My Hundred Lovers (14 page)
Each time the Suspicious Wanderer and the landscape gardener came together it was the same. The first kiss, the move to the sofa, the unmade bed. In the bed on the floor beneath the freezing stars he never kissed her, never tried to enter her. They lay side by side like virgins.
âDo you understand the principles of astral navigation?' he asked her one night, long after she believed he was asleep.
âNo,' she said. âWell, sort of. Isn't that when ships steered by the stars? Before compasses?'
He did not answer. Her head was full of questions and the night was cloudless, empty but for the steering stars.
The young woman wondered if the strange young man suffered from some nameless embarrassment or a rare medical condition. She might have thought he did not want her but for the evidence of the stiff press of his penis. Perhaps he was like an Indian yogi who had learnt to withhold his pleasure for hours and hours, except that as far as the woman knew, even a yogi engaged in penetration and eventually arrived at his destination. In every other way Nick was ardent in his passion, from the embrace to the stiffened penis to the tremble of his fingers each time he approached her. Was it her fault?
Before long the Suspicious Wanderer began to grow nervous before each meeting. She grew self-conscious as he began to kiss her and the approach of his mouth felt like a test. She was filled with contradictory emotions: a desire to conquer him, to see him fall to the rapturous moment, and yet also she felt ashamed, embarrassed for herself, as if he considered her an animal, raised to do tricks for his enjoyment.
She began to withhold her pleasure, for she did not want him to witness it, and soon the kissing felt like undeclared war.
Soon the Suspicious Wanderer began to make excuses when the landscape gardener called Nick asked her to the strange, cold house. She was going out, or she had work to do, or she had the flu. He called again and again, and every time she had a reason not to go to the strange, cold house.
She finished editing his article.
After a while he ceased to call and so the young woman never got to ask the landscape gardener why he preferred the building moment over the starburst spill.
In the end she satisfied herself by supposing him to have fallen in love with desire, to have fallen in love with being perpetually held in longing's grip, with the exquisite tension of never arriving.
Sometimes now, on vigilant nights, she pictures the landscape gardener grown old, still looking up at the navigating stars.
She thinks of him lying there, the beautiful moment never arriving, never ruined, never disappointing, over. It must be sublime dwelling in that house of longing, forever poised on desire's trembling tip, before everything is wrecked.
ONCE I FELL IN LOVE
with a dress. You never forget the first dress you fall in love with, and this dress was like a template for all the dresses in the world that girls longed for, rushed down the street in, got married in, sailed away in.
It was a real dress, but it was also a dream dress, stitched from wishes. A particular shade of orangey-red, beautifully cut from the finest cotton, two elegant twists of fabric at each shoulder. Whenever I put it on I felt like a different person, a person without cares. In that dress my body relaxed and became taller, stronger, happier. I rushed, laughing, down the rue de Rivoli wearing it, holding hands with the man I was going to marry, hurrying to get to the jeweller's shop before it closed to claim the gold wedding rings engraved with our names.
I wore that perfect dress for fourteen years, until its weave wore so thin in the back the material frayed in the spot where I sat down.
SOME TIME AFTER FLYING HOME,
between the shadow lover and the landscape gardener who fell in love with desire, between the dissolute lover who made her stomach lurch whenever she saw him and the Italian lover with the splendid name of Leonardo della Francesca, the Suspicious Wanderer's blood began to boil. It was as if her blood sought release from its prison of skin, as if everything inside her struggled to escape.
Whenever she was on a bus or a train the young woman fought a hot, vertiginous feeling that she must get off, rush away, be anywhere other than trapped where she was with a hundred eyes upon her. Her heart thrashed, her mouth grew dry, her palms ran with sweat, soaking tissues right through. All the pints of Scottish and Irish blood and her splash of French blood rose and slapped against her skin.
Paradoxically, she also felt herself to be skinless before the world. Boiling, skinless, trapped.
The Suspicious Wanderer could hardly bear to go to work. Sitting in the open-plan office trying to edit a book her body was primed for escape. Her blood and nerves and senses were on constant high alert, so that she only had to look up and chance upon a glance from a harmless passerby to find herself convulsed, flailing, jumping up and scrambling for the exit.
