Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘I thought that after that story you might feel like seeing her. Maybe we should take her out, maybe we should celebrate?’

  ‘Okay. What should we celebrate?’

  ‘We should celebrate our lives thus far. And our getting married. I want to marry you. We’ve been living together for nearly ten years, so we’re probably compatible. If you want to marry me we only need to choose the restaurant for dinner. You can tell your mother over dinner but not before we’ve ordered. Does she like Chinese? Everyone likes Chinese.’

  Now she was smiling.

  ‘What about your parents? Let’s invite them for dinner too,’ she said, hugging me and running her hand down my back. I looked at my watch.

  ‘I don’t know, Tanya, my mother would have most of the potatoes already washed by now.’

  CHAPTER 10

  The third time I saw Amanda I was on the second floor of a department store in the city, a little lost, trying to find my way to men’s formal wear on the fifth floor. She had been in kitchenware and had meant to be there. There was nothing there that she needed. It was not as if she had found herself at some earlier time in her kitchen or dining room cursing the absence of salad servers, a fruit platter or a decanter that could be purchased in kitchenware (although the really good decanters, the best ones, were kept on another floor in crystal, not far from silver, she told me). But, as I was to learn, she did need something, and she was there gathering her thoughts.

  I was there to be measured for a dinner suit and had an appointment with a woman Tanya had spoken to whose name, she insisted, was Maria-Men’s-formal-wear-can-I-help-you. Tanya would have come with me but she had back-to-back tutorials to give. She had even started giving guest lectures which she said made her feel a bit like the barrel girl who gets to host the show every now and then when the regular host is unavailable. We talked about the possibility of introducing a ‘wheel’ segment into her lectures, ‘Tanya’s Wheel’, in which she might give away our car or a weekend for two staying with my parents at the home they dreamt of on the Gold Coast, looking at baby photos of me and going to Seaworld. This would make her lectures very popular with students and that was a much faster road to academic advancement than publication which required so much original work and so much liquid paper.

  Amanda’s hair was a little shorter than it had been the previous times I had seen her. She wore a matching aubergine jacket and skirt with pleats that would have made her mother proud, and under the jacket, a white ribbed singlet. Her face and her skin around the singlet were still as smooth as a little girl’s and she had brought along those breasts to mortgage your house for. Even after I had seen her and registered that it was her, I pretended to the world and to myself that I had not seen her. I had an appointment. I was getting married. Amanda Claremont did not really exist. I should have known that by then.

  ‘Eddie? Eddie! Eddie, is that you?’

  I had to think about that. All I knew with certainty was that it was really her calling out, and not just to any member of the crowd in the department store willing to answer to my name, but to the favourite climbing tree that was too high, the porchlight so attractive to moths, the rocking chair on the verandah she was suddenly not allowed to rock on anymore, the fig jam she tasted only once or twice, enough to remember it fondly before forgetting; yes, it was me. Me. I was twenty-eight years old and six weeks away from marriage, a chemical engineer by profession, by trade, by accident, one of those good-natured young educated people for whom rented accommodation was invented, a person who did not so much look back fondly on his childhood as who still dipped into it in his spare time. It was not over. It was just that younger people had more time for their childhood. But I was too busy playing other roles for the most part by then. None of them was remotely connected to Amanda Claremont.

  ‘God! I thought it was you,’ she said kissing me on the cheek.

  ‘I’m not God. You’ve mistaken me for someone else.’

  ‘Eddie, you haven’t changed a bit.’

  ‘I have so. I’m much taller than I was at nine. You see, you have mistaken me for someone else.’

  ‘We’ve seen each other since then, surely?’

  ‘Yes, briefly at university,’ I conceded, taking the opportunity to look at the floor.

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘That’s pretty much what you said then too.’

  I cursed her freshness, her svelte beauty, her clean designer scent, her girl-next-door hair to which no doubt an advertising agency had the sole rights. And I cursed the well inside me the depths of which she plumbed each time I saw her. That time I was a stand-up comic. I could not help it. I wanted to say something, anything for a laugh. But neither of us was laughing.

