The Engagement

by Hooper, Chloe

  I stood at the door averting my eyes as he stripped off his birth-stained clothes. When he was just in a white undershirt and a pair of boxer shorts, he turned on the groaning tap and began brushing around his nails in the trough.

  “Do you need help with dinner?” I asked.

  “Oh, no.” He glanced over at me. “It’s under control. Thank you.”

  “I could do the dishes?”

  “They won’t take long. I’ll do them later.”

  I nodded, not wanting to push him. “Well, I might go and freshen up. Unless you’d prefer to shower first?”

  “No, after you.”

  The shirt and jacket he’d lent me as well as my own jeans were covered in a less dramatic mix of mud and blood, but I didn’t care. I felt light. Somehow I was managing to hold at a distance the unreality of the letters. And in doing so Alexander became almost an ally. It was easier to cope with being here if I believed there was someone out in the world, out in the darkness beyond this house, who wished us both ill—making him and me sudden innocents. Whoever had been writing was evil, but we were good people who worked on a farm. We helped animals, helped them and their babies. Perhaps it sounds mad, but I felt the flicker of a hope-filled truce open between us.

  “Liese.” Turning off the tap, Alexander put down his nailbrush. “I have a surprise for you.”

  Half laughing: “Another?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I give in.” I smiled, waiting. “Will you tell me what it is?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  In his underwear, he led me through the corridor back to the entrance hall; his sinewy shoulders were tense, and a stiff control had returned to his limbs. Pushing open the dining room door, he revealed the long, polished table to be decorated in lavish style, set with crystal wine and water glasses, monogrammed plates—cream with a cobalt trim and cursive C—and heavy silver cutlery—knives and forks of different sizes upon embroidered lace napkins. There must have been thousands, tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of family treasure laid out. It gave the table undeniable power. And it posed a kind of dare: there were settings for six people.

  He held himself very straight. “I’ve invited a few friends to dinner.”

  “Oh.”

  “I wanted us to celebrate.”

  Whereas an hour ago I would have instantly wondered which of the guests might rescue me, now I was also touched by the effort he had gone to. “It looks beautiful.”

  Alexander allowed himself a small grin. “There should be flowers. Wait a minute.” He left the room and returned moments later with a pair of pruning shears. “Will you organize an arrangement?”

  “Where from?”

  “The garden, Liese.” He reached out, brushing my face. “That’s where flowers are made.”

  Taking the key from the little hook behind the curtains, Alexander opened one of the room’s French doors and stood back, evidently satisfied that I would not start running.

  On the veranda, inhaling the cool night air, I felt, for the first time in days, that I could actually breathe. The planting beds framing the lawn were lit by the dining room’s windows and I cut a flower, a white camellia, the chill moving into and out of my lungs.

  I cut another stem and stretched my neck, just slightly.

  Soon this could be over. I had the option of asking one of the guests for a lift to the nearest town. There I could hire a car with the cash and drive through the night to my old life—the idea was wonderful . . . and also not wonderful. My old life seemed increasingly frivolous.

  I had lived too close to the surface—that was my job, making spaces easy on the eye. I had worked in artifice and illusion, convincing myself that finding the right stone, or marble, or color of render to conceal some building’s blemishes was a useful way to spend one’s days. Here I was connected to the things humans were meant to be connected to: cows and magpies and mud and dogs. I looked at the camellia bush, the buds set to open like perfectly wrapped gifts, each giving off the subtlest fragrance.

  Probably I was just giddy, so close now to freedom, but I had to ask, What am I returning to? The apartment above my uncle’s garage? The daydream about China, where, in reality, I’d have to keep designing shiny boxes? Or, most likely—if I went home and tried to regroup—my old bedroom in Norwich, where every morning through the wall I’d hear the nozzle of the vacuum cleaner hit the door frame, my mother’s way of saying, Get out of bed! Start sending around your CV! I’d have to walk along our cul-de-sac to the post office, dodging the neighbors telling me how their sons-in-law had also been laid off, knowing they still saw me as a big, plain lummox of a girl, not very popular and a bit standoffish. That was the irony of the letters: growing up, I had been the opposite of the neighborhood slut; I’d been barely visible.

  Those letters . . . they worked like a riddle at the edge of my brain.

  I had not told anyone I was seeing Alexander.

  He claimed he had not told anyone either.

  If he had not written them, a third person was trying to drive one of us mad.

  Was there anyone who could hate me that much?

  Quite possibly. I’d left home at eighteen, and with a late bloomer’s sheer will cured my accent, the slow-talking upswing, the provincial manners; I’d lost weight and learned to walk and dress and even smile differently. The experiment had worked: I was desirable. And it was intoxicating to have this sudden power after the years with none. How ought I use it? One standard of feminine success came down to me from 1950s movies, the heroines of those films sloughing off suitors as though it were a sport.

  So yes, I could think of a number of men who at one stage or other would have liked to write me abusive letters, although most of them were now married with small children—they’d no longer have the time.

