Reading Madame Bovary

by Amanda Lohrey

  ‘No, it’s okay,’ he said, and his voice came out like empty bellows. He was winded. His mouth tasted of acid bile, his body felt like putty. His heart lurched suddenly, rancorously, into his guts, and with a rising groan he vomited his breakfast onto the grass. He remembers glancing across at the sandstone wall along the high grassy mound on the northern side, and the familiar graffiti in red spray-paint – FUCK ALL WOGS – was blurred.

  Somehow he drove home. When he got there he made himself a cup of scalding hot tea and put four heaped spoons of sugar in it. Sugar for shock, he remembered. Then he rang his GP, David Wang, who said to come over immediately. David pronounced him mildly concussed and wrote out an authorisation for him to go straight down to the public hospital along the road and get his head X-rayed. He thanked David, said yes he would, wrote out a cheque and didn’t bother. He was beginning to feel better; physically, anyway.

  David had been outraged on his behalf, had urged him to report the incident to the police. But he knew better. It was his own fault, he had brought this madness on himself, not that he could explain that to David, who prided himself on his counselling skills. He would warn his patient about the classic syndrome of the victim blaming himself, feeling somehow that he had invited attack, that some inadequacy or quintessential unworthiness had marked him out. Everyone knew this sort of spiel by now; it was even in the lifestyle section of the papers. But he knew it wasn’t that. It was something else, and it was this. He had looked into the younger man’s eyes and seen his own madness, his own ugliness, his own rage and humiliation reflected back at him.

  That night he waited until Luke was in bed and then he told Zoë what had happened. ‘I got beaten up today,’ he said, baldly.

  What had he expected? Sympathy? Muted fear? Cool disdain?

  She screamed at him. ‘You what? You hit a black man, four blocks from an Aboriginal street, in the middle of the city …’ her first shriek trailed off in disbelief. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  And before he could respond, could say anything more (‘It wasn’t in the middle of the city—’), she screamed at him again.

  ‘How could you? How could you? There were children there! Young children. And what if Luke had witnessed this, his father being beaten up in broad daylight! As it is, he’ll probably hear about it!’

  Her face was a grimace of pain. Tears leaked from her eyes. At that moment, he could see, she despised him.

  ‘And what about us? Did you think of us? You could have been seriously hurt, you could have had your face smashed in, you could have had your ribs broken. You …’ her voice cracked and faltered, ‘… you could have been killed!’

  But I wasn’t, he was thinking, I wasn’t. I was agile and I did okay. But these silent words were just a last gasp of self-defence against a great grey tide of self-pity that was about to engulf him at any minute and he couldn’t bear the despair between them for another second. He got up and walked through the open door of the kitchen and out onto the back lawn. In the darkest corner of the garden he sat on the grass, under the platform of Luke’s tree house, and put his face on his knees. He could hear the synapses of his brain firing and misfiring, over and over and over until he thought his head might explode.

  After a while, he looked up. It was a clear night. The stars blinked down at him.

  When he went inside, she was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for him. She had been crying. ‘Sit down,’ she said. ‘I have something to say to you.’

  Here it comes, he thought, my second divorce. He could see Luke asleep in his single bed, and he knew he would do anything not to give him up.

  Her voice was low, quavering and grim. ‘I can’t go on living with your anger,’ she said. ‘In the last year you’ve been unbearable.’ She spoke hurriedly, as if she could not afford to pause. ‘Either you go and see a counsellor and get some sort of therapy, or I’m leaving.’

  Therapy, he thought, what was the point of that? He had tried it once in the past and while it had helped, it had not been enough. The vessel was still half empty. He wanted something more, something more than – what? Something more than comfort. But what else was there? What else could any of us offer one another but that?

  For most of the next day he slept.

  That evening, Luke was at a friend’s place, staying for dinner; Luke who could always ground him, could induce him to play-act his best self.

  Zoë brought home take-away for dinner and they barely spoke. He jabbed at his food listlessly until the silence got to him and he stood up. ‘I’m going to sit outside for a while,’ he said.

