Quipu (6 page)

“For a man of only 47 he’s done exceptionally well, you know,” Ray confides. “His
Hostellerie du Moulin de Mougins
received three stars last year, which makes him only the seventeenth great chef holding that honor at present.”

Joseph gazes gloomily at his plate. He hates raw vegetables.

Grant Moore flips open a file, scans it rapidly, props it out of sight. “Is that right? Let me quote you something that your fellow ‘hike’ Mike Murphy said at last year’s dust-up. This is from a man with a recorded IQ of 186. He said this: ‘Hike groups are antisocial and corrosive. They damage your openness to the rest of the world and promote a fascist sense of narcissistic superiority. It’s like heroin: it gets in and seeps through the person, rotting as it goes.’ How do you—”

“What is truly astounding.” Ray says piercingly, taking more wine, “is that Vergé got his first star as recently as 1970. Just five years, Grant. That’s even more remarkable than Paul Bocuse, who had one star in 1960 and took until 1965 to get his third. Of course, it helps to have your own restaurant. Poor Guérand is still—”

“Why are you avoiding—”

“Grant, the whole world’s heard of
Cuisine Minceur
but the poor devil’s still waiting for his third star. Of course, it didn’t help when the authorities went and ran a highway through his original establishment. This terrine is very nice, Jean-Pierre.”

“Thank you. I shall give you fresh peaches for dessert, and black coffee.”

“Great.”

Grant regards him balefully. “Are you quite finished on that topic?”

Ray says very rapidly and clearly, “The international Convocation is being conducted at the Humanities Research Center by some two hundred people brought together by an entire swag of motivations. Some will listen dutifully to discussions of multi-factorial competence evaluation. Others’ll mill about with their friends from here and abroad, friends they’ve made through a curious but painless interest in their own particular forté, which is to be clever. They will get plastered if that is their vice, and stand up in front of each other and give, we can only hope, entertaining addresses on various topics. Joseph here will talk about his attempts to pin down a kind of faster-than-light sub-atomic particle.”

“Yeah, I—”

“And the common theme will be plain friendship among people whose intellectual capacities, through no fault of their own, outstrip those of virtually everyone else on this plodding and pragmatic planet.”

“Look, this isn’t a—”

“Grant, let me ask you one question. Are you caused to tremble in your bed if you learn of the convening of a company of, I dunno, of tegestologers all panting eagerly at the prospect of comparing their beer-mat collections? Or is it just
smart
people that worry you?”

Grant leans sideways across the table and pours expensive wine. “So you hikes reckon you’re too smart to bother with the rest of us?’?

“By no means. The Convocation is open to anyone who takes a supervised test and scores suitably. Even those who fail are invited to join the forum discussions. You have nothing to worry about, Grant. Some of my best friends,” and Ray pats him reassuringly on the hand, pauses for a killing beat, “are…mediocre.”

The interviewer laughs explosively, slapping the table top. “You bastard! Okay, Shirl, let’s have the peaches for Christ’s sake.” He roars again, perfectly unruffled, confirmed in his impeccable self-worth by a million viewers.

1983: dropping in

The end of Joseph’s pot-holed streetlet is barred by an impressive piece of Contemporary Italian Pastrycake: all brown brick and bronze aluminum windows, row upon row of fat-calved white pillars on verandahs at multiple levels, no entrance way without its pair of barfing lions, pre-pubescent stone lads chubbily hovering over small fountains with urine only potentially cascading from their unnipped pizzles, for their water has been cut off along with the supply to the above-ground pool all crusted with tiny tiles in ornate patterns. The drought enforces equality of opportunity.

Shuddering, Brian Wagner hops from his parked car, pushes open the tired rusty gate. Joseph is not a keen gardener at the moistest of times; in this season of despair within and without, his poor array of shrubbery sags and browns, a vegetable Auschwitz.

On the verandah, out of the direct sun, Brian takes off his sunnies and considers plugging his nostrils with wads of Kleenex. The reek of unspayed tomcats cannot be ignored. He locates the electricity meter, watches the flat disc edging its round like the notorious mills of God. Running the fridge, presumably. If the telly were on for the afternoon soaps and quizzes, the thing would be whipping along at a hungrier pace.

