Eloquent Silence (21 page)

She could not help but wonder what the index to his character was. Why was he so afraid to unbend, to confide? Didn’t he realize after all this time that she was on his side?

Uneasy, she endeavored to pass over her discomfort. Why was he holding back, failing to open up to her, not acquainting her with his dinner guests? Introducing his family members only when she happened to meet them accidentally at his house? What had he to hide?

Julia was unable to face her fears, to put a name to them, knowing that the response would be, ‘Forty questions! Ha ha,’ in his deep, throaty voice accompanied by gusts of meaningless laughter.

Bewildered, she would sink into silence at his failure to include her in his socializing. She had no reply to his comments of,

‘Lip-dropper, hey? Green-eyed monster, hey?’

Sadly, she began to realize he was insensitive as well as secretive.

Unimpressed, she tried to explain further to him, failing pitifully in her attempts. His comments overrode her each time. She tried to see past his often withdrawn expression and look deeply into his eyes to endeavor to see the man living in there. Nothing was visible inside those heavy-lidded eyes. Nothing. Behind his eyes there was only the blankness of secrecy.

Ralph’s birthday came around. Julia chose his present with as much care as she could, cooked a special dinner, tried to show him that he was loved. The night went well and Julia assumed they had found a closeness not so far reached in their relationship. But it was only an assumption that would soon be shot down in flames.

A few nights later he informed her that he was being taken out for dinner for his birthday by certain members of his family. Knowing that in a reverse situation she would have included him in the invitation, she found herself unable and afraid to put her queries into words as he would poo-poo them and make fun of her in an effort of distraction.

She sat dumbly on the sofa beside him as he chatted away about this and that—how much he loved her and how fortunate they were to have found each other. She replied in monosyllables. In her mind questions roared, alarms sounded in her brain, fears clambered over one another. His actions and his words did not match.

What’s it all about? Why I aren’t I fit to meet these people, his mother, his sons and their wives? Yes, I’ve met his mother by accident. That didn’t auger particularly well. Is he ashamed of me? Perhaps there’s another woman who’s included at these times? Does he pretend to still be faithful to the wife he’s separated from? Divorced from, so he says.

He stopped speaking and stared at her coldly.

‘Come on. Up you get. Home you go.’ He stood and handed her the keys of her car.

‘No, no, we must talk,’ she objected, ready to cry.

‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ he said as he walked swiftly towards the front door.

He returned to her, grabbed her hand, opened the door. His face broke into a warm smile.

‘See you when you’re in a better mood. I’m off to bed. Goodnight.’

Arriving home, she phoned him, knowing she was in emotional difficulty.

The television was roaring. He hadn’t gone to bed at all.

‘Ralph, darling, I’m trying to tell you there’s something I’m not comfortable with. I can’t put my finger on it, but something doesn’t fit.’

‘Go on to bed, Possum. I’ll give you a buzz tomorrow.’

Tomorrow came and went. No contact. She wrote him a short letter, trying to communicate the questions running around in her head after six months of having these issues dodged. No response. She rang him.

‘I have to talk to you, Ralph. We have to talk. We simply can’t let it all end like this. We’re supposed to love each other.’

‘I know, Sweetheart. I’ll give you a buzz on the weekend. We’ll get together and talk then. Okay?’

Saturday arrived. They had made previous arrangements to attend a dinner dance that night. Waiting until 3pm for him to ring and discuss the proposed outing as well as their big discussion, she could stand the tension no longer, deciding to go to see him. She drove the few blocks to his house and entered through the front door.

He was sitting watching the football.

‘How are you? I was going to ring you soon,’ he said as he laughed low in his throat, a smile of welcome, however temporary, warming his face.

‘I’m a little upset, Ralph,’ Julia replied. Her large brown eyes swum with unshed tears. ‘I was wondering if we were still going out tonight and whether we could talk about all this, I hoped we could find out the cause of our problems.’

‘No, not tonight, Darling. I’m going over to my mother’s for dinner.’

