by S. J. Finn
‘Is this Renny?’
I got up from the kitchen table and funeral-marched from the room, my limbs heavy.
‘Are you having an affair with my wife?’
I slowly ascended the stairs. Standing at the end of our bed, facing away from the pillows, my arms out, I fell backwards as if floating from the edge of a very tall building. I could only hear his muted tone. I didn’t want to know what they were talking about. I kicked off my shoes, curled into a foetal ball, and sank into a heavy unwanted sleep that prevented me from asking.
SIX
A kind of madness took over, one that felt close to disassociation – except that, as the central character, I kept being reminded of who I was and what I’d done, even when I begged the universe to render me safely oblivious.
Eight days later, a few before Xmas, the three of us – Marcus was with my friend Ange, organised by Dave – sat at the table in our open-plan kitchen.
Because Dave kept demanding – the same question repeated like a theme – So WHAT’S going to happen now? Renny was forced to ask what was, on reflection at least, a ridiculous question: ‘Can I have an affair with your wife?’
I looked from one to the other, atrophied as the request pushed past me. Not only were they conversing, but they were doing so with a diplomacy that felt surreal, that could have been hallmarked for a UN convention.
‘You can’t,’ Dave answered.
Renny put both hands up, her palms open in stop signs. ‘That’s enough for me.’ She placed them then in front of her, webbing her fingers together and bowing her head in symbolic withdrawal.
Dave turned to me.
‘You’re going to have to leave me if you want a relationship with a woman.’
And that was it, the pivotal moment, right then -the point at which the quintessential reality of what was happening fused, the exact time it soldered its al-lotropical equation in me and I saw that I was going to have to do exactly that. How strange, I thought even before I answered, the way that buttered-bread falls. Dave was sculpting his demise even as he thought he was saving himself.
‘I might just have to do that,’ I said.
‘She never will.’ He turned back to Renny who sat motionless, ‘So I’ve won and you’ve lost.’
She didn’t answer, her face a cold mask, her thoughts hardened.
He looked at me. ‘We’re meant to be going out to dinner.’
‘I know.’
‘Are you coming?’
‘I’ll be there.’
I wanted him to give me some time to reassure Renny that I was serious, but that I just wasn’t able to come straight away.
He did leave to pick up Marcus, his walk housing a strange rickety-ness. Renny left too, monsoonal tears railing down her face, determined that no matter what I’d said, I would never break it off with Dave. ‘Marriage,’ she told me bitterly, ‘has too powerful a hold on people.’
Somehow Dave and I had a normal evening with friends despite flashes of lunacy poking at my thoughts. We roamed through our usual array of topics: news, weather, work, house matters, politics, art, children, back to news, and so on. The more mundane the conversation, the more madness prodded at my composure. On the inside I was emblazoned, on the out I remained – somehow – cool. It was a duality that tested me. I hung on.
The next morning, after a breakfast of croissants and coffee, we hopped in the car and drove four and a half hours to Sorrento for Xmas with Dave’s family. That evening I told Dave this was it, our last night together. He didn’t believe me, which made it easier and was, perhaps, another folly on his part because the next day after lunch, after we’d packed and said our goodbyes – his family none the wiser – I asked him to pull up as we got to the train station at Frankston.
‘You’re really doing this?’
‘I’m sorry, Dave.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Michael’s.’ (Michael, my brother, lived in Melbourne at the time. I could ring Renny, see if she could pick me up from there.)
‘If you go, it’s over.’
‘I know,’ I said, desperate for him to understand. I turned to Marcus, strapped-in in the dim interior of Dave’s van. His small face was taut, a ghostly stare plastered to it. He was taking it all in. I remember my heart booming in my chest, heralding my actions with deafening clarity. I just didn’t know what else to do but to stay calm and trust that I was making a decision, that at least I was taking action. I’d been attracted to women for years by then – for as long as Marcus had been in the world – and there was that nagging, burning question, the one Dave had himself repeated ad nauseam: So WHAT’S going to happen now? I couldn’t fool anyone, particularly myself, any longer.
