Stories

by Helen Garner

  ‘Sick? Are you?’ He put his two hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes like a doctor.

  ‘Sick with love.’

  ‘Your eyes are healthy. Lustrous. Are mine?’

  His room was on the top floor. Opposite, past some roofs and a deep street, was the old-fashioned tower of the building in which a dentist I used to go to had his rooms. That dentist was so gentle with the drill that I never needed an injection. I used to breathe slowly, as I had been taught at yoga: the pain was brief. I didn’t flinch. But he made his pile and moved to Queensland.

  The building had a flagpole. Philip and I stood at the window with no clothes on and looked out. The tinted glass made the cloud masses more detailed, richer, more spectacular than they were.

  ‘Look at those,’ I said. ‘Real boilers. Coming in from somewhere.’

  ‘Just passing through,’ said Philip. He was looking at the building with the tower. ‘I love the Australian flag,’ he said. ‘Every time I see it I get a shiver.’

  ‘I’m like that about the map.’ Once I worked in a convent school in East London. I used to go to the library at lunchtime, when the nuns were locked away in their dining room being read to, and take down the atlas and gaze at the page with Australia on it: I loved its upper points, its vast inlets, its fat sides, the might of it, the mass from whose south-eastern corner my small life had sprung. I used to crouch between the stacks and rest the heavy book on the edge of the shelf: I could hardly support its weight. I looked at the map and my eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Did I tell you she’s talking about coming back to me?’ said Philip.

  ‘Do you want her to?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  I sat down on the bed.

  ‘We’ll have to start behaving like adults,’ he said. ‘Any idea how it’s done?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it must be a matter of transformation. We have to turn what’s happening now into something else.’

  ‘You sound experienced.’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘What can we turn it into?’

  ‘Brother and sister? A lifelong friendship?’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I don’t know anything about that. Can’t people just go on having a secret affair?’

  ‘I don’t like lying.’

  ‘You don’t have to. I’m the liar.’

  ‘What makes you so sure she won’t find out? People always know. She’ll take one look at you and know. That’s what wives are for.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  ‘How can you stand it?’ I said. ‘It’s dishonourable. How can you lie to someone and still love her?’

  ‘Forced to. Forced by love to be a hypocrite.’

  I thought for a second he was joking.

  ‘We could drop it now,’ I said.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘I don’t mean it.’

  Not yet. The sheets in those hotels are silky, but crisp. How do they get them like that? A lot of starch, and ironing, things no housewife in her right mind could be bothered doing. The bed was wide enough for another two people to have lain in it, and still none of us would have had to touch sides. I don’t usually go to bed in the daylight. And as if the daylight were not enough, the room was full of lamps. I started to switch them off, one after another, and thinking of the phrase ‘full of lamps’ I remembered something my husband said to me, long after we split up, about a Shakespearean medley he had seen performed by doddering remnants of a famous British company that was touring Australia. ‘The stage,’ he said, ‘was covered in thrones,’ and his knees bent with laughter. He was the only man I have ever known who would rejoice with you over the petty triumphs of the day. I got under the sheet. I couldn’t help laughing to myself, but it was too complicated to explain why.

  Philip had a way of holding me, when we lay down: he made small rocking movements, so small that I sometimes wondered if I were imagining them, if the comfort of being held were translating itself into an imaginary cradling.

  ‘I’ve never told anyone I loved them, before,’ said Philip.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t know anything about me.’

  ‘At your age?’ I said. ‘A married man? You’ve never loved anyone before?’

  ‘I’ve never said it before.’

  ‘No wonder she went away,’ I said. ‘Men are really done over, aren’t they. At an early age.’

  ‘Why do you want to fuck like a boy, then?’

  ‘Just for play.’

  ‘Is it allowed?’ he said.

  ‘Who by?’ I said. I was trying to be smart; but seriously, who says we can’t? Isn’t that why women and men make love? To bend the bars a little, just for a little; to let the bars dissolve? Philip pinched me. He took hold of the points of my breasts, between forefingers and thumbs. I could see his teeth. He pinched hard. It hurt. I liked it. And he bit me. He bit me. When I got home I looked in the mirror and my shoulders and arms were covered in small round bruises.

