was dry. “Did you know,” she gasped, “that ‘on the beach’ was the expression they used in the South Seas last century for men, Europeans, who had gone off traveling and run out of money and luck and were marooned, on the beach, literally?” All she had to offer she had acquired, unwillingly, from testing her father in his many and various categories of passion.

  Tom laughed, his laughter forming a gentle musical phrase. “Say, that’s pretty good. I like that. You should come with me, sometime, to the beach, when it’s not raining.”

  “Will you give a ringcheck?” Lark said.

  “Ringcheck?” Tom looked down at her. “Good grief. You mean rain check? Where did you pick up that dated cliché?” He spread his arms wide. Donna Bird was gathering her things together. “Meanwhile the world is waiting to be saved.” Donna stood up beside him, like a queen next to a king on a coin or a postage stamp. “Colonized people are struggling for independence, and Australia, which still does not admit anyone with a less than white skin, is teamed up with America supporting imperialism. At the same time the new Nazis are gaining strength, as if there had been no war at all.” He raised his voice, no longer soft and confiding, to include more of the cafeteria. “And soon anyone will be able to build a nuclear bomb of some sort. They won’t need a sophisticated delivery system, just the bomb, which could be driven into Manhattan in a semitrailer or sailed in on board an old ship. You’d have to find someone willing to drive the truck, ready to die for his cause, but that would not be hard to do. Just think of those Japanese pilots and one-man submarines during the war.” He stopped and looked around the cafeteria, then smiled down at Lark, before continuing just as loudly. “The desire to penetrate is not sexual. Rather, it’s part of our deep need to return to the simplicity of the single cell. Jung didn’t take the idea of collective unconscious far enough.”