Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘What’s the difference between a commodity and something else?’

  I had no idea what to answer but I knew it was possible to love her, if I didn’t already.

  By the time the university offers came out we were already taking each other seriously enough to have become co-conspirators in what really amounted to a form of subterfuge, each with respect to our parents and the issue of our enrolments at university. Our parents, or more specifically my parents and Tanya’s mother, her father having died when she was eight, were made to feel that we were consulting them about our futures but in fact we consulted only each other.

  That we would be attending the same university went without saying. That was really all that mattered. Nothing was more remote to us than the future and, in any event, any discussion of it seemed futile since we knew with certainty that, whatever we chose to study at university and however intensely we studied it, we would still, in the end, be the same middle-class, socially concerned, politically inactive, foreign-film-going, wine and cheese tasters.

  It was late one summer afternoon a week or so before enrolment. Tanya lay on the bed while, supine on the floor, I finished her old school library copy of Antigone. Her mother was out and her brother and his band had either stopped for the day or were taking a break. We had just made love. There was a slight breeze which I did not notice until the battle between the dad-king and the deities was done. I closed the book and looked up at her on the bed. There was no more beautiful woman in all of Thebes.

  ‘I thought the son sleeps with his mother. Didn’t you say that?’

  ‘Same family, different play.’

  ‘Same playwright?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Well, at least whoever wrote Oedipus used the same pen-name or chisel-name but how can anyone really be sure about anything in the life of someone who died in 406 BC? Come here, Creon, my tragic king.’

  I took the book and lay beside her and suddenly with a need to be overtly theatrical, I read aloud. ‘I am nothing. I have no life. Lead me away …’

  ‘I said Creon, not cretin.’

  Undeterred I continued.

  ‘That have killed unwittingly

  My son, my wife.

  I know not where I should turn,

  Where look for help.

  My hands have done amiss, my head is bowed

  With fate too heavy for me.

  ‘How could he get away with starting a passage with That?’

  ‘Sophocles? No standards. The guy was a hack. For a moralist he sure got away with murder.’

  I lay face down and she started massaging my back, kneading away at the sinews.

  ‘Do you know what you want to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Yes … tonight and then a bit later … at university.’

  ‘I’ve narrowed it down to seven.’

  ‘I’m still a bit that way too.’

  She shifted on her elbow and looked over me into the middle distance.

  ‘The sky is the limit you know,’ I said, face buried in her pillow.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, not to put too fine a point on it, we’ve both done well enough to do anything we like, Medicine, Law, Engineering, Arts, Science—whatever we choose.’

  ‘And if we do put too fine a point on it, what then?’ she asked.

  ‘The point being too fine meaning more fine than it should be?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tanya, I don’t understand what you’re asking me.’

  ‘Do you want to spend your life behind a desk?’

  ‘A desk or a bench, yes. Not all of my life. I’d like to mix it up a bit each day, a bit of desk, some couch and then bed. Without condescending to the particulars, I do see the rest of my life involving the exploitation of furniture. There’s no way out of it. I refuse to perform surgery on a levitating patient. All it takes is one person in the operating theatre to cease suspending disbelief and we’re all on the floor looking for the instruments.’

  ‘So it’s Medicine.’

  ‘Tanya, I don’t know. I was kidding. I haven’t got any burning desire to be a doctor.’

  ‘Then you shouldn’t be one.’

  ‘Alright then, I won’t,’ I said kissing her on the forehead.

  ‘Are you patronising me, Eddie?’

  ‘No, I’m not patronising you. I’m failing to understand you. Do I want to spend the rest of my life behind a desk? What does that mean?’

  ‘Which side of the desk do you want to spend the rest of your life behind?’

  ‘Well, if the room is air-conditioned, I won’t mind having the sun on my back.’

  ‘You see, if you, if either of us, spends our life behind a desk, away from the door and with a chair on the other side, waiting for people to seek us out, to seek out our supposed expertise, it will have an effect on us. We will be different people because of it.’

  ‘You’re saying we’ll be worse people because of it?’

  ‘Yes, I think so. There will be a kind of uptight righteousness about us. We won’t be able to brook disagreement. We will have to be right all the time. Now assume we were to spend the rest of our lives together.’

  ‘Assume away.’

  ‘How could both of us never be wrong?’

  ‘Well, we could never disagree?’ I suggested.

  ‘Yeah, but that’s not likely and anyway I love disagreeing with you.’

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Yes. I like to try to change your mind with the cleanest argument I can muster, distilling my thoughts, filtering out my emotions, just for the sake of the competing propositions, I mean.’

  ‘But, I love your emotions.’

  ‘You’re the first person I’ve ever known who feels about things but can put his feelings to one side for the sake of an argument. If I can’t convince you of something then you convince me. This has never happened before. I love it,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe you should do Law, Tanya?’

  ‘Law! It sounds so dry and, besides, I really don’t want to be on the expert’s side of the desk playing God and losing touch with the things I most like about myself. Then there are the hours, the stress, the fatigue and likely ill health from it all. I would never want to be a lawyer.’

