My Hundred Lovers (13 page)
She was back in the arms of the shadow lover, but she was also not really back. Even as she kissed his ghostly lips, her spirit was away.
She slept with a film-maker many years older than her, who wanted to film them fucking. She said yes, but she meant to say no. Afterwards she wondered if the film-maker had wiped the film as he promised.
Sometimes she wonders if somewhere in the world today there is a film of a young woman, recently turned twenty-two, looking as if she is not sure what she is doing, if she is here or there, asleep or awake.
She slept with a sad-faced boy at a party because the shadow lover was at the party too, except that she could not find him. She searched every room, the front yard and the back, before finally glimpsing him down the lane behind the backyard of the house. He was fucking a girl against a fence and the Suspicious Wanderer quickly ran inside and grabbed the hand of the sad-faced boy and led him to the nearest bedroom.
She slept with an Italian hairdresser with the splendid name of Leonardo della Francesca, who came on her stomach because he did not trust women. He said all women were manipulative by nature and every woman wanted a husband. He would not put it past one to trick him into marriage by accidentally-on-purpose becoming pregnant.
One day she inadvertently slept with all three. This is how it happened: one evening she went to bed with the older film-maker, a sensual and lazy lover who lapped at her lips and between her legs. In the morning they made love again, still slippery from the night before. Every girl in the whole world was on the pill then, and no-one used condoms.
Walking home from the film-maker's house she met the sad-faced boy. He promised to cook her lunch and afterwards they spent two gentle hours on his Indian bedspread, beneath a poster of Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser printed with the words:
For the man who said
life wasn't meant to be easy MAKE LIFE IMPOSSIBLE.
When she reached home she ran a bath and soaked pleasurably for an hour. She put on her favourite nightie and crawled between sheets freshly washed the day before. Luxuriating in the full splay of her limbs, her toes flexed against the top sheet tucked tight into the end of the bed, she sighed. She considered her body honoured, even worshipped.
She was almost asleep when she heard a knock at the door. It was Leonardo della Francesca, with a bottle of Asti Spumante and a dozen red roses. â
Ciao, bella
,' he said.
She knew that if Leonardo della Francesca knew there had been two men before him he would turn on his heel. Yet she also knew as she took his hand that she felt free and alive. In those days she still calculated her worth on how many men wished to sleep with her. She had no idea how to calculate her own value so she put herself up for market valuation, not knowing the fallibility of the marketplace or the fickleness of the laws of supply and demand.
âNo coming on my stomach tonight,' she instructed Leonardo della Francesca as she took his hand and led him to what she thought was her triumphant bed.
THIS HOUSE OF SKIN, THIS
empire of net in which I am captured, how well it has held me. Full of breath, blood, cellular intelligence, its own plans. All my stories written on it, my skin memories, the tiny crack just below the hairline where my father failed to catch me when I jumped from a tree into his catchless arms, the white stripe on the back of my thumb from a cut from a shard of porcelain, the scar high up on my hip where I burnt myself while ironing naked, my attention having wandered into an erotic daydream of the dissolute lover who made my stomach lurch whenever I saw him, as if travelling too fast in a car over an unexpected hill.
The skin tags scattered around my neck, soft brown nubbles of flesh, round. When my son was learning to speak, he loved nothing better than trying to pick one. â'Tana,' he said, short for sultana, which he imagined they were, since he could see no reason why my plentiful body, the source of everything he needed and desired, should not grow sultanas.
The first lover I slept with after I lost my husband sometimes traced his fingers around my necklace of sultanas. âFruits of the body,' he said, like a poet, and I was struck by how closely this matched my baby son's description.
Ro, with a battleaxe for a mother, betrayed by her own net of skin. Staunch Ro, firm friend to Steph and me, felled at forty, well before her mother the battleaxe, who died comfortably in her bed at ninety-three. A tiny mole on the skin, so infinitely capable!
Ro, that great hulk of a woman, with an enormous bum that sprouted straight from the middle of her back like an African woman's, that bum which rolled impressively when she walked, each gigantic buttock apparently independent of the other. âThere she blows,' Steph used to say fondly as she approached, and indeed our Ro resembled a great seaworthy vessel, unsinkable.
Sometimes, even now, I lift the phone to ring her.