  Out in the shadowy courtyard he felt spacey, disoriented. There was an obscure humming in his head. He sat down, carefully, on the edge of an old deck chair and closing his eyes he began, involuntarily, to relive the events of the previous day. A garish reel of film ran through his head, sometimes speeded up, sometimes in slow motion, until he could bear it no longer and blocked it out in a black dissolve …

  When he opened his eyes, everything in the garden seemed exaggeratedly there, larger than life but alien. His senses were acute. A mosquito buzzed by his ear and he looked up. It was a warm, scented night and the brightness of the moon ought to have calmed him but his pulse was slippery, his breathing taut and irregular and his heel drummed against the concrete slab. A slow, disengaging cog began to shift and grind in his chest … He looked down, looked up again, blinked … the back of the house was receding from him, the kitchen window panes framing little squares of golden light that seemed to grow smaller and smaller and smaller. He stood up with a start and shook his head. Any minute now he would lose his grip on reality, would tear and splinter into gaping viscera and jagged bone.

  Inside the kitchen Zoë was sitting at the table, reading the paper.

  He stood in the open doorway. ‘I’m going for a walk,’ he said. This is it, he thought. I will start to walk, and then I will just keep on walking until I drop.

  She nodded, curtly. Then she looked up at him and her eyes were full of a sadness he hadn’t seen there before.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, and rose purposefully.

  And walk they did, he unthinkingly beside his angry wife; aloof, holding his breath, oblivious to the world around him, to the blur of shrimp bushes, of overhanging hibiscus and fraying palm. They walked and walked, looping around the hill and taking the long way back, and somehow the walking began to work its spell, the simple rhythm of striding in step, feet on the ground, arms swinging, withthe black fog in his heart seeping down into the soles of his shoes to be left behind, like an invisible film on the grey asphalt.

  In the weeks that followed he felt as if he were waiting.

  Waiting for what?

  And Zoë, too, was waiting.

  And then one of his programmers, a man called Carl Kremmer, hanged himself in the basement of the North Sydney offices. The cleaners came in on a Monday morning and found him hanging from an air-conditioning pipe. The irony of this was not lost on Rick. A man had contrived to cut off the flow of air through his body by tying himself with nylon cord to a valve that was there to enable him to breathe more wholesomely, more comfortably, without the extremes of heat or cold, without noise or smog or wind or dust, without frost or mist or airborne pollen.

  By the end of the month, the office of human resource management had circulated a memo offering free programmes in stress management – a reward, as Zoë had remarked, tartly, for working late into the night and falling asleep at your workstation.

  One of these programmes was a short course in meditation. The memo came accompanied by a glossy brochure extolling ‘an age-old technology of the self’ and promising a technique that would ‘eliminate stress’ and enable you to ‘maximise your potential’.

  Why not? Rick thought. He’d tried everything else, and this at least would placate Zoë, would look as if he were making some kind of effort.

  When the forms came back, only two from his team had elected to go. The other wa
s Mark Paradisis. Mark was a young systems analyst, twenty-eight years old and cocksure, a real Mr. Cool whose reddish-brown hair was shaved with a number-one blade and who ran to a series of stylish oversized jackets, collarless shirts and occasional waistcoats that complemented his dark looks. Bumptious and clever, in that narrow-banded way that tech-heads have, he treated Rick with a deference that was part mock, part real, and would circle around him like a teasing child, absurdly deferential one minute, taking stinging liberties the next.

  One evening he informed Rick that currently he, Mark, was ‘between cars’ and since they’d be going straight from work to meditation classes – ‘Oops, sorry, stress management’ (winking at him) – he thought perhaps Rick could give him a lift, at least to the introductory lecture on the Monday evening. Beyond that, he couldn’t, y’know, guarantee that he’d front. ‘They might be a bunch of crazies, K, know what I mean? Hippies, cult-struck mind-benders. Whatever.’

  When the time came, Rick was glad of the younger man’s company. As part of a twosome, he felt less self-conscious. It seemed like more of a game.