  I went to his house, in the town where he lived. I told him I would be passing through on my way south, and he invited me, and I went, though I had plenty of friends I could have stayed with in that city.

  There was a scandal in the papers as I passed through the airport that evening, about a woman who had made a contract to have a baby for a childless couple. The baby was born, she changed her mind, she would not give it up. Everyone was talking about her story.

  I felt terrible at his house, for all I loved him, with his wife’s forgotten dressing-gown hanging behind the door like a witness. I couldn’t fall asleep properly. I ‘lay broad waking’ all night long, and the house was pierced by noises, as if its walls were too flimsy to protect it from the street: a woman’s shoes striking the pavement, a gate clicking, a key sliding into a lock, stairs breathing in and out. It never gets truly dark in cities. Once I rolled over and looked at him. His face was sleeping, serene, smiling on the pillow next to mine like a cherub on a cloud.

  He woke with a bright face. ‘I feel unblemished,’ he said, ‘when I’ve been with you.’ This is why I loved him, of course: because he talked like that, using words and phrases that most people wouldn’t think of saying. ‘When I’m with you,’ he’d say, ‘I feel happy and free.’

  He made the breakfast and we read the papers in the garden.

  ‘She should’ve stuck to her word,’ he said.

  ‘Poor thing,’ I said. ‘How can anyone give a baby away?’

  ‘But she promised. What about the couple? They must be dying to have a kid.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, and looked at me with the defiant expression of someone expecting to be crossed. ‘Yes. I am.’

  The coffee was very strong. It was bad for me in the mornings. It made my heart beat too fast.

  ‘I think in an ideal world everyone would have children,’ I said. ‘That’s how people learn to love. Kids suck love out of your bones.’

  ‘I suppose you think that only mothers know how to love.’

  ‘No. I don’t think that.’

  ‘Still,’ he said. ‘She signed a contract. She signed. She made a promise.’

  ‘Philip,’ I said, ‘have you ever smelled a baby’s head?’

  The phone started to ring inside the house, in the room I didn’t go into because of the big painting of her that was hanging over the stereo. Thinking that he loved me, though I understood and believed I had accepted the futurelessness of it, I amused myself by secretly calling it The Room in Which the First Wife Raved, or Bluebeard’s Bloody Chamber: it repelled me with an invisible force, though I stood at times outside its open door and saw its pleasantness, its calm, its white walls and wooden floor on which lay a bent pattern of sunlight like a child’s drawing of a window.

  He ran inside to answer the phone. He was away for quite a while. I thought about practising: how it is possible to learn with one person how to love, and then to apply the lesson learnt to somebody else:
someone teaches you to sing, and then you wait for a part in the right opera. It was warm in the garden. I dozed in my chair. I had a small dream, one of those shockingly vivid dreams that occur when one sleeps at an unaccustomed time of day, or when one ought to be doing something other than sleeping. I dreamed that I was squatting naked with my vagina close to the ground, in the posture we are told primitive women adopt for childbearing (‘They just squat down in the fields, drop the baby, and go on working’). But someone was operating on me, using sharp medical instruments on my cunt. Bloody flesh was issuing from it in clumps and clots. I could watch it, and see it, as if it were somebody else’s cunt, while at the same time experiencing it being done to me. It was not painful. It didn’t hurt at all.

  I woke up as he came down the steps smiling. He crouched down in front of me, between my knees, and spoke right into my face.

  ‘You want me to behave like a married man, and have kids, don’t you?’

  ‘Want you to?’

  ‘I mean you think I should. You think everyone should, you said.’

  ‘Sure—if that’s what you want. Why?’

  ‘Well, on the phone just now I went a bit further towards it.’

  ‘You mean you lined it up?’

  ‘Not exactly—but that’s the direction I’m going in.’

  I looked down at him. His forearms were resting across my knees and he was crouching lightly on the balls of his feet. He was smiling at me, smiling right into my eyes. He was waiting for me to say, Good boy!

