At its worst, she worried that their relationship was little more than an exchange of facts and orgasms. He told her things about music and art. She told him things about science. They had good sex. Of course there were other exchanges, too. He provided the accommodation (free of mortgage or rent); she earned most of their money. She paid for the food; he bought it and cooked it. Just another symbiosis, like fungi and algae in lichen. But she loved him, and she knew he loved her. That added a buffer against imbalances, perhaps. Or maybe it magnified them. Was it true that in every relationship one person loved the other more?
Dusk was half an hour away, and the city streets were thick with traffic and noise and office workers heading for trains and buses. Although the shortest way to the Opera House was straight down Macquarie Street, they diverted, as they always did, into the Botanic Gardens entrance across from the State Library, and down to the water’s edge at Farm Cove. They had made this trek many times before, thanks to Richard’s orchestral season tickets, so no conversation was required to agree on the route. Indeed, when Richard spoke as they passed Charlie’s favourite Morton Bay Fig, a gnarled monster with aerial roots as wide as her hips, she realised they hadn’t said a word to each other since leaving the university.
‘Why didn’t you change your name back after you and Shadrack divorced?’
It wasn’t what she was expecting. His tone wasn’t accusatory, but gentle. He really wanted to know. There was jealousy there, but not anger now, she thought.
She tried to make light of him speaking to her for the first time in over twenty-four hours.
‘Back to “Uijttewilligen”? You seriously need to ask?’
He looked at her, saying nothing, wanting more.
‘Okay, lots of reasons. I honestly didn’t want to go back to no one being able to spell or pronounce my name. You try living in Australia with a name like that.’
‘Fair enough.’
‘Plus, by then, I’d had papers published, I was getting a bit of a name in the field as Charlotte Zinn,’ she continued. ‘No one would have known who Charlotte Uijttewilligen was.’
He nodded. They’d reached the low wall next to the Harbour. The water was darkening with the evening. They stopped and stood beside each other, watching a ferry passing Pinchgut, making its way to Cremorne or Mosman. Its decks were full of people heading home. The perfect commute, thought Charlie, especially now car accidents were constantly screwing up traffic.
‘I guess that’s why you took on his name in the first place? It doesn’t seem like something you’d do, otherwise.’
That was true, but not the only motivation. She had been the only Uijttewilligen she knew, her parents long dead, no siblings. Two aunts and a handful of cousins, on her mother’s side, far away in another hemisphere. The name gave her no sense of belonging. Shadrack’s huge, boisterous extended family, by contrast, was something she wanted to be part of from the first Seder she’d spent with them. She wanted to be enveloped in their warmth and their wit – she wanted to be one of them. She couldn’t explain that to Richard though, not now.
‘I was young. Young and unformed.’
‘How young?’
‘Nineteen. Second year of uni. I’ve told you that, Richard.’
‘I’m just curious. I just want to understand.’
Charlie turned to him. ‘You know I love you, right? You know there’s nothing left between me and Shadrack?’
‘I don’t know that. I think he still loves you.’
‘I don’t think he does, but even if he did, it doesn’t matter. I’m with you now.’
Richard gave her a sad smile, and they began walking along the harbourside path that curved around to the Opera House. The building emerged beside the sandstone cliff, its white sails glowing in the pinkening evening light. Their hands slipped into each other’s and Charlie felt relief: things were thawing.
‘So, tell me about what we’re hearing tonight.’ It was part of their routine, Richard’s pre-concert talks to an audience of one.
‘It’s a night of Germans. First up is Brahms’s Serenade number one. Then there’s a guest soprano, Huang Qiuming –’
‘Doesn’t sound very German.’
‘No, Hong Kong Chinese, and apparently brilliant. Really looking forward to hearing her. But she’s singing Wagner, who’s as German as it gets.’
‘Wagner … you mean that Nazi mate of Hitler’s who wrote stuff about women in horned helmets?’
He looked at her with alarm, then caught her expression.
She laughed. ‘It’s okay. I’m not that ignorant. Even I know he died before Hitler was born.’
‘There’s hope for you yet,’ said Richard as they mounted the broad stairs to the Concert Hall, and he told her facts about the Beethoven in the second half.
Their seats were in A Reserve of the stalls, at the centre, around fifteen rows back. Season tickets to the symphony were one of Richard’s luxuries and he didn’t skimp. He’d told her once that a certain sign you were in the right career was your favourite things being tax deductible. Concert tickets, canvases and brushes, and getting your piano tuned. Proof positive of contentment.
‘Excuse me.’ It was the woman who generally sat next to Charlie, making her way to her seat. Richard retracted his long legs to give her passage. Charlie always found it hard to let herself be as absorbed into the music as Richard, and so often found herself focussing on her surroundings instead. At times, an entire piece could go by without her particularly registering it, and this woman was a constant distraction. She was expensively dressed and coiffed, and before each concert began would carefully unpeel four cough drops, which she’d lay out in a row along her thigh and then consume throughout the performance.
