Quiver

by Tobsha Learner

  Everything about Deidre was immaculate and streamlined, as if she was wary of letting a natural curve break out from under the pressed blouses and suits. There had been enough drama in her younger years, back in the seventies and early eighties. In those days she was married. Dave and Deidre. They were one of those couples that were identified as a unit. They even ran an interior-decorating business together: Dave would do the design work and Deidre the accounting. Their marriage was a pleasant haze of work and parties, drunken cruises on the harbor and Sundays spent smoking pot and reading the lifestyle pages of the weekend papers in bed. They became rich together, and increasingly Deidre found herself not only handling the books, but bringing in the clients. All was going well.

  Until she forgot to take her pill.

  In the same week that she discovered she was pregnant, Dave told her that he’d been having an affair. A day later she found out that his mistress was in fact a man. After the abortion, an event she refused to grieve over, they separated and divorced. Deidre, still in shock, had been so reasonable, so amicable about the whole thing that it was Dave himself who persuaded her to seek legal representation over the splitting of their joint assets.

  That was 1982. A past client, who had been impressed with Deidre’s chutzpah, offered her a job at the merchant bank he worked for. Fifteen years later she was still there. It had been a difficult climb, and although she had finally managed to win the respect of her employers, the younger men working with her begrudged her the position she had gained. Rumors of her sexual frigidity were regularly circulated around the office—she was known as “the snow duchess” behind her back. Despite this, Deidre had managed to insulate herself against the absence of invitations to the marriages, dinner parties and celebratory lunches over the years, justifying it as a lack of breeding and class on behalf of the voracious young merchant bankers. Deidre was a snob; it was her anchor in an increasingly bewildering and alienating world.

  * * *

  She reaches the Square. It is a beautiful day, not too hot, with a southerly wind blowing in gently from the harbor. She is heading toward her favorite flower stall, set up near the bronze sculpture of the Tuscany boar, donated to New South Wales by some obscure Italian general. She always visits this flower stall; they have the best selection of flowers, and because she is a regular, Mr. Gretchka gives her a discount. Mr. Gretchka is an elderly Russian, who immigrated here only five years ago. Deidre suspects that he is overqualified to be running a flower stall. His English is bad but his enthusiasm for Australia and being out of Russia is inspirational.

  She stops for a moment in front of the boar. The snout has been polished a shining bronze from the touch of thousands of hopeful hands. It’s good luck to make a wish and rub its nose. Interestingly enough the tip of its penis is also a lustrous bronze, rubbed bright by braver people wanting to wish away their loneliness through the hope of some sexual conquest or intimacy. She hesitates. Normally she would touch the end of the snout, but something inside her kicks back, an ennui, a rebellion against all the small routines that make up her life. Before she knows it she finds herself reaching out and touching the end of the boar’s penis.

  “Double good luck,” Mischa ventures. Startled, she whirls around. Standing by the flower stall is a compact young man of Eastern European appearance. He’s handsome, but badly dressed in the way of all immigrants from impoverished countries—his seventies jeans finishing unfashionably short on the ankle.

  “Fortune favors the brave.” He winks at her. For a moment Deidre has to fight off the impulse to look behind her. Then she realizes that the remark is directed at her.

  “I’m Mr. Gretchka’s nephew. From Russia. You want flowers, yes? He told me about you. You are special customer.”

  “I want something for my mother, it’s her birthday today.” As they lean over the flowers, the tentativeness of the young man’s gestures undermines his brash selling manner, which she suspects is the product of his uncle’s coaching and too many bad American movies.

  He suggests Christmas lilies but she thinks they’re too funereal. They move on to hyacinths, then a mixed bunch of spring flowers, arguing about the nature of flowers and their psychological properties.

  “Daffodils, they are unsubtle, they are the prostitutes of all flowers. They come up from the ground so quickly, with this bright color, standing on the street corner for just a second of the year, and then poof! They’re gone! Disappeared. Whores. Much better to buy a flower that is more loyal, that has dignity and will stay around for a lot longer. Like a lily or a tulip that is still closed.”

