My Hundred Lovers (6 page)
A vocal dog, given to loud theatrical yawns, and groans of erotic pleasure when stroked. Neither before nor since have I come across a dog who so clearly signalled his joy: when I held Rhett against the length of my body, when I was still so small that the span of a warm outstretched dog from tail to snout was greater than my own, he emitted long, satisfied groans in my ear. I felt his heartbeat, lighter and faster than a human's, as if all his life was being used up more quickly. I lay with him in my arms on the carpet or on the grass, and he gave out great, hot sighs.
My father owned a travel agency, which meant our family got cheap international airfares. This was in the early days of jets, when flying was thrilling and strange, an exclusive privilege granted to the rich and the exotic, and we were frequent flyers before the term was invented. (Travel, too, gave my father the chance to fly in and out of our lives like a man on a magic carpet.) When we flew away, to Disneyland or Fiji or New York, Rhett moved to a kennel. It was always the same kennel, Waggin' Tails, and somehow Rhett always knew the moment he was put in the car that he was being packed off. All the way to Waggin' Tails he howled, a head-thrown-back, deep-throated whine of misery. We tried everything: furtively packing his water and food bowls in the car in the dead of the night before, investigating new and more labyrinthine ways of negotiating the streets to the kennel door. How did he know we weren't going to the beach or to the national park for a picnic? How did he know he was on his way to incarceration at Waggin' Tails and the enforced friendships of other dogs, to long, sad days of separation from everyone he loved?
At the kennel car park we had to wrestle him out of the car. My brother Paul and I attempted to take one end and my father the other but it always ended in a wild scramble of nails, hair and teeth and my father picking up Rhett and carrying him in. When Rhett was set on the floor of Waggin' Tails' reception area, his last-ditch attempt was to put on the brakes, to concentrate the full force of his muscular twenty-five-kilo body into his stiff, unmoving legs. We had to drag him down the corridor, his four legs comically extended like a dog in a cartoon, his nails skidding on the linoleum. It was like pulling a small truck or a dead body, but when we finally wrestled him into a cage all the weight went out of him, and all his puff. He accepted defeat, floating to the floor as if he suddenly weighed no more than a kitten.
Rhett comforted me when I was sad, resting his large, understanding head against mine while I cried. I do not think it is anthropomorphic projection to say that Rhett felt unhappy when I was unhappy, and happy when I was happy, and that we shared some magical, speechless accord. He had a keen empathy, the ability to swiftly assess emotional temperature and to align himself with it. Rhett had his own strong, independent emotions, too; he could get jealous, for example, and when I patted other dogs he instinctively batted them away, giving them a sharp nip around the ears for good measure.
If I have ever had another lover who loved me more, his name is a secret.
ON FIRST SEEING THE CLOUDS
below me, those great swelling blooms of vapour, those mountains of air, I was confirmed in my love of going somewhere. The earth was free and the sky was open! I was suspended in time, or rather travelling in it, my body and time as one, moving through space, through matter, through the wonders of enigmatic existence.
Movement enraptured me, or, more particularly,
sic gloria transit
mundi
, a sudden apprehension of the passing glories of the world. In flight I was a body transported, joined to all that passing glory, and it did not matter where I was from, or where I was going.
WHEN I TURNED TEN, A
fizz of adrenaline lit up my veins, causing my breath to come fast, making me bounce from foot to foot as if in preparation for a race.
Every afternoon I experienced a queasy mixture of excitement, shyness and anticipation as I waited with sweating palms, a thumping heart and a dry, hot mouth for
The Monkees
television show.
I was at the beginning of my desire to dash myself against the perfect lover, perpetually out of range, in the form of a boy or man who would never love me back. The Monkees drummer, Micky Dolenz, was my first lover in that dream in which no matter how hard we dream, the perfect lover remains beyond.
Later, even when certain lovers breathed into my face, they were still afar.
I AM NO LONGER SUPPOSED
to smoke. I am supposed to recognise the cigarette for the lethal drug it is, for its toxic mix of chemicals and death. But certain men and women are known for falling towards what is wounding with what can only be described as open-hearted intent. For someone like me, raised by a spoilt man wreathed in smoke, weaned by a red-nailed, ash-covered beauty, the cigarette has a seductive, hypnotic pull.
I love the cigarette's siren call to my mouth, the rude intimacy of holding a cigarette between my lips. I love the sensuous connection between the round filtered tip of a cigarette and the nipple, the suck of it, the drawing in. I love a cigarette's poisonous spill into my blood, the electric rush of nicotine to my brain. Because I don't smoke often, the first cigarette hits my nerves and blood and heart in one hot druggy rush, a venomous blossoming in my lungs that sometimes makes me lean against the nearest thing for fear that I might faint.
A GIRL WHO HAS FELT
the knife against her throat and imagined that upon her tongue blooms a thousand flowers naturally falls in love with her father.
The girl's father is a charismatic and glamorous figure to her, and she quickly takes his side over her mother's. She is perhaps obeying some deep unconscious impulse to win the father from the mother, since the mother is her rival for his love. It is not uncommon for a girl to try out her emerging sexuality on her father, but when that father is a man compulsively driven to seduce as many women as possible, this may prove a fatal introduction.
Her father never tries to seduce the girl in a literal sense, but he seduces her into a world of sexually incontinent, feckless men, so that for many years the only men she finds attractive will betray her.
The afternoon Sharon from the office calls her father at home the girl instinctively knows to lie when her mother asks who is on the phone. âIt's Nina,' she says.
âHaven't you just said goodbye to her?' her mother remarks. âI don't know what you girls find to talk about.'
It is true that the girl speaks to Nina Payne at recess and at lunchtime and then talks to her all the way home. She speaks to her on the telephone every afternoon, too. But the days have long passed since Nina Payne was the girl's sexual slave and they never talk about that time. They never talk either about whether Nina Payne is better-looking than the girl, or whether the girl is better-looking than Nina Payne, although this is the true subject that concerns them. They are squaring up to their futures, trying to find out what each girl carries in her basket.
When her father gets home, the girl waits until her mother has left the room before she tells him Sharon called. He is mixing himself a martini, his new favourite drink, and before him on the coffee table are some brochures for the new hotel he is going to take them to in New York.
âWhat did she want?' her father asks.
âGuess,' she replies.
Her father looks up from the business of ice cubes and silver tongs (it is the days of cocktail shakers and ice-cube holders). It seems to her that he looks at her properly for the first time in her life. She feels dazzled, singled out, special. She is twelve years old.
He sips his drink and lights another cigarette.
Then he smiles.
Soon after this the girl happens to catch sight of her father and Sharon sitting together in a parked car not far from the travel agency. She is walking Rhett, who is taking his time investigating the bouquet of urine left against a fence by some previous dog. While waiting for Rhett to finish his sniffing, the girl chances to look into the car containing her father and his girlfriend.