  In Australia I’d effectively put myself in quarantine. Making Alexander pay for sex was meant to set up a firewall. The terms being clear, theoretically we could both gain considerable pleasure without either of us getting hurt. However, I had come here to start a new life, and perhaps, despite our struggles, I was about to do it, to become a person who could commit to another. This new me would surrender. All these years, I’d believed that marriage extinguished identity. That it was a tether to the worst parts of someone else: their insecurities and vanities and futile emotional weather. But one can’t avoid the horror of another person. A real person is horrifyingly, excruciatingly real! And yet, what real person does not want to fall to her knees with another in a great, ecstatic, transcendental show of giving up the self ?

  I looked around, making out, just, the edges of the hedged garden where Alexander had proposed. So, was I trapped? Who isn’t trapped? If marriage was a trap, I had felt trapped outside the trap. Being forced into matrimony, being given this sort of nudge, was probably the only way I was actually going to do it.

  I reached out to cut another camellia and focused on the sleeve of my jacket, my borrowed jacket. Alexander had left muck stains when, after the birth, he’d held me close. The sleeve’s outer fabric was stiff oilskin, but it had a soft padded lining—and all at once this material felt different against my body.

  Had he truly never solicited prostitutes prior to our meeting? His sexuality now seemed too complicated for a nonprofessional to have to deal with. Who had owned the assorted clothes I’d found upstairs if not other women? Well, my rational self explained, he is pragmatic: no point disposing of garments like this jacket that are perfectly useful. The day before, Alexander had also made me put on old clothes. He had watched me dress in another woman’s shirt and trousers before we left the house to tour the farm. He had proposed to me, staring into my eyes with great longing, while I wore this outfit, and so, taking me in his arms, dancing, he’d inhaled someone else’s perfume . . .

  I cut another flower. These anonymous letters weren’t a deflection from his
own past, were they? There had been others here before me. Maybe he’d paid them, maybe he hadn’t, but they had been kept in this house with him. And they’d left possessions behind, clothes and makeup, which he’d hung on to as mementos. My chest was tightening: what if the letters regarding my ghosts blinded me to what was in plain view?

  I stood, both hands holding a random bouquet.

  “You are taking a long time.”

  Alexander was standing on the veranda, observing me. Behind him the dining room’s chandelier was ablaze, and through the French doors I could see the long table lined with plunder.

  Freshly showered and dressed in clean clothes, Alexander came down into the garden. He firmly took the pruning shears, then the pile of flowers, out of my hands. His features were gray and shadowy. “You’ve trimmed half the garden.”

  I looked down at the stems I’d been holding—some were almost branches—and heard myself ask, “Have you really never been married before?”

  He began trimming leaves off the stems. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Engaged before?”

  There was a long pause.

  “I thought our pasts weren’t relevant, Liese?”

  “But you’ve decided you know mine. So have you?”

  He shook his head. “Frankly, you’ve not really got any right to be jealous. None at all.” More quick, efficient cutting, then with his boot he swept the debris into a plant bed. “You’re trembling. Come back indoors.”

  On the mahogany dining table there was now an elaborate tiered vase of silver and cut glass. He had chosen it to complement the rest of the table’s spoils, but together these things looked awkward, as if in trying to re-create a memory from childhood, he’d tried too hard. Alexander transferred the camellias to the vase.

  In the light, I noticed he had shaved. His skin was smooth again, except for a tiny nick to his cheek. I was standing next to him in another woman’s clothes, and despite myself, despite every reservation, something in me caught. I was moved to kiss his wound, to show him real affection.

  He blocked me, suspicious. “What is it now?”

  “Nothing!” I smiled but felt foolish.

  “The birth made you feel maternal. Is that it?”

  “No!” I exclaimed. But was that it? That regardless of everything, I wanted life inside me?

  “Arrange the flowers, please.”

  The camellias were in the vase, and there didn’t seem much else I could do; I shifted around the stems.

  Alexander crossed his arms. He seemed dismayed that the birth had brought out something base in me. “A normal woman would see that, and sex would be the last thing on her mind. Just about anything seems to get you started, though. It’s lucky you do make me pay, Liese.”

  I left the camellias as they were.

  “No, no. It looks like you’ve found an old jam jar and stuffed them in. How hard can it be?” he asked, glaring at the arrangement. “Isn’t it a basic feminine art?”

  “If you’re displeased you can always fire me.”

  He seemed genuinely surprised. “What are you talking about?”

  “Just fire me.”

  Straightening, he stared at me with something close to loathing. “No, I don’t think it works like that. ’Til death do us part, et cetera.”

  Why Alexander had suddenly turned poisonous again I did not know. Perhaps it was the pressure of the approaching guests, their judgment of me. He walked around switching on the room’s plug-in radiators, putting fresh candles very straight into the candlesticks, brushing invisible fluff off the napkins. If I would not admit the truth of my past, he would rather we didn’t speak at all. He had held a picture in his mind of how this day would be—the leisurely breakfast, our cooking for the engagement party, his consoling and supporting me over the mysterious correspondence—and I’d not lived up to it. Even my drawing breath now seemed to irritate him. I had become too familiar, as though we’d been long married already.

