The Complete Stories (25 page)

“And the girls?”

“They're at the pool.”

There was an open-air saltwater pool just ten minutes away, on a walk along the Harbour.

“Miranda should have stayed,” he grumbled. “You shouldn't have to do all this.” Including the guests, there would be more than a dozen of them. He picked a round of cucumber out of the tuna salad, ruining one of her attempts at symmetry, and leaned with his back to the refrigerator.

“What can
I
do?”

“Open the wine and get me something to drink.”

Instead, he came up from behind, put his arms around her, and buried his face in her hair. Maggie laughed.

“That was lovely,” she told him, "but what about my drink?”

He opened three bottles of red, set them on the bench with the corks laid across their mouths, then drew her a glass of flagon white with soda.

For a few minutes they moved easily together in the space between table and cupboards, her stacks of empty egg boxes, the spilled waste from the bin; not touching, but in an easy association of bodies that was a kind of dance before the open-mouthed wine bottles.

The upper part of the house, its rooms all disorder and stopped noise, hung above them like a summer cloud, dense but still, alive with events that were for the moment suspended. The door to his workroom was closed for the day, its flow of sound also suspended, but on a chord that continued to reverberate in his head and teasingly unfold. It was
there, humming away, and could wait. He would find his way back to it later.

Maggie turned and looked at him. Seeing herself reflected in his gaze, she brought the back of her hand to her forehead where a strand of hair had come loose.

It was difficult to say at such moments, she thought, whether this was before or after; whether the children were about to come bursting back into their lives from the pool, from the surf, all wet towels and hair, complaints and appetites, riddles, the smell of suntan oil and Bacon Crispies—or whether they were still waiting in youthful expectancy in that one year when there had been just the two of them, in the long nights, the short days. Not so long ago really.

They stood for a moment outside time, outside their thickened bodies, in renewed youthfulness. He nibbled. She sipped. The chord moved out through the house, discovering new possibilities in what might have passed for silence.

The doorbell rang.

“Damn,” she said. “That'll be Stell. They're always early.”

At the same moment, from the back porch, came the voices of the girls, little Cassie's breathless with grievance.

“Mummy, they tried to run away from me.”

“We did not.”

“They were chasing boys.”

“We were
not”

The bell sounded again.

“You get it,” Maggie told Sam, and turned to face the onslaught.

“Now, Cassie,” she told the child, who was clinging to her hip, "stop whinging We've got visitors. Lars and Jens are here. Cressie—Ros— you should be ashamed of yourselves.”

Miranda, hair dyed pink and green in the punk style she now affected, stood in the frame of the doorway, frowning, unwilling to be drawn in.

“And so should you, miss,” Maggie told her. “I let them go with you because you're sixteen and supposed to be responsible. Sometimes I wonder.”

But the rebuke, as Miranda knew, was ritual. There was no conviction in it.

“Now go and get yourselves decent, all of you. Before the real guests appear.”

The real guests were an American visitor, Diane Novak, and her friend Scott McIvor, a much younger man than they had expected who turned out to be a local sailmaker. The others were family: Maggie's sister Stella and her two boys, Lars and Jens, and Stella and Maggie's old singing teacher, Miss Stinson. Then—invited unannounced by Miranda, it seemed, but more likely uninvited and hastily vouched for—Miranda's “best friends” of the moment, an odd pair called Julie and Don, also known “The Act.”

Sam was appalled. “How did
they
get here?” he demanded fiercely, the minute he got Maggie alone.

“I don't know,” Maggie told him. “Any more than you do. I suppose Miranda asked them. They'll be all right. I've put all the kids out in the sunroom. You just look after the drinks. And, Sam, love,” she pleaded, "try not to make a fuss.”

Julie was an intense, waiflike creature. Tossed out of home (or so she claimed) by her stepfather, she had taken herself out of school and was living now in a squat—a plywood cubicle in an empty warehouse at Marrickville. Like Miranda she was sixteen. She got herself up, Sam thought, like an anorexic teenaged widow, entirely in black, and painted her lips black and her fingernails as well—in mourning, Sam had once suggested, for her own life.