  The tone of his voice, his nearness, the vibrancy with which he speaks and his sense of humor ignite something in her body. At first Deidre is terrified that he’ll notice. As if she herself has started to exhume a fragrance of her own to attract, like some overblown rose. As he hands her a bunch of lilac, their hands touch just for an instant. A frisson of buried pleasure sparks between them. It is difficult to ignore.

  She steps back, internally chastising herself. Don’t be ridiculous, you’re old enough to be his mother.

  “And tonight, are you free?”

  “What?”

  “Sorry, I am being out of place. A woman such as yourself must surely be busy, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Yes. Let’s go out. I’ll meet you at Circular Quay at eight.” There they are, the words. Her heart beats painfully under the crisp linen suit. This is worse than finalizing a big deal. Get a grip on yourself.

  “Good, at eight then.”

  She walks off with tulips, dizzy with the new set of detonated chemicals surging through her blood. A date, for the first time in five years.

  Mischa watches her go. She reminds him of the single white lily, the large blossom always threatening to blow away from the tall, frail stem. Her pale, serious face perched on that long neck. Often he’d fantasized about lifting up that fine hair and kissing her from lip to nipple. He would do it slowly as if collecting the dew of her skin like honey from a flower.

  She was turning eighty-two, although officially she’d been in her late sixties for over a decade. As far as she was concerned she was the center of the universe and all else should orbit around her. Deidre was ten minutes late.

  “Mauve? Well, I suppose they are rather unusual, although there is something rather common about tulips.”

  “Mother, I’ve given up trying to please you.”

  “That’s evident.”

  She was impossible to please. Deidre knew that but she fell into the same emotional trap every time. It must be biological, a form of genetic envy that makes mothers think that anything their daughters do isn’t good enough.

  “How’s Wallace?”

  “Fine, it took two hours the other night but the prostate held up.”

  Wallace was her mother’s seventy-eight-year-old boyfriend. They’d met at the casino during one of the pensioners’ nights out. Wallace was hopelessly in love with the flirtatious Ethel, who kept him ruthlessly dangling, occasionally allowing him the odd sexual favor.

  “You should get yourself a boyfriend. Preferably younger. It’s not healthy to be inactive from the neck down.”

  “I’m not inactive.”

  “And as for that last slip-up! I knew the moment I saw him, but children never listen. Homosexual. That’s why he was so good with the wall papering.”

  “Interior design, Mother, how many times do I have to tell you? Anyway I’ve got a boyfriend.”

  Deidre instantly regretted the words but there they were, sandwiched between the sponge cake and her mother’s dentures.

  “You have not.” Ethel gagged on her cake. For one horrible moment Deidre was terrified that her teeth would go flying. It had happened before.

  “Not yet officially, but I am seeing someone, tonight actually.”

  “He’s just after your money.” Deidre hated the sinking demoralized feeling her mother provoked in her when she came out
with statements like these.

  “He might just like me,” Deidre put forward, not entirely convinced herself.

  “He might. I suppose it’s not entirely implausible that he might just find you attractive. Who knows, you might even get laid. Then again, a meteorite could hit Paris.”

  Matricide had never seemed so attractive as at that moment.

  Deidre watched her mother’s ferocious gesturing as she grumbled about the taxation department. Looking at the pinched skin around her mother’s lips, the tightness of her disapproving mouth, as if all the burdens of the world were pressing down on those two thin strips of flesh, reminded her of the aging of her own face. Already she could see echoes of the same lines and the tensions between the eyebrows, around the nose. Eventually Deidre drifted off into a slight reverie, lulled by the scent of the tulips and the talcum powder Ethel used so profusely.

  The epic, that’s what she craved: to get away from her cantankerous mother; away from her cocoon of stale middle-classdom and decay; away from the bank with its hothouse time that took no account of life cycles.

