The Engagement

by Hooper, Chloe

  “What sort of thing?”

  She gave a little shrug. “How did you meet?”

  All of them, even the teenager, seemed to collectively resist one huge smirk as they pictured him winding down his car window on a dark street corner.

  “I work in real estate,” I said defensively. “Alexander is interested in a property investment.”

  “Well, you’ve certainly found a nice property here.” Graeme tried for conviviality before his wife shot him a look.

  “Oh, yes, he’s rich now that he’s sending his sheep to the Middle East.” Annabel leaned across the table and adjusted her son’s knife and fork too. “If the animals survive the journey—no, that’s not fair,” she conceded. “I hear the boats are wonderful these days, it’s when they arrive that their throats are cut.”

  Alexander reentered the room, using oven mitts to carry a large silver tray.

  “I was telling Liese about your live exports.”

  “Lachlan, move those flowers, will you?” With a fixed grin, he waited as his nephew cleared a space for him to place the tray. Upon it was the great gleaming bird surrounded by its mound of vegetables. “Yes, invest in Australian agriculture. You can’t go wrong.”

  “And how the animals die very painful deaths.”

  Alexander turned to the minister. “Reverend Wendy, would you mind saying grace?”

  “Oh, certainly.” Layering her chin, she stared down at a monogrammed plate. “Thank you, Our Lord, for bringing us together to celebrate this occasion with our good friends Liese and Alexander—and his family.”

  Annabel pushed back her chair, clasping her cigarette packet.

  “Thank you for your wisdom and grace in helping Liese and Alexander to meet each other,” the minister continued, “for giving Liese her career in real estate, and Alexander the need for . . . shelter. Thank you, Lord, for showing them your love through their love for one another. . . .”

  My head lowered, I tried to ignore the diamond ring putting on its little light show. Glancing around the table, I wondered who I should ask for a lift. His sister may have hated him, but blood was thicker than water, I reasoned, turning to the minister and Graeme. They were people of God—surely their consciences would be good for a ride into town. And yet I could not be sure what Alexander had told them about me. About the letters.

  “May this couple always find haven in each other.” Reverend Wendy was raising her head. “And may they know they enjoy our friendship and support in their union. Amen.”

  “Amen,” mouthed her husband.

  Standing, Alexander sharpened a bone-handled carving knife and started dividing up the bird.

  I addressed the minister: “Do you think Jesus loved Mary Magdalene because she was a prostitute, or despite that fact?”

  “Honestly,” Alexander spat, “what sort of conversation is that?”

  “No, no, I don’t mind.” Reverend Wendy cleared her throat. Her speed in answering suggested she’d been considering the issue. “Luke seven does seem to refer to her as blemished. I mean,” she added, “by the standards of the day. And, behold, a woman in the city, which was a sinner. In the Apocrypha, however, Mary Magdalene is depicted as one of Jesus’s most learned and beloved supporters, so”—the minister tilted her head from side to side, mimicking scales—“I tend to think the patriarchy’s having another free kick, and now Hollywood has glamorized the idea.”

  “Wendy has done a lot of counseling,” Graeme explained, “around St. Kilda, which—Liese may or may not know—is Melbourne’s red-light district.”

  “She’s discreet, of course,” Annabel vouched, a touch ambiguously; she lit a cigarette.

  “Some sex workers who’ve sought help turn their lives right around.” Reverend Wendy’s nod was meaningful. “Girls—very, very young sometimes, and in the grip of dreadful heroin addictions.”

  “Junkies?” Alexander used the word like it might bite. He was irritated, even offended. “If we have to talk about this, the point is that the woman was in some way fallen and Jesus forgave her.” He was looking around the table for backup. “He forgave her. It’s a story about tolerance.”

  “It might not be about him forgiving her !” I was practically shouting. “He should have forgiven those who spread lies about her, all the hypocrites and bigots who can’t stop themselves judging!”

  For a while no one spoke.

