Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

So ‘Old Man Williamson’ was no longer alive. Was there something I would have said to him? This was ridiculous. I had made no imprint on the pages of his life. But his business was a large part of his life and I was a regular customer, albeit not a regular purchaser. People like me and Tanya had helped that business survive and keep the same name, if nothing else, till the prime of the young bald man. We had known the rules and were respectful in our discourtesy. I pulled out of the car-park thinking that perhaps, merely as a representative of my peers, I would have told him what had become of me and maybe thanked him for taking a chance on the soundtrack to my youth. Abby was strapped in the back seat singing to herself between bites of a donut.

  ‘So let me see … your teddy bear.’

  On the spur of the moment, I drove to Tanya’s mother’s house. It was only a few streets away and it was in keeping with our excursion through nostalgia. Tanya’s mother, who could not do enough to be part of our lives, especially Abby’s, was delighted.

  ‘What have you got there? Elvis Presley?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Abby before drinking her cordial, ‘but we can’t listen to it ’cause it’s not a CD.’

  ‘Really?’ said Tanya’s mother.

  ‘No, it’s an LP record from the olden days, isn’t it, Dad? LP stands for long playing.’

  ‘Would you like to listen to it, Abby? I have a record player. It used to be your mother’s and Uncle Marty’s.’

  ‘Could we? We could dance in the Elvis way. Nanna, do you know the one about the hound dog?’

  When she had made the two of us a cup of tea, Tanya’s mother played Elvis in Las Vegas for Abby and the two of them danced to it in the lounge while I went down the passage to change a light bulb in the ceiling of her bedroom.

  The house managed to be both small and empty. I had not visited it often enough recently for its dimensions not to have changed. It was not sufficient to have Tanya’s mother over to our place even once a week. Looking at the photos on her dressing table of a younger Marty, Tanya, Abby and of Abby, Tanya and me, I realised that we had to take time to visit her at her place so that it was not just a museum. I stuck my head into Tanya’s old room where she had started all her thinking so long ago, where Antigone had wrestled with a temporal and spiritual conflict of interest and where Tanya and I had practised the begetting of Abby to the strains of Marty’s band paying homage to Creedence.

  In the lounge room Abby and her grandmother swivelled their hips to another Elvis recording that had found its way like a Gideon Bible into a cabinet by the silver tea set. Together they sang Abby’s song about the dog.

  ‘You said you’re in my class … that was just a lie.’

  It was Abby’s choice next. We would do whatever she wanted to do. She chose the beach in order to add to her rock collection. I could help, she told me. We drove to the beach, not far from Tanya’s mother’s house, where Tanya and I used to walk and make love between the beach-houses. I didn’t ask but suspected that Abby knew it was a destination in keeping with the sort of day we were having. We parked in the car-park at the top of the cliffs and made our way down the steep path where the ti-trees had been cleared, singing and giggling what became a medley of Elvis tunes. I found myself encouraging this Elvis exegesis.

  ‘Don’t be cruel to a heart that’s two.’

  Abby ran to the water’s edge and back again towards me as the waves gave tired chase to her feet, just going through the motions and letting her escape each time. I held her shoes and socks until I was forced to drop them when she ran full bore into my lap while I was standing fully upright.

  Something about the beach brings out the philosopher in my daughter or perhaps it is just being around water, because she’s prone to matters ontological in the bath too.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Yes, sweetie.’

  ‘Are there more grains of sand in the world than drops of water?’

  ‘You mean in the whole world or just at this beach?’

  ‘Dad, I’m serious. Be serious!’ She had learnt this response from her mother.

  ‘Abby, that’s like asking how long is a piece of string.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause, for one thing, it depends on the sizes of the drops of water and, like a ball of string, a drop of water could be any size.’

  ‘What about a ball of wool?’

  ‘Same thing.’

  ‘But wool comes from sheep, Dad, and if we knew how many sheep there were in the world we’d know. You could work it out. You’re a scientist. You could work it out with science couldn’t you, Dad?’