  ‘You could earn a comfortable living from it, comfortable or better.’

  ‘Yes, but I don’t think I would be comfortable with that. Would you?’

  And there it was that I lay on Tanya’s bed in her mother’s home late one summer afternoon before enrolment, with a gentle breeze coming through the fly-wire screen and the beginnings of a Creedence tune from her brother’s rejuvenated band, backed into a corner. No one expects that they will one day only have three dollars.

  ‘Would you want that, money, I mean? Do you need money and do you need to tell people what to do in order to be happy?’ she continued.

  ‘No, of course not. But I’d like to be able to eat, to pay the bills.’

  ‘To see movies when we want, buy all the books we want,’ she said.

  ‘To eat out, just occasionally,’ I added.

  ‘I can cook and I’d teach you.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said unconvincingly, being, as I was, unconvinced. ‘What about music, Tanya? I’d like to be able to buy records.’

  ‘Of course, and I want to travel a bit too. I don’t mean we should starve in a dark room.’

  Whatever the unreality, immaturity and plain stupidity of this conversation I saw almost none of it. I was too busy trying to hide my elation at Tanya’s projection of us together. Who cared what I did for a living?

  ‘Eddie, were you really thinking about Medicine?’

  ‘I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t on my list but it’s not at the top.’

  ‘What is at the top?’ she asked. We lay on the bed, beneath her brother’s opening to ‘Bad Moon Rising’, waiting for my answer.

  ‘Engineering, I think. Maybe.’ She rolled on top of me, took me in her arms and squeezed me withi
n them. The room was warm and I was floating within her embrace. Even now it is hard to think of a time when I have been happier. Sophocles fell to the floor as she undressed me. ‘Tanya, an engineer implies some expertise, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ she said taking off her t-shirt, ‘but no one will care.’

  We began making love again, the curtains gently swaying in the open window and I listened to Tanya’s breathing as her brother sang in the other room: ‘Don’t go round tonight for it’s bound to take your life. There’s a bad moon on the rise’.

  Tanya enrolled in Arts and I stood in the queues for Engineering. I didn’t know anything about it but I had it in the back of my mind that if I majored in Chemical Engineering I would probably be alright. I was not, at the time, aware of the extent to which my enrolment in Engineering was externally influenced rather than an act of my own volition. University itself had always been the goal. I had achieved it. Now I was free to be single-minded in my pursuit of Tanya’s recommendations. We were exchanging ideas and opinions all the time. There was nothing wrong with this. It did not, of itself, necessitate any loss. We seemed to work perfectly. It was chemistry working. We were hot. In most chemical reactions heat is either taken in or given out. By the First Law of Thermodynamics, an increase or decrease in heat must be accompanied by a corresponding change in some other form of energy. I realised that I might have my atoms rearranged but there would be no loss.

  It was one of those summers everyone either has or years later remembers having had: bike rides at sunset, walks along the beach, cigarettes in the long grass behind the beach huts, shared beer stolen from her mother’s fridge (bought by her brother for the band), poetry, prose for every occasion, hot chips with salt and vinegar, music and an exchange of windcheaters after quiet windswept sex in the most private of public places.

  Hours were spent shopping without anything ever being bought. We went from one newsagent to another reading all the newspapers and magazines together, over each other’s shoulder or sometimes just side by side, occasionally pointing out something of interest. The shop that knew us best was Williamson’s Cards and Music. We must have driven Old Man Williamson crazy, asking him to play us one record after another, especially since we never bought any and he knew we never would.

  At first, he played our requests over the system that broadcast our taste through the shop and into the street but after a little while he made us listen through the headphones. Since he had only one set of headphones we listened with one ear each. As bad as this was, it had to be better for Williamson than having one of us listening to both headphones singing aloud to the other one. It was usually me singing to Tanya, guitar solos and all, while she collapsed on the floor with laughter, gasping for air and begging me to stop. She was probably making more noise than I did singing.

  Between the two of us we would have taken a few years off Old Man Williamson’s life by driving his customers away. At least he didn’t have to search the length of the store each time we asked to hear something. He seemed to have all our requests catalogued under ‘T’. We wondered about this. Under ‘T’ we found The Clash, The Jam, The Cure, The Sports, Television and Tubeway Army before and after they split up to become Gary Numan.

  Music was critically important to us at that time. It served as a link between popular culture, and that included its alternative allegedly avant garde face, and the private culture we shared only with each other. Since no one we met in those early days at university read Wordsworth, Keats, Eliot, Robert Frost or A.D. Hope, we paid lip-service to humility and gave our seal of approval to anyone who listened to Joy Division.

