The Pacific Room

by Michael Fitzgerald

  In spite of the rain, a young man edges barefoot around the pool with his net. Lewis can just make out the words of his T-shirt: God can do! And across his back: Just ask.

  Lewis marvels at his apparent faith in navigating the blurred space where the garden finishes and the pool begins. He wields his net aloft in the watery sky, like a giant oar.

  Lewis thinks of the pool as the Pacific itself, its water level rising and falling and constantly changing outline and shape to accommodate such brave and extravagant lost souls.

  He’s thinking this as he sits cross-legged by the coffee table, here in the Roberta Haynes fale at the hotel on the harbour. The room is perfectly shaped like an egg. The curtains and bedspread are patterned in 1950s ‘island style’; the ceiling, carved and vaulted, rises to a central pitched point. Looking up he feels newly hatched into his parents’ age.

  The day before he had noticed other garden bungalows identical to his, each connected by a freshly painted black path lined with shrubbery and small wooden sculptures. Each carried a different name: Marlon Brando, William Holden, Harry Bullock … famous past guests who had stayed here during the hotel’s heyday. It tickles him to be confined to this fantasia of fales, especially now the outside word is losing its shape and definition in the rain. This sea of curiously shingled huts, each an island or an idea.

  Lying open before him is a book with a photograph of the Scottish writer. The reproduction is poor, but everything about it is otherwise clear. It’s a few months before the arrival of the Italian painter. Tusitala sits on the verandah at Vailima, an island in a sea of women: his mother in profile like Whistler’s mother; Aolele glowering, perhaps reproaching the photographer for taking too long; Aolele’s daughter looking askance, a shadow of her mother; and their Australian maid dressed in white, her whale-boned waist still painfully thin. Within months she was on the steamer ship back to Sydney.

  Her stern brow and refusal to smile remind Lewis of the university colleague he once shared an office with, also called Mary. He grew fascinated by the way this Mary preened her eyebrows and how she hummed with pleasure while eating her food at her desk each lunchtime.

  He’s still staring absently at the photograph when he hears the sound of drumming outside. Breakfast is being served. Cast adrift on the coffee table is a small box inscribed with pharmacy type: name, address and instructions to take one daily with food. He shakes it, hearing the metallic sheets inside, studded with blue, the keepers of his equilibrium, and slowly rises.

  Any compulsion he once felt has gone. He feels loosened, like stretched elastic, without the desire to spring back to his former life or shape. Coming here to the island has freed his body somehow, relaxing him and releasing him from the pang of need. It’s as if he has already dived into the pool outside and is swimming like a tadpole underwater, slowly changing shape. The water offers no resistance. For the moment there is no need to come up for air: God can do! … Just ask.

  He puts the pills out of sight on the top shelf of the bathroom vanity. Closing the mirror he pauses, surprised by his own reflection dwelling there. The strangeness of it. His heterochromic eyes have never looked so dissimilar; a long crooked nose pulls the symmetry of his face out of balance. Caked around one nostril is a tiny trace of blood from the night before and he feels the faintest of wobbles. Not even the silver moustache can join the two halves of his face together. It’s a struggle to comprehend such a vision of himself. He imagines swallowing the pill and becoming miraculously whole. At the same time he realises: This is how I am.

  Sometimes, when he isn’t expecting it, the image of his twin brother will materialise – in a window, a doorway or a sliver of mirror. Never does he appear at the same age he died but, rather, in uncanny parallel with Lewis’s own life. This morning it’s as though Garry has emerged, dripping and tingling, from the swimming pool outside – hair plastered across his brow, moustache drooping.

  He smiles, water trickling down his chin. And then, as if daring the mirror to release him, he spins around. Where at school Lewis had excelled at languages, Garry shone in Latin tango. At the Year Nine dance class, lines of girls eager to be whirled out first would regularly mistake Lewis for his brother, and he would revel briefly in the duplicity before freezing when the music began. Then he would watch Garry’s quicksilver moves across the stage, fast–slow, fast– slow, always a fraction ahead of his partner, and think, if only the two of them were put together – with his cerebral love of pictures and words and Garry’s of bodily rhythm, they would be in perfect sync.

