Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  ‘Mr Schauble?’

  ‘Roger Schauble.’

  ‘Oh yeah, the company secretary, sorry.’

  ‘Roger calls and wants to see me. I told him I didn’t think it was such a good idea. We were both involved.’ Amanda sipped her wine.

  ‘With other people?’

  ‘Both involved with other people and had to work together and everything.’

  ‘And everything?’

  ‘I told him I thought it was against company policy.’

  ‘Was that a joke?’

  ‘I don’t remember. I was stalling.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Yes. He told me to check the manual.’

  ‘Was he joking?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Does the company have a manual covering that sort of thing?’

  ‘Yes. It covers everything from Alluvial Mining to Maternity Leave all the way to Zirconium.’

  ‘Zirconium! I’ll bet that section of the manual gets a thorough thumbing.’

  ‘More than the page on Maternity Leave.’

  ‘So was he joking about you checking the manual before giving him an answer?’

  ‘I don’t think so. A week later he called again to ask how my investigations had gone.’

  ‘The manual?’

  ‘Yes. He said that he’d wanted to call me every day but had kept putting it off. He said he’d been afraid. He sounded so vulnerable, Eddie.’

  She squeezed my hand.

  ‘Did you stall for time?’

  ‘No, I agreed to meet him that night, just for a drink. I’m a fool, I know. Do you think badly of me?’

  Did I think badly of her? It was more true just to say that I thought of her. I had, on and off, for almost twenty years. But what did I actually know about her? We had lost touch since my parents’ wardrobe.

  ‘No, Amanda. I’m not being judgmental, especially not about you, my dear old friend.’

  ‘Wait. There’s more. Drinks became dinner and over dinner he told me he had feelings for me, strong feelings. He said he’d had them for a long time and was never going to say anything but the fact was—he was ill. He asked if I’d heard the rumours. I said I hadn’t; I lied. I don’t know why. It just seemed like the best policy. He was so sweet. He has cancer, Eddie. I felt terrible. Then he grabbed my hand and kissed it.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the restaurant, sitting just like we are now.’

  ‘No. Where’s the cancer?’

  ‘In his prostate. He said he was due to go into hospital and that he wanted to go to a hotel with me. Just once. I don’t normally do this sort of thing but it seemed like the right thing to do, the moral thing.’

  ‘So you went?’

  ‘We took a room at the Regent.’

  ‘What about Gerard?’

  ‘Eddie, it meant nothing to me. If I didn’t say anything to Gerard, if he didn’t know or doesn’t ever find out, then where is the harm? I really mean that.’

  ‘That’s a question, Amanda. Do you really mean to be asking me this question?’

  ‘I have done a good turn by a sick, probably dying man. I have made him slightly happier without hurting anyone and it was such a simple act. I have never done anything like that before. I don’t know what I was expecting but it’s really quite straightforward. No one at reception asks any questions about luggage or anything. It’s as though the entire hospitality industry is giving you a wink. Have you ever done anything like this?’

  The closest I had ever come to doing something like that was agreeing to have this lunch with her and permitting her to take my hand.

  ‘I’m not sure I see it that way, Amanda,’ I said removing my hand. ‘What we’re dealing with is a question of trust. I’m not sure that the issue is simply a matter of what he does or doesn’t know?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Gerard.’

  ‘Look, it might be wrong but, in the heat of the moment, that did not seem to be the issue,’ she confessed.

  ‘Now I’m really not being judgmental, Amanda—’

  ‘I just knew you wouldn’t be.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said taking my hand in hers again.

  ‘Well, remember I’m just thinking out loud, coming at it cold, as I do, ’cause I can see your point, but—’

  ‘Would you like another drink? I’ll see if I can get the waiter’s attention. You were saying …?’

  ‘Getting back to Gerard, as a concept I mean, any particular act of infidelity or unfaithfulness, which the other person might not ever know about, is a breach of an agreement with the other person—’

  ‘You mean Gerard.’

