Beginnings (16 page)

And not for the first time he considered retiring. He had all that a man could desire. He had the funds to keep it. He and Emma could join Paul on one of his adventures, or head out on their own adventure. How often had he heard of people his age pulling the plug on their careers and moving to a coastal town and living a simple life? He’d never known any of these people personally, but they did exist. Surely.

He stood looking at his wife, he knew for certain what he would do in the first hour of retirement but couldn’t see further than that. In fact, his thoughts of retirement always ended in this way. Why? Why would one retire? He loved what he did. He loved excelling. Why leave that? The form in front of him was one reason, no doubt, but then, didn’t he make much of her already?

We can imagine Emma’s horror on hearing such thoughts. Twenty-four-hour David would drive her mad. But, thankfully, David had never expressed them to her. In his mind retiring early
was like retiring hurt, was like capitulating. He expressed it to himself and dwelt on it in secret. To express these thoughts to Emma would be to admit to a doubt he had in his abilities.

David stood at the end of the bed, contemplating what most men might have contemplated if faced with Emma’s sleeping form, spread thus, under a clinging sheet. In this one thought he was entirely honest.

That was partly why Emma took such delight in the sexual. To look into someone’s eyes and behold the untainted truth, to feel the truth – when else can someone be so sure? Any dope can tell if someone is abusing themselves and the truth of desire. It’s in every movement they make. That was one reason Emma found little pleasure in fucking anyone paid to do so. She could find pleasure in it, but she doubted very much
their
pleasure. It was a great obscenity to her, a defilement of sexual truth, but then, Emma was quite capable of enjoying certain defilements.

David finished his coffee and placed the empty mug on the bedside table. He was very much tempted to wake his wife. He stood by her, leant his face towards hers and could sense how deeply she slept. Still the temptation lingered. He still
thought her the most beautiful woman he’d seen. And even now, how powerfully she attracted him! Her loose dark hair, a representation of madness, covering part of her face, her shoulders and the pillow. It seemed now to beckon him, to have a life of its own.

Wake! he thought. Wake now!

He wanted to kiss her but knew from experience that this would wake her. He dreaded waking her and incurring her wrath, and this dread was greater than his need.

He was about to lift the sheet from her, just a little, to see her naked body, to smell her, but he heard the shrill ring of his mobile coming from the pocket of his suit jacket which he’d left in the kitchen.

He turned quickly and left his wife and the many signs on her alabaster body of the very physical activity her body had endured hours before (and the foreign scents still remaining after the hasty shower an exhausted Emma had had before collapsing into bed at dawn).

Hours later Emma stood naked before the full-length mirror in the corner of her room. The sun
now hung high above the house already into its descent westward. Having opened the shutters and the doors she examined in broad daylight the marks left upon her by an enthusiastic Jason. She wasn’t happy with what she found.

When she woke she’d been so very aroused. She’d been shaking with desire. She’d lain in bed luxuriating in an orgy of sensual memory and had made herself come four times in succession before she felt the shadow of calm.

The urgency she was experiencing subsided somewhat. But did not go away. She felt thoroughly sexual. Every movement reminded her of the fact. No amount of masturbation could cure her. Her toes rubbed themselves against the corner of the mattress and she felt if she kept doing so she could bring herself to orgasm.

She hadn’t fully shaken sleep. Anything was possible. Her head was full of impressions – warmth, the texture of Egyptian cotton against her and beneath her, her wetness, summer sounds, Jason and all that made him desirable, David’s scent, the artificial darkness of her room and a million others. Impressions wafted unimpeded through her mind.

This went on for a good twenty minutes before it occurred to her that some of the urgency she
was feeling was, in fact, a very real need to pee.

Catching herself in the bathroom mirror as she passed by prompted her, after her pee, to open the shutters and make a thorough inspection of herself before the full-length mirror.

It was then that she realised she’d been naked and uncovered when she woke. Thank goodness for the shutters, but even so, David would have seen the bruises. Surely! Alabaster skin was all well and good but when it came to having passionate sex no skin could be more telling.

She turned and twisted and bent and lifted and could almost read the marks like a script. Not that it was truly, entirely Jason’s fault. He was completely inexperienced and male, so his ability for prophesy was disabled by his innate disregard of thought. No, she was being harsh. But Jesus! How could she explain or hide this? This? These.

Failing her own high standards she fell for the circumstantial evidence and convinced herself that David had seen the marks. She pondered whether to wait and see if he revealed his knowledge to her in his eyes, or to come clean, ring him up and brazenly tell him what she did. In her dream world she would have that relationship with her husband
and in the beginning when everything she did was seen by him as exciting she might have got away with it. But now, David was closing the door to that kind of life. And he expected her to do the same. He thought Emma would grow out of her flirty ways.

Emma sat on her bed and considered her options. She found the whole situation distasteful. David’s narrow vision was closing in on her. It was galling to her. She had married someone with whom she couldn’t share the excitement of fucking an eighteen-year-old!

She’d come so far in life, had fought so many prejudices and narrow world views only to have married someone who appreciated, but could not accept, her ambition. To think that David loved her for who she was, and at the same time who she was was the one thing he wanted her to change. He didn’t see it that way. But surely if she excited him like no other, as he claimed time and time again, he knew the reason why! It wasn’t her beauty – there are so many beautiful women. It was her unbridled sensuality, her unrepentant, unfaithful, illicit, unimpeded, dirty, greedy, pleasure-seeking, pleasure-giving, hedonistic, altruistic, experienced, self-assured, voracious, loving, lusting self!