While this suggested an assiduous concern about not interrupting the other audience members with her cough, her other behaviour was less thoughtful. As soon as the music began, she would close her eyes, affect a demeanour of transcendence, and beat the time on the armrest. At the conclusion of each piece, she was always the first to start applauding. Charlie wasn’t musical, but she knew enough to realise that the woman had no sense of rhythm, and she suspected this was part of the woman’s own performance, one which told everyone else that she was such a passionate music lover she knew to the nanosecond when the scores would end.
The orchestra began tuning up and Richard handed Charlie the program. ‘Want a read?’
She shook her head. ‘No, I’ll just take it as it comes.’ She leant back and stretched. ‘I hope this was a good idea. You know, with your synaesthesia?’
‘What, you think I might leap out and paint the Opera House sails? Don’t worry, I didn’t bring the oils.’
The conductor emerged, the audience applauded, the Brahms began, and Charlie’s companion started her arrhythmic tapping. Richard’s eyes were closed too, but Charlie knew there was no pretence there. He was lost in his world of colour. She felt a pang of envy. Richard had always had felt aesthetic pleasure so much more deeply than she did. It was like she was colour-blind in a technicolour world. And now she was blind and deaf to the realms to which his synaesthesia had taken him.
As usual, the music was eluding her. Gazing up at the enormous acoustic doughnuts hanging high above them, she felt her mind wander. She thought over possible approaches to T. pestis, about Winnie’s taxidermy job on Mr Darcy, Brigid’s vegetarianism, the ethics of corporatised agriculture and industrial feedlots, about how she’d really wanted a potbelly pig as a pet when she was a child, and then she was jolted by the woman next to her bursting into applause.
Richard leant close to be heard over the clapping. ‘Did you like that?’
Charlie nodded her lie. ‘Beautiful.’ He seemed to believe her and she was struck again by their lack of knowledge of each other. Oughtn’t he know that she found classical music hard to get into? More to the point, why had she never told him? Their argument, at least, was now forgotten, or, rather, now being ignored. She wondered if they’d ever r
efer to it again. More likely, it would be neatly packaged up in a box and stuffed in a corner of their emotional basement. She hoped it wouldn’t leak.
The conductor left the stage, only to return again almost immediately. He was followed by a Chinese woman wearing a long red dress and the audience’s applause increased. Charlie peered at the program in Richard’s lap. Huang Qiuming. The piece was called ‘Liebestod’, from the opera Tristan and Isolde. Charlie prepared to hate it. Shrieking soprano and overblown noise that went nowhere.
But it wasn’t like that.
The soprano’s voice began soft and low, with strings and a woodwind instrument beneath it. It had a purity and depth that made Charlie catch her breath. Then the voice soared and the strings filled the space. Slowly, slowly it built, rising then tapering off, tantalising. Charlie thought it exquisite. She became peripherally aware that her neighbour had stopped tapping. She, too, was genuinely caught up. The instruments seemed to be all on their own journeys, but somehow they meshed into a beautiful lushness.
When the melody had seemed to reach some sort of quiet resolution, it started growing again and pushing up, up, with the strings holding it in the air, urgency belied by delicacy of tone. It was coming in waves, crests that didn’t quite break, that were tantalising and overwhelming. Charlie heard a deep moaning next to her, and turned, startled, to see her neighbour with a look of pained ecstasy on her face. The woman who’d been pretending all this time but wasn’t pretending any longer grabbed Charlie’s hand on the armrest and squeezed it, squeezed it, as the music squeezed the air out of the concert hall. The music kept pushing, the strings moving in waves, waves, reaching a peak and –
‘–Aah!’ The woman’s head was thrown back, neck distended and mottled, back arched. Charlie startled, alarmed it was a seizure. But it wasn’t just this woman. In the row in front, three people; two ahead of them. Up in the dress circles, to her left and to her right, both men and women, groaning and bucking.
‘What the …?’ Richard murmured and Charlie looked at him in bewilderment. Still the soprano sang, as the strings built and built again, until they finally reached the point of climax and she cried out, in perfect control beyond control, a thrilling, aching, extended note, and then the music subsided to a resolution, just as the audience did, in what for many of them was literally a post-orgasmic collapse.
People started standing and stumbling, rushing for an exit, men holding their programs in front of their groins. Others were pinioned to their seats, still thrown back in sexual spasm. Some in the orchestra were sitting blankly, their instruments frozen, unable to continue. But the soprano, the conductor and most of the players kept going until the music gently settled into its final silence.
‘Oh my. Oh my.’ The woman next to Charlie was collecting her belongings, not bothering about applause this time. She just wanted to get out, and tripped over Charlie and Richard’s feet on her way. The lights came up and the clapping was sporadic. Standing ovations from some, dumbed silence from others. On stage, some players had left without waiting for applause.
Richard turned to Charlie. ‘What the hell was that?’
Charlie shook her head, flummoxed. ‘How are you feeling? Any, um …’
‘Fine. Normal. Nothing like that.’ A man nearby was lurid red with mortification, standing frozen in front of his seat. Despite herself, a spasm of laughter erupted from Charlie’s chest, and she put her hand to her mouth to suppress it. But then she made the mistake of looking at Richard, whose restraint was dissolving into giggles.