Brian belts the door once or twice. He hardly expects Joseph to come rushing to answer his summons, but he opens the wire screen anyway and waits. Is there a flicker at his eye’s edge? The bedroom curtain pushed ever so slightly aside? He lowers his head, shoves his right index finger into the dull brass letterbox flap, looks into gloom. The stench is worse closer to the ground.

“Hey Joseph, it’s me. Put down that copy of
Hustler
at once and clean yourself up.” No response. A cat mews. Another scampers, a gray flash across the end of the hallway extending down the middle of the house. Well, if they’re still here and being fed, he must be alive. Brian shudders at his own instant vile conjecture: unless they are eating poor old Joseph’s decaying bod.

“Wake up, you bastard. It’s Wagner.”

Now even the cats are silent. Could he be out? After all, he has to do his shopping some time. Still, the laws of chance deny that Joseph could have been so consistently about his own business during all three of Brian’s visits to date. He must be lurking in there, feeling sorry for himself, drooping and getting drunk and reading old quipu, his obsessional anodyne when he gets into these self-destructive moods.

“Listen, did you get that
SMART GENES
I sent round?”

That ought to galvanize any clever dick of spirit. It fails to do so. Wagner puts his mouth to the propped-open letter slot and speaks with exaggerated care.

“I will go, Joseph, if that is what you wish me to do. However, I must leave you with one heart-warming item. The other night, I took Kathy to dinner at the Finlays’.”

This is untrue and preposterous, on at least three counts: Ray and Marjory are still holidaying in trendy Pearl Beach, a thousand kilometers to the north; it is unlikely that Marj would have him in the house on so intimate a basis as dinner for four; and Kathy Schutz is deeply entranced by Jim Westcott, a part-time savate instructor. These elements of confusion and mystery may embed themselves in Joseph’s unconscious, with any luck, and fester there. Anything to stir the swine into action.

“As you will know, Joe, if you have been keeping abreast of your hikeish reading, I have become very fond of that new artform, the mini-saga. The haiqu, if you’ll allow the pun, of our prosy age. The epic of the digest epoch. I was inspired to record our dinner at Finlays’ as a fifty word mini-saga, Joseph. If it will help improve your mood, I shall now recite this informative tale through your keyhole.” He squints again into the dusty hallway. Nothing moves. Perhaps a cat snores.

He sighs. No doubt it would be possible to go around the back and clamber over the fence, although Williams Senior, half paranoid before the cancer got him, had festooned the backyard with nasty coils of barbed wire. Besides, Joe really would not appreciate such a direct assault.

“I call this work ‘A Nice Night’s Epic’,” he cries dismally through his narrow aperture. “Are you listening? Are you poised? Not a spare syllable here, Joe. Not one phoneme wasted. For God’s sake don’t sneeze halfway through or you’ll destroy the whole majestic flow and counter-thrust of the narrative sweep. Okay. Here it is. This one is for you, Joseph D. Williams.”

Theatrically, Brian Wagner clears his throat. A blob of mucus hurtles into his mouth. As he turns to spit it into the stricken garden, he notices the interested Mediterranean faces peering down at him from the atrocious castle. He gives a jolly wave and returns to his brass hole.

“‘We went to the Finlays’ to dine. We drank, ate pate with bread. The meat was pink, cooking.’” Has there been some minor shift in the tension running from bedroom through the hallway to the front verandah, that inaudible psychic hum detected by the hairs on the back of the hands? Wagner has a flickering mental image of Joseph lifting his head from the pillow, turning a shabby unshaven face toward the heavy curtains that block the windows.

“‘We ate paté with bread, drank. The meat darkened.”’ He pauses. There is no change. To his imagination comes a whiff of pork, bubbling under a grill, crisping at its thick hard edge, the rind drying into crunchy salty crackling. Does hungry, heart-crushed Joseph respond with the same mental zest? Is his dry mouth beginning to fill with anticipatory juices?

“‘We drank mineral water, champagne.’” He hesitates through a cruel beat. “‘The meat was burnt.’” Was that the faintest snigger from the house? “‘We ate paté and bread; everybody drank,’” he concludes bleakly. “‘Back home, tired, we opened a can.’”

One of the Italians has come out onto his verandah and stares down in a menacing manner. Joseph has always maintained that this is one of the strong selling features of the area, and Brian admits that it is one of the few enviable aspects to living in the non-Anglo segments of the near-inner city residential areas. They keep an eye on one another. Much less chance of getting burgled. Unless, of course, they are the ones who do the burgling (which, by and large, they aren’t, preferring to obtain their out-of-pocket expenses by burning down one another’s pizza parlors for the insurance).