Her partner Don, the other half of The Act, was a slight, sweet-faced boy, girlish but not it seemed gay, whose pale hair had been trained to fall perpetually over one eye and who affected little pink silk ballet slippers that Julie had embroidered with vivid scarlet and emerald-green thread. Julie was a designer. She created fashion garments from scraps picked up at the Salvation Army and St. Vincent de Paul op shops. Miranda today was wearing one of Julie' “creations,” a recent present. It was a flared skirt made entirely of men's ties, in heavy satins and silks, a little grimy some of them but all vivid in colour and glossily shimmering.

She was always giving Miranda presents. Trashy jewellery she bought with her outsized allowance, miniature artworks of her own
devising and of a crazy intricacy: cages in search of an inmate, efficient tiny guillotines involving razor blades and springs—bad-luck charms all, which Sam did not want smuggled in among them. Offerings, he had once observed, to some god of ultimate unhappiness.

“Honestly,” Miranda told him. “I can't believe you'd say a thing like that! You're so ungenerous! And you think Julie's the crazy one.”

Miranda liked to scare them with lurid accounts of what Julie, poor thing, “been through.” How at seven she was abused by a favourite uncle. How three months ago she'd been raped in her plywood cubicle by half a dozen ethnic youths but had declined to press charges.

Was any of this true? Or was it, as Maggie assured him, just another of Miranda's stories? Designed to shock them into admitting how out of touch they were, how little they knew of what was really going on.

“Young people these days see all sorts of things,” Maggie told him, trying for an unconcern she did not quite feel. “Things we had no notion of. They survive, most of them—if they're sensible. Miranda is
very
sensible, you know that. All this is just showing off. She wants you to be impressed.”

“Impressed!” Sam exploded.

“In your case, love,” she told him with a twisted smile, "that means scared.”

“Well, I am,” he admitted. “I'm bloody petrified. I don't know how you can be so cool about things.”

But that was just the point, the point of difference between them. And it was the mystery of this, more than anything Maggie actually said or did, that had its effect on him, a belief that Maggie did know something he did not, and that he could rely on this to get him through all doubts and difficulties. It was what she offered him. He had no idea what it might be that he offered her in return. Now, ignoring the irruption of Julie and her pallid companion into what was meant to be a private celebration, he followed Maggie's instructions and set himself to dealing with the drinks, but was not happy. It was a mistake—that's what he now decided—to have made his first meeting with Diane Novak a family affair.

For one thing, it had become clear that she hadn't made this trip “down here” only to see him. However eager she appeared to be, and full of interest in his workplace, the house, the bottlebrush with its
sprays of pink-and-gold blossom that drooped over the front porch— "Callistemon, I think,” she pronounced accurately—all the flow of energy in her, and it was considerable, was towards the young sailmaker, Scott, one of those easy-going, utterly likeable, ponytailed young fellows from good North Shore families and the best private schools who, instead of following their fathers into accountancy or the law, went back, led by nothing more radical than their own freewheeling interest, to trades their grandfathers or great-grandfathers had practised, and became carpenters and did up houses, or built boats, or made surfboards or sails.

Diane Novak was from Madison, Wisconsin. Three years ago Sam had come across one of her poems in an anthology and was led to set it to music. Later he sought out others and had ended up with a loose cycle. He wrote to her. Diane Novak wrote back. A correspondence developed.

Correspondence.

He had never given much consideration to the word till then, but “correspondence” and all it implied seemed entirely rich and right for what had since then flowed so easily between them: the current of curiosity and interest, of shy revelations on his part, flights of extravagant fancy on hers; jokes, wordplay, essays in boldness that took them, he had sometimes felt, to the edge of flirtation; small hints at the erotic. A hint too of darker things. Disappointment. Pain. Which his music had found in the poems, and which corresponded, he felt—there! that word again—to something in himself that had remained to this point wordless, though not entirely unspoken.

