Pursuing Love and Death, page 17
‘Dearest Luna,’ she read aloud, ‘Would you believe I slept through your dinner party last night? I feel awful. Exhausted and awful, my pet. You know my insomnia when I’m stressed and would you believe I am absolutely stressed! I am so sorry, darling. I wanted to tell you in person so I didn’t ring but you see now I am resorting to a note so it would appear as though I have failed you again. Forgive me, my eldest and most gorgeous one. I love you I love you I love you! V’
Luna folded up the note into an origami frog and flicked it so it flipped once then rested on the table between herself and Kate. ‘I should save this letter. Put it in a little box to remember the occasion.’ She looked at the paper frog as if it epitomised her relationship with her mother, then snapped out of it and returned to straight posture, hands clasped, breath of fresh air: ‘I love how everyone is so stressed out because of my wedding. How horrible of me to want to be happy!’ Her smile was disarming. Was she being playful or wanting to kill someone? ‘Sorry, Kate, but you might as well be prepared for all of our problems. You’re one of us now, aren’t you?’ She laughed sardonically.
‘For better or worse.’ Kate laughed half-heartedly.
Luna felt her muscles tighten – for better or worse. ‘So how did you know, Kate? How did you know my brother was right for you? You know, to be the father of your baby? I mean it’s really a massive step, isn’t it?’
Kate shifted uncomfortably in her seat, seemingly ill at ease and unsure of what exactly she should say. To be sure, it was a complicated subject. ‘I suppose “right” isn’t the word really. I don’t know that it can be “right” for a gay man from Australia and a straight woman from Canada, eleven years younger, to raise a child together.’
Luna felt the room expand: she could now relax in the knowledge that at least Kate knew what was what. Her biggest fear had been that Ginsberg had duped her into believing he had turned straight – for what reason, she hadn’t a clue.
‘I only know that there’s no way I could’ve gone back home when my visa ran out without knowing I’d be coming back to him. And then when I came back and knew I had left Canada for good and we fell in love, he became home for me.’ She sipped through her straw and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Does that make sense? I guess I just mean he’s … I don’t know … everything to me.’
Isn’t this woman lucky, Luna thought, to know this at such a young age? Unless, of course, she was being duped. Could Ginsberg really be in love with her? Surely he was confusing it for some sort of longing. Some sort of desire to be normal. ‘So obviously it’s not a residential thing.’ Luna nodded towards Kate’s pregnant belly.
‘Well, it was, initially, but then it turned into something else. We didn’t really understand it. Still don’t, in fact. But here we are!’ Kate held her bump with both hands. Her smile showed she was a mixture of ready and fearful.
Luna responded in kind but she was not so transparent. Her smile was out of politeness, because she could not pull a face that said, You can’t possibly have that with Ginsberg. And I definitely don’t have that with Mark.
‘Do you and Mark want children?’ Kate asked in a way which Luna could only interpret as excitement at the prospect of beginning a Smith-family mummy’s club.
‘Yes,’ she said calmly, unsurprised that she was finding it hard to swallow saliva past the stubborn lump in the front of her throat. And then it just happened, as if a camera had zoomed in on her, the meagre four or five restaurant-goers fading out of the frame, Kate but a mere suggestion to the left of the screen: Luna began to cry.
‘Luna, did I say something wrong?’ Was Luna unable to bear children? Did Mark not want them? Had there been a recent miscarriage? An abortion?
‘No.’ She wiped her eyes, remembering where she was and not wanting the staff to be discussing the many possibilities that tears before a wedding day can mean. ‘I’m just like them, you know. I’m just stressed and overly emotional.’
Kate reached over and touched her hand. The movement angered Luna. She wanted to tell Kate that she had no right to glow while she herself was a paler shade of gloomy. Just say it! she commanded herself. And then, as if all of the background clanking and cutting and pouring and chatting had been edited out: ‘I think I’m only marrying Mark because I want to be a mother.’
