Jacko (36 page)

Renmark's publicity office issued a statement about how Mr Renmark had known it was a joke from the start, and, being the jovial fellow he was, had clowned along. The concept of Renmark clowning along caused all of us at our table in Elio's to convulse with hilarity.

From my side of the table I watched Jacko's eyes twinkle in the old way. If it hadn't already been clear, it was now: he loved tough, glittering women. He did not love accommodating, innocent women. Hence Dannie. As with locked doors, he'd been deprived of them in childhood. Their fixity was of a different species from Chloe's, their sexuality more arduously constructed.

In any case, encouraged by the room we'd all given to his first story, Jacko went on with his tale of penetrating the Malibu Colony. He had waded across a tidal creek, he and his camera crew, Clayton holding his camera above his head, Dannie riding on the shoulders of a big technician. They had first invaded the house of an English star, who had given them something close to a welcome, for there was something in Cockneys which sympathized with this intrusion of the Colony, and the star was a Cockney. He was trying to make pancakes in his kitchen and lacked an ingredient, so he sent Jacko and the camera crew, conniving in their mischief, down to the home of a soap opera actor. Jacko carried a teacup, ready to ask for the loan of some sugar.

The soap opera star used Sunday for meditation and ordered Jacko off his sundeck, and, within two days, sued him and Vixen Six. The head of Basil Sutherland's Vixen Studios in Los Angeles ordered Jacko and Durkin to desist from molesting stars the Vixen Studios might need to recruit for feature films. The footage was never shown. Jacko had wrongly supposed people would be charmed and engaged by his brave assault on the big guns across Malibu Creek.

The laughter sounded brittler and more indulgent by the time he'd told this story, and caused me to wonder if Jacko understood the margin between the creative practical joke and buffoonery.

Greenspan said, I can see we're going to have to set someone to monitor your exuberant talent, Jacko.

His tone, though part forgiving, was also part threatening.

—Oh for the day of the bladder transplant, he said then, smiling and rising, bowing and then making his way across the floor to the back of the restaurant – a brave and even sturdy figure, a player at seventy-five in the cult of youthfully deployed forcefulness.

Jacko and Tracey fell into conversation as if he had never left. The darker woman, whose name I had never mastered, turned to me.

—You should warn your friend. Hubert won't forgive him for playing to Tracey. It's understandable. Hubert's nearly as old as the century and when he has sex he has to pump his pecker up with some kind of hand pump in his scrotum.

I stared at the woman, amazed by the image.

—Tracey's just as culpable as your pal. She ought to know better. Whereas your friend is very innocent.

The old man all in white returned, and diners looked at him admiringly as if he had handfuls of benevolence to distribute. A third bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé had arrived, and the empty second was borne away. Jacko was drinking heroically, and it must have been having its effect. We all ate our pasta, and Hubert Greenspan his sweetbreads. I rose and excused myself, looking at Jacko in the hope that he would need to come with me. To my relief, Jacko – the man who penetrated all America's doors, the knowing Man from Snowy River or Burren Waters, immune to every tide except compassion, mateship, and the sexuality of alien woman – got up at once.

We entered the men's room together.

—Thank God, he said, stepping up boisterously to the urinal beside mine, a man ready, unthinkingly, to void himself of the sort of effortless stream no doubt long since vanished from Hubert Greenspan's repertoire.

—That little blonde, Tracey. She could be my producer, mate. Can you imagine it?

—No, I can't. Not if you two keep playing to each other the way you're doing.

—Come on, he chided me. I've only just got my testosterone working again.

I told him about the warning the dark-haired woman had given me.

—Oh shit, he said, addressing the plumbing above his head. She's meeting me for dinner next Tuesday.

—If I were you I'd make it lunch. And at the end, I'd shake hands.

—Christ, you sound like one of those Marist Brothers who tried to stop me going for the groin. Why don't you mention eternal bloody hell-fire?

I was angered. I zipped up with such fury that I caught a corner of my shirt. I promptly amended that.

—Lucy's only just left, I said. Most people have a mourning period. How long was yours? Three minutes?

