And with those words, another small death came over me – a shadow that darkened with time. It dulled me so subtly that I didn’t feel the glow disappearing, wearing our marriage away.
By now my professional prospects had significantly improved. I’d worked in publishing and in cultural marketing and was now director of the Sydney Writers’ Festival. I loved the job: it was challenging and rewarding, and I had the privilege of working with writers I admired. But each day I would come home to sit on my mother’s couch. As the springs gave away, we were pulled ever more deeply into it. ‘Hard to get out of,’ people commented cheerfully when they came over for dinner parties. To sit on this couch was to be embraced, clasped. It grabbed you.
One day a sofa is a sofa and the next it represents something much grander and you’re left wondering how you could not have seen it this way the day before. What clears at those moments? A fog? I couldn’t sit in the sofa without feeling the grip of our marriage pulling me down. ‘It’s just a sofa,’ I told myself firmly as we ate dinner on our laps, watching television. But by the time the weatherman came on with the forecast, it was, again, everything that was wrong with our union.
It wasn’t that my life with my husband was awful. He was a good man, loving, gentle and kind. He was conservative – not politically, but in a way that made him sensible and deeply cautious, which is what I had wanted when we first met.
We did share values and believed in the same ideals, something I always thought was important. Yet we were different in the most fundamental of ways. I didn’t see it at first, but his default position on almost everything was ‘no’. Mine was ‘yes’.
How could I be with a man like that after growing up with my father, who believed ‘yes’ was his only option?
It didn’t take all that long until I began to think ‘no’ for myself, to save my breath. His starting point was always ‘that’s not possible’ or ‘that’s not sensible’ or ‘don’t wear that’. Perhaps worst of all for a person like me, ‘don’t do that’. In essence, don’t be who you are and don’t do the things you want to do.
I felt old when I wasn’t yet forty. I longed to dance again. I ached for some of the risk and edge of my life before marriage. I’d lost the truth of myself in our safe married life. Without realising, I’d turned out the lights and shut the door on a room I loved.
I often went to other literary festivals for inspiration and to meet new writers to feature at the Sydney Writers’ Festival. It was at one of these that I met an author who woke me from the slumber of my marriage.
I’d long admired his writing but it was during his on-stage interview that I saw the full extent of him. He had a beautiful liquorice voice. Afterwards, there was a long line of people for his book signing. I watched as he graciously accepted compliments from his readers, was attentive and genuine to every person in the long line. He didn’t flag in his attention to his readers.
After he signed the final copy of his book, his publishers and a group of other industry people introduced me to him and invited me to join them for dinner.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, excusing himself from the invitation. ‘I’m exhausted and really need to go to sleep.’ I felt a slump of disappointment. I had wanted to be seated next to him at dinner.
But it turned out we were walking in the same direction and the others peeled off and we waved them farewell.
‘Good,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’ I asked.
‘I don’t really need to go to sleep. I want to have dinner just with you.’
We walked along the edge of the dark harbour, the lights of boats and ferries flickering in the distance.
The restaurant we came upon was expensive, with views across the water. He ordered duck that came in thick slices. I had scallops that arrived swimming in delicate foam that I thought looked like bubble bath. I told him I didn’t think food and foam really went together no matter how fancy the restaurant, but he tasted one and said it was superb. Then he told me he didn’t like to share food. He asked questions and he listened.
It was late by the time we made our way outside onto the footpath. The street was hushed. We walked in silence in search of a taxi until I stopped him. ‘I want to kiss you,’ I said. He turned towards me.
I wrapped my leg around him and he pulled me into him. He had a firm and confident grip. I felt any reticence rush out of me. I wanted to devour him. I closed my eyes and didn’t think about anything other than this.
He held me tight and I pressed into him. I felt like I could just keep falling into his frame, that he could envelop me. I caught glimpses of his beautiful face in the midnight darkness only as beams of light from passing cars swept by. I raised both my hands, palms flat towards him. A stop, or surrender – I wasn’t sure which. He placed his palms to mine and we pushed against each other, wanting more. His hands were on my hips, wandering. He put his leg between mine and raised his knee up to me and I ground down into him, wanting.
We were all in a rush now. I pulled his shirt out from his pants and slid my palms up on his chest. I was so excited by his strength. He bit my neck gently and I felt weak and bent to him, putting my lips to his stomach. His skin was soft like a child’s. I put my tongue in his bellybutton, licking him along the rim of his brown leather belt and reached down and felt him hard in his pants.
‘Come back to my room with me,’ he whispered in my ear when I stood up, his tongue wet on my earlobe. He took my hand and I followed him.
We moved apart from each other in the hotel lobby as the bellboys and receptionists smiled to greet us. I felt sure the world could see the charge between us. The lobby was grand and silent, just a hush and the sound of my heels clicking on the marble floor. The heavy pulse of my heart made me slightly seasick, as though I was being knocked off kilter with every beat. The doors to the elevator slid open and shut silently behind us. I fell back into his arms as we were whisked up tens of storeys to his room looking out over the curve of the world.