Now what does one say to that? Kate sat quietly, waiting for Luna to continue. But she didn’t, and the silence was awkward, what with all the background clanking and cutting and pouring and chatting. Life was going on around them. What was to be said?
‘You don’t love him?’ Kate asked.
‘Yes, I love him,’ the sound of exasperation, ‘but I feel like I could love another man, any man, just as easily.’ Luna looked Kate straight in the eyes, emphasising her point: ‘I could absolutely live without him.’
Kate wondered if she could live without Ginsberg. ‘I could live without Ginsberg,’ she said, in all honesty. ‘But it would break my heart.’
‘It can’t be that easy.’ Luna shook her head, composing herself. ‘What about soulmates and completing one another? Shouldn’t I be feeling that?’
‘Would it make anything less complicated?’ Considering Kate’s relationship with Ginsberg, their own unique doubts and their own brand of strange and beautiful love, simplicity was not a priority. ‘I think that sort of intensity causes more problems than it solves. Think of your parents.’
Luna briefly considered her parents but then erased them. They were an awful image together. ‘But you – what you said about Ginsberg – that neither of you understood it. That sounds like perfect love. Intuitive. The stuff of legends. I don’t feel that with Mark.’
‘Well, you said you loved Mark. However you love him, isn’t that good enough?’
Luna wanted it to be. She really, really did. ‘I don’t know.’ Her eyes drooped. She felt old and tired. ‘Who am I to judge what “good enough” is?’
‘Who is anyone to judge “good enough”?’ Kate, so wise beyond her years; the salt and the sugar, the saga and the fable.
THE MAILBOX THE MAILBOX THE MAILBOX
Graham Smith studied his computer and all of the notes pinned to the corkboard. He stopped, then swore in ungrammatical sentences at the ineptitude of his process. He reread the last two sentences. He was clearly stuck, didn’t know where to go, how to end it, whether to scrap it and start from scratch. Truly this was the most difficult piece of writing he’d ever set for himself. It was two steps forward, one step back. Magnificent profundity, stupid generalisations. It was an awakening; it was a pain in the arse. And because it was so complex a beast, Graham decided to take a break.
He went into his living room and sat on the couch, which was way too big for a thin, lone man, way too new for someone so old. There was sunlight coming through the window and landing directly on his face; a perfect stillness in the room. But it was hardly a treasured moment of peace. The quickening in his ear and a flood-filled stream of rushing was deafening. Will I ever know peace again? It was not a question adding to a growing pile of self-pity; it was a genuine realisation that he may soon forget what silence was.
He’d been going about his obituary all wrong. There was no intensity of the written word because, aside from incoherent dribble and short lists with half the words scratched out, there was no written word. And as for the research, no inspiration. Where was the humour and pride he’d always imagined would accompany the writing of his own obituary? Wasn’t he the hero of his own story? Hadn’t he always done his own stunts? Where were the stunts? And why wasn’t he conducting the symphonic soundtrack?
He knew in his gut it was Velma. Bloody Velma. He’d been conscious of his focus the past few days and it was lying heavy on his mind. As the old song went, he was bewitched, bothered and bewildered. Confused, grasping at clarity. All these years, he thought, ebbing and flowing between surprise and concern. There she was.
He couldn’t make it work with her, the woman he’d loved most in his life. So much depended on his inability to make her stay. Would it have made him a better man? If he could have been a better husband then wouldn’t that have made him a better man? Allowed him to be a better father? The problem with this line of thought was that Velma would always have left. If not then, the question would have been when?
‘I’m not meant to get up at six thirty in the morning. I know this. My body was made for lazing about until a suitable hour for brunch.’ Velma lay on the bed, which may as well have been a cross, exasperated by Luna’s hungry cry. She loved her daughter, but she was tired.
‘Our life is what it is.’ Graham was shuffling about, dressing himself as if late for work, though it was a Wednesday, and on Wednesdays he worked from home. That he took these ‘home days’ so seriously annoyed Velma to no end. Professionalism had no place in the home. ‘All we can do is accept it and get on with it.’