  “You must have really provoked that man to get him into this state.”

  I could see a sheet of paper on the sideboard, as if he’d just set it down after rereading. “But you think he was abusing me.”

  “That doesn’t stop me wondering how the hell you let him. Some freak who can barely even spell.”

  A freak like you? I thought.

  “And please don’t start going on about the letters with the guests.”

  “Why would I?”

  He was rearranging the cutlery, making every knife and fork, every dessert spoon and fork, exactly symmetrical. “I mean, some of my friends know the history of our relationship, but this correspondence is a private matter.”

  “You said you hadn’t told anybody.”

  A gruff sigh. “After the letters began coming I needed counsel.”

  Feeling myself start to sway, I reached for the back of a chair. The air around us tasted stale again. My face was hot and stinging. How infinitely and exquisitely embarrassing. People other than Alexander now believed I was a hooker. And my fantasy—in a sense, the contents of my mind—had been made public.

  I spoke just to hold on. “Why don’t we call the police?”

  “Don’t be an idiot.”

  “Isn’t this a crime?”

  “How, exactly?”

  “Slander comes to mind—”

  Alexander snickered. “You want me to call the police and say, ‘Help! Until recently my fiancée was a prostitute, and now one of her clients is writing dirty letters to us’?”

  “No, I’ll call the police and say, ‘This abuser, this curb-crawler, is holding me against my will!’ ”

  “If you like.” He took the accusation calmly, but pushed the chair I’d been clasping hard under the table, straightening it. “The rest of the district, those who don’t already know your résumé, would certainly find out about it quickly.”

  I saw a chance. “You’re ashamed of me.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “If you’re so ashamed, why not just let me go?”

  “But I’m not ashamed.” Alexander returned to full patrician mode. “I’ve simply realized we will need to keep our life very private.”

  “So you won’t be defending my honor?”

  “How can I?” His expression was free of all affection. “The nutcase who wrote these letters could be anyone. What do you want me to do, open the White Pages?”

  I knew then that I must never be let out. In his latest plan I would not leave this house, for if we were walking down the street of a nearby town someone might recognize me. In his imagination, any man he saw even fleetingly in a shop or restaurant window, anyone he met at a party or a cattle sale, could once have paid me for sex. We won’t go anywhere together, I thought I heard him say, although his lips were not moving. With you as my wife there will be nowhere I can take you.

  “Then, for God’s sake,” I asked quietly, “why marry a whore like me?”

  He picked up the letter and folded it inside his pocket. “Because I love you.”

  PART THREE

  I

  I knew before now. That our game had gone too far.

  This was the moment I realized: Alexander and I met outside an apartment for sale in Toorak, a supposedly exclusive Melbourne suburb. I greeted him professionally and let us both into the building’s foyer. We rode the elevator to the right floor and found the right door. Inside he handed me the usual envelope of money and I was already recalculating my debt as I took off my jacket, looking around the room to refresh my memory about an incident that had never happened. The owners had moved overseas, but to make the place desirable each room was full of rented furniture. Decor at the height of fashion, say, seven years ago—mainstream versions of 1960s space-age design which invited sex that was clinical and stylized—the kind that people think they ought to have.


  I began a story along these stark lines, and soon Alexander had pushed aside a hired tulip table to kneel in front of me as I perched on a hired armchair. My legs around his shoulders—I was close to losing myself; shutting my eyes, trying to disappear—I heard a knock on the door.

  We both stopped still.

  There had been close calls before. Once we’d been about to start when we heard a key turn in a lock. I’d scrambled to put my clothes back on just as a cleaner bustled in carrying his strap-on vacuum. With my panties now in Alexander’s coat pocket, I’d negotiated with the man to call back when the inspection was over. Then I’d returned to the room in which Alexander was waiting, only to find him standing in his suit, barefoot. At the time I’d thought he was too nervous to finish dressing. But when I put my hand under his shirt to still his heartbeat, I found it perfectly calm.

  Now the knocking began again—the quake of the timber panels and the metal safety chain rattling.

  Alexander leaned over me, deeper inside me.

  Unable, really, to move, I did not know if I should call out that this was a bad time. I didn’t know if by not calling out, whoever was on the other side of the door would think no one was home, take a key from his pocket, and open it. I did not know who had spare keys. Could my uncle? Had he seen the office car parked out front and, as my phone was switched off, stopped to give me a message? I did not know if it was a friend of the owners checking that the place was clean. Or someone from downstairs who, hearing the noise above, wondered what was going on.

  “Who is it?” Alexander didn’t lower his voice.

  Shaking my head, I mouthed, “I’ve no idea.” The knocking sounded angry. It was as though this person knew what we were doing.

  “Is it another client, early?”

  “Be quiet.”

  “Someone who couldn’t wait?”

  He was staring into my eyes, aroused by my panic. Did I wonder then if he was mad?

  “I want you to open the door.”