  Whether her faith in science was more misplaced than her faith in me was sometimes hard to say. I managed to get her away from balls of wool and string, drops of water and grains of sand by showing sudden enthusiasm for her rock collection. It took us to the rock pools where she squealed at the starfish, the minnows and the sea anemones. But it was only a short reprieve from the metaphysical.

  ‘Dad, do you want to talk about God?’

  ‘Didn’t you talk to Mum about that?’

  ‘Yep, in the bath. But that was ages ago.’

  ‘Well, I suppose things might’ve changed. What do you want to talk about?’

  ‘Dad, do you think I believe in God?’

  ‘I don’t know, sweetie, I’ve been away for a little while. I might be a little bit out of touch. Do you believe in God?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ she looked up at me with her mother’s eyes. ‘Is that okay?’

  We put the rocks in a box in the boot of the car and I picked her up in my arms.

  ‘Abby, like you, that’s perfect.’

  I placed her in the back seat and snapped shut the buckle of her seat belt. Before I had turned the key in the ignition she was singing again.

  ‘I still want to see the tigers … but tigers ain’t the kind you love enough… Dad?’

  ‘Yes, sweetie.’

  ‘Why did Elvis say “ain’t” instead of “are not”?’

  We stopped for a Dairy Queen and a Flake on our way home. It was almost dinnertime so Abby had to promise she wouldn’t tell her mother. As I wiped the last vestiges of our indiscretion from her fingers and her mouth, she confessed that she might be able to keep a secret but that she wasn’t sure. Could she just see?

  The sun was setting behind our neighbour’s hedge as I carried the shopping and the box of Abby’s new rocks from the car to the house where Tanya had had the day free to work uninterrupted on her thesis. Abby’s exuberance at returning home to Tanya was heightened on seeing her sitting in the lounge room drinking coffee with Kate. She flung herself onto Tanya and burst out for both of them with machine-gun rapidity selected highlights of her day: Elvis and Nanna, the beach, some new rocks, a Dairy Queen and a Flake. When I came in from the kitchen Abby passed me to find Elvis in Las Vegas which was standing upright on the kitchen table between a bag of broccoli and a box of Coco Pops. Some habits die hard.

  There were four coffee cups in the kitchen sink suggesting a more than social intake of caffeine. A box of tissues by Kate’s side in the lounge room suggested a crisis. Tanya confirmed that suspicion privately a few minutes later in the kitchen when we decided it would take two of us to make a fresh pot of coffee.

  ‘She’s left him,’ Tanya whispered over running water.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Is it a fight or is there something … deeper behind this?’

  ‘Both. Why? Don’t you think she’s done the right thing?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know anything about it. Did you know it was coming?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘Eddie,’ she whispered over the whistle of the kettle, ‘she’s left him for good. I hate to see her like this.’ She pressed one side of her face against my chest. ‘Did you have a good day? You were gone such a long time.’

  ‘We had a fantastic day,’ I said running my fingers through her hair. ‘We even visited your mum.
’

  ‘Oh, that’s great. Was she delighted? I bet she was.’

  ‘Yeah, took it rather well. Listen, shouldn’t we get back out there? Abby’s probably got her dancing to “Jailhouse Rock”.’

  ‘You couldn’t guess all the places we’ve been to today,’ I said, carrying the fresh coffee into the lounge room where Abby sat on Kate’s knee. Tanya came a minute or so later.

  ‘Oh yes, I could,’ said Kate bouncing Abby on her lap as though her life were not falling apart.

  ‘I told her, Dad.’

  ‘Oh, well then it’s not guessing. Do you know Williamson’s Cards and Music?’

  ‘Near the beach?’ Kate asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said pouring the coffee.

  ‘Oh, Eddie and I used to live there when we first started going out,’ Tanya volunteered with a smile.

  ‘Did you, Mum? Did you and Dad live there?’