Our time together was brief; only snatches between his heavy festival, media and publishing commitments. I felt alive with him near me. He only had to put his elbow next to mine on an armrest for a charge to run through me.
His kiss ignited me. I’d forgotten the taste of that kind of intoxicating desire. I’d let the thought of it slip from my mind. He brought it flying back, with a force that left me winded.
‘I’ll call you when I get home,’ he whispered on the last day of his stay. I was lying with my ear to his chest, listening to his heart. I didn’t believe him.
‘Tears,’ he said, ‘are for kissing.’ He kissed mine, whispering, ‘Don’t be sad, honey.’
He walked me down to the lobby and out into the hotel driveway, where the concierge hailed me a taxi. The writer was wearing black and white Nikes with no socks. I noticed he had beautiful thin ankles. I could also make out the faint outline of his cock as he waved me goodbye. He blew me a kiss as the taxi pulled into the busy street.
There was no turning back. I felt dead towards my husband. Our marriage was over. He was being retrenched from his job and I should have waited for him to be in a better place before delivering the news, but I couldn’t wait. I arranged to meet him in a park near the Art Gallery of New South Wales. We sat on a bench in the dusk light, overlooking the harbour, and I told him I was leaving. It was brutal, but I couldn’t pretend.
I didn’t tell him about the writer because that hardly felt like the point. As far as I was concerned our marriage had been over for a while; I just hadn’t seen it that way until I experienced an alternative way of feeling. My husband and I had propped ourselves up with friends and buying an apartment, but the joy of it had gone. We were a dull version of our former selves. I’m not sure if he saw it that way. He was blindsided and I hit him when he was already down. I was cruel.
I slept on couches until I was invited by my friends Vyvian and Pete to spend some time in their beautiful cottage by the sea, near Wollongong. Long coal trains wailed
along the bottom of a steep escarpment, so close by that it felt I could stick my hand out the kitchen window and touch them as they whooshed past.
As the trains ran along beside the house, rattling their way across the mountain, I thought about what it would feel like to walk onto the track and lie down. I imagined the waiting, the feel of the hum of the train’s approach through my spine, wishing for the bright blue of the sky to turn to black. Where would I rest my head? On the track, or with my neck against the metal?
To feel the steel and screeching bearing down on you as you determine to simply lie still and be delivered. An end to the interminable black line you’ve been on for God knows how long. I wasn’t suicidal, I felt liberated and free, but listening to those trains, for the first time in my life, I could understand the darkness my mother had felt.
My marriage was over and the man I loved was living happily with his wife on the other side of the world.
The writer and I had done some high-octane fooling around, but what really hooked me was his mind and his voice. I couldn’t shake him. As I was folding my clothes and putting them in boxes, he was unpacking his suitcase and putting his clothes into the cupboard beside his wife’s dresses and blouses. I’d hitched myself to an unavailable man.
One day my mother loved my father, the next day she did not. Here I was, in the same position.
My husband didn’t ask if there was another man. Had he, I would have told him. But he let me go as easily as he’d accepted every other disappointment in his life.
I went around our echoing apartment, wrapping my things in newspaper, taking books out of bookshelves and placing them in two separate piles.
A real estate agent came and gazed around our apartment contemplatively. His black BMW was parked illegally out front so he could make sure it wasn’t getting keyed or broken into.
‘You must,’ he said, ‘give people an idea of the lifestyle they aspire to. You have to show them that they can live a certain way in this apartment.’
He paused for effect. ‘You need a stylist.’ He looked at each of us, unsure who was the decision-maker. ‘You see, it’s about lifestyle.’
He was a brochure of himself. ‘It’s got good bones – great bones – but it needs, well, something, a lift … All new furniture. That will do it.’ He looked at the old couch and declared confidently, ‘A sure sale if you can make it look right. I have a friend I can recommend. She works magic.’
I bit my bottom lip, trying to hold in my fury. ‘My arse’, I thought. ‘We’ll do it.’
More than anything I wanted to punish us both. Push the tragedy so far up into our faces that it screamed loud and clear, ‘What a fucking waste!’
A week later I went back to pick up my husband and we drove in silence to the shops we’d been to over the years. In one afternoon, we bought all the furniture we’d passed over during our marriage. A dining table, matching chairs, a coffee table, rugs, a beautiful red throw, an occasional chair and, of course, a new sofa.
‘Does this strike you in any way as ironic?’ I said, as we drove away from the last shop with a pile of receipts on the dashboard. I wanted to punch the windscreen. Smash it all.
‘What do you mean?’ he asked. ‘I don’t understand why you are so angry at me.’ He was staring at the road ahead.
‘We’ve bought all this beautiful furniture for an empty nest to be sold. In one afternoon, we’ve furnished our home as we were incapable of doing in the three years of our marriage. Can’t you see that we’ve just made a showroom of how not to live?’ My throat was tight.
He continued to look at the road ahead. ‘You are upset,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to discuss it.’
He was right: I was upset and there was, indeed, nothing to say.
I realised all these years that I’d been looking for matches, trying to strike something in my husband to ignite him. I might as well have been trying to light water, or trying to bring movement back to my father’s limbs.