I slowly opened my door and disembarked carefully – gravity having deserted me – and walked around the vehicle to the side door to get out a bag I’d packed.
‘I’m going,’ I repeated.
‘This is it,’ Dave threatened a little more desperately.
‘Bye, Dave.’
I waved meekly to Marcus who seemed to understand the solemness of the moment and didn’t respond.
It occurs to me now, writing this, that my actions might appear cold, that it would look as if I’d just left Marcus there, in the dingy interior of Dave’s van, without hugs and goodbyes. I had, of course, already explained to Marcus that I was going away for a week and would be back. And all I can say in my defence is that playing down my departure was a calculated move. I didn’t want to start a scene of tears or terse words in front of him. Physical contact may have produced an arm around the neck that I’d have a hard time extracting myself from. Also, not for a millisecond did I think I was leaving him. He was with his dad. And to be honest, it was Dave’s turn – he could make up for a little of the last six years. No, my relationship with Marcus would not change. Back then I actually thought I had to leave before I could continue mothering him. But there’s that flapping adolescent naivety at work, reducing a foghorn-emotion to a convenient detail. Still, I’m neglecting the most compelling aspect: necessity had taken over, and was shifting me to some other longitude. All the trifling messages I was busily feeding myself were really just the props I needed to keep me from tripping up.
As I turned away from them I was clinging to the thought that at least I was keeping my word to Renny. I couldn’t bear to think of her being broken-hearted. It was a type of yearning, a fretting that I’d only ever experienced in regard to Marcus. It winged me to the station platform. (Was it me who said love is evolution’s most honed trick — that it’s the only presentation impossible to treat therapeutically?)
The rest of the night – the train trip, the hour at Michael’s, the drive with Renny to stay with friends of hers – I let myself be led along like a donkey on a tether. It didn’t matter that I was going from a man to a woman. I was changing partners and the reality of that – for me, one of those “forever” people – was alarming. In my journal I wrote: I feel like I’m in a maze, going back is as fruitless as proceeding. There’s little choice but to wander about.
SEVEN
I‘ve only ever been in one maze – one real one, that is. The green walls of the hedge reached up, allowing only a narrow strip of sky to ingratiate itself overhead. The feeling, while not exactly one of claustrophobia, was odd enough. In essence I walked, quickly, over and over the same path. Disorientation set in. Anxiety inevitably rose.
The maze that presented itself in my mind during my separation from Dave – time being elastic – lasted longer than you might think. Certainly long after the affair with Renny had been exposed or even my fleeing from Xmas celebrations. Metaphorically speaking, I’d only just stepped under the arbour at the entrance of the maze, little purple sarsaparilla flowers overhead, stern walls of fascist-like hedge facing me. And, just like at the actual entrance, it seemed to be still so straightforward. I was hopeful I was about to head off in a direction that would surely lead me to a central destination. I had no idea the confu
sion that lay ahead, or even that there were many turns to be made.
A week after I left Dave, I drove along the winding unmade road to the house where Dave, Marcus and I had lived. While not being the most maternal of people, I was desperate to see Marcus. I was also conscious that – with Marcus in the back of his van – Dave had driven the long haul home from the city with the reality of my departure rattling in his bones.
Outside, after hugs and kisses and ebullient hel-los from my little boy, I found myself nervously requesting to take him with me for a few days. ‘Ange has offered me the camp site at Seaspray,’ I explained.
Dave looked past me onto the garden we’d landscaped, the stack of wood we’d carefully constructed for future colder months. I’d seen this distractedness before – a defence, a fall into bewilderment to avoid a kaleidoscope of unwanted actualities. He said, ‘Everything’s set up down there, I guess.’