  The classes began at seven and they drove straight from work, journeying across the bridge in the wake of peak-hour traffic and going by way of Taylor Square to make a pit-stop for souvlaki, which they ate in the parked car. It was hot and dusty, and as they sat looking out the window at the squalor of the square – its rough street trade, its sinister little patch of grassy parkland between the traffic lights, its pungent smells of burnt coffee, rancid frying oil and carbon monoxide – the absurdity of their dinner setting, only minutes away from the meditation centre, made Rick feel perversely cheerful, and he chortled out loud, almost choking on the first bite of dry pide bread.

  Mark turned his head sharply. ‘What?’ he asked.

  Rick was still struggling to swallow. ‘Nothing,’ he coughed, ‘nothing at all.’

  Mark then began, in between bouts of wolfing down the kibbeh special, to launch into a riff on the mechanics of his mental well-being – which would have been funny, if it hadn’t had a certain quality of robotic desperation.

  It was like this, he explained: he was not moving forward, he was not making progress in his life. He’d had a few knocks in the last couple of years; been dumped by his girlfriend, got pissed a lot, lost his licence, lost the plot you might say. Then this came up and, well, as he saw it, it was like servicing or reconditioning your car. Things wear down after a while, the engine’s not ticking over, there are some clunks in performance – you go to a good mechanic and you get it seen to. So you can move forward, so you can progress. As he saw it, the car you’ve got may not be much good but it’s the only one you’ve got. You’ve got to tune it up from time to time, otherwise the wheels will fall off. You won’t move forward, you won’t progress.

  By this time they had finished their hasty supper and Rick had pulled out into Oxford Street. ‘How do you know when you’ve progressed?’ he asked, teasingly. He noticed how nervy Mark was, how he couldn’t sit still and jiggled one knee up and down like it was on voltage. Hot-wired.

  ‘You look at it this way,’ Mark said. ‘You check for reality statements. You ask yourself: where am I now compared to where I was? You get feedback from people you work for. They’ll tell you: now you score – I don’t know – say, eight out of ten, whereas once it was three, four, something like that.’

  He remembers thinking: here is Mark, talking as if he were a machine, a machine within a machine; a bright red Honda SL encased in my old silver Fiat. And then Mark said something poetic: ‘Y’know, K, I’m annoyed at having my future dictated by my footprints in the sand – places I’ve been, what I’ve done in the past, all that.’

  ‘You read that in a book somewhere?’

  Mark shrugged, glanced away. ‘Yeah, probably.’

  At that moment they turned into Underwood Street.

  The house they were looking for was an elegant old terrace, painted in lavender and white. It stood on the brow of the hill looking down to the sweep of the bay and had a big peach-coloured hibiscus bush in bloom by the front door. He remembers it now as one of those stifling summer evenings, the gardens petrified in a humid stillness; remembers how he and Mark paused at the iron gate, struck by the shadowy beauty of the street; the exquisite tracery of the trees in outline against the darkening sky and the rich, orderly beauty of the terraces, unfolding down the hill with the satisfying symmetry of a series of perfect numbers.

  The door was ajar so they went in and through to the front salon, a room of elegant proportions fitted out like a corporate office; pale-grey carpet, eight rows of pale-green chairs and a whiteboard positioned in front of a marble fireplace. On the chairs were twenty or so men and women who looked like Mark, mostly in their late twenties or early thirties, stressed-out yuppies in casual but expensive clothes. Instinctively he cast an appraising glance at the women in the room and noted Mark doing the same. Primal instinct.

  They sat and looked ahead without speaking, as if they had exhausted their chitchat in the car. Before long a man in his early forties, dressed in a suit, entered the room from the rear and stood by the whiteboard. Smiling at them, he introduced himself as Jack.

  Jack was to be their trainer.

  Rick liked Jack on sight. In his light-grey suit, pale-blue shirt and yellow tie he presented in every way as a middle-level executive. His skin shone with a tanned glow and this, combined with his balding head and round face gave him the appearance of a corporate buddha. Jack spoke with an almost permanent smile on his lips, as if sharing a joke, but his eyes shone with a warm dark gloss, insinuating that yes, the unfathomable could be fathomed.

