by Jill Malone
“When Grey was our supervisor, we’d play Saturday afternoons after shift.”
“One of the guys stepped on a bee and screamed like a toddler the day I saw you. You pulled the stinger out for him.”
“Yeah, I remember that. Jerome stepped on a bee: he was such a whiny little bitch; he sat out the rest of the game. I can’t believe I didn’t notice you, though.”
Had I really overlooked this cream-skinned little redhead? I remembered Jerome panicking about an allergic reaction he’d had once after making a fort on a yellow jackets’ nest when he was six. Twenty-nine stings, he’d repeated over and over like an incantation. Twenty-nine stings.
“I have a sketch of the second time too.”
“When was that?”
“At Magic Island. Barefoot again, playing volleyball with a hostile group of women.”
“You mean competitive, not hostile. I play tournaments there some weekends.”
“Someone grilled oysters that afternoon and you guys stopped playing to eat.”
“Must have been a pick-up game. What were you sketching at Magic Island?”
“You.”
I sat up to scrutinize her more closely. Concentrating on the falls, she referred to her pad fleetingly as her hand dragged across the paper. Her hair had dried in dark ringlets around her face. Before the night we’d hooked up, I’d noticed Audrey in the bar, but assumed she was straight. The idea that Audrey had noticed and possibly even pursued me kicked reason from my head.
“I don’t have a sketch from the third time, but I’ll bet you remember.”
“At the Spark after closing. Grey, totally fucking hammered, had passed out at the bar. We were waiting for Emily to finish counting the till upstairs. I’d been watching Joe, that greasy-haired goliath bouncer, hit on these chubby Filipino chicks when I noticed you looking at me—I thought you were looking at me. It was hard to tell through the tinted windows.”
“I was looking at you.”
“I had this impulse to rush outside and tackle you. You looked like a pixie with your little skirt. But Emily came down and saw me staring at you like a fucking adolescent— Jesus, she can be nasty. I humped Grey to the car and didn’t even let myself look back at you.”
“So you and Emily Taylor dated?”
“Ancient days.”
“And you and Grey?”
“He’s married.”
“That doesn’t necessarily—”
I grinned and shook my head.
“I’d been curious about you before, but that night you left the bar I determined I’d fuck you.”
I laughed at her: such a small, dangerous creature.
“Oh yeah, a campaign?”
“And here you are.”
She stopped drawing, laid her sketchpad on top of her pack, and crawled toward me. I laughed, leaned back on my elbows, and let her hover above me, her curls haphazard around her delicate face and the astonishing blue of her eyes. She smelled of rain, sweat, and mud. Petite and smooth, her hands slipped through my hair, clutched my neck, and forced me backwards until I lay flat on the rock shelf beside my pack. Still damp, both of us with chicken skin, my hand stretched up her thigh.
Could two sketches—two versions—of me actually exist in her studio? Did I already have a past with this woman?
On our descent late that afternoon through another rainstorm, dodging roots and stones, Audrey asked for a story. I thought of the pool beside the falls and her mouth on mine, how I could see the deep green of the trees through her ringlets in the heights above me. How pure her face looked, her watercolor eyes. I told her my mother’s story of Eden:
“God was bored and invented a hunt. After calling the animals to him, God told them: ‘I have hidden something precious and you must each hunt for it in your own way. Seek and find.’
“Turning the earth with their claws, the honey badgers dug wildly, snuffling for a scent of something precious. Through the garden the dog pack pressed their noses to the grass, searching for a trace to follow. The cats lay in the sun and slept. High up in the trees, the birds chattered with the monkeys: ‘What is this thing we seek? What is precious?’
“The elephants trampled around, bossing the pigs to root and the leopards to scour, swinging their great trunks to batter down copses. Soon, the garden trees bent under the weight of too many animals; the pathways furrowed from claws and hooves; fractions of trampled flowers; the lake filled with silt from the forage and still they found nothing.