  ‘It’s so good to see you. You won’t believe this, Eddie, although I hope you do, but I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately.’

  ‘Oh you have, have you?’

  It was meant to sound like Bogart and for the first couple of syllables I think it did. But as it hung in the air I realised it was more like Moe from the Three Stooges, right before he says ‘A Wise-guy, eh?’ and knocks Larry’s and Shemp’s heads together. My palms were moist and their heads would probably have slipped out of my hands. I was neither Bogart nor Moe. I was Curly Joe. I was Zeppo or Gummo, more likely. I was Pete Best, Syd Barrett and ‘Jerker’ Jenkin, upon whose back Jezza jumped to immortality in the 1970 Grand Final.

  ‘Eddie, have you ever gone through a period in your life where your past keeps getting replayed in your mind at all hours, day and night?’

  ‘Yes, but they said I’ll get over it.’

  ‘No, I’m serious Eddie, I don’t quite know what it is, although I could guess, but lately I keep thinking about my life, my family, my past all the way back to my childhood. I’ve been thinking about you too, that I’ve really wanted to talk to you. Is that funny? It’s as though I missed something, some particular richness in my life and I’m all the poorer for it. It might sound silly, I know, but it keeps coming back to me—you, that is.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s something you ate?’

  Sid Caesar would have fired anyone who gave him a comeback like that. If only she had sounded silly, but it sounded like the sort of thing some people wait their whole lives to hear, like ‘you’ve just won the car’, or ‘the house is now yours’, or ‘you know I’ll never leave you’.

  ‘Can we talk, Eddie? Do you mind? There’s so much I want to talk to you about. Am I embarrassing you? Just a quick coffee perhaps, you’re not in such a hurry are you?’

  ‘Amanda?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is your life a mess?’

  We drank coffee-flavoured milk water amidst the sturm and drang of food-trolley collisions, the crying of small children and the heightened fluorescent realism that is a department store cafeteria. She worked in administration and coming from what was to me an egregiously wealthy background, she was forced to earn more than she needed. It was that time in her development for her to be angry with her parents and all that remained was for her to figure out exactly why. I suggested that although I was late for an appointment and she was even later with her disapproval of her parents, I was quite sure that I could help her blame them for most things, particularly her mother, whom I blamed for the Cold War and cholera. Even after her cameo ignore of me at the university (I wanted to ask her about that), I could not be angry with Amanda but I was already late for my appointment to be fitted out by Maria-Men’s-formal-wear-can-I-help-you. I told her that I had to go, that I was sorry if I appeared rude and that the coffees were on me. She followed me to the cash register.

  ‘Eddie, I’d hate to lose touch with you. I’m serious, I really would like to talk to you. Not just about our childhoods. I’d like your advice on a few things.’

  ‘You’ve no reason to put any store in my advice, Amanda. What do I owe you?’ I said to the cashier with sudden embarrassment as I looked in my wallet

  ‘What’s the matter, Eddie, don’t you
have it?’ Amanda asked.

  ‘No. No. It’s just that I always … well, I usually put everything … I was going to put everything on the credit card today ’cause I didn’t get to the bank. Excuse me, can I put this on the card?’

  ‘Credit card, sir?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m sorry. There’s a ten-dollar minimum limit.’

  ‘Let me get this one, Eddie. You can get the next one.’

  CHAPTER 11

  The next one was lunch about ten days later at a restaurant not far from where I worked. It was, she said, time for her to tell me everything, or at least the most recent part of everything. I was uncomfortable just being with her. I had only ever eaten there once before, at one of the secretaries’ going away parties. This secretary had had several going away parties—twice when she got pregnant, once when she took long service leave and once when she had her hysterectomy. It was for this last one that someone, feeling like a change, booked a table at this particular restaurant. Afterwards, everyone agreed it had cost too much for a hysterectomy, especially when you consider what we paid for each pregnancy.