Brian straightens, rubs at his back. He’s heard none of the laughter he’d hoped to provoke. Either the bugger actually isn’t in after all, or is in worse straits than anyone had guessed.

Brian trudges to his car. The faces stare down like something banal out of a Fellini movie. “It doesn’t really work without the close-ups,” he calls to them with an idiotic smile. “If you pressed yourself against the wall we could try some Antonioni.” But they do not hear this last; he is in his car, turning the key, backing out across the damaged asphalt and the shattered spray of glass where the laughing irrepressible wog kids have smashed their drained bottles of Coke and Fanta.

1969: workers compensation

Randwick, NSW 2 December

My dear Joseph

The academic life. I’m sitting in the sun in the Roundhouse in the university at Kensington, where I have acquired a position as cleaner.

I am staying with Lanie at her brother’s place. He and his wife are polite, well-off, no kids, perfectly happy with their middle-class way of life (stockbroker or something; she’s an art teacher). I can stay indefinitely, so I think I’ll just work here through the summer and see how I feel then.

Why am I not living in bliss with dear Antony? He didn’t say a word, I had to work it out for myself. He’s been offered a job at Kuringai National Park as a Ranger—collecting tolls at the gate, actually, but it appeals to some fantasy of the outdoors life. I’ve never met anyone (apart from you) less like the outdoors type. I’m fed up with his cowardice and dishonesty, and mean to have it out with him when he gets back from looking at the Park. The situation is unbearable—I’ll have to bail out soon.

Before he hitched up to the Park, he and I and Francine went out to dinner in a trendy Paddington pub. Painful. She kept making claims on him, taking his arm, sort of shoving me out of the picture. Not that I minded really. Just so sad that she’s this clingy. I drifted off and talked to lots of other people, and finally got invited to a party while the other two went crabbily home. Antony realized that he wasn’t so essential to me as he’d imagined.

I feel rather desolated, don’t know what to do with myself. So frustrated, reading and going to gallery exhibitions, unable to express myself in any of these arts that involve me so intensely. There’s no outlet. I’m frightened of going mad again. The only solution I can think of is suicide which is so selfish but…

I got the bus over to Double Bay and took that John Barth book back to Henry for you. He’s working on an encyclopedia at the moment and sent his sympathies for your dreary job. Maybe you could write and see if he could put some freelance encyclopedia writing your way?

I’ve joined a group called the Women’s Liberation & Revolution Group which is beaut. I’ve always maintained that woman is the underdog and it’s time to bite back. Read some quite interesting literature on the topic, including a thing on the Vaginal Orgasm which refutes the myth that the vagina rather than the clitoris is the site of orgasm—it’s supposed to be one of the most insensitive organs in the body. If that’s true, it’s strange that men don’t have one.

Very impressed with Mailer’s
Armies of the Night.
The way he is allied with and simultaneously alienated from the Movement. How his ego reciprocates etc.

A movie I saw on the Black Power movement (
Uptight
) threw me into confusion. The notion that the Negroes have tried everything conciliatory that they can came through strongly. The only option left is violence. But even if they succeed, what then? Massacre and counter-massacre? “It doesn’t matter if we are killed, we were born dead.” The audience didn’t appear to be greatly affected. They’d done their “thing” by going. Back to the dope and the telly. People in Australia just ignore so much—it’s very exasperating.

Got a letter from Margie informing Lanie and me that a man is the answer to all our problems. How can such an intelligent woman be so naive. Settle down with babies and ignore everything.

So life goes on, week by week, hour by hour, stuffing food down our throats to survive week by week. Until my next epistle, all my love,

A DOG’S WIFE

…eight

I suspect that what brought Fiona around in the end was the flamboyant song and dance my father laid on when the word reached him in Hollywood or at whatever banal location he was shooting his latest depredation. My desire to marry he found innately disagreeable, as who would not having entered that singular state fourteen times. (It’d eventuated that his wife was, in fact, a woman, though only just. Had the rules of entry been a hair more stringent Marcia might easily have graced the hippo category. Still.) Yet Randy discerned a redemptive quality in my choice of spouse.