Sometimes, even now, I want someone to tell me where the dead go.
FORTY-EIGHT
The lover who fell in love with desire
BACK IN AUSTRALIA THE SUSPICIOUS
Wanderer no longer felt at home. She had entered that parlous state, the terrain of the liminal, one foot in night and one foot in day. Her body was in Australia but her heart was in France, which was not her home either.
She stayed away from her family as politely as she could. She was still busy abasing herself at the hands of the shadow lover, who was telling her that she was not clever or anywhere near as beautiful as her sister. She was busy sleeping with as many lovers as possible, with as many glamorous and feckless men as she could find.
In between sleeping with men and abasing herself at the hands of the shadow lover she was busy sewing words. She was happiest of all when her fingers were swift and acting, taken up with the task of mending the word-lace. She found work as an editor on a reference book about gardens, and found beauty and satisfaction in equal parts in tidying up the scraps, the last loose threads of black upon white. You could say her fingers were searching on her behalf for a more satisfactory mode of being.
One morning a young landscape gardener came into the office. He had only ever written one or two articles before, and the Suspicious Wanderer's boss asked her to oversee the writing of an article she had commissioned. The landscape gardener, who was called Nick, was much the same age as the young woman, with an attractive looseness about his person.
That winter in Sydney was the coldest in sixty years. Snow reached the Blue Mountains, even Hornsby, and could be felt as a kind of vibration in the air. Frost frilled the mornings, enamelling the earth.
Throughout that famous cold winter when the young woman slept with Nick he kept a fire burning in his strange, falling-down house. He kept that fire burning all day and night in an old blackened pot-belly stove he had rigged up, held by wire to one gaping wall at the side of the house. It was like camping, staying at Nick's, his bed a mattress and a few sleeping bags on the floor, in a part of the house without walls. At night they lay with their faces turned up to the trembling air, looking at the stars. Nick wore a beanie to bed and the young woman took to wearing one too, pulled down hard over her ears because otherwise they throbbed with cold.
Nick was a wonderful kisser, and the Suspicious Wanderer loved kissing. She loved the creamy thrill of it, the closed-eyed sway. She loved the intimacy of her tongue inside another person's mouth, the tongue that moved words around, the tongue that was thick and alive and rooted deep in the floor of her mouth, and in his, muscled, pulsing.
The landscape gardener called Nick did not enter her the first night they lay together.
He kissed her instead, for one minute, and then two; for five minutes, for ten. He kissed her, standing up at first, then on the sofa, kissing and kissing. She felt for him beneath his clothes and he was already hard, straining, so she reached for his beltâbut he stilled her hand. His hand moved instead to her jeans, which he unzipped, pushing aside the cotton of her underpants, his fingers diving between the creamy folds.
His touch was perfect, exact, and the wetness of his mouth, the dreamy slide of the kissing, the glide of his tongue mirrored the movement of his fingers so that before long her body was engaged in a dance of throb and sway, of rise and fall. His fingers and the lips and the sliding went on and on, for so long that she knew she would come. She had to hide her face for shame, for she could feel the flicker start up inside her, the joyous heat building and building, drawing closer with each careful stroke of his fingers. His forefinger danced, around and around, up and over. She swelled and blossomed, breathing hot into his shirt, her breath fast. She squeezed her eyes and came in a shivery wave, her blood beating.
To cover her embarrassment, the Suspicious Wanderer placed her hand upon him, still hard, trapped inside his jeans. Again the landscape gardener stopped her hand.
âCome on,' she said. âDon't be scared.' She tugged at his belt.
âDo you want a drink?' he asked, breaking away and standing up. âBeer? Wine?'
He tucked his shirt into his jeans and turned away.
The same thing happened the second time they slept together.
And the third.
And the fourth.
And the fifth.
And the sixth.
And the seventh.
The Suspicious Wanderer did not know the landscape gardener well enough to ask him what was happening. She hardly knew him at all and everything that they did not know about each other stood between them.
Oh, those days! Those days in which it was possible to know the intimate geography of another human body without knowing a single thing about them. It was possible to know the exact dimensions of the left nipple with a soft hair sprouting from one side, or the precise colouring of the puckered skin around a testicle, without knowing another thing about what went on within their breathing hearts. In those faraway days girls often slept with people they did not know.