  Annabel blew smoke toward the ceiling.

  “That’s definitely not duck,” Graeme said eventually.

  “Nor goose,” added Reverend Wendy, taking a bite, rolling it in her mouth. “This is almost fishy.”

  We stared at our plates, silent.

  “Well?” Alexander had the air of a man with the punch line.

  Raising the dark meat to my lips, my mouth would not open. “It’s swan,” I realized aloud. The one I’d seen on our picnic?

  “So wait! Like you went out and shot this bird?” Gazing from behind a low fringe, Alexander’s nephew was suddenly keen-eyed.

  “Basically, yes.”

  “And did you get it by stealth kind of thing, using a scope?”

  Lachlan’s mother stubbed out her cigarette on the side of her plate. “He probably wrung its neck.”

  “No, that wouldn’t be sportsmanlike,” Alexander answered. “The bird should always be in flight.”

  “What size cartridge?”

  “Size four.” He coughed. “I used your grandfather’s old Browning.”

  “And it took one shot?”

  “It’s far more difficult, Lachlan, to shoot a swan than, say, a duck.” Alexander bit his lip. “They’re all neck, and a size-four cartridge has fewer pellets. Anyway, the dogs found where the bird landed and it was extremely aggressive; it scared the hell out of them. No, I needed two shots.”

  Bile rose in my throat as I thought of the creature I’d watched gliding over the lake. . . . Now the image would fix in my head of the dogs finding the bird. And the bird knowing it was going to die, hissing as it tried to fight back, flaring its wings, thrashing, wild-eyed, desperate.

  Rising woozily to my feet, I asked, “How could you?”

  The others stopped, recoiling.

  “How could you do this?”

  Alexander looked like a child reprimanded in public—resentful, churlish—but also slyly pleased to see me so unhinged. “Liese, sit down.”

  “No, I will not.”

  “Sit down.”

  “Don’t ever tell me what to do!”

  “Fine. Stand there screaming in front of our guests.” He forked the bird’s meat up to his mouth.

  As I headed to the door, the minister made a move to follow me, but he raised his hand. “Don’t worry,” I heard him say, “she’s just in a mood. I thought she liked swans.”

  My heels were out of time on the tiled floor.

  Walking past the staircase, I turned down the corridor to the rear of the house. There was a sour, sickening, alive taste in my mouth. I could smell feathers on my breath, feel them on my tongue.

  My shoulder was hard against the back door, and when it opened I fell outside, gasping for real air. A lemon tree stood sentry and I was next to it, doubled over, trying to vomit, while coughing up nothing. Had he done this after he’d seen how the bird thrilled me? My lungs burned with the night’s chill; tears streamed down my face. I hate you. I hate you completely. I would rather die than ever marry you. That some part of me, some infinitesimal feminine part, had even considered this a possibility added to the nausea. Walking around in small circles of disgust, I cried and heaved in the dark. After eating little for the past two days I had fallen on the meat, and each piece I’d swallowed now felt like acid in my gut.

  A dog growled out a long, low note of suspicion.

  I stopped.

  Remember the children’s game where one player t
urns and the other players, right behind her, mimic statues? There was no one else behind me, but the trees were playing that game, acting still, a fake sort of still, while something fluttered in the highest branches. I could hear these branches moving in the wind, but glancing up, all I saw were out-of-focus stars. The air’s bite, at first welcome and purifying, now made the shiver in the small of my back turn chronic.

  Slowly I started walking around the house’s perimeter, my hand pressed against the cold bluestone walls. The rear of this place was like the back of a stage set. There were pipes and exposed wiring and small, dark windows.

  I passed a corner and stepped through rectangles of light coming from the dining room’s glass doors onto the veranda. I stared in at the room, all lit up with money and perversion. Alexander and his guests were sitting around the table, talking among themselves as though nothing had happened.

  That’s my engagement party, I thought.

