My Hundred Lovers (19 page)

He holds her weeping head against his chest for a long time, stroking her hair. She smells again the smell of his caramel skin, feels again the feel of his steady hands, and notes how gently he holds her.

Oh! What is wrong with her that she should have walked away from his steady hands and his eyes with their heavy, dark lashes?

‘I can't see you again, you know,' he says.

‘I know.'

After he has gone she makes a vow that, like him, she will strive to find someone to love.

She is almost thirty. She fears that her character is already set, fixed until death. She fears that she is destined to live out her life within the poor confines of her unwitting compulsions.

SIXTY-TWO
Super Nan

BUT WHERE IN THE WORLD
does the Suspicious Wanderer belong? Is it in Sydney, Australia, or Paris, France?

And—most troubling of all—to whom does she belong? Does nobody claim her but her nan?

She feels she has lived all her days in voluntary blindness. She feels as if she is approaching some hidden, decisive moment. She might have given herself away too freely, too easily, in a way that reveals how little she loves her body as her own. She lost her body so long ago she has forgotten that she lost it.

Once again the Suspicious Wanderer flees the scene, from one side of the world to the other. Unlike her great-grandmother Lil, who was once frightened of bushrangers, and unlike her blind great-great-grandmother Rose, who grew watercress upon a flannel, she can time travel. But, like them and like Mademoiselle Emilie Joubert and like that perished line of giggling sisters, she belongs to the unbroken river and to the current's remorseless flow.

Two days before she leaves again for Paris, the woman goes with Nana Elsie to visit Super Nan in the nursing home. Super Nan looks tiny in the bed.

‘Hello, Mum,' says Nana Elsie, ‘we've brought you some mango.'

Super Nan is ninety-nine years old. In three days she turns a hundred. A hundred! That small head full of years. Her eyes are the size of currants, plonked down on either side of her nose, which appears to have grown. The girl who was once famous for being the most beautiful girl in Orange has a nose so large it resembles one of those fake noses held on with a piece of elastic.

‘Come here, love,' she says.

The Suspicious Wanderer gives her a kiss. ‘Hello, Super Nan.'

She has lost her wits. Before she moved into the nursing home from Nana Elsie's house in Five Dock, she was rising at three o'clock in the morning to cook a baked dinner, which often involved trying to cook the cat.

‘How did you get in?' Super Nan says.

‘We just walked in,' the Suspicious Wanderer replies.

Super Nan looks at her daughter. ‘Who's she?'

‘That's Elsie,' the Suspicious Wanderer says. ‘Your daughter. Your favourite girl.'

Super Nan looks at Nana Elsie as she goes about the business of pulling up a chair by the bed, opening the Tupperware container of freshly sliced mango, and finding a clean spoon.

‘Come on, Mum,' Nana Elsie says. ‘Open up.'

Sometimes the Suspicious Wanderer comes by herself to the nursing home. After she has visited Super Nan she always goes to the sitting room, where there are other old people whom nobody comes to visit. Survivors of themselves, washed up on some far shore, they are immeasurably happy if she sits with them, taking their bony hands between her fleshy fingers.

She particularly likes one old man with a thick Scottish accent.

‘What are those people doing?' he asks her once, indicating the other old people in the room.

‘I don't know,' she says.

One of the cheery nursing assistants tells the Suspicious Wanderer that the old man is originally from Edinburgh, and that he came to Australia as a young man to teach. His wife is long dead; they had no children.

The next time the Suspicious Wanderer goes to the nursing home she takes with her a framed photograph of Edinburgh that she saw for sale in an op shop for fifty cents.

But the old man is not in the sitting room.

‘He's had a stroke,' a nurse tells her. ‘He's in his room, number fourteen. He can't speak.'

In his room the old man is by the window, lying in a reclining chair, covered by a rug.

‘Hello,' she says. ‘I hope you won't mind a visitor. Look what I found.'

She walks towards the window, holding up the photograph. He tries to turn his poor, twisted head. His face has fallen in, one side completely collapsed; there is drool on his chin.