  ‘No. Not actually live there, sweetie.’

  ‘Yeah, I think I might know it,’ said Kate.

  ‘Well, you might remember the old guy that used to run it, Old Man Williamson?’ Kate looked vague. If it didn’t come flooding back she wasn’t going to trowel for it.

  ‘Yeah, what about him?’ asked Tanya.

  ‘He’s dead,’ I told her.

  ‘Really? Dead!’

  ‘Yeah, only physically, the business is still there.’

  Abby went to bed after dinner but even before then it was clear without anything being said that Kate would stay the night with us. Over dinner we had limited ourselves to conversation that was consistent with the common adult charade that we are just dangerously large children; the conversation was not about that which absorbed us to the exclusion of everything else. Strangely Abby did not ask where Paul was or why he was not there, children being so often more adaptable to change than adults. Or perhaps it was just that Kate was her friend as well as ours, whereas Paul and Abby had always tacitly agreed not to bother each other. Abby was an example of what Kate wanted that Paul would not give her and Paul was one of those adult outlines that was coloured in only after Abby went to bed. (She had grown up falling asleep to the sound of Paul and Tanya disagreeing.)

  CHAPTER 18

  There is always a last argument, the one that permits us to be tempted at some later time into thinking that if only we had not said, seen or raised some issue or other then things might not have ended as they had and always would have.

  We listened quietly, vacillating between apprehension and resignation, as Kate told us of the straw that broke the camel’s back.

  He was my friend, best man at my wedding and all that, but what did it mean to call him my friend? He was someone that I saw and he saw me. Our wives saw each other and we went with them most of the time. We were responsible for their knowing each other. We followed each other’s progress with an interest that seemed largely motivated by a desire to see how it ends. There had been camaraderie there once, at the beginning. But it dissipated as a result of some combination of the effects on him of his parents, their money, his job, and the times which made powerful and arrogant buffoons out of little people who might otherwise have spent their whole lives misguidedly waiting for the realisation of a potential they did not have.

  Kate had married my friend from university and Paul was not that man anymore. Neither of us could have known that he would change in the way that he did but she was the one that had married him. We were all like peas in a pod in those days except that Paul was only trying it out, just visiting. He did not have to stay in the pod. We stayed there and ripened only to be thrown into an industrialsized cauldron and turned into pea soup for a chain restaurant. His parents owned the franchise.

  Paul had not understood why Kate was walking out. She said it was bad enough that he tried to allay her fear of losing her job with his usual cant about economic efficiency and the over-supply of teachers. He had no idea of how things were on the ground, of teacher-student ratios, or of the provision of opportunities for disadvantaged children. But worse for her than any of this, he had only a limited understanding of her need to work. How could he defend policies that stopped her from working? Did he not appreciate how much passion there was inside her to get out and do something in the world? Did he think she could be bought off with the range of Lancôme products?

  He had become enraged, infuriated, that she did not want to stay home and be looked after. He threw a lamp, not at her, but near her. There was money. He would take her out. Why did she have to turn everything into a critical issue when things could be so easy? She threw a wooden box of pot-pourri. It hit his leg. She didn’t have to struggle, to get up early every morning and fight her way through the traffic, he argued. Wasn’t that what every woman wanted?

  ‘I was bored,’ she told us, her face half in shadow and warming the palms of her hands. ‘I had been bored for a long time. You must have known that?’

  She looked up at us sitting next to each other on the couch like children and we looked back sheepishly, as though we had known all along and failed to do all the things it was not in our power to do. In her pain she had grown smaller in the shadows.

  ‘But I thought if it was just boredom you can live with it, find the spark somewhere else, friends, work, reading, movies … children. He kept saying he wasn’t ready for children. What’s the point of being shackled to the prick if he won’t even give you children?’

