The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (5 page)

“Fuck off,” Denny told him amiably. “Actually, Emily, if you can allow for Neanderthal imagery and symbol systems, the Australian male is tolerable. Shall I treat you to my insightful glossary on this particular collection of painters, poets, musicians, intellectuals, and other misfits all pining for London or New York?”

“London if they haven't been fully appreciated yet,” one of the men said, a shaggily bearded satyr, brown as desert sands, shambling over to them barefoot. “Critically speaking, that is. New York if they're past that stage and just want to make money.”

“This is Deakin,” Denny explained. “History prof. Haggard from churning out papers to present at overseas conferences so that the world will remember his existence and his Oxford D.Phil. And will offer him a professorship in California which has higher salaries and gentler tax brackets.”

Ignoring her, Deakin said: “What you are going to have to realise from the start, Emily, is that you don't have a hope of being taken seriously here while you're so undilutedly American. You can't expect to get anywhere in Australia until you've suffered through a couple of winters in a poorly heated London flat. There's just no evidence of artistic integrity.”

“Deak's hot new scheme for an expenses-paid trip to Denver, Colorado,” one of the women said. She wore very short shorts and a halter top and tossed her long chestnut hair like a colt. “A Social History of the Colonial Inferiority Complex: Some Cultural Implications. Grateful acknowledgments to the Australian government who made this trip possible. Annotations, pomposity, and bullshit courtesy of Deakin Frazer.”

“Come here, Heather,” Deak said sternly, frowning at her from under his bushy eyebrows.

“Make me.”

“With pleasure.”

He scooped her up and slung her over his shoulder like a sack of wheat; she hammered on his back with her fists; they rolled in the grass together, laughing,

Emily was entranced. It is the sun, she thought again. It is a lubricant; it gives a perspective of mirth to everything; it coats their faint bitterness with nonchalance. She wondered if it were possible for anyone to maintain outrage or moral purpose or even the selfish restlessness of ambition in Sydney.

Tranquillity must surely do everyone in.

“True. It's like molasses.” She was startled. Had she been thinking aloud then? “Like trying to run in a dream.”

What she noticed, apart from the inevitable glow of tanned flesh that assaults the senses of newcomers, were his eyes, the skin around them weathered like a network of dried riverbeds.

“I'm Dave,” he said.

“It's the sun,” Emily was eager to explain, to give him the benefit of an outsider's clear-sightedness. “You take it for granted. You can't imagine what a difference it makes. And the sheer clarity of sky. You must grow up with the goodwill of the universe as a certainty in your bones.”

“That's just Mosman, lush with shade and well-watered gardens. I would only need to drive you out into the southwestern suburbs to see grit and irritation. I could take you out to my property west of the Blue Mountains and you could see dry waterholes and the carcasses of sheep and bushfire scars. I grew up there and I never thought of the land as well-intentioned. I guess I thought of her …” He trailed into silence, seeing the shimmer of heatwaves over scrubby spinifex grasses. “She's a tough seductive sheila. She's a bitch I'm in love with. It's a thrill to do battle with her because she never lets up.”

“Oh!” I am fascinated by men with obsessions, Emily thought. I see the tongues of fire over their heads and am instantly bewitched. “I'm partial to bitches. I hope you'll introduce me.”

“Any time. First the southwestern suburbs,” Dave said. “Brown grass and red dust. Shall we go?”

Driving across the Harbour Bridge, inevitably he asked her: “What do you think of our white elephant?”

“Your white elephant?”

“Our hundred-million-dollar idiot child”— indicating it with a nod of his head.

“Oh, the Opera House! I think its breathtaking! Dazzling!”

“Do you really?” He seemed pleased. “To tell you the secret truth, I'm rather crazy about it myself. Though it's quite unfashionable to admit that. In our circle, anyway.”

“Why?”

“Oh I don't know. Showing off embarrasses Australians. We leave that to the Americans; you know: world's greatest this or that. We go the other way You're supposed to say witty disparaging things. Like: It reminds me of an untidily sliced apple.”

She laughed. “Now that you mention it…”

“Or a highly successful cement works”

“Oh cruel. How about a bevy of paper planes?”

“Hey!” he said sternly.
“You
can't say nasty things, only us. Those are the rules. You're a bloody Yank and it would be filthy cheek on your part!”

“Well, since I do think it's gorgeous …”

“It's supposed to be finished this year. So we're promised. With luck you'll be playing there by Christmas.”

I'll be very pregnant, she thought. I'll play for the opening, but will they make me take leave soon after?

“Before you,” he said theatrically, in the overly mellow voice of a documentary narrator, “are the rusting iron roofs and shrivelled lawns of suburbia. Behind that peeling paint, the worlds most bored and unhappy women await the return of pot-bellied husbands who are even now emptying their pay envelopes in every corner pub in Sydney.”

