“You’re English,” he said, like it gave us some bond.
“Yes.”
“London?”
“Most recently.”
“And how do you like Australia?”
“Oh, I love it.” Staring straight ahead, I drove through the fog of heat, sensing he guessed I barely knew where I was going.
Not that it mattered. The whole point of this country was that nothing particularly mattered. Compared to London, the streets of Melbourne seemed almost casually occupied. There was a lack of critical mass. There was a lack of critical anything. People felt obliged to tell me that the Economist had ranked this “the world’s most livable city.” Miles from anywhere else, the population believed their town to be enchanted—and I wished someone would wave the wand over me.
I had come to start a new life: for the past six weeks I’d trailed my uncle, learning his ways. To succeed in this job, he advised, one needed to be hardworking, honest, a good communicator, and, most important, attractive. That was the main prerequisite, so I began dressing in a close-fitting gray suit and fawn heels, the plastic name tag Liese Campbell pinned to the breast of my white shirt. My uncle had assigned me to his rental division. Driving a newly leased VW Polo full of property brochures, I’d arrive at some stranger’s house to unfurl and plant my flag in his front garden bed: OPEN FOR INSPECTION. Then, in the orange glow of afternoon, I held a clipboard while in trooped couples, divorcées, students, down-on-their-lucks, all of them thinking, Choose me, write my name on your form. Here, “real estate,” as they called it, was a type of public theater—all the community felt entitled to look through their neighbors’ houses. Meanwhile, I inhaled the rising damp and reeled off platitudes about these caves.
That was basic training. After a few weeks my uncle moved me to the higher-end properties; he thought my accent would lend some class to the proceedings, a colonial thing. This was a course in improvisation, and the people I met, conceivably also taking the course, were acting the need for shelter. I was acting that I wasn’t out of control. Lifting Ovid from the shelf of a “deceased estate,” I’d started reading Metamorphoses like a self-help book. Somewhere within its pages would be a story of a thirty-five-year-old woman who could change at will into a bird or a fawn or a real-estate agent. Why not? There was something about being in other people’s houses, a frisson of freedom: perverse, I suppose. Released from my normal life, I stood in rental properties monologuing on courtyards, laundry facilities, parking spaces—
quoting prices I could not afford, as if these figures were a test of one’s true inner worth.
Tenants—especially men—listened to the spiel and took me seriously. If a man and I were alone, I tried to show him any bedroom quickly, but even so, often something basic—a shared apprehension of illicit possibilities—passed between us. He would look at me and sign a contract, then a check, and I knew he wished he were paying for something else.
At the first places I presented to Alexander Colquhoun, he was in a hurry to leave, as though we were trespassing, and gazing into other people’s closets, even empty ones, was shameful.
We were in a district where, as far as I could tell, a whole cul-de-sac of apartment buildings had just the week before sprung out of the dust of reclaimed industrial land. My uncle, who had bought a number of one-bedroom units off the plan, now needed to sell them, and I wanted to broaden my repertoire; it would be thrilling to make a sale. Each apartment had been decorated neutrally, stylishly, so buyers might step into their very own fantasy. Everything in the manner of a four-star hotel—sparkling surfaces, bedspreads pulled taut, hand towels no one had touched fanned under expensive soaps—but in each was a photo frame with the same generic image of a bride revirgined, posing amid flounces of white in a horse-drawn carriage.
These were the kind of places which in my old life I’d drafted. Back in England I’d trained as an interior architect, hoping to create airy, modernist dream houses. Instead I spent years designing boom apartments with sleek surfaces to be erected quickly and cheaply. At home this work had slowed right down, but here there had been no bust. As my uncle put it, the locals just pumped minerals over to China, then stacked higher and higher 1BR or 2BR boxes for assholes making a killing in resource stocks who needed to diversify their portfolios.
We saw three apartments on that first morning, none of which was to Mr. Colquhoun’s liking. Nevertheless, I smiled and continued smiling as we visited new addresses in the afternoon where, with an almost regal air of bemusement, he coughed into his fist and conveyed that such characterless places were beneath him.
Standing by the floor-to-ceiling windows of a twenty-seventh-floor apartment, he looked out at a shrunken Melbourne, with toy skyscrapers and toy trains running by little patches of garden no one had watered and said, “Modern cities are all the same.”
“I think old ones are.”
“Is there a building out there that’s in any way original?”
Sighing, I thought, He’s probably right. What am I doing here?
This was a place to while away a life, not to find oneself—if that wasn’t too dated an ambition. Self-discovery was meant to happen in the Third World, surrounded by others’ squalor. A surge of dissatisfaction came over me at not being somewhere more exotic, more testing. Even these buildings seemed content to not be very interesting.
“No comment?” He seemed eager for conversation, yet his mode was to play the curmudgeon.
A wall of plate glass was an inch in front of me, then the sheer drop. I felt vertigo and some other tension: my shoulder happened to be touching the side of his bicep. “It’s not a fair sample. Plenty of contemporary buildings are as exciting as any Gothic cathedral.”
He smiled as though moved by my naïveté.