‘I don’t think it’s a laughing matter,’ the red man barked at them. He was right, it wasn’t, but his words toppled them over the edge. Charlie and Richard’s mirth become convulsive and uncontrollable.
‘I’m sorry,’ wheezed Charlie to the man, and the look he gave her set her off again. Richard put his arm over her shoulders, their silent shaking unstoppable.
The second half of the concert was cancelled, with management announcing that refunds would be given. Apparently some of the orchestra had refused to return to the stage, and a good third of the audience had left. Others milled in the foyer, discussing animatedly what had just happened, as bemused Opera House security guards stood by, clearly unsure what to do. Charlie and Richard slipped through a glass door and out into the night, walking down the steps towards the Quay. They found a tiny wine bar in a side alley, where Charlie had a glass of Shiraz and Richard a pale ale. They were nestled on a leather banquette together, and Charlie was warmed by their renewed closeness.
‘I’m guessing it’s another manifestation of the parasite,’ Charlie told him. There were cases of synaesthesia – rare, but documented – where people’s orgasms were experienced in colour and shapes, much like Richard was seeing music. So it wasn’t too much of a leap to see how the perception of one sense – hearing – could result in the stimulation of what was, after all, just another sensory function. It was certainly extreme, but really no more mysterious than wet dreams.
‘And you know that thing you get sometimes when you hear music?’ she said. ‘When you get a kind of shiver down your spine and your skin tingles? It’s not too far removed from that, really.’
‘You get that? I didn’t know you got that. I don’t.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Nope. I wish I did. It’s to do with that thing, “dopa-something”.’
‘Dopamine?’
‘Yeah, that’s the one.’
‘Look at you, being all sciency.’ She grinned. He grinned back and they held each other’s gaze for a moment. Things were good again.
‘So, music causing orgasms. And I thought I was lucky with my synaesthesia! Can you imagine what that’d be like?’ Richard examined the tapas plate that had just been delivered to their table and popped an olive into his mouth.
‘I imagine it’d make composing a pretty messy process,’ she said wryly.
‘These are great,’ said Richard of the olives. He plucked up another and fed it to her. He was right. A perfect olive.
‘You can’t grow more symptoms with this Toxo, can you?’
‘No idea,’ she said. ‘This is new territory. What interests me is why the second piece had this effect, and the first – Brahms, right? – didn’t.’
‘That’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Is it? Something to do with the music?’
‘Are you kidding? The “Liebestod” is all about sex! Hell, the whole opera is. You just got the last few minutes. The whole thing lasts five hours, five hours of rising tension, unresolved chords, and it builds and builds, and you have that amazing rhythm, then whammo, orgasm. Isolde’s aria is pretty much the money shot.’
Charlie scrunched up her nose. ‘Richard!’
‘You know what “Liebestod” means, don’t you?’
She shook her head.
‘Love-death? La petite mort?’
Another blank. He gave her a look of mock awe. ‘The classics entirely passed you by, didn’t they? Look, sex and death have been mingled in the arts forever, and Wagner was playing with that idea. In that final aria, Isolde falls dead upon Tristan’s corpse in an ecstasy of passion. She dies in both senses, and in death they are united.’
‘That doesn’t make sense, Richard. You think that people had orgasms because fictional Isolde did when she carked it?’
‘No, no. It’s the music. They were feeling the music and what it was saying – literally feeling it. This opera has form, you know. Back when it was premiering around Europe, plenty of nice, refined young ladies were forbidden to attend because people thought it might arouse their passions. It was supposed to be inappropriate for those of delicate sensibilities. Just think how their sensibilities would have been if they’d been there tonight …’
‘The woman who was sitting next to me, you know, the one who does the thing with the lozenges? I have a strong feeling she won’t be back.’
‘Or she’ll buy a second season ticket so she can come twice as often. So t
o speak.’
‘Well, bad luck for her “Tristan and Isolde” isn’t on at every concert.’
‘It could be, though …’
‘What?’
‘Not “Tristan”, obviously. But music that does what it does, replicates sexual desire and release.’
She looked at him. ‘You’re not serious. You’re not thinking about writing … musical porn?’
‘You know what they say. Classical audiences are dying of old age. There’s a constant drive the world over to attract younger listeners. I think it’s about time classical music branched out. A new renaissance.’
‘You are serious,’ she said, absorbing that. ‘I think I need another drink.’
17.
Brisbane
Brigid slipped off her shoes and wriggled her toes into the thick red pile of the carpet. The Media Gallery was filling up for Questions without Notice. Today was the third sitting day since Effenberg became premier and there was much interest in gleaning the new leader’s agenda. The progressive opposition had been reduced to a tiny minority of seats at the last election but, although the swing to the National Conservatives had been substantial, the numbers weren’t a true reflection of overall political opinion but rather an artefact of the electoral system. The bad old days of gerrymander had returned and Brigid feared Effenberg would make the system even more undemocratic if he could get away with it.
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