  ‘Yes, in this case … Gerard … he’s the other person here and while he might not ever know about your … indiscretion—’

  ‘We were discreet but go on …’

  ‘Well, you’ve explicitly or implicitly agreed that he—’

  ‘Gerard or Roger?’

  ‘Gerard, he is your partner until further notice and he expects you not to be with—’

  ‘Not to sleep with?’

  ‘Not to sleep with anyone else. I haven’t put this very well at all have I?’

  ‘Not really, Eddie. Although listening to you, I felt a bit sorry for Gerard for the first time ever. You see the truth is we’re having a few problems, nothing to do with Roger. Sadly, tragically, Roger is dying and won’t really enter into it.’

  ‘What if he doesn’t die?’

  ‘He will.’

  ‘But if he doesn’t?’

  ‘Then I’m in deep trouble.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I told him I’d marry him.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Just to give him hope, Eddie. The patient’s attitude is a very important factor, perhaps even critical. I’ve read some of the literature and even heard from some of his doctors.’

  ‘How do you know who his doctors are?’

  ‘He told me. I’ve been on a party line when he’s called them. There’s consensus. He won’t survive the financial year.’

  ‘That’s terrible.’

  ‘Yes. Isn’t it. But my problems with Gerard are a separate matter. Sometimes I think they’re separate from Gerard.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know, Eddie, not exactly anyway. I seem to be having problems with everybody, well, with my family anyway. I feel very removed from them. My father started making a lot of money when I was in my early teens, you’ve probably read about him, and from then on we saw less and less of him. The more money he made, the bigger the houses and the dinner parties and we’d just get wheeled out for show and to pass around the hors d’oeuvres. I’m serious. One Christmas when I was sixteen my mother threw a Christmas garden party for my father’s business associates and their wives and a man there, an investor or important shareholder—I forget his name—fondled me, in front of his wife and in front of my father. My dad just laughed.’

  ‘Your father—he’s a chemical engineer—isn’t he?’

  ‘By training yes, but he hasn’t worked as a chemical engineer for around twenty years or more.’

  ‘Hasn’t he?’

  ‘No, he’s a mining investment adviser, he’s on several boards of directors and he has his own consultancy business. Plays the market mainly. Mergers, acquisitions but all from a consultancy base.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. He says consulting is the way of the future, sell your knowledge and experience. No overheads.’

  ‘Right.’ Suddenly, I started to cough, fit-like, inexplicably. People at nearby tables looked around at me with the mildest irritation.

  ‘Eddie, are you alright?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said in a wheeze. ‘It’ll pass. Something went down the wrong way.’

  ‘But you’d finished eating. Do you want a drink?’

  ‘No. No. I’m okay but I’m going to have to get back to work. Didn’t realise the time … We’re so muc
h older now.’

  She took her bag from under the table and from her purse she took out a business card for me and a credit card for the waiter. I was breathing normally by the time I stood up and when I went to shake her hand she used my outstretched arm to pull me closer and kissed my neck about where my jaw and ear could share the experience equally.

  ‘Now, you’ll call me, Eddie? There’s still so much to say. You haven’t told me anything about your life. And it’s your turn to buy me lunch—or dinner if it’s better for you.’

  CHAPTER 12

  There were, in all, three visits to Maria-men’s-formal-wear-can-I-help-you, the third with Tanya to collect the altered dinner suit and accoutrements in which I was to be married. So full of good tidings and optimism was Maria that Tanya and I left her the deposit with such hope that my attenuated first appointment for a fitting was all but forgotten. From then on Tanya took it upon herself to organise everything. I was just following orders.

  We were married by a civil celebrant in the old Mint Building on the corner of William and Latrobe Streets opposite Flagstaff Station. I had suggested everyone take a train there to reduce our expenses, but the humour in the remark was not made welcome.

