Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  I sat up further, suppressing anger, more back pain and a desire to shake her, to wash her mouth out with hope. ‘Hey, we’re not conservatives. Don’t be so simplistic. That’s stupid. We’re not tending towards disorder. It’s just that our friends look like they’re splitting up. Now maybe they should and maybe they shouldn’t but either way we’re not conservatives.’ I took a breath. Now that Old Man Williamson was dead breathing would become a talking point in the endless conversation I had with myself.

  ‘Well, do you think she should leave him, start again?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said yet again. ‘I mean, if it’s just a matter of ideology maybe she should think again.’

  Tanya sat up.

  ‘What do you mean, just a matter of ideology? It comes down to some pretty fundamental issues like core values and respect. If his cores values are so corrupt and repulsive then she can’t have any respect for him and if she doesn’t have any respect for him she can’t love him.’

  ‘And if she doesn’t love him?’

  ‘What do you mean if she doesn’t love him? Isn’t it obvious what she should do if she doesn’t love him? Otherwise she’ll become like everyone’s parents.’

  ‘If she doesn’t love him should she leave him? Must she leave him? What if she liked him, could learn to like him, re-learn? They have years of shared memories. She is financially secure with him. She could go back to study, look for another job, have children sooner or later with him. Is she lonelier now than she will be pushing forty and trying to meet unattached men, with the spectre of unemployment, and with all the promise of a rented one-bedroom flat and the intermittent whisper of regrets as the years pile up like the English and History textbooks she will no longer have room or need for? Think about it, Tanya. Should she leave him?’

  Tanya slowly took in a deep breath through her nostrils and let it out rather less slowly through her mouth before answering.

  ‘I don’t know, Eddie. I don’t know.’

  The paint on the ceiling was flaking. It had been flaking slowly before our eyes every day but we, or at least I, looked at it only at night in the dark. When the light was on I was either reading, making love to Tanya or fumbling for a book or the light itself, or the semi-conscious button of the clock radio that had silently kept the beat of our inner lives, or else I fumbled for my wife, sometimes to hold her, sometimes to find her and sometimes just on her behalf. But we had been talking with the light off. (My bedside lamp was in the lounge beside the sad and naked Kate.) Nonetheless the paint on the ceiling was visible to me and therefore probably visible to Tanya. It had reached such an advanced stage of disrepair that our night-eyes could not ignore it. That is what lay above us while, yet again, at night the helicopters moved looking for something less likely to be found by day.

  ‘Tanya, how important is ideology to you? I mean, would you leave me if our ideas on the important things were not the same?’

  She turned from lying on her back and rested her head on my chest.

  ‘I can’t begin to imagine it, Eddie.’

  ‘Leaving?’

  ‘Your ideology changing. It’s so much part of you, your strength, your integrity.’

  ‘But what if you found that I’d compromised my integrity?’

  ‘I can hear your heart beating. Listen!’

  ‘I can’t hear it. Tanya, what if you found that I’d compromised my integrity?’

  ‘You wouldn’t. You are your integrity.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are.’

  ‘I’m more than that.’

  ‘I know that, darling, but your integrity is one of the things I admire most about you, along with all the other things of course.’

  The helicopters were closing in. When the paint was ready it would fall on my hair. Perhaps I would breathe in minute flakes of it till I was ready to meet Old Man Williamson. He would want to lecture me like all old people did, especially once they’re dead. But what could I have done differently? Could I have loved her more or fought harder to prolong the sweet childish days when our immaturity guaranteed non-cognisance of any of the things that could happen to us?

  ‘What if I compromised my integrity, say, for the sake of my job, if I made false findings, wrote false reports, something like that?’ I asked again.

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  ‘I wouldn’t but what if I did?’

  ‘Why would you?’

  ‘To keep my job.’

  ‘Oh, you wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘No. I know.’

  ‘You’d be the last person in the world to do that!’

  ‘After you?’