I knew he was a man warding off meltdown, a man hanging onto the tiniest sliver of hope, but this clinging to his position as overseer, as foreman of the factory floor when his duties had been rendered defunct, slapped at me.
I swallowed, struck by how starkly and quickly alliances change. My head dropped dutifully, however. It would be hard for him to hand Marcus over, have the ensuing days totalling up in front of him for real aloneness. Or, perhaps guilt was producing submissive-ness. Certainly Dave and I had never fought. So how could we start now when everyone was so heartbroken?
He turned to Marcus. ‘Would you like to go camping at the beach with Mum?’ (I was struck by the lightness of his tone. Was this unencumbered question a glimpse into a future of functional separation?)
‘Yeah!’ Marcus stepped into action. ‘I’ll get my snorkel.’
Showing his strong upper lip – just one notch under stiff – Dave turned to follow Marcus to his room. I stood awkwardly at the front door, alone and unfamiliar on the threshold of a house I’d lived in for nine years. Politeness didn’t count; so alien and peculiar was the feeling, I felt as if something as normal as cleaning my teeth had been taken over by a troll.
The second time this conundrum of "separate parenting" was nudged forward we’d been in a pattern of sharing the task for six or so weeks, Marcus staying with me at my friend Ange’s house where I had moved to. Clearly, or so I thought, I had come some way since that first week. This time, however, our conversation took place outside one of my workplaces. While three days a week I was employed at the local hospital in an outpatient psychiatric team, the other few days I was at a day-training centre for intellectually disabled adults. And it was at this centre that Dave arrived in the car park as I was knocking off.
‘Hello Jennifer.’
It was no longer “Jen”, and “Monty” was out of the question.
A smile dragged at his face, a slippery half-drawn grin, full of succour and yet strangely smug, sycophantic. I pushed the thought away – it wasn’t like Dave, not the Dave I’d been married to. The wind caught his long hair and lifted it in wayward chunks as he came towards me. He looked old, which was not surprising given what he’d been through. But nonetheless, I hardly recognised him. I couldn’t find the man I’d known. It was as though in a couple of weeks both of us had inextricably altered.
‘I’ve written this for you.’ He held out a scrappy piece of paper.
‘What is it?’
‘Marcus.’ he said. But that was it, his words, it seemed, became glue in his throat. I realised how nervous he was and that he’d written the note with the same apprehensive jitter. His writing, never the best, resembled a child’s and was impossible to decipher. Annoyance – perhaps, looking back, irrational annoyance – rose in me like blowflies trapped.
‘I can’t read this,’ I flapped the paper at him.
‘I want to have Marcus more than one weekend out of four.’
‘You’ve got him all week.’
‘The way things are, I don’t do enough with him.’
‘Why are you writing this down on paper?’
‘Because I forget what I’m going to say.’
‘I can’t believe you want him more. He’s living with you,’ I said sourly, upset now.
‘Not on the weekends.’
I glanced at the note.
‘You want him two weekends out of four.’
I turned my head, my sight locking onto a little profiterole cloud as it motored behind the hard edge of the building I’d just exited. ‘You can have him one out of three.’
‘One out of three?’
‘Yes, Dave, one out of three.’
I handed him back his piece of paper, feeling, almost absurdly, infiltrated by its presence in my hand. Disdain roiled in me.
He looked around him searchingly, his top teeth rolling over his bottom lip.
‘Alright. I’ll pick him up this Friday. You’ve had him the last two.’
‘That’s fine.’ I waited for him to say something else. When he didn’t I pushed my hair from my face.
‘I’m going to go. Someone’ll probably come out in a minute and…’ It was my turn to stumble for words. I walked across the black asphalt to my parked car, a strange flutter in my chest.
I cried as I drove home, furiously sad over the loss of love rather than the loss of him. Indeed, to fall out of love is perhaps as much a shock as any disappointment can be.
Still, there was an imperative: in these situations one can’t look back.