There was nothing dangerous in it. No suggestion of an affair, even a long-distance one. He passed all Diane's letters on to Maggie, though he suspected she did not read them, and could, without fear, have shown her his own. The deeper connection was impersonal. It lay in the inwardness with which he had taken her words, felt out the emotion there that had given them just their own shape, weight, texture, and found music for it. Released, she might have said, the music that was already in them and in her. She recognised that. Had felt it strongly as something secret, though not quite hidden, that he had subtly but again secretly made plain, for which she was grateful to the point of an agreeable affection that constituted a correspondence of an even more intimate
kind. Inexpressible, or rather not needing expression, because he had already expressed it for them in the thing itself—the music.

So there was no need for them to meet, she told him. They had already done that, in their own chaste but public consummation,
there.

In the meantime, they could joke about passing one another as intimate strangers on the moving walkway in some airport, Hawaii or Atlanta, or pressing fingertips on either side of a glass partition in Anchorage.

When she wrote out of the blue announcing a visit, he had assumed, foolishly, and with some trepidation, that she was coming because of him. But then, from her hotel, she had called and admitted to another “down here,” this Scott the sailmaker, whom she had met at a poetry reading in Seattle. And now they were seated, Diane Novak, this Scott, who at twenty-seven or so was a good twenty years younger than his companion, at the big pinewood table in their front room, together with Maggie's sister, Stella, and Miss Stinson. Maggie and Diane, Sam thought, seemed entirely relaxed and easy with one another, like old friends united in understanding.

Of what? he wondered. Him?

Only now did it strike him that Maggie might have her own correspondence with Diane Novak. Through the words he had found music for. To which Maggie, in performance, had brought an exploratory sense, which she was now testing, of the other's shifting emotions, but also her own presence and breath. Is that why he felt so uncomfortably displaced, the only one here who seemed out of tune with the occasion?

The truth was, he was confused.

Very blonde and tanned, very carefully presented, but in a stringy way that was a mite “American,” Diane Novak was not what he had pictured. There were angularities to her that he had not foreseen. Something in the way she came at things—too directly, he thought— set him ill at ease. He wondered now if there had not been in her letters a suggestion of—what? Artfulness and high self-mockery that she had expected him to share but that he had mistaken or missed.

In her letters, not in the poems. She was rounder, softer there. Or was that because he had translated the poems so fully into Maggie's sphere?

Either way, while remaining excited, fascinated even, he had begun to doubt his clear sense of Diane Novak, and was disconcerted by the
speed with which she and Maggie, for all the differences between them, had caught one another's tone.

D
IANE
N
OVAK
was also disconcerted. She had brought presents, of course: jewellery of various kinds for the girls, a Ferragamo scarf for Maggie. For Sam a pair of Indian moccasins. He had received them, she thought, as if they were an exchange, not quite adequate, for something she had deprived him of, rather than as a gift, and was suddenly aware of all those little signs of unease she had felt between the lines of his letters and put out of mind, but which in the man himself were too close to the surface to be ignored. Goodness, she thought, what have we got here? She was disturbed a little, amused a little, but also touched.

Because the music he had found for her was so inward, so intuitive and acute, she had assumed a degree of knowingness in him that had led her into a kind of playful exaggeration that she saw now might have been a mistake. He wasn't at all knowing. He was, for all his sleekness, altogether boyish and at the mercy of his own wild starts and emotions.

Proprietorial too, she saw. Of herself, of Maggie. Of everything. She would have to be careful of wounding him. She would have to rely on Maggie to get them through.

Thank goodness, she thought, for Maggie.

She shot Sam a glance that was meant to be reassuring, collusive even, but all he did was look alarmed, and she was reminded yet again of how much of what life cannot deal with may be taken up, taken care of and reconciled, in the work.

She was well aware of what this meant for her own work, and had assumed that he too must know it—which is why she had responded so completely to him. She saw now that he might not. And saw too, almost too clearly, how much of “life” his work might have to make up for.