He makes a gurgling sound.

He looks at the photograph.

The last time the Suspicious Wanderer saw her great-grandmother, Super Nan asked her what Paris was like.

‘Is it as good as Sydney?' she said.

She really did ask that. The Suspicious Wanderer wrote it down on a piece of paper because she was so struck by the clarity of the question.

She never got to tell Super Nan that Sydney or Paris, Melbourne or Boston, no-one said ‘Anyway' like her.

SIXTY-THREE
The wine lover

THAT LIQUID OF THE FIVE
senses, of myth and desire! Pearly, clear, tawny, the palest straw yellow, how I love your dance upon the tongue, the sound of you being poured into a glass, the smell of you.

The shimmering ice-cold wine I drank with my new husband at a table in the garden of a faded hotel in the spa town of Royat, France. The leaves were starting to fall from the chestnut trees around our heads and on the table a perfect late-summer peach and two honeymoon glasses of the most fragrant, delicious grass-coloured wine I had ever drunk in my life.

That first glass of champagne we drank after the birth of our son, the cork hitting the ceiling, the champagne overflowing from the bottle, spilling onto my husband's shaking hands. The bubbles swarming in my throat, fizzing, bursting, excitement made manifest.

The juicy Corsican wine I drank at Horatia's stone house, that object lover with whom I was in love. We were on its roof, seated at the long wooden dining table under the stars, eating silvery fish. The fish might have swum up from the sea through the valley to our table, so fresh and alive did they seem.

I turned my face to heaven, the wash of wine in my mouth, intoxicated by the air, the stars, by the stones beneath my feet warm from the sun. I had no money, no savings, no house of my own and yet I felt myself to be richer than Croesus.

The mysterious alchemy of the grape turning to wine, the rows and rows of vines near Fitou in the south of France turning orange, red, russet, burnt, in the days before the
vendange.
Farmers, princes, the rich, the poor, everyone is equal before the grape, the workers filling up their plastic petrol containers with
vin de pays
through a rubber hose, the titled rich strolling through private vineyards as manicured as the finest tended gardens. The mysterious alchemy of the sugar-filled fruit turns everyone
égalé
because hierarchies disappear before it.

The mysterious alchemy, too, of getting drunk, the wine working its way within me, running in my veins like a fresh, cool river, loosening my limbs, my shyness, my cares. The way being drunk makes me feel happy, loved and loving, everything wrong miraculously put right. The stars are reachable, the world has a meaning, and if alcohol is a depressant its message is undeliverable while wine runs like a stimulant in my veins, rendering anything possible. I know boys who have leapt off bridges and girls who have run naked down the street while that fresh, cool river runs exhilaratingly fast over fears, worries, over every rock blocking the way.

That happy memory of drinking wine from one of the remaining fine crystal goblets carried in the suitcase of a sixteen-year-old blind girl from Ahascragh.

Drinking wine from such an object was like supping with memory itself, raising a glass in the company of ghosts. I never once raised one of those goblets without being conscious of my pulsing fingers against the stem. I felt my fingers to be alive, sensate, warm, as the fingers of that blind girl, Rose, had been too. I felt the tracery of her fingers against my own and the imprint of her lips as I sipped. Each of us, every one, joined in the democracy of our transit.

Drinking wine from those glasses turned every wine aromatic to the tongue, too. There was something about the shape of the fine glass, the sensory feel of it against the fingers, the way the bowl of the crystal sat upon the stem that distilled every wine to its essence.

The glasses fitted my hands perfectly, as if especially made for them.

Each glass had a fine turned rim at the top, perfectly shaped for swallowing lips. Just below the little rim, the glass was etched with a curly delicate pattern, so that the full fat centre of each glass sparkled in the light.

Now there is one sparkling goblet remaining.

SIXTY-FOUR
Paris

IN PARIS THE WOMAN, WHO
was almost thirty, with no house or money or children, stayed in one of Horatia's large spare rooms in her apartment on the rue Saint-Jacques.