Three Dollars

by Elliot Perlman

  It is with deep regret. It is with regret. We regret.

  I could not have said it better myself and since I knew her so well, I knew that they could not have said anything worse. It is with inadequate understanding of Tanya’s capacity to enthuse other people and to enlighten them in ways they would never forget, and with disregard for the consequences to her financial and emotional well-being, that the university regrets it is unable to extend her contract of employment. They would like to take this opportunity to offer her grave self-doubts and to employ a meaningful cliché towards the bottom of the letter, without fond sincerity, without gratitude for past service, so that the printed words on the page, when viewed in the middle distance through unfocused eyes, generate the image of an upside-down Christmas tree.

  Placing the letter back slowly as though nothing had been disturbed, I realised that before she could be made to believe it, I would have to believe that she would again laugh uncontrollably, in that completely liberating way, even between unsuccessful applications for jobs that were beneath her. I would have to convince her that she would again feel her own strength when catching her daughter in her arms; that she would not ever have an emotional understanding of hunger; that she would not be whatever she was forced to do for a living nor would she become what had been done to her that went unseen by those she thought would always look down on her. And that she need never ever feel alone. But how to convince her of this when I had not been told what had happened?

  Why had she kept this to herself? I had kept things from her, it was true, but that was for her sake. For a start, we had a long tradition of not talking about engineering or anything connected with the natural sciences, that stretched all the way back to our student days. I thought this was because, while I was interested in her subjects, she was terminally bored by mine. The pressure of a mass of ideal gas multiplied by its volume is equal to the mass of the gas, in terms of its molecular mass, multiplied by the universal gas constant, multiplied by the absolute temperature of the gas. It seemed we never got around to discussing something even as basic as this. I took it for granted that she knew it, or if she didn’t know it, that she didn’t want to know it. Since beginning work on her PhD thesis she had started reading a little about the history and philosophy of science and she knew that any survey of the twentieth century could not escape scathing criticism without acknowledging the impact of science on technology and of technology on almost everything else. Pure science was left untouched, abandoned religiously, by almost everyone.

  Within this tradition of my sharing most of her interests and views on literature, history, politics, cinema and music, this tradition of monitoring, with her assistance, the highs and lows of her all ordinaries index, there seemed to be no room for the vicissitudes of my career and neither of us had minded. ‘Those bastards’ in the Department sent me away too much. We agreed on this but, by and large, we both just accepted it. Perhaps we even suspected that my trips away gave us a regular heightened longing for each other that most other longstanding couples could only watch versions of on video and simulate on wedding anniversaries. So she had no idea that the temperature of the environment in which I worked was steadily rising. I had not given her any idea. Was this because it would only make her anxious, because I did not want to hear her enthusiastic advocacy in my defence, or was it because I had no wish to remind her of Gerard, a man for whom she had once left me, a man who was paid an extravagant stipend and who could, with the imprimatur of the State, tell me what to do? Yes, yes and, to be honest, yes.

  But other than this, what had I not told her? The helicopters. They were there at night above her as well but she slept through them. She was able to sleep through them. I was up, I stayed up, the family’s satellite dish receiving messages from the outside world and filtering them, sanitising them, swallowing them whole, so that she might sleep undisturbed by helicopters, by Nick’s torn snapshots, stray dogs, by the heel snapping of flexi-accounts, acid rain on the horizon and all the visiting collateral damage of the new world order which came disguised as mail. She slept but I was on call against the world, twenty-four hour call. And if the news from the world was not good and likely to alarm her, I let her sleep through it. Her daughter got through uncensored. It was only the world coming down on us that I kept from her, that I had only ever tried to keep from her. That was all … And Amanda.

  But if she kept things to herself and I kept things to myself, if we hoarded enough of them to pave a once grand city of deserted streets, thinking there was some prize for this kind of protection of each other, then we were alone.