  Tanya at least met people who read. No one in the Engineering Faculty knew it was an option. I had to keep it quiet myself. But Joy Division was something else. A shy apocalyptic punk poet meets manic but melancholy pop. This was the cutting edge and I was on to it early, pre ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. Even some of the engineers could understand this music. It was urgent and when a shy young engineering student like me heard it at the awful parties Tanya took us to, final night parties for the cast of the University Revue and for the aristocracy of student politics, I would be transformed. I knew all the words and in an instant I was dancing like someone I could never be, someone I hoped Tanya would not ever want me to be. But there I was in the dark of an urban warehouse or suburban sharehouse dancing like Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Division, arms everywhere, anywhere. It was not until years later that I learned he was an epileptic.

  It did not matter that I had nothing to say to Tanya’s new friends, because I alone knew which of ‘Unknown Pleasures’ and ‘Closer’ was recorded first and that Joy Division came from Manchester not London, that Martin Hannett was their producer and that they were once called Warsaw. And if this sort of erudition was what it took to impress her new friends, then it was something I did not mind regaling them with. It was not that Tanya needed me to be that person but rather that her friends did. It was the only way I could interact with them and Tanya seemed to want to be with these people, not all the time, not as much as she wanted to be with me, not then. Later the balance would tip and she would need these people and when she did, it was only the recognition of the fact that was hard. Changing her perception was more than hard, it was beyond attempt and I was at least smart enough to know that.

  This is how it happens. An introspective young man finds himself enrolled in Engineering, deeply attached to a romantic headstrong gypsy-girl with new friends who seem to admire nothing in him but his own admiration and emulation of an apocalyptic epileptic Mancunian Sinatra. All of a sudden you have taken on an identity. Why have you become this? Where do you go from there? To the centre of the city where all roads meet waiting for you. You are, more or less obviously, waiting for her all the time, either physically or in your mind. I was written and authorised by Tanya and if I had been her I would have become bored with me too.

  You can dress in black, waving your arms around at parties for only so long. It wasn’t that I could not see myself but that I saw myself too clearly and I was desperately unhappy with the post-industrial parody of myself that I had become. The greater my despair the deeper I was driven into the ascetic jejune persona of the romantically anti-social recluse; my overt affect suggested that I understood pain better than anyone else which is how I came to be Ian Curtis’s personal representative on campus. But what pain did I have? None but the usual angst of a young man, too often drunk, hungover or tired, struggling with his subjects and with an empiricist’s fear of his own inability to measure the imperceptibly increasing distance between himself and the woman he loved.

  Tanya never faltered in her step, guided as she was by the light of the tyranny of the new. She became increasingly involved in student politics, student theatre and what she called ‘woman’s business’, a term which always reminded me of one of my mother’s euphemisms for a hysterectomy. None of this seemed to affect her Nobel prize-winning exam results which had her tutors and lecturers courting her and bribing her with offers of paid research work during the holidays. She was in her element and believed that everything that was happening to her was a part of the evolutionary process that turns a caterpillar of the car-park and the checkout into a butterfly of Vienna-at-the-turn-of-the-century. I saw it as a subversion of all that I had loved about her for the better part of two years and the best part of my life. I felt shut out of her cocoon. Previously I had never felt lonely when I was with her, now that was when I was most lonely.

  My subjects were threatening to make a fool of me. Engineering in all its guises was difficult enough but even more difficult was to be interested in it. I had lost interest in the university and felt that it was reciprocating. Only two years at university and already I had struck a reef. I took to wearing eyeliner at certain parties in the hope that it would make people suspect that I was bisexual and interesting. Perhaps even Tanya would think I was. She had time for people with all sorts of sexual preferences now. This increased my potent
ial competition by fifty per cent. Nobody noticed the eyeliner or if they did they were too polite to comment. Nobody except Tanya, who whispered to me one night with a kindness which really hurt that she did not think Ian Curtis wore eyeliner and that if I had ruined her applicator she would kill me.

  My concentration seemed to evaporate on contact with any of the required reading and I found myself attempting to learn by rote, a sure sign of quintessential floundering. I paced my bedroom repeating with emphasis that it is movements of the earth’s crust along with subsequent weathering and rock displacement that provides for mineral formation and relocation into the sites where minerals are found. I always seemed to get stuck at the fault lines. I understood what they were but it was at this point that my attention would float off the page to a world where there was no fault and the original layers of rock formed by sedimentary or chemical processes were never distorted into folds to produce synclines and anticlines but rather that we were always inclined towards each other, as we were at the beginning.

  I knew that where the folding is sufficiently severe, the rock is frequently heavily fractured, particularly where it is under tension. But equilibrium on the surface of the earth was a thing of the past. At the end of four or more hours at my desk this was all I really knew.

  CHAPTER 4

  The second time I saw Amanda I was not certain that it was her. I was waiting in a queue trying to decide what I would order for lunch. It was spring. There had been almost a week of hot storms but now the sun was out and everything grew unrestrained. Exams were not so far off. People took the opportunity to wear t-shirts for the first time in months. My mind was more or less divided between the act of choosing either a baked potato with chives and sour cream or a hot turkey roll, and the quiet inarticulate indulgence of self-pity.