  I was hurt: this sick part of me had almost enjoyed playing the bride-to-be. It was akin to telling oneself an old, old fairy tale that included bridesmaids carrying posies of wildflowers, a veil blowing in the breeze, confetti and rose petals raining down. . . . How could I have known that all the soothing stories of girlhood would spring up like so many seeds waiting for a fire to germinate them?

  Even now, I could half picture putting tables under the trees—­covering them in white cloths, with all the table settings white too, but for place cards in an Edwardian-style font. We could find a caterer who specialized in slow food. There would be a wedding cake frosted with ivory icing and sugar flowers—gardenias, roses, lily of the valley—and I’d arrange candles throughout the trees, hanging them from branches with white satin ribbon. . . .

  I turned, disgusted again, and with the light from the dining room made out in the darkness the shape of a car—a station wagon. Across the gravel I walked toward it. I could just read the insignia stenciled on the side, “Colquhoun’s Roses of Distinction,” circling the image of a bud. As I opened the door it made an aching noise, as though bending the wrong way: low bucket seats with ripped upholstery, the overwhelming smell of manure, of blood and bone. I immediately shut the door, gagging.

  Some way down the driveway I spied another car, a silver sedan. Shaking now, I went to it.

  If I just hid here on the backseat, if I just lay down and waited, then the minister and Graeme would have to take me away from this place. I’d demand they drive me to a hospital or a police station, and I’d wait there until a bus came traveling to Melbourne.

  The car had central locking, and when I pressed down one lock, every door clicked. Leaning my head against the headrest, I swallowed hard. So close to safety, I needed it immediately. A deodorizer hung from the rearview mirror, and next to me on the seat there was a box of tissues, a safety kit, the Bible—I took hold of it.

  On school excursions we’d visit Norwich Cathedral and wheel a mirror-topped cart over the vaulted floors to look at the wooden carvings on the ceilings. All the stories, from the Fall of Man to the Resurrection of Jesus, blended together: there was Noah on his ark surrounded by animals; a wounded doubting Thomas; the pharaoh drowning in the Red Sea with his followers’ naive faces only just bobbing out of the water; Adam and Eve smooth and naked, kneeling under a tree of golden apples, the serpent waiting . . .

  If Alexander had written the letters I could truly say that in some strange way he knew me. I’d told him true things and he’d extrapolated. I’d told him false things, but parts of his letters were still true. That was what was unnerving: among the madness there was insight.

  My own desire could make me feel obscene. It could make me feel sluttish and out of control. And as the letters pointed out, the money seemed a way to manage this. It gave my vast and clumsy longings a neater shape, a strategic purpose. This was functional shame. But, of course, shame can only be resized like this for so long before it bursts out. Shame had been built into the very act of taking his money; it washed over me each time I was paid, brief but extra potent. It was the deeper for being in someone else’s house. The sex itself drove the feeling back for a while, but I suppose doing ever wilder things to avoid shame was bound to bring more of it.

  Reading the letters had taken me inside my own head. I recognized all the murky, half-hidden parts—the feeling of being indecently different, and the old yearning to be someone else. On those cathedral excursions the other children are playing and I am the big girl who lurks at the side, watching. Standing under the great limestone arches is like being in the shell and the wave. And a switch turns on and I find I can sleepwalk through this day, while in my alternative, secret world, magic possibilities roll out before me . . . I’d left home and remade myself as best I could—but now, sitting in a stranger’s car, there was horror in these layers of invention. The letters made me feel deeply that I had no secrets left. Even their lies seemed to show me for who I really was. Did getting close to another always mean discovering you were a fraud?

  A flash of silver—dangling in the ignition, the car keys were reflecting the moonlight. Crawling straight over to the driver’s seat, I sat and laughed. So this was how it ended: I would go howling into the dark night! I’d worry about changing my life later. For now, adjusting the car seat, I turned the key in the ignition and I was blazing with victory! I pressed down on the accelerator and the engine roared—nothing happened. The car was manual. I did not know how to drive a manual. I pushed the gearshift and heard crunching. When I pushed it harder, it was worse.