  ‘You know I resented you,’ his brother tells him through the mirror. ‘The way you could see things. I never could. Things were always moving too fast.’

  ‘But you could feel things,’ Lewis begins to protest, but already Garry’s image has started to fade. Then it disappears altogether, and Lewis is faced once more with his absence.

  A school concert and hockey season were the official reasons Lewis wasn’t on the trip. No, Lewis couldn’t possibly miss the under-seventeens finals, and so he was spared the joy flight down McMurdo Sound. Until that year he had shown little ability for sport. But on a muddy hockey field, at last his looping limbs could do some good. And then there was the school orchestra. Even with a knocked-about cello his long white arms became unusually eloquent, sometimes reducing his bow to wispy strands of horsehair. There was a school concert the same week as the Antarctica flight.

  He remembers Garry was becoming something of a stranger. It was 1979 and he was beginning to coat his long lashes with mascara, stiffening his shoulder-length black hair with eggwhite. Around his tiny wrists he tied strips of ripped calico like bandages. As a boy Garry had liked to draw himself as an earringed pirate or a Japanese princess, and now this vision was materialising before the family’s eyes.

  ‘You’re going down paths that are alien to me,’ their father had said when Garry arrived home one morning at breakfast time, the bandages still dangling from his wrists.

  Yes, a trip to Antarctica would be just the thing, it was decided. So Aunt Agatha was summoned from across the Tasman, alighting with her black Gladstone bag, pinched waist and pert pink nose. It was then she had given Lewis his first book on art, with Manet’s little drummer boy on the cover. As they leafed through the pages together, Aunt Agatha always turned to the colour plate of Vermeer’s lacemaker. With her downcast head guarded by ringlets, the lacemaker seemed to offer an interior world quite unlike the bold gaze and dancing hands of the drummer boy.

  ‘You shouldn’t favour one twin over another,’ Aunt Agatha would tell his mother. ‘You know it will come back later in life to haunt you.’

  But despite Aunt Agatha’s protests, she and Lewis were there at Mascot to wave the family off.

  It’s still raining as he waits at the hotel entrance for his taxi. Glimpsed through the trees, the harbour has become a dirty washout with the sky. So evenly grey it could be a painted opera set, the sharply silhouetted palm trees but cardboard cut-outs. Like extras, the bellhops run – their umbrellas, lavalavas and flip-flops constricting moves that would be unbridled on a rugby field. Lewis is so entranced by their movements that he doesn’t pay much attention to the taxi being whistled over to him until he steps down into the darkened cabin.

  Hanging from the rear-view mirror is a necklace of sharks’ teeth, along with a crucifix.

  ‘Hello, Mr Wakefield,’ says the driver from the day before.

  Once again Lewis is struck by the man’s calm, knowing manner. The bellhop offers a few words in Samoan before closing the door behind him.

  ‘I won’t be climbing the mountain as I’d hoped,’ he begins, without quite knowing where his words might lead him, ‘because of the rain. Where is the public library?’

  The taxi has already looped back onto Beach Road and is slowly heading into town.

  The driver points past the cathedral and a cluster of government buildings ahead through the pinky cloud of coral trees.

  ‘See the clock t
ower at the roundabout? Just the other side.’

  The clock tower stands on its own island in the traffic and appears like a lighthouse squashed down by a giant’s fist. They drive past it at walking pace.

  ‘Are you married?’ the driver asks.

  Lewis smiles at the thought. ‘No, I’m not.’

  Marriage. It’s the most unimaginable of things. In his parent’s wedding photo, his mother wore a white lace mini, and his usually hirsute father was unrecognisably cleanshaven.

  Lewis can’t imagine ever giving up his individuality and turning into someone he could no longer recognise.

  ‘Have a girlfriend?’

  Lewis decides to humour the driver. ‘No, my work is too busy to have someone else in my life.’

  The driver smiles to himself. ‘Do you meet Samoan ladies?’