  Kate was in the kitchen deeply involved with pieces of veal, tomatoes and white wine. She poured me a glass and told me to go and tend to my daughter. She knew where everything was and had discussed the preparation of the meal with Tanya the night before. When I returned to the kitchen, glass in hand, explaining that Abby was asleep, she agreed that it was probably the best thing for her. Of all the people one could love, Kate had to have been one of the easiest. Her eyes were round and large, betraying in a glance an innocence that experience had not yet been able to shift and, at the end of a long day, her hair tied back with a bright red ribbon, no one could have denied her a belief in the possibility of other things. She said something to herself about roma tomatoes, refilled my glass and hers before banishing me good-humouredly from the kitchen. She was enjoying herself, the cooking, the mildly ill, adoring and adored, sleeping child, the man with a glass of wine reading in the other room and Chet Baker playing softly. Had I really wanted to set things off for her, I might have filled a pipe and lit it, preferably an heirloom.

  No longer was she assisting merely with Abby, she was also tacitly helping Tanya look after me. Perhaps this was not purely to enable Tanya to attend late-night seminars, dinners with visiting international academics or even to spend time with her mother. Was it a coincidence of wants, just for a night: Tanya takes a twenty-four-hour leave of absence and we do not yet have to discuss the evaporation of her teaching position or the limbo her thesis is about to be cast into, while, at the same time, Kate steps back into a past she has never known? Through the kitchen door I could see her adding chopped garlic to the olive oil, warming it in the cast-iron pan. She had chosen the Chet Baker accompaniment and the songs infiltrated the time, marinating it, making memories of what would have been blank moments but for her quiet industry, the wine, the scent of garlic changing states, the diminishing light of sunset and, of course, Chet Baker’s songs programmed on the CD player in an order other than that chosen by the record company. One by one they told their separate stories, making one long story: ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’, ‘Just Friends’, ‘Let’s Get Lost’, ‘My Ideal’, ‘I’ve Never Been In Love Before’.

  ‘Where did he get her from?’ she asked me rhetorically of Hardy and Tess as we sat at the dining table with more wine, veal and a tossed green salad before us. Between us, erect but leaning, were candles bought one Sunday afternoon on the St Kilda esplanade but made in a country Tanya had variously categorised as third world, developing, less developed or fourth world. (Candles from the fourth world would not burn. They were the only things from there that wouldn’t. Consequently, the third world was making a killing. Candles were not made locally any more. Few people here were aware of that.)

  I was blanketed by an exhaustion under which my father, the bank, Lyndon H. LaRouche’s outstretched right arm, Tanya’s job and my problems at work all huddled together, fighting for space. There was no room at that instant for my mother, for Abby’s influenza or the earth-shaking crash soon to be but not yet reflected in the all ordinaries. When stocks are low it is time to buy, to reinvest. Everyone knows that. But not everyone can. It presupposes that you have something left to invest. I was tired without constraint, laissez-faire tired, deregulated world’s best practice tired. In the glow of a nineteenth-century interior, Tess was talking about Kate and how Hardy was written all over her face.
The veal was tender and I realised that between half a day at work, making useless hot lemon and honey drinks for Abby and reeling from the mail, I had not eaten since breakfast.

  Kate was alive, quietly alive, that is, positive and animated, without tipping psychophysical VU meters over into the red. She refilled our glasses, we kept draining them, opened a second and third bottle and all the while I tried to remember how it was I came to be dining in strangely familiar and unfamiliar circumstances, comfortable at the end of the day with my freshly ribboned, wide-eyed old friend, talking about Thomas Hardy and his most tragic heroine just like the good old days we never had.

  ‘Where did he get her from?’

  ‘She is a creation of his deepest hopes,’ I answered unhelpfully, distracted, exhausted but not daring to hint at my condition for fear of hurting my friend.

  ‘But he loved her. Hardy loved her as though she existed. When you read it …’

  ‘She seems so real?’