None of it mattered but my leaving. I would sleep on a single mattress on the floor, just as my mother had done in the gallery. I’m not sure if she had felt like this, but I was excited to reshuffle my cards and see what happened next.
Twenty-nine
What happened next was that my father got very sick. Becky called early one morning and told me they were in the emergency room. From the sound of her voice, I knew it was serious. I packed a small suitcase and Jack and I were on a plane to Adelaide a few hours later.
We went straight from the airport to the hospital to find them still in the emergency room, my father sitting in his wheelchair, almost eighteen hours after Becky had brought him in. His eyes were rolling back in his head and he was speaking nonsense. I’d never seen him like that before and I was frightened. The doctors and nurses, I realised, had assumed he was physically and mentally disabled and had been ignoring him for all those hours based on that assumption.
I kept thinking about the matron who had refused to come in for my father’s emergency when he was admitted with polio. It felt like I was in some kind of altered reality. My father’s behaviour and his wheelchair were all the proof these doctors and nurses needed to confirm their assumptions. Nothing I said – that he was accomplished, sane, had an Order of Australia and wasn’t behaving like himself – could convince them that he needed to be seen and treated immediately. I felt like I was screaming underwater.
The medical system was failing him again. No wonder he never wanted to go to the doctor when he was sick. The first time the system failed him, over such a simple thing as a key to a room, the consequences were catastrophic. This moment was looking to be every bit as dangerous.
When the doctors finally attended to him he was diagnosed with sepsis. By this time, after such a long delay, the toxins were all through his bloodstream and he was delusional.
Once they administered the drip of antibiotics and sedated him, he quietened down a bit. I told Becky and my brother Morgan to go home and take a break. They took Jack with them and I was left alone with my still delusional father, who had now at least been put in a bed, but we were still in the emergency room. As I watched the rest of my family walk out through the automatic swinging doors and into the bright daylight, fear gripped me. I had been alone with my father thousands of times, but I had never been the one to care for him. I had fetched him things or scratched an itch, but I’d never given him his pee pot. I used to lift his arm and drape it around my shoulder so I could lie with my head on his chest, but I had never touched his legs.
They had always been ugly and scary, so thin and straight they looked like they’d snap if you didn’t handle them carefully. The skin was tight and shiny, as though it’d been greased. I’d watched my mother and then Becky move his limbs around unceremoniously, but his legs had always creeped me out.
So, when he turned his head towards me and told me he was uncomfortable and needed to move, I panicked. He’d settled down by now and was quite lucid. I stood up and walked to the bottom of the bed, where his legs were resting on a folded hospital pillow. ‘I don’t know how to,’ I said. ‘Becky always does it.’
For a long time, I didn’t know he had feeling in his legs. Somehow the idea didn’t make sense when nothing could move. He used to get mad at me for that. ‘How many times do I have to tell you?’ he’d say, like I was a fool.
‘Just pick them up,’ he said. ‘They won’t break.’ I tried to look calm, taking his thin ankle in my hand and very tentatively lifting it from its resting place and laying it down a few inches to the left. Then I did the other leg. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’
I sat down on the plastic hospital chair beside him wanting to cry, wishing Becky would come back.
After a few days of heavy antibiotic treatment my father was physically much improved, but the episode had changed him. He stopped speaking. I knew being back in this environment was hell for him. When he got out of hospital after contracting polio, he vowed that he would never return
to another ward or gurney bed. Not only had he been unable to keep the vow, this new experience seemed to be bringing back all the feelings of powerlessness that he’d tried his best to forget. The smells, the sounds, the dulled chatter in the corridors, doctors talking about you like you weren’t actually in the room.
I felt he’d given up. The man who had refused to be beaten, to be silenced or hidden away, was quietly but resolutely in retreat. One day I came in and his lunch tray was untouched. No one had noted on my father’s chart that he couldn’t feed himself so the orderlies had unquestioningly removed his untouched tray after each meal. He hadn’t told anyone he hadn’t eaten since arriving. He refused his medication with clenched teeth. My father was killing himself.
Hugh yelled at him through tears and then tried to prise open his mouth. My father locked his jaw tight until, defeated, my brother gave up. I argued with him that Dad had had enough and we should be able to let him go. He had demonstrated time and again that he was no quitter and I felt he had earned the right to tell us he was done with this battle. We had no idea of the pain and the struggle he’d gone through every day sitting in that chair. If he wanted to end it, we should allow it.
Two days later, he came back to us. I arrived at his bedside and he spoke to me like as though nothing had happened. He said he was hungry. I went home and made him soup, which I drove back and fed him for dinner. From then on, I visited twice a day with his favourite meals, prepared with as much love as I knew how. I sat at his bedside and fed him with a silver spoon I brought from the house.
My father was admitted to hospital with a curable problem but, unbeknown to me, had been subsequently diagnosed with terminal cancer. He didn’t mince his words when he told me he didn’t have long to live. I hoped he had softened the blow when he told Morgan and Anna.
Diving into Glass Page 17