Reunion (20 page)

She supposed she should eat something and made her way back to the city and the cafés along the river. She stopped at one of the less crowded places and ordered the house speciality, a fisherman's catch breakfast. She fiddled with it until the hot portions were cold and unappetising and the cold parts were room temperature and suspect, before paying an astronomical price and re-entering the streets. She dawdled in bookshops, plodded through galleries, loitered in front of shop windows, sampled the samples at a Body Shop until it was time to catch the tram to the university for her reading.

The seminar room was already crowded when she arrived. Dotted among the traditional black-clad artistic students were quite a few in skimpy T-shirts and shorts suggesting a greater affinity with the sports centre than the sedentary life of the mind. Ava hoped that appearances would not prove too reliable. She talked with academic staff and was introduced to several students, who were variously described as ‘talented' or ‘promising' or ‘one to watch'.

At last it was time to begin. A serious young lecturer welcomed everyone – ‘The largest turn-out so far for this series' – before providing an analysis of ‘the Bryant oeuvre' in terms so abstract the novels might have been Hegelian philosophy. Then Ava stepped up to the podium, and after a brief introduction to her most recent book,
The Metropolitan
, she began the reading.

She had always enjoyed the performance aspect of public readings, so all her reading passages were well settled in memory and required only an occasional glance at the page. Today the audience was mostly comprised of creative-writing students. Five minutes into her reading she noticed two of the students playing the pads of their mobile phones. With another twenty minutes to go, it was anyone's guess how many more of the talented and promising would follow suit.

All these young men and women were enrolled in a course they believed would equip them to write the masterpieces for which they were destined. Although for many there was a greater sense of entitlement: they expected the course to grant them their masterpieces, and if the masterpieces failed to materialise it was the fault of the course and its teachers, and not any lack of ability on their part. Ava wanted to remind them that Woolf and Austen, Dickens and Henry James, the Brontës and the entire pantheon of Russians had not enrolled in a university program in order to write their novels. And despite earning a considerable portion of her own income through creative-writing courses, she wanted to tell them to quit their writing degrees and go home. Read, write, think, daydream. Writing is a slow and solitary learning, she wanted to say. Go home, all of you.

She glanced down at the page to pick up the start of the next paragraph. She couldn't find it. She couldn't find her place nor could she remember what came next. She scanned the open page. Where was she up to? Had she read that paragraph? She couldn't remember. She'd lost her place. She'd have to stop, she'd have to apologise. Never happened before. She felt faint – was she sick? – reached for her water glass and remembered just in time that the paragraph, the one she had just finished,
ended on the next page. How could she have forgotten? Her heart was thudding, her stomach fumbling, she'd saved herself just in time. She left the water on the lectern and did not raise her head for the remainder of the reading. When it was over she answered the usual questions, she signed books. And all the while her thoughts jerked back to that moment of panic, and then jerked forward to its cause an hour ahead when she would be seeing Fleur again.

 

She looked just the same. The dark angular face, the athletic figure, the turquoise jacket they had bought together on a weekend trip to France soon after the Channel Tunnel was opened, the cropped hair bristly against her cheek as they embraced. And the scent of her. So much the same, but as they settled at an outdoor table of a café in Federation Square, ruggedly different. There was the old rush of seeing her, but the churning had stilled. And the usual excitement but without the dread of new revelations. And an easy pleasure, not the wild wind of old, something more sedate, kinder, and never before associated with Fleur. As Fleur chatted away, Ava found herself thinking of the blandness of skin you no longer love. Is there anything more poignant? Anything less ambiguous? And the confusion not to be feeling what you have long been accustomed to feeling. She looked at Fleur, she listened to Fleur, she touched Fleur's arm and she was perplexed.

They were just like any old friends catching up. They spoke of work, of mutual acquaintances, the situation in the Middle East. And Africa, they spoke of Africa where they had planned to visit. And sitting across the table from Fleur, Ava decided she and Harry would make the trip. She asked about the treasures Fleur had brought out, and whether Fleur would be the courier
on the homeward journey in a few months' time. When told she would not, that these perks were shared around, Ava experienced nothing in the way of disappointment.

It was all very strange.

She asked about the woman Fleur had fallen in love with, the one who had resulted in her own dismissal, the woman whose name Ava realised with some surprise she had forgotten. Chris, Fleur said, her name was Chris, and then she laughed. It seemed her capacity to fall in love was more robust than reliable, for Chris had proved a disappointment. Fleur embarked on a synopsis of the end of that affair and the beginning and end of the one that followed. Ava listened with an oddly objective interest and, more curiously, only a modicum of unease. She was unsure exactly how to feel. Offended? Played for a fool? Amused? Put in her place? (Fleur had always excelled at putting her in her place.) And settled for amused.