  It was at this point that she began to cry. Tanya went over to Kate and took her in her arms. I had not made up my mind whether we should be comforting her by pushing the you-are-so-right line or whether we should be comforting her by gently suggesting that she might feel differently in the morning. Then, of course, there was the question of disloyalty to Paul.

  Kate was right, Paul had become an unmitigated prick but didn’t we, or at least, didn’t I owe my nominal best friend something other than encouragement to his wife to leave him? Was it really in her best interests anyway? And what if they reconciled? In the honeymoon of a reconciliation people tell each other everything. They name names. I could recall instances I had read about. About the only worse thing a friend could do would be to try to make a move on her himself.

  I decided to be firmly noncommittal with respect to the correctness of her decision in a there-there guise, with perhaps a subliminal I-understand timbre to it, while we waited for the fallout from what she had done. This was until at least I could see which way Tanya was going to go. Prudence told me to wait for a sign from her, although it was difficult to imagine her saying anything in Paul’s favour.

  ‘What are you going to do? What do you want to do?’ Tanya asked our sad friend.

  ‘Well,’ she began between sobs, ‘I thought that I would delay telling my parents for a little while. It’ll only upset them and … I don’t know …’

  ‘I know,’ Tanya offered sympathetically, ‘it somehow makes it more real when you start telling people. You need time for it to sink in first. You know you can stay here as long as you like.’

  Kate looked up and smiled at Tanya with something approaching gratitude, then at me and then they both looked at me.

  ‘Oh yes, of course. Of course you can stay here as long as you like.’

  There had not been any time since my coming home from Spensers Gulf the night before that Tanya and I had been simultaneously alone together and conscious, apart from the brief joint venture in the kitchen to make coffee. This made it almost ten days. Tanya fixed up the couch for her with the coffee table doubling as a bedside table on which she put my bedside lamp, while I went to hide in our bedroom. I could hear Tanya whispering to the sounds of Kate getting undressed.

  ‘No, don’t be silly, sleep in the raw if you’re more comfortable. Feel free to put your toothbrush and toiletries in the bathroom. Just make yourself at home. Wake me if you can’t sleep. You might feel better in the morning but don’t be upset if you don’t.’

  I was exhausted from a full day playing with Abby and a full night of symp
athetic listening and silent bipartisanship. Tanya had washed her hair and so had the scent I had often tried to recall during the many nights alone in my hotel room at Spensers Gulf. I nuzzled my way towards her ear but she barely responded, preferring instead to face the ceiling. After so many years together one learns the meaning of ‘no’ without it being said. It’s just that I wasn’t sure what she was saying no to. Such was my tiredness that I was not up to the robust lovemaking that was usually induced by the department’s need to send me out of town. But the dreamy kind, in the rhythm of the slow motion hair-in-the-breeze turning through one hundred and eighty degrees of shampoo commercials, would have been nice. The kitchen was closed.

  ‘What do you think?’ I said, joining her on the ceiling.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s not going to be easy but … I suppose she should leave him if she feels this way. They don’t have kids. God knows she ought to feel this way. Can you imagine living with Paul? I find it difficult enough being his friend, or at least the wife of his friend.’

  ‘Which is it? Which do you find hard, being his friend or his friend’s wife?’

  I wasn’t trying to be funny but it seemed better not to point that out. I was trying not to be scared of all those things I had not yet named, things in Spensers Gulf, things in the department, in our flexi-account and in the answers I had given to the undergraduate psychology major when I could see no further ahead than a glow-in-the-dark space monster at my feet.

  ‘Tanya, he wasn’t always like this.’

  ‘I know. I’ve seen him get worse over the years. What is it about the passage of time that makes the present so much worse than the past?’

  ‘It’s a law of the physical world that things tend from order to disorder. It’s called the Second Law of Thermodynamics.’

  ‘A law with no appeal. It’s … even been happening to us,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I sat up slightly, with a twinge of newfound lower-back pain.

  ‘We used to be progressives. Now we look back with almost religious fondness to the past. This is a distinguishing characteristic of conservatives.’