“You seem determined to make me despise the place.”

“I thought I already explained my coded comments. This is an absolutely dreadful country except for Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke and Patrick White and Test cricket. And Joan Sutherland and Co., who of course don't count, having fled. It's parochial, isolated, sun-blasted, and full of beer-punchy Philistines. I love it with a bigot's passion and I don't want you saying anything unpleasant about it. Let's get away from this ugliness and I'll show you my house. It has a view of the Pacific. My Sydney house, that is. Maybe one day I'll show you Kurrajong.”

“Which is?”

“My station out near Forbes.”

“I know you're not a musician. Are you an artist or a professor?”

“None of the above. I don't quite belong. But we all went to university together and we keep in touch. Besides they're all clients of mine, not all of them paying ones.”

“What do you do?”

“I'm a lawyer. Partner in a Sydney firm. And a gentleman farmer on a modest scale. Benefactor of the arts. That means I give free legal advice to impoverished writers and painters I was an undergraduate with.”

“It's an interesting group.”

“We're all scholarship kids. Amazing country when you think of it. Anti-intellectual to the core, and yet there's a pack of us. I was the golden boy of Forbes High who won a university fellowship. My father sheared sheep for station owners all over western New South Wales and never had two sixpenny bits to rub together. I managed to buy Kurrajong in time for him to die on it.”

Kurrajong.

If it had not been for Tory's letters, Emily thought. If the past had not crowded her, if she had not been pregnant, if she had not retreated to Kurrajong. If she had never taken refuge in the town house in Sydney.

If extrication were as simple as the process of hopeless entanglement with Dave had been.

“Oh Adam,” she said, holding him tightly, remembering his birth, the tiny body cradled between the crook of her elbow and the palm of her hand, the sense of awe (a life, a responsibility). Dave, as proud as though he were the father, bending over both of them, telling her:

“I'll call your parents.”

“No!”

“But Emily, surely …?”

“No. It's not their affair. It has nothing to do with them. I don't want them to know.”

I do not, she could not quite have articulated, want this occasion sullied by my father's judgments, by the things he will not be able to stop himself from saying.

There had been more than shock in Dave's eyes. She had perceived a kind of stunned fear, as of something more awful than he was able to understand. He had stroked her hair with one hand and the baby's down-soft head with the other, waiting for her to reconsider. Not able to believe she meant it.

She had seen the, same gaunt look of loss in his eyes five years later.

“You can't dispense with your parents like that, Emily. You can't dispense with me like this. You can't do it to Adam. He has a right to all of us. I have a right to him. I have a right to meet your family and they have a right to know about me. You can't snap your fingers and extinguish people.”

But I can, Emily had thought then. I have to.

She had changed her flight reservations secretly, leaving for England several days earlier than Dave was expecting. No one had seen her off from Sydney airport, no one had met her in London.

But Adam still mourned, three years later, for Australia and Dave. He said it again, his voice uninflected by hope: “I wish we could go back.”

“Everyone has to move on, Adam.” She snapped her fingers to disperse his memories. “Time itself moves on.”

IV Edward

In moonlight the flakes of peeling paint jut out against the light like a cluster of batwings. I possess it then. Alone at my window, pacing through a litter of memories like an unquiet ghost, I pass through its matted tresses of honeysuckle and stalk its benches like a tomcat. Under the weightless pads of my feet, the wood is soft and rotten, smelling of sugared vinegar or overripe oranges. I pace, I pace, snarling into its eight niches, sniffing out the past. The tiger in the tiger pit is not more irritable than I.

By day it is merely shabby, listing toward the southwest plane of its octagon. In daylight it is violated by squirrels and small children. Sunlight, the great mocker, leers in at my window where I sit helpless, chained to my chair, manacled to my unedited and unacceptable life. I watch the smothering mutations of the honeysuckle.

Since the thaw the entire structure has slumped a little more into its southwest footing. I monitor this decline with avid interest, with far more precision than that sapling of an intern takes over my heart charts. I would like to think that on the day of my death the foundation will give way with an organic moan, will offer itself up to the honeysuckle in vegetable submission. My personal icon.

I remember the first day I saw it.

I remember the instant of lust, the precise moment of obsession, the determination to be offered this hitherto unappealing position. I would become the principal of a country high school, I would live in this schoolmaster's house. How I coveted that skeletal tribute to graciousness, not even knowing what it was called. Resolutely I looked away from it, feigned a lack of interest, afraid the board members would detect the beating pulse of my motivation.