As Fleur nattered on, Ava wondered about the passionate, irresistible woman who had colonised her heart, her mind, her work. Where was the woman who had supplied the spark, the vigour, the urgency that propelled her through seven breathless years? Might Fleur have always been this benign? And if so, how could Ava not have seen?

‘It is so good to see you.' Fleur laced her fingers through Ava's. ‘I really have missed you.'

Ava stared at their joined hands, aware of a weird numbness. The sharp edges had worn from her joy, the burn from her excitement; the longing had disappeared entirely. And along with the cravings, the adulation had disappeared too. Adulation: so essential to the type of relationship she had with Fleur, but – she had never before realised – only ever dished out by her. Once she would have done anything to earn Fleur's
love. But while you can earn gratitude, loyalty, a car, a house, an overseas trip, you cannot earn love.

There's nothing to be picked from the rubble of a dead love, she told herself, and reeled off some unconvincing excuses before hurrying away.

She hailed a cab, she was desperate to be home, away from Fleur and the past. It was Harry she wanted. She'd ring him in Canberra. But there was a light on when the taxi pulled up outside the house. He was home! He must have changed his plans and come home. She ran up the path. And there he was, Harry, standing in the doorway, waiting for her.

He wrapped his arm about her shoulders and pressed his cheek against hers. She nuzzled into the familiar roughness, his familiar end-of-day smell, and the two of them entered the house together.

1.

It was ten o'clock in the morning and Jack was slumped across the couch in Helen's lounge. Sun plastered the room, the white walls glared. The night had disappeared in a bottle and a half of shiraz, a few glasses of ancient cooking sherry and a couple of stale joints. Jack couldn't remember walking to Helen's, he couldn't remember anything after finding the sherry.

His skull was tolling the seconds. A slab of meat was lodged in his throat. He lurched into the bathroom; vomiting made the pain worse.

He was cleaning himself up when Luke appeared in the doorway with aspirin.

‘You sure got hammered last night,' he said.

The session had begun soon after he saw Ava with Fleur. Jack had returned to the office to collect his belongings and found Connie with time to fill. Minutes later, the two of them had headed across Princess Bridge to Young and Jackson's pub. They found a vacant table in the upstairs lounge far removed from the famed portrait of naked Chloe and her admirers, and
plunged into an alcohol-laced raging at life. Connie was fed up with TV executives who were either unable to make decisions or lacked the authority – successful pilot notwithstanding, his TV series was far from being a certainty – and Jack mourned the attack on authentic love in an age of impermanence. By the time the second bottle of wine arrived, Connie was lambasting twenty-five-year-olds who showed no need for sleep and a great need of maturity. When Jack reminded him of Linda's maturity, Connie immediately switched to a sentimental riff on Sara's charms.

They were halfway through the second bottle when Jack reported his sighting of Fleur.

‘She's here, in Melbourne. With Ava.'

‘Whether Fleur or someone else, it doesn't make much difference,' Connie said. ‘With the exception of Harry, Ava's never subscribed to fidelity.'

Jack found this ludicrous. ‘Ava's been unfaithful to Harry numerous times.'

Connie stretched across the low table and gave Jack's shoulder a kindly squeeze. ‘You never understood that of us all, all her lovers –' and seeing Jack's surprise, ‘oh yes, I had my time with her too. Of us all, only Harry was permanent.'

Although Fleur was looking suspiciously permanent too, Jack was thinking as he swallowed the aspirin Luke had given him. As for Ava and Connie, he had known of their affair even while it was happening, but preferring not to know had pushed it to the very back of consciousness where it had slipped into the black forgotten.

He took his miserable body to the kitchen. Luke looked up from his laptop as Jack entered. ‘Coffee's made,' he said, and jerked his head towards the cafetière.

Jack shot him a smile of gratitude and simultaneously Helen's voice, raised in irritation, soared into the kitchen.

‘What's bothering your mother?' Jack asked.

‘She wants to book a flight to America, but first she's trying to change the airline's scheduling policy.'

Jack laughed and clasped his head. He poured the coffee and joined Luke at the table.

‘Working?' he asked, indicating the laptop.

Luke was home on a study day, but he was not studying. ‘I'm learning self-hypnosis,' he said. ‘To help my game.' And seeing Jack's incomprehension, ‘Football. Aussie Rules. Linda's idea.' And responding to Jack's still-uncomprehending expression, ‘Linda the anaesthetist, married to Connie. Knows about the mind.'

When he was Luke's age, Jack might have used hypnosis to crank up his memory or reduce his need for sleep; he would never have considered using it for sport. Perhaps if he had been more like Luke his life now would be more than a dusty pile of yesterdays. But with neither energy nor desire to deal with it, he pushed the thought aside.