As I stepped from the window, my reflection shimmered—I straightened my shirt, pulling it smoothly over my bust, aware Alexander was watching. I was more curvaceous than suited my personality; carrying around all this pale flesh seemed indiscreet, like I’d made some lewd genetic choice. Each morning, to counteract it, I pulled my hair into a tight blond ponytail and wore very little makeup, hoping to be fetchingly wan without looking tubercular—an exotic in a place where everyone else was tanned.
I brushed at a stray hair and turned toward the apartment’s kitchen area. “So what do you think?”
“I’m not sure that’s actually for cooking.”
“Have you seen the restaurants around here?” I stayed close to him. “You won’t want to cook. And this newness,” I said the word in parody of fogeyism, “which you find off-putting, is really part of the convenience.” Touching his arm, pointing out the Miele appliances: “No one’s come in and broken everything.”
“You don’t think the ceilings seem very low?”
“It’s just that you’re so tall.”
Alexander walked around the rooms again. It was as cramped as he said, and I couldn’t not notice the build of him through his clothes. He didn’t move the way I thought a farmer ought. He was lean and muscular but had a high level of physical unease. Something about his body—I presumed his gangliness—embarrassed him, and he opened doors for me bowing slightly, in a style suggesting both deference and satire. The more he disguised his nature, the more aware of it I was. He even smelled slightly different. Was it the scent of the farm? All his politesse drew attention to what was raw.
As the afternoon wore on, he seemed to imply that we were looking for a place to suit us both, that I’d passed a test and turned from his bête noire into a coconspirator. Did I enjoy this assumed intimacy? Yes. I was trying to sell him a property and, I guess, in a new city where I knew next to no one, even these appointments counted as company.
“Now, this would be nice,” I said, peering into a bathroom.
It had a freestanding, double-ended bath, a wall-mounted basin, limestone tiles.
“You’re sur
e you like it?” he whispered although we were alone.
“Very much.”
“And the color?”
“It’s subtle, restful.”
Alexander was beginning not to want to disappoint me. “Well”—he shrugged, looking sheepish—“I wouldn’t have thought of buying something like this, but perhaps it isn’t a bad idea.”
“Shall we move on?” It was best to stay upbeat.
“Where are you taking me now?”
“I think this last place will really appeal to you.” I smiled optimistically. “I can see you in it.”
“You can see me in it.” He met my gaze. “And what am I doing?”
“You are living your lifestyle dream, as the brochure promises.”
Alexander laughed without making a sound, and followed me back down in the tight elevator to the close little car.
When we arrived at this last apartment of his tour, my hand fumbled in the envelope, trying to divine the right key. He glanced at me expectantly. If I picked the key without checking the tag and it opened this door, we would cross the threshold straight into our new life.
The key did not fit.
I looked now at the labeled tags and pulled out the correct one. I turned it in the lock, and I stood in the doorway, feeling a shiver of déjà vu. I could predict the apartment’s exact layout: it was just like those I’d been drafting before I was retrenched. An almost identical plan had been on my computer on the last day of work, when the boss brought in a cake—as though this were merely a birthday—and I ate a slice, then loaded a box with my belongings before I and three others were shown to the door. It was the global financial crisis; everyone was losing their job. My colleagues had all handled their cake nervously. These days English firms were contracting designers in Vietnam or India, and I’d breezily told my boss I’d long been planning to work in Australia anyway. “You see, I have an uncle in property . . .”
Now I didn’t touch Alexander’s arm, I didn’t dare as I led him through the living-dining area to the master bedroom, with its bed crowned by a little pink-velvet, heart-shaped cushion (some developer’s idea of a personal detail), to the dressing room, a narrow mirrored area in which I could hear his breathing change. He paused to take in the bathroom with its shower big enough for two, and broad marble countertops. Everything was too suggestive—the right size or shape for other things.
Quickly I steered us back to the kitchen.
“The oven’s a good make,” Alexander admitted. “It wouldn’t do badly at all.”
I thought of those dreams where one finds an extra room in a small house. He seemed to see extra rooms—spaces invisible to me—one after the other, and I realized he was actually moving toward the purchase.
“Yes,” he said with a nod, picturing himself here, “perhaps this is—”
“You know,” I interrupted, “I can understand why these places don’t appeal.”
“No, I’m thinking perhaps it could work.” He looked over at me, expecting I’d be pleased.
“But you don’t really like it.”
Alexander straightened, confused. His brow creasing, he glanced around as though he’d just lost something.
“You’d never be happy here,” I went on, moving us back to the bedroom. “I feel sure of it.”
“Wrong lifestyle dream?” He sounded annoyed, but he was following.
I can only think the apartment was too familiar. That seeing all its uncanny resemblances to the places I’d designed in London, along with the sharper humiliation of my recent firing, made me want to somehow tarnish it. The fittings were new and smooth and begging to be soiled—that was the whole point of this kind of design. And that was why I led sober Mr. Colquhoun to the double bed and began unzipping my skirt, then rolling down my tights. And that’s why I lay on the mattress and lowered myself onto the little pink-velvet pillow, positioning it just under my bottom.