It has always been a problem, this tendency to fixate on details. For example, the minutiae of love. Insanity. I tripped over details too fine for an unfevered eye. Bessie, that first time I saw her …

But this requires a detached perspective …

One Sunday afternoon in Boston in his prehistory, his apple-tree days, young Edward Carpenter stands diffidently outside an imposing house, the scholarship boy from the mill town who has scrabbled his way into respectability via earnest years at Harvard, via chalky days of teaching at Cambridge Latin. He has made passing acquaintance with the families of several of his students, he has been invited to a number of terrifyingly stuffy afternoon teas to which he has always gone although knowing his presence to be a symbol of benevolent condescension.

He subjects himself to the sherry, the small talk, the quietly arrogant susurration of silk skirts and silk cravats, the rough edges of his ambition snagging in that seamless web of genteel indifference. He can never belong. The only way to acquire ease here is to inherit it. He is completely
other
to them, pickled like a museum specimen in their immaculate politeness. Their patronage coats his tongue with a fur of bitterness like the taste of a cheap and juvenile sherry.

Through the forest of fathers discussing boardrooms and cigars, he sees a young woman sitting at the piano, playing. She is slender, almost gaunt, with intense cavernous black eyes. An intellectual, a New England version of Virginia Woolf. The type alarms him — with those blackbird eyes casting about for a passionate cause on which to alight. He feels repelled, as by some aberration in nature, yet fascinated.

But then as he watches and listens, she raises her head to look out the window, her hands and body still making music in an abstracted sleepwalking way. Gradually her hands enter the stillness of her vision — some movement of light outside the window? a bird? memories of another time and place? — and rest themselves motionless on the keys. Her lips are slightly parted, her head raised like that of an alert woodland creature, her neck extended. It is white and vulnerable and exposed, unbearably fragile. A vein flutters and twitches like a blemish in finest porcelain. He is mesmerised by it, by that bleating dimple of blue blood against her white skin.

I married her for that. Fifty years of marriage based on the vagaries of capillary activity. It is astonishing how simply and inconsequentially a die is cast. On that very afternoon, at that very moment, I made up my mind. I would have it all — the swan neck, the blue blood, the sherry, the monogrammed napkin rings, the crystal salt-cellars with miniature silver spoons, the children born into thoughtless ease with it all.

If Jason knew, if Emily knew, the cost of their comfortable sarcasm. I gave them that. I gave them the right to be disdainful about propriety, the vantage point from which it is safe to spurn silverware and wedlock and nineteenth-century poetry. If they knew the cost.

I am told that Victoria sometimes throws tantrums, demanding elegance. That she has hurled aluminium salt and pepper shakers across the cafeteria, that the nurses have indulged her with cut-glass ashtrays of salt, providing Q-tips for artful tapping against the finger. This is an obscene parody, typical of the reparations always demanded of me.

Nevertheless. When Adam comes …

If Emily does not bring Adam, this is what I will do: they will have carried me downstairs. (I will not permit Jason; they will have to get the neighbour's son.) When they are all absorbed in the stupid rituals of celebration, I will cross the grounds. Yes, it will be possible with both my canes and the rod of my will. I will stand in the gazebo, I will embrace its spindles and finials and its soft uprights smelling so sweetly of rot and honeysuckle. With a last explosion of the heart, I will pull it down upon my life in a climax vehement as Samson's.

Ever the village schoolteacher, the public performer, the self-dramatist. Watch me, watch me. When I look at myself through Jason's eyes I am embarrassed. I despise my antics.

Reject melodrama then. Edit a little.

Act V, scene v, retake: The old man staggers through the grounds in solitary pain and sits gasping on the bench, leaning back against the honeysuckle. Around him the indifferent revels proceed, a swirling carousel of inanities. At last he is missed, searched for, keened for. When they find him he is stiff with terminal dignity, his hand clutching his breast, his face contorted in a brave denial of pain. A suitable tragedy, observing the decorums.

I did not even know, that day of the interview in Ashville, what such structures were called. I knew only that it was the equivalent of the blue vein in Bessie's neck, the next rung in my climb.

“There is one of those things in the grounds,” I told her, back in Boston. My voice trembled under the strain of its flippant indifference. It was like discussing a woman, a secret mistress, with an interviewing school board official — the irresistible pleasure of the name on one's tongue, the delicious risk. “Like an empty bandstand. Silly things. I don't know what you call them.”

I drew a sketch for her.

“Oh,” she shrugged, amused. “A gazebo.”

I married her for that too: for her amused shrugs and exotic vocabulary, things as unattainable for me as a silver christening mug.

She was not impressed by the gazebo. She saw the whole move as an affliction. I expected her at least to be grateful for clean rural air for the child — Victoria was four at the time and had not yet shown any sign of turning strange — but I should have known better.