Luke was prattling on about Linda, actually he was preaching Linda, so well did he think of her. She was honest and loyal, reliable and loving, and given what Connie was doing with Sara, far too good for him.

‘Sara is far from being Connie's first indiscretion,' Jack said.

‘Indiscretion? How pathetic is that, Jack? You mean Connie is cheating on Linda. You mean he's doing her in. You mean he's fucking her over.'

Fortunately Helen put an end to the conversation. She burst into the kitchen railing at airline scheduling that disregarded the schedules of working people. She had an important meeting
near Atlanta at the end of the following week and she wanted to travel when she would normally be sleeping. ‘I don't want to waste time,' she said. ‘Is that so much to ask?'

‘And if you lost twenty-four hours would it be so catastrophic?' Luke said.

Helen glared at her son. ‘Some of us find every wasted minute unconscionable.'

‘You need to get a life, Mom.'

Still muttering about the airline, Helen grabbed a packet of instant noodles and headed for the door.

Jack was horrified. ‘You don't plan to eat that stuff. It's all chemicals and preservatives.'

Luke looked across at his mother. ‘But very convenient.'

She smiled at her son. ‘Exactly.' And then to Jack, ‘Would love to talk, so curious to know what put you in your cups. Can't stop, got to run. We'll catch up soon.'

She kissed Jack, she kissed her son, she dashed from the kitchen. She rattled around in her study, ran down the hall, swore loudly, returned to her study to collect something she had forgotten, ran down the hall again and out of the house, leaving the door to slam behind her.

2.

By mid-afternoon Jack was recovered sufficiently to go into work. Not his first preference but he felt disoriented, nothing to do with the hangover, something far less tangible, a browning at the edges of the familiar, a fraying of the fabric of his life. He had forbidden all thoughts of Ava.

Within moments of his arrival, Harry appeared in the doorway. ‘Great to see how busy you've been. And some very impressive engagements too.'

He proceeded to appraise Jack's recent calendar. The consultations with the Department of Trade were a real coup; the interview on public radio was a waste of time; the address to the shadow cabinet was politically smart. Harry had attended none of these occasions, but the newly omnipotent Harry made it his business to know everything that might be relevant to NOGA.

Jack was becoming increasingly wary of the Network. The fact was, Harry knew too much. He had his minions in the office, contemporary versions of the courtiers of old who willingly did his bidding. They turned up at selected meetings and briefings – one had accompanied Jack to the feedback session at the Department of Trade – and lurked in the corridors of NOGA. But a couple of sycophants couldn't account for the extent of Harry's knowledge.

Harry had passed comments, some of a highly personal nature, about NOGA members whom Jack knew Harry had never met. NOGA existed largely online; electronic surveillance of its ever-expanding web of members was, from a technical point of view, not difficult.

Jack had become so concerned he had confided in Connie.

Connie dismissed his suspicions. ‘Harry's done us all a favour with these fellowships,' he said. ‘And besides everyone should, as a matter of course, follow sensible web practice. Just be careful what you say on NOGA.com.' And with a kindly arm across Jack's shoulder, he wondered whether it was time to drop his ‘personal vendetta against Harry'.

Harry was now checking through Jack's upcoming engagements. He seemed so friendly, so interested, so benign, and
perhaps he was. But at the moment what Jack most wanted was for Harry to leave him alone. Finally he was finished and Jack closed the door behind him, aware of a reluctant sympathy for the poor sod given what Ava was probably doing at that very moment.

Jack stood in the centre of the room, absolutely still. He felt tense and raddled, and not just because of Ava; Harry was right, he had been busy. There had been consultations with lobbyists, bureaucrats and government advisers, and background briefings to business and export groups. Every few days the Department of Foreign Affairs contacted him, and he was the first port of call for a surprising number of foreign embassies and High Commissions. He had addressed think-tanks and university institutes, he had even been invited to speak at a literary festival. And every day brought a raft of phone calls and emails from the media requesting information, analysis, comment, preferably in a single quotable sentence. Sometimes he felt as if people hit on him instead of Google.

He tried to provide what everyone wanted – he would always feel obliged to give his best – but he was aware of a growing resistance from within. It could not be ascribed to his growing wariness of NOGA, nor the frustrating superficiality of the analysis required of him; rather it was the world events themselves which were increasingly repellent. The fact was he could hardly bring himself to study these events any more. It was not specifically terrorism and the never-ending Israeli–Palestinian quagmire, nor Iraq's disintegration and Iran's terrifying ego. It was men in a dozen different African countries displacing, starving, raping and butchering their own. It was communities reduced to rubble, fanatics waving guns, self-righteous politicians with blood on their Armanis, boys
hurling stones in Gaza and wielding machetes in the Sudan, children across the globe whose lessons in hate were so masterful that the conflicts were assured for generations to come.