  ‘Say something reassuring,’ he said. ‘Say something close, before I go.’

  I took a breath, but already he was not listening. He was ready to work. Philip loved his work. He took on more than he could comfortably handle. Every evening he came home with his pockets sprouting contracts. He never wasted anything: I’d hear him whistling in the car, a tiny phrase, a little run of notes climbing and falling as we drove across the bridges, and then next morning from the room with the synthesiser in it would issue the same phrase but bigger, fuller, linked with other ideas, becoming a song: and a couple of months after that I’d hear it through the open doors of every café, record shop and idling car in town. ‘Know what I used to dream?’ he said to me once. ‘I used to dream that when I pulled up at the lights I’d look into the cars on either side of me and in front and behind, and everyone would be singing along with the radio, and they’d all be singing the same song. Even if the windows were wound up we’d read each other’s lips, and everyone would laugh, and wave.’

  I made my own long distance call. ‘I’ll be home tonight, Matty,’ I said.

  His voice was full of sleep. ‘They rang up from the shop,’ he said. ‘I told them you were sick. Have you seen that man yet?’

  ‘Yes. I’m on my way. Get rid of the pizza boxes.’

  ‘I need money, Mum.’

  ‘When I get there.’

  Philip took me to the airport. I was afraid someone would see us, someone he knew. For me it didn’t matter. Nothing was secret, I had no one to hide anything from, and I would have been proud to be seen with him. But for him I was worried. I worried enough for both of us. I kept my head down. He laughed. He would not let me go. He tried to make me lift my chin; he gave it soft butts with his forehead. My cheeks were red.

  ‘I’m always getting on planes with tears in my eyes,’ I said.

  ‘They’ll be getting to know you,’ he said. ‘Are you too shy to kiss me properly?’

  I bolted past the check-in desk. I looked back and he was watching me, still laughing, standing by himself on the shining floor.

  On the plane I was careful with myself. I concentrated on the ingenuity of the food tray, its ability to remain undisturbed by the alterations in position of the seatback to which it was attached. I called for a scotch and drank it. My mistake was to look inside a book of poems, the only reading matter I had on me. They were poems so charged with sex and death and longing that it was indecent to read them in public: I was afraid that their power might leak out and scandalise the onlookers. I kept the book turned away from two men who were sitting between me and the window. They were drinking German beer and talking in a European language of which I did not recognise a single word. One of them turned his head and caught my eye. I expected him to look away hastily, for I felt myself to be ugly and stiff with sadness; but his face opened into a dazzling smile.

  My son was waiting for the plane. He had come out on the airport bus. He saw how pleased I was, and looked down with an embarrassed smile, but he permitted me to hug him, and patted my shoulder with little rapid pats.

  ‘Your face is different,’ he said. ‘All sort of emotional.’

  ‘Why do you always pat me when you hug me?’

  ‘Pro’ly ’cause you’re nearly always in a state,’ he said.

  He asked me to wait while he had a quick go on the machines. His fingers swarmed on the buttons. Death By Acne was the title of a thriller he had invented to make me laugh: but his face in concentration lost its awkwardness and became beautiful. I leaned on the wall of the terminal and watched the people passing.

  A tall young man came by. He was carrying a tiny baby in a sling against his chest. The mother walked behind, smooth-faced and long-haired, holding by the hand a fat-nappied toddler. But the man was the one in love with the baby. He walked slowly, with his arms curved round its small bulk. His head was bowed so he could gaze into its face. His whole being was adoring it.

  I watched the young family go by in its peaceful procession, each one moving quietly and contentedly in place, and I heard the high-pitched death wails of the space creatures my son was murdering with his fast and delicate tapping of buttons, and suddenly I remembered walking across the street the day after I brought him home from hospital. The birth was long and I lost my rhythm and made too much noise and they drugged me, and when it was over I felt that now I knew what the prayerbook meant when it said the pains of death gat hold upon me. But crossing the road that day, still sore from knives and needles, I saw a pregnant woman lumbering towards me, a woman in the final stages of waiting, putting one heavy foot in front of the other. Her face as she passed me was as calm and as full as an animal’s: ‘a face that had not yet received the fist’. And I envied her. I was stabbed, pierced with envy, with longing for what was about to happen to her, for what she was ignorantly about to enter. I could have cried out, Oh, let me do it again! Give me another chance! Let me meet the mighty forces again and struggle with them! Let me be rocked again, let me lie helpless in that huge cradle of pain!