  It was a small wedding. Tanya described it as quaint but it was small, pathetically small. I had asked Paul to be my best man, not so much because I considered him to be my closest friend, although perhaps he was—men who grow up in times of peace (and in times of war, but the aetiology is different) often find themselves short of close friends. I asked him to be my best man because Tanya was fully occupied as the bride and could not be both.

  My parents stood so close together, holding one another by the arm, it looked as though they were one being, a small and fragile one. My father wore his blue suit with a white carnation and his shirt was so crisply pressed he might have been anyone’s father. He had taken the day off work. My mother was an animated floral arrangement. She wore a stupid little hat that made me want to protect her. As happy as I was to be finally marrying Tanya, to see my parents, joined to each other as they were, and so newly small, gazing upon us both with their radiant eyes like shiny wet marbles, filled me with a profound sadness that made it unbearable to look at them. But they had got me there. From childhood they had got me there, with small walks and vanilla slices when it rained, hanging onto my father’s tie, and he in his woollen cardigan, her story-telling, their nocturnal monitoring of the influenzas they promised would go away soon: they had taught me how to love Tanya. Nothing my sister and I had done at any time in our lives had ever displeased either of them for more than an hour. They loved us to within an inch of our lives, but within that inch there was room to move, to grow, to make mistakes and then come back. My mother had always been active in voluntary organisations, working for them quietly without ever shaming those she knew who could not give of themselves without needing payment for it.

  ‘Some people cannot do it,’ she once told Kirsten and me.

  ‘Because they have too little?’ my sister had asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Or else because they have too much.’

  Now she stood in the old Mint Building for my wedding, unencumbered by religious or political convictions and physically attached to my father. They had wanted so little and yet had always managed to get a little less.

  After the ceremony we all went back to Kirsten’s place where her two children were waiting as super-heroes for the occasion, Batman and Batman, two of the same to keep the peace. Tanya’s mother had prepared marinated chicken wings and my father found more praises for them than any chickens have a right to expect. Tanya took him outside onto the verandah for a while. When they returned she had her arm around his shoulders and he was trying to fold his handkerchief with one hand and return it to its pocket. With Tanya’s brother, Marty, Paul shared the responsibility for alternating the Creedence, Supertramp and Chopin records every twenty-two and a half minutes while Kate cut her pavlova and her orange cake inequitably for all. A third cake, an iced chocolate cake, had not made it to the reception. In her haste she had iced it incorrectly and was not willing to serve a cake that read Eddie and Tanya—Just Marred.

  We put off the honeymoon because Tanya had papers to mark and because the landlord was planning an inspection in the next few days. Besides, we were unable to choose one Flag Motor Inn on the Mornington Peninsula over another. Such was their uniformity, it really came down to the smoothness of the table-tennis table of one over the charm of another’s serving of rice bubbles in the morning through the gap in the door. There was really nothing in it.

  The landlord and the real estate agent visited us one evening while we were eating our take-away chicken curry. After they left we decided to try to save for a deposit on a place of our own where strangers would have to be invited to come and see us living like refugees (albeit not from another place).

  The decision coincided with what was tantamount to a promotion, perhaps even a vote of confidence in me from above. This made the saving of a deposit seem more attainable but more than that, there is something about a newly married man who has just been promoted and given a pay rise, however trifling, that makes bank managers want to stand up and sing the national anthem. This is what we thought as we left the bank manager’s office one ripe autumn morning but in hindsight it was not just the leaves which were gold; this was the mid-eighties when people found it as easy to borrow money as they would find it to lose their homes a few years later.

  The promotion was a mixed blessing. It meant my duties were quite radically altered. I was required to travel a lot and prepare on-site reports for someone else to read. The travelling itself was not bad at all. I got to say ‘good morning’ to people in parts of the country I had never been. But it meant leaving Tanya and neither of us liked that. She said that as soon as I left home the place started to look a mess. Socks walked out on each other citing irreconcilable differences and stains took such advantage of Tanya’s innocence in the natural sciences that she was certain the cottons were conspiring with the synthetics to humiliate her.