  ‘Mmm … maybe even after me. I’m more pragmatic than you,’ Tanya declared.

  ‘You think so? You would do it to keep your job?’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘But you could? You can’t rule it out?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

  ‘What if I did? What if you found out that I did?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t find out, you’d tell me.’

  ‘And if I did?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d lose respect for you.’

  CHAPTER 19

  In the morning I awoke to find myself alone in bed once more. My wife, who knew the bed in all its moods, was up with a purpose. She and Kate were preparing a lavish breakfast and Abby was leafing through a book, primarily concerned with tigers, in the warmth of the couch that had been Kate’s bed. From the bedroom I could hear the festive sounds of capable women teasing out their destinies over the random clatter of morning domesticity, a sort of tertiary pyjama party. One of those inarticulate night-time fears which are meant to evaporate on contact with the morning was hanging on valiantly despite the sounds of human activity: the fear that Kate and Tanya had come back almost full circle to Freud’s latency period, and that if they had they would virtually ignore me and only read books by women authors.

  I crept out of the bedroom into the bathroom which had been swiftly and painlessly colonised by Lancôme. Being a male felt a lot like being alone. I wondered who my male Kate was and remembered Paul. He was an idiot. I did not want him sleeping naked on my couch.

  In the vanity mirror my teeth smiled back at me under sufferance, tobacco-stained from too much tea and coffee. The bathroom had its attractions. I could shower and shave. But the bedroom contained my clothes. Each room was a beach-head with its own distinct advantages and disadvantages. I felt the need to meet the activity of the rest of the house only when I was fully prepared. I took off my pyjamas, and while waiting for the water under the shower to become anaesthetisingly warm, I noticed the bathroom window was slightly ajar. Fresh air had been invited to join forces with deodorant, soap and perfume in the war against steam and the products of our bodies. I looked irresolutely through the window along the side of our house, and out onto the street. Several dogs had nothing to do.

  Why do we love? It gives us hope of escaping a solitary existence. When I was clean I wrapped myself in a towel, shaved and sneaked back to the bedroom to dress for the breakfast party. I put on corduroy pants, an innocent face and, quite alone, went to join them.

  There can often be an air almost of euphoria after fundamental changes in people’s lives, even when these changes are to their detriment. In the days surrounding the death of a long-term chronic sufferer of some debilitating illness, family members or very close friends who have made a pilgrimage to the scene will often finally give in to exhaustion and laugh inappropriately until the gravity of the situation returns to chide them. No one had died at our place but there was that same slightly surreal festive atmosphere. There we all were making the best of it like stranded campers, Kate utterly spoiling Abby, or helping Tanya in the kitchen and everyone, myself included, generally diverting themselves after their unanimously acknowledged hard day at work.

  There was a tacit understanding that although we had discussed with Abby the origin of the species, sex, death, God, sw
earing and not swearing for tactical advantage, racial prejudice, the dichotomy between equality and freedom, and involuntary peristalsis, conversation concerning divorce and even trial separation was not on. In this way we maintained the campfire ambience and ignored the future which included the end of this unplanned series of days. Kate had still not told her parents nor had she spoken to Paul for four days. It was almost time to change the sheets on the couch.

  It was also approaching the time when I could not any longer in good conscience put off speaking to Paul. It did not have to be a matter of taking sides or of providing aid and comfort to the enemy. He was, after all, my friend of nearly twenty years and his wife had just left him. That day, the fourth, I decided I’d call him at work. He said he was fine and he sounded fine.

  ‘Kate’s been staying with us,’ I said in an exhaled apology, like an unpleasant confession.

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘How did you know? I thought you hadn’t spoken?’

  ‘We haven’t.’

  ‘Then how did you know she was staying with us?’ I was both peeved and relieved that he knew.