Do not expect sensitivity from those who take status for granted. Blessed are they in the land of opportunity who pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, but woe unto those observed doing it. They journey from contempt to contempt within a lifetime, from the polite amusement of in-laws to the embarrassed sarcasm of offspring.

Bessie was never sensitive to my needs, but then she was not, I suppose, particularly aware of her own either. I had seen, I believe, her essence in that arrested moment at the piano. She has spent most of her life outside it, elsewhere. She never showed gratitude though it was certainly due me. (To be fair, she never considered that she had married beneath herself, never flung that at me, though her relatives did. Not in so many words, of course, but by a lift of the eyebrow, an infinitesimal grimace at the corners of lips.) It was due me, her gratitude, because of what I saved her from — the life of a genteel Radcliffe-educated New England spinster. (I am not referring to her age — she was only twenty when we married — but to that air of over-intelligent quaintness.) You can see them any day in Copley Square, their family monies eaten up by inflation and taxes, their teaching pensions woefully inadequate, their sharp intelligent faces and sparrow-hawk eyes daring you to snicker as they spread newsprint with fastidious care on the steps of Trinity Church and bring forth their picnic lunch of one orange and one styrofoam cupful of soup. You can see them any day on Beacon Street and Marlborough Street, hobbling along with their canes and their tattered pride, muttering to themselves about A. N. Whitehead — all the brilliant Bessies who did not get married to gauchely aspiring young men; the Bessies whose beauty was ambiguous and was easily mistaken for homeliness when they were not animated by the discussion of an idea.

“Ashville,” she had said, as though I had mentioned some disease. “It's so isolated, Edward.”

She meant: How will I sustain the loss of Boston?

It was typically inappropriate that she should think of it in that small self-preoccupied way at a time when war was tearing through Europe like a shredding machine. Who knew what was going to happen in the next few years? Those of us with a sense of history saw apocalypse around die corner. Bessie's people, the people of die afternoon teas and grand pianos, saw inconvenience.

It was 1940. I remember waking one morning and asking myself suddenly: Will I die in the country of my birth? I remember holding one arm up against the early light and wondering: Will I die in one piece, all my limbs still attached?

But Bessie cared only for the loss of Boston.

Victoria ran in from the garden, I recall, prattling, “Daddy Daddy,” a flawless child she still was, her black curls bouncing. (Interesting that she should have Bessie's colouring, the dark mad strain in full bloom, I suppose. Jason and Emily are fair like me, though there the resemblance ends.) She was greedy as a puppy for affection, wanting kissing and hugging, a basic weakness in her nature even then, though we did not realise it. My impulse was to take her in my arms and kiss her ravenously — the delicious peaches of her cheeks, the little cushions of her buttocks in my hands. But I have never indulged myself in that way.

I gave her a pat on the head, restraining her, holding her away a little with my hands. They need to be taught that.

Bessie, however, fondled the child in a way that was quite distressing to me. She was always cavalier about propriety, being so steeped in it. For a well-bred woman, my wife several times shocked me in the early years. On our wedding night, for instance, when I discovered how misleading the discreet flutter of an aristocratic vein could be. Perhaps she thought it would please me, that vulgar energy. I never spoke of this but was pleased that in time she became a lady again, white and still and intoxicating.

Victoria was burrowing herself into the space between Bessie's thighs.

“Don't spoil the child,” I said angrily.

She went on stroking Tory's cheek, caressing her hair, staring at me out of her black eyes. I would say looking back, that something happened within Bessie on that day, but she was always unreadable. From one perspective, something snapped, I suppose. From another, perhaps, she simply came to terms with reality, acknowledged me as the rightful director of our fate.

I would say she never forgave me for the move to Ashville. In another sense I would say that everything ceased to matter to her. She was docile. She began to become stupid. She lived permanently within the ambience of that abstraction I had first seen on a Sunday afternoon in a Boston living room, books and music walling in her life like fortifications. A solitary impregnable tower. And always, and still, when I see her poised in that fragile patrician fog of distraction, like a dove suspended in flight, my blood rises. And in the passive aloof way she has gone on submitting for these fifty years to my fever of possession, my frenzy has been reborn over and over again. To possess the unpossess able. That is why I married her. Married into them. To ruffle their calm.

None of this is true. None of it. The medication makes me maudlin. I married a plain girl out of pity, a proud plain girl, gaunt as fencing wire, who came to me on our wedding night with a gauche vitality hoping to please. I was offered a promotion, a schoolhouse, and gracious living. Away from the city her bogus intellectual interests withered. She was bookish but withdrawn, eccentric. An ordinary uninteresting vegetating country housewife and mother.

There followed disturbances which require editing, which require a certain distance, which require dispassionate narration.