  Lewis suddenly remembers the Tropicana the night before, and how the women’s names wafted through the air thick with kerosene smoke. Today it all seems like a dream. But he prefers not to share last night’s story with the driver, who has turned suddenly suspicious.

  ‘No,’ Lewis says. ‘Work.’

  Slowing the taxi down so that it is all but stationary, the driver turns to him and confides, ‘It is different in your country, my friend.’

  The springs in the car seat squeak as he leans in closer. Lewis can see a stud glittering in the man’s earlobe and wonders why he hadn’t noticed this until now.

  ‘Here we have customs and traditions. There must be a man and a woman, and the two come together.’

  The taxi has stopped outside the Nelson Memorial Public Library, its entrance marked by a wall of crazy paving.

  Lewis is still remembering last night and how men and women came together on the dance floor, but probably not in the way the driver envisaged.

  ‘I’m only saying this because you were seen last night at Tropicana.’

  Lewis looks up guiltily, wondering if the man has stolen his thoughts again.

  ‘There are no secrets in Samoa,’ the driver says with a smile. ‘They are always being told.’

  Lewis feels momentarily caught out, another palagi not to be trusted, a heaven breaker.

  ‘I find it strange, that’s all,’ the driver says, leaving his suspicions to dangle in the cab.

  Lewis can’t help himself. ‘Strange?’

  ‘That an educated man such as you would choose to spend time –’ here he pauses to let out a sigh – ‘with them.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘Yes, those moral degenerates you were seen with last night.’ The man’s anger comes like a thunderclap in the rain. ‘They are God’s disgrace, those fa‘afafine.’

  Flicked from the man’s tongue, the word sounds magical, like a genie released from a bottle. Lewis is astounded. ‘You mean the girls performing on stage?’

  ‘Surely you must know,’ the driver says with a final bitter laugh.

  Lewis really doesn’t mind not knowing. And with this realisation he quickly pays his four tala and steps out into the rain.

  Chapter 21

  THE AMANUENSIS

  From the upstairs verandah she catches the words tossed up by her brother in the garden, as if in a game of ball. She knows she is fine as long as she does not pause with them, to own them, before passing them on to her stepfather inside.

  Each day the words are more or less the same, announcing the same information, but today they carry with them an added weight, as if knowledge has somehow calcified them. They are little rocks, these words today.

  ‘He says the painter has arrived.’

  She says it with the swiftness of her step, which carries her from the verandah railing to the pale green interior of her stepfather’s study. From her mother, who swept up their little lives in a suitcase, she has learnt that the confidence of movement disguises any undercarriage of fear or uncertainty. She is her mother’s daughter. Even the dark rings around her eyes seem to be cast from the same shadow.

  ‘He will wait for you in the smoking room.’

  She tries to reconcile her impressions of the painter with the man she saw yesterday in the photograph. Until now he has been a fumbling figure of fun, charcoal-smudged, of whom her stepfather has fashioned a limerick:

  Did ever mortal man hear tell of sae singular a ferlie,

  As the coming to Apia here of the painter, Mr Nerli …

  A painter of portraits, but in his gait more like a dancing bear. A man of bowing, dipping graces, forever advancing and retreating. With hat-squashed hair and large clownish eyes, lips the colour of pomegranates. But who was it who said that no Italian is in himself entirely harmless?

  It was the previous afternoon she encountered her brother on the mountain road. She had been sent down to the market to buy yet more reams of paper to absorb Tusitala’s outpouring of words; her brother was returning from John Davis’s photography studio in town. His blond-haired hands carried a satchel of freshly developed plates and it took but a casual remark from her to coax a viewing of the photographs. Under the nodding heads of the taro leaves they had looked through the prints, still stained and smelling of chemicals.

  They did not speak, only swallowed. He had withheld the picture in question until last, calmly convinced she would know what to do with it, that she would carry the knowledge it contained along with her fingertips, that she alone could make sense of its tangled truth. It was Sosimo who had nicknamed her Teuila, a dissembler of beautiful lies, a weaver of words, so enamoured was she with the elaboration of her stepfather’s stories. Though as Tusitala’s amanuensis, surely she was more a trader of truth.