It surprised him how the Israeli–Palestinian horrors brought the Jew in him to the fore, although a different sort of Jewishness than he had previously known. Like a horsehair and silk undergarment, where the horsehair was contemporary Israeli policy and the silk was Judaism's traditions of liberal humanism and learning. He abhorred the rocket attacks on Israel, a country less than a third the size of Tasmania. At the same time he was appalled when Israel acted the brute and the bully. If force were the answer then the conflict would have been settled aeons ago. Not force but reason, he wanted to say to both sides. But with hatred blowing at gale-force, reason did not stand a chance.

Horsehair and silk, and he simply couldn't watch another Israeli incursion into Gaza, the tanks crushing the possibility of peace as they cracked open streets and mowed down houses, and in the dust so much hate fomented. And he couldn't watch another Palestinian suicide bomber kill ordinary Israelis – babies, children, teenagers, mums, dads, lovers, grandparents gathered in a restaurant or travelling by bus or just walking vaguely along. He couldn't bear the violence any more.

Everywhere he saw the ferocious inventiveness of injustice, and while he hated the simplicity of the media reports he found himself choking on the complexities. It was not simply a matter of disenfranchised Muslims having nothing to lose; these young people were being brainwashed to love death more than life. Goebbels was right: you can be taught to believe anything even if it destroys you. And it was not simply a matter of Islam's failure to modernise, radical Islam was fill
ing a leadership and a values' vacuum in several parts of the world. Radical Islam was promising to restore to the Muslim people the power and confidence that used to be theirs.

So much of life was wonderful. Music, books, friendship, the natural world, the vast universe, the possibility of life elsewhere. Yet rather than these wonders, his own speciality was, increasingly, humanity's gangrenous underbelly. Every day he spoke about events that were causing him to rupture, events that had him doubting the essential human goodness to which he had subscribed all his life. He felt a responsibility to continue working in this field but a diminishing desire. That he lived in safety far from these conflicts and had no right to suffer them merely made him feel worse.

He went to the kitchen for a fresh cup of coffee. Through the open doors of offices he saw people working hard and, he assumed, with satisfaction. He wanted what they had, he wanted it in much the same way as a different sort of person would covet a Rolex or a Mercedes Benz or their own lap pool. To work, to be absorbed in a new book, that's what he wanted.

Back in his office he finished some briefing documents for the Department of Trade, then, with no particular plan, he wandered over to his bookshelves. Assuming a cool and distant curiosity – a less disinterested approach would have been too cruel given the prolonged sterility of his pen – he drew from the shelves a copy of his own first book,
Literatures of the Semites
. He wondered if Jacqueline du Pré ever listened to her own recordings after multiple sclerosis had swindled her of her gift. Not that he would put himself in her class, but still he wondered whether she ever visited her never-to-be-repeated joys and successes.

He turned to the title page, the dedication to his parents, scanned the contents – a great deal of ground had been covered for a first book – and then dipped into the body of the work. How unfamiliar it was, hardly recognisable as his own. He chose one of the shorter chapters and standing by the bookshelves read it in its entirety. It was good. He had been good.

Next he took down the original edition of
The Reinvention of Islam
and withdrew to his armchair. This was the book that had prompted his rehabilitation. He scanned every page from the dedication,
For AB
, to the end. By the time he finished, the city buildings were jutting brilliantly into the night sky, roads were glowing veins shooting into the suburbs. He closed the book and cradled it against his chest. He had been a good scholar: his analysis had been thorough, his approach original, and he had made creative and constructive use of his being Jewish.

What, he wondered, had happened to him?

 

There are Australian backblocks and American boondocks, but the back of beyond in New Zealand warrants its own category of end of the line, off the map, beyond consideration, beyond prospects, beyond hope. Whether it was lack of ambition or a self-defeating attachment to old-fashioned principles, the fact remained that if Jack had stretched the domain of comparative religion, if he had published a few papers or sought out some paying consultancies, he would never have had to resort to the New Zealand job. He had made one or two half-hearted attempts to offer his services on the open market, but in those days no one was interested in comparative religion, neither the non-religious, who saw all religious studies as anachronistic, nor the crowing packs of evangelicals and other fundamentalists who, already in possession of the truth, did
not need Jack's interpretations. As for politicians and business people, in the absence of any efforts from Jack to promote his relevance, they showed no interest. Selling himself did not appeal, and selling himself for questionable means appealed even less. Jack's contract in Australia was not renewed and he took the New Zealand job.