How innocent or experienced was he? I could feel his hip bones when he lay on top. And when I was on him, his large hands, calloused, held my hips as if he were weighing me. How long since he’d touched someone in this way? I could not tell.
Afterward, while Alexander was dressing, his face flushed, his mannerisms just slightly overstated, he checked the pockets of his moleskin trousers, half removing a roll of cash. Seeing the way I beheld it, he turned from me. He was fumbling with the roll.
“Perhaps I ought to help get the quilt cleaned,” he murmured. “Please, take a hundred.”
“Only a hundred?”
I realized he didn’t know what to do. There must have been something about the way I’d gone about this that made him think he ought to pay for it—and now I did too. Taking the roll, I peeled off two more hundred-dollar notes. “It’s half price,” I said, “because I like you.”
Hands trembling, I went about straightening the white bedclothes and my own clothes. Later, deadlocking the door after us, there was only one thing I felt bad about: the little heart pillow now had a mark on it. While he wasn’t looking I’d dabbed at the stain with a towel, then left it turned over on the bed.
III
I hated houses like this. Shutting the door of the pink bedroom, I retraced my steps along the dim upstairs hallway. Furlike dust covered everything, every coiled, frilled detail: the carved eaves around each closed door, the banister of the staircase and its railings. At college we barely studied Victorian architecture. It was considered mildly embarrassing, too full of pomp and sagging grandeur, too historical. If anyone referenced the aesthetic it was to be ironic. But walking down the steep stairs, I tried to draft a plan of the layout in my head. The first floor was one long rectangle, bedrooms on either side; the ground floor opened onto the entrance hall with its two grand adjacent rooms, and farther along, to each side of the staircase, separate corridors led left and right.
Alexander had switched off the entrance hall’s light, and in the dark I placed each step carefully, feeling for the stair, until my foot landed hard on the tiled floor. I could not tell in which direction to go now.
I paused, listening.
Past the left-hand corridor was a faint light. I walked toward it and entered what must have been the old servants’ wing. The dimensions were tighter, the ceilings lower. It smelled of earth.
“Hello,” I called.
“This way,” Alexander answered.
I followed his voice into a kitchen, large enough for a fleet of cooks and unchanged since their departure. Scuffed red linoleum on the floor and cream cupboards running to the ceiling, lining each wall. An antique Aga was embedded in their midst. Beside it stood my host.
“You are here,” he said softly, almost bowing. “You are actually here.”
Yes I am, I thought. And I should have known it would be like this, the house matching his faded decorum.
He looked like a teenager who’d shot up without broadening. On his long, thin torso his apron was too small. Behind him a frying pan spat but he stood as if overwhelmed, a strange, sweet smile on his face. “Are you hungry, Liese?”
“I am.”
“And you eat meat?”
“I do.”
“I suppose I should have asked.” His voice was tight as he tried to sound casual. “It’s a scratch meal tonight, but an English specialty: kidneys. Tomorrow I promise to cook properly.” He turned back to the stove. “Do you mind a slightly pissy taste?”
I hesitated. “Is there an alternative?”
“A not so pissy taste.”
“Oh.”
I remembered how in the different places we met, properties for sale or rent, he would occasionally look in people’s pantries, scan their cookbooks.
After our first liaison, Alexander phoned once a week to tell me when he’d be in town. Each time I gave him a different address. He would knock on the door and I would lead him into a “spacious 3BR
entertainer’s town house, showcasing stylish architectural vision in a dream lifestyle location.” Or a “refurbished bluestone church featuring infinite breathtaking possibilities.” Or the bay window of a “freestanding Victorian with tuck-pointed facade and excellent rear access.” (All the copy eventually sounded like singles ads.) That he had to pay me was taken for granted. He would hand me a white envelope with cash inside it. I would spread a towel on the bed, undressing myself, then him.
In the beginning he was serious, worried he might somehow cause offense—even in the most basic moments all that breeding never quite left him—whereas I had to fight the itch of comedy. I considered charging him exorbitantly just to touch me but throwing in fellatio for free, or adding a tax if he gave over the money in a way that struck me as begrudging. Why not be paid for degrees of penetration, with a surcharge for other objects? Or a fee for different surfaces, including penalties for carpet burn?
I owed money, you see. And every morning I woke with this figure imprinted on my eyelids. Debt’s gnawing was like a small insect burrowing deeper and deeper toward my brain. Cash was the only analgesic.
So we would be lying on someone else’s bedspread, their photographs and ornaments arranged carefully on the bedside cabinet, the things they wished to keep from view still hidden inside, and I’d be thinking, I can’t believe I’m doing this. Using these rooms was the transgression, taking his money just an element of our game. This game involved leaving normal life and returning unscathed. (Back in the office, the towel we’d used jutted from my bag; my workmates believed I’d taken up swimming.) I assumed Alexander knew he was my sole customer ever. I also assumed he preferred I didn’t mention that to be the case. It was a game until it was not. Then we were anyone—everything. Total strangers, trying to forget our own names. It always worked best to imagine we’d never see each other again.
The Engagement Page 2