“Apart from this, a woman stood. It occurred to her that God is a trickster. So she called out: ‘I have found what is precious.’
“‘Yes?’ answered God.
“‘Nothing.’
“‘Oh?’ God asked.
“‘The dogs search in vain for a scent; the birds spot a vacant sky; the badgers find dirt, and the fish spy the sea. Your hunt is no hunt for nothing is the prize.’
“‘Your answer is imprecise,’ said God.
“‘Oh?’
“‘Nothing is the hunt, but it is not the answer. You have used the answer to solve the hunt.’
“The rest of the animals had gathered around now and squawked and squirmed and tried to get a view of the conversation between God and the woman. Even the cats were awake, their tails snaking in the sun-soaked grass.
“‘Well,’ said God, ‘do you know the precise answer?’
“The woman nodded and left the ramshackle garden through the tumbled-down wooden gate. She understood the precious thing was reason, and reason could not remain in the derelict garden of beasts.”
XXXIX.
Even with the door thrown wide, the office reeked of marker and Delvo sat at my desk in some kind of swoon—even her hair was wired—with poster board cast onto the desktops and floor and chairs; fluorescent-colored carnage with black slogans in bold caps: VALUE EDUCATION; FAIR PAY TODAY; YOUR CHILD’S EDUCATION IS WORTH MORE; I LIVE IN MY CAR.
“I live in my car?” I asked her.
“My dear Elliot, grab a marker and help me; I’ve promised to have fifty of these completed by 2:00 p.m.”
“What are you doing here? I thought you’d be dead drunk on the floor of some bar by now.”
She continued drawing large, exact lines of text, as if she hadn’t heard me: INDENTURED SERVITUDE IS RUDE.
“Don’t you know they’ve settled?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Delvo, the strike is off. The governor agreed to a ten percent raise for seven extra teaching days a year. The TAs are yelping up and down the halls like fucking puppies.”
“They’ve settled?” Delvo said dazedly.
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
“Elliot, you wouldn’t be foolhardy enough to invent this?”
“Never in life. Who came up with these slogans? Someone would actually have carried I live in my car?”
“So they’ve settled,” she said, gazing around at the poster board. “What am I going to do with all of these? Do you think I could get a refund for the unused sheets?”
“Save them for next year’s strike.”
Delvo regarded me, “And you call me the pessimist. You’ve been looking decidedly unwell lately, Elliot. I’ve been worried. Come along to the bar with me and we’ll drink to the settlement.”
“I’d love to Delvo, but I have classes to teach this afternoon.”
“Lovely word, settlement. Of course, common usage has corrupted it, but think of its historical precedence: settlers were cultivators—they tamed the wild places. Only the most adventurous dared settle.”
“Or, in this case, a negotiator without enough skill to finagle us fifteen percent and two extra teaching days.”
Her eyes, weary and kind, focused on me for the first time in months: “Are you unwell?”
“Tired is all.”
“Well, then, you’ll meet up with us after class—a quick, celebratory drink. Say you will.”
“I will.”
“Excellent. If you don�
�t mind, I’ll just leave these signs here and cart them home on the weekend.”
When she’d left, I traced the sign on my desk—Value education—with my fingertip and started laughing. With the strike threat resolved, we could return to interdepartmental backbiting and administrative sabotage. I’d wanted a strike; I’d wanted to be compelled into furious action into desperate, terrible motion.
Before the Greeks went into battle, they sat quietly and combed their hair, preparing for a beautiful death. Was that courage? To premeditate before inevitability and accept it, groom for it, so serenely?
