The Point (33 page)
He thought about the little boy Brad, who’d never existed. He did believe in him, the aborted and now imagined child that she invoked to comfort her. Stole clothes for. You probably had to think he was better off being a figment than being real. He was glad that Brad wasn’t off in Cowra being looked after by a drunken grandmother and a momentary de facto who wasn’t his father. And glad to see that Gwyneth wasn’t the careless uncaring mother he’d supposed she must be, seeing her pay so little attention to the child or her missing of him. He liked her better for it. No, not that, he felt more comfortable with his fondness for her. Though he didn’t know if she was better off. Maybe if Brad had been born he would be making her happy. Her making good money in the massage parlour – had there ever been a massage parlour? – and bringing him up carefully. Or maybe there would be some passing temporary lover shaking him till his brain died and ending up in gaol for murder.
He liked lying with Gwyneth like this. It was a comfort. A good moment in the present. There was his rule to think of his life only in its present moment, and no reason to break that rule for a passing stranger which was after all what Gwyneth was. The comfort of bodies, lying together, that was the thing for now.
He woke up with the daylight. A sense of urgency. Gwynnie, he said, what about getting pregnant? You’re not on the pill, are you? We better get you to a doctor.
It’s okay, she said. I don’t have periods any more.
Why?
Might be being thin. Or people say it’s the methadone. She gave a little gleam of a laugh. Lucky, eh?
Gwynnie was better at living in the moment than he was. He wasn’t even going to mention AIDS. You could hope the kids were too young for that. The pale sun shone out of a pale sky. It was cosy on the warm vent. They would get up soon, into another day; just that, another day.
I’ve never got into the habit of going to plays. I wonder if it’s because my idea of the theatrical was nourished by the mass, its hierarchies and repetitions, its utter dependability. The absence of surprise is the great comfort of the mass. The same yesterday, today and forever, world without end, amen. I can enjoy music, once I know it, and of course I do like plays, I just don’t go. But Elinor was flogging tickets for a production of
Doctor Faustus
, her daughter Blanche who’s a public servant by day but longs for a career on the stage was in it. Elinor was drumming up an audience. I bought tickets for myself and Flora, and then on a whim for my lads. Since I was always worrying about their lack of general culture, this seemed a chance to do something about it.
Blanche is a tall fair slender girl with a short shapely haircut. I imagined her playing Helen, and Flora said as she recalled it wasn’t a very large role, that Marlowe doesn’t make much of women’s roles in that play, or ever, really, it seemed hardly worth going just to see Blanche. In fact, said Flora, I don’t think Helen has a single word to say. She’s just an object, a phantom maybe. Though some of the best lines in the play are said
to
her.
Sweet
Helen, make me immortal with a kiss
, she murmured.
That’s love, I said. Any mortal believes that, at the moment of desiring to kiss his beloved.
It was on at the ANU Arts Centre, and I have to confess I wasn’t expecting a lot, amateur productions and all that. I was surprised. They did it in modern dress, Faustus in shapeless tweeds with leather elbow patches and half glasses on his nose that made him peer, for all the world like one of those old codgers that would have inhabited this campus before the universities got privatised. The students were a scruffy lot in jeans and besloganed tee-shirts. And the thing was, Blanche wasn’t Helen, she was Mephistophilis. Dressed in a black jacket with satin lapels and straight black trousers, a man’s dinner suit – Elinor reckoned it was what the French call
le smoking
, made popular for women by Yves Saint Laurent – and as I have said she is tall and blonde, definitely a young woman, but in that outfit there was something quite sinisterly androgynous about her. The suit was tailored in a soft fine wool and when she moved it shaped her body, yet it was such a masculine garment. She wore shoes with heels, her mouth was painted in a large red bow, her hair smoothed flat to her skull. Such a confusion of messages. She was a woman, but a consciously ambiguous one. Sexuality had lost its safety, here. There was a sense of anything going. She made the audience distinctly uneasy.