  The photograph curled up at its corners. Perhaps the chemicals had overcompensated for the immodesty of the image, blanching it, as if seeking to erase Mary’s freckles from the enveloping expanses of skin. Unmistakable, however, was the painter’s pointy black beard emerging from this shipwreck of limbs.

  ‘So how long have you known?’ she asked her brother, suggesting the photograph was but a pictureless vessel for the knowledge it contained.

  ‘Just this past month. Of course, there is no question the portrait must continue, but what is to become of the girl?’ He spoke with the utmost seriousness, like one of the boys from their stepfather’s books.

  She looked at her brother, his head nodding earnestly along with the taro leaves, and thought of Mary. Normally her long carroty hair was pulled back from a forehead that contained not intelligence so much as an intuitive otherworldliness. But here in the picture it fell across her face, with only an ear emerging, as perfectly formed as a shell. The painter’s sleeping head lay next to it, perhaps dreaming of its faraway sound.

  It seemed suddenly indecent that such a private moment had been captured by her brother’s camera, snatching this single thread of memory to be left dangling there. And so she grabbed the photograph out of her brother’s hands and, without further word, continued on with her journey down the hill.

  She does not need to look at it to know that the photograph is there. Screened from the writer’s eyes, she feels bold enough to touch it inside the pocket of her flowing native dress, patterned in mould, just like her mother’s. She feels the thrill of this little secret she holds in her fingers. It gives her the courage to take the next step, to call her stepfather to account.

  ‘He says the painter has arrived,’ she says again. ‘He will wait for you in the smoking room.’

  She could be speaking in Japanese to her stepfather, immune to her words, who lies supine on his bed dressed in a long blue and white kimono. He stares up at her, his eyes as large as life buoys, even if she, his stepdaughter, is the one in need of saving.

  At Grez she had watched him row her mother out onto the lake, her tiny feet balanced on the prow in red espadrilles. How easily it could have been her, alone with him on that gently nodding boat. But, prone to seasickness, she had let her mother go in her place.

  Watching from the shore as her mother’s red espadrilles grew fainter, she had suddenly wished that
it was her. Not long after, as if emulating her mother’s first marriage, she had been betrothed to a scoundrel – an artist this time, not a prospector, though the ensuing life of single motherhood was just the same: a protracted cry for help.

  In being summoned to the Pacific, she had been saved. Her son was now safely dispatched to school in California, his legal guardianship passed along to her stepfather. In so many ways she is beholden to him, this prone figure swimming in silk. But deep down she wonders if she is still the same young woman at Grez, watching stricken from the shore.

  His face turns to her, as if coming up for air. Through the mosquito netting his lips seem to be scribbling but no words spill out.

  As long as she keeps circling the bed with her notebook and pen, ready to catch the stories, she will be fine. She thinks of her mother lying motionless in her bedroom next door, her spirit rotting like the camisoles in her camphor chest. As long as she keeps moving, this fear won’t fester.

  The call from her brother had caught them midstream. Her stepfather had been dictating a new passage of the story that had gripped them all these past few months – about the trader Wiltshire and his shotgun bride Uma on the beach at Falesá, and how superstition swept down from the forest like contagion looking for a host. ‘Devil-Work’, the chapter was called.

  In writing them down, in their precise rhythm and flow, she wondered if words could have this effect, disseminating the very fear of their telling. If he was Tusitala, the teller of tales, then she was Teuila, the flower of their telling.

  So she thought as she watched and waited for his mouth to release these words to float across the room to her. It was her duty to catch them before they dematerialised, snatching their meaning and shape before the breeze from the harbour swept them away.

  This morning he was summoning the sound of a spirit from the forest:

  It rose, and swelled, and died away, and swelled again; and now I thought it was like some one weeping, only prettier; and now I thought it was like harps; and there was one thing I made sure of, it was a sight too sweet to be wholesome in a place like that.