‘We? We must “get on with it”? Since when has having a child affected you? Has our body suffered and become warped? Does that child attach herself to you relentlessly so you never have a moment to yourself?’ She gave him no time to answer. ‘No. You have many moments to yourself. You have the whole day and night to yourself. That baby isn’t crying for you. You’re meaningless to her, you and your book and your newspaper job. We are meaningless to you. I’m not part-time. I don’t get weekends off.’ And on and on she would go and go. Graham knew this argument inside out and was convinced it was only partly Velma, mostly hormones and sleeplessness, because though she was often irrational, she had never really been cruel. But the more he heard it, even after he’d secretly watched her cooing with the baby, heard her telling her friends on the phone how much she adored being a mother to Luna, the more burdensome he began to feel as both husband and father; the more he began to question his role. Perhaps I should stick to what I know. And so that became his strategy.
Thirty years later, he was questioning that strategy. Wondering if he’d been bullied into feeling inadequate. She pushed me further and further into my office, he comforted himself. She pushed me away.
It was only three suburbs away. She’d found the new house for herself and the kids; she even paid for it with her own money, though Graham had insisted otherwise. He too would be moving out as soon as their house was sold. Their house – that was the thing. How could either of them live there any longer than they had to? That’s what Graham had thought, though in the end, moving had been just too difficult.
He’d still see them whenever he wanted so the split, in that sense, was amicable. But it wasn’t entirely about the children. This was about the dissolution of a marriage, the end of a curious and crazy dream which they’d both believed they wanted. Graham could never have predicted then that it was the beginning of a scepticism regarding women and his relationships with them that would last into his old age.
He thought of Sharon, wondered what she meant to him now.
It had been unseasonably windy after Velma and the kids left. Like spring, though it was early into winter. Clothes would have come off the line if he had done any laundry. Plastic toys would have been scattered round the yard if Velma hadn’t packed most of them up, leaving very few seeming sad and abandoned. The wind was the perfect prop for his ghost-town life. And he felt cold, too. He’d always been a skinny man, not much meat to keep him warm, and with the temperature down in the upper single digits but the wind speed registering in the upper twenties, Antarctica was calling just as loudly as a screeching freezing crow in their old pear tree. It seemed highly appropriate to Graham.
‘I still love you,’ she’d tell him on the phone, and he could hear just when the tears would begin their journey in thick and heavy drops from her eyes. They would journey for an eternity in many shapes and rhythms of flow, but in those early memories, he missed her tears.
‘Then come back,’ he’d tell her, meaning it with every muscle that twitched in his face: just below his eye, just above his lip, smack dab in the middle of his chin.
‘Jesus, Graham, we’ve been through this –’
‘You’ve been through this –’
‘You’re not going to change.’
Change? But why do we have to change? Why can’t we grow together? Rather than ask what should have been asked, he had answered her with exasperation. ‘I have to go,’ and he’d hang up the phone. It was always him hanging up the phone, wound up and exhausted. And with that, Velma had all the response she’d needed. Too much unsaid. So much lost. She felt justified in her position.
After she left with the children, Graham was lost. He didn’t know what to do, where to stand or how to breathe. He had stopped writing, stopped cooking. His mother had always made him a sandwich when he was blue and that somehow seemed to work, so Graham lived on sandwiches. His heart was tight, unsure of which beat to keep. The slow and sorrowful drumming of a man defeated and left alone or the powerful pounding of a man done wrong? What did I do? he’d ask relentlessly. The only answer he could give himself was that he just wasn’t good enough.
Graham felt the return of the timpani drumbeat in his heart as he sat on his too-large couch, staring straight ahead. It was powerful. It pounded. He now knew for certain he had been wronged.
A hundred phrases rushed around his brain, imagining all the things he would say to Velma when he saw her again. The most selfish person I’ve ever met flashed in thick and bold letters; Denied me my happiness shone in neon pink, hot and angry; I want you gone from my dreams, as unwavering as the image of her face engraved in his mind; You are no longer welcome, he asserted.