  Her mother burped, discreetly. The clock chimed. Deidre kissed the dry forehead and for an instant regret passed between them like a ghost. Regret for the intimacies they had never made time to share, regret for a history that had made it impossible for them to let their guard down and be friends. Ethel, lost for a moment in the memory of the small child whose hair she used to curl, shook herself back to reality and stroked the hand of this woman, her daughter, who looked so tight and unloved and sad. God bring her joy, the old woman prayed.

  Deidre pulled back the door of the cupboard and looked at her naked self long and hard. Harshly, no cheating, just the realities of time staring back at her from the glass. She had a figure like Eve in a van Eyck painting. Unfashionably broad hips that ran into long, thin legs. She extended one and turned her ankle. Her legs were the one thing she really loved about herself. They were good, slim in the thigh, and she frequently wore short skirts to show them off. Still, her skin was firm, she looked good for forty-four years old. She turned sideways and wondered how pregnancy would sit on her frame. She couldn’t imagine it. Eight years ago, after the abortion and the divorce, she’d had four unfertilized eggs removed and placed in storage in an IVF clinic. Every year a maintenance invoice for a thousand dollars would arrive in the mail.

  Four potential babies.

  Deidre didn’t really know why she’d done it—a vague hormonal impulse perhaps, somewhere between pragmatism and buried maternal instinct. Always leave your options open was her major premise in life and it had served her well as a banker. Eight years later the eggs were still there, still waiting. She tried to imagine her breasts swollen in their biological destiny. She couldn’t.

  She picked out a long skirt and a thin silk blouse from the wardrobe. It wasn’t too revealing, but she knew she could go without a bra and that her nipples would be just discernible under the silk. Now for the perfume, something light. She hated the heavy, overpowering scents that left you slightly dizzy and nauseous. She chose Chanel No. 19; it was youthful enough to blend in nicely with her own gentle undertones.

  Somewhere a phone started ringing. She walked into the bathroom and rescued her mobile from her briefcase.

  “Christ, where have you been? I’m having another crisis!” Zoe’s dramatic tones bounced off the pale blue tiles and resounded around the large bathroom. Deidre geared herself up. Sometimes she got sick of playing unpaid social worker.

  “Let me guess, Justin hasn’t rung.”

  “Not Justin, that was two weeks ago. This one’s called Felix and it’s a lot worse than that, it’s an utter catastrophe!”

  “He’s run off with your share certificates?”

  “He’s given me scabies! The whole house is crawling with them.”

  “Don’t you practice safe sex?”

  “You don’t get it from sex! You get it from normal things like rubbing legs together, sleeping in the same sheets.”

  “Sounds revolting.”

  “It’s called affection, Deidre, you must have experienced it at least once or twice in your life.”

  “But I thought you just slept with them for the sex.” Zoe broke into a loud wailing. Deidre, used to Zoe’s tantrums, would make the obligatory soothing noises at the threats of suicides, face lifts or migration. She had even suggested a couple of psychologists Zoe might try. Today she didn’t feel quite so indulgent.

  “Well, is it curable?”

  “I have to paint my legs with this revolting ointment that stinks of horse piss and wash all the bedding. I’m so upset. I thought he was such a nice man.”

  “The painter?”

  “The video-installation artist. I haven’t gone out with a painter for at least a month. This time I thought it was special, we really clicked. There was a real intimacy there.”

  “You did share diseases.”

  “God, you’re cruel.”

  “Sorry, I was trying to cheer you up. Guess what I’m doing tonight. I’ve got a date.”

  “So you rang that dating service! Good for you, I knew it’d work.”

  “No, this was spontaneous, you know, destined.”

  “Destined? Since when have you believed in destiny?”

  “I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, I don’t want to jinx the experience.”

  “I’ll ring tomorrow morning and I expect the phone to be off the hook.”

  “I don’t believe in sex on the first date.”

  “Darling, if you don’t, some other woman will—it’s a jungle out there.”

  “If he wants me, he’ll wait. I’ve got to rush, I’m expected at eight.”

  “Be bad, and if you can’t be bad be worse.”

