My Hundred Lovers (12 page)

MY TONGUE LOVES TO CURL
itself around a French word, to feel my lips push out into a sensual pout because French words sit forward in the mouth, well past the fat roll of tongue at the back of the throat and down and over the slippy pointed tip which meets the teeth.

A word can be as delicious upon the tongue as dissolving chocolate. My tongue loves to roll and dip around words, exotic words and plain words, foreign words and English words, strange words and familiar. A word is a kingdom, a key, a clue, a word is a thing to savour and roll upon the tongue, and if we are lucky sometimes words are all that are left to us.

At ninety-five, Nana Elsie still ruled over a realm of words. Towards the end I sat with her and held her hand even though she had lost her lips and forgotten who she was. Her words were random, mysterious, floating. ‘The clothes are burning,' she might say, or ‘Beautiful brown' or ‘She's a good cup.'

Once, in a rare moment of lucidity, she said, ‘If I gave you a thousand pounds, would you take me home?'

Nana Elsie and her radiance appeared to dwell between this world and the next, in the slippage between them, where life meets death and where time is rendered eternal.

FORTY-ONE
Words in her fingers

IN PARIS THE YOUNG WOMAN
began to formulate a plan. She wanted to hold words in her fingers as well as in her mouth, to move words this way and that.

Steph knew the manager of an English-language bookshop, who knew someone who knew someone else, and so it was that the young woman found herself working part-time in Shakespeare and Co, the famous bookstore on rue de la Bûcherie owned by the eccentric American, George Whitman. George sometimes came down from his room above the shop dressed in his pyjamas, his hair wild, to shout winningly at customers. ‘Look sharp, Deborah,' he once shouted. She was shocked to find he knew her name.

At Shakespeare and Co she met the owner of a small English press, who needed a proofreader. And so she began proofreading and copyediting, reading the pages of manuscripts, working carefully with her fingers and eyes on tiny black marks against white. It was pernickety, detailed work, requiring concentrated and discerning effort. She imagined it to resemble the art of lace-making, stitching everything perfectly together as if with a very fine needle.

Sometimes she found the work a chore, her brain anxious and trying too hard, and then she stumbled and made the mistakes that she feared. Soon she recognised that if she allowed her eyes and fingers to act instinctively, the work became fluid and easy.

She fell in love with the laws of form, the satisfactions of order, with the illusory human notion that everything could be perfected. Sometimes the fingers who loved her thought they knew everything. She was still an unfortunate romantic girl who wanted everything explained.

In wielding her needle, she came across a word she believed described herself. It was a French word,
métèque
, meaning foreigner or stranger and, more pejoratively, wog. It came from the ancient Greek word
metic
, which referred to those in the Hellenic cities who were stateless.

The definition of
métèque
she liked best of all was ‘suspicious wanderer'. She took to signing the letters she wrote to Ro back in Sydney with her new favoured initials, SW, for Suspicious Wanderer.

FORTY-TWO
Heavenly sleep

LISTEN TO THIS: IN A
global survey of some twelve thousand five hundred souls, almost sixty percent admitted they preferred a good night's sleep to a night of magnificent sex.

In nine out of ten western countries, men and women confessed that sex was all very well, but sleep was essential. Only horny Canadians preferred sex to sleep.

I lost my ability to sleep after the birth of my son. I became an incurable insomniac, listening for each newborn breath. I was his guard, and for a while I thought I had to breathe for him. By the time I discovered that I did not, it was too late, and I was tipped forever from sleep's rosy arms into wakeful vigilance.

For many years my bed, like my body, was my son's playground and his kingdom. I surrendered to him, willingly and grudgingly, because by then I knew that ambivalence lived beside me and in me, inhabiting everything, even that unbreakable watchfulness between mother and son. By then I was no longer a romantic.

When my son was a growing boy, long and stretched and fatless, his legs like gnawed chicken bones as mine had once been, I loved to watch him sleeping.

He tucked himself into sleep as if into the most comfortable of beds. He locked himself tight into its furthest corner, sealed into sweet oblivion. At the time he liked being asleep more than anything else. When he was twelve, thirteen, fourteen, his voice not yet broken, his body invisibly knitting itself into new adult dimensions, he slept for hours and hours.

He was like a newborn again, except that it was his adult self being born. He was lost, happy, found, away, in a beautiful place of his own making. His face was as composed as a mask and only occasionally would his eyelids flutter with a dream.