There were people she could share this knowledge with. She knew it, but they were few and not so emotionally involved. David was in the thick of it. His pride was involved. His male vision of right and wrong. His mother’s vision too. Hell, the whole world was on his side. Narrow bunch that they were.

How tired she felt then.

The whole world vs Emma.

Could she continue?

Of course she could, but now she would have to lie far more than she liked to. She would have to live beside a man whose knowledge of her would always be patchy at best. But then, when hadn’t she felt somewhat manipulative in her relations with people? Puppet-master Emma.

She should have told David about Jason the day he jumped over the fence. Why hadn’t she? She knew damn well why she hadn’t. It was the same then as it was now.

The day had started off so well.

TWENTY-TWO

Jason couldn’t remember the start of his day. He was in the middle of third period before he knew himself. But even then he was more in touch with his reminiscences of the previous night than the classroom in which he sat. When he did take note of his immediate surroundings they were distasteful. Somehow the desk seemed smaller. The chattering of his fellow students seemed more adolescent than he had previously noted. He much preferred to dwell on last night. So much food for thought there, so little in this vast institute of learning.

By the end of lunch he had been insolent to two teachers and one form master (who promptly awarded him a detention notice), he had insulted his best friend, had found himself unable to eat, although he was ravenous, and had provoked a scuffle with the school bully in a stairwell and won outright. He then sat through the last two periods watching the clock and left school before the teacher had dismissed them, ignoring the detention notice and boarding the early bus home.

On the bus he pulled off his tie, untucked his shirt and stared aggressively at the other children. No one sat next to him. But their noises and antics were soon irritating enough for him to start thinking of getting off and walking. He’d finally had enough at Cremorne and pressed the button.

Once off the bus he stood dazed in the bright afternoon light. He was feeling so unusually aware. Tired and hungry and almost distraught after the day at school, he stood beside busy Military Road and watched the four lanes of speeding traffic fly past him with a strange new clarity.

He began walking home.

He was more tired than he knew, but his natural and habitual buoyancy kept him moving, kept him from realising how taxing each step was to
him. He was experiencing that alert state of mind we sometimes encounter when all our major faculties are shut down in order to save on energy. Jason felt more alive than ever and this was because his whole being was experiencing something like tunnel vision. He crossed streets safely, negotiated uneven pavement, dodged dog poo and tree roots. But his focus was on women.

He had never noticed just how many attractive women there were on any given street.

He was noticing women twice Emma’s age, young girls, and even noting the faces of women flashing past in their cars.

It was obvious to Jason that having attracted Emma and having done what they had together it followed he could attract all women and behave with them in a like manner.

He hovered at the intersection of Spofforth Street and Military Road just to watch for a moment. Three changes of lights and at least fifty wonderful sightings later he moved on.

He was bold in his appreciation too. Catching many a woman’s eye and holding it till they looked away in confusion. Such confidence in a young man, standing erect in his dishevelled school uniform …

Emma’s appreciation of Jason was not a quirk, he was an attractive specimen made more so by this newly acquired self-possession.

Time would not erase, nothing ever would erase, the final three hours he and Emma fell to after all that foolish play. Nor the lessons learnt therein. If Jason was bold he had every right to be.

He moved on.

Near the big furniture shop at the end of Glover Street he walked behind a woman pushing a stroller. He might easily have passed her but he attuned his step to hers. The sway of her hips was intoxicating, in the true sense of the word. She held the young man captivated for a hundred metres till their paths diverged and she had no idea. Nor would she know just what kind of young man she had metres behind her, for she had spent the whole time chattering away nonsensically with her two-year-old daughter.

Jason was no longer able to appraise what he saw according to the fashions of the day. He was attuned to a woman’s erotic potential, not the size of her hips or breasts. Unthinkingly he was picking out what it was that attracted their men to them, his personal tastes had not truly formed. Some were beautiful but some were not. He was
aroused nonetheless and it was something in particular in each instance. The woman pushing the stroller had wide hips and her buttocks wobbled grossly with each step, but it was the rhythm of her walk and the timing of the sway which held him there. Jason saw her naked and felt her weight rising and falling on him.

But then he turned down Belmont Road and she continued along Military Road.

In his rush that morning Jason had forgotten to charge his phone and so was forced to judge the time by the afternoon light. The walk was taking far longer than he had anticipated. He was bored. All the women had vanished. He was quite alone in his seemingly endless tramp along the dull pavement. The school bag on his shoulder was irksome. He considered leaving it somewhere. He had no need of it now. He wasn’t going back to school. He was done with being told what to do.

Why had he alighted from the bus? He’d have been home by now. He’d have been with Emma. If he could get to a payphone he could call her and she could pick him up. They would just drive off together. Jason’s parents owned a holiday house on the Central Coast. They could drive up there and hide out.

Thoughts like these made the walk endurable. So lost was he in his desperate conjugations that the halfway mark was passed unnoticed. As he drew nearer the end of the road his thoughts shifted from Emma to the other female in his life, young Jess. For it was her habit, after school, to sit with her friends on the far side of Border Oval, smoking and talking till dusk. Jason had occasionally joined her there. And now he was nearby and he had, only the night before, promised to meet her there that very afternoon. He could hardly believe that only one day had passed since giving his promise to her. Less than a full day. Jess could not imagine the changes he’d undergone since they last spoke. Nor could he.