When she first appeared, Faustus sent her off and told her to come back again dressed as a Franciscan friar because
That holy
shape becomes a devil best
; I had to smile at that. But she soon cast off the woollen robe, and tap-danced round the stage with the ethereal elegance of a Fred Astaire. But then she pouted, and flirted, and would not do as Faustus asked. Alternately flouncing away and smoodging up to him. He, she, was a flirt and a tease, and never once did Faustus have his way. Mephistophilis’ response to Faustus’s request for a wife was little short of obscene. His hands fluttered and suggested unspeakable gestures that straightaway you supposed you’d imagined, but hadn’t; I checked with Flora later. And at the same time he was oddly honest with Faustus, trying to talk him out of selling his soul. Saying of his present circumstances:
Why this is hell nor am I out of it
– chilling stuff.
His attendant devils were all young women, dressed as their own sex, rather like Bluebell girls in skimpy costumes with frilly half skirts frothing behind them and long gloves and feather headdresses, dancing with all the highly patterned synchronicity of a Busby Berkley chorus. I noticed that two of them were twins, and then realised they were the Prelec girls, Cressida and Candida, acting quite different parts from demure waitresses or nice little birthday girls.
I didn’t take this to mean that the devil and her minions are all female. It was rather that the natural order of things was subverted, so they were quite dangerously not what they seemed. And of course we know that the devil has all the best tunes. And the best dances, it appeared. And then the play is full of shows and set pieces, the pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Dirge of the Friars who are roundly trounced, the vision of Helen, all choreographed with the élan of a musical. Not to mention a great deal of knockabout farce, and setting off of firecrackers. Squibs, but not damp ones.
Helen of Troy, for her part, was a boy, another slender pretty youth, but gangling, and entirely out of his depth, his face too brightly painted like an amateur drag queen’s, his expression terrified, his knees in their high-heeled sandals knocking together. A figure of fun, who made you laugh but was so endearingly pathetic you were ashamed you had done so.
Was this the face that
launch’d a thousand ships
, asked Faustus, and the audience roared. To see the pair of them trotting off stage, the crusty old don pulling at Helen to be his paramour, was to observe the epitome of sex-as-farce.
Poor old Faustus. His tragedy wasn’t that he had sold his soul, it was that he got so little for it. His Helen a joke, his knowledge nothing he did not already know, his magic power the clumsiest of conjuring tricks, and his servant Mephistophilis the puppet master controlling every one of his moves. His wisdom, ah, that was nonexistent.
Well, after all this time, I can still rave on. The play delighted me, and the delight is with me still. However much tempered.
All sorts of people were there. It was one of those occasions on which you realise Canberra is a small place. The foyer was a performance all of its own. I recognised a number of people I had seen in the restaurant – the lawyer, the member of parliament, the surgeon, the builder, like players in a game. The lawyer’s pretty daughter. Godblot, whose son apparently was playing Helen. Laurel and Oscar, the beautiful boy, taking his mother on his arm with such charm that she glowed. I saw Anabel in the distance, with her chap Nigel; I hadn’t imagined them liking theatre. And George, Clement’s brother, turned out he’d gone to university with Blanche, they were old chums. George grinned at me: The all-singing all-dancing
Doctor Faustus
, he said. What a triumph. I’ve never seen comedy segue so wickedly into tragedy.
It was a twilight performance and afterwards a group of us went to Dickson and had a meal at one of the Vietnamese. Blanche’s sister Isabel who works at the ABC in Sydney took on the job of ordering for us. Some fine things. The mermaids’ tresses I rather liked, and some fresh spring rolls, cold, with prawns and raw vegetables. A dish called silver fish, which was a kind of whitebait, quite hot with chili. Superb scallops in the shell, dressed with coriander and ginger and rice wine. I thought that really sometimes I should venture into the suburbs for a meal. Knowing I probably wouldn’t, of my own accord.