Now, my vigilant nights have a particular sweetness, my long-ago moments coming again in the stillness of the hour. My body's memories crowding in, my endless loves, once more awake.

FORTY-THREE
Coffee

THAT SUMMER IN PARIS BEGAN
in one single, gleaming day. One evening the Suspicious Wanderer went to bed with the sky starless, unseen clouds dense with rain. In the morning she opened the shutters to a glittering new world. Sunlight polished windows and rinsed the streets, shutters and doors and windows were open everywhere, flowers had bloomed overnight. She thought she heard laughter.

She looked down at herself, dressed in one of Nasser's oversized T-shirts, shrugged, then grabbed her bag and the house keys. ‘Paris, here I come,' she said, running down the circular stairs two, three at a time. The old stairs with their narrow wooden steps and thin, curved wooden handrails never failed to lift her heart and they lifted it now, high, high, higher.

On the street everyone looked happy. It was already hot, and she wasn't wearing anything beneath her T-shirt. The cotton rubbed satisfactorily against her high pink-tipped breasts, still unsuckled. She strode purposefully down Avenue du Maine, past Metro Alésia, past the beautiful creamy stone church on the corner, past scooters and markets and old ladies with shopping baskets and students with cigarettes and scarves.

‘I will stop at the first café I like the look of,' she said to herself, and by this she meant one that faced exactly the right way into the sun, with a table and chair situated exactly in the position she wished it. It drove Steph and Nasser mad, her insistence on choosing exactly the right café, with exactly the right chair at the right table.

‘Just bloody sit down, will you?' Steph was likely to say.

‘
S'il te plaît
, Madame Marie-Antoinette,' said Nasser.

But now she was alone. She saw a café up ahead, one facing the right way into the sun. She sat down. Immediately a waiter, wearing the obligatory white Parisian waiter's apron, came up. ‘
Mademoiselle?
' She ordered and sat back, happy.

She recommends that anyone suffering
tristesse
drink one cup of well-made coffee, slowly and deliberately, savouring the milk, the heat, the roast. Savour the flavour upon the tongue, the entrance into the body. Think of your great good fortune in being able to sit and drink a cup of coffee with your own two hands, of the pleasures of being able to taste it. You don't have to be in Paris to feel blessed: Burwood, Sydney, will do, or Brookline, Massachusetts, or the far reaches of unattractive Leytonstone.

Is there anything more seductive than the smell of coffee beans rising to the nostrils? That rich, deep aroma, conviviality made manifest, the brown, ripe smell of harvest. The woman remembers once carrying freshly roasted coffee beans home on a bus in Sydney and how the smell rose to her nostrils, which suddenly struck her as the organ through which God breathes, in that she and everyone else on the bus breathed in as one the same rich dark scent.

‘Lovely, isn't it?' said the woman sitting next to her.

‘Divine,' said the elderly woman across the aisle.

The bus rattled along with everyone on it sharing the same beautiful smell of coffee beans; the smell of shared confidences, of friendship and of pleasure.

Later, the woman drank the most perfect cup of coffee of her life, not in a nameless café in a street somewhere off the Avenue du Maine, or in a café in Melbourne, but in a room in the hills of Umbria. The steamed milk, the coffee beans, the ritual of making the cup of coffee to bring to the table, all combined to make her feel lucky to be able to drink it, with a tongue in her mouth to taste and two hands with which to hold the cup, a stomach in which to catch the earth's bounteous spill.

But on that long-ago summer morning in Paris the young woman had not yet been to Umbria. She was happy to find herself sitting alone on the first bright morning of summer in the lucky western world, feeling her unbound breasts, her free toes, the sun, her lover, warm on her skin and the wash of freshly made coffee in her mouth.

FORTY-FOUR, FORTY-FIVE, FORTY-SIX
Three men in one day

IF THE SUSPICIOUS WANDERER EVER
thought that flying away from the turban, the magic carpet and the beautiful sister would rid her of them for good, she soon realised her mistake.

When she returned to Sydney she found that the sister had grown even more beautiful, the mother more drunk, the father on his magic carpet even further away with his endless maps and horizons. The poor brother had long since stepped onto that drinking path which would lead him to an early death. The dog, Rhett, was arthritic, blind, a creature so reduced that it took him a few minutes to understand that it was her, returned, and to consequently thump his patchy old tail against the floor. The very next day the mother took him to the vet to have him put down, as if she had timed this occasion expressly for the young woman to witness. ‘It was a mercy,' she reported afterwards. ‘He just faded away.' Miss Meow had disappeared some months before.