On the windowsill of Audrey’s flat the night before, I’d sat and listened to the traffic on the narrow street below, where compact Hondas streamed past in boring, predictable colors. With her miniature bark-a-lot, the Chinese girl from the second floor wore a bright pink visor and shuffled down the sidewalk, allowing the dog to investigate every scent. I’d been thinking of the dentist, of our road trip to Dingle, where we’d listened to the most fabulous live music I’d ever heard. The patrons squeezed into the cluttered smoky rooms of the pub, and the place shimmering with music: the thumped beat of the bodhran; the fiddle player’s eyes closed tight as if in some private ecstasy and the notes soaring; around the pub, the young men sang. I’d been thinking of her mischievous face, and how ruthless she’d been at arguments, always forcing me into a contradiction. It occurred to me, sitting on the windowsill, that I would fail each of them: the dentist, Emily, Nick, Audrey, the next one and the one after that. I would fail them spectacularly with the elegant, deliberate plunge of a high-diver: a stylish failure.
When I’d come to bed, the streetlight peered through the opened window and glared off the knee Audrey had raised to prop herself against the pillows. I lay with my head on her lap and her fingers slid through my hair like water as her other arm stretched across my chest, drew me into her, shielded me. The scent of her calendula lotion as comforting as the tick of the alarm clock, the voices of passersby pitched from the sidewalk like a baseball, the weight of her arm.
XXXX.
From the sidewalk outside Anna Banana’s, we could hear the rumbling percussion as the Samoan bouncer bent in half to kiss Emily once on each cheek, then waved us past without taking our money. Inside, seven drummers lined the stage, dark faces drenched in sweat, their arms battering flat-palmed against the standing drums while before them a throng of dancers spun and leapt. Occasionally a drummer would caw a sound or possibly a command and the rhythm would shift subtly while above us round, golden lights strobed through the dimness.
We launched into the anonymous tangle of arms and torsos—claustrophobic, entombed—a primal pulse waved through the room as if we’d been cast into riptide. My eyes clamped shut; drums kicked through me until my skin burned; above us, the lights whirled delirium, euphoria; we were consumed.
At midnight the drums ceased and the long-armed men sauntered to the bar for drinks. Emily and I pressed gin and tonics to our throats and the backs of our necks. Soaked in collective sweat, my shirt oppressed me.
“It kills me that you’re wearing that shirt in here,” Emily said, her voice arched above the house music. Her short green sarong and black sports bra were much more suitable to the club’s tropical atmosphere.
I shrugged. My latest disguise—long-sleeved croptops—meant for a brutal fucking spring on an island where even the swamp cows trudged about in tube tops and spandex shorts.
“So why exactly haven’t you been able to surf lately?” she asked.
“I’ve been seeing someone.”
“Yeah? A schoolgirl in knee socks?”
I gulped my drink and flagged the waitress.
“I always wondered about her,” Emily said.
“Why, because I couldn’t stop staring at her?
She smirked, bit into an ice cube, and asked, “How is Little Red? Everything you’d hoped?”
“She’s soft, Em.”
I wanted to add that Audrey had become a compulsion. After the first night at her flat, I’d resolved to tell her everything—what could it possibly matter to this girl I’d picked up in a club? So I told her about Nick and my wrists, and about Emily, and Grey’s nun-wife and Dr. Adams’ bullshit and it began to feel euphoric to unravel my secret selves, to tell all my stories to this girl as if it were just another translation exercise. Audrey seemed free of judgment; she seemed free in every way. Something about the way she listened—something pure and intense to her silence—made me keen to tell her.
“She keep your bra?”
“I’ve given them up.”
”For you, not a problem.”
“Gently, please, I’m still learning.”
“But you’re not sensitive.”
I loved what people chose to remember. The last time Emily and I had had dinner together, she’d pulled my shirt up to examine my markings. I’d told her they only looked bad, that they weren’t sensitive. She said they weren’t bruises but oil stains.
“Fuck off.”
“And the Sadist? Has he upgraded to handcuffs and face-masks?”
“You want some water?”
“Dodge.”
The waitress brought our third round, her black nail polish creeping me out as she handed back five ones. I took three sips, watching the barefooted hippies twirl like gyres on the dance floor.
“Response required, honey.”
“I’ve got ladder rungs on my back, Em.”
She set her drink on the table, swept her hair behind her ears, applied her serious expression, and stretched her hand out to me.