  ‘Well, actually, she is a little unreal, too noble to be real. You don’t get that mix of nobility, intelligence and beauty in real life, just the tragic ending,’ she smiled wistfully.

  ‘No, that’s not right. Look at you, noble, intelligent and beautiful.’

  There was a silence. I had shocked us both. She said something about the veal talking but I had meant it when I said it. It was just that I had not meant to say it.

  ‘You are noble, intelligent and … um … beautiful.’ Repeated, it sounded worse. It had, in my head, seemed like a suddenly revealed truth in need of saying but now, propped in the air, it sounded like shameful flirting, the whole thing made worse when I added oafishly, ‘So is Tanya.’

  ‘Oh yes, she is. That’s true,’ Kate agreed. We both felt better. We drank to Tanya.

  ‘There was outrage when it was published.’

  ‘What year was that?’

  ‘Eighteen ninety-one.’

  ‘A big year for outrage.’

  ‘It’s hard to believe something so pure could be the subject of scandal.’

  Provoked and unprovoked by the alcohol, I was still sentient enough to be able to evaluate the likely effect of my candle-lit words, but sadly not until they already had lives of their own, belonging to me only in respect of their origin. They fell out of my mouth and threatened to rebel against the established order even before they had reached their adolescence.

  ‘Were it not so beautiful you could say it was a black-and-white morality tale, pure and simple,’ Kate suggested.

  ‘But don’t you think some of its beauty resides in, or stems precisely from its moralistic nature?’

  Whether or not there was any validity to my response, it needs to be remembered that I was a well and truly soused chemical engineer with certain personal difficulties all competing to bring my world to an end. I was doing well to remember who I was let alone what we were talking about.

  ‘You might be right. As Alvarez says, there’s a tendency to be so moved by Tess’s fate that the beauty of the book, aesthetically and in terms of its language, is perhaps … overshadowed.’

  I tried to repeat her words in my head. I was incapable of determining whether she was agreeing or disagreeing with what I had just said. I could not remember what I had just said. I couldn’t remember what she had just said. I caught only the bare beginning.

  ‘Really, Alverez said that?’

  ‘Yes, in his introduction to the Penguin edition.’

  ‘Mmm … Penguin.’ The cavity where most people stored their tact, poise and memory was, in my case, filled with lead. I thought I was about to collapse.

  ‘I’m sorry, Eddie. I’m boring you.’

  ‘No, no, no, no. Not at all. No.’

  ‘It’s just that I knew you’d read it and I thought it was fantastic. I loved it. I loved her.’

  ‘No, no, no, no. Not at all.’

  ‘I’ll shut up about Hardy. I promise. I love him and that’s it. Enough said. Too much said, probably,’ Kate said, diffidently.

  ‘Of course. I love you too.’

  ‘Eddie, are you okay?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Why don’t you lie down for a second. You look really beat. Do you want to? Come on. Over here.’

  She got up and I watched her guide me from the table to the couch, her makeshift bed. I could smell her perfume or moisturiser on the pillow. With her arms she levered me gently to a horizontal position. She took my shoes off and I heard the clunks as they dropped to the floor seconds apart. With each clunking sound I felt my head lift as if it had bounced off a marble surface, thick marble in slab-form, the kind used to enshrine a dynasty of forebears. A light went out and it was quiet. But it was the dark and quiet of some other world. I lay on the family vault at Kingsbere. Tess had gone.

  There was a scratching sound close by, like someone scraping or clearing moss or some other stubborn and simple life-form from around the marble edges of the family tomb. As my eyes accustomed to the scene, it became clear that there was someone tending the vault. It was Old Man Williamson. He was chiselling away, with an instrument of crude form, at the periphery of the grave. He worked with solemn diligence before noticing me.

  ‘Hey, remember me?’ I called out to him.

  ‘Yes, of course I remember you.’ He looked up through the mist. It was not clear whether it was with slight anger or just tired recognition.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.