  It also meant checking in on the fluctuations in the ‘all ordinaries’ index from far away where it seemed that much harder to talk the market up. Tanya’s mother had been spending more time with us since we were married and they often ate or watched television together while I was away. The difficulty was that Tanya’s mother could watch nearly anything, while Tanya wanted to read, which her mother found a little anti-social.

  ‘But you’re not studying anymore,’ she would say.

  Tanya’s mother had been an actress before she was married. This was where Tanya had got her love of the theatre and particularly of Shakespeare. But her mother had also been a dancer, maybe even a showgirl, and in her advancing years the rumba was more fondly remembered than any soliloquy.

  ‘Eddie, you’ve got to come home,’ Tanya had said over the phone.

  ‘What’s wrong? Are you alright?’

  ‘Everything’s wrong. I miss you, I want to put my mother in a home. I can’t think of a topic for my PhD thesis. I’m not interested in anything anymore. Our house is too small. We can’t afford the mortgage repayments. There’s talk of interest rates rising to seventeen and a half per cent. I want to have a child … should I go on?’

  ‘Sure. The Department’s paying for the call.’

  ‘I hate the university. I want to be a florist. I have to have a PhD to keep my position. I’m stupid. I sound hysterical and I hate myself for almost everything I’ve just said and the way I said it.’

  ‘Sweetheart, you mustn’t hate yourself for wanting to put your mother in a home.’ There was silence. ‘Tanya, I’m joking. You just need a bit of a hug of the kind I’m going to give you in two days when I get home. There’s really nothing wrong.’

  ‘What if I can’t wait two days?’

  ‘Why don’t you call your brother?’

  ‘He doesn’t understand anything.’

  ‘No, but he could fix the right sp
eaker in the lounge room.’

  ‘What if he can’t even do that, Eddie?’

  ‘Then we’ll put him in a home with your mother.’

  ‘Eddie, will you please take this tantrum seriously.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, when I get home we’ll have children and put your family in a home. I promise.’

  When I got home, Tanya was out. I deposited my luggage in the bedroom, threw the laundry in the washing machine and went to check the mail. There was a letter from the bank. Tanya was right. Interest rates had gone up to seventeen and a half per cent. It was not just talk. There it was in black and white signed by a machine impersonating the signature of a highly placed bank official we had never met. They had actually started charging us the higher rate ten days earlier but there had been a delay getting the letters out and the bank apologised unreservedly. The cost of the letter would doubtless be absorbed by the increase. Underneath the signature the bank had decided to place a message of encouragement:

  By depositing your savings in a loan trimmer plan account you have reduced your loan interest by $1.71.

  The mail contained advertisements: for a new gym specialising in fitness for men and women, home-delivered pizza from Cyprus, the Good News Bible, an encyclopaedia of entomology and a letter from our local member of parliament with a range of handy hints that would have Tanya fuming and vowing to put him in a home before the next election. Although he had misspelt our names, I had no reason to doubt the genuineness of everything he said. It was his belief that Tanya and I, as a household, could save up to a hundred and sixty dollars a year in energy by sealing gaps around doors and windows, using heavy curtains and maintaining our heaters regularly. We had only one heater so perhaps we would have to revise down this estimate but it was, nonetheless, a salutary reminder of the economic advantages of maintaining our heater.

  He also recommended Tanya and I undertake regular fire drills replete with an escape plan that has been followed blindfold by everyone in the family at least once prior to the time of an actual fire. There was no mention of the government’s slashing of funding for education but he did remind us that he could arrange messages and telegrams for residents in the electorate celebrating a special occasion such as a fiftieth wedding anniversary, or, for those celebrating one hundredth birthdays, a message from the Queen and Governor-General. Without an escape plan or a blindfold we decided to try to have children.