Graham lifted himself unsteadily from the couch and made his way to the office but the sound of the postie changed his direction and he’d decided to do this one last job before sitting down to a long and difficult session at his computer. But, standing in his garage, looking out past the driveway and focusing on the brick mailbox, it seemed so far away. Seemed hardly worth the effort.
Bugger this, he thought, about to turn around and enter his office. But then he stopped short, felt the rage build inside of him. He turned to face his mailbox again.
‘You want a fight?’ Graham’s heartbeat rose to a trot, though the spinning from the rotation of his body made him trip over his own bony feet. Had anything in his life ever seemed so onerous as trying to keep his balance?
The concrete turned to an inflatable canoe and the waters were choppy. His brow had creased to near cracking point from intense concentration – one foot, two, one foot, two. His destination seemed to be getting further and further away as his anger made him hotter than hell. But he felt stronger in mind if not in body. He was rabid.
‘I’ll give you a fight! I’ll give you a fight!’ he mumbled to himself. Graham’s heartbeat plateaued at a sprint as his hands made fists so deep he thought his muscles might break the skin in his forearms.
As if in perfect step with his defiance, slam! went his shoulder into the metal rails of the garage door. ‘Bloody hell,’ he snarled. Now he was dizzy and battered but he would make it to the goddamn mailbox. He was far too focused a man to let the everyday slip away and the mailbox was, after all, only a minor object.
He straightened himself and shrugged off his imbalance, still a grumbling mess of fuck and shit and the ever-present bloody. He felt each step he took made him appear a monster or at least a human badly deformed. But he was doing quite well. No one would’ve known he was so wobbly. No one would have guessed his rage. How could anybody have ever surmised that he had, perhaps, lost it? No talk on the street would circulate.
‘Fuck you,’ he said, under his breath, eyes focused on the mailbox. ‘I’ll bloody fight you.’ It was not about the mailbox and it was not about the Meniere’s – Graham was too old to be such a fool – and as this painfully came to light he protested again, this time loudly enough for Sharon to hear if she hadn’t been at the butcher. ‘You are not welcome!’ And with that, his first outpouring of real anger towards Velma in all the decades since the day she left and took his children away in their car, Graham opened the mailbox, crumpled the no-good flyers in his hand and the ridiculous suggestion from Telstra that he resume their services and he walked back, composed, to his office. He sat down at his desk, deleted all he had written, scrapped every note hanging from his computer. Graham began to write his obituary.
FOETAL WAVES
Thirteen kilometres away from their not-so-shabby hotel in the cultural district of Adelaide, Ginsberg and Kate lazed in the shallows of Semaphore’s water, salted with an Antarctic touch and an inlet’s calming ripple. This was what Kate had wanted and now, Ginsberg wanted it too. It had taken them a couple of days to work it out but the two young sometimes-lovers, so very, very much in love, had finally gelled.
‘This is what matters, Kate.’
Kate squeezed Ginsberg’s hand. She had returned to the land of Safe and Happy, bypassing the town of Normal.
‘None of the other stuff matters.’
‘Don’t say that, Ginsberg. Of course it matters.’
‘But it doesn’t. Like you said, you’re my family now.’
‘That’s bullshit,’ she said, turning away from a dog swimming the distance to retrieve a fluoro tennis ball. ‘Your family is your mother and your father and your sister and me. I’m the one with only you.’ The look lingered until Kate bent her neck, which looked as if it had been straining to make a point. She returned to looking at her belly, bare and proud, protruding between her bikini top and surfer shorts. ‘You forget you’re lucky, Ginsberg. The more people you have lifting you up, the higher you will soar.’ She laughed to herself. ‘Those were the words my father used when speaking of community. I used to secretly roll my eyes. Now I’m voluntarily quoting him.’
‘I guess some things always stay with you,’ Ginsberg told her, kissing her neck. ‘But whatever my family’s reaction –’
‘Ginsberg, they don’t have to accept you just because they’re your family but they probably will accept you because they’re your family. And if they don’t, it matters. It does matter. It will matter and you will have to deal with it.’