  Deidre stared at the phone, suddenly regretting not asking Zoe about how to seduce or at least how to appear seductive. This was what Zoe was best at: she presented herself as a dizzy cloud of blond hair, scent and swaying slim hips that triggered immediate conquistadorial reactions in any man she happened to want that night. What she was bad at was maintaining enough cool, enough emotional objectivity to keep them interested post-orgasm. Dramatic by nature, she immediately sought reassurance that they were committed to her utterly and forever. They naturally left as soon as they could. And she was terribly frightened of growing old alone. This anxiety rose up in that little silence just after sex and overwhelmed Zoe. She needed to be needed, and until Zoe overcame that fear, Deidre philosophized, she would always be alone.

  Deidre checked her watch. She had half an hour. Sick with nerves, she tried chanting to herself in the hope that it would relax her. It didn’t.

  Mischa stands nervously by the Manly ferry terminal. He adjusts his collar. It feels tight, uncomfortable. He is wearing the only suit he possesses, bought on the black market in St. Petersburg three years ago. Mischa is painfully aware of its broad lapels and baggy trousers. He’s only been in Australia for five months and it hasn’t been an easy transition. A political history lecturer faced by increasing corruption, he had been forced to give up the country he loved, in spite of its utterly humiliating poverty and a native despair that was neither romantic nor intellectually uplifting.

  Here he has found a different kind of poverty—one of experience. Everyone takes everything for granted but complains anyway. For Mischa it is a strange utopia. The bright sunlight that is reflected off the buildings, all new and so modern. The birdsong that at first he’d found so discordant and alien. The endless warmth and indistinguishable seasons which mean you can walk around practically naked all year. The ever-present water, which peeps out at the end of every street, like a shimmering horizon just beyond reach. But for Mischa it lacks sadness, a sense of nostalgia.

  He tried to talk about this to his uncle, but he refused to hear anything negative about his beloved city. He attempted to comfort his bewildered nephew by suggesting that it was a lack of history, and that, after a while, the sandstone, the parks, the small terrace houses would org
anically take on meaning for Mischa, once the young man started to love in this gaudy city. Mischa listened but couldn’t imagine this happening—the metropolis was too bright, too elusive in its ever-changing faces.

  “Like all Russians, you think too much. For once, just live in your heart. What have you got to lose except worry?” the elder Gretchka had muttered, smiling, pulling on the beard of the younger. He loved this son of his sister. Mischa was the nearest he had to his own flesh and, with poignancy, he recognized many of the dilemmas this tall, vehement twenty-eight-year-old was going through.

  “Get yourself a woman. She will tie you to this city before you have time to put your clothes back on.”

  His nephew was too serious, and old Mr. Gretchka worried that perhaps the Australian women would be put off by his intensity, his habit of avoiding small talk altogether, his Russian metaphors spoken in broken English with that learnt American accent of his. God knows, he was handsome enough. Like a Russian angel, the old man observed. A shrewd businessman—he’d also observed the number of women who, attracted by the natural grace of his nephew, crossed the square toward the stall. They all left with flowers, but not yet with his nephew’s heart.

  Mischa rocks on his heels and puts his hand into his pocket. The thought of her has given him an erection. It’s then that he sees her walking around the corner. She looks utterly beautiful. He has never seen her out of her work clothes, and the apparition of this tall woman, in her expensive and elegant clothes, makes him pitifully aware of the shameful condition of his own suit. They meet shyly, neither knowing what to do with the moment, but both recognizing the intense attraction between them. He takes her hand like a child’s and leads her to the Manly ferry.

  From the boat they watch the city transform from a brazen masquerade of advertising and office space into an insect maze of gleaming lights and mirrored windows reflecting the sunset. Overwhelmed by this crystal city, with the blue of the harbor and the foreshore between them, Mischa suddenly loses all his English. This illusion of beauty and wealth was the reason for his migration. The modern splendor of the future, technological and man-made, not like the historical grandeur he’d left behind.