  ‘Another twenty cents down the drain,’ said my son. We set out together towards the automatic doors. He was carrying my bag. I wanted to say to him, to someone, ‘Listen. Listen. I am hopelessly in love.’ But I hung on. I knew I had brought it on myself, and I hung on until the spasm passed. And then I began to recreate from memory the contents of the fridge.

  MY HARD HEART

  ‘Do you call that soul, that thing that chirps in you so timorously?’

  Rainer Maria Rilke

  I MET MY husband at the airport, and there he told me some things that wiped the smile off my face. He put his suitcase down outside the Intercontinental Bar and leant his face and arms on the fire hose: he wept, I did not. We drove home. He lay on the bed and sobbed. I went downstairs and sat beside my daughter on the couch. She was watching a Fred Astaire movie and did not notice how I gazed at the side of her smiling face, as if in that glossy skin I might find meaning.

  I lay beside him in the hard bed and listened to him talking, explaining, crying. I said nothing. My limbs and torso swelled. Slowly I ballooned. I became tremendous. I was colossal, a thing that weighed a ton, a bulky immovable slab of clay set cold, baked hard and heartless. Somewhere in the centre of this inert mass was a tiny spark, hardly a spark at all, only barely alight.

  In a day he was gone. The smell of the house changed immediately. I got up in the morning and stepped out of my bedroom. The door of his old room, the upstairs
one with the balcony, stood open, and across its empty air fell a slice of sunlight.

  The front of the house was festooned with great twining loops of wisteria. People walked slowly past, gazing up. A delicate, warm scent puffed out of the dangling flowers, and when I sat on a cushion on the doorstep and played my ukulele I saw that the flower clumps were full of bees.

  I knew it was a passing euphoria, but all my senses were working. Crowds parted as I approached, old men and boys and babies smiled at me in the street, waitresses spoke to me with a tender address. When I tried to play, notes placed themselves under my fingers. Milky clouds covered the sky, a warm dry wind blew all day, shocks of perfume came from behind fences. I remembered being a student, the delicious agony of exams in spring.

  ‘You wait,’ said Suzie in the wine bar. ‘In six weeks you’ll be walking on rocks. You’ll have a brick wall six inches in front of your face.’

  I bought a Petpak at Ansett and took our cat with me to visit Vanessa in the country. I set him free at the door and he bolted away into what would one day be a garden. Vanessa was wearing sagging purple socks. I sat with her at the kitchen table. She showed me a book by C. G. Jung which contained a series of mandalas painted by one of his patients. The first pictures were grim prisons of rocks and stones, but as the series progressed, oceans appeared and the air inside the circular frames flushed, thinned and became breathable.

  ‘What is a mandala, exactly?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Is it a picture of the soul, at a given moment?’

  I pulled a chair over to the big window and sat watching the movements of the long grasses in the wind.

  ‘Will I be walking on rocks?’

  Vanessa shrugged. She lives alone in a house which from the outside looks small and square but which encloses, with a light touch, one enormous room on several levels, a space of unusual flexibility. The kitchen is right in the centre: everything else radiates from there.

  The cat returned at five in the morning and began to complain and cry. At home I would have thrown him into the kitchen and shut the door, but here, because I was a visitor in the huge room where Vanessa also slept, I had to feed him and bring him on to my bed. When at last he settled down with my hand on his side, I remembered the nights with a new baby: the alarm, the broken sleep, the silently turned doorknob, the plodding from task to task; the despair of fatigue, but the weary patience, and the acceptance of the fact that it is absolutely required of one to do these things: the bearing of duty.