âIt's called a panic attack,' the doctor said. âNothing to worry about. In fact, the worst thing you can do is worry about it. Some men find blushing very attractive.'
He wrote out a prescription for a muscle relaxant.
The Suspicious Wanderer may have been ashamed of something.
Or she may have arrived at that moment when the dizzying responsibility of being alive was revealed to her.
She understood that she was more than a brain, a set of porous lungs, a vagina. It now appeared that she was expected to become a republic of one, even a universe.
Who was in charge here?
For many months, the rush of blood to the Suspicious Wanderer's guilty face caused her to shun the company of her fellows. Soon she became phobic about going out, lest her blood begin to boil, lest everyone wonder what it was that made her so ashamed. She had witnessed no murders, no wars and no tragedies. She was not dying. Yet she appeared to be a vehicle for suffering, a conduit for the wretchedness of the world. She was more ashamed of herself than before.
Staunch Ro tried to winkle her free. âValium! God, Deb, you're not a 1950s housewife!'
She was living in Ro's tiny cottage in Balmain, in the miniscule second bedroom that could barely accommodate a single bed. The house seemed too small for Ro and her gigantic bottom, and for Ro's cheerful boyfriend, Mick, a hippy working temporarily at a biscuit factory because he was saving to go overseas, and who every night brought home flawed, broken biscuits.
The young woman could not stop eating flawed biscuits and soon acquired a comforting layer of protective fat.
In Ro's tiny house the Suspicious Wanderer felt lumbering, huge, and when she stood up her hair seemed almost to reach the ceiling.
Like Alice, she was too big for the house.
She appeared to be growing.
âYou're looking porky,' said her father when he next saw her.
âI suggest a diet,' said her mother. Her sister smiled.
For the first time in her life it appeared the young woman could not eat anything she liked. Those well-sculpted thighs and the graceful scooped back of her girlhood were swallowed, completely gone. No-one would mistake her now for a gymnast.
It was a revelation. She noticed that being a great lump of a girl had its advantages, in that the larger she grew the more invisible she became.
She could happily live the rest of her life as a great lump of a girl, invisible, drugged, eating as many biscuits as she liked.
One morning, though, Ro strode over to the rubbish bin.
âThis is how you save yourself,' she said, throwing away the pill bottles, the repeat prescriptions, everything that stood between the Suspicious Wanderer and panic. âAnd now we are going out,' said Ro. âGet your shoes.'
The Suspicious Wanderer followed obediently in Ro's mighty wake, sluggish. Ro was naturally commanding, preternaturally composed, possibly as a result of being the daughter of a battleaxe. A woman of few words, she was as cool-headed as the young woman was hot-headed.
âKeep up,' Ro said. âWalking is a kind of cure. It's good for the lungs, it's good for the heart and it's especially good for the soul.'
And it was true: the young woman's feet held a flesh memory of freedom. As she placed one foot in front of the other, sadness loosed itself from her limbs, some unnamed, residual feeling that had lived within her for a long time, of being too long a lover of oblivion, too precariously balanced within its trancelike grip.
She could not keep up with Ro, but she kept her eyes fixed on her beautiful rolling bottom, leading her as it were through the swell.
But anyone who has ever loved knows the lover will not be thwarted. It did not take the young woman long to get another prescription. For many more months she continued to float in the loving arms of oblivion. Her mind did not seem to be involved, in that her addiction was more like a compulsion of the muscles, and her body wanted what it wanted, and did what it needed to do.
Valium's chemical promise quelled the boiling of her blood, placing an impenetrable wall between her body and the world. It reminded her of the single time she had snorted heroin, courtesy of a rich, pompous barrister, a friend of a friend, who was a recreational user. âI think of heroin as an occasional treat,' the barrister said. âLike a good bottle of Petrus.'
The young woman adored the way heroin made her feel, and how far from fear it carried her. But she was worried that she loved it too much, and never used it again.
In time in that little house in Balmain the Suspicious Wanderer became aware that the sounds of the world were increasingly muffled. Her mind was sluggish and she could not think. Everything inside her felt like it was lying down.
When her contract ended with a publisher who published cooking books she had difficulty finding more work, and when she did get jobs, publishers rarely used her a second time. Once she proofread a travel book about Australia and failed to notice that an American writer had misspelled Sydney as Sidney.