  “Liese!” Alexander’s voice, calling from a distance.

  I got out of the car and picked up a rock from the ground.

  “Liese!” Alexander again, then other voices, the guests’: “Lee-ease!”

  Dogs were barking. Someone had a flashlight.

  Dropping the rock, I charted my path through the darkness toward the back of the house. Each step was over hard earth, but listening to the guests’ calls felt dreamlike. Had this happened before? And if so, to whom? Whose déjà vu was I experiencing?

  Lachlan was standing by the back door, smoking.

  I grabbed his slender arm. “Do you know how to drive a manual?”

  Already he was stubbing out the cigarette, coughing. “Yeah.”

  “I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you get me to a bus station.”

  “Jesus!” He sounded tempted, but he hesitated.

  “I’ll make it worth your while,” I found myself saying. “Really worth it.”

  I moved closer to him. My hand drifted from his arm to his chest. Even in the dark I could tell he was trembling.

  His voice was higher now. “Let me ask Mum to borrow the keys.”

  “No need.” I tried for an impression of calm. “Reverend Wendy’s car has the keys in it.”

  Lachlan was bending down, burying his cigarette butt and covering its grave in another layer of soil. “Umm, I don’t actually have my license.”

  I turned and walked through the back door. This nightmare was such a perfect fit that I didn’t know how to step out of it, how to shake it off my back. In Alexander’s study, I checked to see if he had replaced the letters. I wanted each one. I needed to take them with me when I left as evidence. Evidence of how he’d tapped into the part of my brain that ran a hate campaign against me. Opening one drawer of his desk after another, I pulled out the contents and dumped all of it on the floor. The letters were gone.

  Out the window I could hear Alexander and the others still calling my name.

  I crept from the study down the hallway and ran up the stairs to the pink bedroom. I’d planned to take the envelope of money and stash it somewhere before leaving. (If nothing else, it could pay for therapy.) But staring at the notes, I now felt myself shudder. For all these months his cash had seemed to have magical properties, to be some elixir that could clear my debts and every other ill. It was only cash, though. Rectangles of
plastic in gaudy colors. Didn’t Freud compare it to excrement?

  The door swung open.

  The minister: her features at first mirroring my fright before bright eyes betrayed a stern satisfaction.

  “Found her!” she called out. “We’ll be back down in a minute!” Reverend Wendy shut the door carefully so as not to startle her prey.

  I spoke first: “Help me!”

  “Of course.”

  “I am not who he thinks I am,” I urged through clenched teeth. “Who you think I am.”

  Reverend Wendy composed her face as if she understood exactly. “My dear, let me say this: a lot of girls these days have a past.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” In my right hand I held the envelope of cash tightly to my hip.

  The minister half shrugged, uncomfortable at the need to spell it out.

  “Look, I am not a sex worker, okay?”

  “No, no.” She glanced at the envelope as I moved it further behind my back. “No one’s saying you are, dear, but early in a partnership carnal relations are central to men’s self-identity. Later, you know, with children, et cetera, everyone’s tired. . . .”

  I stared at her in disbelief. “Did you see what he did to the swan?”

  “You mustn’t be so sensitive,” she said harshly.

  “He killed it as a warning. He did it to frighten me!”

  “Not at all.” The minister was straining to appear sympathetic. “Swans have been discreetly culled around here for decades.” Visibly she shifted to a lower gear, treating me as though I’d just thrown a tantrum. “Alexander lives off the land, or that’s his plan. He’s a gourmand who strives to use totally local ingredients, and I personally feel it should be commended.”

  “Reverend, you don’t seem to understand—I am trapped here.”

  She regarded me without comprehending.

  My God, I thought, was it possible this woman had a crush on him?

  “He won’t let me go, he won’t let me leave.”