—Jesus, that's low, he said.

He was emphatic but not yet angry himself. I wanted to make him angry.

—Lucy, Delia, this one … Tracey … They're all just the one continuum of flesh to you …

—Hold hard! he warned me. I'm not thinking of begetting a sodding dynasty with this woman eh. I just want to go to dinner. And God forbid I should be so fortunate as to be allowed, through the generosity of any girl, to get in a bit of good old horizontal folk-dancing!

The truth behind my fury was that Maureen had had telephone conversations with Lucy in Australia. Arriving one humid dawn, Lucy had felt severely exposed beneath the bright, frank Australian day. Recounting it on the telephone, sending her sorrow up to a satellite over the Equator and then down to New York, she wept easily. Lucy told Maureen a great deal and confessed she was also speaking regularly to Chloe and to her own mother who had moved down to Melbourne. Maureen said tremors overtook Lucy's voice in mid-sentence. Such was the news of grieving, lovely Lucy. While, of course, Jacko laughed in Elio's.

I said, You really are an utter prick, Jacko. Despite everything. Despite the airfares for Sunny and her nurse. And you're not even a cunning prick. You're a dumb bastard! I don't know why I spend time with you, but I don't think I'll be doing much more of it.

There isn't any reason to recount his pretty explicit reply. He walked out, and by the time I got back to the table, he was saying a polite good night to Tracey and the dark-haired woman and Hubert. A luncheon date with Tracey had been openly arranged. In the meantime she wanted to be faxed the terms of his agreement with Silverarts to verify that he was available for hire. Perhaps, she said, he should bring his agent and his attorney to the lunch as well.

He didn't say goodnight to me. I made an embarrassed explanation to the company – Jacko lived in a different part of town. I thanked Mr Greenspan and left to find my own way home.

In the taxi I felt more loss than was warranted. Lucy was gone. And now Jacko. In fact, at one point I found myself reciting under my breath snatches of Jacko's holy text.

—“He hails from Snowy River, up by Kosciusko's side,

Where the hills are twice as steep and twice as rough,

Where a horse's hoofs strike firelight from the flint stones every stride,

The man that holds his own is good enough.

And the Snowy River riders on the mountains make their home,

Where the river runs those giant hills between;

I have seen full many horsemen since I first began to roam,

But nowhere yet such horsemen have I seen.”

It was raining very heavily in New York's friendless night.

19

Maureen and I began our plans for going home as the New York summer set in, as classes were ending in a fug of New York humidity, and the violet trolleys of NYU were delivering bashful graduates and over-dressed parents to Washington Square. Academics and writers I met along West Fourth Street and Broadway were planning summer holidays in places I had seen only in winter: Vermont, say, and Maine. Our summer place was a beach twelve thousand miles away in the mild Australian winter.

Jacko and I had talked stiffly now and then, and even ran into each other in that fairly circumscribed quarter of New York. He would always explain his lack of contact by saying that taping the quiz shows in Los Angeles kept him pretty hectic. But in fact, his timetable was no different from what it had been in the days we used to meet in the Odeon for frequent confessional sessions. He was still doing four doorknocks a week in New York. Whenever I saw his morning television shenanigans, I was impressed by the way he always looked so fresh despite all, so full of zany spriteliness. The act of intruding seemed to give him perpetual vigour.

One night during our last few weeks in New York, Maureen and I met Jacko at a black-tie dinner to open an exhibition of Aboriginal artists from Central Australia and Arnhem Land.

The male and female carvers and painters of the tropics and the desert were guests of honour at this dinner, a strainingly odd affair. I felt silly at having taken on the ridiculous duty of wearing a dinner suit. Maureen and I sat at a table with some of the thin, blue-black women artists from the Australian tropics, who wore their own dazzling batiks, and with two middle-aged sisters called Dotty and Mary Marble, who came from the Tanami Desert southwest of Burren Waters, who knew how cold the night could fall, and so wore large cardigans.