EIGHT
Holidays, special ones, can remain like an imprint on the mind – internalised. A few months after we’d been living with one another, Renny and I flew across Bass Strait to Tasmania. I can see that holiday, remember the feeling of it. Even though we were only there for five days, and even though it was the middle of winter, life was in perfect harmony.
The cold conditions meant there were no tourists. We had the roads, the restaurants, the forests, the Gordon River, the odd towns and strange landscapes of fallen woods, to ourselves. When we came home to the country town I’d been living in for close to twelve years, I couldn’t suppress a sustained feeling of loathing. I remember having to work hard to stop myself from puking. My physical response to my physical surroundings weighing in, I began to dream of getting out.
Renny was going to the city anyway and I… well, I was getting my skates on not to be left behind. Within three months, jobs and a lease secured and a vehicle full, we moved, Marcus with us so he’d feel as if it was his new home too, even though he wasn’t going to be living with us. Dave had made that clear; his son wasn’t going to live in the city with lesbians. It was one of the few times I’d seen brutishness surface in him. He was steadfast! Absolute! Certain! As for me, who knows why I capitulated to his demand and agreed that Marcus should reside with him? Perhaps in the end, it just seemed like a good idea – the best thing given the circumstances. I do remember thinking his definiteness was about his desperation not to lose everything and neither did I want that for him. I also knew I couldn’t stay. It was clear for all sorts of unmarked but palpable reasons. The town was repeating on me. The cafes, the people, the streets. I needed a bigger canvas. Somewhere that would offer some expansion, that would allow me to shed my old skin while not having to apologise for it. I needed to cast myself out of the set conventions people had boxed me into. I needed to have everyone step back a pace or two so I could breathe.
NINE
So there was that! One life finished and a new one being embarked on. “Chapters”, as people call them, although things felt more fluid than that. Perhaps it’s truer to say periods are fenced around us with intermittent boundaries. We exist concurrently and continuously throughout, osmosis our natural condition.
Consequently, I thought it would be easy. I was going home, back to the city I’d grown up in, and I was glad to be leaving country life. Clearly, I hadn’t realised the cost of moving away, the wrenching sadness that missing Marcus would bring, pain which would creep up on me incrementally, sinking in like slow-release fertiliser or a d
ormant virus that at some point would find its trigger of proliferation and fire.
That was yet to reveal itself though. At first, while I experienced a querulous shock at the city – worried that cars were about to mount the kerb and run amok on the sidewalk – I was absorbed by the stimuli, distracted and occupied from feelings of anything disturbing. Macabrely enough, the place looked clean, shining, almost – and I hate to say it – pristine. Every view was alive and fresh to the eye. The fact I’d been staring upon dowdy, struggling businesses in a town that, while going forward, often seemed to be languishing back, may have been enough to skew my outlook, but the city appeared to be as bright as if someone had brought out the Brasso and a polishing rag and gone to work.
Even the bone truck from Knapp’s – the wholesale meat outlet next door – was a wonder to behold. It rumbled outside our place every morning, its big mechanical arm reaching like a one-clawed crab into a skip before swinging back to drop a load of shiny bald knuckles and long bloodied dinosaur-worthy bones into its trailer. Don’t be mistaken, despite being amongst quasi-industrial businesses – the meatworks, Reece’s plumbing, Middy’s electrics – Renny and I lived in the middle of caffe latte paradise. Beachside-tourist suburb St Kilda: I adored it. Added to this, and call me strange – beguiling to some, disgusting to others – but St Kilda had a street prostitution scene I’d never before witnessed and, at such close range, found fascinating. Here, without having planned it, we were surrounded by it.
The sex workers stood along the pavements and gutters, soliciting punters. Our street was even named in the Lonely Planet guidebook under the heading: “Sex Tour”. While backpackers showed little interest, tourist buses of Japanese sightseers came to look at the “ladies of the night” – except that they were women of the morning, noon and every hour.