  He began by telling them that meditation was a simple, undemanding process through which the mind effortlessly arrived at the source of consciousness. The source of consciousness? Immediately Rick’s fickle mind began to play with this, punning on the idea of source – he couldn’t get out of his head an image of sauce on the brain; a large brain on a plate with a lurid red sauce poured over it, and then a white sauce, and next a yellow, like thick custard … without this sauce the brain looked remarkably naked, uninteresting even … doughy and grey, like batter left overnight in the fridge that has begun to oxidise … could this be the organe supérieur, the summa cum laude, the source of all that was bright and beautiful and inspired?

  Look how his mind had wandered already! He recollected himself.

  Jack was talking about peak performance. ‘During meditation the body enters into deep levels of relaxation and rest, a more profound rest than that experienced even in deep sleep. The body becomes attuned to the subtle vibrations of nature, which repair the body and release the creative energies of the human organism …’

  Next to him, Mark had fallen asleep, which was not surprising, given that the words had a high degree of abstraction, an airy quality, and that often Mark didn’t leave his workstation until after ten at night. And Jack had a soft, soothing voice which exuded warmth. The effect was soporific. He was, Rick could see, a very contained man, though with a surprising tendency to a soft, silent giggling. Nevertheless there was something attractive in his persona that was hard to define, something subtle.

  Rick looked around him. Not everyone, it was clear, had a mind as restless as his. Everyone else appeared attentive, and serious. Most of them were younger than he, and as junior executives they were used to paying attention; used to listening for the ‘grab’, the slogan, the key phrases, the code words, the open sesame.

  And now they were here for the mantra. As Mark would say: ‘If it works, it’s cool.’

  In Jack’s discourse there seemed, he thought, to be a lot of emphasis on the brain. What about the heart?

  As if reading his mind Jack moved on to the subject of ‘perfect health’ – didn’t these people ever use qualifiers? – and heart disease, and how medical research had shown conclusively that meditation regularises blood pressure and lowers cholesterol and stress levels. Indeed, in orthodox terms, this was the
area of its greatest success.

  Beside him now, Mark had begun, gently, to snore.

  Jack’s soft, hypnotic tones were such that perhaps they didn’t need to learn to meditate; perhaps all they needed was a tape of Jack’s voice with one of those piping flutes in the background and the sound of running water. On the way over Mark had told him about the time he worked for a hot new IT company in Palo Alto in California where, during a particularly tense and difficult project, one of the supervisors had had a notion to play a relaxation tape as background in the office, a tape of running water, until all the programmers had shrieked that it was getting on their nerves. Tonight, however, The Voice was working for Mark, who dozed through almost the entire talk, eyes closed, head slumped forward on his chest.

  Jack concluded by asking each one of them to say why they had come. And they all said something sensible. They wanted ‘better concentration’; they wanted ‘to achieve more’, to do twice their current workload. They wanted to feel less tense, less tired, less impatient, more calm. No-one said they wanted to maximise their potential. No-one admitted to being fed-up and angry. And no-one talked about ‘the mysterious absences at the heart of even the fullest lives’, to quote from a book review Rick had idled through in the dentist’s surgery only yesterday.

  Mark woke up in time to say that he regarded his body as a prime racing machine, and just lately he realised it needed a bit of a tune-up. Rick said he wanted to get more done with less fatigue. What else was he going to say? That he was angry? That as he grew older he was getting angrier? Angry at the universe for failing him? Listening attentively to the reasons the others gave for being there that night, he wondered if they too were dissembling, cam-ouflaging some inner vision of flames – some moment of madness, some visceral ache of yearning – with the managerial workspeak of the brochure, a language they knew how to put on like a suit of armour; like battle fatigues.

  The introductory talk finished early, around nine-thirty, and Rick hadn’t far to drive his companion who asked to be dropped off at a club in Oxford Street. Refreshed by his nap at the meditation centre, Mark was ready to party on. On their way up the hill Rick teased him about falling asleep and with the disarming ingenuousness of a child, Mark asked for a ‘recap’ on what he had missed.