  ‘She told me on Saturday that that’s where she was going. Listen, Eddie, you’ve got me at a really bad time. I’ve got back-to-back meetings all afternoon. How’s she doing? Is she taking it okay? Oh shit! I didn’t realise the time. I’m gonna have to call you back … mmm, being realistic it’s gonna have to be tomorrow at the earliest. I hate to do this to you.’

  ‘She’s fine, Paul.’

  ‘You take care of her. I’m sorry you guys have become involved.’

  ‘Paul, it’s okay on us. That’s the least of …’

  ‘Yeah. Okay,’ he called out to someone on his side of the phone. ‘Gonna have to go, Eddie. Take care of yourself and … yes, okay, coming!… give my love to Tanya.’

  The really difficult part of being Paul’s friend, I realised as he put down the phone, was that I, unlike his wife, could not leave him. There was probably a duration after which he would notice that a period of time had elapsed without our having spoken but he could never really be sure that I had left him and in order properly to leave someone they have to know about it. Kate had left him and adopted us. It was unequivocal. She was lucky.

  I did not tell Tanya about my conversation with Paul or even that I had called him. I’m not sure why I kept it from her. There is something addictive about keeping things to yourself. It started with Gerard’s managerial role in the department and then with his managerial role in my life. Since I had managed successfully to keep from her the identity of the persona that was sending me to Spensers Gulf every other day, it became almost a challenge to see how much I could keep from her before I was keeping something of myself from her. Then it became obvious that in keeping from her my concern about the effect on my career of my report on the Spensers Gulf project, I was already keeping back part of myself, but it was an anxious part that could only have exacerbated her periodic sense of our impending doom. Actually it had started way before any of this. Tanya had never even heard of Amanda.

  The weekend arrived and still no one had discussed Kate’s leaving, not her leaving Paul, not her leaving us. The first week had gone and she had finished the novel she had been reading when she came and was ready to start reading something else by my bedside lamp. The three of us agreed there was something sad about coming to the end of a good novel and that each of us tended to remember the year in divisions delineated not by months or seasons but by what we were reading at the time.

  She had the night before just finished Tess of the d’Urbervilles and saw herself, naturally, as Tess and Paul as Alec d’Urberville. I was afraid to ask who in her life was the romantically idealised, apparently progressive but fatally flawed Angel Clare. Hardy’s tragic heroine and her tale had made a deep impression on Kate. She wanted everyone to read it.

  ‘It’s so beautiful and so very sad,’ she said. ‘It would have changed my life … but it’s already changed.’

  That dangerous hour was upon us when the sun is leaving and you have not yet capitulated to the night by pulling the curtains across and turning on the lights. We had started a new cask of red (we drank by the cask since Kate had moved in) and I looked at her and it seemed that Tanya and I were thinking the same thing; how special she was. Like so many other people, when you looked closely at her, she was manifestly precious and in need of protection.

  ‘You know,’ Tanya said, already onto her second glass, ‘I used to think there were two kinds of people in the world; people who read novels with no plot, about horses in beautiful rugged landscapes, and people who read other things but—’

  ‘No, that’s not right,’ Kate interrupted. ‘There are two kinds of people; people who read books and people who deal in the short-term money market.’

  ‘No, no, you’re both wrong,’ I volunteered. ‘There are two kinds of people in the world; people who divide people into two kinds of people and people who don’t.’

  Kate threw a pillow at me. She laughed and the two of them made Oh-Eddie noises. I was scared for her and thought perhaps the best thing for her was to sleep naked on our couch next to my bedside lamp reading Hardy for the rest of her life.

  It was decided that we would all stay in and that once it was really dark and much colder I would walk up the street and buy some take-away curry. (Tanya and I couldn’t very well go out and leave Kate to babysit Abby even though her offer was no doubt sincere.) Because I had spent the last part of the day vigorously impersonating a Sri Lankan tiger in the back yard with Abby (a tiger per se was insufficient, she needed to know its ethnicity before we could play), it was agreed that I should shower before walking up the road to collect the food.