‘But what about the dinner dance. My friend Ellen and her husband Stretch will be expecting us.’

‘Not in the mood, Honey. I’ll give you a ring when I get back from Japan. We’ll see how we’re going then. Don’t give up on us, will you? I love you.’

‘When will you be going over there?’ she asked, mystified at this new information.

‘I’m going in three or four weeks.’

‘Please don’t do this. Don’t just cut me off. Can’t we discuss our feelings? Our problems?’

‘Sure, Sweetie, we will. But go now. I don’t want to talk. I haven’t slept for the last two nights. I don’t need that. But I do love you, you know.’

Standing, he again handed her the car keys and opened the front door as he had on Monday night.

‘Don’t give up on us yet, Baby. But I’m not ready to talk to you. I will, though.’

‘Please talk to me, Ralph. Don’t hurt me this way.’

She walked to her car, then returned to where he stood at his front door.

‘There’s no one else, you know. I just can’t talk to you,’ he said, patting her shoulder.

Defeated, she went home.

Ralph went to his mother’s for dinner. At 10pm he was home and answered the telephone.

‘Please, Ralph, I’m sorry. Forget I ever got upset,’ she told him. ‘This is tearing me apart. I love you.’

‘What do you think it’s doing to me? I haven’t slept for two nights, I told you. I love you, too.’ He sounded tired and distressed and she longed to be close to him.

‘We must talk. We must be honest with each other,’ she told him, blinded by tears.

‘I know, Darling,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll give you a buzz through the week. We’ll get together and talk it all out.’

‘Have you been at your mother’s all evening?’

‘What’s this? Forty questions? Ha ha ha. I don’t have to answer to you.’

Chirpy again, switching his emotions on and off.

What was this man’s problem? Of what was his make up constructed?

‘No. But we have to be able to communicate, Ralph.’ Julia was beginning to realize the futility of her wishes.

‘I’ll give you a buzz through the week. Okay.’ Sending a few kisses, he gently hung the phone up.

On the other end of the line, Julia gazed at the instrument in bewilderment, almost certain there was no honesty in her relationship with Ralph, as hard as they both had seemed to try for a time.

Trembling between hopeful and teary, she tried to turn her despair into something she could live with, aware by this time that she had been led up the garden path to a situation where there was no garden present and she would have to turn away before she was injured again. She must needs right her toppled life while surviving yet again. It was the only way.

The moment arrives for every couple when they have to learn how to deal honestly with each other if they are to survive as a twosome. This time came. It passed. There was nothing left to say. There was no common ground on which to stand.

As another song says, sometimes love just isn’t enough, especially if you are mixed up with a deceiver who has no truth to tell.

Julia found herself to be totally over musical comparisons to her life and loves. Some enchanted evening was just another anecdote to add to the many others that left her deflated as she picked herself up, dusted herself off and found herself to be up to living her life without Ralph the Roving Ragamuffin, renowned for his racketeering slant on life.

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M
aureen met him at a party. It was just an average, run-of-the mill sort of party, but then they were just average, run-of-the-mill sort of people with their small worlds about to be turned upside down. His name was John. John Richard Donohue, third generation Australian with a voice that carried more than a hint of Irish brogue in it and the air of a wild, restless Irishman about him. He had sharp, chiseled, ruddy features and was powerful through the chest and arms from decades of wrestling with contentious animals, bagged grain and heavy machinery. His shoulders were slightly bowed as though for altercation, arms slightly bent as if for action. Yet the face was that of a peaceful man with a mouth displaying a slight line of cynicism. Tall and agile, he ate well, slept deep and had the contented soul of a hard-working man.

All these matters were little more than an impression she received as she sat on the couch in these people’s lounge room, a vivid room painted mauve with trimmings of gold-colored paint and a lime green lounge suite. A little bewildering to the eye, a certain amount of time was needed to settle the shock to the occipital area of the brain. On a feature wall hung a large framed painting of can-can dancers, by a particular dwarfed French painter, Maureen thought, unable for the moment to recall the name of the man who had given his heart and soul to the painting of these particular women. Oh, yes, she remembered after a while of searching through her mental index filing system. Toluouse la Trec, a dwarfed man, genius painter.