All the male artists were seated at other tables, but were not dressed so differently from the stockmen on Burren Waters, which made us stuffed-shirt Caucasians look sillier still.

All these dozen or so visiting artists had – at the start of the dinner – proceeded into the dining room to the applause of all the people in black suits and long dresses. Taking their seats, the desert and tropic painters had looked both shy and composed, tentative and worldly. I hoped the dinner crowd knew that many of them – including the Marble sisters – had achieved international repute, were used to having their work shown in cities far from home, and sometimes travelled accompanying their work to fashionable places. Some of the men in the stockmen's clothes and the Arnhem Land women in batik, whose specialties were bark paintings, were accustomed to seeing four- or even five-figure prices put upon their work.

I noticed Jacko at a table across the room from ours. His black tie was loosened and untethered, and he sat with a woman who was not Tracey, who was probably younger in fact, perhaps as young as Lucy. She leaned forward, talking energetically to her companion. Jacko grinned when her speech ended in a spate of more thorough and childlike laughter than worldly Dannie or Tracey would ever have permitted themselves.

Maureen, who thought that having got out of my friendship with Jacko with my health intact I ought to let it go at that, suggested I should use the distance between our tables as a reasonable excuse not to talk to him.

But I was pretty sure he had seen us.

So against Maureen's advice, and driven by more of a desire to plug myself back into the Emptor melodrama than I'd care to own up to, I went across to the table.

It was a Vixen Six crowd. Dannie wasn't there but Durkin was, together with his new American wife. Bringing Basil Sutherland's style of television to New York had made its inroads on Durkin's boisterous marriages as well.

Jacko introduced me to the girl, Angela his new doorknock producer. I made loose, over-eager, hollow promises about meeting up in the middle-future, when I came back to New York at the start of winter, when my book on China would be published, and so on. I even heartily invited the two women, Jacko's companion and Durkin's wife, both of whom I'd never seen before this evening. Such lengths I went to to pretend to Jacko, such lengths Jacko went to to pretend that we were as we had always been. We said sentimental things about the places I'd soon be in: about various Sydney beaches and places around the harbour, about eating hurriedly before the opera or ballet, or before one of Evans's plays performed by the Sydney Theatre Company in the flank of the great white building facing the Harbour Bridge. Dining at Kable's say, or Bilson's or Beppi's, or at Doyle's out at Watson's Bay. The world, including New York, might have its casual geography, but Sydney Harbour had its ordained geography, engraved – or you would have thought so from the way we were talking – on our DNA.

And then Jacko became less perfervid, dropped his voice and said, You ought to go and see the old woman.

—Chloe?

—All jokes aside, you ought to go up there. I believe it's quite a scene. Women's bloody commune. That's the other thing that's changed. Chloe says my bloody brother, Petie, has a thing going for Delia. Sunny's down to half the medication she was on when she left here. When she's not hanging around the kitchen drinking tea with Chloe, she trails behind the bloody helicopter pilot, the one called Boomer. She's become a real helicopter groupie by all reports.

This outcome, however, seemed to please him very much.

—Three women. That doesn't exactly make a commune, Jacko, I said.

—We're talking four, he said. Lucy's gone up there.

—What about the cello? I asked.

Burren Waters was not a credible venue for a virtuoso cellist.

—She's put off the cello. She's doing some paintings. Naturally I take the blame for interrupting her career.

—It could be so, Jacko, I told him.

But he didn't react. By now he expected me to champion Lucy.

—It's a question of what she wants, isn't it? If she really wanted the cello thing, she'd do it no matter what.

—Perhaps, I conceded without any enthusiasm.

—She'll probably tell her problems to some sensitive stockman too.

—Why not, Jacko? You've managed to find a few friendly ears yourself.

—Ha bloody ha. Go and see the old woman eh. Make sure you're back for the fall television series. I'm going to be a national idol.

I laughed despite myself.

—You'll be even more bloody uncontrollable.

—Damn right, son, he told me. But back to old Chloe. She's got this idea you've cut her off the way Bickham did.

—Why would I cut her off? I spoke to her on the phone just recently.