  ‘Look at you, Eddie, a chemical engineer!’ she said smiling and then again, ‘Look at you!’

  ‘Well thanks, Amanda. Really. Don’t look at me. Look at you.’

  She told me she’d had a series of unsuccessful relationships, unsuccessful in that they had ended. She was working as the personal assistant to the chief executive officer of a mining company, or at least that was the way I translated her description of what she did. This was in part what she wanted to talk to me about. I thought that perhaps she might have thought she could get some privileged information with respect to the mining company out of me. After all, I did work for the government. I had even voted for it. But if this was her game she was out of luck. All I knew that she didn’t know was that I was not privileged to any privileged information. It soon became clear however that my position in the Department of Environment was really not what this was about.

  ‘I don’t know where to start. It’s sort of hard …’

  ‘Amanda, you don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to. In fact, don’t tell me anything even if you do.’

  She took no notice.

  ‘We work in groups at our level, in teams. I work very much with the CEO, as part of his group. Tell me if I lose you. Our group had been working on a pretty major deal—you’ve probably read about it—but that doesn’t really matter, not for our purposes.’

  ‘Our purposes?’

  ‘It was one of those on-again off-again mergers …’

  ‘Yes, the on-again off-again mergers—I think I read about that.’

  ‘I was doing a lot of liaising, you know, their lawyers, our lawyers, that sort of thing. Eventually after weeks of long hours, late nights and weekend work, the deal was finally done. The group went out to dinner to celebrate, you can imagine the scene, an outrageously expensive restaurant, a lot of drinking, back-slapping, the whole thing. Are you with me, Eddie?’

  ‘Yes, an outrageously expensive restaurant.’

  ‘Right. So we’re at the front in the bar section at first, having celebratory drinks. There’s a lot of back-slapping and I’m talking with the company secretary, a man called Roger Schauble—a nice enough guy in his late forties or early fifties, and all of a sudden I notice that he has his hand on my knee. Can you imagine? Imagine how I felt!’

  I could only imagine how she felt. I had not touched her knee since I was nine.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do. I mean, I’ve had men make passes at me before.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said letting her drink moisten the inside of her neck, ‘but they’ve always been gross drunken slobs, really revolting men.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Most of them, yes. But this was different. Roger Schauble was a nice guy. He had two kids from a first marriage and was now in a relationship with another woman. There had been rumours that he’d been ill. Anyway, he left his hand there on my knee. I didn’t know what to say and I just pretended not to notice. After a little while everybody got up to go in to dinner, to the table. Roger removed his hand and escorted me to the table. It was a long boozy dinner, wonderful place—I should take you there—at the end of the dinner the CEO, my boss, starts calling cabs for everyone. It turns out that Schauble lives in North Fitzroy. Well, I live in North Fitzroy too. My boyfriend has a place there.’

  ‘Your boyfriend?’

  ‘Yeah. Gerard has his own place there. He runs an import company from the ground floor and we live on the top floor. Anyway Roger Schauble finds out I live in North Fitzroy and offers to drive me home. He really shouldn’t have been driving. We’d all had too much to drink. His car was parked in the underground car-park back at the office so we walked from the restaurant back into town. It was almost 2 a.m. but it wasn’t far and, anyway, it wasn’t as if I was on my own. We got into the car and I directed him to where we live. He takes me there, reverses tentatively into a spot outside our place and turns off the engine. I thanked him for driving me home and he reaches over to kiss me. I let him. I kissed him back. We sat there kissing for quite a while.’

  ‘Why did you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I was embarrassed I suppose. It happened suddenly and I didn’t know what to do. We’d been drinking. As horrible as it is to admit, older men …’

  ‘Have always done something for you?’

  ‘Have always told me what to do.’

  ‘But he wasn’t telling, he was asking.’

  ‘Telling, asking, begging, it’s the same thing given the situation.’

  ‘The situation?’