  Once again, alone in the bathroom, naked, I looked at my untouched body, untouched because it would have been insensitive of us to express affection for each other in front of Kate, and unnecessarily dangerous to make love in our bedroom when it was so close to where Kate was probably still wide awake with Tess and Angel Clare. I looked at my face with the shower running. I was getting older. I always had been but it was visually unmistakable now and only steam on the mirror could conceal it. If only steam could be counted upon in the street and in offices. The bathroom window was slightly ajar again and I peered through it along the side of our house, and out onto the street. It was too early for the helicopters. Under the street-light two dogs had nothing to do.

  CHAPTER 20

  Tanya had phoned to order our take-away curry. All that was left was for me to collect it. She was to give Abby a bath and Kate would read before dinner. And with this makeshift civilisation in place, I set off on the three-or four-block trek to bring home the bhutuwa. There was barely time for my mind to come to rest from checking for my wallet and keys when it was claimed by a man a little further down the road.

  He wore a tight pink t-shirt which showed a well-developed upper body and firm biceps unambiguously veined. He was pacing, his eyes threatening impatience. Clutched to his chest was a small dog with white fur and tight curls and a little shaggy beard between the lower jaw and its neck. Both the man and the white dog held to him looked down at another larger dog, brown with a white patch between its ears, that seemed to have, or wanted to have, some connection with them. It barked at them intermittently and intermittently the white dog replied. As they moved the brown dog moved with them so that the distance between them never increased. The man, who could not have been much past forty, kept shifting his attention from the imploring brown dog to me and back again as I approached. A thin film of sweat filtered down from his own dog-like brown curls to the top of his forehead and I could see from the overwhelming despair which had long ago found a home on his face that the ordinary no longer ordered him around.

  ‘You live around here?’ he asked, not without some menace.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Do you know who owns this dog?’ he asked pointing to the brown dog with his free hand.

  ‘No, I don’t. I
’ve seen it around, I think, but I don’t know who owns it.’ I had seen both the dogs from my bathroom window and only recognised them now from their evident friendliness with each other, the two dogs who had nothing to do but look blindly at me looking, through the steam, at them looking.

  ‘So you don’t know who owns this dog?’ he said, still clutching the white dog to his chest. ‘Fuck!’ he said under his breath, his eyes filling and he not wanting me to know.

  ‘Are you alright?’ I asked in the manner we ask people who clearly are not. He continued moving with his white dog attached to his chest, rocking it as one rocks a baby, the brown dog with the white paw-print on its head watching them.

  ‘What would you do?’ he asked. ‘It’s not my dog.’

  ‘Not your dog?’

  ‘No. This is my dog. That,’ he said nodding at the brown dog, ‘… is someone else’s dog. I can’t look after it. I can’t keep two dogs. This one belongs to someone else. You don’t know who. I just can’t understand. It’s been dumped here. Someone’s obviously dumped it. It’s been coming around to my place playing with my dog and it won’t go. I can’t keep it. But you know what will happen if I call the pound. He’ll be dead inside ten days. You know that. They knew that, whoever it was that just dumped him here. I don’t know how someone could do it, you know. I can’t keep him but he keeps coming round. Should never’ve fed him in the first place. You can’t kill him. What would you do? I’ve been walking the streets with him hoping to find someone who might know the owners, who might’ve seen him dumped or maybe someone who might be able to take him in but there’s no one bloody around … just me. What would you do?’ He was crying. There were cuts on his hands.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe you could put up some signs in shop windows, asking if anyone knows about him.’

  ‘Signs … in shop windows?’ he repeated under the street-light without trying to hide his contempt for the perfectly reasonable and practical suggestion that was at once, of course, of no use. We stood there for a moment on the corner under the street-light, cars going by oblivious to us, the little dog tucked under one arm and pressed against his chest, me not knowing what to do, the larger brown dog in the cameo appearance of its life and the man with paw stains on his pink t-shirt trying to brush away tears with his free hand.