We filled a number of tables. George sat next to Flora (I said he was a clever lad), I heard him quizzing her about the Slow Food Movement. I sat next to Elinor, who was quite feverish with excitement over the performance. Not just because Blanche had been so dazzling, but because the whole experience had that exhilarating effect you can get from a good production. Of course it wasn’t perfect, but the ideas were so terrific, especially the games with transexuality, the dancing girl chorus of devils, the fairly female Mephistophilis, and then it’s a great play, great words, and the production didn’t lose those, they came across with a wonderful clarity. Elinor couldn’t stop talking about it. The ending, she said, it’s dreadful, he could save himself, God stretches out his arm, but he can’t take it, he could, but he thinks he can’t, he believes himself damned, he knows there is always the possibility of grace, but the real damnation is he can’t reach out for it, not that the grace isn’t there. Oh, it’s so terrible.
And to be damned for so little, I said. It was always imitations, shadows, never the real thing.
It’s a good image of hell, isn’t it, said a man called Peter Cummings, who’d produced the play. Never the real thing.
Do you know Alec Hope’s poem, asked Ivan. It’s called ‘Faustus’. When the time comes for him to give up his soul nothing happens, nothing at all. Next morning he meets the devil in the street and asks him why nothing’s changed. The devil tells him not to fret,
We have your soul already, quite safe in hell
. You know that marvellous deadpan that Hope can write. The devil explains that they take souls in instalments now, on hire purchase; his final payment was made months ago. He’s been losing his soul piecemeal since the bargain was signed.
Fuck that for a nightmare, said George.
Hope has Faustus go off and cut Helen’s throat, then his own, said Ivan.
Interesting, isn’t it, said Peter Cummings. We don’t believe in hell any more, and have serious doubts about souls, yet a play like this moves us.
It’s because it’s true, said Elinor. Not literal, but true. We all know people who’ve sold their souls.
Not mentioning any names, said Ivan.
But does it do them any harm, asked George.
Probably not, I expect they flourish like the green bay tree, said Elinor. And are perfectly happy because they don’t care whether they’ve got souls or not. Probably found them inconvenient.
I wouldn’t like to live without my soul, said Flora. I don’t quite know what it is, but I would if I didn’t have it. I’d know if my work was soulless.
I think, said George, now we’ve lost hell we have to kid people there are all sorts of other sanctions, but there aren’t.
I don’t know, said Blanche. Playing Mephistophilis, I did feel he was in hell, even though he dances about, and plays tricks, he’s in hell, and it’s a very modern one, it’s not pitchforks and boiling oil and Bosch-like monsters biting on you, it’s who he is, and he knows it.
Or she, said George.
Oh yes, said Blanche, blushing a little, her fair hair still shapely but soft, not slicked tight to her head, wearing trousers lowish on her hips and a rather too short top, so she showed some inches of pale brown tummy, as is the fashion these days, which I find somehow quite heartbreaking, this little secret stretch of flesh. I love to look at it but think I shouldn’t, it’s so private. Especially when the girls are a bit plump, and there’s a little pudgy roll between the two garments. So endearing. Anyway, there was no ambiguity about Blanche’s sex, in these clothes.
Peter Cummings said, You know, we think of Faustus as wanting to know, that’s the Faustian temptation, but actually his ruling vice is gluttony. The words
belly cheer
come up several times. Peter said the words with gusto. From the very beginning, in the Prologue, intellectual desires are depicted in terms of hunger, and did you notice … his last feast is a sort of dreadful inversion of the Last Supper? Nothing spiritual about him, all sensual.
Nothing intrinsically wrong about that, said George.
No, except when you claim and maybe yourself believe something different.
There was a lot more of this sort of conversation. The banquet went on. Flora, who always struck me as a kind of reverse image of gluttony, was taking a mouthful of each dish, I could see her concentrating as she tasted it. I watched her savouring – the only word, though I could not be sure it was favourably – a slice of salt and pepper squid. I asked her what she thought. She said it was rather good, it was interesting to see salt used as a flavour in that way, part of the raison d’être of a dish, instead of a seasoning; to have it there for its own sake, not as a means of bringing out other flavours.