“Let me see.”
“Here? I don’t fucking think so.”
“What? Nobody’s looking, you paranoid.”
“The guy at the next table has been staring at us for fifteen minutes.”
She looked over her shoulder at the thick haole guy slouched on his stool, who appeared to be wearing some sort of soccer uniform, a cigarette slack in his mouth. He’d turned his entire body so that he faced our table as if we were a television screen.
“Can I bum a cigarette?” she asked him.
Soccer-boy fumbled a cigarette from his pack and Emily held his hand as the butt slid into her mouth. When he extended his lighter, she turned back to me, her face bright as a demon’s. I leaned into her, lit the cigarette, and shook my head. The tanned flat line of her belly, toned cut of her arms, tumble of brown hair; Christ, the chick was a walking prick tease: annihilating.
“How long are you going to play this game?” she asked.
I took the cigarette from her and inhaled, no longer able to think of the roping as a game. The previous weekend, Nick had insisted on taking me to Punchbowl. A picnic, he said. At the same grave, he’d tried to pose me before the shrine like a fucking muppet; the artifice glared between us as unrepentantly as the midday sun, and I fought him, refused, walked back to the car alone.
“You know I missed you,” he had said, when he caught up to me. “I used to think of my trips as free zones. If I met a woman, then no harm, right? But I don’t even look anymore. You’re enough for me.”
Enough, I weighed the word in my mouth, thinking of Audrey’s hands light on my wrists as if my skin were a Braille chart. The inside of her lavender flat like a bruise, like a shield, and if I had told him then, would he have agreed that the bruise was a free zone, the girl no harm?
He’d bought a harness and that night in his bedroom, Latin freighted through my brain—teneo, -ere … to hold, to possess. Tenuero, tenueris, tenuerit, tenuerimus, tenueritis, tenuerint. I will have possessed. You will have possessed. He will have possessed—as PJ Harvey’s “Rid of Me” blared in the background, her quirky rage an anthem in the dark. The boy was slick and he’d wigged me out.
At Anna Banana’s the drummers had taken the stage again, the pummel rippling through the crowd like a desperate heartbeat. I stabbed the cigarette into the ashtray. I wanted to tell Emily, This will all end badly, but I smiled instead, the gin sweet in my mouth like s
ummer.
I let her French manicured nails slide between my fingers when she led me to the bathroom. She locked the door and eased my shirt over my head as gently as a mother undressing a child. And then Mother was crying.
“It’s not that bad, Em. It’s just the week after. Still swollen, you know? I only notice when I lean back.”
“Christ. Oh, Christ.”
In the grungy bathroom, scraps of paper towel littering the base of the trashcan, pink soap filming the sink, I held her against me. The walls around us throbbed: another free zone, another harmless girl.
XXXXI.
Audrey was tired. So exhausted that she was no longer able to hold her tumbler in one hand, but had the glass clasped in both hands like the hilt of a sword. She stood in the kitchen, her lower back nudged against the sink, and stared at me. We had been fighting for decades, so long that glaciers had softened and flooded Australia, the sky had filled with birds, the entire world was shrieking, and we stood in this peri-winkle kitchen, waiting for something to give.
She was looking at me with the same look my father had given my mother whenever he came home to find the kitchen in ruins, or had been called by a distraught local merchant who claimed my mother had left without paying again, or those times my father found her bleeding. A look that I had always thought was unfathomable sadness, the sort of look my heart mimicked whenever I was with my mother: despair for her, for my father, our family. But I was wrong.
The look my father gave my mother, the same look Audrey gave me, meant simply: excepting this, we might be happy. They had named the thing between them with silence, acknowledging only what it cost—all that it cost.
So I had become my mother at last.
“We never talk about this,” Audrey said again. “Why don’t we ever talk about this?”
“Because it has nothing to do with us.”
We were not talking about my back and wrists. We were not talking about Nick. We were not talking about Emily.