  ‘An older man, a powerful man, a nice guy, a man I had spent time with, worked with, wants something of me. I didn’t think. I thought I’d stall for time.’

  ‘By kissing him?’

  ‘Not much of a plan, was it?’

  Being judgmental must surely be one of the most joyful activities known to the species and it is cruel that other animals are denied this pleasure. But judging or perhaps pre-judging her was likely to be the only pleasure I was going to get from this. Even just the mention of the name ‘Gerard’, especially coming from Amanda, the perfect mythical remembrance of things past, had me spluttering into my napkin. From there I was off on an endless journey loaded with premonitions of Amanda and Tanya, both of them together with Gerard in some kind of sick domestic arrangement in a North Fitzroy warehouse, all of it too horrible to contemplate. Except that I had already begun to contemplate it. I thought better of being too hard on Roger Schauble, the company secretary, an older more mature family man who already had one ex-wife to his name. ‘Ex-wife’ allows at least for the possibility of a return to relative calm, a beach after a shipwreck. I could probably do business with him.

  ‘I’m sorry, Amanda. I am sounding judgmental. I don’t mean to.’

  ‘No, you’re right,’ she said with the instant self-reflection of a 1970s telemovie. ‘I’ve been really stupid. And there’s more.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘Yes. Can I tell you?’

  ‘Well, yes, if you think it will help anything, but really, Amanda …’

  ‘You’re very sweet, Eddie,’ she said taking my hand before continuing. ‘I got to the front door and fumbled in the dark for the right key. Roger was still out there in the car, in the dark. I crept inside and, as quietly as I could, slowly, trying not to disturb anything, I got undressed, garment by garment, placing them softly on the chair, listening out for Roger’s car. I remember just standing there, naked, watching Gerard sleep, terrified that Roger was still outside, that he wasn’t going to leave. Eddie, you have to imagine it.’

  Why did I have to imagine it? Why was I even there? Was it all a random event? Was it chaos? Was chaos random? I thought of the ‘butterfly effect’. A butterfly flutters its wings somewhere in Japan, there’s a tidal wave off the coast of Miami and a few years later some meteorologists from
MIT win the Nobel prize. Every nine and a half years, it seemed, I see Amanda. I was to be married to Tanya in four and a half weeks and Amanda had the tips of three fingers of my right hand inside her palm. The mischief of Japanese butterflies is proportional to the proximity of my marriage.

  Somewhere in Princeton, or maybe Cambridge, there are some very dedicated people on the verge of discovering what Amanda Claremont was doing in my life, orbiting me every nine and a half years. I have been completely unable to help them and they, just like Amanda in her effort not to disturb the admirably sinewed Gerard, grope about in the dark comforted only by the knowledge that any physical system that exhibits periodic behaviour should be predictable. For all I know, they might have already formulated the dynamical equations and just not be aware of my sensitivity to the initial conditions of our first meeting when I was nine and a half.

  ‘I carefully slipped under the covers and into bed so as not to wake Gerard but he was only half-asleep. He turned over and placed the palm of his hand on me softly, just below my belly button. I remained deathly still. Gerard is a very solid man. His palm is heavy. Can you imagine! I still had Roger’s saliva in my mouth and Gerard is stroking me with a heavy hand. I couldn’t sleep. I felt just awful. I wondered what it meant about my feelings for Gerard. What do you think it means? I really appreciate you helping me like this, Eddie. As I said the other day, I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately and I’ve been wanting so much to talk to you, to see you, to see what you look like. And now here we are! I mean, what were the chances of running into you out of the blue like that the other day?’

  ‘About one in nine and a half times three hundred and sixty-five,’ I replied, wondering at the vacuous Mills and Boon cum Vogue world Amanda belonged to, and how you go about joining.

  ‘I didn’t sleep at all that night. I suspected that Gerard knew something. Not that there was really anything for him to know. But I was incredibly edgy. In the morning I felt he was looking at me in the shower. Perhaps I was paranoid. Do you think I’m an idiot? The next day at work Mr Schauble calls.’