When she saw John enter the front door Maureen had an innate sense of familiarity with him as he entered the room but had never met him in her life that she could recall. She did not know if he had noticed her and didn’t particularly care as all she wanted was to go home.

Who were these people she was sitting in the midst of feeling disorientated and alone and how did she end up at a party in the home of a couple she had never met in her life? Miles from home and feeling out of kilter, in fact, drop-dead miserable to put it mildly.

That’s right. She’d agreed to come with a male friend who had promptly gone outside to hang around with the men who were gathered close to the beer keg out beyond the rear patio. This was, of course, positioned as far away from the women as possible and closer to the back fence that bordered on the scrub on the side of the hill.

A largely Australian custom, this one of segregation at parties and she had been led to believe, but one that wasn’t conducive to meeting members of the opposite sex, should one so wish. The beer keg on another planet would have been an appropriate description of the arrangements for entertainment.

Not that she was particularly wishing to meet anyone of interest. It was merely something to do with another Saturday night in the sticks.

The old Aussie barbecue, minus children, strict ostracism in place, although not intended to be unfriendly but simply showing the knowledge that men and women had little in common to discuss. No one objected to this, at least not openly. There may have been murmurings of displeasure between couples when they arrived home, but at the time of the party this was how the lines were drawn.

Thus Maureen was left to sit idly in a room full of totally stranger women, hating every minute of it, sipping a glass of Chardonnay and pretending to be having an excellent time. She didn’t know anyone from a bar of soap and they were all obviously well known to one another. Chatting animatedly amongst themselves, the women looked at her and smiled politely but none of them broached the conversation barrier.

The men much preferred the outdoors at these gatherings, talking cattle and grain, weather and farming, leaving the women inside to talk clothes and children. Or such was the general impression Maureen received as she listened to these women who had all known one another since the bears were bad in the woods on the hill behind the sturdy red brick house with the log fence.

Dusk had settled on the street outside in the Australian summer, but the deep, heavy heat persisted. It was enough to make the men very thirsty as they worked their way through the keg of icy cold beer exchanging chummy male banter.

John had come in through the front door and would have had to run the full gamut of the women to get to the male-dominated area out back but he stopped when he saw the stranger sitting there in relative isolation. When introduced to her, he blinked, as if in surprise, as though a shiver of recognition had run through him as Maureen felt it had run through her. They exchanged smiles as he sauntered over to her rather shyly, and gave her a quizzical look before he paused beside her, noticing she looked as lost as he felt.

After the preliminary introduction and conversation John sat on the floor beside her to talk, seemingly oblivious to the unspoken rule of segregation that was a bylaw in this one horse town. But not so oblivious that he didn’t wander off from time to time to refill his beer glass with light beer as he had the normal dread of losing his driver’s license.

He always returned to her side, hardly skipping a beat and resuming their conversation where they had left off. The goodwill in his eyes as he looked at her was almost palpable and she basked modestly in his obvious pleasure of her company.

She drank a little white wine while he sipped his beer. John was a bachelor. So was his brother Bryan, one of the circle outside around the keg talking cattle and crops. Maureen recalled reading an article recently about men of Irish heritage and their above average tendency towards bachelorhood, a hangover from the days of the Great Hunger when many men couldn’t afford the luxury of a wife and children.

John’s tightly curled, springy, dark blonde hair hung in a mop on his forehead, thick and abundant even at forty-three. His blue eyes were narrowed, a habit he had assumed from squinting against the glaring Australian sunshine in his busy days of tending cattle, clearing large tracts of scrub, cultivating, planting and harvesting crops.

He sat beside her in his open-necked shirt, jeans and riding boots, the uniform he wore everywhere except to the occasional wedding or funeral, as do so many of his ilk. His unlined forehead was open and honest, his eyes candid and friendly.