  ‘Clearing things, keeping order, preparing.’

  ‘Preparing?’

  ‘Preparing for your father.’

  ‘Preparing the tomb for my father?’

  ‘Yes, and for you.’

  ‘For me? Why for me?’

  ‘We all go the way of our fathers or our forefathers. Have you learnt nothing from Thomas Hardy?’

  ‘But my dad’s going to be okay. He’s not coming here.’

  ‘How would you know? You haven’t seen ’n since afore the harvest and now you can’t afford to see’n at all. Well, you’ll see’n soon enough, I can tell you that.’

  ‘Wait a minute! You were never a malevolent old man.’

  ‘No more’n any and I’m not particular so now. Whatever ’tis there was always there. You just n’er noticed it, ’tis all. I was always too old for the likes of you to pay me any mind.’

  ‘Are you saying that if I visit him I can keep him from here?’

  ‘Answer yourself then. How can you visit’n if you ha’nt any money? That’s in the first place. In the second place, how can you of all the hayfarers and dairymen to walk the district keep’n from the final place? Have regard t’yourself. If e’r you could do’t you cannot do’t now. You know’t in your heart and you cannot fight it. The best a sort of man like you can do is to know it, store it, file it under “T”.’

  ‘Under “T”?’

  ‘ “T” for The future. Your future is as dark as this here night that hides all but the very hand you see before you but, as a fact, it is as plain as this as well. You cannot come to your father so he will be coming here. You yourself, in what others may call your prime, live from week to week, scrimpin’ and savin’ and always at the beck and call of an ass of a man, an ass of a man who knew your wife. Your wife knew him even though she had knowed you a’fore ’n but it did not stop her calling on’n then. And in those times she had all ahead of her, or so she thought, and her frail constitution had not yet set in. How can y’not admit the possibility that she might know’n again, he never having been so much taller than you before, she ne’er afore so much needing to be raised?’

  ‘But she’ll find other work. She was just tutoring. And I will help her. I’ll help in every way I can.’

  ‘No doubt you will and there’s the sadness t’is the mark of your current self. Just a tutor, you say! There be cutbacks in these dark times till even the best of students are turned away. Remember Jude Fawley, as fine a man as you’d ever want to be, was turned away in the darkness at Christminster.’

&nbs
p; ‘Jude Fawley? Was he at Monash? I’m sorry, I don’t remember him.’

  He exhaled slowly and with time-honoured exasperation muttered underneath his breath, ‘Bloody engineers. Tanya’d remember him. He was a stone-mason, a strong man. Ask Tanya should you find yourself speaking with her.’

  The sound of someone making their way through the foliage arrested his animation.

  ‘Someone’s coming,’ he whispered, as though no one was meant to see him, but I did not want it to end there. I called to him with increasing desperation.

  ‘I can help her. Why don’t you believe me?’

  He continued in a low but urgent whisper. ‘’Tis not your will be lacking but you’re surely no full man at all.’ He stood upright with his scraping instrument in hand ready to flee whoever or whatever was approaching and continued in a hasty whisper, looking around as he spoke.

  ‘It might be Tess or someone else who comes here now but no matter to you, son, you who are at once too young to know what’s missing in you, or the price of it, and too old to grow up and acquire it.’

  With that he went past me with ghostly speed. I grabbed at him to keep him there but missed and caught only his parting whisperings, of a nature somewhere between advice and admonition.

  ‘In the night streets of the town they’re carving swastikas into the hearts of stray dogs but still you and your wife keep separate counsel. Have regard t’yourself. Could you be assisted much less attracted by someone in your position?’

  Then he was gone and Tess it was lay down beside me in the mist seemingly unaware of my presence on the tomb, at least initially. She was wearing a red ribbon in her hair and freely gave away the recently familiar scented invitation from the Lancôme products in my bathroom and from all manner of things around the lounge room couch. She looked tired beyond sleep and had been crying.